A Brazen Evil: Benny Morris argues for nuclear genocide against Iran

[Marcus Marulus]

July 21, 2008

A Brazen Evil: Benny Morris argues for nuclear genocide against Iran

by Justin Raimondo

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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[Marcus Marulus]

David Bromwich

Benny Morris Justifies Israel's Coming Attack on Iran

Posted July 18, 2008

On Friday July 18 the New York Times published an op-ed by the Israeli historian Benny Morris. It is entitled "Using Bombs to Stave Off War." Morris chose this American venue to announce that Israel would "almost surely" attack Iran some time in the next few months. And he indicated that America would be well advised to support the attack.

The reputation of Benny Morris is founded on unquestioned scholarly achievement and a far more dubious political stance. As one of Israel's "new historians," he recovered the record of harassment, murder, and expulsion of the Palestinians in the war of independence -- a finding that largely discredits the Israeli myth that the inhabitants fled from their own timidity, or because they were told to flee by Arab governments.

But speaking as an Israeli citizen, more recently, Morris has declared his view that the mistake of Ben-Gurion and the leadership of 1948 was that they did not carry the expulsion of the Palestinians all the way. Morris sees Israel in 2008 as a state under perpetual siege and the focus of a clash of civilizations; he sees Palestinians -- and to a degree, all Arabs; and Iranians, too -- as a species of animals not yet inducted into full humanity. Thus in a well-known interview with Ari Shavit, published in Haaretz on January 5, 2004, Morris described the Israeli problem with the Palestinians:

"Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another."

In the years since Benny Morris spoke those words, the construction of the Israeli wall in the West Bank, and the blockade of Gaza by land, sea, and air have created the cage he believed was necessary.

Now, writing from Israel for the American newspaper of record, Morris offers his advice concerning the proper treatment of Iran and Iranians. Since Iran is five years from being able to make a nuclear bomb (Morris says one-to-four years), Israel is compelled to bomb Iran "in the next four to seven months."

One may notice that the Israeli attack goes on a much faster schedule than the Iranian pace of research and discovery. Why the haste for destruction? Could it have something to do with the American presidential election of 2008 (which comes at Morris's four-month lower limit), or something to do with the inauguration of a new president in 2009 (thirty days before his upper limit of seven months)? Morris does not say. He writes, he says, because people need to realize that the success of Israel's coming "conventional assault" on Iran will be good for Israel, for the United States, and even for Iran. If, on the other hand, this conventional assault fails, Israel will some day launch a nuclear attack; and that will be less good.

The choice, Morris concludes, lies with the rest of the world, and especially with the United States. If Iran does not submit rapidly to the next round of international pressure, the world had better support Israel and hope for the success of its first aerial assault against Iran.
Morris confesses, or implies, one reservation. It would better if the United States could launch the attack. But, being realistic, he remarks the lack of enthusiasm among Americans "for wars in the Islamic lands."

"Which leaves," says Morris, "only Israel."

There is an irritant driving this article, a motive more deeply lodged than Morris is willing to avow. For he suspects Israel alone cannot do the job well enough. So having first dismissed the U.S. and the American public as faint-hearted and unequipped for "wars in Islamic lands," and having then come half way to ask again, Morris at last accuses the United States. If we do not soon intervene, and attack Iran as he counsels, the result will be further nuclear progress by Iran. This will be terminated eventually with a nuclear attack by Israel against Iran.

A nuclear attack on a nation of seventy million people (a great many of them innocent of the desire to wipe Israel off the map) is morally indefensible. How can Morris defend it? He can because he knows -- not believes but metaphysically knows -- that the moment that Iran comes into possession of its first weapon, the leaders of Iran will commit national suicide in order to obtain the pleasure of destroying Israel.
Morris alludes to his ulterior knowledge in two sentences so full of blandness, abstract jargon, and bureaucratic euphemism that their meaning is not initially clear; but if one reads with care, one sees that the message is never in doubt:

"Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificing mindset of the mullahs who run Iran, Israel knows that deterrence may not work as well as it did with the comparatively rational men who ran the Kremlin and the White House during the cold war. They are likely to use any bomb they build."
Iran will use a nuclear bomb, Morris is sure, as soon as it has one, even knowing that to do so means the destruction of Iran. The Mullahs will do it because that is the kind of people they are.

Here then is the way around the charge that Israel, in attacking Iran some time before March 2009, will be committing a crime. By Morris's logic the attack by Israel will be an act of self-defense. Indeed, it will be preemptive -- hardly more than common sense -- given the knowledge that Benny Morris possesses of the "fundamentalist, self-sacrificing" nature of the leaders of Iran. No evidence for his intuition is ever offered -- evidence from (say) the history of Iranian foreign policy over the past fifty years, or 200; evidence founded on actions rather than words. What if Iran's words since 1979 have been wilder than its deeds? What if Israel's actions since 2002 have been wilder than its words (wilder, even, than Benny Morris's words of 2004)? These findings could not possibly touch the argument. Morris writes as a man in possession of a racial and religious knowledge that is superior to evidence.

