The last time the Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, washed up in America to warn about Iran he came armed with a six year olds drawing of a cartoon bomb but so serious is he this time around that he didn't visit a nursery this time around and just came armed with rhetoric.
While as popular as a bacon sandwich in Tel Aviv elsewhere, he is always assured of a warm welcome by the religious right in America and he tried to hit every button he could to try and get the Iran nuclear deal called off.
He went for the scare tactics that any deal would: 'inevitably lead to a nuclear armed Iran whose unbridled aggression will inevitably lead to a nuclear war' and then lurched to a good old favourite that Iran was: 'weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons' and ended with another favourite of invoking the holocaust with: 'The days where the Jewish people remain passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over'.
Not that anything in this is new as almost two decades ago, in 1996, Netanyahu addressed the American Congress and warned: 'If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country, and not only for the Middle East, but for all mankind' adding that 'the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close'.
Almost 20 years later that deadline has apparently still not passed, but Netanyahu is still making dire predictions about an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon. Four years before that particular speech, in 1992, Netanyahu advised the Israeli Knesset that Iran was 'three to five years' away from reaching nuclear weapons capability, and that this threat had to be 'uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S.'
In 1995 he asserted that Iran would have a nuclear weapon in 'three to five years' and then we skip forward to 2009 where Netanyahu informed a visiting Congressional delegation that Iran was 'probably one or two years away from developing weapons capability' although in 2012 he said that Iran was just 'a few months away from attaining nuclear capabilities'.
I am sure that despite all the above, some will see the Prime Minister as a credible voice on this issue even if he just repeated much the same things he’s been saying for the past two decades about an impending Iranian nuclear threat, and the short of thinking can always be counted on to believe him.
2 comments:
I saw a few quoted snippets of Netanyahu's speech. I had been hearing from various "talking heads" over the past month about how some folks were complaining about it being an inappropriate method for Netanyahu to try to influence American policy. I'd have to say, yeah, the forum and context of the speech itself made the whole thing very uncomfortable to watch.
-Nog
Ariel Sharon said something along the lines of 'We control America and America knows it' and it seems the arrogance has continued with this dope if he thinks he can turn up and tell you who you can't and can't talk to and what you can talk about. Israel is not a popular country and it can't be wise to tick off your only friend and the one who pays for your military.
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