Matthew Stadlen in The Telegraph
It was supposed to be an event targeted at young people and I’m not that young any more; it was meant to be a campaign designed to build confidence and I don’t see myself as the timid type; and anyway, I was there to interview World and Olympic Champion Jessica Ennis-Hill, not for an education in self-help. Yet I left Sky Studios the other day profoundly influenced by a single sentence.
Find something you love and then stick to it.
These words emerged from the mouth of Melvyn Bragg, the enduring broadcaster who has reached the very top of his profession. They amounted to Lord Bragg’s recipe for confidence. He was speaking on a panel put together by Sky Academy, a bursary scheme that supports emerging talent in the worlds of sport and the arts. His advice immediately lodged somewhere deep inside me, partly perhaps because Bragg is a luminary in my own field, partly perhaps because I’ve enjoyed meeting and interviewing him in the past. Its real impact, though, stems from its essential truth. If you love something, you’re more likely to be confident at it and therefore to succeed.
Despite my self-assurance, bred in me by my privileged schooling, my parents and a childhood environment in which I was surrounded by successful role-models, I do sometimes doubt my career trajectory. The life of the self-employed can provoke uncomfortable journeys into dark corners of the mind where confidence seems a distant relative. But Bragg reminded me that I do love what I do and that there is a very strong argument for sticking at it. There are echoes of a line from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist in Bragg’s philosophy: “Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.”
Of course, Bragg’s winning cocktail must include a decent dose of natural ability if it’s to translate into success. Simply loving something isn’t enough, you have to have some talent or aptitude too. It's a maxim that England’s rugby players must now know only too well. They no doubt love what they do (much of the time) and they are talented; but not talented enough, it turns out.
There were plenty of confident noises emanating from in and around the England camp last week ahead of the do-or-die match against Australia. Ben Morgan, one of the 18-stone forwards, threatened to expose the Wallabies’ infamous insecurities in the scrum; Danny Cipriani, the talented back excluded from England’s tournament squad, claimed that not a single Australian would get into the England team. In the event, England crashed out of their own World Cup, the English pack was humiliated in retreat and it was hard to see how more than one or two Englishmen would make it into the Australian team.
Stuart Lancaster's England appeared to suffer a crisis of confidence during their World Cup games Photo: REUTERS
So much for English confidence. But then again, maybe they were faking it. I was in the stands to watch their disintegration, part physical, part mental, in the final excruciating minutes against Wales the week before. Could every England player really have been that sure of themselves after such a bruising defeat, facing an Australian team fresh from winning the southern hemisphere’s coveted Rugby Championship? Perhaps. Or maybe self-doubt had crept in but they decided to subscribe to the Davina McCall blueprint for confidence.
The former Big Brother host, was, together with Ennis-Hill, Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts and YouTube personality Alfie Deyes, on the same panel as Bragg. McCall is not an obvious candidate for self-doubt, but speaking with impressive candidness, she talked about her own teenage issues with a chronic lack of confidence. Her remedy was to act as if she really were confident. Fake it, she advised. If you’re not confident, teach yourself to project confidence instead and eventually you might end up believing it.
Fake it to make it: Davina McCall admits to suffering from low confidence as a teenager Photo: Andrew Crowley
Mahatma Gandhi seemed to be saying something similar when he reflected, “Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”
Roger Uttley, a former England rugby coach, offered advice to the incumbent, Stuart Lancaster, via an interview with The Telegraph between the Wales and Australia games. “You have got to get over things quickly,” he said. “Stuart has to look the part in terms of his body language. It is tough to do that but important. Players feed off it.” Lancaster did put on a brave face, but he had already admitted to being “absolutely devastated” following the loss to Wales. Hardly the sort of message to be sending down from on high. The scoreline worsened against Australia and this time Lancaster was “absolutely gutted.”
Just how critical confidence is in sport had already been spelt out in an ITV interview given by Warren Gatland ahead of his side’s thrilling victory over the English. England have more money, more fans, more players – yet still Wales won. “When are you at your best?” Gatland was asked. “When I'm under a bit of pressure. It's always been my biggest challenge often with the Welsh players to keep building on that confidence and that self-belief that they are good enough to compete with the best teams in the world and they're good enough to go out there and win.”
Gatland was then asked what was the one quality he had as a player that has never left him. “Self-belief,” came the reply. Together with greater skill and fitness, what Wales demonstrated in those final frantic minutes was a core belief that they could still win a game that seemed lost at half-time. The players aped the confidence of their coach.
