The New York Times: Making Nuclear Extermination Respectable
by James Petras / July 30th, 2008

On July 18, 2008 the New York Times published an article by Israeli-Jewish
historian, Professor Benny Morris, advocating an Israeli nuclear-genocidal
attack on Iran with the likelihood of killing 70 million Iranians - 12 times
the number of Jewish victims in the Nazi holocaust:

Iran's leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their
nuclear program. Barring this, the best they could hope for is that Israel's
conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure,
this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international
humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland.

Morris is a frequent lecturer and consultant to the Israeli political and
military establishment and has unique access to Israeli strategic military
planners. Morris' advocacy and public support of the massive, brutal
expulsion of all Palestinians is on public record. Yet his genocidal views
have not precluded his receiving numerous academic awards. His writings and
views are published in Israel's leading newspapers and journals. Morris'
views are not the idle ranting of a marginal psychopath, as witnessed by the
recent publication of his latest op-ed article in the New York Times.

What does the publication by the New York Times of an article, which calls
for the nuclear incineration of 70 million Iranians and the contamination of
the better part of a billion people in the Middle East, Asia and Europe,
tell us about US politics and culture? For it is the NYT, which informs the
'educated classes' in the US, its Sunday supplements, literary and editorial
pages and which serves as the 'moral conscience' of important sectors of the
cultural, economic and political elite.

The New York Times provides a certain respectability to mass murder, which
Morris' views otherwise would not possess if say, they were published in the
neo-conservative weeklies or monthlies. The fact that the NYT considers the
prospect of an Israeli mass extermination of millions of Iranians part of
the policy debate in the Middle East reveals the degree to which
Zionofascism has infected the 'higher' cultural and journalist circles of
the United States. Truth to say, this is the logical outgrowth of the Times'
public endorsement of Israel's economic blockade to starve 1.4 million
Palestinians in Gaza; the Times' cover-up of Israeli-Zionist-AIPAC influence
in launching the US invasion of Iraq leading to over one million murdered
Iraqi citizens.

The Times sets the tone for the entire New York cultural scene, which
privileges Israeli interests, to the point of assimilating into the US
political discourse not only its routine violations of international law,
but its threats, indeed promises, to scorch vast areas of the earth in
pursuit of its regional supremacy. The willingness of the NYT to publish an
Israeli genocide-ethnocide advocate tells us about the strength of the ties
between a purportedly 'liberal establishment' pro-Israel publication and the
totalitarian Israeli right: It is as if to say that for the liberal
pro-Israel establishment, the non-Jewish Nazis are off limits, but the views
and policies of Judeo-fascists need careful consideration and possible
implementation.

Morris' New York Times 'nuclear-extermination' article did not provoke any
opposition from the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations
(PMAJO) because, in its daily information bulletin, Daily Alert, it has
frequently published articles by Israeli and US Zionists advocating an
Israeli and/or US nuclear attack on Iran. In other words, Morris'
totalitarian views are part of the cultural matrix deeply embedded in the
Zionist organizational networks and its extensive 'reach' in US cultural and
political circles. What the Times did in publishing Morris' lunacy has taken
genocidal discourse out of the limited circulation of Zionist influentials
and into the mainstream of millions of American readers.

Apart from a handful of writers (Gentile and Jewish) publishing in marginal
web sites, there was no political or moral condemnation from the entire
literary, political and journalistic world of this affront to our humanity.
No attempt was made to link Morris' totalitarian genocidal policies to
Israel's public official threats and preparations for nuclear war. There is
no anti-nuclear campaign led by our most influential public intellectuals to
repudiate the state (Israel) and its public intellectuals who prepare a
nuclear war with the potential to exterminate more than ten times the number
of Jews slaughtered by the Nazis.

A nuclear incineration of the nation of Iran is the Israeli counterpart of
Hitler's gas chambers and ovens writ large. Extermination is the last stage
of Zionism: Informed by the doctrine of rule the Middle East or ruin the air
and land of the world. That is the explicit message of Benny Morris (and his
official Israeli sponsors), who like Hitler, issues ultimatums to the
Iranians, 'surrender or be destroyed' and who threatens the US, join us in
bombing Iran or face a world ecological and economic catastrophe.

That Morris is utterly, starkly and clinically insane is beyond question.
That the New York Times in publishing his genocidal ravings provides new
signs of how power and wealth has contributed to the degeneration of Jewish
intellectual and cultural life in the US. To comprehend the dimensions of
this decay we need only compare the brilliant tragic-romantic German-Jewish
writer, Walter Benjamin, desperately fleeing the advance of totalitarian
Nazi terror to the Israeli-Jewish writer Benny Morris' criminal advocacy of
Zionist nuclear terror published in the New York Times.

The question of Zionist power in America is not merely a question of a
'lobby' influencing Congressional and White House decisions concerning
foreign aid to Israel. What is at stake today are the related questions of
the advocacy of a nuclear war in which 70 million Iranians face
extermination and the complicity of the US mass media in providing a
platform, nay a certain political respectability for mass murder and global
contamination. Unlike the Nazi past, we cannot claim, as the good Germans
did, that 'we did not know' or 'we weren't notified', because it was written
by an eminent Israeli academic and was published in the New York Times.

James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New
York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the
landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of
Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books). Petras' forthcoming book, Zionism and US
Militarism, is due from Clarity Press, Atlanta, in August 2008. He can be
reached at: jpetras@binghamton.edu. Read other articles by James, or visit
James's website.