#752 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #752, 5/31/15

Missing From This Morning’s Inq: An ‘N’ Word in an Otherwise Sound Trudy Rubin ‘Worldview’ on the Iran Deal

Trudy Rubin, the Philly Inquirer’s house world affairs columnist, has been with the Inq for a long time, and for a long-time this media watch has challenged both her language – “Arab East Jerusalem” and “1967 borders” among other atrocities – and analyses where Israel’s concerned.  In her elsewhere-focused columns, Ms. Rubin shows guts in going to dangerous places and seems to me less emotionally caught-up in writing about them.

Ms. Rubin’s “Worldview” column this morning (Inq, Sun, 5/31/15, C1-5, “Worldview: U.S. Should Follow France and Stay Tough on Iran Nuke Deal”) seems to me to make sense.  Among Ms. Rubin’s contentions:

Clearly, the French are more familiar than the White House with the basic tenet of bargaining in the Mideast bazaar.

If you want a good deal, you must be ready to walk away from a merchant who sets his price too high.

The French believe that the United States has been too eager to make concessions to Tehran….

The French ambassador to Washington, Gerard Araud, a longtime expert on the Iran nuclear issue, tweeted on March 3 [n.b.]: “We want a deal.  They need a deal.  The tactics and the results of the negotiation should reflect this asymmetry.”

Ms. Rubin put her hekscher upon this:

While I support a deal in principle, I believe the French position on negotiating strategy is spot on.  Now is the time to hold firm.

As it happens, while the French were saying on March 3 “We want a deal.  They need a deal,” meaning, in Ms. Rubin’s words, that “if you want a good deal, you must be ready to walk away from a merchant who sets his price too high,” the leader of another country, likewise familiar with what Ms. Rubin described today as “the basic tenet of bargaining in the Mideast bazaar,” was likewise saying on that same day, March 3, in almost identical words:

Now, if Iran threatens to walk away from the table – and this often happens in a Persian bazaar – call their bluff.  They’ll be back, because they need the deal a lot more than you do.

That country leader was Israel’s much-Trudy-Rubin-vilified Bibi Netanyahu, and the place where he said that that same day, March 3, was a joint session of the United States Congress.  Yet this morning was one time Ms. Rubin’s favorite Mideast ‘N’ word, “Netanyahu,” didn’t make it into a Mideast-focused “Worldview” column.

The more’s the imbalance of that omission, given what Ms. Rubin has written in her Worldview column about Bibi’s March 3 address to the Congress.

In her March 5 column, just two days later, Ms. Rubin wrote that Netanyahu’s “actual goal seemed to be to torpedo any deal rather than make its terms stronger.”  A fortnight later, in her March 26 Worldview column, Ms. Rubin wrote that “unyielding critics of any deal” are “convinced, as is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that Iran is an existential threat to Israel and that no deal can be good.  Or they are ready to damn any deal President Obama would endorse.”  Even before Netanyahu spoke to Congress, Ms. Rubin had already made up her mind.  In her February 19 Worldview column she wrote: “Bibi Netanyahu wants to make sure President Obama doesn’t ink a nuclear deal with Tehran.  Any nuclear deal.”

The irony is that Ms. Rubin’s own views, as expressed in her Worldview column this morning, are not far different from Bibi’s.  In her column’s last paragraphs, Ms. Rubin wrote that “Sunni states in the region fear that sanctions relief for Tehran will finance even greater Iranian interference in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the Gulf and Yemen,” that Obama “needs to convince Arab leaders that he won’t be rolled by the merchants in Tehran,” and that “a tougher U.S. stand on talks might make the ayatollahs rethink their overreach in the region.”

Here’s what Bibi told Congress:

We can insist that restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program not be lifted for as long as Iran continues its aggression in the region and in the world.

Before lifting those restrictions, the world should demand that Iran do three things.  First, stop its aggression against it neighbors in the Middle East.

Second, stop supporting terrorism around the world.

And third, stop threatening to annihilate my country, Israel, the one and only Jewish state.

Netanyahu went far in speaking to Congress to dispel the strawman that “the only alternative to this bad deal is war,” that “the alternative to this bad deal is a much better deal,” one “that doesn’t leave Iran with a vast nuclear infrastructure and such a short break-out time,” which he called “a better deal that Israel and its neighbors may not like, but with which we could live.”

Do these seem like the ravings of an irrational damn-any-deal war-monger?  Yet that is exactly how the Philly Inquirer’s house world affairs columnist has chosen to portray Netanyahu.  Here’s a reprise of those quotes from three of her Worldview columns above:

*** March 26:  “… unyielding critics of any deal” are “convinced, as is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that Iran is an existential threat to Israel and that no deal can be good.  Or they are ready to damn any deal President Obama would endorse.”

***  March 5:  “[Netanyahu’s] actual goal [in speaking to Congress] seemed to be to torpedo any deal rather than make its terms stronger.”

***  February 19:  “Bibi Netanyahu wants to make sure President Obama doesn’t ink a nuclear deal with Tehran.  Any nuclear deal.”

Israel, Bibi and we deserve fairer at the hands of the Inq.

Regards,
Jerry