From Cheap Theatrics to Useless Diatribe

It took Netanyahu of Israel a full year to learn that cheap theatrics do not fool people. That's what he tried to pull last year at the UN General Assembly when he drew a red line on a chart, and managed only to tickle the fancy of a handful of American idiots while leaving the thoughtful people unimpressed. And so, in his speech this year to the same UN assembly, he gave a different kind of performance. Alas, it turned out to be nothing more than a 3000 word diatribe that was as useless as the theatrics were cheap in last year's performance.

He began the speech with the lie that those who call themselves Jews are an ancient people whose ancestral homeland is Palestine which they now call Israel. The problem is that he was talking to an assembly of nations where Jews live, some of whom convert to Judaism and go live in occupied Palestine. The view everywhere in the world is that even if the so-called Jews were the true descendants of the Hebrews who used to live in Palestine, they would have no right after thousands of years of absence to go uproot the people who have lived there continuously since the beginning of time – 4000 years according to Netanyahu – and occupy their homes.

If “re-establishing a sovereign state” in that manner were allowed, no one on this planet will be safe because there will always be someone who will wake you up in the middle of the night, point a machine gun at your family, point to the armored vehicle behind him, to the helicopter gunship above, and scream at you: Move over; I'm taking over your house because my ancestors lived here 4000 years ago. That's what these people have done and are still doing, which is why they meet with the greatest of adversities that Netanyahu is complaining about. He and those like him are so out of touch with reality, they do not understand why they get no sympathy.

With this big lie out there, he now builds up toward another lie hoping of convince enough people that someone else deserves to be destroyed. That would be the ancient nation of Iran which he accuses of producing nuclear weapons intending to destroy Israel. He says that the Iranian animosity toward Israel started in 1979 when a new regime came to power there. He describes it as a radical regime that crushed its own people's hope for democracy, and led wild chants of “death to the Jews.”

Netanyahu explains that since that time, Iranian presidents have come and gone, the latest being President Rohani who used to head the nation's security council before being elected to the presidency. And this is the point at which Netanyahu unleashes a venomous diatribe against Rohani as well as Iran and everything Iranian. He tells of bad things happening in several places around the world, incidents that were traced to Iran while Rohani was head of the nation's chief of security. The curious thing is that Netanyahu does not compare those accusations – which may be true, half true or false – with the targeted assassinations that Israel commits in the occupied territories and abroad. What happens here is that Israel lets the hired mouthpieces brag about them in its name while staying coy and ambiguous about the whole thing.

And so, based on these one sided accusations that remain unsubstantiated, Netanyahu says that Rohani should not be trusted. He says so while offering no hint of any kind why Netanyahu should be trusted with anything he says now or anything he may do as prime minister of Israel. And he goes on to list the many places in the world where he says Iran is doing bad things – places like Syria, Lebanon Yemen and Bahrain. But here again, he neglects to tell of the many places where Israel sells weapons to both sides in a conflict, and sells American secrets to potential enemies of America.

Believing that he has succeeded in painting a bleak picture of Rohani and of Iran, Netanyahu now starts making the case against their nuclear program. He takes issue with Rohani who said that “Iran has never chosen deceit and secrecy.” Not so, says Netanyahu because “in 2002 Iran was caught red-handed secretly building an underground facility in Natanz. And in 2009 was caught building an underground facility near Qom.” Before you have the time to marvel at the flimsiness of this evidence, he shoots himself not in the foot but in the mouth.

Look what he does. First he says: “Rohani assures us that all of this is not intended for nuclear weapons.” Then, the man who stands there shouting at the top of his lung that Iran must never have a nuclear enrichment facility; the one who is prime minister of the country that bombed a civilian nuclear station in Iraq, and a civilian irradiation facility in Syria, now asks the question: “Why would Iran build underground enrichment facilities?” You do not waste you breath responding to him; the stupidity of his question carries its own response. And all you can do is watch him shoot himself in the mouth as if to say to himself: Shut up, you idiot.

But he does not shut up. In fact, he goes on to ask a number of other questions for which there are obvious answers – or if not, the answers have already been supplied. In other cases such as: “Why would Iran defy multiple Security Council resolutions?” the obvious answer would be to throw the question back at him: Why would Israel defy multiple Security Council resolutions? As to the question why Iran builds long range rockets, the obvious answer is: Why does Israel want to own a fleet of bombers with mid-air refueling capacity? Why does Israel want to own a fleet of submarines?

That's how bad Iran has been in the past, says Netanyahu, and now he plays the role of prophet and tells us how bad it is going to be in the future. Here is that part: “Iran is positioning itself to race across the red line.” That's the intention, but Iran faces the problem of sanctions that is crippling its economy. So how does Rohani overcome this obstacle? Netanyahu says he knows what the Rohani strategy is. This is it: “First, smile a lot. Second, pay lip service to peace. Third, offer meaningless concessions. Fourth, ensure that Iran retains sufficient material to race to the bomb when it chooses to do so.” He says Rohani did it before, and he'll do it again. There is also North Korea that played this game and built a bomb. What? A North Korean smile? Did anyone see a North Korean smile? What does it look like?

Having declared himself a prophet, he would not be worth his salt if he did not predict at least one apocalypse. And so he does that now: “As dangerous as North Korea is, it pales in comparison to a nuclear-armed Iran [that] wouldn't be just another North Korea [but] another 50 North Koreas.”

There is more. Netanyahu would not be a Jew if he did not try to have it both ways, thus blow his presentation to smithereens in the process. Worse, he did so while playing the role of historian. He says that Iran's regime leads these chants, “death to America, death to Israel.” Would he have preferred: Drop dead or jump in the lake? Every language has its idioms, and the Iranians say death to so and so as habitually as we tell someone to go to hell.

He also complains that Iran pledges to wipe Israel off the map. This is not true; no such pledge was ever made. But what is true is that the foreign minister of Israel threatened to blow up the Aswan dam in Egypt, thus flood the country and kill millions of people. And he wanted to do so for a reason that you will not believe. He threatened Egypt because President Mubarak had declined an invitation to visit Israel. Note that the minister wasn't “leading” someone to make the threat, he made it himself in his capacity as foreign minister.

So now, look what Netanyahu does with regard to the false accusation that he leveled against Iran; the one that people dismissed because it proved to be baseless. He writes this: “Have these people learned nothing from history? The last century taught us that when a regime with global ambitions gets awesome power, its appetite for aggression knows no bounds.” If that's what he says about Iran, what does he say about his foreign minister?

Now that he has proven he and his government are ready for the asylum, he wants to take charge of the asylum. To this end, he tells what must be done: “Fully dismantle Iran's nuclear program and prevent it from having one in the future.” This should be done in four steps, he says, which he spells out. He then stresses that no residual capability to enrich uranium can remain in Iran. To make this point clear, he quotes Reagan who said “trust but verify.” That's what Reagan said but he is Netanyahu, the extremist that's ready for the asylum. This is why he must say something that reflects his extreme insanity. It is this: “Distrust, dismantle and verify.”

It takes Netanyahu another 600 words to complete the presentation, but it is all bluster and reveries that are neither here nor there. Better ignore that part.