(Photo entitled "Best depiction of today's protest in Tehran" posted by brl85 over Twitter)
Has there ever been a more tone-deaf speech? As there world sat enthralled with the outpouring of defiance and dissent throughout Iran, here's what Benjamin Netanyahu had to say:
The Iranian threat still is before us in full force, as it became quite clear yesterday. The greatest danger to Israel, to the Middle East, and to all of humanity, is the encounter between extremist Islam and nuclear weapons. I discussed this with President Obama on my visit to Washington, and will be discussing it next week on my visit with European leaders. I have been working tirelessly for many years to form an international front against Iran arming itself with nuclear armaments.
You would think that he might at least try to pander to the international sympathy for Iran's pro-democracy activists, but as Akiva Eldar rightly pointed out the speech was "a patriarchal, colonialist address in the best neoconservative tradition." The problem for Netanayahu is that outside of Bar Ilan University and the right-wing/settler bubble his government exists in, the neocon tradition has lost all credibility.
Even assuming that Ahmadinejad emerges from the current crisis with his presidency intact, the current protests in Iran have made it impossible from this point on to paint Iran as a monolithic country hell bent on destroying Israel. The great irony of the Iranian election is that an apparently repressive anti-democratic effort to fix the results has revealed the amazingly vibrant Iranian civil society. The world is watching democracy in action. The protests have may not have only fatally crippled the legitimacy the of the Ahmadinejad government, but have also destroyed the carefully crafted neocon image of the country as the center spoke of the axis of evil.
Today the world is standing with the people of Iran, tomorrow they are not going to want to turn around and attack them.
