Senior Obama administration official on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu: "he’s a chickenshit,”

If Bibi is chickenshit, what does that make Obama?

Via The Atlantic:

The other day I was talking to a senior Obama administration official about the foreign leader who seems to frustrate the White House and the State Department the most. “The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,” this official said, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, by his nickname.
This comment is representative of the gloves-off manner in which American and Israeli officials now talk about each other behind closed doors, and is yet another sign that relations between the Obama and Netanyahu governments have moved toward a full-blown crisis. The relationship between these two administrations— dual guarantors of the putatively “unbreakable” bond between the U.S. and Israel—is now the worst it’s ever been, and it stands to get significantly worse after the November midterm elections. By next year, the Obama administration may actually withdraw diplomatic cover for Israel at the United Nations, but even before that, both sides are expecting a showdown over Iran, should an agreement be reached about the future of its nuclear program.
Keep reading…

Tweet of the Day: Rubio And Netanyahu Bump Water Bottles In Israel… Nice!

Outstanding...

Awesome. Rubio & Netanyahu twitter.com/jacktink/statu…
— jack tinker (@jacktink) February 20, 2013

Obama to make final attempt to deter Israel from attacking Iran

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet on March 5th. Reportedly, Obama will yell and scream make a final pitch to deter Israel from attacking Iran. The official administration position is it would be imprudent of Israel to attack Iran at this time. I wonder if it would be more prudent if it was Washington that faced the possibility of having a mushroom cloud over it?

The Jewish Press reported:

The March 5 meeting in Washington between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be the final attempt on the part of the US to bring Israel around to its position on the global efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

President Obama’s National Security Adviser Tom Donilon concluded three days of talks with the Prime Minister and other Israeli leaders in Jerusalem Monday, in the midst of a brewing Israeli push for a military end to Iran’s nuclear plans. Donilon conducted a caustic, 2 hour conversation with Netanyahu Sunday, in which the two disagreed radically on the ways to deal with Iran’s progress in enriching uranium and the relocation of its nuclear production to underground sites.

Monday’s statement from the White House said that Donilon and the U.S. delegation discussed “the full range” of mutual security concerns, and that the visit was “part of the continuous and intensive dialogue between the United States and Israel and reflects our unshakable commitment to Israel’s security.”

Donilon was only the latest American official to meet with Netanyahu and with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, after the chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff Gen. Martin Dempsey January visit to Israel. Dempsey said on CNN Sunday that an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would be “destabilizing,” and that such a move wouldn’t be “prudent at this point.”

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu names the NYT at an enemy of the Jewish State

The New York Times is an enemy of the American State too.

(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s two greatest enemies areThe New York Times and Haaretz, the editor of The Jerusalem Post said in a speech.

Steve Linde, addressing a conference in Tel Aviv of the Women’s International Zionist Organization, said Wednesday that Netanyahu made the remark to him about the newspapers at a private meeting “a couple of weeks ago” at the prime minister’s office in Tel Aviv.

“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.’ ”

Linde said he and other participants at the meeting asked Netanyahu whether he really thought that the media had that strong a role in shaping world opinion on Israel, and the prime minister replied, “Absolutely.”