Jeffrey Goldberg (The Atlantic) has long history of Muslim-baiting & war-mongering (Iraq's WMD, etc)

[stockholmer]

I see him all too often posted on DU. He is a toxic neo-con enabler. He is certainly one who can lay claim to first hand knowledge in the use of 'dog whistles':

First he found WMDs in Iraq– now Jeffrey Goldberg finds ‘Jihadists did this in Norway’

http://mondoweiss.net/2011/07/jeffrey-goldberg-reports-wmds-in-iraq-imminent-attack-on-iran-and-jihadists-did-this-in-norway.html

This is funny. Flapola nails Jeffrey Goldberg, http://flapola.blogspot.com/2011/07/no-shame-at-atlantic.html and then Goldberg amends his post w/o saying as much, and then... well, it's too complicated for me, but apparently Glenn Greenwald is after Goldberg, and some folks are going after Jim Fallows for assailing Jennifer Rubin for the same thing-- wrongly blaming Norway on Muslims without any evidence-- and not going after his colleague Goldberg. (Bear in mind, Goldberg's bad reports from Kurdistan in the New Yorker, suggesting that Saddam was getting WMDs, helped paved the way to the Iraq war)... Flapola:

On Friday July 22, Jeffrey Goldberg posted “Mumbai Comes to Norway”. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-vOFk8Kggp8J:www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/mumbai-comes-to-norway/242380/+%22mumbai+comes+to+norway%22 The link is to a cache of the original version of the post. The text reads:

"I'm following news of the Norway attacks like the rest of you, and am curious to see, among other things, Norway's response. I hope it is not to pull troops out of Afghanistan; this would only breed more attacks. So, why Norway? It doesn't seem likely, on the surface. There are many countries with more troops in Afghanistan than Norway; and there are several countries whose newspapers have printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. My first reaction is two-fold: 1) Jihadists did this in Norway because they could. Norway is pretty well-known among homeland-security types for being among the softer, less-defended countries of the West, and 2) Norway is making moves to expel a jihadist called Mullah Krekar, who is one of the founders of Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda-affiliated group that operated in Iraqi Kurdistan with some help from Saddam's intelligence services. This could be a message about his coming deportation."

Flapola continues: http://flapola.blogspot.com/2011/07/latest-jeffrey-goldberg-scandal.html

When events demonstrated how reckless he’d been, Goldberg added a third paragraph raising the possibility of right-wing terrorism. By not labeling this as an update, he left readers to conclude that he was just exploring multiple theories rather than using the massacre to make a bold pronouncement about the worldwide jihadist danger. Later that evening, beginning around 8 PM, Goldberg began adding 4 further paragraphs on stray thoughts, each of which he did carefully label as an “UPDATE”. At the same time he also added “(UPDATED)” to the title. So he was capable of noting updates when there was nothing to be gained from not doing so. On Saturday, Goldberg posted a roundabout defense of his decision to rush to judgment, “On Suspecting al Qaeda in the Norway Attacks.” It is characteristically disingenuous, particularly about what he had written in “Mumbai”.


snip

---------------------------------------------------------

The Greater Islamophobia: Bombing, Invading, and Occupying Muslim Lands (II)

http://www.loonwatch.com/2011/12/the-greater-islamophobia/


This article is part II of The Greater Islamophobia: Bombing, Invading, and Occupying Muslim Lands (I). Read Part I first. http://www.loonwatch.com/2011/12/the-greater-islamophobia-bombing-invading-and-occupying-muslim-lands-i/

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg is a prominent establishment journalist who helped push the country to war against Iraq: he famously claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, was on the verge of going nuclear, and was linked to Al-Qaeda and 9/11. These were all lies, nothing short of alarmist war-propaganda. Jeffrey Goldberg is at it again, but this time against Iran http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-08/why-obama-might-save-israel-from-nuclear-iran-jeffrey-goldberg.html and Pakistan http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/12/the-ally-from-hell/8730/?single_page=true . This is part of his overall warmongering ideology, one that involves advocating what I call the Supreme Islamophobic Crime: bombing, invading, and occupying Muslim lands. The justifications used to wage war against Muslims are steeped in hypocrisy and double standards, which are very prevalent in Goldberg’s articles.

