Quote: "Then there is the American political angle. Netanyahu wants the war and the crisis to linger at least until November. He needs the war to become an electoral issue that hurts Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, which it likely won't, but he is intent on helpingDonald Trump. If the United States does nothing, the Biden administration would be accused of aloofness and inaction. If they exert pressure on Israel, Netanyahu will run and whine to his Republican friends thatPresident Joe Biden and Harris betrayed him while he is fighting America's war, as he indicated in a speech to Congress in July."
Netanyahu is indisputably a “Vile Messiah,” but let’s not avert our eyes from the Americans in his “Cult of Lies and Death. Beginning with Trump whom Netanyahu is doing all he can to get him elected as POTUS, as he had in 2016. But those “Republican friends” are exemplified by Quincy/Koch Institute’s favorite Republican J.D. Vance, and his fellow National Conservatives who are always featured/promoted in foreign policy events put on by Quincy’s “New Right” faction, as with their fellow Charles Koch funding recipient The American Conservative magazine (according to Vanity Fair magazine) as well. With neither of them being above reproach just because they’re so heavily represented here, in my opinion, as they are playing such an active role in justifying, and funding through Congress, Israel’s Genocide, in my opinion.
Those two Charles Koch funded “mass consciousness activities,” have been the principal purveyors of National Conservative propaganda from the beginning of Hazony’s Settler Front activities in calling for impunity for Israel under International Law which could hold Israel accountable for its war crimes. That along with Koch’s role in passing anti-BDS legislation throughout the country, should make clear that the Great Libertarian Charles Koch is right up their with Miriam Adelson, in promoting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, and military expansionism, in my opinion.
I don’t know if this is an accurate quote or not but it is appearing as comments in recent articles. Regardless whether it is attributed correctly, it is certainly true, and U. S. National Conservatives and their media platforms are as complicit in that as any “aider and abettor” to any crime is. As media platforms were found guilty of at Nuremberg for that previous genocide.
“Pre-Oct 7 Gaza was a concentration camp. Post-Oct 7 Gaza has become an extermination camp”. Former US Ambassador Chas Freeman.
There’s obviously a concerted effort by “right-leaning,” anti-Harris forces (She’s a Marxist!) to get Trump elected, in their writings, by commission, or omission. Lined up at they are with these NatCons below:
With this the latest Republican Statecraft Trump campaign event, with Emily Jashinsky their newest NatCon spokesperson as one of their “experts.” No party flacks? :-)
Biden-Harris want the war in the Middle East to end now.
Israelis know that if the war ends with Hamas in charge in Gaza, Hezbollah victorious having driven 80,000 Israelis from their homes, and the Iranian nuclear program on the brink of breakout—Israel will have suffered a devastating defeat from which it may never recover.
This means that Biden-Harris are on a collision course with Israeli public opinion which is unwilling to accept the defeat the Democrats want to force upon them.
For most of this year, Biden’s answer to this confrontation has been to try to replace Netanyahu with a new Israeli prime minister who would end the war.
But these attempts have failed. Bibi is still standing and his position has only gotten stronger. This rupture between Israel and the US Democratic Party may turn out to be permanent.
Israelis were shocked, devastated and confounded by Sunday's news about the six hostages seemingly executed in cold blood by Hamas. They are furious and incensed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his callous recklessness in repeatedly refusing a hostage deal. But they should not be surprised.
Netanyahu was never going to agree to a hostage deal. He wants and has a vested interest in prolonging the war. It's that simple. Tragic, inhuman, infuriating, but simple.
For some inexplicable reason the United States believed him, and most of the Israeli media played along with his lies and manipulations. Even the Israeli negotiating team, occasionally venting their frustration with him, never stood up publicly and exposed the truth: He does not want any hostage deal that includes a cease-fire that could signal the de facto end of the war.
It is very hard to find new ways, a new psycho-political diagnosis, new explanations, new angles, new terms or words to describe Benjamin Netanyahu's inept performance as prime minister or his character traits. It seems everything has been said and written.
But then he conjures another breathtaking exposition of cruelty, recklessness and incompetence. This time, it was the savage execution by Hamas of six Israeli hostages, all of whom could have been released and saved had Netanyahu assented to the very hostage and cease-fire deal he himself proposed in late May, and again in late July. Instead, he deceived and conned everyone, and ultimately reneged on it – though not without his trademark eye-rolling on how much he cares.
Protesters rallying outside the Defense Ministry against the government, in Tel Aviv on Monday.Credit: Florion Goga/Reuters
He was warned for months that through his evasive and spurious reluctance to strike a deal, he was recklessly condemning hostages to their fate. As late as last Thursday, he was told unequivocally by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that his incomprehensible, senseless insistence on retaining an Israeli presence on the Philadelphi route between Gaza and Egypt was effectively sentencing hostages to death. He couldn't care less. In fact, no hostages, no worries.
