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‘Auto-anti-Semitism!’ Naftali Bennett declares war on Jewish self-hatred in Israel

Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett could be said to have made a genius triple breakthrough in the fields of psychology, psychiatry and sociology, coining a new term: “auto-anti-Semitism.”  

“Auto-anti-Semitism is a social-psychological phenomenon in which a Jew develops obsessive contempt and hostility towards Jewish tradition, customs, and observant Jews.”

He wrote that on Friday, as cited by the religious-nationalist settler-outlet Israel National News, in response to criticism from leftwing organizations that “Jewish content is permeating more and more into the education system”.

Actually, Bennett is simply calling secular Jews “self-haters.” But he found a new term to cloak this notion with.

What a novel term. Such invention can only come from the Jewish-home-grown genius of such ‘Jewish Home’ party politicians as Bennett. His party comrade, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked is not too bad either, with her genocide advocacies, with the “little snakes” metaphor for Palestinian children. But you have to hand it to Bennnett – whether it’s comparing Palestinians to “shrapnel in the butt” or saying he “killed lots of Arabs and there’s no problem with that”, he really drives his point through.

And now he’s really developing his terminology, it’s becoming refined: “auto-anti-Semitism.”

The background is fears among secular parents in Israel that religious messages are being insidiously inserted into the school content. Haaretz has been following this development in the past years, and last month, Allison Kaplan-Sommer wrote a piece titled. “How Israeli Parents Are Fighting Jewish Missionizing in Secular Schools”.

Kaplan-Sommer noted that the cities of Tel Aviv and Givatayim have announced measures aimed at raising their level of vigilance against religious influences in the mainstream Jewish school system.

In a widely discussed television report last month, secular schools held end-of-year ceremonies in which children sang of building the Third Temple in Jerusalem, laying spray-painted golden “bricks” to do so – part of an Education Ministry directive to emphasize Jerusalem as the theme of such celebrations. Shocked parents circulated the videos on social media.

Kaplan-Sommer quoted Dr. Avner Inbar, co-chair of Molad – the Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, putting the blame on Bennett’s party, Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home):

“There is an orchestrated and coordinated infiltration of dozens of private organizations, the vast majority of which is related to Habayit Hayehudi, united under a single umbrella organization named Zehut [‘Identity’], in which the notion of strengthening Jewish identity and a need to ‘cure’ what they see as the disintegration of Jewish identity among secular Jews is the crack through which they enter the Jewish education system”.

Zehut is said to bring hundreds of religious young women doing national service to secular schools and kindergartens. Dr. Inbar believes that is not necessarily to convince secular Israeli children to “convert” to Orthodox practice, but to impress upon them the centrality of religious Zionism and the “Greater Land of Israel,” so that they become adults who are sympathetic to the settlement agenda and view Orthodoxy as the legitimate expression of Judaism.

As I wrote in May, the Israeli state religious school curriculum has also been inserting a strong messianic message, for example in curriculums such as “Love of the Land and the Temple” (referring to the idea of the 3rd temple being built upon the ruins of Al-Aqsa mosque). The Messianic message is thus being extended outside those circles.

In addition, the exclusivist, anti-“miscegenation” message is increasing. At the end of 2015, Dorit Rabinyan’s novel Borderlife, about a romantic relationship between a Jew and a Palestinian, was banned from schools by Bennett’s Education Ministry for “threatening Jewish identity”, despite the fact that the official responsible for teaching of literature in secular state schools recommended the book for use in advanced literature classes, as did a professional committee of academics and educators. The further irony was that in the book, the relationship doesn’t even work out.

This is the new type of “Judaism” that Bennett wants to “educate” towards. It is orthodox, it is exclusivist, and it is highly nationalist. And now he is diagnosing a pathology in those who criticize this, saying that they suffer a social-psychological syndrome of “obsessive contempt and hostility towards Jewish tradition, customs, and observant Jews” – because they don’t willingly go along with it. He’s actually calling them ‘self-haters’ and ‘anti-Semites’.

Who knows, maybe after years under such “education”, those kids will also end up calling their parents “auto-anti-Semites” for being hesitant about building the third temple…

H/T Nurit Peled Elhanan for alerting me to Bennett’s recent words.

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The far left makes up terms just as absurd as anything on the right. Two peas in a pod.

Bennett is insane. Israel is insane. I crossed paths with some Isghaeli “Jews” today. Shemesh. Lo. The German r with their fake plastic biblical language. The whole thing is insane. The greed. The persecution. The victimisation of the innocent. The abandonment of the victims. The acceptance of German money. The treatment of the Palestinians  .
Askenazi Jews are people of the schmaltz. No butter with meat and no olive oil in Poland. As if they could escape the trauma by moving to Shangri la. It is a fucking nightmare.

Well,

I would like to comment, but don’t remember last time my comment about anti-semitism made it through the moderation.

