Authored by Guy Birchall via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on May 10 that he hopes to wean Israel off U.S. military support within a decade.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Israel, on March 19, 2026. Ronen Zvulun/ReutersIn 2016, under the Obama administration, the United States agreed to give Israel $38 billion in military assistance. The memorandum of understanding covered U.S. fiscal years 2019–2028.
“I want to draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have,” Netanyahu told CBS News’ 60 Minutes on Sunday.
He said that it is “absolutely” the right time to reset the U.S.–Israeli financial relationship, adding that he doesn’t “want to wait for the next Congress,” but wants to “start now.”
The state of Israel has long enjoyed support from both Republicans and Democrats in the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, particularly on the topic of military aid.
Since the outbreak of war in Gaza, in response to the attack by the Hamas-led terrorists against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that left about 1,200 Israelis dead, support from both politicians and the U.S. public has waned.
A Pew Research poll published in March found that some 60 percent of American adults now view Israel unfavorably, with 59 percent saying they had little or no confidence that Netanyahu would do the right thing regarding world affairs.
Both those percentages had risen by seven percentage points from a year earlier.
Netanyahu told 60 Minutes that the deterioration in support for his nation amongst U.S. citizens “correlates almost 100 percent with the geometric rise of social media.”
He said that several countries have “basically manipulated” social media in a way that “hurt us badly,” but added that he did not support censorship.
Netanyahu said these nations used “bot farms with fake addresses” to break American sympathy toward Israel, and rupture the alliance between Washington and Jerusalem, “because they think it’s in their interest.”
“And they do it in a clever way,” he said, offering an example. “You know, it’s like you hear a text message, ‘I’m a, you know, red-blooded Texan. I always supported Israel. But I can’t stand what they’re doing. I’m turning against Israel.’ And then you trace the address to some basement in Pakistan, you know.”
Defending Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon, Netanyahu said that the Jewish state had “gone to unbelievable lengths” to prevent civilian casualties.
Damage in the Ain el Mreisseh neighborhood of Beirut, Lebanon, on April 8, 2026, after an Israeli strike. Nael Chahine/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images“We text message millions of text messages to them. Make millions of phone calls to them, pamphlets, leaflets, you name it, okay? And whereas, Hamas and Hezbollah go out of their way to keep their own people in harm’s way, they shoot them,” he said.
Netanyahu added that though there had been civilian casualties in the course of Israel’s actions, “the proportion of civilian casualties, noncombatants to combatants is one of the lowest in the history of modern urban warfare.”
Though the Israeli leader declined to discuss his nation’s future military plans or a timetable for ending the war against Iran, which Israel is prosecuting in conjunction with the United States, he did say that it was only after conflict had broken out that Israeli planners recognized Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz.
“It took a while for them to understand how big that risk is, which they understand now,” Netanyahu said.
He said that if the current Iranian regime was weakened or ousted, he believed it would be “the end of Hezbollah, it’s the end of Hamas, it’s probably the end of the Houthis, because the whole scaffolding of the terrorist proxy network that Iran built collapses.”
When asked whether it was possible to topple the Iranian regime, he said: “Is it possible? Yes. Is it guaranteed? No.”
Tyler Durden Mon, 05/11/2026 - 17:00The former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator who helped shape the 6-foot rule, extended lockdowns, school closures, and “15 Days to Slow the Spread” (that somehow became much longer) is once again on television recommending widespread PCR testing - this time for hantavirus.
In recent appearances on mainstream outlets, Dr. Deborah Birx discussed a hantavirus situation linked to a cruise ship. She suggested offering PCR tests to passengers who had already disembarked and were scattered around the globe, calling it “21st-century technology” and arguing it would catch early or asymptomatic cases. She referenced lessons from COVID, noting that “we’re not testing populations… we don’t really know whether there are subclinical cases” and that “it’s never good to track viruses through symptoms; we should be tracking viruses through blood tests like PCR, we learned that with Covid.”
Dr. Deborah Birx starts to laugh and suggests that we need to begin testing the population for hantavirus with PCR testing, similar to what was done during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She says there could be more human-to-human transmission occurring and that they should be tracking… pic.twitter.com/lkZbilTpcF
She also pointed out that many universities and schools were able to stay open during the pandemic because of weekly testing. The clip, which has circulated widely, shows her laughing while making the case for broader availability of such testing.
This, of course, is the same Dr. Birx who, in her 2022 book Silent Invasion, described how the initial two-week shutdown was never really meant to be just two weeks. She wrote that she didn’t have the numbers yet to justify extending it but had two weeks to get them - aka she pulled it out of her ass.
The 6-foot distancing rule, school closures, and other measures she defended have faced years of scrutiny. Former Trump administration health official Dr. Paul Alexander has stated publicly that certain CDC guidelines, including aspects of social distancing, were essentially “made up” with little to no science behind them at the time. Congressional testimony and reporting later revealed internal debates and evolving rationales for lockdowns and mitigation steps that went well beyond the original “flatten the curve” pitch.
Now, with a hantavirus outbreak tied to one cruise ship - a virus that has existed for decades, spreads primarily through rodent droppings, and has limited human-to-human transmission - Birx is reaching for the familiar tools: more PCR testing, population-level tracking, and references to what “worked” during COVID for schools and beyond.
Hantavirus is serious in the rare cases it occurs, but it is not a novel respiratory pathogen racing through communities the way SARS-CoV-2 did. The current context is narrow and specific. Yet the language echoes 2020: test more people, track more aggressively, make it widely available, because that’s what we learned last time.
No visible course correction. No reflection on the documented limitations of PCR testing at high cycle thresholds, the collateral damage from prolonged restrictions, or the fact that many of the original rules were adjusted or walked back as more data emerged. Just the same public-health reflex applied to the next virus that makes headlines.
Tyler Durden Mon, 05/11/2026 - 16:40