The Drakula Times

Where is Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Please, can someone call her?

Rumor has it that a nest of vampires took over the Times building in midtown manhatten. The Times editors reportedly go to their daily meetings with mugs of tepid blood in their hands. And all the mirrors have been removed from the bathrooms. To keep their supply of fresh beverage flowing, the editors have been for years justifying the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Thomas Friedman used to do most of the heavy lifting with unforgettable catchy phrases such as 'give war a chance.' But Judith Miller and other minor vampires also sunk their teeth in targets of opportunity.

Demand for fresh blood is apparently growing. Because there is a new master vampire at the Times, one for whom justifying the murder of hundreds of thousands is just too unimpressive a feat.

Meet Benny Morris, the Israeli historian who believes that the only wrong thing about the Palestinian Nakba is that the ethnic cleansing wasn't thorough enough. Not incidentally, Morris also believes that the genocide of native-Americans was a good thing. Benny the Vampire has other fascinating beliefs, including that the essence of history is the movement of troops across battlefields, that honesty is a liability, that people of different identities who live intermingled are "mindless," and that Ariel Sharon will be remembered for his contributions to peace. Can there be a better fit for the op-ed page of the U.S. leading newspapers?

So Friday Morris graced the Times with his explanation of why Israel probably must and will attack Iran with nuclear weapons.

ISRAEL will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months — and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country’s nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb. ( the Times, July 18th 2008)

As you'd expect from Morris, the argument rests on a) a lie, and b) a racist, orientalist (and of course false) image of Iran. (so two lies actually, one white lie, and one White lie)

The white lie is that..

Western intelligence agencies agree that Iran will reach the “point of no return” in acquiring the capacity to produce nuclear weapons in one to four years.

That is a white lie because according to the public National Intelligence Estimate Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon.

And the White lie is that...

Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran, Israel knows that deterrence may not work as well as it did with the comparatively rational men who ran the Kremlin and White House during the cold war.

This is the crudest Orientalist manure, but it is 'fit to print' in the Times.

It is frightening to think that Benny Morris considers both himself and Israel's leaders to be rational people, and that using nuclear weapons is the kind of thing rational people would do. If that be reason, let us all pray for insanity.

That the Times would print lies is unremarkable. They do it all the time, intentionally and methodically. But there are lies and then there are lies. If the Times editors had an ounce of humanity in them, they would have never published an op-ed that justifies vaporising millions of people in order to maintain U.S. global and Israeli regional dominance.

They would have instead editorialized that whichever county uses nuclear weapons, they would commit to do everything in their power to bring everyone involved--from the head of state to the fueling mechanic--to face the maximum penalty at the Hague.

This is what the Times editors would have published had they been human.



But they are not. They are vampires. And they are thirsty.