“Award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker”, John Pilger has given an interview to that Indymedia-with-a-budget site, Democracy Now. He claims that President Obama is a “a creation of this media world” who “delivered virtually the opposite” of what he “promised” and “started his own war in Pakistan”.
So, the US, under Obama is responsible for the war in Pakistan? Nothing at all to do with the Taliban making a grab for a nuclear powered state!
But of course, Pilger also intimates that President Obama’s fingerprints are behind the coup in Honduras and the unrest in Iran.
“We see the events in Iran and Honduras in quiet subtlety, but very directly influenced in the time-honored way by the Obama administration. And yet the Obama administration is still given this extraordinary benefit of the doubt by people, who in my view are influenced by the mainstream media.”
Fortunately, below the video of the interview is a transcription. This saves one from having actually to listen to Pilger’s incredibly inarticulate mumbling and verbal stumbling as he struggles to marshall his thoughts into coherence. And, all this is delivered in a drone which I suspect must be calculated to be the precise frequency required to penetrate tinfoil hats. In print, at least, he appears fluent, and his poisonous tongue is more easily exposed.
Naturally, it doesn’t take long before the discussion takes a sharp left-turn and suddenly Israel is centre stage. Wow, we’re talking about Obama’s relation to events in Pakistan, Honduras and Iran and *wham!* suddenly we’re talking about Israel? How did we get onto that? Oh, of course, all that talk about “manipulation” in “the mainstream media” must have triggered neurons to fire like laser bolts at an Imperial Death Star: tchew… tchew… jew… jew…
Indeed, seemingly out of the blue, interviewer Amy Goodman declares:
I want to play for you a clip of David Gregory on NBC. He replaced Tim Russert as the moderator of Meet The Press. And he was interviewing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the midst of the crackdown on the protest in Iran.
Oh, I get it. She wants to contrast the way “the mainstream media” reports the treatment of protesters in Iran with the treatment of “protesters” in Israel. And Pilger doesn’t disappoint her in his response:
“But no one ever presses an Israeli leader. Netanyahu or Olmert or any of them. There are given, Israeli leaders were given a legitimacy during what was unconditionally a massacre in December-January of this year. And the sum of that was to suggest, number one, that there was a war between Israel and Gaza and there wasn’t.”
What interests me is that the far-Left keep insisting that Hamas is the “democratically elected government in Gaza” yet seem to think that Israel should treat Hamas’s aggressive acts as a domestic affair. Well you can’t have it both ways. If Hamas are the “democratically elected government” then it is their responsibility not to make trouble with a neighbour and to heed the warnings of consequences if they fire rockets. If Hamas were leading, as Pilger says a “defenseless country”, then why did they themselves refuse to support a ceasefire? Pilger then criticises Obama with a question that makes this baffling claim:
“Did he reach out to the government in Gaza, which in spite of the media distortion, has time and again called for a two-state agreement in the Middle East?”
Hamas has called for a two-State solution? Time and again? Wow. I’m tempted to say ‘you couldn’t make it up’ – except of course he has!
Anyway, let’s not get distracted by the inevitable anti-Israel sideshow that somehow always becomes central to any discussion about global politics in any region. We all know why this is.
Let’s return to the sickening moral relativism of this crank:
“[T]he demonizing of Iran goes on, the lecturing of Iran, which is extremely political complex society, goes on. And the policy is unchanged. The crime always is independence. Iran is an independent state and has almost miraculously maintained itself in forms that we might not approve of, certainly, but it has maintained itself as an independent, major state in the Middle East. That is absolutely intolerable to the U.S. State.
“And Obama has not shifted from that at all. He has made a number of patronizing appeals to the Iranians, but now, as he is in effect saying, the protesters should be allowed to control the streets of Tehran. Turn that around. What if it was suggested that protesters should be allowed to control the streets of Washington? But that of course is another side of double standards.”
Perhaps that is because the US is a democracy! People do periodically take to the streets to protest this or that in a democracy. They are not gunned down by agents of the state on motorcycles. Pilger can’t seem to appreciate that not only can free people protest, but they have a hell of a lot less to protest about! It didn’t take a “miracle” for Iran to “maintain itself in forms that we might not approve”, it took – and continues to take – brutal repression by a theocratic fascist state!
And speaking of theocratic fascists. The hostilities in Pakistan – that he began talking about before being diverted neatly into talking about Jews – appear in Pilger’s world to have nothing to do with the aggressive expansionist plans of the Taliban. Oh no, this is, according to Pilger, an American “colonial” war. (Really, ships are leaving New York with settlers from Brooklyn on their way to new sunny climes in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan? Really?)
He says:
“Obama has begun a new war. There is in Obama war and that is Pakistan. The shaking of the hornets’ nest, if you like, in Pakistan, which this administration has done willfully, is a historic disaster. The creation of up to 2 million refugees in Northwestern Pakistan caused by the attacks by the Pakistanis government, egged on and paid for by the Obama administration, the use of electronic battlefield weapons such as drones and other unmanned vehicles. Drones have killed according to the Pakistanis authorities, American drones launched from I believe near Las Vegas have killed something like 700 civilians since the inauguration of president Obama. So there is a new war. It is a war in Pakistan.”
I’m not really sure what fools like Pilger want. Do they want groups like the Taliban, assorted Islamists and rogue states like the Jonestown II that is North Korea, to simply march unhindered so far that the only thing that will stop them is another world war?
One might mistake him for one of those ‘end of days’ lunatics.
Gene adds: The point which Hamas apologists like Pilger fail to grasp (or acknowledge) is that Hamas not only rejects a two-state solution. It rejects a one-state solution– that is, the far-Left fantasy of Arabs and Jews living peacefully together in a “democratic secular” Palestine.
As Hamas representative Azzam Tamimi made clear (when he told a Tel Aviv-born Israeli to “go back to Germany”), the only solution Hamas supports is a Jew-free solution.
