Netanyahu says 9/11 was a good thing…for Israel

From Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem

"Likud Leader and former Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has once again described the 9/11 terrorist attacks as “very good for Israel.”

“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,” the Ma’ariv newspaper reported this week. “These events swung American public opinion in our favor.” Netanyahu made the comments recently during a conference at Bar-Ilan University on the future of Occupied Jerusalem. This is not the first time Netanyahu makes such remarks.

In a televised interview soon after the landmark terrorist attack, Netanyahu remarked that “this is good for Israel,’ But prevaricated when asked by the interviewer how he could describe a horrible act as being good. Netanyahu apparently didn’t think that his remarks would undermine Israel’s image in the US due to Israel’s overwhelming influence over US politics and media.

In 2001, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was rumored to have said that “the Jewish people control America and the Americans knew it.” "I want to tell you something very clear," Sharon reportedly told his foreign Minister Shimon Peres in October, 2001 "don't worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it."

Netanyahu is accustomed to using Nazi epithets to describe the Palestinians and Iran while he himself often makes manifestly racist and Nazi-like remarks advocating ethnic cleansing of non-Jews. In 1989, Netanyahu told students, also at Bar Ilan University, that “Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations at the Tiananmen Square in China where world attention was focused on that country to carry out mass expulsion among the Arabs of the territories.”

There have been wide speculations that Israel played a certain part in the 9/11 events, given the fact that the Jewish state has been the main beneficiary of the terrorist attacks........

Other reports suggested the far-right Israeli politician Eifi Eitam may have been the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks."