Protests are heating up again in Iran, so comment on the following is timely.
In June 2007 I remarked on Amy Goodman’s fawning interview with left extremist John Pilger, a declared supporter of the Iraqi insurgency, an admirer of Hezbollah and apologist for Palestinian suicide bombers, and a Balkan genocide revisionist to boot. (Pilger considers himself part of the “peace movement.”) Now Goodman has aired another fawning interview with Pilger (hat tip Brett), in which he issues the following Palin-esque statement on Iran:
Now there is no doubt that among the people protesting, the many people protesting in the streets of Iran, are those who want another Iran, those who want greater freedoms, we have heard from that in the past, but without any smoking gun, without any credible information, without any evidence that that election in Iran was rigged. Rigged to get rid of something like 10 million votes. I mean, I don’t think anyone does in an election like in Iran or in the United States, there is a fraud. In most elections, there are. They may well have been extensive fraud in the Iranian elections.
Goodman fails to challenge this doublespeak. No credible information? No evidence of fraud? Iran’s Guardian Council has conceded there were widespread irregularities. We also have Chatham House’s authoritative study, which Juan Cole endorsed and linked to on June 22. The argument is settled. Goodman posted the Pilger interview on July 6 and she says their discussion occurred “last week.” So Pilger is either ignorant of the Chatham House report, or he chooses to deny its existence. (The late Harold Pinter on Pilger — my italics: “He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is.” Nonsense.) It is Goodman’s duty as a journalist to mention the Chatham House study to her listeners. Widely hailed on the left as a tough-minded and well-informed interviewer, she is neither.
Incoherent as it is, Pilger’s quote above allows him some wiggle room to deny he’s wholeheartedly backing the Iranian regime. But there’s no mistaking it — in this epic contest between the Iranian people and the baton-wielding state, Pilger is nauseatingly sympathetic toward the latter:
[Obama] 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?
Again, Goodman — I remind you, she is host of a program called Democracy Now! — fails to challenge Pilger on this chillingly anti-democratic statement. But it is helpful to know that if unruly mass protests were ever to break out in evil Washington, Pilger would apparently put in a word for random beatings and arrests, shootings, street surveillance, total blockage of the media and social networking and so on. Maybe he feels the Kent State and Chicago ’68 protesters had it coming.
Along the way, Pilger hails Democracy Now! as an “alternative source of information.” In truth, it is a softball, back-patting forum for the fringe left.
PS — Goodman has also interviewed Cynthia McKinney about her arrest and deportation from Israel. As Adam Holland has reported, McKinney is making the rounds of racist and antisemitic hate radio, first on something called Information Underground, more recently on the program of Daryl Bradford Smith, a fellow who believes in a “Judeo-Bolshevist plot against Christianity.” Don’t expect Amy Goodman to report on McKinney’s hard-right fascist ties anytime soon. And shame on pro-Palestinian activist Adam Shapiro for consorting with her.
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