Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest personality fault, his deep paranoia, has produced another Nixon-like moment: Steve Linde, the editor of the right-wing Jerusalem Post, told the crowd at a Women’s International Zionist Organization conference of a strange exchange he had with the Israeli Prime Minister.
JTA reports:
“He said, ‘You know, Steve, we have two main enemies,’ ” Linde said, according to a recording of the WIZO speech provided to JTA. “And I thought he was going to talk about, you know, Iran, maybe Hamas. He said, ‘It’s The New York Times and Haaretz.’ He said, ‘They set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world. Journalists read them every morning and base their news stories … on what they read in The New York Times and Haaretz.’ ”
As Haaret’z diplomatic correspondence Barak Ravid tweeted, Netanyahu is confusing himself with the State of Israel, but this is also nothing new.
UPDATE I: I was able to get a hold of a recording of Steve Linde. The quality is very poor [problem solved, better file embedded], but it matches the transcript by JTA. Money quote is around 20 seconds.
Netanyahu to Jpost Editor: My Main Enemies are Haaretz, NY Times by noamsh
UPDATE II: Netanyahu refused to comment to JTA, but the Prime Minister’s Office denied the quote to walla.co.il, and later on Twitter. Jpost’s Linde told The 7th Eye, an Israeli media watchdog site, that he didn’t know there would be journalists in the audience, otherwise he wouldn’t have shared the story with the audience at the conference. Linde also said that his words “were taken out of context.”
January 19, 2012
2:55 am
You’ve made a ‘hate list’. You must be doing something right. Carry on!
January 19, 2012
7:35 am
Netanyahu’s real enemy is the truth.
January 19, 2012
9:22 am
Ha’aretz just went into a little more depth about Bibi’s denial. Sounds very much like a weasel in a trap…
http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/netanyahu-denies-calling-haaretz-and-new-york-times-israel-s-main-enemies-1.408167
January 19, 2012
9:53 am
Netayahu is right.
Haaretz should be called Gazaretz.
Haaretz cant even criticize Palestinians when they lynch Israelis.
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/manager/features/display_message.asp?mid=528
Another Israeli journalist at a different newspaper, Nahum Barnea of
Yediot Aharonot, wrote in November of 2000 that there are Israeli reporters who do not pass the “lynching test.” These are journalists who
could not bring themselves to criticize the Palestinians even when two Israelis were savagely murdered by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah. Which journalists? Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, and Akiva Eldar of Ha’aretz.
January 19, 2012
9:58 am
Let’s see, Something happens. Haaretz wants more Israeli concessions. Rinse. Repeat.
Mubarak is strong. Israeli concessions. Mubarak is gone. Israeli concessions. Arafat is in power. Israeli concessions. Arafat finances terrorism. Israeli concessions. Abbas is in power. Israeli concessions. Abbas honors tons of Palestinians Terrorists for killing Israeli civilians. Haaretz wants Israeli concessions. For Haaretz Israeli concessions are the hammer and everything is a nail.
January 19, 2012
10:00 am
The time-proven tactic of Israel haters
If at first you don’t succeed,LIE,LIE,and LIE again.
THREE CHEERS FOR ISRAEL!!!
January 19, 2012
10:02 am
The problem is Arab hatred and racism.
This is who Noam Sheizaf supports.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/151758PA Religious Official Publicly Calls for Genocide of Jews
PA’s principal religious leader presents the killing of Jews by Muslims as a religious Islamic goal.
Elad Benari
1/16/2011
The best post i saw about this.
There have been many PA religious and other officials who have openly called for the genocide of the Jews. Jews have been called aids, cancer, apes and pigs by these wicked hatemongers. Poll after poll over the years have shown many Palestinian Arabs support mass murder of Jews in suicide bombings, shootings and other terror attacks. It’s just so obvious what these evil people really want. The destruction of Israel, and the genocide of it’s Jewish citizens.
January 19, 2012
12:40 pm
I wonder if there is a mental health professional that could analyze Netanyahu’s behavior and possibly draw a conclusion about official Sociopathy or a Narcissism-type complex? If we can expose him as a diagnosed mad-man, it will be way easier to convince the world that him and the Likud and the Revisionists do not speak for Jews or Israelis.
January 19, 2012
1:03 pm
Whilst getting this sort of rating from Netanyahu can’t be a bad thing, the fact that the JPost editor backtracked and said it was just ‘his analysis’ is an insult to journalism. Trying to backtrack by claiming a verbatim sentence is actually only ‘analysis’ is truly dismal.
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Barry, I read your posts and didn’t agree at all. Then I re-read them, but in a hip-hop style:
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“Mubarak is strong. Israeli concessions. Mubarak is gone. Israeli concessions. Arafat is in power. Israeli concessions. Arafat finances terrorism. Israeli concessions. Abbas is in power. Israeli concessions.”
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I think they’d probably do just as well with a grindcore/hardcore backing. The power of music. Wow.
January 19, 2012
3:58 pm
A mental health professional would find fruitful ground in the postings of such as Barry Rosen, a series escalating in rabidity.
January 19, 2012
3:59 pm
Go away, Barry.
