Netanyahu
This is interesting. A year or so back, Netanyahu said that Israel’s greatest threats were Hamas and Iran and Richard Goldstone. Now he has apparently revised that assessment and said that Israel’s greatest enemies are Haaretz and the New York Times, per this account.
I have to believe that Netanyahu is serious and this is his logical conclusion– which is why his office rushed to deny the account today. But the original assessment squares with Ali Abunimah’s belief that the walls of international opinion are closing in on Israel. The Netanyahu assessment is proof that the truth is what will set Palestine free– knowledge of the occupation and conflict, overcoming the hasbara. We complain all the time about the New York Times here, but even it is reflecting more critical views of Israel…
JTA:
On Wednesday, [Jerusalem Post] editor, Steve Linde, addressing a conference in Tel Aviv of the Women’s International Zionist Organization, said that Netanyahu made the remark to him about the newspapers at a private meeting “a couple of weeks ago” at the prime minister’s office in Tel Aviv….
“He said, ‘You know, Steve, we have two main enemies,’ ” Linde said, according to a recording of the WIZO speech provided to JTA. “And I thought he was going to talk about, you know, Iran, maybe Hamas. He said, ‘It’s The New York Times and Haaretz.’ He said, ‘They set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world. Journalists read them every morning and base their news stories … on what they read in The New York Times and Haaretz.’ ”
Linde said he and other participants at the meeting asked Netanyahu whether he really thought that the media had that strong a role in shaping world opinion on Israel, and the prime minister replied, “Absolutely.”
Ah, the ol’ “hostile media” (tikshoret oyenet) meme. The right loves that sort of thing. Is it election time already?
The real threat to Israel is religiofascism .
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/religious-israeli-soldiers-have-found-a-new-form-of-disobedience-1.408057
.field-unit commanders say they detect a growing trend. Soldiers from hesder yeshivas, which combine military service with religious studies, protested when they had female instructors for shooting, artillery and other activities.
This kind of disobedience is relatively new and reflects a more extreme religious approach. Reserve officers who served with hesder soldiers in the 1970s and 1980s say thousands of religious students were trained by female instructors without a murmur.
The officers school where a scandal over women’s singing broke out in September is now hammering out a lesson plan to teach future officers how to command soldiers from different religious and ideological backgrounds. The plan emphasizes the precedence of the military discipline and framework.
Four of the nine religious cadets who walked out of a ceremony in which female soldiers sang in September were ousted from the infantry officers course. Two of them were allowed to take the course again.
As in an argument over the wording of the Yizkor prayer, Chief of Staff Benny Gantz made an effort to clarify the regulations dealing with women’s status in the army after the uproar in the officers school. But numerous similar incidents are giving the IDF a bad reputation, even among its well-wishers overseas.
In the middle of the month a delegation of retired, senior American officers, including generals with three and four stars, visited Israel. The visitors showed understanding toward internal Israeli conflict over fighting terror in civilian population centers. But they had no tolerance for the involvement of civilian rabbis in the army, or for women’s exclusion.
“A chaplain, like a priest, has one duty only – to provide religious services,” one of them said. “Nobody in Washington can understand or accept incidents of offending women or infringing on their dignity. If you continue this way, you will lose your friends in the world.”
Bibi denies the haaretz story
http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/netanyahu-denies-calling-haaretz-and-new-york-times-israel-s-main-enemies-1.408167
The truth sets an agenda of anti-Israel campaign. Change the truth and change the agenda. Shooting the messenger is the last redoubt of charlatans, liars and propagandists.
Does Israel have influence over US legislation or not?
Would control over internet provide comfort to Netanyahu?
Is SOPA PIPA an Israel-lobby driven or at least Israel lobby influenced proposal?
In a way, Netanyahu is right. Jewish tribalistic solidarity is breaking, there are some cracks in once very united , propaganda wall.
“Tous pour un, un pour tous” (all for one, one for all) motto ain’t working anymore.
People start to see more and more unaltered Truth, and they start to wonder who is really the Bad Guy in all of it. Truth doesn’t work well for Israel.
They are afraid of it, and they also know the power of the Media.
Powerful Media, that they can’t control become ,automatically, their enemy.