The Man Who Dared

Even as Bibi spent decades warning of the threat from a nuclear Iran, and acting behind the scenes to stave off that danger, he was derided as a coward, too hesitant to act. Last week’s stunning strike represents Netanyahu’s late-career emergence as a decisive war leader, at the head of a country heading into the unknown

IN a long-running campaign of character assassination that Barack Obama’s inner circle waged against Bibi Netanyahu, a 2014 article in the Atlantic was the most vicious.

“Myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering, pompous, and Aspergery,” were just some of the contemptuous adjectives that the Obamaites leveled at the Israeli leader according to editor Jeffrey Goldberg.

Unlike Team Obama’s patron saint, the Israeli prime minister was a “no-vision small-timer.” For the cardinal sin of refusing to sacrifice his country to create a Palestinian state he was deemed a “national leader who acts as though he is mayor of Jerusalem.”

Most devastating was the lip-curling judgment of cowardice for Bibi’s failure to attack Iran after all his warnings. Sheltering behind their anonymity, the intrepid Beltway briefers sneered, “He’s not Rabin, not Sharon, not Begin — he’s got no guts.”