…Livni said she didn’t regret the decisions that may have brought on her political downfall, saying she wasn’t “sorry for not backing down in the face of political blackmail, even when the price was staying outside the government, and for not being willing to sell the country to the ultra-Orthodox….
It’s a typical situation to lob metaphorical F-bombs at the visible minority in the country. The so-called religious Jews outside the power structure and tend to be out of the top loops in income and social status in the society. Inflammatory comments directed by known members of the secular leadership against religious Jews or government institutions seeking to act within the realm of democracy and civil liberty are fair game, and choice targets are seen as reinforcers of the exercise of free speech, even down to the small bottom feeders like Jeff Halper and ICAHD in which their op-eds are usually invoking “the rabbis” of yore as moral pretext for this type of heroic secular branding with the veneer of the sages with a little jew bashing just to affirm they are not on the bottom of the pecking order. Far less “fanatical” and dogmatic and chronic criticism coming religious jews is labeled blasphemous and provative of a reaction that could undermine the very basis of the traditional Jewish fibre that binds the nation together.
Read More:http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/19.1/bilsky.html ---The target of his criticism was the negotiations that Kastner had conducted with Adolf Eichmann and the Nazi officer Kurt Becher (responsible for the economic exploitation of the Jews). Gruenvald asserted that these negotiations had facilitated the destruction of Hungarian Jewry while benefiting Kastner personally. In a pamphlet he sent to Ha-Mizrahi members in the summer of 1952 Gruenvald phrased his charge that Kastner had collaborated with the Nazis in vivid and offensive terms: The smell of a corpse scratches my nostrils! This will be a most excellent funeral! Dr. Rudolf Kastner should be eliminated! For three years I have been awaiting this moment to bring to trial and pour the contempt of the law upon this careerist, who enjoys Hitler's acts of robbery and murder. On the basis of his criminal tricks and because of his collaboration with the Nazis . . . I see him as a vicarious murderer of my dear brothers. . . . According to Gruenvald's allegations, Kastner had become friendly with the Nazis through their negotiations and as a result had been allowed to save his relatives and a small number of Jewish dignitaries. In return, Kastner had let the Nazis use him by not informing Hungarian Jews of the real destination of the trains. Gruenvald also alleged that Kastner, in collusion with some Nazis, had stolen Jewish money and then helped save the life of Becher with favorable testimony at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Warned by the attorney general that he must either sue Gruenvald for libel or resign from his government post, Kastner sued. Since he was a senior government official, he was represented at the trial by the attorney general, Haim Cohen, himself. In the course of the trial, however, it was Kastner, not Gruenvald, who found himself on the defensive.---
Please pass out the brown paper vomit bags they have on airplanes. When Yair Lapid, secular high priest of communications, and wannabee first son of holocaust survivor to be P.M. says, he sees pogroms in Israel agitated from the right, questioning whether they are jews, “do not understand Jewish ethics, the Jewish collective memory, or the meaning of Jewish existence.” we have a loop of logic inhabited by black kettle painters. Its the condescending tone, the tokenism and the yuppie white liberalism that is pervasive, and even normal, turf defending behavior in defending control of the bureaucracy, the plum appointments, and concentration of power in the sphere of an elite which seeks a collective identity in the State alone, in the tradition of liberal democratic enlightenment and the rule of secular law both domestic and internationally. Some of the mocking disdain, contempt, for diaspora and holocaust jews that Hannah Arendt scribbled out in her coverage of the Eichmann trial. The patterns of power that were set up in the early days of the state and pre-statehood period have persisted until today.
Like Kastner cutting a deal with Eichmann to save the cream of the Hungarian and let the great unwashed clang in cattle cars to their fate, the religious jews are, even in what is supposedly their Biblical homeland, no more than tolerated guests. Higher than an Arab, but less than an anarchist with a good middle class pedigree and education. the identical inner circle that took power in the early days of the state still runs the non-elected institutions of the state, the media, internal security, judiciary as self perpetuating rights, entitlements, closed off to those not buying into their vision of secularism where the Judaic nature is of symbolic significance, and even then an unfortunate birth defect caused by bad luck, a lousy toss of the dice. And their power is not negligible. The Supreme court has one oreo religious judge, a reserved seat, and the financial power of state-sanctioned cartels and professional guilds serves as a barrier to entry, and fixes prices all of which confirms the image of a plutocracy imbued with its own self-image while fobbing off platitudes on democracy, vibrancy, tolerance, responsibility as pacifying narrative while the lilly white hands exploit and control.
