Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Netanyahu's First Speech to Congress, 7/10/1996

In 1996, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Ancestral surname: Mileikowsky) addressed Congress at a pivotal time in U.S. history. Terrorist acts surged — Beirut (1983), Pan Am 103 (1988), World Trade Center (1993), and Oklahoma City (1995). The Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse had shifted U.S. intelligence from Cold War threats to finding new dangers. Amid the rising tide of global and domestic terrorism, and without evidence, Benjamin Netanyahu accused states in the Islamic world, particularly Iran and Iraq, of pursuing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and nuclear weapons (and potentially supplying them to terrorist groups), thus filling the void in America’s search for a post-Soviet enemy. We have been bombing and warring ever since.