by B. R. GOWANI
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a packed House chamber on Capitol Hill on March 3, 2015. PHOTO/Jack Gruber/USA Today
The POTUS, President of the United States, Barack Obama (a Democrat), the most powerful person in the world, was humiliated by a hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of a tiny nation called Israel. Netanyahu accepted the offer extended by House Speaker John Boehner (a Republican) to address the US Congress, made up of House and Senate. Boehner revealed to Chris Wallace of Fox News that he had asked the Israeli ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, not to tell Obama about the invitation because Boehner didn’t want any “interference.” Netanyahu is going to reap one more benefit out of this speech. There is a general election on March 17. There are chances that this invitation could have been engineered by Netanyahu’s own people.
Boehner’s action was unconstitutional, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman points out. But nothing is going to happen to Boehner.
Obama couldn’t do anything and so Netanyahu addressed the US Congress and uttered as many lies as he could to force the Obama administration to stop negotiating with Iran. He was applauded 43 times!
(Out of the 435 House members, there are 188 Democrats. And out of the 100 Senators, there are 44 Democrats. A little over 25% or 60 Congress persons of the Democratic Party boycotted the session. Rest of the members of both parties were there to clap and hope that as usual the money from the Israel Lobby will keep on flowing in their coffers.)
Of course, Netanyahu didn’t forget to thank Obama for all the known, unknown, and never to be known (intelligence related) things he has done for Israel.
Then he started his tirade against Iran and his warning to the US public about the danger Iran posed to Israel, US, and the world. He mentioned Haman, a Biblical figure, who, 2,500 years back, had tried to convince Persian King Ahasuerus to kill all the Jews. But Ahasuerus’s Jewish wife thwarted Haman’s plan, who then was hanged to death. Netanyahu, however, didn’t mention that in the past, Haman’s people had been wiped out in certain areas by Jewish leaders, David and King Saul.
Netanyahu also forgot to remind his audience about another Persian, King Cyrus the Great, about 2600 years ago, who after conquering Babylonia freed the Jewish captives of Babylonia. But then it would have portrayed Persia or Iran in good light and that was not the goal.
Coming back to recent history, after Israel was founded on stolen and seized Palestinian land in 1949, one of its best friend in the early 1950’s was Iran, then under the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, commonly known as Shah (1919-1980)(1941-1979). Israeli secret service Mossad helped Iran in training Shah’s secret police called SAVAK. After Shah’s overthrow in 1979, the relations between Iran and Israel soured.
With the Shah’s departure, Iran’s relations with the US came to an end. Obama is trying to restore relations with Iran and bring that country back into, as the Western countries are fond of calling, “the family of nations.” The super-head of that nations or tribes is US. But Netanyahu and the Israel Lobby in the US are dead set against any reconciliation between Iran and the US because that will somewhat loosen Israel’s dangerous grip over the US and the region. Their aim is to see the US waging a war against Iran and thus embroil US into another war and to destabilize further the region already passing through a great turmoil.
A little comparison between the US and Israel:
United States land area 3,531,905.43 sq miles
Israel land area 8,522 sq miles
United States population 320,206,000
Israel population 8,238,300
Every year, Israel gets over $3 billion in economic and military aid – totally free. It also gets more than that amount from private Jewish citizens of the US.
A leader of such a tiny nation with a miniscule population, dependent on US money and security, has the power, of course granted by the pimps sitting in the Congress, to come and ruin US President’s efforts to improve relations with Iran.
So who is most powerful, the US president or the Israeli premier?
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com