In the eye of the storm: Wales coach Warren Gatland Photo: AFP
During the recent Ashes summer, Sky Sports ran a series of programmes profiling some of cricket’s greatest stars of the past. Listening to Glenn McGrath speak about his record-breaking career, it was immediately obvious how pivotal self-belief was to his success. Just like the Welsh rugby team, confidence was welded onto ability, in his case onto his metronomic accuracy with the ball.
“The biggest battle I ever had when I was bowling out in the middle was with myself,’ he said. “And if I won that battle the rest was pretty easy. It's about having a bit of mongrel in you. You've got to be aggressive.” His two main strengths, he said, were that accuracy and a little bit of bounce. Then he added: “And just self-belief.” Interviewed for the same profile, McGrath’s former new ball partner, Jason Gillespie, reflected: “I don't think anyone came close to believing in their own ability as much as Glenn McGrath.”
Confidence is essential in politics too. It’s something that David Cameron projects so effectively that it is rarely, if ever, questioned in profiles of the Prime Minister. Despite his pledge to end “Punch and Judy politics" when he became leader, he has often been forthright and confrontational at the despatch box and exudes an air of watertight self-confidence that borders on a sense of entitlement. To what extent this is contrived, we don’t know, but much of it may have its roots in an elite public school education at Eton.
Wherever Cameron’s confidence comes from, it now stands in stark contrast to the hesitancy of Jeremy Corbyn. Maybe the Labour leader’s indecisiveness in interviews can be spun as the supreme confidence of a man with a mandate from his party’s grass roots not to play by the long established rules of Westminster politics. Up goes the cry: 'It’s the new politics!' But, if he continues to dither, he will continue to be cast by others as un-Prime Ministerial and as an uncertain figurehead.
Margaret Thatcher came across as even more self-assured than Cameron (and she was a state-educated grocer’s daughter). No one could claim that confidence is a male preserve. But it is, perhaps, worth asking whether gender sometimes plays a role. If you haven’t heard of impostor syndrome, it’s a phenomenon thought to be particularly prevalent among high-achieving women. It is, essentially, a conviction that success, however merited, is actually undeserved.
There is also that feeling of guilt so common, we’re told, among new mothers. In my interview with Ennis-Hill, she explained how anxious she’d been ahead of this summer’s World Championships in Beijing. When training wasn’t going so well, she imagined how she’d feel if she didn’t perform as she hoped. “I would have been away from my son for two weeks and I would have been absolutely devastated because I would be so mad with myself for being away. As a mum as well you feel guilty about everything, so it’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever, ever done,” she told me. How many men would have questioned themselves in this way?
Ennis-Hill spoke openly about one of the more challenging consequences of childbirth. “Your confidence does [take a] knock,” she said. “I was thinking, 'Oh gosh, I’ve got to train now as well and fit all this in. You’re up through the night and that has an impact on how you feel about everything and whether you can do it, and your self-belief. Everything’s a million times worse when you’re tired.” In a changing world, men also travel emotional postnatal journeys and undoubtedly suffer from sleep deprivation too. But they certainly aren’t forced to battle through changes to body shape.
And then there’s the question of why there are so many more prominent male comedians. Earlier this year, I asked Jason Manford for his explanation in an interview for the Radio Times. “Audiences on a Friday, Saturday night are a bit rowdy and I always think stand-up is a bit like flirting,” he said. “So when a bloke comes out and he does his thing, he’s making people laugh, this is what you do when you’re flirting one on one.
“So it’s harder for females sometimes to come on and be on the forefront because that’s not what we’re used to in our societal rules. It’s a bloke who’s on the forefront and generally the woman’s passive. For a female to be aggressive is not what we’re used to. So I think female comics generally have to work harder because of an audience’s preconceptions.”
Handling rejection, Manford believed, is another factor. “Blokes are more used to rejection. Generally it’s a bloke who asks a girl out. I’m stereotyping but that’s what we do. And I’ve noticed it on the circuit. A girl will come off stage, she’s had a bad gig, and she’ll go, ‘I must have said something wrong.’
“A guy will come offstage and he’ll go, ‘Maybe the sound was off’ or, ‘It was definitely the audience’. He’ll find an external reason for his failure."
Whether or not there’s something in Manford’s analysis, we still live in a society where – last time I checked anyway – the onus is more frequently on the man to chat up a woman. That involves confidence. Peacocking isn’t a ritual confined to the animal kingdom.
