From Holocaust Documents to the Carpet Cleaning of Torqozabad; All of Netanyahu's Controversial Speeches

More than thirty years after the first time he spoke on behalf of his country at the United Nations General Assembly as an ambassador, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, stood behind the same familiar podium, holding a photo of Torqozabad and several enlarged images and maps. Netanyahu, who is considered one of the most skilled orators on the global stage by both friends and foes, clearly enjoys participating in these international forums. His fluent English, with an American accent, a result of his long life in the United States since adolescence and his academic studies at top American universities, is his best and strongest tool in delivering his speeches. Many say that a large part of the success of this 68-year-old politician, who is now called 'King Bibi' in his country and has held the longest tenure as Prime Minister for over 13 years after David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, lies in his ability to captivate global attention during these speeches, thanks to his fluent English and the use of terminologies that perhaps few speakers in the U.S. master. He is also a successful performer, appearing in many clips in a role that is often a mix of humor and seriousness, knowing that besides his fluent language and exceptional command, the use of visual aids also guarantees the success of his speeches; that is why he often approaches the podium with a bag full of tools. Israelis became more familiar with Netanyahu after the death of his heroic commando brother during the famous Entebbe incident in 1967, when he served as his country's representative to the United Nations for a four-year term in the 1980s; a position that became his springboard to rapidly enter Israeli politics upon his return to his homeland, and from there, reaching the Prime Minister's office and defeating seasoned politicians like Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon was a relatively short and easy journey for him. Netanyahu delivered his first speech at the United Nations General Assembly as Prime Minister in 1998 during the fifty-third session, where he addressed the Palestinian issue and mentioned Iran only twice. In 2009, when he became Prime Minister again, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the controversial President of Iran, had been captivating the world with his statements about the Holocaust and Israel for several years. Ahmadinejad's speeches heated the General Assembly every eight years and were referred to as the 'best show' in other American forums. In that year's speech, Netanyahu presented moving documents and evidence of the Holocaust's atrocities and spoke about the historical rights of Jews in the land they inhabit. Netanyahu's presence at the United Nations General Assembly in 2011 was the last time he wrote a significant portion of his speech around the Palestinian issue; in that speech, he told Mahmoud Abbas, 'Right now, here, or wherever you want, come let’s talk.' His speech at the UN General Assembly in 2012 became controversial; it was when he and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, incessantly warned then-President Barack Obama that an Israeli attack on Iran was imminent. Netanyahu held a small drawing board and drew a relatively crooked line with a red marker to show the amount of enriched uranium in Iran and its 'dangers.' The UN General Assembly in 2013 was held when Hassan Rouhani had just replaced Ahmadinejad as the President of Iran; in his speech that autumn, Netanyahu focused all his efforts on neutralizing Western attention towards Rouhani and his smiling foreign minister, who, like him, was fluent in English and had been his country's representative to the UN; however, Netanyahu said, 'Ahmadinejad was a wolf, but Rouhani is a wolf in sheep's clothing.' In 2014, Netanyahu arrived at the General Assembly just after the Israeli army had concluded a costly and devastating war in Gaza; his tools in this speech included images of Hamas rocket launchers and Hamas forces hiding behind Gaza civilians to redirect the blame for the renewed destruction of parts of Gaza onto Hamas; considering that the world's fear of ISIS was also very deep at that time, Netanyahu stated, 'Hamas and ISIS are branches of the same poisonous tree.' In 2015, when Netanyahu took the podium at the General Assembly, the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) had just been reached; to show that he mourned this 'very bad deal,' he caused a minute of complete silence, leaving everyone wondering what had happened! Besides that, he held a 416-page book titled 'Palestine; From the Perspective of Ayatollah Khamenei' and introduced the contents of its eight sections as evidence of Iran's efforts to 'destroy Israel.' In 2016, Netanyahu stated during the seventy-first session of the UN General Assembly that the JCPOA was a reality, but monitoring Iran's compliance with commitments should be the main task of Israel and the world; he said this, but that autumn, perhaps his hope was the imminent election of his long-time friend Donald Trump as President of the United States; when he arrived in the U.S. for this General Assembly, most American media suggested that Hillary Clinton's victory in the upcoming elections