Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest personality fault, his deep paranoia, has produced another Nixon-like moment: Steve Linde, the editor of the right-wing Jerusalem Post, told the crowd at a Women’s International Zionist Organization conference of a strange exchange he had with the Israeli Prime Minister.
JTA reports:
“He said, ‘You know, Steve, we have two main enemies,’ ” Linde said, according to a recording of the WIZO speech provided to JTA. “And I thought he was going to talk about, you know, Iran, maybe Hamas. He said, ‘It’s The New York Times and Haaretz.’ He said, ‘They set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world. Journalists read them every morning and base their news stories … on what they read in The New York Times and Haaretz.’ ”
As Haaret’z diplomatic correspondence Barak Ravid tweeted, Netanyahu is confusing himself with the State of Israel, but this is also nothing new.
UPDATE I: I was able to get a hold of a recording of Steve Linde. The quality is very poor [problem solved, better file embedded], but it matches the transcript by JTA. Money quote is around 20 seconds.
Netanyahu to Jpost Editor: My Main Enemies are Haaretz, NY Times by noamsh
UPDATE II: Netanyahu refused to comment to JTA, but the Prime Minister’s Office denied the quote to walla.co.il, and later on Twitter. Jpost’s Linde told The 7th Eye, an Israeli media watchdog site, that he didn’t know there would be journalists in the audience, otherwise he wouldn’t have shared the story with the audience at the conference. Linde also said that his words “were taken out of context.”
