The U.N. General Assembly room has been welcoming a lot of celebrity guests lately.
Last week, Emma Watson gave a significant speech on gender equality. She was followed by Leonardo DiCaprio’s important but ineffectual plea for action on climate change.
On Monday, the delegates got to hear from Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel and self-proclaimed Defeater of Terrorists.
He opened his speech with a passionate and truly beautiful story of the Jewish people’s struggles throughout history. It was inspiring and hopeful. Then came the rhetoric.
Bibi took advantage of the world’s intense, justified fear of ISIS to bring up his favorite talking point: Iran is bad.
There are signs that the cold relationship between Iran and the West is thawing. Iran has been involved in the global coalition to stop ISIS and related extremist movements. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s visit to New York last week, and his meetings with prominent political leaders and journalists also suggest that Western relations with Iran are normalizing. Bibi seems disturbed by the extent to which the West is getting comfortable with an enemy of Israel.
It’s important to understand the target audience of Netanyahu’s speech. Bibi was, of course, speaking directly to the U.N. General Assembly. However, the fact that he spoke in English and made a ham-fisted reference to Derek Jeter suggests that his true target was the American public.
Netanyahu’s speech was overwhelmingly comprehensive. There was a brief period where he defended the Israeli Defence Forces’ bombing of Palestinian schools. The rest of the speech focused on the dangers of Islamic extremism, while grossly oversimplifying the nuances of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After another reminder of how scary ISIS is, he claimed that Hamas and ISIS are two sides of the same coin. Never mind that Hamas’ endorsement of Palestinian nationalism over the formation of a Pan-Islamic state makes the organization, in the eyes of ISIS, apostates worthy of decapitation.
Turning his focus to Iran, Netanyahu tells us that all of the recent official condemnations against terrorism and Islamic extremism that we’ve been hearing from Rouhani are “crocodile tears” and that we shouldn’t be fooled by such obvious attempts to curry favor with the West.
Netanyahu claimed that Rouhani’s real goal is to acquire enough uranium to build a nuclear weapon. Once that happens, he warned, Iran’s role as the orchestrator of terrorism worldwide will become overt.
He not-so-subtly implied that Iran would be willing to give the Islamic State weapons of mass destruction, an absolutely ridiculous claim. Iran is predominantly Shia, which means Sunni-led ISIS likely hates them even more than they hate the United States.
Netanyahu could have used the threat of ISIS and Rouhani’s willingness to reach out to the West as an opportunity to advocate for a peaceful solution to the conflicts in the Middle East and beyond. Instead, Netanyahu chose to portray Rouhani as a shifty-eyed, malevolent figure eager to supply terrorist groups around the world with nuclear weapons.
The only way this sort of appeal could work is if the general public was somehow massively unaware of what actually happens in the Middle East. Unfortunately, that is exactly the case today.
Iran isn’t exactly a shining example of freedom and democracy, but that’s no reason to doubt that Rouhani’s opposition to ISIS is genuine.
Here’s something you’re unlikely to hear about Iran on cable news: Christians and Jews are legally protected by Iran’s constitution and are guaranteed seats in the Iranian parliament. However, that doesn’t fit into the fearmongers’ narrative that conflates all Muslim groups and nations together. Those who are loudly beating the war drums won’t give up until we engage in another round of self-righteous hellfire, $1.6 million missiles blowing everything to smithereens as any hope for peace goes down in flames.
Alec Carver is a UF journalism sophomore. His columns usually appear on Thursdays.