Of course, he hopes that Israel will not be forced to go all the way (though he has deplored Ben-Gurion's failure to go all the way with expulsion of the Palestinians). He imagines most Iranians would prefer not to see "Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland." Morris has thus given the readers of the New York Times a vision of a hellish future, but then atoned for the extravagance by suggesting that, if things fall out so, it will be the fault of Iran and the United States. Israel will have done the best it could with a monstrous and implacable enemy and a reluctant ally.

All circumstances taken together, this New York Times op-ed by Benny Morris is at once the most overt and the most peculiar intervention we Americans have witnessed thus far, by an Israeli attempting to influence U.S. policy in the Middle East. The article is weakly founded on partial facts and conjectural truths. It passes without transition from mock-prudential calculations to a tyrannical threat to destroy a civilization for the good of the world. Yet, though unpersuasive, it acquires significance when published between a recent visit to the U.S. by the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and the current visit by the defense minister Ehud Barak. Morris's article is meant to be read in the context of such recent assurances as Olmert's, for example, that President Bush "understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on that matter before the end of his term in the White House."

But let us return for a last look at Benny Morris.

No person into whose mind had entered the idea that an Iranian may be a human being--and that there are millions of innocent Iranians -- could have generated with such casual facility the image of Iran as a "nuclear wasteland." Yet this was the image of Iran that the Israeli Benny Morris decided to conjure up for American readers in the New York Times.

In the Haaretz interview of January 5, 2004, the following exchange occurred between the interviewer Ari Shavit and Benny Morris: "Would you describe yourself as an apocalyptic person?"

"The whole Zionist project is apocalyptic. It exists within hostile surroundings and in a certain sense its existence is unreasonable. It wasn't reasonable for it to succeed in 1881 and it wasn't reasonable for it to succeed in 1948 and it's not reasonable that it will succeed now. Nevertheless, it has come this far. In a certain way it is miraculous. I live the events of 1948, and 1948 projects itself on what could happen here. Yes, I think of Armageddon. It's possible. Within the next 20 years there could be an atomic war here."

This apocalyptic danger Morris may conceive himself to have put off a few more years by writing an editorial on behalf of Israel's coming attack. But whether the attack on Iran comes sooner or later, whether it is executed by Israel or the U.S. or both, and whether carried out with conventional or nuclear weapons, Morris has no doubt of one thing. It will have served the "apocalyptic" vision of the "whole Zionist project," and it will coincide with the highest values of humanity properly defined.

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[bombadillo]

Is there any evidence that

1) Iran is intending to build nuclear bombs? and
2) That it will use them against Israel?

Under the terms of the NPT, Iran is allowed to enrich uranium, which is what it is doing.

[Germanicus]

Originally Posted by bombadillo

Is there any evidence that

1) Iran is intending to build nuclear bombs? and
2) That it will use them against Israel?

Under the terms of the NPT, Iran is allowed to enrich uranium, which is what it is doing.

Daily Mail 21-7-08

Gordon Brown will today pledge to support Israel in the face of Irans "totally abhorant" threat to wipe Israel off the face of the map.
He will deliver a blunt message to Tehran by insisting that the radical regime must abandon its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
And in a landmark speech to the Israeli parliament -the first by a prime British minister _ Mr Brown will o0ffer unequivocal support for Israels right to exist.

Well, to me that sounds like Israel is going to do something.
You do not get a British Primeminister getting in a flap like that for no reason...........

[bombadillo]

Originally Posted by Germanicus

Daily Mail 21-7-08

Gordon Brown will today pledge to support Israel in the face of Irans "totally abhorant" threat to wipe Israel off the face of the map.
He will deliver a blunt message to Tehran by insisting that the radical regime must abandon its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
And in a landmark speech to the Israeli parliament -the first by a prime British minister _ Mr Brown will o0ffer unequivocal support for Israels right to exist.

Well, to me that sounds like Israel is going to do something.
You do not get a British Primeminister getting in a flap like that for no reason...........

Yes, but it doesn't answer my questions. Politicians like Blair and Brown lie through their teeth -- it's their livelihood. I haven't seen evidence behind their assertions. As I see it, Israel wants to maintain its nuclear monopoly come hell or high water.

It just doesn't make logical sense that Iran will build nuclear weapons and then promptly strike Israel. It's signing one's own death warrant. The arguments of the USA, UK and Israel are the same hysterical and mendacious garbage we were treated to in late 2002 and early 2003.

Phrases like "right to exist" leave me cold. A lion's "right to exist" is at the expense of other animals. Israel's "right to exist" is at the expense of stateless and murdered Palestinians. This is deftly brushed under the rug, and we are left with the moral bromide of "right to exist." Sordid realpolitik is couched in sterile moral verbiage.

[Marcus Marulus]

Originally Posted by bombadillo

Phrases like "right to exist" leave me cold. A lion's "right to exist" is at the expense of other animals. Israel's "right to exist" is at the expense of stateless and murdered Palestinians. This is deftly brushed under the rug, and we are left with the moral bromide of "right to exist." Sordid realpolitik is couched in sterile moral verbiage.

The incessant blathering about Israel's "right to exist" and whining about the fact that it might be endangered is pathetic and ridiculous in the light of the fact that Israel is - proportionally to its small territorial size - the biggest military power on earth, with military technology, both conventional and nuclear, superior to all of its neighbours combined. Ipso facto is its "right to exist" guaranteed, no matter what some spokeman of Hamas or whoever else says.