Obama to pass on meeting netanyahu during washington visit
Source: AP
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned trip to Washington in March is kicking up a diplomatic dust storm in the nation's capital.
On Thursday, the White House said President Barack Obama would not meet the prime minister when he comes to the U.S. to address a joint session of Congress. The official White House explanation was that Netanyahu's visit fell too close to the Israeli election and the Obama administration wanted to avoid the appearance of taking sides.
"As a matter of longstanding practice and principle, we do not see heads of state or candidates in close proximity to their elections, so as to avoid the appearance of influencing a democratic election in a foreign country," National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said.
But the timing of Netanyahu's visit also gave the White House a convenient means of retaliating against the prime minister for his decision to accept an invitation from Republican leaders to address Congress. GOP lawmakers and Netanyahu worked out the arrangement without consulting with the White House or State Department, only alerting the Obama administration a few hours before the Israeli leader's trip was made public.
Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_NETANYAHU
= new reply since forum marked as read
How I persuaded six intelligence chiefs to pour out their hearts
Dror Moreh, whose The Gatekeepers has been nominated for an Oscar, tells the Times of Israel how he conducted the revelatory interviews in his acclaimed documentary, and the impact the spy heads’ revelations had on him
BY MITCH GINSBURG January 11, 2013, 4:25 pm
Dror Moreh’s film, The Gatekeepers, is a quietly stunning documentary. Six men, most wearing different shades of blue oxford, sit in a chair and talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – the topic most glaringly absent from the current elections discourse. Six men. The six living former heads of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service.
[center]
[/center]
Moreh is a modest filmmaker. He keeps the camera on his subjects and provides them room to talk. Because most of the men spent the majority of their lives avoiding just that, and because each of the six former Shin Bet commanders, in charge of the very apparatus that enables Israeli control over several million Palestinians – an apparatus that is far more ruthless than most Israelis care to know – has such explosive material to convey, the movie, punctuated with pungent archival footage, is electric.
<>
ToI: I felt the ghost of (Vietnam War-era US defense secretary) Robert McNamara reverberate through the film and later saw that Errol Morris’s (2003 Oscar-winning) documentary film, a biography of him, was an inspiration. Why?
Moreh: The Fog of War was really a text book for me. One of the inspirations for me to do this film. The intimate look at someone who was deeply involved in the most secretive discussions, near the leaders, who can tell firsthand about the reasoning, when you see that depth of someone who was there, and the account that he can give, it blew me away completely. I said to myself, if I can do something like that about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict it will be riveting. Because when you see movies about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is always from the point of view of Leftists or people that have suffered or Palestinians, but never from the heart of the establishment.
<>
ToI: When did you realize that you were sitting on incredible material?
Moreh: After the first interview. After three or four interviews I could feel this sort of buzz sound in my ears and I knew I had amazing material, amazing stories.
ToI: What was it like interviewing these men?
Moreh: The minute I knew that I was going to get them I knew I had to be at my best when interviewing them because they are the ones who are deciding. This is their work. They are interrogators. You come to the interrogators and you want to interrogate them, so you have to be very well prepared. Provide them the right atmosphere so that they would feel secure enough to speak openly. This is what I tried to create for them. This is why I said that you have to make sure that the setting is very comfortable for them. It is not an interrogation. The fact that you are coming to a conversation is not an interrogation. The technique of using the interview as that, is not what I do. Slowly, slowly you tell them that they can trust you. That they can open up to you. This is what I do. I try to create an atmosphere of a conversation.
<>
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-gatekeepers
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/03/the-vegetarian
