…by Jonas E. Alexis, VT Editor

Whenever a flaming Neocon opens his mouth and starts talking, you can be sure that he is going to spread one nonsense after another in a matter of seconds. In fact, they simply cannot utter ten sentences without saying weird things, crazy things, diabolical things.

You remember Jonah Jacob Goldberg? Some may not remember him, but he is the crazy, completely deluded and deranged Neocon who wrote back in 2002:

“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”[1]

Did you catch that? You may want to read that again to get the deep philosophical knowledge that Goldberg was bequeathing upon America in 2002. One year later, America picked up a “small crappy little country” called Iraq and, with the help of Neocons like Goldberg, blew it up to hell. Why did America have to do that? Neocon Michael Ledeen has the answer:

“Creative destruction is our middle name. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law.”[2]

Following the Neocons’ lead, America did the same thing in Afghanistan, Syria, etc. So, what did brother Goldberg say when Iraq turned out to be a complete disaster? Well, he wrote an article in the LA Times in 2006 entitled, “Iraq: a worthy mistake.”[3] Listen to Goldberg here:

“The Iraq war was a mistake. I know, I know. But I’ve never said it before. And I don’t enjoy saying it now. I’m sure that to the antiwar crowd this is too little, too late, and that’s fine because I’m not joining their ranks anyway…. I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.”[4]

That is a categorical lie. And it is pretty sad that it was repeated in the LA Times. Goldberg must have known that he was repeating a lie precisely because all the documents we possess state that both Bush and much of the Neocon establishment knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam was not buying uranium from Niger, and that Saddam had no plan to attack the United States.

Yet those categorical lies were summoned by Neocons of various stripes because, like Dracula, they were hungry to drink the blood. This type they wanted to feast on the blood of decent people in the Middle East.

I challenge anyone to pick up Paul R. Pillar’s scholarly study, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (Columbia University Press, 2011), Michael MacDonald’s Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), John J. Mearsheimer’s Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), John M. Schuessler’s Deceit on the Road to War: Presidents, Politics, and American Democracy (New York: Cornell University Press, 2015), and see if Goldberg wasn’t just lying to his teeth.

Neocon Paul Wolfowitz was so aggressive about invading Iraq that one Republican lawmaker declared Wolfowitz “was like a parrot bringing [Iraq] up all the time. It was getting on the President’s nerves.”[5] After one such meeting in Washington, we are told that Colin Powell rolled his eyes, declaring, “Jeez, what a fixation about Iraq.”[6]

After making one preposterous statement after another, the flaming Neocon moved on to say: “Truth is truth. And the Iraq war was a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003.”[7] When Wolfowitz was told by deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, Wolfowitz responded with certainty, “We’ll find it. It’s got to be there,”[8] which is another way of saying that if it does not exist, they would make it up.

So, when people like Goldberg are trying to entertain you with dumb statements like they didn’t know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, then that’s an infallible sign that these people did make a political pack with Lucifer, who, in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, declares, “So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost. Evil, be thou my good.”

So when Corey Robin of Brooklyn College and the City University of New York’s Graduate Center wrote that “The biggest challenges to today’s public intellectual are imagination and will,”[9] he was categorically wrong. Goldberg didn’t lack imagination. In fact, he invented lies. He lacked the courage to tell the truth and act upon that basis.

So what is Goldberg up to these days? Well, certain Iraq is no longer on his mind. He is hoping that the US gets into an inflammatory conflict with China now. “China is definitely an adversary,”[10] Goldberg didn’t stop there. He went on to assert: “China’s ruling ideology is much better understood as nationalistic, with bits of oligarchy, aristocracy, racism and imperialism thrown in.”[11]

He’s got to be kidding. China doesn’t have separate buses for foreigners, but Israel does have separate buses for Jews and Palestinians! Or how about “Jewish-only ‘national self-determination’” law?[12] Isn’t that racist? Let us stop and think for a moment. Can you imagine the reaction if some neo-Nazi group happens to start a similar law in America or in Europe? Wouldn’t Jewish organizations (from the ADL to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency) start screaming and kicking and gyrating all over the media?

Yet racist laws and policies have become routine in Israel and no serious Jewish organization has said a damn thing about it. Migrant workers for example have ended up working “at 25% below the minimum wage, without medical or social benefits, and without any work permit whatsoever.”

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Racism is also ingrained in Israeli schools as well. Listen to a tenth grader:

“For me, personally, Arabs are something I can’t look at and can’t stand, I am tremendously racist. I come from a racist home. If I get the chance in the army to shoot one of them, I won’t think twice. I’m ready to kill someone with my hands, and it’s an Arab.

