Mainstream Media Throws Temper Tantrums as Netanyahu Returns to Power in Israel
Sound familiar? “A Frightening Day for Democracy”
As former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returns to power, the mainstream media is throwing a huge temper tantrum, bashing the Israeli democracy and painting doomsday scenarios.
British newspaper The Guardian declared Netanyahu’s election victory “a frightening day for democracy.”
“This is a truly frightening moment,” the left-wing British daily continued. “The country’s increasingly rightwing electorate has picked a government likely to pursue an extreme and authoritarian trajectory, trampling over the lives of Palestinians and the democratic safeguards of Israel.”
Washington Post: Israel Becoming an “Illiberal Democracy”
The Washington Post sounded equally displeased with the Israeli election result.
Days after millions of Israelis voted to elect a news government, the WP complained in an op-ed published on Thursday that “Israel takes a troubling turn toward illiberal democracy,”
On Friday, the newspaper saw the Netanyahu’s victory as a lesson for Democrats who were trying to prevent former U.S. President Donald Trump from returning to the White House.
“Netanyahu’s Israeli victory shows how not to stop Trump,” the newspaper warned.
Noting the importance of Israel in the U.S. political discourse, the WP lamented: “The Jewish state is a crucible for global contests over nationalism, religion and identity — and to the American liberal mind, its latest turn is a source of foreboding.”
‘The Israel We Knew Is Gone,’ NYT Mourns
The most bizarre criticism, however, came from The New York Times, where its senior columnist, Thomas Friedman, painted a grim and scary picture.
Friedman opened the piece with an apparent ‘doomsday scenario’ to jolt the NYT readers:
Imagine you woke up after the 2024 U.S. presidential election and found that Donald Trump had been re-elected and chose Rudy Giuliani for attorney general, Michael Flynn for defense secretary, Steve Bannon for commerce secretary, evangelical leader James Dobson for education secretary, Proud Boys former leader Enrique Tarrio for homeland security head and Marjorie Taylor Greene for the White House spokeswoman. (…)
“Impossible,” you would say. Well, think again. (…)
The coalition that Likud leader Bibi Netanyahu is riding back into power is the Israeli equivalent of the nightmare U.S. cabinet I imagined above.
With a generous sprinkling of meaningless phrases like “anti-Arab,” “ultra-Orthodox,” and “ultranationalist” meant to scare his readers over the prospect of a Netanyahu-led government, Friedman concluded the article with a dismal warning that “we are truly entering a dark tunnel.”
Yet another badly flawed oped by Thomas Friedman to put in a drawer and pull out in a couple of years to demonstrate how consistently he gets the Middle East wrong. https://t.co/f2hIJRGIlh
— David M Friedman (@DavidM_Friedman) November 4, 2022
Highlighting Friedman’s life-long anti-Israel bias, eminent American lawyer, Stephen M. Flatow, wrote in the Jewish News Syndicate (news agency) that the NYT columnist “believes it his mission to heckle and harass the Israelis until they give in to Arab demands.”
In an op-ed published on Sunday, Flatow recalled:
The truth is that Friedman’s hostility towards Israel has nothing to do with the reelection of Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister or the center-right governing coalition he is about to form.
For nearly half a century—going all the way back to the early 1970s—Friedman has publicly attacked every Israeli government, whether it was right-wing, left-wing or somewhere in between.
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Screw these people. Dont’ dignify them by treating them as credible.
Simply put: shun them and let them die on the vine. It’s the old saying: “Argue with an idiot, and you then have 2 idiots arguing.’
The MSM is made up of a generation of mediocre students who took leftist political science courses, but primarily classes on “journalism”, a repetitive exercise that reiterates the same material for 3 years. These students are ill-educated, without common knowledge, much less the specialized knowledge needed for economic, science and medical stories.
It may be ‘made up of’ useful idiots, but they’re merely doing their malignant handlers’ bidding.
It used to be “The media is the message”. Now, it’s “The Media is the enemy.”
““Netanyahu’s Israeli victory shows how not to stop Trump,” the newspaper warned.”
You don’t need to take any more lessons at that, you clowns, you’re doing just fine.
