As Hart Williams of the Moderate Voice says, there was a right-wing blogswarm this morning.
The story, titled "Report: Obama Threatened to Shoot Down IAF Iran Strike," appeared at the site of Arutz Sheva (israelnationalnews.com). It went viral on righty blogs and also led the Drudge Report just as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing to speak to Congress. The story began:
The Bethlehem-based news agency Ma’an has cited a Kuwaiti newspaper report Saturday, that US President Barack Obama thwarted an Israeli military attack against Iran's nuclear facilities in 2014 by threatening to shoot down Israeli jets before they could reach their targets in Iran.
Following Obama's threat, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was reportedly forced to abort the planned Iran attack.
According to Al-Jarida, the Netanyahu government took the decision to strike Iran some time in 2014 soon after Israel had discovered the United States and Iran had been involved in secret talks over Iran’s nuclear program and were about to sign an agreement in that regard behind Israel's back.
The report claimed that an unnamed Israeli minister who has good ties with the US administration revealed the attack plan to Secretary of State John Kerry, and that Obama then threatened to shoot down the Israeli jets before they could reach their targets in Iran.
Mediaite's Dan Abrams writes:
The source of the report so absurd that one might think it emanated from the parody site The Onion. Try and keep this straight: a Bethlehem-based news agency called Ma’an cited a Kuwaiti newspaper called Al-Jarida which is now, in turn, being cited by something called Israel National News which is serving as the source for the American publications.
Memeorandum got one basic fact wrong: the author of this article, Mark Langfan, doesn't work for Reuters. In fact, he's not primarily a journalist at all. On his own website, he describes himself as "a New York-based attorney who writes frequently on Middle Eastern affairs and security issues confronting Israel." (His law firm specializes in real estate.) He is also the chairman of Americans for a Safe Israel. Current headlines at the AFSI homepage:
* The Appeasers Get Eaten Last! Congress Take Charge!!
* Obama the Ostrich
* A President Who Will Not Blame Islam
And elsewhere at the site:
Langfan's articles are a tad inflammatory. This is typical:
... today, Israel is surrounded by millions of people who are religiously inspired by the genocidal hate of Adolf Hitler.
Take Iran. Why did Persia change its name to Iran? In 1935, Reza Shah, the head of Persia changed the name of "Persia" to "Iran" because Reza Shah was a rabid Nazi-Hitler lover and wanted to show common cause with Hitler.
"Iran," in Farsi, means "Land of the Aryans." Therefore, today, the "Islamic Republic of Iran" really means the "Islamic Republic of Hitler."
Which brings us directly to the '67 'Auschwitz' lines. Everybody, everybody, listen to me, the "1967" lines are "Auschwitz" Holocaust 2.0 lines. Israeli Ambassador Eban said it in 1969. Israel's current Minister Landau said it in 2013. And I'm saying it today.
Langfan is extremely proud of an article he wrote a while back titled "Iran: The Fourth Reichastan." He has translations of it available in 21 languages, and he proudly reminds site visitors that the piece was published in 2010 at the website of Pravda, which is about as reliable an information source as the Weekly World News.
A sample of "Iran: The Fourth Reichastan":
It is warmly comfortable to lazily scan the Hamas-Hezbollah-Syria-Iran-Iraqi Insurgency Axis as a disparate and discrete group of political/terrorist movements. For to otherwise view the insidious amalgam as a single coherent military and political machine would be to admit to an unthinkable and dark reality: that there currently exists a waxing nuclear capable Fourth Reichastan which is about to devastate and lay waste to the Judeo-Sunni-Christian-Buddhist-Hindu world. Such a conclusion would tear away the false veneer that now exists which isolates the Iraqi, Hamas and Hezbollah insurgencies from each other and from Syria's and Iran's vital military and sovereign support of both. The grim reality is that the Hamas/Hezbollah Israel War and the Iranian backed component of the Iraqi insurgency are two sides of the same coin that has as its fount the growing Iranian Fourth Reichastan Axis against America and the World.
It pretty much goes on like that.
When Langfan isn't writing about geopolitics, he can be found denouncing the Metropolitan Opera for producing The Death of Klinghoffer and (at approximately 1:25 in the video below) describing the Metropolitan Opera House as an "Al Qaeda terror safe house."
(Langfan has suggested a civil rights lawsuit against the Met for staging the opera.)
And when he's not doing that, he's posting crafts projects for the like-minded:
Oh, and did I mention that he writes for Newsmax? And has sown fear on Pat Robertson's CBN? And worries that Iran is going to "destroy the West" with an electromagnetic pulse weapon (EMP)?
Yeah, there's your reliable source, righties.
Crossposted at No More Mr. Nice Blog
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