McKinney is a familiar guest on Goodman’s program; the two women share a similar political ideology, as well as a strong interest in the U.S.S. Liberty, an American Naval vessel attacked by Israel, in a tragic case of mistaken identity, in the midst of the Six-Day War.
McKinney has called for congressional investigations into the Liberty case (which has already been looked into on numerous occasions by investigators in the U.S. and Israel, with no credible evidence found of malice on Israel’s part.) On “Democracy Now,” Goodman has given McKinney the chance to expound at length her theories on the Liberty – theories virtually identical to the tripe one finds on countless neo-Nazi and Islamist websites.
Another dear friend of Amy’s is the British journalist and author Robert Fisk. He’s a regular on her show, reporting in from around the world. Fisk at least can be admired for a certain degree of integrity: he’s not one to hide his unadulterated animosity toward Israel. Writing in the Independent about a particular Israeli’s unwillingness to act “reasonably” with regard to the Palestinians, Fisk draws on, and seeks to strengthen and extend, ancient anti-Semitic themes:
“The rabbi’s dad had taught him about an eye for eye – or twenty homes for one stone in this case – whereas my dad taught me about turning the other cheek. Judaism and Christianity had collided. So was it any surprise that Judaism and Islam were colliding?”
Yet another friend of Amy’s is the Australian journalist John Pilger, who proclaimed on her show: “The resistance in Iraq is incredibly important for all of us. I think that we depend on the resistance to win, so that other countries might not be attacked, so that the world, in a sense, becomes more secure. The outcome of this resistance is terribly important.”
Goodman conducted a friendly interview with Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician who served eighteen years in an Israeli jail for leaking information about Israel’s nuclear weapons program, by phone shortly after his release. Vanunu, who converted to Christianity in prison, boasted, “The Mossad was very, very angry and upset with my revelations. I made a mockery of them to all the world. The spy organization who was respected in all the world found themselves naked.”
Vanunu told Goodman that he had no regrets about his decision to share Israeli intelligence information, saying that Israel, “which reminds the world ‘Holocaust, Holocaust’ every hour, has built a Holocaust factory.” In the lengthy interview, Vanunu asserted that he was treated “barbarically” in Israel and that the Israeli media turned the Israeli people against him, making them hate him.
If Goodman attracts listeners who may not be motivated by hatred for all things American and Jewish, it may be because of her focus on journalistic freedom. She repeats like a mantra, everywhere she goes, that our mainstream media is “a megaphone for corporate interests.”
Al Jazeera, the infamous Arab news outlet that, typically, called the scandal involving former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey’s private life “an Israeli intelligence operation,” kicked off one of its anti-Israel screeds with a quote by Goodman: “It’s most challenging to go where the silence is and say something.”
That’s certainly a nice idea, and definitely part of a journalist’s job, but what’s actually said should count too. That truth and decency don’t always seem to matter to Goodman was evident from her coverage of the Israeli military operations in Jenin in 2002 – which came in response to a string of suicide bombings across Israel.
Goodman led the charge on the Left that Israeli forces had committed a massacre of civilians. “Amid the Ruins of Jenin, the Grisly Evidence of a War Crime,” howled one headline on her Democracy Now website. “A Massacre Revealed as Palestinians Search for their Loved Ones Amidst the Wreckage of Jenin,” read another.
It turned out, of course, that none of this was true. Even the United Nations was forced to admit that no massacre of any kind had taken place. Once again, those who wish Israel ill had placed their own slanderous intentions far above any respect for the truth.
Goodman, self-proclaimed “granddaughter of an Orthodox rabbi” and “great-granddaughter of a chassidic rabbi,” claims to be an advocate for a truly free and independent journalism.