NPR has given Jeffrey Goldberg a platform for his argument that Israel is going to strike Iran and that the U.S. better help out because Israel can’t do it on its own. Tom Ashbrook’s program On Point. You will see that the piece was preceded by a bunch of disclaimers, that Goldberg has never heard a war drum he didn’t dance to, that the piece is provocative, controversial, etc. And Goldberg’s argument is countered by Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan. Haven’t listened to the broadcast, but what about a real debate; why not Steve Walt or Glenn Greenwald of Jim Lobe or myself, writers who have all taken on the Israelcentric looniness of Goldberg’s argument?
P.S. Notice how the commenters at the On Point site are almost all against this bellicosity. One of them makes the point that Walt made a year or so back; you have the third-holiest site in the Muslim world in Jerusalem, and millions of Muslims living within 100 miles of it. And Iran is going to nuke Israel?
Why doesn’t NPR put on Noam Sheizaf, Israeli journo, who says that Goldberg is carrying the water for Netanyahu and the military establishment, and leaving out many anti-Iran-strike voices inside Israeli society?
I must say that I also don’t feel a great anxiety in the Israeli public regarding Iran, or at least not what you would expect if Israelis really believed that they are facing a second Holocaust. People don’t discuss this issue so much, and when they do, you don’t get this sense of mass hysteria I got from Goldberg’s article.
