The Audacity of Bibi

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." - Napoleon.

It's better if Prime Minister Netanyahu gives the speech to Congress in March, to a half empty room it looks like. Let him make a fool of himself, as he did on the floor of the United Nations with his cartoon bomb, and as Ahmadinejad did at Columbia University when he said there were no gays in Iran. LOL.

Hopefully, Netanyahu will go the way of Ahmadinejad. The world has had enough of irrational messianic leaders who make foolish statements and pour fuel on fires. If Netanyahu wants the world to burn so much he should step down as the leader of Israel and join ISIS.

Below are two articles that shed light on why President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu don't see eye to eye on a lot of things.

An excerpt from, "The roots of why Obama and Netanyahu dislike each other so much" by Terrence McCoy, The Washington Post, February 26, 2015:

Obama’s opinions on Israel have long contrasted with the militant view adopted by Netanyahu’s Likud, a point he made clear during the 2008 campaign, which made some pro-Israel hawks nervous. “I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re opposed to Israel, that you’re anti-Israel, and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel,” Obama said.

These statements weren’t lost on the Israeli public, and in a 2010 Jerusalem Post poll, only 9 percent of respondents said Obama’s administration was pro-Israel. Nearly one-half called it pro-Palestinian. Roughly three-fourths of Israelis who considered themselves right-wing — like Netanyahu — said Obama’s worldview was pro-Palestinian.

Now the differences between Netanyahu and Obama — on matters from settlements to modern Zionism — have come to a crossroads, a showdown set for next week when analysts say all of that building disdain between the men may finally come to a head. It will be a “tense political drama of the kind that House of Cards writers can only dream about,” said Haaretz.

An excerpt from, "Obama, the Jewish President" by Peter Beinart, Times of Israel, April 16, 2012:

During his run for the US Senate in 2004, in response to a questionnaire from the Chicago Jewish News, he criticized the barrier built to separate Israel and its major settlements from the rest of the West Bank, a remarkable statement given that that same year, after the International Court of Justice condemned the barrier, 361 members of the House backed a resolution supporting it. When his US Senate campaign — at the request of local Jewish activists — submitted a position paper on Israel, the activists deemed it too weak, and obtained a rewrite.

Obama’s description of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict in his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” is also telling. In the one paragraph Obama devotes to the conflict, his central theme is the similarity between Israelis and Palestinians. He describes talking “to Jews who’d lost parents in the Holocaust and brothers in suicide bombings” and hearing “Palestinians talk of the indignities of checkpoints and reminisce about the land they had lost.”

Flying by helicopter over Israel and the West Bank, he says he “found myself unable to distinguish Jewish towns from Arab towns, all of them like fragile outposts against the green and stony hills.” While such rhetoric is hardly radical, it subtly contradicts the view of major American Jewish leaders, who usually reject any equivalence between Jewish and Palestinian suffering. The American Jewish establishment generally stresses the moral dissimilarity between Israelis and Palestinians; Obama in “The Audacity of Hope” does the opposite.


Perhaps most revealing of all, as an insight into Obama’s view of Israel’s occupation, is the fact that he read, and vividly remembers, David Grossman’s 1988 book, “The Yellow Wind.” Grossman is not only one of Israel’s leading novelists, he is among its leading intellectual doves, and “The Yellow Wind” is his searing account of the occupation, as he witnessed it during seven weeks on assignment in the West Bank for an Israeli newsweekly. It is difficult to read “The Yellow Wind” without being profoundly disturbed by its portrait of Palestinian life under Israeli rule. That Obama read it, along with the novels of another famed Israeli dove, Amos Oz, lends further credence to Arnold Wolf’s claim that in his pre-presidential years, Obama “was on the line of Peace Now.”