Israel Hayom
24 November '11
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=893
Wednesday's speeches by Tzipi Livni and Shaul Mofaz in the Knesset accurately reflected the deterioration of the political debate in Israel. After we all read the article on Saturday about Israel being similar to the Weimar Republic in its final days, all hope is lost. What can you say to someone who believes that they live in an imaginary reality of baseless historical comparisons? This is total intellectual anarchy.
Mofaz used a well-known gimmick - George Orwell's "1984." Mofaz interspersed his brief speech with words taken from an alarming semantic pool: "dark regimes," "unenlightened," "thought police," "destructive," "dictatorship," "dangerous," "evil" and "monstrous."
The irony is that in "1984," Orwell actually lashed out against the European Left and the fulfillment of its political aspirations in the Soviet Union. So Israel is both a fascist dictatorship and a horrific Stalinist regime? What will they say tomorrow when they run out of comparisons and historical analogies? Ah, I remember, Mofaz also said we are a "pale version of the iron boot of China." Who writes his speeches? You have gone too far.
Listening to Kadima members talk about democracy and tyranny of the majority is just funny. Kadima was initially founded on a platform that spit in the eye of democracy and voters' wishes. Livni and Mofaz spoke about the silencing of voices in the media. I actually remember the media silencing the voices of anyone who opposed the (Kadima-led) disengagement or the Oslo Accords or anyone who dared criticize Aharon Barak's school of thought, and more. And on the flipside of the same coin the media has made every effort to market the crazy ideas of the Left, even at the cost of bloodshed.
Putting their usual performances aside, Mofaz and Livni know that the Israeli media's monolithic point of view is the real danger to democracy. It is this uniformity of ideas that prevents any serious debate on the core Israeli issues, because it fails to represent conservative viewpoints – with which the majority identifies.
That is what the Left is protecting – its control centers – and all this talk about the amendment to the libel law is secondary. The libel law amendment is not the issue, rather it is the feeling that things are about to radically change in the media and that the excluded public will finally get a voice and a turn at the microphone.
By the way, the Left and its mouthpieces are calling the amendment to the libel law "the silencing law." The satirical website Latma states that according to that logic, we should also call the law against rape "the law of abstinence"...
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The Israeli Left for all it's pretensions has been intellectually bankrupt for decades. Were it not for the Israeli media and the courts, the Left in Israel would have been dead and buried long ago.
ReplyDeleteYou have picked on Kadima members Livni and Mofaz as being particularly absurd in their ideas, but Shimon Peres, the Israeli President has been wowing us to fits of roaring laughter with his historical inaccuracies, shallow and ridiculous political comparisons, and utterly foolish negotiating positions for fifty years, and he's President now!