Netanyahu wants control over economic data, Lapid charges

The government is attempting to appoint an ally as the head of the Central Bureau of Statistics to gain control of the data that reaches the public, opposition leader Yair Lapid said Tuesday.

Lapid’s comments from a KAN radio interview came in the wake of a KAN report Monday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief of staff had directed the CBS to freeze all hiring until the prime minister chooses an ally to lead the organization.

KAN reported last month that Netanyahu at first had tried and failed to appoint the current director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office, Yossi Shelley. Shelley is a long-time Likud member and ally of Netanyahu, and prior to his current position he served as ambassador to Brazil.

What did Lapid say?

“Part of the essentiality of a modern economy is that it is willing to handle the facts, even when they are not pleasant. What dictatorships across the globe do is create fictitious facts – and the Central Bureau of Statistics disrupts this, as it is not willing to argue that we are growing economically when in fact we are falling. So they want to control the facts,” the opposition leader said.

“Such regimes always take every effort in the world to block uncomfortable information,” Lapid added in the Tuesday morning interview.

“They [the government] taught themselves that they can sell any lie if they repeat it enough times. That is why they built the poison machine [on social media], and now they want to turn the poison machine into a governmental poison.”