Just another indication of how tone deaf and blind to Israel's increasing isolation in the world community that Nethanyahu has become:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has picked as his new chief of public diplomacy a conservative academic who suggested President Obama was anti-Semitic and compared Secretary of State John Kerry’s “mental age” to that of a preteen.
The choice for the role of diplomacy chief, Ran Baratz, lives in a settlement in the occupied West Bank and a decade ago expressed his wish to see the building of a third Jewish temple on a contested Old City compound. Palestinians say such provocative ideas have helped fuel the recent outbreak of attacks against Israeli Jews, though Mr. Netanyahu insists he has no plans to change the current arrangement at the site.
Just last week, he insulted Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, in a Facebook post.
Israeli politicians called for the nomination to be rescinded, while commentators said the decision was sloppy work on the part of his staff — Mr. Netanyahu’s office said he was unaware of even Mr. Baratz’s most recent Facebook comments — and reflected the prime minister’s blindness to Israel’s increasing isolation.
“He’s giving a very strong negative message to the world, which is, ‘I don’t care about public diplomacy, I have a right-wing government, I have a right-wing policy, and I’m going to send people who are offensive,’ ” said Mitchell Barak, a political consultant in Jerusalem. “Every time, people say, ‘Oh, he must have made a mistake, we can’t take it seriously,’ but frankly, he seems to be sending a very clear message, which is, ‘I’m going to appoint the hard-core ideologues, I’m not going to even pay lip service to any diplomatic solution, I’m going to entrench myself more.’ ”
The selection of Mr. Baratz, which is subject to cabinet approval, comes at an inauspicious moment: The prime minister and Mr. Obama are scheduled to sit down together on Monday for the first time in more than a year, a summit meeting seen as an opportunity to repair their rocky relationship after it plunged to new depths.
The official announcement said Mr. Baratz would serve as Mr. Netanyahu’s media adviser and head of public diplomacy and media for the prime minister’s office, a job that was not clearly defined; he would replace Liran Dan, who left in August as head of the national information directorate, akin to a communications director who guided message strategy.
Mr. Baratz’s nomination joins a pile of right-wing appointments that have raised eyebrows in Washington and other Western capitals, and a string of recent problems with message discipline.
Mr. Netanyahu last week quieted his deputy foreign minister, Tzipi Hotovely, after she told an interviewer that she dreamed of raising the Israeli flag atop the Temple Mount, the Old City site known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.
He also retracted his own statement that it was a Palestinian cleric, not Hitler, who came up with the idea to annihilate Europe’s Jews — a statement that was declared to be completely false by Holocaust historians but that earned the sympathy of Mr. Baratz.
Mark Regev, Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, would not say whether Mr. Baratz would join the prime minister on his trip to Washington, or if anyone had vetted his social-media profile and other public writings before announcing his selection Wednesday evening.
Around midnight, the prime minister’s office posted on Facebook that Mr. Netanyahu “was not aware of the things Ran Baratz wrote and views them as unworthy expressions.”
Mr. Baratz, for his part, told Israeli news outlets that his Facebook posts were written as a private citizen and intended to be humorous, and that his tone would change when he became a government professional.
“Naturally,” he wrote on his own page Wednesday night, “my Facebook activity, which includes a myriad of political remarks, critical and satirical, will be reduced and focus more on the personal and less on the public.”
Mr. Baratz, 42, has a Ph.D. in philosophy and founded Mida, a far-right website where he responded last year to Mr. Kerry’s remarks on a Muslim holiday by saying, “This is the time to wish the secretary of state good luck, and to count down the days with the hope that someone over there at the State Department will wake up and begin to see the world through the eyes of a person whose mental age exceeds 12.”
In March, Mr. Baratz used Facebook to criticize Mr. Obama’s reaction to Mr. Netanyahu’s speech in Congress against the nuclear deal with Iran. “This is how modern anti-Semitism looks like in the modern Western world,” he wrote.
In June, he said the dispute over the Iran deal was “a strategic disagreement, it does not have to do with the personalities of Obama or Netanyahu, their relationship, American Jews or someone’s table manners.”
“While Obama helps us with tactical issues like threats by Hamas and Hezbollah, he is establishing a new global strategy of compromise with Iran,” Mr. Baratz wrote, also on Facebook. “Obama has certainly thrown us under the wheels of the bus, even if he did this with a winning smile, while he supplied us with plenty of Band-Aids.”
Regarding the Temple Mount, Mr. Baratz, who is not religious, wrote in a 2004 essay that “the desire to build the third temple is worthy, Jewish and Zionist of the highest level,” adding that he hoped a way to build it would be found.
He said that if Muslims “will not accept our sovereignty” at the site, “there will anyway be war.”