Why is Israeli news a concern for AMERICANS? We need to stop linking our country onto israeli wars for Israeli hegemony. Netanyahu is a gangster. He might be ok for Israel but he’s NOT good for the USA.
Really? Netanyahu is a strong leader whose leadership creates a stronger Israel. That translates into a stronger ally for the US. If you think the US can go it alone in the world, good luck to you. Keep watching Tucker.
Actually he isn’t a strong leader. He caves under moderate pressure from the USA, or even slight pressure from the Israeli legal establishment, which has him in a corner. But he’s the leader Israel’s got, and there’s no viable alternative until he’s gone. Lapid is a joke and Gantz’s heart is with the enemy. Bennett or Saar could have been leaders but they failed the test. Elkin made a bad gamble and has paid the price. Feiglin would have been great but unfortunately he has no public support. So Netanyahu it is until he’s ready to step aside for someone else.
In any case he’s certainly no gangster. And Israel does not fight wars for “hegemony”; it fights only for survival. It fights to prevent Holocaust Part II, which is what the so-called “Palestinians” have been planning and dreaming of ever since Part I was brought to an abrupt end. They were the Germans’ allies and never gave up the cause.
Israel is one of a number of issues you could count on one hand that Americans agree on. This is despite the fact that the liberal establishment including Barack Obama absolutely detest Israel.
Not only did Netanyahu keep my views on Israel mainstream in America during his administration; he made Israel a lot more independent from Europe by greatly expanding its relationship with Asian countries.
Furthermore he made great diplomatic improvements with every major European country and with some not so major European countries.
European leaders have been warmer and more personal in welcoming Netanyahu back into office than they were towards congratulating Biden despite the major mega super ultra gap between the importance of the countries in question.
BDS was a failure in no small part because of his leadership.
All this in exchange for not building at all in areas Israel agrees it will not keep when the final borders are agreed to; and the places it might or might not have will get some restrictions.
If you want we could start discussing the Netanyahu economy to, and we could discuss the fact that the IDF was very busy doing drills but didn’t have to say storm Lebanon as it did before he was PM.
His achievements are the definition of good leadership. Not on the battlefield thank god however; nobody should want to be tested there.
Seems everything terrifies the media these days. Maybe they aren’t so powerful after all.
The media is like the bully who has been punched in the nose. They want to still act like a bully but are constantly glancing around in case the kid that smacked them down shows back up.
To be more precise it is a bully punched in the nose who is punching back and the fight is continuing with no end in sight.
Lets hope we prevail but half the country is taking its cues entirely from mainstream media.
Netanyahu is a better leader than the one we have, so what’s the problem?
That’s an extremely low bar.
What terrifies the media?
Being exposed as in the pockets of the new communist axis of China, Russia and Iran.
The media has been spoon feeding us liberal establishment state propaganda about Russia for 6 years, it is in no way in Russia’s pocket.
How do you not understand that that is the whole point? You seriously do not understand.
Honestly, they’re more terrified of losing their cushy jobs, where they sell out our country. Just look at the scum that was infesting a public company like Twitter (and this is just the tip of the iceberg):
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/former-twitter-employee-convicted-acting-foreign-agent-saudi-arabia
These leftists are deranged and are the actual dangers to democracy. They are frauds!
No, they’re simply embezzlers hiding behind a ’cause’.
The Brits are anti-Semitic to their very core and always have been. There are some rather convincing documentaries on the same streaming, discussing the British official and popular opinion regarding Jews, Zionism, and Israel.
understatement of the year
maybe of a millenium
that would be since 1022 AD
1. If you mean historically you are dead wrong
2. British attitudes towards Jews in general are not anti-Semitic
3. There is a hostility towards Israel and it is based on the establishment liberal media. If your sources of news consisted of the BBC and the Guardian you would be at least as much if not significantly more anti-Israel.
And yet the near daily harassment and violent attacks on English Jews target primarily visibly Orthodox Charedi Jews, who are as likely as not to be non-Zionist.
You could have been giving a description of New York City there.
Those attacks are mostly not by English people.
I can’t figure out if you’re malicious or ignorant. But it’s one of those.
So you missed the endless attacks on Orthodox Jews in NY City?
