Netanyahu’s new media adviser said ‘unfit’ Biden ‘destroying America,’ echoed Trump’s voter fraud claims
sraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on March 16, 2023. Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images
This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed a new media adviser who has described U.S. President Joe Biden as “unfit” for office, accusing him of “destroying America” and sharing claims made by former President Donald Trump’s supporters concerning voter fraud in the 2020 presidential elections.
Gilad Zwick worked at the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 news for the past year and previously reported for the Israel Hayom daily newspaper, which also supports the premier. Over the past two years, Zwick has utilized his Twitter account, which has garnered approximately 30,000 followers, to criticize Biden and his ability to fulfill his role as president.
Last July, Zwick shared a brief video clip of a speech by Biden accompanied by the following comment: “The media is doing everything to hide Biden’s incompetence, yet the Chinese, Russians and Iranians are not stupid, they understand well that there is no leadership in Washington.” A year earlier, Zwick wrote that Biden is “slowly but surely ruining America,” comparing him to the leaders of Iran and North Korea by referring to him as “Supreme Leader Biden.”
After the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Zwick shared conspiratorial content from supporters of former President Donald Trump about alleged voter fraud that led to Trump’s loss and Biden’s victory.
“This election will not be settled without a fight,” he wrote on Twitter three days after the election, when Biden’s victory was already a forgone conclusion. “Hopefully the right-wing elected officials here [in Israel] will learn a thing or two about courage and determination from their American counterparts,” he added.
Zwick later retweeted a post that allegedly showed fake ballots being counted in Georgia, where Biden beat Trump, which read “Video from Atlanta, Georgia — after they cleared out the observers and the media and were told that the count was over, there were still four workers left. What did they do? They took out suitcases with forms from under the table, began to scan vigorously for at least two hours – of course without any supervision.”
Zwick even claimed that the workers “counted 18,000 votes” more than the margin by which Biden beat Trump in the state. He has also shared allegations against Dominion Voting Systems, which recently won a lawsuit against Fox News for spreading conspiracy theories regarding fakes ballots in its machines in 2020.
“Another interesting development,” Zwick wrote on Twitter about three weeks after the election, going on to say that “Dominion representatives recanted and refused to appear before Pennsylvania lawmakers about the security of their machines.” The tweet was captioned “What do they have to hide?”
Another of his tweets referring to Dominion Voting Systems quoted Trump lawyer Sydney Powell, as saying “Dominion’s machines were exposed to manipulation and forgery on a large scale, to the point of biasing the election results.” It should be noted that Fox News had to pay Dominion approximately $800 million in compensation for spreading false claims against the company.
Another tweet by Zwick referred to election workers in Michigan who he claims testified under oath regarding voter fraud in the state, including “persuasion of voters to vote for Biden and duplicate ballots.” Biden won in Michigan by a margin of more than 150,000 votes, but Trump claimed without any evidence that the results were fake and went so far as to try to prevent the process of officially confirming election results.
Two days after the January 6 Capitol riot, Twitter suspended the accounts of senior Trump officials who were spreading conspiracy theories regarding the election. Outraged, Zwick tweeted that “Silicon Valley has declared war against the right’s freedom of expression.”
Since returning to office five months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has yet to receive an invite to the White House to meet with President Biden.
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