Israelis pack a wallop with those “rubber bullets,” don’t they, Mr. Goldberg?
What Goldberg fails to reveal in his commentary is that the “Israeli action” which causes innocent Palestinians to die as an “unfortunate byproduct” represents the implementation of the ultimate Zionist objective, which is to eradicate Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank through oppression, economic strangulation, and, when they can get away with it, direct military action.
As for the wounded and dead Israeli civilians, they are the tragic victims of retail terror carried out in response to the wholesale terror waged by their government and that of the United States.
“Wanted: An Iranian Saddam” from January of 2006 offers quite an impressive display of mental contortions and truth distortions, even for one as ethically limber as Jonah Goldberg:
“Conventional wisdom holds that there are really only two options for dealing with Iran: military strikes (by us or Israel) or the usual bundle of conferences, ineffective sanctions and windy UN speeches that lead to nothing….
But there is a third option that, alas, has become less and less likely in recent years: regime change from within. Pro-democracy — or at least anti-mullah — sentiment has been building in Iran for over a decade. In recent years there have been huge protests against the regime. Soccer stadiums full of Iranians have chanted “USA! USA!” In 2004, polls of various sorts indicated that anti-regime attitudes were held by up to nine out of 10 Iranians.
Iranians are a proud, nationalistic people and would probably rally around their government — or any government — were it threatened from without. That’s one reason Ahmadinejad has been rattling his sabers so much lately: It’s an attempt to bolster his unpopular regime.
A coup by sophisticated and serious members of the military would be great news. Even better would be a popular uprising. And best of all would be a combination of the two.
An Iran with an old-style military dictatorship charged with defending democratic institutions would be an enormous, epochal victory for the West and for the Middle East. That would go a long way toward guaranteeing success in Iraq and would neutralize the threat of the Iran’s nuclear ambitions, even if they decided to pursue a bomb. After all, the argument about nuclear weapons is no different than the argument about guns. The threat is from the people who have them, not from the weapons themselves. Lots of countries have nukes; we only need to worry about the ones run by whack jobs.”
Writing from an ahistorical perspective so typical of the corporate media in the US, as Jonah laments that the “third option” of “regime change” is becoming “less likely,” he neglects to remind readers that the United States has been there and done that in Iran. In 1953 the CIA installed the Shah to replace Iran’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. (Mossadegh, elected by the people to serve in parliament and by parliament to become prime minister, had exhibited the audacity to nationalize the oil industry to prevent US ally, Great Britain, from reaping nearly all the profits from Iran’s petroleum.)
By 1976, the Shah’s rule had evolved into such a brutal tyranny that Amnesty International declared that Iran had, “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.”
It was the blatant US violation of Iranian sovereignty that catalyzed the 1979 revolution, hostage crisis, and subsequent formation of an Islamic government, a government which remains understandably hostile to Western intervention in its affairs. “Regime change” worked so well the first time. Why not try again, eh Jonah?
“An Iran with an old-style military dictatorship charged with defending democratic institutions would be an enormous, epochal victory for the West and for the Middle East.” Wow! Jonah veered way outside the parameters of rational thought with that bizarre conclusion. “Old style military dictatorships” and “democratic institutions” are components of antithetical political structures. His column on Pinochet and this piece seem to indicate that Mr. Goldberg suffers from the delusion that the two can somehow coexist. Or perhaps he simply regards the intellect of his readers with such contempt that he thinks they will swallow his nonsense.
As for his assertion that, “lots of countries have nukes; we only need to worry about the ones run by whack jobs,” George Bush has the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet at his disposal. If Jonah’s statement is true, we have tremendous cause for concern.
As nauseatingly opportunistic as his mother, Lucianne Goldberg, a woman who spied on George McGovern for Nixon in the 1972 presidential campaign and advised Linda Tripp to tape her conversations with Monica Lewinsky, Jonah has few peers in the punditocracy who can match his mendaciousness or the degree to which he has prostituted himself.
May his readers, listeners and viewers recognize that he is nothing more than a shill for exploitative imperialists who impose their will on the world through acts of economic extortion and wholesale terror.
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