In the last 24 hours as the controversy over his planned speech to the Congress has mounted, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters have been getting crazier and crazier. Look at the hysterical image at the top of this post. That’s what Netanyahu is tweeting to the world. (“This is called projection,” says Scott Roth.)
Mort Klein of the Zionist Organization of America suggests that American politicians who stand with Obama instead of Netanyahu and refuse to attend the speech are… anti-American. Politico:
“We will, of course, be publicly condemning any Democrats who don’t show up for the speech—unless they have a doctor’s note,” said Mort Klein, president of the 30,000-member Zionist Organization of America. “It’s really an anti-American, anti-patriotic position to take.”
Josh Block, the head of The Israel Project, says this about Iran:
They want to dominate & enslave every man, woman and child they can reach w/ their nuclear terrorist totalitarian regime
Sober judgment, huh?
Will Iran collaborate with the Moon-Nazis to enslave us or will they compete for our precious bodily fluids? pic.twitter.com/3P3FFtLuJU
— Eli Clifton (@EliClifton) February 7, 2015
Clifton lately reported that Richard Perry and Paul Singer are paying Block’s organization, the Israel Project, $1 million each. Singer is a big neoconservative. Perry and his wife Lisa are big supporters of Hillary Clinton, Lisa gave money to Barack Obama, and Richard is devoted to Israel. And you wonder why the Democratic Party doesn’t want to say anything against Netanyahu?
At the Forward, Nathan Guttman reports on a radio interview in Israel with a Netanyahu confidante in which he openly states what many critics have been claiming about Netanyahu’s agenda:
“The Republicans know, as the president has already made clear, that he will veto [Iran sanctions] legislation,” [deputy foreign minister Tzachi] Hanegbi said. “So in order to pass legislation that overcomes the veto, two-thirds are required in the Senate. So if the prime minister can persuade another one or two or another three or four, this could have weight.”
Do we really want a rightwing foreign prime minister in our politics to this degree? That’s why the Netanyahu speech scandal is so welcome; it exposes the agenda of the Israel lobby in U.S. politics, and makes that agenda controversial. And this is why so many leaders of the lobby, from liberal Jeremy Ben-Ami at J Street to rightwinger Abe Foxman at the ADL, want the speech to go away, lest it turn Israel support into a political football. When American support for a state that occupies Palestinian land, destroys the two-state solution, and massacres children in Gaza ought to be a political football. Our politicians ought to debate that support. Ari Fleischer sees the same political shift that I do: “If [Democrats] boycott the speech, they’ll be casting their lot with the more liberal, not pro-Israel base of the party, and that would be a shocking development. It would be a radical break.”
Speaking of crazy ideas… Here’s Trita Parsi tweeting a photo of Dermer and Netanyahu during the Iraq war runup, when Netanyahu testified in favor of a war on Saddam Hussein. “2002, Netanyahu testified for war w/ #Iraq. The man behind him is now Israel’s Amb to US.”
Plus ca change:
I don’t know about you but I’m sick of this crowd.
The last image seems to be stretched laterally.Look at Dermer,s broad shoulders.All the better to bear the weight of the worlds safety .What a hero he is.Are we not blessed to have such unselfish protectors of world security working so tirelessly to defeat those who would annihilate us all.
“Allah Akbar”.
Barghouti said that when he was in college in the US, at Columbia, Zionists that he debated were really smart. Now he’s mocking them and saying that their IQs are dropping fast.
This entire clown show certainly adds weight to his derision.
Another part of me wonders how much of this is really acting in a dumb manner and how much of it is just the changed atmosphere and debate climate we live in. After all, as several Mondoweiss commenters have reminded me, Bibi pulled this BS with Clinton in the 90s.
But then, there was no scandal, even if it was the same behaviour. So maybe it isn’t Bibi that has done anything drastically different, maybe it is simply America that has changed for the better and he has not caught up with the change.
And a lot of this is due to the people in the SJP movement, the BDS movement and independent grassroots websites like yours truly. The pre-internet MSM was as reactionary, if not more so, as Congress is today.
They would never have blown this up like today’s digital/internet-bound media, if it wasn’t for the alternative viewpoints people have in the blogosphere as well as on campus.
There’s never been a group like the Isr Fifth Column more deserving of being dragged before the Senate in McCarthy type hearings on subversion and sedition and treason.
Before this Isr aberration is over in the US, everyone, including the Jews and Israel, are gonna wish we had ended it that way instead of letting it continue into the kind of conflagration it’s likely going to end in for the US and other countries.
Complain and condemn all you want about using McCarthism to shut down Zionism in the US—-if anyone has a better and unbloody way to end it once and for all I am open to suggestions.
I, too, am beyond sick of this crowd.
But a true megalomaniac isn’t going to back down. It’s pedal to the metal, with ZOA threatening to take names, personally attack the patriotism of those who dare not attend. It’ll be the standing stooges and the timid sheep pretending to be standing stooges.
I think it is a very dangerous time on the false flag front, because, if current tactics don’t “work” to fill the house, what else will he do?
We see before us the astonishing spectacle of the Israel lobby issuing Stalinist-style threats to punish Americans who side with their own president against a foreign leader — and attacking them as “anti-American” — how much crazier can it get? :)
But by all means let’s hope that Benjamin Netanyahu keeps fanning the flames of this controversy — one should never interrupt a political opponent who is making one unforced error after another.