Drone Attacks, Buenos Aires JCC

The 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires JCC is a staple of Zionist anti-Palestinian, anti-Hizbullah, anti-Muslim, and anti-Iran propaganda, and Philip Weiss addresses how the attack is discussed in US news media in Two versions of Roger Cohen's Iran piece (in IHT and NYT) offered different takes on a loaded issue and underscores the role this discussion plays in US and Zionist anti-Iran demonization.

There are three other aspects to Roger Cohen's columns ([NYT] Iran, the Jews and Germany and [IHT] Cohen: Iran, the Jews and Germany) that are worth mentioning:

• a comparison between the JCC bombing and US drone attacks in Pakistan,
• the meaning of totalitarianism, and
• "the U.S. propensity to fixate on and demonize a country through a one-dimensional lens,"

US Drone Attacks

The Buenos Aires Jewish Community Center was a command and control center for Zionist propagandization, recruitment and fund-raising. By the standards that the USA uses to justify drone attacks in Pakistan and that the USA has used since the NATO-Yugoslavia war, an attack on the JCC was completely legitimate and certainly not grounds for complaint against Iran, Hizbullah, Palestinian resistance fighters or any group that might have decided to use US ethical standards as justification for forceful countermeasures against racist Jewish Zionists.

The Meaning of Totalitarianism

Cohen tells us that Iran is not Nazi Germany, but Koonz points out in The Nazi Conscience that Nazi Germany was not really the totalitarian bogeyman of US discourse if one were not Jewish, and the German Nazi treatment of Jews up until the invasion of the Soviet Union was exactly comparable to Jewish Zionist treatment of Palestinians today.

Americans often confuse the historical German Nazis with the Hollywood depiction of German Nazis as absolute evil. Walter Rinderle and Bernard Norling point out some of the complexity of the phenomenon of German Nazism in The Nazi Impact on a German Village (p 135).

Until 1938 Jewish families in Lahr county [Germany] believed themselves to be well-integrated into their communities. In Lahr city they received permission to form an NSDAP "Party of Jewish Youth" in 1935, and in Offenburg Jewish founded their own group of patriotic War Veterans.

In contrast, the Palestinian family that considers itself well-integrated into Zionist Israeli society is extremely rare and probably non-existent while a "Party of Palestinian Youth" as an adjunct of a Zionist political party is practically inconceivable. (See Zionism, Penisism, and Joseph Massad for more information.)

One Dimensional Lens

Cohen has not so much identified a US propensity but has highlighted a tendency of Jewish mobilization for radical, to wit, Communist, and racist, to wit, Zionist causes that can be traced back for at least a century. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Jewish journalism is many things but is certainly not objective.

Jewish-owned media have almost invariably presented the commonly accepted Jewish view as the only acceptable position.

Columbia Professor Stanislawski makes the following point in Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1823-1855[296] on p. 3:

Before we can study the history of the Jews in the Russia of Nicholas I, we must examine the legacy of interpretation bequeathed to us by the classic historians of Russian Jewry. With the luxury of hindsight it is possible to discern that this scholarship reflected the social and political circumstances of its authors as much as history itself. This is, of course, true to some extent of all history writing, but Russian-Jewish historiography was particularly conditioned by contemporary reality: apolitical objectivity was neither its hallmark nor even its pretended goal. On the contrary, all the major historians of Russian Jewry consciously and candidly wrote history as a political and national statement, hoping to redress the tragedies by chronicling their horrors and thereby to influence in the most direct fashion the political fate of the Jews. Many of the resultant works were issued as party publications or parliamentary briefs. Most were published by openly ideological presses or periodicals. While the ideologies involved ranged across a reasonably broad spectrum of political opinion, they were all united against one common enemy, the tsarist regime and its obvious anti-Semitic bent as exemplified by the governments of Alexander III and Nicholas II.

This exogenous stimulus to scholarship quite naturally had considerable effect on the assumptions, as well as the conclusions, of the scholars. To a large extent, their research was aimed at tracing the origins and background of contemporary attitudes and actions of the Russian authorities in regard to the Jews. This led, perhaps inevitably, to what now appears as an overidentification of the past with the present, a projection backward of the context of the government’s relations with the Jews.

The analogy with contemporary Holocaust scholarship can hardly be avoided, and Grace Halsell describes her run-in with Jewish Zionist thought-control in What Christians Don’t Know About Israel. (See Bringing Holocaust Religion to Arabs.[297] and The Truth Was Out There.)

To be fair to Cohen's critics, I have to admit I found his columns somewhat superficial and one-dimensional. I have known Iranian Sunni Muslims, who complained that Iranian Shiites treated them like najis (نجس -- treif for those familiar with the similar Jewish concept). One must wonder whether latent Sunni-Shi`i hostility provides a certain amount of distraction from Jews, but on the whole I have the impression that intra-Islamic tension is on the decline‎ with some exceptions, which may also be tribal.

The Iranian government as well as leading Shiite clerics have all condemned such behavior and made a strong push for Islamic unity against injustice while leading Sunni shuyukh have agree with Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwiy (يوسف القرضاوي) when he explicitly stated, "Shias agree with the Sunnis in the main principles of Islam while the differences are only over the branches."

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