In part I, I responded to Goldberg’s claims that Iran should be attacked because it is supposedly on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. I pointed out the hypocrisy of the U.S. and Israel in this regard, both of which also have nuclear weapons and are either in violation of the NPT (the U.S.) or refuse to sign it (Israel). As George Orwell famously said http://www.salon.com/2011/12/04/george_orwell_on_the_evil_iranians/singleton/ in his critique of nationalism: “Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them.”

For the record, I am a strong believer in complete nuclear disarmament. However, either all countries should get rid of nuclear weapons or all countries have the right to acquire them. There cannot be a double-standard in this regard. If the United States and Israel possess them, then Iran–which is under constant American and Israeli threat of not just conventional warfare but nuclear strike–not only has the right to obtain them, but–as Glenn Greenwald notes http://www.salon.com/2011/12/04/george_orwell_on_the_evil_iranians/singleton/ –“nothing is more rational than Iran’s wanting a nuclear weapon” (note: that is, if Iran secretly wanted to do so).

* * * * *

Here in part II, I will tackle the rest of Goldberg’s article, which is filled with typical Zionist, neoconservative, and warmongering rhetoric. Each of his pro-war arguments can be equally applied to America and/or Israel, reinforcing Orwell’s statement. First, Goldberg writes:

snip

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Does the past record of journalists matter?


http://www.salon.com/2010/08/13/past_2/

The Atlantic‘s James Fallows, whose analysis I often find worthwhile, yesterday defended Jeffrey Goldberg and his Iran article from unidentified critics http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/08/bombing-iran-what-is-the-atlantics-line/61408/ (emphasis added):

Is this article warmongering? Or to put it more delicately, is it meant to condition the American public and politicians to the prospect of an attack on Iran? Many people have portrayed it as such. I disagree. I think that those reading the piece as a case for bombing Iran are mainly reacting to arguments about the preceding war.

Jeff Goldberg was a big proponent of invading Iraq, as I was not — and those who disagreed with him about that war have in many cases taken the leap of assuming he’s making the case for another assault. I think this is mainly response to byline rather than argument. If this new article had appeared under the byline of someone known to have opposed the previous war and to be skeptical about the next one, I think the same material could be read in the opposite way — as a cautionary revelation of what the Netanyahu government might be preparing to do. Taken line by line, the article hews to a strictly reportorial perspective: this is what the Israeli officials seem to think, this is how American officials might react, this is how Israeli officials might anticipate how the Americans might react, these are the Israeli voices of caution, here are the potential readings and mis-readings on each side.

First of all, it’s inaccurate to claim that critiques of Goldberg’s article are based on what he did in the past. The objections I raised yesterday, http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/12/goldberg/index.html based largely on Jonathan Schwarz’s well-documented analysis, http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003356.html concern false and/or dubious claims in Goldberg’s current essay, all of which just so happen to militate in favor of attacking Iran. Take, for instance, the glaring contradiction between (a) Goldberg’s 2002 statement about the effect on Saddam’s nuclear ambitions of the 1981 Israeli strike (“After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts”) and (b) his claim about that same topic in his current Iran article (“In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting — forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions”). The point of that contradiction is not — as some Goldberg defenders (such as his friend Joe Klein) http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/08/12/nonsense-and-more-nonsense/ concluded — that Goldberg made inaccurate claims about Iraq’s nuclear program back in 2002 and therefore shouldn’t be trusted now.

snip
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Goldberg's War

http://harpers.org/archive/2006/06/sb-goldbergs-war-1151687978

Last week Jeffrey Goldberg, the Washington correspondent for the New Yorker, spoke at a panel session here that asked the burning question, “Can Liberals—and Only Liberals—Win the War on Terror?” Readers may recall that Goldberg was, in the year leading up to the war, a strong proponent of invading Iraq, and wrote a number of articles that echoed the administration's arguments for toppling Saddam Hussein. That was no coincidence, since his reporting relied heavily on administration sources and war hawks (and in at least one crucial case, a fabricator).

