Anon. “Jeffrey Goldberg: National Correspondent for the Atlantic” (21 March 2007) Shame the Hacks Who Abuse Media Ethics. Retrieved from https://shameproject.com/profile/jeffrey-goldberg/.

  Jeffrey Goldberg | National correspondent for The Atlantic

  For two decades now, Jeffrey Goldberg has peddled blatantly false war propaganda with disastrous consequences, fronted for the military-industrial machine, played a key PR role pushing America into war with Iraq, and advanced the agenda of the Israeli military-intel establishment—and he has been rewarded for his lies and failures with the top editor's job at the Atlantic Monthly. Put another way: If Judith Miller was a dweeby Ivy League graduate who worked as a detention camp guard holding Palestinian prisoners, and she never had to answer for her journalistic fraud after being exposed, she would be Jeffrey Goldberg.

  The recovered history of Jeffrey Goldberg

  In the early 1990s, Goldberg served as a prison guard at Ktzi'ot, Israel’s largest detention camp for Palestinian political prisoners. In an interview, Goldberg described his prison guard duty as "not ... an entirely negative experience” and “hopelessly exotic for me." The prison has long been criticized for its inhumane conditions, including frequent beatings, lack of drinking water and forced labor. Among the hundreds of books forbidden to prisoners at Ktzi'ot have been The Lord of the Rings and Hamlet.

  In his 2006 book Prisoners, Goldberg described a scene from Ktzi'ot in which his friend repeatedly hit a Palestinian prisoner in the head with a with a heavy, sharp-edged army radio, beating him to a bloody pulp, a beating that Goldberg "deduced was prompted by something [the prisoner] said." Goldberg admits that he lied to cover up the crime: "I found another military policeman, and handed off the wobbling prisoner, who was by now bleeding on me. 'He fell,' I lied."

  Goldberg also admitted he took part in beatings of Palestinian prisoners, but justified it this way: "Unlike [Goldberg's camp guard friend], I never hit a Palestinian who wasn't already hitting me."

  In 2012, Goldberg denied that he was ever a prison guard: "the actual title of my position was 'prisoner counselor,' believe it or not, which meant that I saw after the culinary, hygiene and medical needs of the prisoners." Yet in his book, Goldberg explicitly states that he was more than just a counselor: "I was a 'prisoner counselor,' a job title that did not accurately reflect my duties in the related fields of discipline and punishment, but which did convey the notion that I was not meant to engage the prisoners solely with pepper spray and barked commands."1

  In 1991, right after finishing his prison guard duty, Goldberg wrote an article for the Jerusalem Post titled "More tear gas, please?" in which he explicitly identified himself as an "Israeli" participating in the "armed administration" of Palestinians. "This leaves us, and by us, I mean Israelis of good will, in a quandary: We administer approximately two million people in the occupied territories..." In the same article, Goldberg mocked Palestinian suffering with crude jokes suggesting, for example, "Arab women ... compete in 'Miss Gaza Refugee Camp' and 'Miss Mother Who Sends Her Children into the Street to Catch Israeli Bullets with Their Heads' contests."

  After 9/11, Goldberg became one of leading "journalists" responsible for propaganda that drummed up unfounded terrorist fears in order to scare the public into war with Iraq. Goldberg was one of the key Bush administration media assets used to manufacture non-existent links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

  In 2002, Goldberg published a two-part fake scare story in the New Yorker alleging that the Shia Muslim group Hezbollah had penetrated deep into the United States and was, among other things, running a black market cigarette ring on American soil in order to finance its terrorist operations. He also claimed that Iraq and Hezbollah were likely to attack Israel in retaliation for the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq: "Iraq will fire missiles at Israel—perhaps with chemical or biological payloads . . . But Hezbollah . . . might do Saddam’s work itself." Goldberg won a $20,000 "International Investigative Reporting Award" from the Center for Public Integrity for the story.

  That same year, in 2002, Goldberg published a New Yorker article—titled "The Great Terror"—that connected Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein through a single extremely unreliable source: a jailed drug dealer provided by Kurdish intelligence. The London Observer interviewed this same prisoner and determined that he was "a liar" and his story "simply not true." But that didn't stop Dick Cheney, who "twice waved around that prisoner’s story  in Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece . . . on Sunday talk shows in late 2002" in order to sell the invasion to the American people.

  "The Great Terror" won the Overseas Press Club's award for "best international reporting in a print medium dealing with human rights," and was praised by former CIA director and active neocon James Woolsey, who called the story "a blockbuster."  Woolsey was also heavily cited and quoted in the article and, as some have speculated, might have helped Goldberg with some of the article's "research."2

  In 2007, David Bradley, owner of the Atlantic, was able to lure Jeffrey Goldberg away from his position at the New Yorker to work at the Atlantic by bribing Goldberg with a couple of ponies.