If a crime spike in London makes the UK anti-Semitic ..perhaps instead of attacking me personally you could take the dam time to refute the argument and explain what exactly makes the London crime spike anti-Semitism and the NY crime spike a ok.
You state that the British are not historically anti-Semitic. But you don’t know the history of British anti-Semitism, which goes back at least 500 years. I cannot put that history into a comment on LI. Your statement is just plain wrong.
The Irish are contemptibly anti-Semitic, too. The virulent anti-Israel venom and feckless, idiotic dhimmitude that is present in Irish media and in the Irish ruling class is appalling and despicable.
My hope is that the first thing the new government does is invalidate the terrible “deal” made with Lebanon over the gas fields. In typical left wing fashion, the agreement basically turns the whole thing over to the Muslims in return for a promise that they will behave. You know, a variation on the “land for peace” theory which has worked so well for them.
My fear is that it will not do that. I expect that Netanyahu will persuade Gantz to join his coalition in order to “save” the country from the “extremists” Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and there is no way Gantz would go along with tearing up the Lebanon agreement. Netanyahu also has form on honoring terrible agreements that his predecessors made; the first time he became PM, one of the first things his government did was to carry out the disastrous Hevron agreement that Peres had made but had not carried out.
I forgot: Am Chai Yisroel!
Thomas Friedman has an almost pathological dislike for a strong Israel that is willing to defend itself even if it means doing that without the approval of the Arabists in WashingtonHis columns are a good example dog what it means to be a self hating Jew
Thomas Friedman just does what he’s told. He’s a Fetterman/Biden, only packaged a little better.
It’s not “almost pathological.”
“Imagine you woke up after the 2024 U.S. presidential election and found that Donald Trump had been re-elected and chose Rudy Giuliani for attorney general, Michael Flynn for defense secretary, Steve Bannon for commerce secretary, evangelical leader James Dobson for education secretary, Proud Boys former leader Enrique Tarrio for homeland security head and Marjorie Taylor Greene for the White House spokeswoman. (…)”
Sounds like a damn fine day to me! Bring back Betsy DeVos, Mike Pompeo! Find something for Sarah Palin too! Make a cabinet you can trust this time.
It’s going to be a festival of MAGA!!
Oh, and consider Dershowitz for DOJ. He may be a lefty, but he sure understands the law and equal treatment.
Enrique Tarrio should be kept as far away from power as humanly possible. In fact he should be in jail for the rest of his life for deliberately bringing people into danger knowing they would be killed/hurt. Ethically that man is below dirt.
As far Sarah Palin seriously? You are seriously telling me you miss the Bush era? You miss us killing 5 year old Muslims with drones? You miss us wasting trillions trying to force Baghdad to turn into LA? You miss use of torture on such a wide scale that one of the finest legal minds of our age (Alan Dershowitz) suggested a legalization in order to create a higher bar to use of torture than “agent in the field thought it was needed”?
Enough of this nostalgia no more Bush’ and that includes Bush people without the name Bush.
Isn’t that fact that she helped Dems win a congressional seat in Alaska enough to convince you she isn’t worth your nostalgia?
What? I haven’t followed his case closely, but what the heck did Tarrio do to earn a place in prison forever? What exact and specific law did he break that earns such a sentence? And what the actual frack are you doing lumping Sarah Palin in with neocon progressives like Bush 43? This is all madness. Are you drunk? Tell me you’re drunk.
Well first he has tried to pressure women to kill his children so from that we know he isn’t who he says he is (I have also never seen him quote any western figure of the past so highly doubt he cares about Western Civilization) I was speaking a little hyperbolically but he has repeatedly done protests in areas he knew Antifa was out in force, went to the part of the city he knew Antifa was in order to get his followers attacked by them knowing police wouldn’t intervene and knowing that it would be useless. From Portland to D.C. that bastard has been deliberately causing clashes between where people get hurt knowing fully that the police will just arrest proud boys when it is over and it will help the left by giving the media another chance to discuss clashes in the street by the far right. His entire shtick is get gullible people to follow him; deliberately put them in danger; when the media massively reports the “clash in the street” he exalts in the attention he gets; the media gets to spread a narrative; and the only people who get hurt are the people he no doubt sees as disposable anyway. On a legal level he isn’t responsible for that but on an ethical level? Think of the cop who leaves an innocent person he thinks did something wrong in area he knows he will be attacked and possibly killed in. I don’t think he should be arrested for this; but I do think that a man that selfish, that parasitic and who has that much of a concern for his followers needs to be kept as far away from any form of power as possible.