Goldberg and his friends predicted that events would unfold smoothly in Iraq, and now that they haven't, he wants to make sure that U.S. troops stay put and fight the war that he helped promote. The Democrats, he told the Washington panel, can regain power only by reaching out to their conservative wing (and to voters even further to the right who over the years have migrated from the party to the G.O.P.). He's been interviewing members of this vital voting-bloc, he said, and he was able to report that they would “like to leave Iraq but they'd really like to win Iraq” and are looking for “a party and leadership” that can lead the way to victory.

Prior to the American-led invasion of Iraq, Goldberg wrote two lengthy articles in the New Yorker which argued that there were extensive ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Much of what he wrote in a mammoth March 2002 story was based on the testimony of Mohammed Mansour Shahab, a prisoner in a Kurdish-controlled town in northern Iraq. Jason Burke of the London Observer later demolished Goldberg's story http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,892159,00.html when he spoke to the same prisoner and found that he couldn't even describe the city of Kandahar, where Shahab had claimed that he'd traveled on Al Qaeda-related business. “Shahab is a liar,” Burke concluded. “ubstantial chunks of his story simply are not true.” Goldberg also peddled the Iraq–Al Qaeda connection during a February 2003 interview on All Things Considered, delivering the grim news that Saddam's agents had some years earlier helped Al Qaeda “in the teaching of the use of poison gas.”

Goldberg's hysteria peaked when it came to his claims regarding Saddam's “weaponization” of a biological agent called aflatoxin. Aflatoxin, he wrote on October 3, 2002 in Slate http://www.slate.com/default.aspx?id=2071670&&entry=2071895#goldberg , “does only one thing well: It causes liver cancer. In fact, it induces it particularly well in children.” (In this same Slate item Goldberg attacked Slate contributors who opposed the war, saying the critics had “limited experience in the Middle East” and that this led them to “reach the naive conclusion that an invasion of Iraq will cause America to be loathed in the Middle East, rather than respected.”) Within an hour of President Bush signing a congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, Goldberg was on CNN and again claimed that Saddam had “weaponized aflatoxin, which is a weapon that has no military value. Its only value is to cause liver cancer, primarily in children.”

snip

----------------------------------------------------

Foreign Policy Magazine: Goldberg goes bananas (again)

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/12/03/goldberg_goes_bananas_again

I never cease to be amazed at how virtually any criticism of Israel can cause Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic to go bananas and make all sorts of wild charges. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/11/the-impotence-of-the-pan-semitic-front/67222/ This tendency is especially evident when someone writes about the Israel lobby. It is usually best to ignore him, because he seems incapable of getting the simplest facts right. But occasionally I feel the need to set the record straight.

Goldberg's forte is character assassination, and his main weapons are name-calling and misrepresenting his opponents' arguments. Instead of calling me a "Jew-baiter" (a despicable accusation for which he has no grounds), as he has in the past, his latest sally calls me a "neo-Lindberghian," again implying that I am an anti-Semite. This is a serious charge -- the political equivalent of calling someone a racist or child molester -- and you'd think a respectable journalist would go to some effort to document the label before using it. You'd think he'd supply a lengthy array of quotations from my writings and speeches to prove his point. Goldberg cannot do this, however, because no such evidence exists.


Goldberg doesn't know me; doesn't know my history, relatives, friends, students, and close associates, and has no idea what I really think about any of these questions. Judging by what he writes about my work, he doesn't even know what I've written. For example, he claims that the book that John Mearsheimer and I wrote on the Israel lobby http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374177724?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0374177724 describes a "nefarious, all-powerful Jewish lobby." and that we "love to capitalize the word 'Lobby.'" Both statements are demonstrably false, as he would know if he had bothered to examine the issue.

We portray the lobby as a legitimate interest group like many others and emphasize that its activities are a normal part of democratic politics in America (pp. 13-14, 112, 150). We explicitly reject the term "Jewish lobby" (p. 115) and we don't capitalize the word lobby anywhere in the 484-page book. Indeed, the only place we ever capitalized that word was in our original London Review article; but we openly acknowledged in our subsequent response to critics http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/setting_the_record_straight.pdf that this usage was misleading and have not done so in any of our subsequent writings.

snip

-------------------------------------------------------
I can go on, but you get the point

[Scurrilous]

1. K & R