Where is Benyamin Netanyahu?
Where is the Iranian “threat”?
Where is the nuclear watchdog IAEA (Amano who?)?
Where is Waldo?
Accelerating and competing events in far-flung places like Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Hong Kong, and the regional mayhem caused by the well-financed wild Salafi Abus, possibly others, have sucked the air out of these normally reliable stealers of limelight and world attention.
For Netanyahu, it can be a double-edged sword. He likes the attention being diverted from Israel and its illegal settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem (annexation, including East Jerusalem is illegal according to international law and the UN, regardless of what the wildcatters in the U.S Senate and Congress think).
All these shifting world headlines have emboldened Netanyahu, enough to, yet again, poke a finger in Barack Obama’s eye even as he visits with him. That finger came in the from of reports about new plans for more illegal settlements in East Jerusalem while he was visiting in New York and Washington.
Yet Netanyahu does not like attention moving away from Iran and toward his landgrab. He professes loudly that he worries they will move closer to the nuclear weapons they do not have, the weapons they swear they do not want to develop. Unlike Israel. He also wants any attention on the Middle East to focus on Iran and not on the Palestinian land issue. To have his cake and eat it too (or vice versa).
At the UN, there was not much extensive coverage of his annual speech (I assume he gave his usual speech). Clearly there were no funny Looney Tunes cartoon drawings and amusing graphs of the type he used in past years. The same cartoons the anchor ladies on CNN and MSNBC and Fox had swooned over in the past.
Yet he is stirring again, pulling his many strings in Washington, warning against complacence. Complacence is a dangerous thing, be it about nuclear proliferation or illegal annexation.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum