Netanyahu’s UN speech: Sounds like a sociopath?

Who can disagree any longer that Israel is out to push America into war – and is putting on quite a show of it, too? The Obama administration is trying to neutralize Iran’s nuclear program diplomatically, and Bibi Netanyahu and the Israel lobby are the unquestioned, highest-possible-profile leaders of the campaign to stop them.  Netanyahu is all over TV around the world, beating the drum against this “very, very bad deal” being put together in the Geneva talks, which resume Wednesday. His American-accented emissary Naftali Bennett is walking the halls of Congress, right in the White House’s face, lobbying senators and congress members to crank up the sanctions on Iran. Meanwhile, AIPAC and the rest of the Israel lobby, of course, are blasting away with the same theme.

America, together with Russia, China, Britain, Germany (but evidently not France), are trying to make peace with Iran, which is a pretty important, fairly historic mission  – and Israel is out in front trying to torpedo it. After warning that the failure of the Geneva talks “could … become a pathway to war,” a recent New York Times editorial concluded:

[I]f talks fail now, Mr. Netanyahu and the hard-line interest groups will own the failure, and the rest of us will pay the price.
Food for thought, no?  

But Netanyahu isn’t saying he wants the talks to fail or, God forbid, for America to start a war by bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. No, he wants to prevent that – by intensifying sanctions and forcing Iran to agree to tear down its nuclear project completely and let inspectors inspect where they please. That’s reasonable, isn’t it? This is how an Obama administration official summed up Netanyahu’s strategy to the New York Times this week:

Mr. Netanyahu “will be satisfied with nothing less than the dismantlement of every scrap of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure,” one administration strategist said the other day. “We’d love that, too — but there’s no way that’s going to happen at this point in the negotiation.”
Netanyahu’s idea of diplomacy with the Iranians is to present them with terms of surrender – to agree that they have no right to build anything connected with anything nuclear, while the U.S. and the other world powers, not to mention Israel, are free to build all the hydrogen bombs they want. If the Iranians don’t agree to such terms, if they instead go home and continue  their nuclear program unfettered, it won’t be Netanyahu who caused the U.S. to bomb them – it’ll be the Iranians themselves.

This is the way Bibi and his countless admirers in Israel and the United States think. They make the other side an offer it has to refuse, and if the result is war, it’s not their fault. Thus, if Team Netanyahu succeeds in blocking Obama’s quest to defang Iran’s nuclear project peacefully, the squad’s next step will be to pressure the president to keep his pledge to prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and by then there will be only one way left to do it: with missiles.

Obama doesn’t want to risk another war in the Middle East. Neither do the American people.  But none of that has any effect on the prime minister of Israel.

The media are reporting that there’s a good chance for an agreement in the coming days in Geneva between the world powers and Iran. But the U.S. Congress, where Israel is most influential,  could very well trash such an accord soon afterward by turning up the already devastating  sanctions.

Israel’s leader and his fans could actually push America into war against its will. They are certainly trying as hard as they can to do so. This is the sort of claim against Israel that used to be made only by extremists and anti-Semites, because in the past it wasn’t true, it was a gross exaggeration. But now this claim is being made by the likes of the New York Times, and it is true. The truth of it is right there in front of everyone, loud and clear.

http://972mag.com/who-needs-anti-semites-when-weve-got-bibi/82181/