Sign up for The Jerusalem Post Premium Plus for just $5 Upgrade your reading experience with an ad-free environment and exclusive content<doc-sep>Placard after placard, aerial photo after aerial photo, sensational revelation ahead of dramatic expose – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech Thursday at the United Nations was one of his most professional, persuasive and effective appearances. Well equipped with Israeli intelligence achievements, he formulated a precise and credible indictment against Iran and its proxies in the Middle East. >>FULL TEXT: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's 2018 UN General Assembly speech Netanyahu has apparently fallen in love with the effect he had with his document and CD show in the Prime Minister’s Office in May. He makes public use of the Mossad’s achievements more than any other prime minister in recent history. This has political significance, of course: in the collective imagination, the prime minister is seen as the person without which this would not have happened. And indeed, Israeli intelligence has chalked up considerable achievements in the past. Previous prime ministers did not run to the UN General Assembly waving these secret materials like a cheerleader waving pompoms. >> Abbas' UN address: A speech laced with helplessness and lack of strategy | Analysis ■ The two words Netanyahu is afraid to repeat out loud | Analysis ■ Netanyahu backs future Palestinian state, reigniting the leftist’s dilemma | Analysis Israelis watching Netanyahu certainly did so with mixed feelings. On the one hand, they appreciated his phenomenal skills as a presenter on an international level of the Israeli case. On the other, fear crept into the hearts of some: Where is all this good, in the bad sense, leading us, if not to all-out war in the north? Netanyahu could not have been clearer in his threats against Hezbollah, which is hiding facilities to upgrade precision missiles within spitting distance of Beirut International Airport. “We won’t let them get away with it.” He will have to make good on the check he waved publicly. An attack on these facilities will certainly lead to a response that could develop into an all-out conflict. Netanyahu’s speech was 40 minutes long. Most of it was devoted to Iran. The evidence that indicates the presence of a nuclear storage facility in downtown Tehran, not far from the storage facility from which hundreds of CDs and notebooks were taken by the Mossad in February, will have to be checked. It may be assumed that the Mossad operatives will get fed up with the many emails that will be circulated in the coming days and weeks among European capitals in an attempt to persuade their leaders who are still holding fast to the nuclear agreement to wake up and listen to the music Netanyahu is playing for them. This will be the push that comes after the revelation. Netanyahu has appeared many times before the UN General Assembly over the past decade. His speeches are usually about Iran. As long as a Democratic president was in the White House, leading a different policy, Netanyahu looked and sounded like a stubborn child, a rejected nudnik, repeating his frightening apocalyptic messages like a broken record. Open gallery view Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Prime addresses the General Assembly at the United Nations in New York September 27, 2018. Credit: AFP Over the past two years, and more so over the past year, the world has changed. President Donald Trump has taken his country out of the nuclear agreement, imposed paralyzing sanctions on the Iranian government and transferred the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu could appear this time self-assured and arrogant, like a rooster atop the mud of his poultry run. Trump is behind him, one hundred percent. He gave the American president the reward of his sustained applause during Trump’s speech. In the visitors’ gallery, the prime minister’s entourage gave a standing ovation to their “Donald.” This embarrassing show of Israeli provincial sycophancy, with the notable absence of Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, the casino owners, for whom Netanyahu’s charm has faded in the shadow of Case 2000. Anyone expecting a statement heralding even the slightest hope of renewed negotiations with the Palestinians was disappointed. The right wing declared business as usual. The all-clear was sounded in the settlements. It could be seen that peace-shmeace with the Palestinians was of interest to him like his speech interested the American TV channels on Thursday, riveted as they were to the hearing on Capitol Hill. For a moment, the day before yesterday, it looked as though something good was threatening to move on the Israeli-Palestinian front. The American president expressed his love for the idea of two states (and afterwards did a reversal in a typical act of shallow trickery). The Israeli prime minister uttered the word “state” for the first time in a while spiced with a thousand reservations and conditions. Suspicious minds immediately accused him of moving to the left in order to buy the hearts of the legal elites soon deciding about his three bribery cases. The schedules definitely match: the investigations will near completion around the beginning of 2019. Trump’s peace plan is supposed to be presented at around the same time. Elections will be held either before or after or in tandem. But this train, the investigations train, cannot be stopped, even if Netanyahu disguises himself as Shimon Peres.<doc-sep>'Tyrants of Tehran': Netanyahu slams Iran & anti-Semitism at UN in speech Follow RT on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has addressed the UN General Assembly, spending most of his time talking about the "tyrants of Tehran." He also slammed the way Israel is treated by some UN member states.<doc-sep>UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday described what he said was a secret atomic warehouse in Tehran and accused Europe of appeasing Iran as he sought to rally support for U.S. sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Addressing the United Nations General Assembly, Netanyahu showed an aerial photograph of the Iranian capital marked with a red arrow and pointed to what he said was a previously secret warehouse holding nuclear-related material. He argued this showed Iran still sought to obtain nuclear weapons, despite its 2015 agreement with world powers to curb its program in exchange for loosening of sanctions. Netanyahu spoke 4-1/2 months after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the accord, arguing it did too little to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and triggering the resumption of U.S. economic sanctions on Iran. Netanyahu said the site contained some 15 kg (33 pounds) of radioactive material that has since been moved, and he called on the U.N. atomic agency to inspect the location immediately with Geiger counters. “I am disclosing for the first time that Iran has another secret facility in Tehran, a secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and materiel from Iran’s secret nuclear program,” Netanyahu said. The world will dismiss Netanyahu’s claims, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi said, according to Fars News. “The world will only laugh loudly at this type of false, meaningless and unnecessary speech and false shows,” Qassemi said. Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that there should be more scrutiny on Israel’s nuclear program. “No arts & craft show will ever obfuscate that Israel is only regime in our region with a *secret* and *undeclared* nuclear weapons program - including an *actual atomic arsenal*. Time for Israel to fess up and open its illegal nuclear weapons program to international inspectors,” Zarif tweeted. Israel has pushed the United States toward isolation, Zarif said, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA). Slideshow ( 3 images ) “In recent days we’ve seen how much the policies that Netanyahu has imposed on America has isolated them in the General Assembly and Security Council,” Zarif said, according to IRNA. “Now see when they can pull America to this level of isolation how isolated they are themselves.” Netanyahu did not identify the material nor specifically suggest that Iran had actively violated the nuclear deal. SECRET ARCHIVE A U.S. State Department official called on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to investigate Netanyahu’s claims. In a statement, the official said it was “absolutely imperative that the IAEA fully exercise its authorities in order to provide confidence to the international community that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran.” An outspoken opponent of the deal, Netanyahu has previously made allegations about Iran’s nuclear activities that are difficult or impossible to verify, including presenting a cartoon bomb to the General Assembly in 2012 warning of how close Tehran was to producing a nuclear device. In April, Netanyahu presented what he said was evidence of a large secret archive of documents related to Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program at a different site in Tehran. He said Israeli agents removed vast amounts of documents from that site. At the time, Iran said the documents were fake. In a speech in which he said relatively little about efforts to achieve peace with the Palestinians, Netanyahu said Iran had since begun moving items out of the second site. “Since we raided the atomic archive, they’ve been busy cleaning out the atomic warehouse. Just last month they removed 15 kilograms of radioactive material. You know what they did with it?” he said. “They took it out and they spread it around Tehran in an effort to hide the evidence.” Slideshow ( 3 images ) He said Iranian officials still had a lot of work to do because there were some 15 shipping containers full of nuclear-related equipment and materials stored at the second site. “This site contained as much as 300 tonnes - 300 tonnes - of nuclear-related equipment and materiel,” he said. Under the nuclear deal struck by Iran and six major powers - Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States - Tehran agreed to limit its nuclear program in return for relief from U.S. and other economic sanctions. The IAEA has repeatedly said Tehran was abiding by its commitments to the deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), including in a document reviewed by Reuters on Aug. 30. France, Britain, Germany, China and Russia have stayed in the pact, vowing to save it despite the restoration of U.S. sanctions and this week discussing a barter mechanism they hope may allow Iran to circumvent the U.S. measures. Netanyahu criticized Europe for doing so in unusually harsh language that evoked European nations’ initial failure to confront Nazi Germany in the 1930s. “While the United States is confronting Iran with new sanctions, Europe and others are appeasing Iran by trying to help it bypass those new sanctions,” Netanyahu said. MISLEADING A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States is aware of the facility Netanyahu announced and described it as a “warehouse” used to store “records and archives” from Iran’s nuclear program. A second U.S. intelligence official called Netanyahu’s comments “somewhat misleading. First, we have known about this facility for some time, and it’s full of file cabinets and paper, not aluminum tubes for centrifuges, and second, so far as anyone knows, there is nothing in it that would allow Iran to break out of the JCPOA any faster than it otherwise could.” The Israeli leader also lambasted Iran’s ballistic missile activity, identifying three locations near Beirut airport where he said Lebanon’s Hezbollah was converting missiles. “In Lebanon, Iran is directing Hezbollah to build secret sites to convert inaccurate projectiles into precision-guided missiles, missiles that can target deep inside Israel within an accuracy of 10 meters (yards),” he said. The IAEA and Hezbollah were not immediately available for comment.<doc-sep>
NEW YORK -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may declassify new, revelatory intelligence on Iran and its nuclear program in his speech to the General Assembly on Thursday, according to Danny Danon, Israel's ambassador to the UN. Speaking with The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, Danon said those watching Netanyahu's speech can expect to learn information beyond what was included in his April 30 announcement of a raid on a storage facility in Tehran stocked with files on the Iranian government's clandestine nuclear weapons program. "I think the content is important. He views the information that was captured in Tehran as critical," Danon said, replying in the affirmative when asked if new information would be included in the speech. The ambassador declined, however, to confirm whether new details included in the speech would be sourced from the January raid– an event that reportedly helped US President Donald Trump reach his decision to withdraw from Iran's nuclear agreement with world powers. "We have a lot of means to capture information, and we will see what he has to say," Danon said. "He will deal with the Iranian issue and he'll keep it interesting." Both Netanyahu and Abbas are scheduled to address the chamber on Thursday. Danon said that the Israeli team told their American counterparts in New York, in a meeting led by Trump and Netanyahu, that they will respectfully evaluate and engage with the administration's upcoming peace plan– even if they ultimately disagree on some of its content. Trump said on Wednesday for the first time as president that he preferred a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He hopes to release the plan by the end of the year. Trump and Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, both spoke to the assembly on Tuesday, trading insults with one another. While Trump accused Iran's leaders of "sowing chaos, death, and destruction" regionwide, Rouhani accused Trump of "authoritarian" and "Nazi" tendencies. "We used to be the only one in the room speaking about this issue, and here you have the president of the United States representing it on the floor," Danon said, praising Trump for embarking on an economic pressure campaign to compel Iran to change its behavior. "I think the end goal" of the pressure strategy, he added, "should be that the Iranians understand they cannot continue with their ballistic missile test, acquiring a ballistic missile capabilities. The result will be a better agreement." cnxps.cmd.push(function () { cnxps({ playerId: '36af7c51-0caf-4741-9824-2c941fc6c17b' }).render('4c4d856e0e6f4e3d808bbc1715e132f6'); }); if(window.location.pathname.indexOf("656089") != -1){console.log("hedva connatix");document.getElementsByClassName("divConnatix")[0].style.display ="none";}