The Washington Post Company-owned American bimonthly magazine “Foreign Policy” published in its December issue the list of world’s top 100 global thinkers. This list is supposed to introduce people who have had the most remarkable influence on the world’s economic, political and social developments.
The magazine, which invariably includes in its annual lists of top global thinkers names such as Bill Gates, Paul Krugman, George Soros, Ben Bernanke and one or two Chinese dissidents, this year came up with a striking innovation and named Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak as the co-winners of the 13th berth of the top 100 global thinkers!
The reason for the selection of the two Zionist hawks was their efforts “for forcing the world to confront Iran’s nuclear program.”
Of course Israel went through fire and water to stall Tehran’s nuclear program by running a campaign of assassinating Iran’s nuclear scientists, spreading malware and viruses through Iranian government’s computer systems and pressuring the U.S. and European governments to impose hard-hitting economic sanctions against Iran, but it seems quite unclear which part of these malicious actions makes the two Israeli politicians “global thinkers.”
There’s no doubt that the Foreign Policy will never include in its list of global thinkers such as late Rachel Corrie or late Vittorio Arrigoni for their brave resistance against the Zionist project of the colonization of Palestine, or a courageous artist such as Gilad Atzmon who has the courage to denounce his (Israeli) nationality because of the atrocities Israelis are committing against the innocent Palestinians, or the dozens of world-renowned progressive journalists, such as the late Alexander Cockburn, who have outspokenly challenged the endless U.S. warmongering around the world, but the fact that they gave the 13th rank of their list to two Israeli extremists is quite a bizarre move.
There are few people in the world, and even among the Israelis, who doubt that Netanyahu and Barak are two mass killers. Their hands are smeared with the blood of hundreds of innocent Palestinian civilians, and they’re responsible for the strangulation of 1.7 million Palestinians living under the worst circumstances in the besieged Gaza Strip. During the so-called Operation Cast Lead of 2008-2009, they massacred some 1,400 Palestinians, as reported by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and in the recent military onslaught on Gaza, they killed more than 160 Palestinians and destroyed scores of houses, mosques, schools and hospitals.
Therefore, it’s quite incomprehensible why these two men have been named as global thinkers, especially a few days after they humiliatingly accepted truce with Hamas in the eight-day Gaza war which added more war crimes to their shameful curriculum vitae.
“Almost single-handedly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have wrenched the world’s attention toward the apocalyptic potential of a nuclear Iran,” wrote Foreign Policy in describing the reasons why it named Netanyahu and Barak as two of the top global thinkers of 2012.
“The effects of a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities remain unknown, but the result of this rhetorical offensive has been impressive. The two Israelis not only sparked a political debate at home but also induced Europe to cut off oil imports from Iran and got U.S. President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney into a prolonged argument over which presidential hopeful would be a better ally to the government in Jerusalem,” the American magazine added.
The irony is that Israel, the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East and a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has 200 to 400 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, according to the Federation of American Scientists, and at the same time, it wants to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear technology.
Although Iran is under four rounds of UN Security Council sanctions and unilateral embargo by the United States and European Union over its nuclear program, there has never been any shred of evidence confirming that it has been working toward developing nuclear weapons, and no IAEA report has verified this claim. But thanks to the unconditional support provided by Washington, Tel Aviv has always been immune to inspection of its atomic arsenal and IAEA has never dared to investigate Israel’s underground nuclear facilities. And now, two bellicose politicians with a hazardous nuclear stockpile are talking about preventing Iran from going nuclear and then are praised by the Foreign Policy magazine.
Of course such selections and decisions contribute to the defamation and discrediting of such mainstream media outlets, demonstrating that global thinkers, as identified by the experts and editors of these outlets are not simply recognized for their intellectual contributions and activities; they can be selected for simply being as much imprudent and idiotic as Netanyahu and Barak are.
