How can Bret Stephens, who is so sensitive to any slight he perceives against Jews, use the phrase “disease of the Arab mind” when writing about an Egyptian Olympian, and hundreds of millions of other people, in the Wall Street Journal no less? The answer is that a group of ethnocentric spokesmen for the Jewish people, including Jeffrey Goldberg and Benjamin Netanyahu, exercise an Orwellian influence over what can and cannot be said out loud.
Mr. Netanyahu, I have a question: How long will “the world”, who unlike you believes the Palestinians are human beings like the rest of us, continue to just look on as you talk the talk and walk the walk of the most dangerous demagogues in history? A meditation on Netanyahu’s video dehumanizing Ayoub Sroor, a helpless Palestinian father in the occupation.
Black Lives Matter is not going to use careful and precise language about Israel, nor should it. Black Lives Matter sees the ugly reality of the occupation so it has taken on the conflict directly, and will not be bullied by the Israel lobby. When that fight gets out in the open, Israel’s actions will be in the spotlight.
If Georgia congressman Hank Johnson had not been criticizing the Israeli occupation when he likened Israeli settlements to “termites,” no one would have noticed. The smearing of Johnson as an alleged anti-Semite is vicious and contradicts the Torah.
Hillary Clinton decided to embrace Elie Wiesel as a hero when people who support Palestinian rights pointed out his rank hypocrisy. And she has lots of pro-Israel company in doing so. But she should consider what violent ethnocentric friends she is embracing, and what their extremism is doing to Israel and Palestine.
Why is Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu showing us the bloodstained room of a settler girl who was murdered by a Palestinian? Because he has no answer to the political crisis of the occupation but to incite Israelis toward racial hatred — and to try to tell the world that Israelis facing Palestinians who have endured 50 years of occupation are the same as westerners confronting ISIS.
Netanyahu’s only goal is to control the news cycle and the New York Times gave him two solid victories last week by playing up a misstatement by Palestinian president Abbas in Brussels. And the construction of Abbas’s line as anti-Semitic reflects the power in our discourse of a tribal Jewish fantasy: non-Jews are always thinking anti-Jewish thoughts.
Bloomberg News runs a Pravda-style article about Israel’s political crisis whose goal is obfuscation from start to finish so as to make Netanyahu look good. Those charges of fascism? Eli Lake reports that they call you a fascist in Israel when the garbage doesn’t get picked up.
Netanyahu is alone. He has lost every world leader and his own security establishment and is reduced to the support of Jeffrey Goldberg, the lobby and neocon hacks in the US. The Israeli establishment will be able to remove Netanyahu politically in the next year or so and it will try and get a peace deal with the Palestinians. And you’d never know any of this from reading the New York Times.
In an Al Jazeera interview, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy trashes PM Netanyahu for misusing the Holocaust to oppose the Iran deal and not having political dialogue with Hamas and says his days are numbered. Why aren’t American leaders and media reflecting these views?