  A 2008 MRI scan of Jeffrey Goldberg's brain revealed that photos of Ahmadinejad and Bin Laden lit up his ventral striatum, an area of the brain responsible for processing reward. Although Goldberg claimed to be puzzled by the MRI results, the implication was very clear: Exploiting fear of Iran and terrorism had brought Goldberg big career rewards. In the same experiment, a photo of Atlantic Monthly publisher David Bradley lit up a part of Goldberg's brain normally triggered when a person looks at his own reflection in the mirror.

  In 2009, Jeffrey Goldberg suggested that American Jews who don't agree with Israeli apartheid policies have given up their Jewish identity—they were no longer  Jews, but "anti-Zionists with Jewish parents."

  In 2012, Goldberg took part in a smear campaign initiated by AIPAC against liberal bloggers critical of Israel's policies. Goldberg relied on a quote by a fake anti-Semitism "expert" later scrubbed from existence by the Washington Post to falsely accuse them of anti-Semitism.

  Goldberg's shilling for Israel has become increasingly bizarre and fringe-nutcase, so much so that even former Bush admin lackeys and Iraq War boosters like Andrew Sullivan have started bashing him. Goldberg's degeneration has reached a point where he now cites "birther" conspiracy theory websites as credible sources about alleged  Iranian plots to destroy Israel.

1.       More on Goldberg's prison guard duties here, and his denial here. [↩]

2.       Description accompanying the award:  "In this exposé of the crimes of the Iraqi regime, Goldberg described Saddam Hussein's horrifying gas attacks against Kurdish villages, investigated ties between Iraq and al Qaeda terrorists and explored the scope of Iraq's chemical weapons arsenal. Goldberg spent six months on this assignment, often from places that were off limits to western journalists. A former CIA director, James Woolsey, called the story "a blockbuster." [↩]

  Updated on March 21, 2017

  SHAME Reports

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg Was a Follower of Jewish Rightwing Terrorist Meir Kahane

SHAME Publishes Profile on Jeffrey Goldberg: Prison Camp Guard, War Booster & Israeli Apartheid Apologist

  Smoking Gun Quotes

“It was hopelessly exotic for me. I mean, I’m from the South Shore of Long Island, and then all of a sudden I’m in the Negev Desert, by the Egyptian border, as a prison guard in what’s probably the largest prison in the Middle East, guarding the future leaders of Palestine. It was pretty exciting.”

  —On being a prison guard in an detention camp for Palestinian political prisoners; New Yorker interview; Sept. 25 2006

  I had an unusual job at Ketziot. Most soldiers were forbidden to talk to the prisoners. But I was a "prisoner counselor," a job title that did not reflect accurately my duties in the related fields of discipline and punishment . . .

  —From Prisoners; 2006

  “In five years . . . I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.”

  —Slate; Oct. 3, 2002

  The next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America. Everything else - Fannie Mae, health care reform, energy independence, the budget shortfall in Wasilla, Alaska - is commentary.

  —On the eve of the 2008 U.S. presidential elections Goldberg outlined what he thought was the single most important issue facing the incoming president; The New York Times, Sept. 10, 2008

  Soldiers should also be trained to take their behavioral cues not from the macho American movie stars on which they were weaned, but from waiters in pricey restaurants: "Hi, my name's Motti and I'll be arresting you today. Our specials this week are administrative detention without trial and a lovely salad Nicoise. Would you like some fresh ground pepper with your handcuffs?" . . . Of course, when confronted by unrepentant axe-wielding, Molotov cocktail throwers, soldiers should shoot first, act polite later.

  —One of Goldberg's suggestions on how to improve Israel's "armed administration" of the Palestinian people; Jerusalem Post, 1991

  Known Associates

  Goldberg runs a neocon Beltway Torah study group that includes David Brooks, David ­Gregory and Martin Indyk, an ex-AIPAC official and former U.S. ambassador to Israel. Indyk is also known for coming up with the neocon-designed anti-Iraq/Iran "dual containment" policy the U.S. is still following today. Jeffrey Goldberg was introduced to his future wife by Malcolm Gladwell.

  Want to know more?

• Goldberg's War - Harper's Magazine - 2006
• Meet the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg - CounterPunch - Alexander Cockburn 
• Short Cuts - London Review of Books
• Long predicted, Goldberg’s eclipse finally begins - Mondoweiss

Hobsbawm, Eric. “Interview with Jeremy Paxman in the occasion of publishing Interesting Times” (3 October 2002) BBC, Newsnight

  Eric Hobsbawm spent his early years in Vienna then in Berlin. Born in 1917 to an English father and an Austrian mother it was in this crucible of pre-War Middle Europe that his life-long Communist views were formed. He moved to England in 1930s and in time became England’s one of most eminent historians, writing such seminal works as his account of the 20th century, Age of Extremes. There are few enough people left with his breadth of experience of the 20th century. So when we met at the British Academy in London I asked him as a historian of Imperialism what he thought of the world in which there is now only one real empire.

ERIC HOBSBAWM: I've seen them come and I've seen them go. In the course of my lifetime, all the old colonial empires went. The one empire which offered to last 1,000 years lasted a good deal shorter. Another great project, my own, which hoped to last for ever, didn't last for ever.

JEREMY PAXMAN: You're talking about the Soviet Union?