“In my education I learned that…their education is to be terrorists, and there is no belief in them. I live in an area of Arabs, and every day I see these Ishmaelites, who pass by the [bus] station and whistle. I wish them death.”[13]

You may think that this is a disgruntled and deranged high school kid, and her abiding hatred toward the Palestinians does not represent a significant number of schools in Israel. But you would be wrong. In an article entitled “Israeli Teens Gripped by Virulent Racism,” the Jewish Daily Forward reported in 2014:

“The student’s comments appear in a chapter devoted to ethnicity and racism among youth from a forthcoming book, ‘Scenes from School Life’ (in Hebrew) by Idan Yaron and Yoram Harpaz.

“The book is based on anthropological observations made by Dr. Yaron, a sociologist, over the course of three years in a six-year, secular high school in the Israeli heartland – ‘the most average school we could find,’ says Harpaz, a professor of education.

“The book is nothing short of a page-turner, especially now, following the overt displays of racism and hatred of the Other that have been revealed in the country in the past month or so. Maybe ‘revealed’ isn’t the right word, as it suggests surprise at the intensity of the phenomenon.

“But Yaron’s descriptions of what he saw at the school show that such hatred is a basic everyday element among youth, and a key component of their identity. Yaron portrays the hatred without rose-colored glasses or any attempt to present it as a sign of social ‘unity.’ What he observed is unfiltered hatred.

“One conclusion that arises from the text is how little the education system is able – or wants – to deal with the racism problem.

“Not all educators are indifferent or ineffective. There are, of course, teachers and others in the realm of education who adopt a different approach, who dare to try and take on the system. But they are a minority. The system’s internal logic operates differently.

“Much of the chapter on racism revolves around the Bible lessons in a ninth-grade class, whose theme was revenge. ‘The class starts, and the students’ suggestions of examples of revenge are written on the blackboard,’ the teacher told Yaron. A student named Yoav ‘insists that revenge is an important emotion.

“He utilizes the material being studied to hammer home his semi-covert message: ‘all the Arabs should be killed. The class goes into an uproar. Five students agree with Yoav and say openly: the Arabs should be killed.’

“One student relates that he heard in the synagogue on Shabbat that ‘Aravim Zeh Erev Rav’ [‘Arabs are rabble,’ in a play on words], and also Amalek, and there is a commandment to kill them all,’ a reference to the prototypical biblical enemy of the children of Israel. Another student says he would take revenge on anyone who murdered his family, but would not kill them all.”[14]

Will Goldberg help fight this blatant form of racism? Is he going to tell us all that he didn’t know these things were going on in Israel? Is he that stupid? And he wants us to take him seriously about China’s racism?

It gets even more interesting. Two years ago, Goldberg wrote a book entitled, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy.

But what about Israel, Goldberg? According to him, It is a “lie” that the Palestinians are being wiped out by the Israelis, despite the fact that the Israeli settlements are classic examples of this. For Goldberg, vibrant and real racism is against Palestinians is another lie.

There are some ideas that are so dumb and diabolical that only a Luciferian Neocon will believe them.

• [1] Jonah Goldberg, “Baghdad Delenda Est, Part Two,” National Review, April 23, 2002; see also Conor Friedersdorf, “The Real Radicals of the Iraq War: Its Proponents,” Atlantic, March 6, 2013; Glenn Greenwald, “Jonah Goldberg’s deeply ‘conflicted’ thoughts on war and torture,” Salon, November 13, 2007.
• [2] Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 210.
• [3] Jonah Goldberg, “Iraq: A Worthy Mistake,” LA Times, October 19, 2006.
• [4] Ibid.
• [5] John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar & Straus, 2006), 246.
• [6] Ibid., 247.
• [7] Goldberg, “Iraq: A Worthy Mistake,” LA Times, October 19, 2006.
• [8] Craig Unger, The Fall of the House of Bush (New York: Scribner, 2007), 40-43.
• [9] Corey Robin, “How Intellectuals Create a Public,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2016.
• [10] Jonah Goldberg, “Column: A Cold War approach won’t work with China,” Chicago Tribune, December 18, 2020.
• [11] Ibid.
• [12] “Israel passes Jewish-only ‘national self-determination’ law despite outcry,” Russia Today, July 19, 2018; see also “Israel passes ‘Nation State’ law enshrining Jewish supremacy,” Middle East Eye, July 19, 2018.
• [13] Peter Beaumont, “EU leads criticism after Israel passes Jewish ‘nation state’ law,” Guardian, July 19, 2018.
• [14] Or Kashti, “Israeli Teens Gripped by Virulent Racism,” Jewish Daily Forward, August 23, 2014.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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