Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was personally and explicitly warned that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning a major attack roughly 10 days before the October 7 massacre, but dismissed the threat and did not alert his security chiefs, according to a shocking new Haaretz report.
The revelations come from research for an upcoming book Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment, written by journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, who writes for Haaretz.
I was pretty young at the time, but the thing that I always think about is the movie Enemy of the State when I think about 9/11. Because before the attack, the general narrative was that we need to be worried about what power we give our government and how much they spy on their people and how far they are willing to go to maintain power. I think about Tomorrow Never Dies a lot too, where a media mogul tries to control world governments and people by controlling the news. I was maybe 7 or 8 when the later came out, but I always remember them in terms of 9/11 because after that attack, both movies started to become prescient. The internet was the only thing that kept me informed on what was really going on in the world. Now even that’s changing.
Under Clinton, the narrative was “we need to be worried about what power we give The Democrats because they are Evil America Hating Communists”. Under Bush, the narrative was “we need to support our Jesus-loving Freedom Loving Republican President”.
I would argue that fear of concentrated power in government went up astronomically in the run up to the 2004 election. But so long as Republicans were in control, the fear wasn’t echoed in national media.
Only after Obama took office did we see a re-emergence of Reaganite government skepticism. And that evaporated the moment Trump took office.