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The headline in The Washington Post tells you all you need to know about how these attacks are being used: “Israel blames Iran for India and Georgia bombing attempts; Tehran denies role.” As Juan Cole points out, Indian investigators do not believe Iran was responsible, though he writes that “American media just parrot” the accusations against Iran by Israeli officials. We’ll likely never know who was actually responsible, though what is clear is that the attacks are being instantly exploited by Israel-devoted neocons to further depict Iran as a Grave Menace (Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post: if Iran is responsible, it’s “one more piece of data that Iran is growing ever bolder and more aggressive”), all without noting the glaring irony that the mode of attack in India is virtually identical to the one used to kill numerous Iranian scientists (“a magnetic bomb was slapped onto [the] car by a passing motorcyclist”).

All of these mysteries received substantial clarity from an NBC News report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem yesterday. Citing two anonymous “senior U.S. officials,” that report makes two amazing claims: (1) that it was MEK which perpetrated the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and (2) the Terrorist group “is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.” These senior officials also admitted that “the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign” but claims it “has no direct involvement.”

WTF.

They are literally decreeing that you are barred from challenging the dubious premises of those who crave war with Iran, are further barred from questioning their fear-mongering about the Iranian nuclear program, are also barred from assigning blame to the settlement-expanding Israelis for the lack of a peace agreement, and are even barred from condemning the increasingly unsustainable and anti-democratic treatment of the Palestinians — all upon pain of being formally condemned as anti-Semitic.

This rhetorical maneuver is as morally repugnant as it is potentially catastrophic. Religious tolerance is not complicated. It doesn’t involve picking sides in wars, policy disputes, or speculative debates. It is about not picking sides. I’m sure that is harder for religious people than for atheists, but it’s no excuse for debasing a principle that has spared modern societies from the centuries of religious wars that came before.

I could literally spend the rest of the day posting identical examples. That the targeted assassination plot aimed exclusively at the Saudi Ambassador was “Terrorism” was the automatic, unexamined, consensus claim from major media outlets, foreign policy experts, and the U.S. Government. Indeed, the accused defendants were formally charged with “international acts of terrorism” notwithstanding that it was to be a targeted assassination of a Saudi official. If anyone disputed this characterization, it escaped my notice, and I pay close attention to debates over the Terrorism label. Very few people, if anyone, objected at all when this allegedly Iranian plot was repeatedly denounced as Terrorism.

But now that it’s widely believed that some combination of Israel and the U.S. are behind the ongoing plot to serially extinguish Iranian scientists — see here, here and here for just some of the evidence suggesting that — it’s suddenly improper, even outrageous, to suggest that this is Terrorism. That’s because the U.S. and Israel are incapable of committing Terrorism, by definition. Terrorism is only something done to those countries and by Muslims, not the other way around (the list of examples proving this to be true is extensive indeed).

It would be hard to invent a better example of our culture’s hypocritical and manipulative use of the word “terrorism” than these murders of foreign scientists have sadly provided.

“Arab street”: the derogatory term long used to degrade public opinion in those nations as some wild animal that needs to be suppressed and silenced rather than heeded. That’s why this Israeli official talks about “the need to respond” to Egyptian public opinion — also known as “democracy” — as though it’s some sort of bizarre, dangerous state of affairs: because nothing has been as important to the U.S. and Israel than ensuring the suppression of democracy in that region, ensuring that millions upon millions of people are consigned to brutal tyranny so that their interests are trampled upon in favor of “loyalty” to the interests of those two foreign nations.

The NYT should really have characterized the previous regime as “authoritarian and loyal”.