Right before Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress Tuesday, a story began to spread Sunday that President Obama threatened to shoot down Israeli jets if they attacked Iranian nuclear facilities, with predictable results.
They all ran with it: World Net Daily, Breitbart, Newsmax, Washington Times, Fox Nation, and, of course, Megyn Kelly, who – again of course – reports it as fact, not rumor.
And she thinks Jon Stewart has been unfair to her. Right.
The report comes to us from religiously conservative Israeli news source, Arutz Sheva, which in turn gleaned it from Bethlehem-based news agency, Ma’an, which in turn got it from the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida, which had apparently obtained it from anonymous sources in the Israeli government.
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The Bethlehem-based news agency Ma’an has cited a Kuwaiti newspaper report Saturday, that US President Barack Obama thwarted an Israeli military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2014 by threatening to shoot down Israeli jets before they could reach their targets in Iran.
Following Obama’s threat, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was reportedly forced to abort the planned Iran attack.
According to the report, Netanyahu decided to strike Iran in 2014 when they found out the U.S. was actually talking to Iran, “because such an agreement is, allegedly, a threat to Israel’s security.” An unknown Israeli minister told John Kerry, who told Obama, who decided to act based on Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 2009 recommendation that Israeli planes be shot down if they attack Iran.
To tell you how absolutely outrageous this claim is, even Breitbart expressed dismay and doubt, saying “the news would appear to hang somewhere north of ‘astonishing,’ but south of ‘unbelievable.'”
And Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu wrote at the conservative Jewish Press yesterday that, “The report has no confirmation from any other source and appears at first glance to be an invention of an imaginative editor.” While acknowledging Al-Jarida editor Mohammed al-Sager’s credentials, he goes on to opine that,
The idea that President Barack Obama would order the U.S. Air Force to down an Israeli seems like a Grade-B horror movie plot…The report may be fantasy, but the fact that Al Jarida dared to report it says a lot about perceptions of the relationship between Netanyahu and Obama.
Roger L. Simon opines that the report “is not likely true,” and that, “More likely, the report, which emerged from Kuwait, is disinformation timed to discredit Prime Minister Netanyahu and make him seem a warmonger in advance of his address to Congress Tuesday.”
None of this clear-thinking has stopped the right wing, generally more than ready to believe anything bad about Obama, explode with outrage at the idea, as the comments at Breitbart demonstrate:
Chuck Finley: It’s now official, Obama is on the side of EVIL.
Well, not really. It’s a rumor even Breitbart finds difficult to credit, and these guys INVENT news.
Sipius is probably reading some of that invented news as he claims that “our military reduced and gutted to pay for entitlements…”
Geeman gave voice to racist crackers everywhere when he complained,
“Who knew Obama was talking about transforming America into a Muslim country? I was worrying about his white commie half when I should have been worried about his black Muslim half.”
Anyone introducing a hint of an actual fact into the conversation, like Sancho Panzer for pointing out that even Meir Dagan, head of Israel’s secret service Mossad, recently said that Netanyahu himself is the man who has “caused the greatest strategic damage to Israel” gets “flagged…for stupidity.”
Because you have to be stupid to disagree with these ill-informed braniacs.
No facts will be allowed to enter the echo chamber.
Yet according to The Times of Israel just a few days ago, “For all his tough rhetoric on Iran, Dagan said Netanyahu had backed down from taking military action against Iran in the past because “all of the professional bodies were opposed.” This additional piece from Aruta Sheva seems to back up this analysis.
Ed Driscoll writes, “If this report is true, who at this late stage in Mr. Obama’s administration who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention to his actions would be at all surprised by it?”
In any case, “I wish Obama was half as mad at ISIS as he is at Netanyahu,” Jon Gabriel of Ricochet tweets. Or as Mark Steyn asked last month when the media ginned up the Rudy kerfuffle, if Obama was “working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?”
Islamophobe-in-chief Pamela Geller, having once invented the “fact” of Obama’s anti-Semitism, , is now saying, “I told you so.”
He doesn’t even pretend anymore. And the terrible reality is that there are so many on the left who love this — The Democrats have become the anti-Israel party with the anti-semite-in-chief.
In other words, something that didn’t happen proves something she invented is true. Ouch. That hurts my brain.
A couple of comments at her Atlas Shrugged site are also illustrative of right wing hysteria over a mere third-and rumor:
WarEagle82: The Republic has been overthrown by Marxists.
Mordy: Enemy of America. Enemy of Israel. Enemy of Holiness
Mordy even compares Netanyahu to Esther (doesn’t he know that’s Sarah Palin?):
Like Queen Esther, P.M. Netanyahu broke protocol and also will not be silent in the face of an existential Persian threat to destroy the Jewish People.
And DanaR commented at Newsmax that, “And here we have Obama showing he would protect Iran over Israel.”
It doesn’t even occur to any of these “patriots” that by attacking Iran, Israel would have been drawing the United States into a war on its behalf, essentially setting American foreign policy with a fait accompli. Or that preventing Israel from controlling U.S. foreign policy is not a defense of Iran but a very legitimate defense of U.S. interests.
It becomes apparent, in thinking about all this, why John Boehner and Benjamin Netanyahu get along. I have no help to offer Geller’s fanboys and fangirls, but maybe, when Netanyahu gets voted out of office, and Boehner gets ousted as Speaker of the House, the two can meet at Boehner’s Florida mansion paid for with Koch dollars, and discuss the might-have-been dystopian futures they tried to bring about.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