There’s no doubt that confidence is an attractive quality in both men and women. It can transform appearances and draw in admirers who would otherwise walk on by. It can also be, as we’ve seen, a pivotal ingredient in successful careers. But overconfidence not only becomes unappealing, it can mutate into arrogance, pride and, ultimately, a fall.
The ancient Greeks knew about nemesis following hubris thousands of years ago and I’ve always thought Piers Morgan’s Twitter profile is brilliantly clever. He is one of the most confident men on social media, but he’s carved an indemnity clause into his online presence with a simple, biographical bon mot: “One day you’re the cock of the walk, the next a feather duster.”
Grace Dent in The Independent
One of the binds of having an extraordinarily long marriage, like Tom and Linda Jones’s 58-year partnership, must be questions about how it has survived – and then disgruntlement over the answer. Because the answer we all want about marital longevity is a heart-fluttering, lightly existential comment on the benefits of zen-like tolerance, weekly date nights and unquellable, life-long lust. Not, as Tom Jones gave in an interview published this weekend, a response which instead mentions depression, infidelity and a point back in the 1970s where his wife punched him several times in the face over one of his dalliances.
“She’s lost her spark,” Tom said of Linda – although, importantly, the resounding themes about his “solid” partnership were of love, respect, dependency and gratitude for the life they’ve weathered together. “She is an unbelievable woman,” he said. “She’s the most important thing in my life. All the rest is just fun and games.”
I’m sure Tom will be criticised for being candid about Linda, 75, although mainly by single people who “haven’t time for a relationship” and smug marrieds who’ve been together seven minutes. But I very much enjoyed this wholly unvarnished look at the long slog of staying legally tied for nearly six decades to someone you first met when you were both 12.
The fact is that the vast majority of weddings which we maxed out credit cards to attend this summer will implode within the next five or 10 years, in a nappy-scented fug of mutual disappointment, shagged tennis instructors and costly solicitors letters. This rot sets in even if you did have a sublime Puglian villa-wedding with an Instagram hashtag. It happens despite your joint solemn adherence to visiting Bella Pasta every Tuesday night in order to discuss “non mummy and daddy things” and “keep the magic alive”.
I’ve long suspected that any couple’s love which survives over 30 years relies heavily on selective deafness and multiple televisions. The deafness is handy for avoiding hearing the other one tell a story that you’ve not only heard 66 times already, but which you also know isn’t completely true. Televisions in different rooms are vital when one of you loves Homes Under the Hammer and the other loves Columbo re-runs. Also handy is a dog which needs frequent walking – often via the pub – and the option of a spare bedroom for those nights when your beloved is snoring like an asthmatic warthog inhaling tapioca.
None of these things is remotely romantic, especially the most stringent requirement of a long marriage: mutual pig-headed stubbornness.
Tom and Linda Jones could have easily divorced at any point over the past six decades. By easily, I mean that with excruciating emotional pain and a lot of tedious paperwork they could have gone their separate ways upon earth. Tom could have swallowed an enormous divorce payment and had a lot of other weddings with skinny things with pert knockers who, inevitably, would become as familiar as Linda themselves and need upgrading. Linda could have banked the money and remarried a man who didn’t perform pelvis-grinding pop songs in Las Vegas to a sea of screaming knicker-throwers.
Being married to a showbiz god when you’re happier in the house reading paperbacks must be virtually impossible. Staying married to a civilian who doesn’t gasp when your starry self enters the room must take enormous willpower. But instead, Tom and Linda seem to accept – as many normal everyday couples do, too – that regardless of how imperfect home life is, it holds a damn sight more substance than the new or the unknown.
Many have chosen this path, like Tom and Linda, and are seeing it out to the end. Quibbles about her growing reclusiveness, smoking or the stuff he got up to in 1976 are nothing more than window-dressing. Regardless of it all, wherever Linda is, Tom classes it as home. That, I cannot help but think, is a definition of real love – and it’s one that’s rarely paid tribute to in Hallmark Cards.
There is no “Jesus Christ, We Really Are Stuck With Each Other” Day to rival the hollow sentiment of St Valentine’s. Suggested gifts for this new “special day” would be elasticated-waist lounge-pants, anti-dandruff shampoo and lint rollers to remove pet-hair. A tin of anti-freeze for cold grumpy school-run mornings and a Ped Egg so your loved one can grate those hard bits off their toes.
These are the nuts and bolts of real love. Older people don’t mention this much at weddings because the bride and groom would run a mile.