Then, last week, he lashed out at Israel’s president, Mr. Rivlin, calling him “a marginal figure” unworthy of assassination, and suggesting that he “could be sent in a paraglider” into Syria, where the Islamic State would retreat if only Israel would take him back. Mr. Rivlin’s office said it viewed the comments with “utmost gravity.”
Haim Katz, Israel’s welfare minister and a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said Thursday afternoon that he would vote against the nomination when it comes to the cabinet because “this person is not worthy” and “you can find people that apparently think twice before they speak.”
Gila Gamliel, another Likud minister, told Israeli reporters that the nomination should be reconsidered “because the role of head of public diplomacy and media is very sensitive.”
“Expressions against the country’s president and elements of the American administration harm symbols of our government and our great friend, and could be interpreted as an official position,” Ms. Gamliel said, according to a Facebook post by Tal Schneider, a political blogger who broke the news of Mr. Baratz’s nomination.
Isaac Herzog, leader of the opposition in Parliament, demanded on Thursday that Mr. Netanyahu withdraw the nomination.
“A person like this who lashed out against President Obama, besmirched Secretary Kerry, and, worst of all, degraded the beloved president of his country — our most important symbol — must go home and immediately, before he even arrived,” Mr. Herzog said at a conference. “It was faulty judgment that a person like this suits an official national position.”
Ms. Schneider, the blogger, said in an interview that while some of Mr. Baratz’s statements might be shocking to Americans, “in Israel 2015, Ran Baratz is not considered any more a right-wing crazy guy, some of the views that he makes are sort of what people are saying everywhere in Israel.”
Anshel Pfeffer, a columnist for the left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz, described Mr. Baratz as a neoconservative, libertarian, “academic version of Bibi,” using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname, or “Bibi without diplomacy.”
“It reflects what Bibi thinks,” he added. “Somebody who says Obama is modern anti-Semitism, and Kerry is like a 12-year-old, somebody who is openly hostile to Rivlin — it’s certainly what Bibi believes.”
Rafi Mann, a professor of communication at Ariel University in the West Bank, dismissed Mr. Baratz’s defense of his comments, telling Israel Radio, “Anyone who is about to be appointed head of national P.R. has to know there is no such thing as a private page.”
But Yinon Magal, a lawmaker from the conservative Jewish Home party, said Mr. Baratz’s statements “have been taken completely out of proportion.”
“Let everyone go back 10 years in his own Facebook, in his own recordings,” Mr. Magal suggested in a radio interview. “There would be no one who could be appointed to the post.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/w...column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has picked as his new chief of public diplomacy a conservative academic who suggested President Obama was anti-Semitic and compared Secretary of State John Kerry’s “mental age” to that of a preteen.
The choice for the role of diplomacy chief, Ran Baratz, lives in a settlement in the occupied West Bank and a decade ago expressed his wish to see the building of a third Jewish temple on a contested Old City compound. Palestinians say such provocative ideas have helped fuel the recent outbreak of attacks against Israeli Jews, though Mr. Netanyahu insists he has no plans to change the current arrangement at the site.
Just last week, he insulted Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, in a Facebook post.
Israeli politicians called for the nomination to be rescinded, while commentators said the decision was sloppy work on the part of his staff — Mr. Netanyahu’s office said he was unaware of even Mr. Baratz’s most recent Facebook comments — and reflected the prime minister’s blindness to Israel’s increasing isolation.
“He’s giving a very strong negative message to the world, which is, ‘I don’t care about public diplomacy, I have a right-wing government, I have a right-wing policy, and I’m going to send people who are offensive,’ ” said Mitchell Barak, a political consultant in Jerusalem. “Every time, people say, ‘Oh, he must have made a mistake, we can’t take it seriously,’ but frankly, he seems to be sending a very clear message, which is, ‘I’m going to appoint the hard-core ideologues, I’m not going to even pay lip service to any diplomatic solution, I’m going to entrench myself more.’ ”
The selection of Mr. Baratz, which is subject to cabinet approval, comes at an inauspicious moment: The prime minister and Mr. Obama are scheduled to sit down together on Monday for the first time in more than a year, a summit meeting seen as an opportunity to repair their rocky relationship after it plunged to new depths.
The official announcement said Mr. Baratz would serve as Mr. Netanyahu’s media adviser and head of public diplomacy and media for the prime minister’s office, a job that was not clearly defined; he would replace Liran Dan, who left in August as head of the national information directorate, akin to a communications director who guided message strategy.
Mr. Baratz’s nomination joins a pile of right-wing appointments that have raised eyebrows in Washington and other Western capitals, and a string of recent problems with message discipline.
Mr. Netanyahu last week quieted his deputy foreign minister, Tzipi Hotovely, after she told an interviewer that she dreamed of raising the Israeli flag atop the Temple Mount, the Old City site known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.
