Ha’aretz has a story that makes Netanyahu sound like a loon (which, given Ha’retz’s political perspective, is exactly how they want to make him sound). According to the story:
“He thought that his speech at Bar-Ilan would become mandatory reading at schools in the United States, and when he realized that Obama gave no such order, he went back to being frustrated,” one of his associates said.
Oh, come on! Bibi went to high school in the U.S., came back to the U.S. for graduate school and to work in a consulting job, and served in the Israeli embassy in Washington and then as Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Given his extensive background in the U.S., what is the likelihood that Netanyahu thinks that the President of the United States has the power, or would have the inclination even if he had the power, to order that an Israeli prime minister’s speech be read in U.S. public schools? I’d say the likelihood is zero.
I don’t know if the correspondent made this story up, or whether he naively wrote down what someone else told him. But Ha’aretz, which tries to be a respectable news source, really dropped the ball on this one. (The story also claims that Netanyahu refers to Axelrod and Emmanuel as “self-hating Jews,” but the author has already lost his credibility with me.)
UPDATE: Commenters have persuaded me that this is likely just a bad translation of a Hebrew figure of speech. But given that the theme of the article is how erratic and paranoid Netanyahu is, I couldn’t tell.