I haven’t even mentioned the actual impact he has on politics (all negative i.e. when he brilliantly discovered that he could get media attention for himself if he burned BLM banners outside of a black church) or the number of people not physically hurt but sitting in jail because they had the misfortune of listening to him resulting in them being at the wrong place at the wrong time (by his design).
Sarah Palin compared to Tarrio is a saint; and having down syndrome people in my family makes me actually like her on a personal level. However we aren’t searching for a pope and she has described water boarding not as torture but as “A terrorist’s baptism”, she advocated murdering Julian Assange in a foreign embassy in another country following wikileaks, she was fully in favor of all of our foreign wars, she was on board the government has no say in the public square private businesses could do whatever they want bandwagon.
In her favor she very significantly triggered the libs with her existence but at the time if you had selected her as someone who was well not with the Bush agenda….well I highly doubt you would have been able to find many significant areas she wasn’t. John McCain at least called out Bush for making torture widespread. The Tea Party which she was an essential part of was also just about wanting taxes cut and pledges not to have new taxes; a policy that Bush father of the Bush tax cuts was most definitely not the opposite of.
She has personal qualities that are appealing; I fully approve of her pro-life stance; but as far as an appointed position….if she wants to say her positions all changed she should tell us that instead of just showing up. It isn’t just Iraq I would definitely want to see her say she was wrong to defend government unaccountability by misuse of classification, to defend torture etc. If she wants me and other Palin skeptics to view her positively as a politician (Sarah Palin skeptics include most Alaskans by the way) she should address her previous life as well a total hawk. She is a saint not just compared to Tarrio but with a lot of people; but again we aren’t trying to find an ideal cleric, which makes knowing how she thinks about politics and what her policies are key.
Agreed.
We need to secede. It’s the only way out. It’s too late for America as 50 states (54, if you’re Biden and 57, if you’re Obama).
If you’re Biden or Obama, is there really any America anyway? Isn’t just a piece of land that the white man stole and where everyone is now welcome?
Once again we see what the Progressive Left means by Our Democracy ™–although in this case I suppose it’s Their (Israel’s) Democracy. For the Prog/Left, it doesn’t mean normal people voting their preferences and ideas and the most popular wins. It means “Lower class peons voting for what We told them they should.”
And none of them seem able to realize that this is EXACTLY why our Founding Fathers gave us…wait for it…A Republic Not A Democracy! So that no sudden flood of populist sentiment can run rough-shod over other people’s rights and freedoms. To the extent that the Prog/Left have weakened the bounds of our Federal Republic (so that they can more easily enact their agenda), to that extent they have opened themselves to greater electoral disaster when/if populist sentiment shifts against them.
May it please God, we will see this begin next Tuesday.
You forgot the electoral college.
.
The media/left have the same definition of “democracy” as North Korea
Netanyahu’s election is frightening to the vile European, Leftist dhimmi useful idiots and American Dhimmi-crats, because he possesses the gall and temerity to defend Israel’s historical claims to the land on which it sits — a history which predates the founding of the supremacist, totalitarian and belligerent ideology of “Submission” by millennia, let’s note — and, because he defends Israelis’ right to leave in peace, unmolested by the genocide-aspiring predations of belligerent Arab Muslim terrorist-thugs.
If you used the term Dhimmicrat to Netanyahu that would be the last time he ever spoke to you.
Militia in the Russian Civil War under the leadership of politicians like Symon Petlura started the first genocide of Jews in the 20th century on grounds that the Bolsheviks weren’t doing what they did for the publicly stated reasons and for the obvious reasons; but because a cabal of Jews they kowtowed to wanted it.
Historians have never settled on an exact number but the genocide was bad enough that when a Jew killed Symon Petlura in Paris a jury of good Frenchmen could not allow the killer to be convicted even though there was no question he did it and that he was sane.