was certain, yet Mr. Trump met with Netanyahu in his personal tower in New York and praised him; Donald Trump's election as the forty-fifth President of the United States perhaps pleased no one in the world as much as the Israelis and a large part of their leaders; Mr. Trump also stated several times this year in New York that his support for Israel is 'one hundred percent.' In 2017, when Netanyahu was still unsure about the Trump administration's exit from the JCPOA, the main highlight of his annual speech at the General Assembly was an unprecedented threat to Ali Khamenei; Netanyahu sent a message to Khamenei, saying, 'Anyone who threatens us with destruction exposes himself to mortal danger.' And in the seventy-third session of the UN General Assembly in 2018, Netanyahu held up an image of a dilapidated building in the suburbs of Tehran, claiming it was the site of hundreds of tons of Iran's nuclear materials, emphasizing how much the Mossad had informed him about this discovery, saying this seemingly simple building is located very close to a carpet cleaning shop, and indeed, Iranian carpets are excellent. Now, a user on Radio Farda jokingly wrote that Israel must have given a uranium-contaminated carpet to this carpet cleaning shop to leave its mark and lure the agency inspectors there! Despite Netanyahu's luck in attracting media attention and perhaps part of public opinion to his speeches, this time, however, his speech coincided with a misfortune; it was delivered at a time when almost all major and minor American media were busy broadcasting testimonies in the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court. For these media, the statements of Christine Ford, an American woman who claims she was nearly sexually assaulted by this judge when he was a 17-year-old teenager 36 years ago, and then the tearful response of Judge Kavanaugh, were far more important than Netanyahu's announcement of the 'discovery' of Iran's nuclear warehouse. Another misfortune in this speech might have been the name Torqozabad!! A name that can easily make Iranians laugh. The name Torqozabad, which Netanyahu struggled to pronounce, has become a source of laughter among Persian-speaking social media users; one user commented under my report on Radio Farda regarding the major parts of Netanyahu's speech that it was not Netanyahu who chose this place's name that has become a subject of ridicule. Another user emphasized that Netanyahu is saying things that 'if true, besides being catastrophic, could explain the reasons for the arrest of environmental activists.' One user also wrote, 'Perhaps environmental activists realized the burial of nuclear waste earlier!' Many, like Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's Foreign Minister, have emphasized that if Israel is looking for nuclear warehouses in Torqozabad, Israel itself has a large and real arsenal of nuclear warheads and is not only not a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty but has never allowed International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors access to it. Netanyahu himself last month, when he renamed Israel's nuclear center after its founder Shimon Peres, issued an unprecedented warning to Iran about 'being destroyed' at the facilities in Dimona in the Negev desert. In any case, thanks to the efforts of Mossad agents, many now know where Shurabad is and that Torqozabad is real. Netanyahu said that whatever Iran hides anywhere, Israel will undoubtedly discover it; now perhaps there are other names on the geographical map of Iran that Netanyahu will introduce to the world. However, the pleasure and excitement that Netanyahu experiences in these scenes and in announcing his 'discoveries' is followed by a heavy and contemplative silence in Iran; who are the Iranian agents cooperating with the Israelis in these discoveries? Iranian intelligence and security agencies, which claim to be powerful, seem to prefer silence, at least on the surface, and hide behind the official denials of the Iranian government. These official spokespersons also always refer to Netanyahu's delight as 'the boy who cried wolf' and mockingly ask what he is painting this time. However, if Iranian intelligence and security agencies are silent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who seems hard to silence by the Tehran government, recently stated in his long-standing conflict with Heydar Moslehi, the Minister of Intelligence during his presidency, that during Moslehi's tenure, even the head of the Israel desk in the counter-intelligence department of the Ministry of Intelligence turned out to be an Israeli spy and that the most espionage for Israel occurred during this period. The truth of this matter is certainly known to Israel and not to Iranian officials. Netanyahu, in May of this year, while presenting 'over 100,000 stolen atomic archive documents' from Shurabad in Tehran, stated that only a few senior officials in the Iranian regime were aware of the location of this archive, perhaps implicitly confirming that even at such a high level, there were collaborations between Iranian intelligence and security officials and Israel. While the answer to this question may only be speculation for anyone in Iran and the world, the most accurate answer is undoubtedly known to Yossi Cohen, the head of Mossad.