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The member of Knesset who called for genocide — against the mothers of the ‘snakes’

Shaked and Bennett
Shaked and Bennett

As any street smart New Yorker knows, “you can say anything about me, but when you start talking trash about my momma, you got a problem.” Especially so in the context of genocide and race war.

Legal scholar and pundit Jonathan Turley has a great post on inflammatory comments by Ayelet Shaked, a member of the Israeli Parliament from the ultra-nationalist and ultra-religious Jewish Home Party whose leader, Naftali Bennett has been touted as a future Israeli Prime Minister. [Editor’s note: The translation of Shaked’s comments that Turley posted was first published by The Electronic Intifada. Dena Shunra translated it.]

Turley cites a recent  Facebook posting by Shaked, which has been interpreted as a call for genocide. Turkish PM Recep Erdogan asked:”What is the difference between this mentality and Hitler’s?”

Shaked made her post the day before the Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khdeir was kidnapped and burned alive by six extremist Israeli Jewish youths. Her remarks are said to have contributed to the climate of revenge in Israel which led to this immolation murder and fed popular support, at least among Israeli Jews, for operations against Hamas in Gaza. These operations have been characterized as “collective punishment” against Palestinians living in Gaza and have triggered calls for a “war crimes” inquiry from top UN human rights official Navi Pilly.

Wrote Shaked on Facebook (italics, mine):

The Palestinian people has declared war on us, and we must respond with war. Not an operation, not a slow-moving one, not low-intensity, not controlled escalation, no destruction of terror infrastructure, no targeted killings. Enough with the oblique references. This is a war. Words have meanings. This is a war. It is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. These too are forms of avoiding reality. This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for us to define reality with the simple words that language puts at our disposal. Why do we have to make up a new name for the war every other week, just to avoid calling it by its name. What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy? Every war is between two peoples, and in every war the people who started the war, that whole people, is the enemy. A declaration of war is not a war crime. Responding with war certainly is not. Nor is the use of the word “war”, nor a clear definition who the enemy is. Au contraire: the morality of war (yes, there is such a thing) is founded on the assumption that there are wars in this world, and that war is not the normal state of things, and that in wars the enemy is usually an entire people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.

Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

Responding in the Independent (UK,) Israeli writer Mira Bar Hillel said Shaked’s remarks had brought her to the brink of burning her Israeli passport. Bar Hillel:

I can no longer stand by, while Israeli politicians like Ayelet Shaked condone the deaths of innocent Palestinian women and children.

She is young. She is pretty. She is a university graduate and a computer engineer. She is also an Israeli Parliamentarian – and the reason why I am on the brink of burning my Israeli passport. Because behind that wide-eyed innocent face lurks the Angel of Death.

Shaked’s “snake” metaphor is interesting. She must not have gotten the memo circulated by Pro Israel Language Police in the US banning words like “snakes.” And let’s not even mention the Nazi “vermin” metaphor. I also found it interesting that she would reference the “morality of war” while spewing the kind of venom that shows she has no idea what that morality involves. In fact, the kind of venom which is that morality’s utter nullification.

Above is a shot of Ayelet Shaked with her Jewish Home Party leader Naftali Bennett, who is close to Dan Senor, Mitt Romney’s foreign policy adviser and frequent talking head on American television. Those like Senor arguing “shared values” as the underpinning of the US-Israeli “special relationship” might take note. If I recall correctly, Rwandan political figures who made calls analogous to Shaked’s in the run up to, and during, the genocide there in the 1990’s, are barred from entering the US.

Postscript: Noted Zionist enthusiast Seth Lipsky, a former editor of the Forward and the New York Sun who paints portraits of Zionist historical figures like David Ben Gurion and Ze’ev Jabotinsky and has them hanging in the living room of his Brooklyn Heights townhouse, has a column in the New York Post today that might be read as a companion piece to Shaked’s provocative little genocidal screed. The headline of the digital version is “Hamas and Horoshima: The Grim Morality of Fighting Evil.” Lipsky, said by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to have “the most interesting mind in journalism,” likens Israel’s Gaza dilemma of 2014 to the situation the US found itself with Japan in 1945, implying the righteousness of a total onslaught against Hamas, hang the civilian casualties and talk of war crimes. I’ve read many deranged things since taking up the subject of the US-Israeli “special relationship” in the wake of the smearing of Chuck Hagel in early 2013. This is certainly going to be on my personal Top Ten List.

This post first appeared on William McGowan’s site, Coloring the News.

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In the weeks since the most recent Gaza war began on July 8, we have seen organized lynch mobs of Israeli youths prowling the streets of Jerusalem at night in search of Palestinians who have the misfortune to be passing by. Many restaurants and bars in downtown Jerusalem employ Palestinian waiters and kitchen staff; they tend to get off work around midnight or 1 AM, when they have to go home to their neighborhoods. Those are the dangerous hours. Dozens have been attacked. On July 25, two Palestinian men, Amir Jalal Shweiki and Samir Mahfuz, both twenty, were beaten unconscious near the northeast Jerusalem neighborhood of Neve Yaakov. They are still in the hospital. There have also been unconfirmed reports of incidents where the police either stood by or joined in with right-wing thugs, for example on July 24 when two Palestinians, Amir Mazin Abu Eisha and Laith Ubeidat, who were delivering bread to stores on Jaffa Road in downtown Jerusalem, were savagely attacked.