21/23

RE: Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett could be said to have made a genius triple breakthrough in the fields of psychology, psychiatry and sociology, coining a new term: “auto-anti-Semitism.” ~ Ofir

SEE: Naftali Bennett: The David Duke of Israel | by Justin Raimondo | antiwar.com | December 28, 2012

Naftali Bennett is the rising star of Israeli politics, and his party, Jewish Home, is projected to be the third largest in Israel: he is also an upfront racist who has made the presence of Africans in the country a major campaign issue, calling for their immediate expulsion. He’s said he would refuse orders to evacuate Jewish “settlers” from Palestinian lands, and he has a plan to annex most of the West Bank. “Forget whether it’s right or wrong,” he says. “We’re here to stay, now what can we do about it? To strive for perfection brings disaster again and again. It’s time for new thinking.”

However, there is nothing new in this sort of thinking: ever since a right-wing nutjob assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and the “settler” movement began openly battling the IDF, the world has been aware of a dangerous and quite unpleasant streak of extremism taking root in the land of Israel. The Jewish Home party, and its charismatic leader, are but the latest incarnation of an increasingly militant religious fundamentalism with deep roots in the history of the Zionist idea. At the core of this ideology is the concept of “Greater Israel,” which includes the Palestinian lands known by observant Zionists as “Judea and Samaria.” The fundamentalist strain represented by Bennett derives the borders of this expanded Jewish state from the Old Testament, which promises all these lands to the Israelites unto eternity.

As to how this radical expansion would alter the Jewish character of the Israeli state, that’s a question Bennett prefers not to answer: “What do we do in the long term? I don’t know.”

But of course he does know: he just prefers not to say, out loud, that a future Greater Israel will expel all the “Israeli” Arabs, just like his coalition partners in the former Molodet party have long advocated. His Jewish Home party absorbed the Molodet faction of the extremist “National Union” – which openly advocated ethnic cleansing – at its founding in 2008, and his followers know just what he means.

Bennett is, in short, an extremist on the order of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose hatred of Arabs (and African refugees) is being cleverly marketed to a younger crowd, and whose foreign policy views make Netanyahu look like a left-winger. Bennett knows Netanyahu well: he served as Bibi’s chief of staff when the Likud leader was in opposition, and the two will no doubt be reunited after the upcoming elections in a new government, where Bennett will probably be in the cabinet as Housing Minister.

Born in Haifa to American parents who emigrated from San Francisco after the Six Day War, Bennett founded a hi-tech company in New York, where he lived for four years, making millions and then taking off for Israel, where he reinvented himself as an ultra-nationalist political activist. After his stint with Netanyahu, he joined the settler movement – although he prefers to live in a wealthy suburb of Tel Aviv – as head of the Yesha Council, and later joined the National Religious Party after a bitter falling out with Netanyahu over the settlements. He managed to take over the NRP in a primary election, and now seeks to revamp this crucible of ultra-Orthodox obscurantism, rebranding it as “young” and “modern,” with a special outreach to American immigrants.

Friends of Israel among American liberals aren’t fooled. As Jeffrey Goldberg put it:

“The Jewish Home party advances an ideology that will bring about the destruction (the self-destruction) of Israel. The Jewish Home party seeks to erase the dividing line between Israel and the West Bank; it seeks to build more and more settlements; it seeks to absorb the West Bank’s Arabs into Israel as, at the most, second-class citizens. It seeks to empower Orthodox religious nationalism as the dominant ideology of the state. And its policies would turn Israel into a pariah state, and Israel will not survive for the long-term as a pariah state.”

Sadly, it doesn’t look like Goldberg’s views have any influence in Israel . . .

ENTIRE COMMENTARY – http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/12/27/naftali-bennett-the-david-duke-of-israel/

Saban Forum 2014 – A Conversation with Naftali Bennet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaThF8wXC_E

“The far left makes up terms just as absurd as anything on the right.”

In a few isolated cases, perhaps. Give us some examples, please. I tend to believe that that particular kind of intellectual “folly” is pretty difficult to duplicate. To political reactionaries, by contrast, that type of lunacy seems to come natural: as in the alt-right, neo-Nazis, the K.K.K., or “instantaneous-antisemitism.” It’s not only natural. It is routine and time-honored among “blackshirts.” It seems to appeal to a particular kind of “primitive” mindset, I would guess.

That’s one of the most appalling consequences of promoting concepts like “Muscular Judaism.” You don’t want to encourage guys who latch on to ideologies like white supremacy and begin worshipping at those kinds of altars (or in their temples and synagogues).

Prudent people don’t nurture and or stimulate that kind of loony thinking. The very idea of associating antisemitism with automaticity is intellectually sloppy and irrational.

“Two peas in a pod.”

Here we go again: The “far left” is virtually indistinguishable from the “far right.” Your binary reductionism is ham-fisted and mushier than a bowl of porridge.