Twitter pokes fun at Netanyahu’s presentation
Jokes and Photoshop jobs abound after prime minister’s dramatic revelation
As experts around the world were analyzing the significance of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech last night, Twitter pundits were doing what they do best: poking fun.
It wasn’t hard to make jokes at Netanyahu’s expense last night, particularly when he whipped a black cloth off a bookcase full of binders and a wall of CD-ROMs.
Quite a few people joked that the prime minister looked like he was hawking those goods on a TV shopping network.
“SHOPPING CHANNEL,” wrote Kan’s Amichai Stein, posting a photoshopped image made up to look like Israel’s shopping network. The “Amad” bookshelf, it turns out, can be yours for just NIS 1,665.
Josh Billinson, an editor at the Independent Journal Review, joked that it looked like Netanyahu was hosting an episode of The Price is Right: “These showcases have really gone downhill over the years,” he wrote, alongside a GIF of the big reveal.
Plenty of users made fun of the seemingly outdated technology in the presentation, wondering why Netanyahu hadn’t heard of flash drives – invented by Israel – and used one to store the documents, instead of shelves of binders and CDs. Others lamented the poor IDF soldiers who had to paste the CDs to the wall and lug around the binders for the display.
Haredi journalist Moshe Weissberg joked that the room looked like “every charity in every Haredi city.”
Ben Hartman, a former reporter with The Jerusalem Post, joked that “The Iranian regime has all of the old free AOL download disks and they are using them to build a nuke.”
And across the Internet, nobody could quite pass up the perfect Photoshop opportunity Netanyahu provided when he paced in front of a huge white screen.
Billinson added a recent, much talked about tweet from US President Donald Trump to the display: “Thank you Kanye, very cool.”
Jewish Insider reporter Jacob Kornbluh wrote: “The most dramatic part of Bibi’s speech?” referring to Netanyahu by his nickname, while superimposing onto the screen the message: “There was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”
And Tablet Magazine writer Yair Rosenberg went with “the most shocking revelation in Bibi’s presentation today,” having the screen read: “Stormy Daniels is Mossad.”
Others offered a mash-up with another Israeli Photoshop classic: Culture Minister Miri Regev’s famous Jerusalem dress from last year’s Cannes Film Festival. User Freddie the Bear posted an image of Regev in the dress, only this time the entire bottom half was printed with CD-ROMs.
Too bad this year Regev will be skipping the festival entirely.