viewpoint: ben cohen

Bibi Derangement Syndrome — BDS

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My favorite acronym, at least for this year, was coined by historian Ronald Radosh in his PJ Media column back in March. The initials are BDS — not “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions,” but “Bibi Derangement Syndrome.”

Radosh came up with that gem in an examination of the White House’s deliberate distortion of comments that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, made concerning the two-state solution during his most recent election campaign. By promoting the deceit that Netanyahu had reversed his long-held position in favor of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the White House made sure that its vendetta against the prime minister was leapt on once more by media outlets that have garnered an enormous amount of fun from reporting the troughs and peaks of the Obama-Netanyahu relationship.

This “BDS” has broken out again, this time in relation to the debate about the nuclear deal agreed with Iran in Vienna in July. With Congress readying itself for a vote of approval, partisans of the deal are advancing two curiously related positions.

On the one hand, you have centrist Democrats and leading figures in the Jewish establishment arguing that the deal shields Israel from the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon – an argument aimed at those predisposed to believe that American Jews are better placed than Israel’s elected government when it comes to assessing Israel’s core security requirements.

On the other hand, you have progressive activist groups like MoveOn promoting the line that Israel and its supporters in Congress and the media are dragging America into another Middle Eastern war – an argument serving to warm the hearts of Israel’s adversaries from those who tar opponents of the deal as warmongers and Israeli agents.

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