MAX BLUMENTHAL, maxjblumenthal at gmail.com, @MaxBlumenthal
Blumenthal is author of the just-released book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, which is excerpted in the piece “How to Kill Goyim and Influence People: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.” He notes that after meeting with President Obama and speaking at the UN, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still in the U.S., meeting at events with supporters that are closed to the press.
Blumenthal said today: “At the G20 conference in 2011, France’s then-President Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama were caught on an open mic grumbling about a mutual annoyance.
“‘I cannot bear Netanyahu. He’s a liar,’ Sarkozy remarked to Obama.
“‘You’re fed up with him, what about me?’ responded Obama. ‘I have to deal with him every day.’
“Obama was hardly exaggerating. Having been forced to meet with Netanyahu more frequently than with any other foreign leader since entering the Oval Office, he has been transformed into The Bibisitter. When Obama pledged to ‘get Israel’s back’ and Netanyahu has responded by lecturing him on Jewish history, insisting that the lessons of the Holocaust compel the U.S. to attack Iran. When Netanyahu’s summoning of the nightmare of Auschwitz failed to ignite war in the Middle East, he and his billionaire benefactor Sheldon Adelson threw their weight behind Mitt Romney in a campaign to unseat the appeaser Obama. That failed too, and now a panicked Netanyahu has rushed back to the White House following Obama’s landmark phone call with his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani.
“The real Netanyahu is a transferist who urged mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians when he thought the world’s attention was elsewhere; the slick salesman who hijacked American airwaves during the Gulf War; the messianist who presents gullible foreign columnists with a magical ring asserting his holy bond with Jerusalem and the exclusively Jewish right to control the city for eternity; and the Holocaust-obsessed scaremonger stoking panic over the ‘insatiable crocodile of militant Islam’ that controls the Iranian ‘nuclear duck.’ As extreme as he might seem, in today’s Israel, Netanyahu stakes out the political center and sits to the left of the young upstarts who control the destiny of his dominant Likud Party.
“When Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly this week, he attempted to present the Iranian regime as dangerously irrational and unhinged — too dangerous to be allowed to ‘have [its] yellowcake and eat it too,’ as he put it. But as the leader of the only Middle Eastern nation with nuclear weapons, could the same not be said about him and the government he leads?”