This is a place for adults.
January 19, 2012
4:44 pm
I’ve worked in the field of mental health (initially as a carer, then as a counsellor) in many settings, ranging from people’s houses to a secure unit for people in serious crisis. I don’t find slurs on mental illness (or neurological disability, for that matter – there was a snarky comment about the Special Olympics on here the other day) to be very fruitful at all. All it shows is that some people think it’s OK to fight bigotry with bigotry. People with mental illness aren’t ‘rabid’ and mental illness doesn’t affect your politics or your ability to be a compassionate person. Can we stop using it as a cheap insult around here?
January 19, 2012
5:28 pm
Vicky, I beg to differ. If you have someone who’s possibly clinically certifiable, a known liar, with psychopathic tendencies, as prime minister of a nuclear armed state, I think it’s everybody’s business to be critical. And I mean everybody! I remember co-translating in the 90s a biography of Bibi & coming to the conclusion after that experience that he had deep behavioural problems, and was a security threat to Israel. Just as we Israelis categorise any Palestinian who has lost a member of the family to an Israeli military attack as a “security risk” so Bibi’s loss of Yoni must qualify him.
By the way, love the TAGS chosen: an elegantly minimalist haiku, with satirical overtones of Woodward & Bernstein somewhere in the shadows:
TAGS barak ravid, binyamin netanyahu. paranoia, richard nixon, Steve Linde
January 19, 2012
7:20 pm
Who does Barry Rosen think he is.
Prime minister, elected by a sound majority, says that the main enemies are Ha’aretz and NYT, and he spuns his pet theory about main problem being “Arab hatred and racism”. A more humble person would write “but I think that Arab hatred and racism is a problem as well”.
It would be nice if PM would draw proper conclusions. One could half the part of the budget that deals with lesser threats like Barry’s “Arab hatred” and double what is spent of major threats, NYT and Ha’aretz. Because more is spent defense than on PR, this would save about 30 billions of shekels.
January 20, 2012
3:42 am
Angela,
You are also illustrating my point – you see that Bibi behaves in a vicious way, you conclude that mentally ill people behave in a vicious way, therefore you decide Bibi might be certifiable, as though mental illness and viciousness are exactly the same thing. Your comment also includes the insinuation that people with mental illness are more likely to be violent. They aren’t. That’s a myth, and a very damaging one that has cost an unfortunate number of people their jobs and even their homes.
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There are many people with mental illness (including severe and enduring mental illness) who are extraordinarily compassionate, perhaps in part because of their experiences. In my first job I worked with a severely ill woman who could no longer be heavily involved in her former political activism (anti-poverty, right to education in impoverished areas, anti-war, other forms of social justice) because her hallucinations and suicidal thoughts caused her too much distress when she left the safety of her house. She decided to volunteer to maintain the group’s website while she was too ill to go out, and she retained a sensitive and astute interest in these aspects of politics. This was a very ill lady who needed multiple hospitalisations and near twenty-four hour care. The idea that mental illness somehow makes you a nasty person with bad politics is pretty hateful to that sizeable minority of people out there (one in four of the population, in fact) who are going to experience a mental health problem in their lifetime.
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A biography of Bibi is no fit basis on which to diagnose him with a mental illness or to determine if he needs to be sectioned (which is needed only for a tiny minority of patients, and usually because they are a danger to themselves, not to anybody else). Psychopathy especially is very, very rare, yet from the way the term is bandied about as an insult, anyone would think that it just meant ‘behaving like a selfish prat’. If that’s true, then eighty per cent of Internet users are psychopathic.
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This is important – we have a problem when people who are committed to justice for Palestinians feel the need to stigmatise a very vulnerable group of people in order to further that cause. Any peace and justice activism requires us to interrogate our own prejudices on a regular basis. I don’t think the people who use these casual insults realise how damaging the myths they’re furthering are to people who live with mental illness.
January 20, 2012
7:35 am
Vicky – as a mental health worker, I’m sure you’re familiar with the classic _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_ I’d be surprised to learn that this phenomenon is considered irrelevant to mental health professionals, and certainly the ravings of Zionist extremists are fruitful ground for the study of it.
January 20, 2012
8:56 am
Aside from being pretty unintelligent (he is, after all, a Republican), Bibi also probably suffers from a mental disorder that shares some or all of the elements of paranoid-schizophrenia. For example, he seems to believe that it is now 1938, Ahmadinejad is Hitler and that he, Bibi, is none other than the second coming of Winston Churchill. But the most damning evidence of a mental disorder in poor Bibi is the fact that he has been married for so many years to Sarah; if that’s not clear clinical evidence of sado-masochistic tendencies, I don’t know what is.
January 20, 2012
10:59 am
Netanyahu is anti-democratic, anti-secular, anti-freedom and one of the biggest enemies of Israel. Definitely more dangerous Muslim extremists.
January 20, 2012
12:03 pm
Though Bibi and others belie that the NY Times has been unfair to Israel, the respected Columbia Journalism has just published a lengthy article explaining why they’re wrong, see:
http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_times_and_the_jews.php