Bibi Netanyahu loses by columns

THE New York Times gave about 15 column centimetres to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's speech at the UN General Assembly, and this in an article he shared with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who spoke for four times the duration allowed by the rules.

This is a habit among tyrants. Chavez is no exception. The same Times page carried a 60cm piece about Muammar Gaddafi, not on his filibuster at the UN, but dealing with the Libyan leader's appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The reporter, Mark Landler, was at the event and dubbed it a "seminar". I don't know what seminars are like at Georgetown. But at the two places I went to school, Gaddafi's answer to a question about his successor would have been laughed out of court: "He said the question of who would succeed him was irrelevant because, according to the philosophy in his Green Book, the Libyan masses are in charge." "Seminar" indeed.

The elite types who attend the high-dues CFR meetings are easy to pacify these days. "He was remarkably reasonable," said a prominent financier who did not want to go on the record.

I don't know why Netanyahu's speech, delivered within the established time limits, was so chintzily covered by the Times. Maybe it was because Netanyahu included in his remarks a discussion of the Holocaust, which of course the Iranian president denies ever happened. But that was, more or less, the view of the Times in the years of the catastrophe, as Laurel Leff has shown in her history, Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper.

No, that can't be the reason. Probably it's just that the paper doesn't like Bibi, and doesn't like him in a big way.

Of course, it doesn't approve of his reading of Iran, not just as a bitter foe of the Jewish nation, but as an arch adversary of Western civilisation. The Times does not entertain the thought that fanatical Islam is an enemy of the Times itself. This is why its editorial page cannot face the routine and ritualised deception that is Tehran's foreign and nuclear policy. The last few days, well, they have proved the Times is rather gullible ... and President Barack Obama is gullible. Bibi, on the other hand, has been proved right.

Netanyahu's third major argument was about the UN and the Human Rights Council's report on war crimes in Gaza. He highlights the structural impossibility of a truthful account coming from any UN organ. But his greatest contribution to the discussion came in his remarks on the predicament of armies from democracies with respect for human life fighting armies of the millenarian faithful who care not a whit for the human life of their enemies or their own.

And for heaven's sake, let the libel that Israel is opposed to a two-state solution finally be put to rest. Netanyahu reminded the General Assembly that on November 29, 1947, 62 years ago, Israel established the Partition Plan for Palestine. The two entities envisioned were "a Jewish state" and "an Arab state". The Zionist movement accepted this plan, as it had many times before. The Arabs of Palestine did not, and they continued to reject it by war in 1967 and 1973, and in other ways through diplomacy and skirmish up to today.