Say this for Benjamin Netanyahu: he’s not short on chutzpah. He may be the leader of a country whose occupation of conquered territory has put it on the wrong side of UN resolutions for the past 42 years – and was accused of war crimes in a UN human rights report just this month – but that didn’t stop him from sticking a finger in the eye of a US president trying to broker an end to the Middle East’s most toxic conflict, or from rounding on members of the UN General Assembly who dared sit through a vicious speech by the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “Have you no shame?” Mr Netanyahu thundered.
The Israeli leader was hardly innocent of shamelessness, as he blamed the Palestinians’ plight on their own rejectionism and on Iran. But Mr Netanyahu was enabled by Mr Ahmadinejad, whose bizarre obsession with denying the Nazi Holocaust – as if this somehow helps the Palestinians – teed up the Israeli prime minister for an emphatic riposte in which he waved original German documents attesting to the mass slaughter of Jews during the Second World War.
Read Full Article »