HOBSBAWM: I’m talking about the Soviet Union or world communism. So I don't give too much for the long life of anybody declaring themselves a world empire. It will last my time, but probably it won't last as long as some of the people that are going to read my books.

PAXMAN: You talk about your own particular project. I bet you're fed up with talking about this, but it is a legitimate area of questioning. You were, famously, a very long-standing member of the Communist Party. Yet, everywhere one looks during the course of the 20th century, where communism was applied it failed. Do you think your commitment was a mistake?

HOBSBAWM: My commitment to the cause of the poor, the oppressed, wasn't. I think the solution that we thought we had was a much more dodgy business. I thought at one time it was simply the historic fact that it won first in some rather marginal and barbarous countries. There's no question that made it much, much worse. If it hadn't been Russia, it would certainly not have been anything near as barbarous as it was. On the other hand, looking back, I must now say, I can't call myself a communist any more because the kind of party which I believed was necessary, which Lenin pioneered, and which was for a period in the 20th century an incredibly formidable device for changing states and societies, has run out. The historic period for that has gone. Nevertheless, the belief that this is not basically a just society, it may be a tolerable society and it may be a rich society and we live in lucky times and in a lucky part of the world one shouldn't forget the others.

PAXMAN: The problem is the methodology, isn't it? No-one disputes the ideals. Of course we would all seek a fairer world. But can you think of anywhere where those principles were applied in practice which created a society you admired?

HOBSBAWM: In some instances it created better societies.

PAXMAN: Where?

HOBSBAWM: I remember my friends from India going to Soviet Central Asia and saying, "At least they've taught them all to read and write." It may not seem much for us, particularly now, as we can see there was a hell of a lot wrong and they were poor.

PAXMAN: They taught them to read and write but they didn't let them vote.

HOBSBAWM: They didn’t let them vote but then the Americans didn't like to let the other people vote the wrong way. It is a pity. I think the voting worries me less than the absence of freedom of opinion, particularly a free press.

PAXMAN: What was it that made you decide to become a communist?

HOBSBAWM: Being in Germany between 1931 and 1933, living at a time when it seemed clear that there was no solution for the problems of the world, as I could see it as a teenager, which was not revolutionary. Living at a time when not only did you know you were on the Titanic but you knew it was going to hit the iceberg. The only question is what was going to happen when it hit the iceberg. And it was almost impossible. Obviously, if I had been a German, I might have decided to say, "Oh, well, I'm only interested in a solution only for the Germans," and I might have become a Nazi. I could understand why people in my school sympathised with this. I was English, and I was Jewish on top of it so it didn't apply. Liberals, Social Democrats were not on. Liberals were exactly what was failing.

PAXMAN: I can understand that in the context of Germany, with Nazism emerging, that bi-polar intellectual or political world. But that wasn't the world you found yourself in in this country. While membership of the party must have been a warm embrace, it demanded a degree of fealty from you, didn't it?

HOBSBAWM: You wanted to change the world. You see, we were the first globalisers, we believed as, indeed Marx believed from the word go, that this is the way history was going, therefore there must be global solutions. Even though, of course, we were concerned about our own place, our own countries and so on. Nobody else produced global solutions and when I came to England, there was the crucial question of the fight against fascism, against the Nazis.

PAXMAN: Do you think it was a mistake to adhere to those beliefs for as long as you did?

HOBSBAWM: It didn't make much difference, as far as I was concerned. Whether I kept a party card, if you like, you know. I am not a quitter by nature. That is one thing, if you want an answer. I wanted to stay to pay tribute to a cause which was a good cause, a global cause. Never mind Stalin, never mind the Soviet Union, never mind anything. It didn't make any difference to what I did after. I went on doing what I had done before, teaching people, writing books and I took very little part in politics. I am not a political figure, I don't have the talent.

PAXMAN: To the extent that you did, through your work, proselytise for that cause, do you now regret it, given that everywhere we've seen it attempted it's failed?

HOBSBAWM: I did not proselytise for the Communist Party, I proselytised against capitalism and for the liberation of colonial peoples, for the poor, against the rich. I don't regret that. Why should I?

PAXMAN: When you look at the world, with all of the edifices that owed some sort of political antecedents to that belief, and you see this single great capitalist power, what do you feel?

HOBSBAWM: I like America. I have worked in America, so, in a sense, it is a nice country. It has its drawbacks. I am sufficient of an old anti-imperialist to be suspicious of any world empires. Particularly world empires that don't have anybody to keep them in check. For the last 50 years, and it is lucky for us that this was so, there were two world empires who kept themselves in check. One was a more agreeable one, one would prefer to live under, the other was less agreeable, but they kept each other in check. One has disappeared and the net effect of this is, I think, the occupational disease of world conquerors, particularly people that feel their military power is unlimited, namely megalomania. There needs to be a learning curve because there are, even among the officials of the United States, a lot of people who believe that world empires live in the real world and the real world is a bit too complicated to be run single-handed from Washington. I hope that that learning curve can start or at least progress rapidly.

PAXMAN: Eric Hobsbawm, thank you.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.