[lbo-talk] Benny Strikes Again: "This Holocaust will be different"

Bryan Atinsky bryan at alt-info.org
Sat Jan 20 22:15:31 PST 2007


ravi wrote:
>
> I am not sure that Morris has the explicit (in his mind) purpose of
> preparing a justification for a pre-emptive strike. A real propagandist
> with such near term goals would have better logic (there is that pesky
> word again) to offer than Morris' melodrama.

I don't know about that...seems like a no brainer to me on this one. Morris' 'illogical' melodrama is almost definitely with intention to promote a preemptive strike on Iran.

My question is more, why in English (I haven't seen anything by him with similar content recently in any of the local major hebrew dailies)?

It is interesting that here is someone, who, as a historian (or better yet, he should really be called a "documentarian"), at least claims to rigorously hold to the doctrine of "if it wasn't documented, we can't talk about it." Consequently, he critiques researchers such as those who use such tools as oral history, or people who he sees as even projecting too far beyond the explicit evidence of what is in the documentation.

Yet, here he in a quasi-historical narrative style (much like he uses in his academic work), very matter of factly (without any possible contingencies), merely substituting the usual past tense for future tense. For instance:

"The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Front Command units."

read:

"The orders went out and the Shihab III and IV missiles took off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs were nuclear-tipped, even with multiple warheads. Others were dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Front Command units."

It is written as a fait accompli.

He would probably claim, "Well, this isn't an academic paper, and therefore, doesn't demand the same level of academic rigor."

Rereading this article, and knowing his take on 1948 that the dispossession of the Palestinians from their land and consequent world condemnation of Israel was a necessary evil, that there was no other choice ("ain brirah"), I can even surmise that he is not only calling for a conventional preemptive strike against Iran (as he states that it would be ineffectual), but a preemptive nuclear strike against Iran as "ain brirah."



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