He intentionally and grievously ignored those warnings. Netanyahu "knew the Israeli hostages were living on borrowed time ... their blood is on his hands," a senior member of Netanyahu's government told Haaretz's Gidi Weitz on Sunday. The source, cowardly remaining anonymous, added that everyone knew he is "a narcissist, a coward. But his lack of humanity was fully revealed in all its ugliness in recent months."
It is possible that in order to fully understand the underpinnings of his modus operandi and state of mind, you would have to depart from conventional political analysis and consult the American Psychiatric Association's trademark publication, "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (Fifth Edition, 2013).
Since I am not qualified to make such observations, let alone a diagnosis, I'll stick with his psycho-political profile. Netanyahu has an acute case of political bipolarity. He is at once a man with delusions of grandeur, the self-ordained savior of Western civilization against "Islamo-fascism," a once-in-a-generation statesman whose contemporaries are incapable of fully appreciating him – and at the same time, an anxious, disoriented, panic-prone perpetual victim. He is convinced of his political acumen, but never stops whining about being victimized by an ungrateful world and even less grateful Israelis who fail to recognize his greatness.
Whether this is a mental state of affairs or whether it is planned by design is beyond me to determine. He is the person responsible for the worst debacle in Israeli history – Hamas' barbaric terror attack on October 7 – but who deeply believes it was the Israel Defense Forces and intelligence agencies' fault and that only he can fix it, denying any accountability.
Protesters calling for a hostage deal in July, outside Ben-Gurion Airport.Credit: Itay Ron
He is at once pretending to be a seasoned and sophisticated global player while pushing Israel to isolation, condemnation and pariah status. He is a man who incessantly bragged about Israel's successes and yet single-handedly drove it to a level of value-destruction and chaos unprecedented in the history of democracies. He is at once grandstanding the merits of Israeli democracy, while instigating a constitutional coup and behaving like a garden-variety autocrat.
Jewish history, while not being unique in this respect, has a tradition of false or pseudo-messiahs: charlatans who invoke lofty quasi-religious fantasies to advance their fraudulent agenda. From Theudas, who tried to convince Jews to follow him across the Jordan River to redemption before being executed by the Romans in the year 46, to Shimon Bar Kochba, who led the failed rebellion against the Romans of 133-135, to Moses of Crete in 448, and the 12th century's David Alroy in Baghdad. Then there was the most famous false messiah of all: Shabbetai Zvi (1626-1676), who created an eponymous movement and later converted to Islam.
By almost every criteria, Mr. Netanyahu is a false messiah – actually a vile messiah – in both his self-image and the sycophantic cult around him. While he arrogantly regards himself as a providential gift to the Jewish people and Western civilization, his abysmal domestic and foreign policy, and security record, paints the exact opposite, starkest of pictures.
With regards to the hostage deal and cease-fire that he refused to reach, it was all too predictable. Politically, he needs the war and a war-like atmosphere to stay in power. Emergency and cowardice is the glue that holds his governing coalition together and, until Sunday night, prevented large-scale demonstrations. His proactive flirtation with escalations is part of the same logic: to shield him from political strife, vindicate his narrative that this is total war or "a second war of independence," as he calls it.
Then there is the American political angle. Netanyahu wants the war and the crisis to linger at least until November. He needs the war to become an electoral issue that hurts Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, which it likely won't, but he is intent on helping Donald Trump. If the United States does nothing, the Biden administration would be accused of aloofness and inaction. If they exert pressure on Israel, Netanyahu will run and whine to his Republican friends that President Joe Biden and Harris betrayed him while he is fighting America's war, as he indicated in a speech to Congress in July.
Protesters rallying in support of the hostages, in Tel Aviv on Monday.Credit: Florion Goga/Reuters
The gap between Netanyahu's plethora of failures – Iran, the Palestinians, terror, Gaza, the economy, the cost of living, law and order – and the adulation of his base (25 to 33 percent of Israelis) is astounding. There are valid socio-political-cultural explanations, but the gap is so wide that it has all the attributes of a cult.
For his coalition and supporters, it has become a Jesus-like phenomenon: he is suffering for their sins, defending them, standing up for them. Accordingly, he developed a doctrine of "papal infallibility": that he, as their pope, is saved from the possibility of error when speaking ex cathedra, i.e., in an official capacity. So they dismiss the narcissism, the lies and the flaws.
They now apply the same logic to his refusal to conclude a hostage deal. If he did or said it, he must be right. Meanwhile, the majority of Israelis remain shocked by how deep their country has descended.