He also retracted his own statement that it was a Palestinian cleric, not Hitler, who came up with the idea to annihilate Europe’s Jews — a statement that was declared to be completely false by Holocaust historians but that earned the sympathy of Mr. Baratz.
Mark Regev, Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, would not say whether Mr. Baratz would join the prime minister on his trip to Washington, or if anyone had vetted his social-media profile and other public writings before announcing his selection Wednesday evening.
Around midnight, the prime minister’s office posted on Facebook that Mr. Netanyahu “was not aware of the things Ran Baratz wrote and views them as unworthy expressions.”
Mr. Baratz, for his part, told Israeli news outlets that his Facebook posts were written as a private citizen and intended to be humorous, and that his tone would change when he became a government professional.
“Naturally,” he wrote on his own page Wednesday night, “my Facebook activity, which includes a myriad of political remarks, critical and satirical, will be reduced and focus more on the personal and less on the public.”
Mr. Baratz, 42, has a Ph.D. in philosophy and founded Mida, a far-right website where he responded last year to Mr. Kerry’s remarks on a Muslim holiday by saying, “This is the time to wish the secretary of state good luck, and to count down the days with the hope that someone over there at the State Department will wake up and begin to see the world through the eyes of a person whose mental age exceeds 12.”
In March, Mr. Baratz used Facebook to criticize Mr. Obama’s reaction to Mr. Netanyahu’s speech in Congress against the nuclear deal with Iran. “This is how modern anti-Semitism looks like in the modern Western world,” he wrote.
In June, he said the dispute over the Iran deal was “a strategic disagreement, it does not have to do with the personalities of Obama or Netanyahu, their relationship, American Jews or someone’s table manners.”
“While Obama helps us with tactical issues like threats by Hamas and Hezbollah, he is establishing a new global strategy of compromise with Iran,” Mr. Baratz wrote, also on Facebook. “Obama has certainly thrown us under the wheels of the bus, even if he did this with a winning smile, while he supplied us with plenty of Band-Aids.”
Regarding the Temple Mount, Mr. Baratz, who is not religious, wrote in a 2004 essay that “the desire to build the third temple is worthy, Jewish and Zionist of the highest level,” adding that he hoped a way to build it would be found.
He said that if Muslims “will not accept our sovereignty” at the site, “there will anyway be war.”
Then, last week, he lashed out at Israel’s president, Mr. Rivlin, calling him “a marginal figure” unworthy of assassination, and suggesting that he “could be sent in a paraglider” into Syria, where the Islamic State would retreat if only Israel would take him back. Mr. Rivlin’s office said it viewed the comments with “utmost gravity.”
Haim Katz, Israel’s welfare minister and a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said Thursday afternoon that he would vote against the nomination when it comes to the cabinet because “this person is not worthy” and “you can find people that apparently think twice before they speak.”
Gila Gamliel, another Likud minister, told Israeli reporters that the nomination should be reconsidered “because the role of head of public diplomacy and media is very sensitive.”
“Expressions against the country’s president and elements of the American administration harm symbols of our government and our great friend, and could be interpreted as an official position,” Ms. Gamliel said, according to a Facebook post by Tal Schneider, a political blogger who broke the news of Mr. Baratz’s nomination.
Isaac Herzog, leader of the opposition in Parliament, demanded on Thursday that Mr. Netanyahu withdraw the nomination.
“A person like this who lashed out against President Obama, besmirched Secretary Kerry, and, worst of all, degraded the beloved president of his country — our most important symbol — must go home and immediately, before he even arrived,” Mr. Herzog said at a conference. “It was faulty judgment that a person like this suits an official national position.”
Ms. Schneider, the blogger, said in an interview that while some of Mr. Baratz’s statements might be shocking to Americans, “in Israel 2015, Ran Baratz is not considered any more a right-wing crazy guy, some of the views that he makes are sort of what people are saying everywhere in Israel.”
Anshel Pfeffer, a columnist for the left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz, described Mr. Baratz as a neoconservative, libertarian, “academic version of Bibi,” using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname, or “Bibi without diplomacy.”
“It reflects what Bibi thinks,” he added. “Somebody who says Obama is modern anti-Semitism, and Kerry is like a 12-year-old, somebody who is openly hostile to Rivlin — it’s certainly what Bibi believes.”
Rafi Mann, a professor of communication at Ariel University in the West Bank, dismissed Mr. Baratz’s defense of his comments, telling Israel Radio, “Anyone who is about to be appointed head of national P.R. has to know there is no such thing as a private page.”
But Yinon Magal, a lawmaker from the conservative Jewish Home party, said Mr. Baratz’s statements “have been taken completely out of proportion.”
“Let everyone go back 10 years in his own Facebook, in his own recordings,” Mr. Magal suggested in a radio interview. “There would be no one who could be appointed to the post.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/w...column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