I despise anyone who would scapegoat any religious or ethnic group.
At least you are pretending to despise what Democrats are doing. To credit the motives as they are doing it because of Muslims is a genocidal level of hatred and isn’t welcome. We are not the Symon Petlura party, we are not the Anton Denikin Party we are the Republican Party, we are a religious coalition not a coalition of religious bigots.
“If you used the term Dhimmicrat to Netanyahu that would be the last time he ever spoke to you.”
To conceive of a first time is so improbable that to envision a second is entirely irrational.
If an official he could fire used that term to him that man would be out of a job immediately.
Netanyahu has already said that Israel will recognize the Saudis which Gideon Allon had already done in one of the Silva novels! .Once the results from the midterms watch and see what the Israelis do with a favorable Congressional majority and see if Netanyahu a great speaker is invited back to speak to Congress
Israel hasn’t recognized the Saudis? I think you have something backwards. Isn’t he working on getting them to recognize Israel?
People like Thomas Friedman have had a far far worse negative impact on the Jewish people than oddballs like Kyrie Irving.
So how come Kyrie gets suspended, and yet Friedman gets a megaphone in the NY Times?
Neither one of them do us much good. But as between eg Farrakhan and Noam Chomsky, I’m more worried about the former.
For the same reason Walter Duranty got himself a seat at the New York Times instead of the seat he deserved at Sing-Sing.
So Bezos’ Compost, Pravda on the Potomac where the truth goes to die in darkness, has the chutzpah to write: “Israel takes a troubling turn toward illiberal democracy,” The elephant here is that the real illiberal here is this Pravda where truth has died.
If to be known by your enemies is a measure of success, Israel has won the jackpot. The Guardian, WaPo, NYT, and, hold on to your seat, take a deep breath, wait, wait. . . Thomas Friedman! – ta dah! One of America’s most well known deep thinkers – and “kept” men (see also John Kerry).
I stopped reading the Guardian link after they mocked Israel for having had four elections in five years. Or was it the other way around? I forget. Hell, the UK just managed to dump a PM who wasn’t there long enough to move her underwear into 10 Downing St., then replaced her with a PM no one had ever voted for! The Guardian needs a laugh track.
But then, the West has lost its mind. Biden/Harris, Trudeau, Macron, Scholz (sp?), the guy in the UK – good lord. I don’t know if we can hang on for another two years.
Bring back the Abraham Accords, Bibbi – it’ll be a serious start on a return to sanity.
As many people voted for Sunak as for Truss, or for Johnson. All three were elected to Parliament by their respective constituencies, and then elected party leader by their peers in the party.
Let us not forget that Thomas Friedman has been a devotee of China’s Communist authoritarianism.
Gotta love it.
Not only does Thomas Friedman get the Middle East wrong, he apparently doesn’t even understand us politics.
“Michael Flynn for defense secretary,”
– Yes, the person dismissed for lying will be put in as defense secretary. After all, with the success of retired generals as SecDef in the past, Trump will totally do this again.
“Steve Bannon for commerce secretary”
-What? Who would even think that?
“evangelical leader James Dobson for education secretary”
-Holy cow, Dobson is coming back as a boogie man again. Yes, Tump would totally bring in an 88 year old psychologist rather than anyone who actually as direct experience with the area of education.
“Proud Boys former leader Enrique Tarrio for homeland security head”
-Okay, I’d really like to know what he’s smoking to pull this one out.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene for the White House spokeswoman”
– Right, again, what was he smoking? Is it meth? Meth use can very much result in behaviors and thought patterns resemble schizophrenia. I bet it’s meth.
Oh, and not intended to talk down about any of the people listed. It’s just those individuals are some of the STUPIDEST examples of bogey men he could try and pull out.
Again, I haven’t heard James Dobson trotted out as “evil evangelical!!!!!” since the Obama years.
Maybe the Israeli’s are tired of having bombs lobbed at them by the peaceful South Syrian goat herders and terrorists climbing through tunnels to murder them in the street. They may have been less than impressed with Biden colluding with the self hating PM who just left town to sign a deal with Lebanon which is run by Hezbollah terrorists funded by Iran to give away a ton of gas fields in the Med.