• Home
  • Perspectives
  • Articles
  • Columns
  • Platform
  • Poetry
    • Literature
  • Shop
    • Cart
    • My account
  • Support
    • Donation Confirmation
  • Write for us
Search
65.8 F
Los Angeles
Wednesday, February 8, 2023
Sign in
Welcome! Log into your account
Forgot your password? Get help
Privacy Policy
Password recovery
Recover your password
A password will be e-mailed to you.
Media Monitors Network (MMN)
  • Home
  • Perspectives
    • Jerusalem Israel Palestine Dome of The Rock Golden Dome

      The Abraham Accords undermined much-needed peace with Palestinians

      World Map

      Global disturbing disparities

      Globe Algeria Niger Mali Africa

      There is always a price to pay for befriending the Zionists

      Illegal Israeli Settlements

      Antisemitism claims mask a reign of political and cultural terror across…

      The Flower - Pakistan Monument at Night

      Israel in the vanguard of India’s mounting conflict with Pakistan

  • Articles
    • Man studying religious book

      Ishmael and Isaac: An Essay on the Divergent Moral Economies of…

      Mahmoud Abbas

      May Your Home Be Destroyed

      Netanyahu Lighting Hanukah Candles with His Wife and Sons

      Bibi’s Son or: Three Men in a Car

      The Map of Greater Israel

      The Man Who Jumped

      West Bank - Palestine

      Cry, Beloved Country

  • Columns
    • Progressives Must Fight With -- and In -- the Democratic Party

      Steps Left for Electing Progressives and Defeating Republicans in the Midterms

      Tax Revelations and Corporate Media Won’t Defeat Trump

      Nancy Pelosi Could Get Us All Killed

      Tax Revelations and Corporate Media Won’t Defeat Trump

      ‘Fortress Mentality’ Among U.S. Leaders Has Trapped Us in a Cycle…

      Progressives Must Fight With -- and In -- the Democratic Party

      Grassroots Organizing Should Dump Biden and Clear the Path for a…

      Corporate Media Are Focusing on Race -- and Dodging Class

      Biden Refuses to Mention the Worsening Dangers of Nuclear War. Media…

  • Platform
    • Hanukkah Lights

      Hanukkah is not hypocrisy

      The Washington Post

      “Preemptive war could risk millions of casualties. But….”

      When they shout: "We strongly condemn…"

      68

      Why Iran won’t attack Israel

      Is One Iraqi’s Self-Hatred Newsworthy?

  • Poetry
    • Literature
  • Shop
    • Cart
    • My account
  • Support
    • Donation Confirmation
  • Write for us
Home Columns Axis of Fanatics — Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad
  • Columns

Axis of Fanatics — Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad

By
Norman Solomon
-
January 7, 2006
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
WhatsApp
Linkedin
ReddIt
Email
Print
Tumblr
Telegram
Mix
VK
Digg
LINE
Viber
Naver

    With Ariel Sharon out of the picture, Benjamin Netanyahu has a better chance to become prime minister of Israel.

    He’s media savvy. He knows how to spin on American television. And he’s very dangerous.

    Netanyahu spent a lot of his early years in the United States. Later, during the 1980s, he worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and then became Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. By the time he moved up to deputy foreign minister in 1988, he was a star on U.S. networks.

    The guy is smooth — fluent in American idioms, telegenic to many eyes — and good at lying on camera. So, when Israeli police killed 17 Palestinians at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque in October 1990, Netanyahu led a disinformation blitz asserting that the Palestinians were killed after they’d rioted and pelted Jewish worshipers from above the Wailing Wall with huge stones. At the time, his fable dominated much of the U.S. media. Later even the official Israeli inquiry debunked Netanyahu’s account and blamed police for starting the clash.

    Now, with Netanyahu campaigning to win the Israeli election for prime minister in late March, he’s cranking up rhetoric against Iran. His outlook seems to be 180 degrees from the world view of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yet in tangible political ways, they’re well-positioned to feed off each other’s fanaticism.

    The election that gave the presidency of Iran to Ahmadinejad last summer was a victory for repressive fundamentalism. Results have included a negative trend for human rights in the country and a more bellicose foreign policy.

    When Ahmadinejad declared in late October that “Israel must be wiped off the map,” he did a big favor to the most militaristic of Israel’s major politicians — Benjamin Netanyahu — who demanded that Prime Minster Sharon take forceful action against Iran. Otherwise, Netanyahu said in December, “when I form the new Israeli government, we’ll do what we did in the past against Saddam’s reactor, which gave us 20 years of tranquillity.”

    Netanyahu was referring to Israel’s air attack on the Osirak reactor in June 1981 to prevent Iraq from developing nuclear weapons. But now the idea of bombing Iran is nonsensical even to many analysts who are enthusiastic about Israel’s large nuclear arsenal, estimated at 200 warheads.

    “Preemptive military attack is not a strategy for stopping the spread of nuclear weapons anymore; the changes in technology have made it obsolete.” That’s the current assessment from Larry Derfner, who often writes about Israeli politics for the Jerusalem Post. “Concealing a nuclear start-up is so much easier now than it was in 1981 and it’s only going to get easier yet. Throwing fighter jets, commandos and whatnot at Iran is more than risky; it’s almost certainly futile if not altogether impossible. Better for Israel and Israelis to forget about it and instead meet the Iranian threat by making this country’s deterrent power even more intimidating than it already is.”

    Derfner added: “A nuclear Iran isn’t a cause for indifference but neither is it a cause for dread and certainly not for recklessness. A nuclear Iran is actually acceptable. We can live with it. The truth is we’ve been living here with threats very much like it all along.”

