Washington Post call for assassination of Iranian negotiators

The Washington Post has published an article calling for the murder of Iranian negotiators to force Iran to capitulate to US and Israel demands that the aggressors have been unable to achieve militarily. Pakistani intelligence and its air force thwarted alleged Israeli plans to do just that.

In “Iran thinks it has leverage. Here’s how Trump can prove it wrong“, its author, Marc A Thiessen, demands a resumption of the illegal US-Israel war of aggression if Iran does not concede everything Trump (and therefore of course Israel) wants. And he calls specifically for the US to [emphases added]:

carry out a final barrage of leadership strikes, eliminating the Iranian officials who had been spared for the purpose of negotiations. Iran’s leaders must be made to understand that their lives literally depend on reaching a negotiated settlement to Trump’s liking. If they refuse to do so, they will be killed.

Washington Post is gutter journalism

Thiessen is a former Bush speechwriter who has defended the use of torture to achieve US ends. He is also a genocide-denying Israel fanatic who, almost ten years ago, was calling for there to be no peace in Palestine. When peaceful protesters gathered outside the White House in 2023 to demand an end to Israel’s genocide, Thiessen wanted all protesters to be pursued by police and accused the Democratic party of allowing itself to be filled with “antisemites” because Israel are “the good guys”.

Thiessen has been described as “nakedly propagandistic [and] flagrantly dishonest” and “selling [the Gaza] genocide”. He is a ‘senior fellow’ of the hard-right, neocon ‘American Enterprise Institute’. He has called for Trump to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and described the fake 2025 Gaza ‘ceasefire’ as Donald Trump:

[standing] astride the world and delivered something that had eluded every Republican and Democratic president: a Middle East peace.

Israel continues to slaughter and starve innocent Palestinians in Gaza and civilians in Lebanon, which it has invaded while bombing Iran.

In 2024, Thiessen said he was “stunned” by criticism of Israel’s raid in Gaza to retrieve four prisoners of war. The IOF murdered at least 274 civilians during the raid. Thiessen went on to say that anyone who criticised the raid “may be an antisemite”:

The author’s willingness to call, publicly, for the murder of peace negotiators is hardly surprising given the source. What ought to be surprising is the Washington Post giving him space to express his murderous, racist imperialism, as it does regularly. However, the paper has long served US imperialism and perhaps even more so since its take-over by billionaire Jeff Bezos.

The article remains online at the time of writing.

Featured image via the Canary