Are quotes being fraudulently attributed to Israeli ministers (as NMT’s indignant Israeli PR visitors are insisting)? We decided to look into the Ariel Sharon “fabrication” about who controls of America. Let’s just say our hasbara critics are going to wish they’d tempered their indignation. In the process, we found more indecorous pronouncements, which we’ve included with direct attributions from the Israeli press. Tokhis oyfn tish.
Did Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon say “I control America,” or words to such effect? It turns out this has been made a bone of contention since the alleged rebuke to Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in October 2001.
The Israeli PR website CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) has been accusing Arab-sympathetic Washington Report, (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs -WRMEA) of orchestrating this story. The quote was picked up by the international press from Chicago Tribune syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, who had attributed it to having been reported on Israeli radio station Kol Yisrael.
CAMERA claimed that Kol Yisrael denied having aired the quote. But Geyer could not discount the veracity of her multiple Israeli sources, whether or not they heard it on the radio or at the meeting, but the veteran journalist stood by her longstanding contacts. Under a coordinated barrage of LTE complaints by CAMERA, the Chicago Tribune issued this clarification on June 14, 2002:
“[the quote was] widely reported in the Palestinian press but cannot be confirmed in independent sources. Geyer and Universal Press Syndicate regret not having attributed the quote more specifically.”
Hardly an admission of “fabrication,” as CAMERA and this site’s hasbara propagandists are lauding.
And whether Sharon said it or not, Senator Fullbright, or Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had already spelled that notion out for posterity.
Perhaps Prime Minister Olmert’s recent claim to have interrupted George Bush mid-speech, to command Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to stand down on a United Nations vote condemning the recent Gaza attack, proves Israel’s influence, more loudly than pronouncing it.
But a statement about who claims to control whom, pales in comparison to what some Israeli ministers have voiced about their military objectives in Gaza. They remind me of American commanders, utterly oblivious to the Geneva Conventions.
Matan Vilnai
Here’s what Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai famously told Army Radio last year:
“The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger ‘Shoah’ because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”
SHOAH is the Hebrew word for Holocaust; itself a word zealously trademarked by Zionists internationally to mean only the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews.
Israeli PR damage-control immediately jumped in to assert that by ‘Shoah,’ Vilnai had meant ‘disaster,’ the word’s original definition. (Would that be like asking Americans to believe that when Rudy Giuliani brings up 911, he’s talking about dialing emergency?)
Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter
at weekly cabinet meeting Sunday, Jan 20, 2008:
“the government must instruct the IDF to eliminate the rocket fire from Gaza entirely. These attacks need not be minimized or managed, but stopped completely irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians.”
Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit:
“any other country would have already gone in and leveled the area, which is exactly what I think the IDF should do – decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it.”
“We should let them know ‘you have to leave, this area will be taken down tomorrow’ and just take it down – that will show them we mean business. Sporadic actions are good, but they’re not good enough.”
(At the same meeting, according to Haaretz: legal experts were requested to prepare an opinion on a “gradual evacuation of the population” in Gaza from areas of fighting.)
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
at the annual Herzliya Conference Jan 23, 2008
“But there is no justification for demanding we allow residents of Gaza to live normal lives while shells and rockets are fired from their streets and courtyards at Sderot and other communities in the south.”
“Does anyone seriously think that our children will wet their beds at night in fear and be afraid to go out of the house and they [Gazans] will live in quiet normality?”