Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip was originally supposed to be three days. It was extended to five days. He stopped first in New Orleans to speak to a conference of American Jewish leaders, and to meet with Vice President Biden. He’s now spending several days in New York meeting with UN Secretary General Ki Ban Moon, Secretary of State Clinton, and others. The administration’s focus: the peace process with the Palestinians. But Netanyahu is making news by warning military strikes against Iran may be necessary.
“The greatest danger facing Israel and the world is the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran. Iran threatens to annihilate Israel, it denies the Holocaust, it sponsors terror in South America and Afghanistan and Iraq,” Netanyahu said Monday. “This is what Iran is doing without nuclear weapons, imagine what it would do with them. Imagine the devastation its terror proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas and others, would wreak under an Iranian nuclear umbrella.”
“Netanyahu said the U.S. and other nations must convince Iran it risks facing a military strike in order to prevent the Iranian government from developing nuclear weapons,” reports Business Week. “‘The simple paradox is this,’ Netanyahu said in a speech yesterday to Jewish activists in New Orleans. ‘If the international community, led by the U.S., wants to stop Iran without resorting to military action, it will have to convince Iran that it is prepared to take such action.'”