    But Netanyahu has repeatedly emphasized that he wants to launch a military strike on Iran. “This is the Israeli government’s primary obligation,” he said. “If it is not done by the current government, I plan to lead the next government to stop the Iranians.”

    The specter of Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad fueling each other’s madness as heads of state is frightening. In such a circumstance, the primary danger of conflagration would come from nuclear-armed Israel, not nuclear-unarmed Iran.

    Candidate Netanyahu is a standard bearer for nuclear insanity. He’s also an implacable enemy of basic Palestinian human rights. Many Israelis understand that Netanyahu is an extremist, and polls published on Jan. 6 indicate that the post-Sharon era may not be as hospitable to Netanyahu as initially assumed.

    For that matter, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not serve out his full four-year term as Iran’s president. Evidently the hardline clerics who dominate the Iranian government got more than they bargained for when they threw their weight behind the Ahmadinejad campaign last June. In recent months, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has shifted more power to the governmental Expediency Council headed by the shady magnate Hashemi Rafsanjani, a relatively moderate political hack who lost in the presidential runoff last year.

    Ahmadinejad is good at making statements that cause international uproars, but he’s having a difficult time exercising presidential leverage. “Even in Iran’s mostly conservative parliament, the hard-line president has found himself unable to get traction,” the Los Angeles Times noted on Jan. 2. “In a first for the Islamic Republic, lawmakers turned down four of the ministers Ahmadinejad asked them to approve. It took him three months and four candidates to seat an oil minister. Some reformist legislators even agitated for hearings on the president’s ‘lack of political competence.'”

    Using religious claims to bolster their quests for power, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Benjamin Netanyahu each stand to gain by pointing to the menacing fanaticism of the other. Yet many Iranians and Israelis recognize the grave dangers of such posturing.

    As tensions mount and pressures intensify, the White House might end up acceding to an Israeli air attack on Iran. Or the Bush administration may prefer to launch its own air strike against Iran.

    Iran. Israel. The United States. Each country has the very real potential to move in a better direction — away from lethal righteousness. But in every society, that will require more effective grassroots efforts for peace and justice.

    • TAGS
    • about
    • above
    • acceptable
    • account
    • action
    • actually
    • administration
    • after
    • against
    • ahmadinejad
    • Al-Aqsa Mosque
    • almost
    • along
    • already
    • ambassador
    • American
    • analysts
    • anymore
    • ariel
    • Ariel Sharon
    • armed
    • arsenal
    • asked
    • assessment
    • attack
    Facebook
    Twitter
    Pinterest
    WhatsApp
    Linkedin
    ReddIt
    Email
    Print
    Tumblr
    Telegram
    Mix
    VK
    Digg
    LINE
    Viber
    Naver
      Previous articleYou can’t go home again…
      Next articleHow Chrsitian and Jewish Zionists and terrorists undermined the US
      Norman Solomon
      Norman Solomon, the national coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org, is a member of the task force that wrote "Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis." His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." He is a regular contributor to Media Monitors Network (MMN).

      RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

      Progressives Must Fight With -- and In -- the Democratic Party

      Steps Left for Electing Progressives and Defeating Republicans in the Midterms

      Tax Revelations and Corporate Media Won’t Defeat Trump

      Nancy Pelosi Could Get Us All Killed

      Tax Revelations and Corporate Media Won’t Defeat Trump

      ‘Fortress Mentality’ Among U.S. Leaders Has Trapped Us in a Cycle of Militarism

      Google Search

      MMN @ Google Play Store MMN @ Amazon Appstore

      MMN @ TwitterMMN @ FacebookMMN Feed

      EDITOR PICKS

      Progressives Must Fight With -- and In -- the Democratic Party

      Steps Left for Electing Progressives and Defeating Republicans in the Midterms

      August 31, 2022
      Tax Revelations and Corporate Media Won’t Defeat Trump

      Nancy Pelosi Could Get Us All Killed

      August 1, 2022
      Tax Revelations and Corporate Media Won’t Defeat Trump

      ‘Fortress Mentality’ Among U.S. Leaders Has Trapped Us in a Cycle...

      July 25, 2022

      POPULAR POSTS

      167

      The Origin of Freemasonry: The Crusaders & Templars

      April 23, 2003

      Sharon to Peres: We Control America

      November 20, 2001
      Qibla - Kaaba

      Direction of Al-Qiblah

      February 23, 2003

      POPULAR CATEGORY

      • Perspectives13563
      • News6715
      • World5898
      • Asia4843
      • Columns1370
      • Africa936
      • Articles786
      • Australasia614
      • Health605
      ABOUT US
      Media Monitors Network (MMN) is a non-profit, non-partial and non-political platform for those serious Media Contributors and Observers who crave to know and like to help to prevail the whole truth about current affairs, any disputed issue or any controversial issue by their voluntary contributions with logic, reason and rationality.
      Contact us: [email protected]
      FOLLOW US
      • About MMN
      • Disclaimer
      • Privacy Policy
      • Terms and Conditions
      • Contact
      Copyright © 2000 - MMN International Inc. All rights reserved.
      Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
      All other brands, logos, and product names are registered
      trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
      ResponsiveVoice-NonCommercial licensed under 95x15
      MORE STORIES
      Somalia: $2.6 billion appeal to support millions amid historic drought and famine fears

      Somalia: $2.6 billion appeal to support millions amid historic drought and...

      February 8, 2023
      UN chief ‘deeply regrets’ Mali’s decision to expel senior rights official

      UN chief ‘deeply regrets’ Mali’s decision to expel senior rights official

      February 7, 2023