“Israel is the most naive and racist country in the West.” Gideon Levy, in Haaretz:
Israel is both the most racist and most naive country in the West. Racist, because in no other country can politicians make remarks about migrants as they do here and still remain in office another day; naive, because only now has Israel discovered the problem that has been facing the “first world” for years. Only in Israel can a parliamentarian from the ruling party describe the migrants as a–
Yes and if someone wrote Gideon Levy’s column in the United States, that writer would have trouble remaining in his or her office. Ask Paul Krugman.
By the way, Haaretz editors flipflopped the words racist and naive from Levy’s first sentence in the headline, trying to soften the blow. Also, is Israel in the west? It’s in Asia, and 500 miles east of Istanbul. Go figure.
Things will change, because they have to.
We have some politicians just as bad except they inadvertently ‘let it slip out’ instead of declaring it and then claim they “mispoke”.
Does anyone know how to read Levy’s columns without subscribing to Haaretz?
The West is a political/historical/financial term, not about Geography at all, some Latin America countries are not in this West, for example. the guy from the clash of the civilization put Israel in the West, but wrote that Israel can be a seperate civilization all by itself, or something like that.
Gideon is naively wrong on the naive part, the country didn’t just “discover” the migrants problem, it started in the first intifada, when the Arabs from Gaza and the WB stopped being our lumberjacks and water carriers, and Israel started bringing in “temporary” workers from all corners of the world.
Seems that having US Al Jazeera is just getting to be a better idea the more I see how dysfunctional our own press is.