Read More: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=271926 Fernando Botero. ---Meir Margalit: It’s impossible to run a state when each citizen chooses which clause of the law to honor, and which not to. That’s what I am working towards. Chaos would shatter the state – and afterwards it may be possible to rebuild it. What we have today cannot be repaired. We aspire to dismantle the state, with the hope that something new and far better will result from it. Too bad about the spilled blood and the shattered dreams, but we will emerge stronger.---
…MK Michael Ben-Ari (Ichud Leumi) responded Wednesday to reports that journalist Uri Blau will stand trial in the Anat Kam affair by calling to put Haaretz on trial as well.
“The time has come for the Haaretz newspaper, the greenhouse for traitors like Blau, to be put on trial for betraying the state and giving protection to traitors,” he declared. Haaretz printed an article that Blau wrote based on secret documents that he possessed illegally.Read More:http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/241189#.T8esriqF9cc
Read More:http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4235732,00.html---If given the opportunity, some Israeli human rights groups "would be the first to put haredim and settlers on buses and transfer them," Knesset Member Yulia Shamalov Berkovich said Tuesday during a heated House Committee debate of on the influx of foreign migrants into the country. "Those hypocrites," the Kadima member said of human rights activists who are aiding foreign migrants, "I would imprison them all for incitement and for pitting Jew
ainst Jews.---
ADDENDUM:
( see link at end) …Two right-wing public figures are calling for the criminal investigation of a contestant on the reality TV show “Big Brother” who said on the show that “the occupation would be over” if the Palestinians were to “rise up” and refuse to listen to Israeli soldiers performing security checks at roadblocks.
Read More:http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4235732,00.html ---"All human rights activists should be imprisoned and transported to camps we are building," she said, referring to detention facilities Israel is constructing in which African infiltrators will be held.---
MK Michael Ben Ari (National Union) and Sholom Dov Wolpo, the Chabad rabbi who heads the right-wing Eretz Yisrael Shelanu, one of four factions that make up the National Union party, asked Deputy Attorney General Shai Nitzan on Monday to investigate “Big Brother” contestant Edna Kanti. They say she has publicly incited rebellion and advocated refusal to serve in the Israel Defense Forces.Read More:http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/rightists-probe-big-brother-contestant-who-wants-palestinians-to-rise-up-1.260863
F.Scott Hess art. Image: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit4-5-06_detail.asp?picnum=2 ---National Union Chairman MK Yaakov Katz ("Ketzaleh") announced Thursday that he intends to join the hunger strike against the plan to raze a Beit El neighborhood. The strike is being held at a protest tent next to the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem. "I have decided that I will join the hunger strike this Sunday," Ketzaleh said. "I call on the entire nation of Israel, grandfathers and grandmothers, parents and children, to come and strengthen the protest tent."---INN---Image:
..Haaretz, Israel’s left-wing daily, used to be Israel’s newspaper of record and comparable to the New York Times, read also by those who differed from its line. Today Haaretz is read by less than 6 percent of Israelis, overwhelmingly composed of the country’s left-wing “elite.” Haaretz comes in far behind successful newcomer, right-of-center Israel Hayom at 38% and left-of-center Yediot Aharonot at 36%.
Haaretz’s English website, however, gets a very high Alexa ranking—around the 3900th most popular website in the world and currently neck-and-neck with the centrist Jerusalem Post and rightwing Arutz Sheva site. Indeed, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu allegedly called (his office later denied it) Haaretz and the New York Times Israel’s “two main enemies” and said:
“They set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world. Journalists read them every morning and base their news stories…on what they read in the New York Times and Haaretz”.
Whether or not Netanyahu said it, he could have added that foreign diplomats as well base their views of Israel, and their perceptions—however skewed—of Israeli opinion, on what they read in Haaretz.
For his part, Israeli justice minister Yaakov Neeman has allegedly gone even further and likened Haaretz to Der Stürmer…Read More:http://israeljewsjudaism.blogspot.ca/2012/02/anti-israel-campaign-in-haaretz.html#.T8evgyqF9cc
Image: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/dersturmgal/Anti-Semitic%20cartoon%20from%20Der%20Sturmer.html Read More:http://israeljewsjudaism.blogspot.ca/2012/02/anti-israel-campaign-in-haaretz.html#.T8evgyqF9cc ---By now it should be emerging that—aside from portraying Israel as a country that touts a phony Iranian threat for its own nefarious purposes, or might start a Middle Eastern conflagration for its own sneaky reasons—Haaretz is not fond of “the settlers.” The fury toward Israelis who live in the West Bank—now numbering well over 300,000 and covering the full sociological spectrum—clearly smacks of pathological obsession. Wednesday’s column by Zvi Barel directed still more abuse at these people, depicting them as taking over the country while perhaps being “willing to give Israel equal rights under conditions dictated by the invaders of the hills.” ---
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