I liked the part of Tom Jones’s interview when he said he loved speaking to Linda on the phone, wherever he is in the world, as they still have the same old giggle they always did. The idea of a person lying about on a hotel bed in London, chatting and laughing with their spouse in Los Angeles, still solid after 56 years, is rather special.
“When you’re face-to-face with somebody, you realise that time has gone on, but when you’re on the phone, we’re both young again. We haven’t aged on the phone,” he explained. “You’re not looking at one another, I’m looking at an old picture I carry around with me and leave by the bed. She says, ‘I don’t look like that any more’. I say, ‘I know you don’t, it brings back wonderful memories’.”
Rival women have come and gone. I’m fairly sure many of them thought that, within time, boring old Linda with her fags and her social anxiety would be “let go”. It’s exciting being a mistress, for a couple of weeks, until it’s just boring and painful. Women like Linda always laugh last and laugh longest.
Zoe Williams in The Guardian
In its broadest sense, the phrase “there’s no magic money tree” is just a variation on “money doesn’t grow on trees”, a thing you say to children to indicate that wealth comes not from the beneficence of a magical universe, but from hard graft in a corporeal reality. The pedantic child might point to the discrepant amounts of work required to yield a given amount of money, and say that its value is a social construction.
Over time, that loose, rather weak-minded meaning has ceded to a specific economic critique; Jeremy Corbyn – along with anyone who challenges the prevailing fiscal narrative – is dangerous and wrong, since he wants to print money. Money cannot be created from nowhere, because there’s no magic money tree. End of.
The flaw in that argument is that all money is created from nowhere. In normal circumstances, it is created from nowhere as credit, by private banks, and lent to us, usually (85% of the time) in the form of a mortgage on an existing residential property. Decades of credit extension have perverted the housing market to turn a mortgage into a lifetime’s bonded servitude. The economists Jordá, Schularick and Taylor argued convincingly last year that the causes of this economic crisis, the next and the one before are all, fundamentally, the extension of credit and its impact on house prices. So the magic money tree isn’t gushing cash in a socially responsible fashion (if it were used responsibly, it wouldn’t be magic) but the idea that we have a centrally planned, carefully stewarded monetary policy, with finite creation and demonstrable long-term aims, which some loonie leftie wants to come along and unravel, is simply wrong.
In abnormal circumstances, such as the ones we’ve lived through since the financial crisis, central banks are also magic money trees. In the bizarre construction of current economic orthodoxy, you’re not allowed to say so, even though the Bank of England has created £375bn in quantitative easing (QE); theFederal Reserve bought $1.25tn worth of mortgage-backed securities in its first round of QE; the European Central Bank had as a core principle that it couldn’t create money until, suddenly, in awesome amounts, it could; the Bank of Korea has a stimulus package, as does the People’s Bank of China; and Japan started it. Central banks typically justify money creation on the basis that it’s temporary, it’s unfortunate, it’s driven by the crisis and it will ultimately get back to normal.
None of that alters the fact that no bank had that money in savings. I recently said out loud, “we do have a magic money tree, it’s called the Bank of England” in a Newsnight debate with a former adviser to Blair, John McTernan. He made a face like a politician accidentally talking to a member of the public but what the camera didn’t catch was Evan Davis, who stuck his tongue out, like a cat taking a pill. It was days ago, and people are still tweeting me pictures of the Zimbabwean dollar and the Weimar Republic, saying “is this what you want? IS IT?”
Quantitative easing is bizarrely unapproachable, even though it’s happening right across the world and its unwinding will dominate the economic picture for years to come; one is allowed to reference QE, so long as one maintains at all times a technocratic tone, to indicate that one understands and approves of it as nothing more than a lever to create stability. It was the best idea ever, until you suggest something similar could be done for a social purpose, and then it’s the most perilous idea ever. To interrogate why the benefit must always go to the existing asset-holding class, why human ingenuity can’t devise anything more productive and equitable, is to reveal the shaming depth of your incomprehension. It’s not that you don’t understand money; it’s that you don’t understand the exigencies of the debate, which are that you sign up to a number of false principles before you start.
It turned out that the “no money tree” brigade meant: “If you create money infinitely, that will cause inflation” That is a really curious argument against Corbyn’s people’s QE, like going up to someone eating a banana and saying: “If you eat limitless bananas, you will give yourself potassium poisoning.” There’s a secondary argument about the independence of central banks from governments, which is actually rather an elegant example of our dishevelled politics: if the government issues no directive to the Bank of England, and all the gains of QE go to the wealthiest, that’s “independent”. If the government had said, invest this in, say, the green economy, that would have been independence lost. It has become normal to see upwards redistribution as a law of the physical universe, and anything else as the interference of a heavy-handed state.
