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Desperate Netanyahu Sticks to Old Lies
| by Rami G. Khouri | Released: 01 Oct 2014 |
BEIRUT — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the UN General Assembly Monday may go down in retrospect as a sign of two linked issues: how badly out of touch he is with the rest of the world, and how the traditional Zionist use of scare tactics to maintain virtually absolute American support for any Israeli action is steadily wearing thin.
His two principal points were that Hamas, Iran and ISIS emanated from the same roots and had similarly dangerous and predatory global aims, and that it was foolhardy for the United States and other Western powers to negotiate an agreement with Iran on nuclear issues and removing sanctions. All of those basic points he made are factually wrong. Consequently, because he has repeated them so many times without offering any proof beyond his own deep frowns and wild exaggerations, these points do not gain traction among the American public. They have also created the greatest strains in top-level U.S.-Israeli relations for generations.
The accusation that Hamas and ISIS are two branches of the same tree is palpable nonsense. The only thing they have in common is that they draw on Islamic doctrines and values as their guiding principles — in the same way that all recent American presidents and some weirdo, kookie Texan cults have all based their actions in Biblical texts and values. In both cases, though, each group interprets the religious text in very different ways, leading to very different actions that are worlds apart.
The repeated mistake Netanyahu makes — or perhaps it is a deliberate lie — is to see any movement or rhetoric in the Middle East that references Islamic values as a dangerous threat. Indeed, Iran, Hamas and ISIS all claim to act on the basis of religious principles, even dictates, but they operate in three very different universes that Netanyahu conflates into one.
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