“Iran Will Be Free…A Lot Sooner Than People Think,” Netanyahu Says
Plus, Ken Griffin on the Trump tariffs; New York Times smears Milei
Prime Minister Netanyahu, in his third in a series of recent direct video addresses to the people of Iran, suggested that the Iranian regime will be the next one to fall after the Syrian dictatorship that Tehran spent billions to prop up.
“People of Iran: As we see history unfold before our very eyes, I can only imagine what you're feeling right now. Your oppressors spent over 30 billion dollars supporting Assad in Syria. After only 11 days of fighting, his regime collapsed into dust,” Netanyahu said. “Your oppressors spent billions supporting Hamas in Gaza. Today their regime lies in ruins.”
“Your oppressors spent over 20 billion dollars supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon.In a matter of weeks, most of Hezbollah’s leaders, its rockets and thousands of its terrorists went up in smoke,” Netanyahu said. “You must be furious imagining the new roads, schools, hospitals that could have been built with the tens of billions of dollars your dictators wasted backing terrorists who lose over and over and over again.”
“Do you know why Iran’s oppressors keep losing? It's not only because they are incompetent and cruel. They are,” Netanyahu said. “It's because they seek to conquer other nations, to impose fundamentalist tyranny on the Middle East — on the entire world. The only thing Israel seeks is to defend our state. But in so doing, we're defending civilization against barbarism.”
Netanyahu said the fall of the Assad dictatorship is “a chain reaction- a chain reaction to the pounding of Hamas, the decimation of Hezbollah, the targeting of Nasrallah, the blows we delivered to the Iran regime's axis of terror. And all this came as President Trump pointed out this week, 'because of Israel and its fighting success.'”
The Israeli prime minister said Israel wants peace. “But you suffer under the rule of a regime that subjugates you and threatens us. You know what this regime is truly terrified of? It's terrified of you, the people of Iran. And one day, I know, that one day this will change. One day Iran will be free,” he said. “Women, Life, Freedom. Zan, Zendegi, Azadi. That is the future of Iran. That is the future of peace. And I have no doubt that we will realize that future together – a lot sooner than people think. I know and I believe we will transform the Middle East into a beacon of prosperity, progress and peace.”
The Editors has been extensively covering Netanyahu’s drive to support regime change in Iran while much of the rest of the press ignores it. The incoming Trump administration has talked about restoring maximum pressure on Iran with tightened economic sanctions, but it will also face a decision about whether to agree to an Israeli request to help with a one- or two-day air strike against Iranian nuclear weapons facilities. Iran tried to kill Trump, so that is a factor affecting the president-elect’s decisionmaking. Yet Trump and some of his advisers have also been cautious about regime change efforts and what they see as entanglements in the Middle East. The incoming secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is a hawk on Iran.
Ken Griffin on the Trump tariffs: Yesterday’s (December 12) print New York Times included a transcript/excerpt of Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin’s appearance at the New York Times “Dealbook” conference, where he was interviewed by New York Times/CNBC personality Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Sorkin: OK. So Let’s now talk about some of those policy issues, perhaps the biggest one being this question mark that nobody knows the real answer to, which revolves around tariffs, because you have a huge and huge impact on the economy.
Griffin: You’re missing the big picture. It’s not even close to the biggest issue.
The biggest issue in the United States is that America is open for business again. The endless amount of regulatory and litigation-induced paralysis from the Biden administration is over. It’s over. So when I’m with a group of American executives, whether it’s in telecommunications, it’s from the consumer space, they are, whether they voted for Trump or for Harris—from a perspective of building their business, they are smiling from ear to ear because they know they can now focus on creating value for customers and creating jobs and growing their business and prospering rather than having to deal with just the endless onslaught of pointless litigation and pointless regulation. I think that for the United States, you know, all these issues around tariffs…It’s all second order. First order: we’re back to business.
New York Times misleads on Milei: The latest example of the The Editors Rule of Byline Inflation, which is that the reliability of any news article is inversely proportional to the number of reporters who have a byline on it, comes from a New York Times dispatch about Javier Milei’s first year as president of Argentina. It takes three New York Times bylines—Daniel Politi, Lucía Cholakian Herrera, and Ana Ionova—to report that, “Before he took office, Mr. Milei’s critics questioned whether a former television pundit, who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist, could lift Argentina out of its decade-long crisis.”
It’s funny how the Times uses “former television pundit” as kind of a slur, especially when the most likely hope many New York Times reporters have of a significant regular income boost rests in a contract with CNN or MSNBC to become a television pundit.
The Editors reader Michael Segal, who is perceptive, notices that the Times omits that Milei was also an economics professor. It’s true that that Milei was a television pundit, but it’s also true that he was an economics professor. The Times choice to mention one but not the other is an example of how a newspaper can mislead readers by saying something that is technically accurate—lying with the truth.
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