The NY Times quoted a senior Israeli official, who said that in February 2016 Mossad discovered the Tehran warehouse Netanyahu showed in his Monday night presentation, and that the building was under surveillance since then. Mossad agents broke into the building one night last January, according to the Times’ account, removed the original documents and smuggled them back to Israel the same night.
Netanyahu’s slide show and presentation were mesmerizing, both because of the main theme—an indefatigable, murderous, religious cult plotting to wage an Armageddon against the Jewish State as well as the Sunni Middle East and Europe; and for the prime minister’s command of the facts, sans teleprompter, in two languages, refusing to be fazed by a mic failure at the start, and remaining the top public speaker among today’s international leaders.
We can also tell how successful Netanyahu was Monday night by the attempts to cut him at the knees Tuesday morning. Take, for instance, the Ha’aretz editorial that opened: “The information provided by the prime minister yesterday, in an unnecessary stage show, was largely recycled and intended to persuade the United States and European countries to withdraw from the nuclear agreement with Iran.”
“In fact, Netanyahu did not provide information that proves that Iran is breaking the agreement today,” argues Ha’aretz, “The information he presented was mostly published in 2011 in the IAEA report, which contains explicit data about Iran’s military nuclear programs, including the Amad project that has been shelved.”
In its eagerness to belittle the most hated politician in Israel’s lefwing’s history, Ha’aretz misunderstood what the US Administration had no problem figuring out: with one exception, Netanyahu wasn’t speaking about what Iran is doing today, he was pointing out its lies at the time of the signing of the nuclear deal in 2015, and its very much current archival program, which would enable it to restart at will its suspended nuclear efforts.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday night issued a response to Netanyahu’s revelations, saying “this information provides new and compelling details about Iran’s efforts to develop missile-deliverable nuclear weapons. These facts are consistent with what the United States has long known: Iran had a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program that it has tried and failed to hide from the world and from its own people.”
“Iran must never have nuclear weapons,” the press secretary stressed.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued his own, more elaborate statement, saying that “for many years, the Iranian regime has insisted to the world that its nuclear program was peaceful. The documents obtained by Israel from inside of Iran show beyond any doubt that the Iranian regime was not telling the truth.”
“Among the flaws of the Iran nuclear deal was the whitewashing of Iran’s illicit activities related to its military nuclear program,” Pompeo continued, accusing Iran of lying to the IAEA inspectors and to the six nations who negotiated the Iran nuclear deal.
“What this means is the deal was not constructed on a foundation of good faith or transparency,” Pompeo concluded. “It was built on Iran’s lies. Iran’s nuclear deception is inconsistent with Iran’s pledge in the nuclear deal “that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons.”
The Jerusalem Post on Monday night, in a similar attempt to cut the PM’s show-and-tell down to size, noted that the initial White House statement had been written in the present tense, as if the Iranian nuclear program is still on, and the statement was later corrected online. But the gist of the argument made by both the White House and the State Dept. was the Iranians had negotiated in bad faith back in 2015. Even Netanyahu in his Monday night presentation was speaking mainly about how the Iranians have “archived” their suspended nuclear program, readying it for a quick restart whenever they’d decide.
Only one part of Netanyahu’s presentation spoke of a current Iranian nuclear program: when he reminded his viewers of the Fordow uranium enrichment facility, a “secret underground enrichment facility that the Iranians built under a mountain.”
“You don’t put thousands of centrifuges under a mountain to produce medical isotopes,” Netanyahu said, “You put them there for one reason: nuclear weapons, enrichment for nuclear weapons. But the files show that Fordow was designed from the get-go for nuclear weapons…”
“That’s the entrance. It goes under a mountain. You also will not be surprised that Iran insisted on keeping Fordow. And amazingly, the nuclear deal enabled it to do it. It enabled it to do it, but this came with a hitch. Iran was required by the nuclear deal, to come clean to the International Atomic Energy Agency about its nuclear program. This was an explicit condition for implementing the nuclear deal. Iran has to come clean,” the PM said.
“So in December 2015, the IAEA published its final assessment of what it called the military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program. This is the report. This was Iran’s chance to fully come clean to the IAEA. They could tell the truth, they could say, we had this program, this secret program, it’s over, we shelved it, it doesn’t exist, we destroyed the material,” he continued.
“Here’s what Iran actually told the IAEA. It said, Iran denied the existence of a coordinated program aimed at the development of a nuclear explosive device,” Netanyahu said.
The Ha’aretz editorial on Tuesday morning suggests that while Iran’s suspended nuclear plan could be kept dormant by the deal, Israel’s challenges of Iran’s military presence in Syria could lead to a conventional war Israel may not be able to withstand. The flagship paper of Israel’s left warns that Netanyahu invited the wrath of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and even Russia by blowing up those 200 Iranian missiles, causing a minor earthquake.
They stopped short of suggesting this whole nightmare would go away if only Netanyahu carried out the two-state solution, which goes to show that in Israel even the left’s madness occasionally recognizes reality.
