|
|
|
Friday's New York Times
Evil usually hides its face, because the sight of it repulses all
but the depraved. However, in the case of Benny Morris, writing in
Friday's New York Times, we see something new: a proud evil,
glorying in pure malevolence. His piece is a cold, calculated
attempt to simultaneously shock and intimidate, one that succeeds at
the former but fails miserably at the latter.
|
|
|
Seven Months Till Israel Attacks
Here's the shocker, really a double jolt: "Israel," he avers,
"will almost surely attack Iran's nuclear sites in the next four to
seven months." Either that, he writes, or else Israel will
eventually have to launch "a preemptive nuclear strike." His message
to the West: take out Iran, or we'll nuke 'em!
|
|
|
|
|
Morris Has The Inside Track To Israeli Decision
Makers
The Israelis have been
threatening to strike for the past six months, so nothing new there,
except for the tone of certainty. Morris is no fringe nut-job
flailing away on his obscure blog; he's a prominent Israeli
historian writing on the most noted opinion page of them all, a
veritable bulletin board for governing elites worldwide. As such, he
is almost certainly speaking with some insight into Israeli
government plans. It is, in any case, almost inconceivable that he
wrote his piece without the foreknowledge and consent of Israeli
government officials.
|
|
|
If We And You Retaliate, We Will Nuke You
As to whether he – and they – are bluffing, well, I wouldn't
count on it. With all this talk of Iran's alleged attempt to build
nuclear weapons – which our own intelligence services say was
abandoned years ago – Israel is the one country in the region we
know is armed to the gills with nukes. Given their history, the
increasing extremism of their leadership and polity, and their
fanatical devotion to the doctrine of preemption – indeed, they
invented it, while George W. Bush merely adopted it – the Israelis
are far more likely than any other member of the nuclear club to
actually use nukes, as Morris makes all too clear.
|
|
|
|
|
Another Zionist Genocide Like In The 1933 Ukraine
In what has to be the most widely circulated
blackmail note ever written, Morris announces, "It is in the
interest of neither Iran nor the United States (nor, for that
matter, the rest of the world) that Iran be savaged by a nuclear
strike" – so take out the Iranians, or we will. To be fair, he also
says it won't be a good thing if "both Israel and Iran suffer such a
fate," but since Iran has no nuclear weapons and has given up all
attempts to make them, this is just window-dressing for a genocidal
agenda.
|
|
|
Israeli Intelligence Says "Go"
Morris's rationale for mass murder is oddly hollow and formulaic:
Well, you see, "Every intelligence agency in the world believes the
Iranian program is geared toward making weapons, not to the peaceful
applications of nuclear power." To begin with, this has got to be a
misprint. Surely what Morris meant to say was that every Israeli
intelligence agency thinks Iran is on the verge of acquiring nukes.
Why else are the Israelis slated to make a series of trips to the
U.S. to convince their American counterparts that they are right,
and the Americans' National Intelligence Estimate on Iran is wrong?
|
|
|
|
|
Point Of No Return
Aside from that, there is a dispute as to where to draw the "red
line," the point-of-no-return, the passage of which acts as a
tripwire provoking military intervention. The Israelis have a far
tighter timeline, as you might imagine, and their forecast – "one to
four years" – is wildly improbable. It is based on the development
of the ability to weaponize nuclear processes in a purely
theoretical sense, quite aside from the problems posed by
construction, possible detection, and delivery.
Reading the Morris screed, one wonders how he came to write such
an unimaginative apologia for what would rank among the worst crimes
in human history: "everybody knows" the Iranians are trying to build
nukes (where have we heard that before?), the sanctions aren't
working, the Russians and the Chinese won't cooperate, oh, and "the
American public has little enthusiasm for wars in the Islamic
lands."
|
As anyone with the least amount of historical or common sense could
easily figure out, even if Iran did develop a nuclear weapons arsenal,
it would create a nuclear stalemate analogous to the Cold War standoff
between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Morris claims this example
doesn't apply, due to "the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of
the mullahs who run Iran." Aside from the ruling by Iranian Shi'ite
religious authority Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – the real leader of Iran –
that forbids the development, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons,
what about his own genocidal mindset, which glories in the prospect of
ethnic cleansing? No Iranian personage of any prominence has called for
the nuclear extermination of Israel in quite the same terms as Morris,
not even Iranian President Ahmadinejad, whose vague remark about Israel
"disappearing from the page of history" has been interpreted as a threat
to use nukes.
Morris neither knows nor cares about Iran's alleged nukes. Lurking
behind his mundane laundry list of complaints is, I fear, a darker
motive: sheer bloodlust. Morris simply wants to kill as many Muslims as
possible, so why doesn't he just come out and say it? After all, it
isn't like he hasn't said it before:
"There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I
know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st
century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide –
the annihilation of your people – I prefer ethnic cleansing."
It isn't very often that we get to see pure, unmitigated evil, in all
its Satanic darkness, expressed openly on the printed page. Morris and
the Times have given us one of the rare modern examples of the genre.
One might compare it to Hitler's maleficent vision in Mein Kampf, but
that would be giving Morris too much credit. Unlike the Nazis, who
blamed their victims for the horrors visited upon them, Morris also
blames Israel's friends and allies – the West, and specifically the
antiwar American public, which "curtails the White House's ability to
begin yet another major military campaign in pursuit of a goal that is
not seen as a vital national interest by many Americans."
We must forget our national interests and go to war for Israel's sake,
or else the Israelis will unleash their illegal and unaccounted-for
nukes, killing tens of thousands, poisoning the atmosphere, and forever
scarring human history with the mark of their heinous crime. This is
like one of those hostage dramas in which a mad gunman grabs someone and
uses them as a human shield, braying his demands to horrified onlookers.
Americans must reject this attempt at moral blackmail with the contempt
it deserves – and perhaps begin to reexamine the "special relationship"
that enables Israel to even contemplate such crimes against humanity. As
for Morris, he should be shunned by every decent human being, although
perhaps that description doesn't apply to the editors of the New York
Times.
~ Justin Raimondo
|