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.”
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 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.”
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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