None of this is to say that people’s QE is straightforward and unproblematic; Corbyn is talking about spending on infrastructure (housing, broadband), whereas that phrase as it was coined described helicopter money, or overt money financing, literally getting money into the economy by randomly giving it to people. They’re two discrete propositions – overt money financing and green and social investment – and rolling them into one doesn’t do much to promote understanding on this terrain.
However, the real barrier to debate is, as with so much in the realm of debt and austerity, that it’s conducted in bad faith, with infantilising aphorisms, aimed not at deepening understanding but at shooing away public interest with unavoidable economic realities. As a tactic, this has reached the end of its plausibility.
Uri Avnery in Outlook India
"WE HAVE nothing to fear but fear itself," said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was wrong.
Fear is a necessary condition for human survival. Most animals in nature possess it. It helps them to respond to dangers and evade or fight them. Human beings survive because they are fearful.
Fear is both individual and collective. Since its earliest days, the human race has lived in collectives. This is both a necessary and a desired condition. Early humans lived in tribes. The tribe defended their territory against all “strangers" — neighboring tribes — in order to safeguard their food supply and security. Fear was one of the uniting factors.
Belonging to one's tribe (which after many evolutions became a modern nation) is also a profound psychological need. It, too, is connected with fear — fear of other tribes, fear of other nations.
But fear can grow and become a monster.
RECENTLY I received a very interesting article by a young scientist, Yoav Litvin [*], dealing with this phenomenon.
It described, in scientific terms, how easily fear can be manipulated. The science involved was the research of the human brain, based on experiments with laboratory animals like mice and rats.
Nothing is easier than to create fear. For example, mice were given an electric shock while exposed to rock music. After some time, the mice showed reactions of extreme fear when the rock music was played, even without being given a shock. The music alone produced fear.
This could be reversed. For a long time, the music was played for them without the pain. Slowly, very slowly, the fear abated. But not completely: when, after a long time, a shock was again delivered with the music, the full symptoms of fear re-appeared immediately. Once was enough.
APPLY THIS to human nations, and the results are the same.
The Jews are a perfect laboratory specimen. Centuries of persecution in Europe taught them the value of fear. Smelling danger from afar, they learned to save themselves in time — generally by flight.
In Europe, the Jews were an exception, inviting victimizing. In the Byzantine (East Roman) Empire, Jews were normal. All over the empire, territorial peoples turned into ethnic-religious communities. A Jew in Alexandria could marry a Jewess in Antioch, but not the girl next door, if she happened to be an Orthodox Christian.
This "millet" system endured all through the Islamic Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate and still lives happily in today's State of Israel. An Israeli Jew cannot legally marry an Israeli Christian or Muslim in Israel.
This was the reason for the absence of anti-Semitism in the Arab world, apart from the detail that the Arabs are Semites themselves. Jews and Christians, the "peoples of the book", have a special status in an Islamic state (like Iran today), in some ways second-class, in some ways privileged (they do not have to serve in the army). Until the advent of Zionism, Arab Jews were no more fearful than most other human beings.
The situation in Europe was quite different. Christianity, which split off from Judaism, harbored a deep resentment towards the Jews from the start. The New Testament contains profoundly anti-Jewish descriptions of Jesus' death, which every Christian child learns at an impressionable age. And the fact that the Jews in Europe were the only people (apart from the gypsies) who had no homeland made them all the more suspicious and fear-inspiring.
The continued suffering of the Jews in Europe implanted a continuous and deep-seated fear in every European Jew. Every Jew was on continuous alert, consciously, unconsciously or subconsciously, even in times and countries which seemed far from any danger — like the Germany of my parents' youth.
My father was a prime example of this syndrome. He grew up in a family that had lived in Germany for generations. (My father, who had studied Latin, always insisted that our family had come to Germany with Julius Caesar.) But when the Nazis came to power, it took my father just a few days to decide to flee, and a few months later my family arrived happily in Palestine.
ON A personal note: my own experience with fear was also interesting. For me, at least.
When the Hebrew-Arab war of 1948 broke out, I naturally enlisted for combat duty. Before my first battle I was — literally — convulsed by fear. During the engagement, which happily was a light one, the fear left me, never to return. Just so. Disappeared.