A particularly terrible case occurred in early July when a train of the Light Rail, the electric tram, was surrounded in the border between east and west Jerusalem by an Israeli mob screaming “Death to Arabs!” A Palestinian Ph.D. student in Islamic studies at the Hebrew University, a woman well known to my colleagues, was caught in the tram and witnessed passengers trying to shove another Palestinian woman, a young mother with her baby, out of the carriage, into the hands of the mob. Most of the passengers, as so often in such cases, watched passively. Fortunately, the tram was eventually able to continue its journey, and the mother and child survived. On June 30, according to eyewitness accounts, right-wing youths repeatedly entered carriages of the tram looking for Palestinians to assault. …..
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/aug/02/palestine-hatred-and-hope/

Considering how zionists attack, and keep bringing up, the other side for making similar remarks, it seems the Israeli Jews have a sense of entitlement to make racist, anti Arab, ugly statements, and we should all accept that without any questions.

This sense of entitlement is getting lame, since it is they who are inflicting death and injuries on those they oppress, and from whom they keep stealing lands. I am seeing more hate speeches coming from Israelis than from any other side. Hatred cannot be controlled in zio land.

If the Palestinians are mothers of snakes, then Israelis are mothers of all things Evil . This young woman is trying to impress the extremists in her country, by making statements to make them thrilled to bits, that after all the hatred and savagery, that is part of their psyche, is shared by her too.

I would note that these extreme theorists, Shaked, Gordon and so on, are resorting to the idea that where no social contract exists there is no natural or logical, and therefore no ethical, limit to acts of hostility, not even when it comes to the point of genocide or, as Hobbes says, ‘all means of force and fraud’ along the way.
I would ask them to consider that this can only be, at most, part of the story. To remove all ethical limitation is to abandon your own right to complain in ethical terms about what hostile people do to you, that is your whole ability to think ethically at every point where your mind is concerned with conflict, that is your humanity. That is to license hatred directed against you. So logic does after all require that there be some intention at least to limit hostility somehow: so an intention to go as far as genocide, even as far as demonstrative slaughter, the mother of hatred, is after all illogical.

Yes, the use of the term snakes reminds me of the “classic anti-semitic tropes” of the octopus, et al that we are always warned about here by certain posters… And biorabbi talking about Hamas being “de-fanged” on the other thread…imagine that. I guess it’s only wrong if you use it against certain semites?

“Above is a shot of Ayelet Shaked with her Jewish Home Party leader Naftali Bennett, who is close to Dan Senor, Mitt Romney’s foreign policy adviser and frequent talking head on American television. Those like Senor arguing “shared values” as the underpinning of the US-Israeli “special relationship” might take note. If I recall correctly, Rwandan political figures who made calls analogous to Shaked’s in the run up to, and during, the genocide there in the 1990′s, are barred from entering the US.”

Dan Senor was front and center yesterday on CNN, spouting Israel’s official hasbara. Dan Senor brought us filthy lies via his vociferous support of the Iraq war. His association with Bennett and Shaked comes as no surprise. Never forget that he was the chief spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. from wiki:

“Senor spent much of the 1990s working as a staffer on Spencer Abraham’s (R-MI) 1994 Senate campaign and then in his Capitol Hill office. He later worked for Senator Connie Mack (R-FL) and at AIPAC. During that time he caught the attention of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, who introduced him to the neoconservative group affiliated with George W. Bush.[3]

From 2001 to 2003, he was an investment banker at the Carlyle Group.[5]

In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and during the fighting, Senor was a Pentagon and White House adviser based in Doha, Qatar, at U.S. Central Command Forward; he was subsequently based in Kuwait, working with General Jay Garner during the final days of the invasion and was in southern Iraq when the Saddam Hussein regime fell.

According to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Senor was known for the zealous spin that put a good face on the disaster unfolding in Baghdad (the Iraq War did not end until December 2011). Some statements he made to the press did not reflect the actual situation in the city.[6][7]

Senor formally re-located to Baghdad on April 20, 2003. He traveled with General Garner’s team in the first American post-war civilian protection unit, becoming one of the first American civilians to enter Baghdad after the fall of the regime. In Iraq, Senor served as Chief Spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), as Senior Advisor to Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, and as adviser to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. In the U.S., he was “a regular television fixture in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 Iraq invasion”, thus becoming “the face of the Bush Administration’s efforts in Iraq”.[3]

Senor remained in Iraq until the summer of 2004. His 15 months working for the CPA from Baghdad made him one of the longest-serving American civilians in Iraq at the time. For his service, he was awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award, one of the Pentagon’s highest civilian honors.”

His association with Romney is but a footnote to his complicity in spreading lies to the world. He’s a parasite and warmonger of the first order. Just have a look at his history and with whom he associated. I’m much more concerned about his association with the Shaked and Bennett, than with Romney. The fact that he gets a platform after his many disgraces is really worrisome.

There are indeed many “Angels of Death” that deserve to be profiled. Thank you William McGowan.