In the following 50 or so engagements, including half a dozen major battles, I felt no fear.
I was very proud of this, but it was a stupid thing. Near the end of the war, when I was already a squad leader, I was ordered to take over a position which was exposed to enemy fire. I went to inspect it, walking almost upright in broad daylight, and was at once hit by an Egyptian armor-piercing bullet. Four of my soldiers, volunteers from Morocco, bravely got me out under fire. I arrived at the field hospital just in time to save my life.
Even this did not restore to me my lost fear. I still don't feel it, though I am aware that this is exceedingly stupid.
BACK TO my people.
The new Hebrew community in Palestine, founded by refugees from the pogroms of Moldavia, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, and later reinforced by the remnants of the Holocaust, lived in fear of their Arab neighbors, who revolted from time to time against the immigration.
The new community, called the Yishuv, took great pride in the heroism of its youth, which was quite able to defend itself, its towns and its villages. A whole cult grew up around the new Sabra ("cactus plant"), the fearless, heroic young Hebrew born in the country. When in the war of 1948, after prolonged and bitter fighting (we lost 6500 young men out of a community of 650,000 people) we eventually won, collective rational fear was replaced by irrational pride.
Here we were, a new nation on new soil, strong and self-reliant. We could afford to be fearless. But we were not.
Fearless people can make peace, reach a compromise with yesterday's enemy, reach out for co-existence and even friendship. This happened — more or less — in Europe after many centuries of continuous wars.
Not here. Fear of the "Arab World" was a permanent fixture in our national life, the picture of "little Israel surrounded by enemies" both an inner conviction and a propaganda ploy. War followed war, and each one produced new waves of anxiety.
This mixture of overweening pride and profound fears, a conqueror's mentality and permanent Angst, is a hallmark of today's Israel. Foreigners often suspect that this is make-believe, but it is quite real.
FEAR IS also the instrument of rulers. Create Fear and Rule. This has been a maxim of kings and dictators for ages.
In Israel, this is the easiest thing in the world. One has just to mention the Holocaust (or Shoah in Hebrew) and fear oozes from every pore of the national body.
Stoking Holocaust memories is a national industry. Children are sent to visit Auschwitz, their first trip abroad. The last Minister of Education decreed the introduction of Holocaust studies in kindergarten (seriously). There is a Holocaust Day — in addition to many other Jewish holidays, most of which commemorate some past conspiracy to kill the Jews.
The historical picture created in the mind of every Jewish child, in Israel as well as abroad, is, in the words of the Passover prayer read aloud every year in every Jewish family: "In every generation they arise against us to annihilate us, but God saves us from their hands!"
PEOPLE WONDER what is the special quality that enables Binyamin Netanyahu to be elected again and again, and rule practically alone, surrounded by a flock of noisy nobodies.
The person who knew him best, his own father, once declared that "Bibi" could be a good Foreign Minister, but on no account a Prime Minister. True, Netanyahu has a good voice and a real talent for television, but that is all. He is shallow, he has no world vision and no real vision for Israel, his historical knowledge is negligible.
But he has one real talent: fear-mongering. In this he has no equal.
There is hardly any major speech by Netanyahu, in Israel or abroad, without at least one mention of the Holocaust. After that, there comes the latest up-to-date fear-provoking image.
Once it was "international terrorism". The young Netanyahu wrote a book about it and established himself as an expert. In reality, this is nonsense. There is no such thing as international terrorism. It has been invented by charlatans, who build a career on it. Professors and such.
What is terrorism? Killing civilians? If so, the most hideous acts of terrorism in recent history were Dresden and Hiroshima. Killing civilians by non-state fighters? Take your pick. As I have said many times: "freedom fighters" are on my side, "terrorists" are on the other side.
Palestinians, and Arabs in general, are, of course, terrorists. They hate us for taking part of their land away. Obviously, you cannot make peace with perverse people like that. You can only fear and fight them.
When the field of terrorist-fighters became too crowded, Netanyahu switched to the Iranian bomb. There it was — the actual threat to our very existence. The Second Holocaust.
To my mind, this has always been ridiculous. The Iranians will not have a bomb, and if they did — they would not use it, because their own national annihilation would be guaranteed.
But take the Iranian bomb from Netanyahu, and what remains? No wonder he fought tooth and nail to keep it. But now it has been finally pushed away. What to do?
Don't worry. Bibi will find another threat, more blood-curdling than any before.
Just wait and tremble.