RUTHFULLY YOURS

When 57-year-old Haifa resident Moshe Silman set himself on fire during Saturday night’s demonstration in Tel Aviv to mark the year anniversary of the social protests, he also sparked a media blaze.

Before he’d even made it to the hospital, comparisons were being made between his “act of desperation” and that of Muhammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose own self-immolation in December 2010 was the catalyst of the so-called “Arab Spring.”

That Silman had left a note on the scene blaming the government for his woes — which, indeed, were many — served the Israeli protest movement well. Scores of placard-wielding malcontents descended on the Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, where Silman has been lying in the Intensive Care Unit since he lit the match to his gasoline-doused clothing and skin.

Bouazizi did not survive. Nor is it likely, according to doctors interviewed, that the comatose Silman will live, after having 90 percent of his body covered in severe burns.

The public and the press are eating the story up, ignoring many of the details that have emerged about Silman’s personal life which indicate he’s no Bouazizi. One already knows (though few deign to state) that Israel in no way resembles Tunisia today — nor ever did. But those who seek to bemoan their fate while undermining the government never let facts get in the way of ideology.

In this case, in particular, who is going to cast aspersions on a man who was in such existential pain that he opted for an agonizing and slow suicide? Even I am not prepared to do much more than express my sadness and horror at Silman’s plight — which is exactly what the country’s politicians have all been doing this week.

Still, I have no compunction whatsoever about taking issue with a certain member of the media, political commentator Oren Nahari, whose broadcast on Monday morning made me want to pour flammable material over the radio in my kitchen and flick my cigarette lighter at it.

In a sanctimonious tone that journalists reserve for solemn occasions, Nahari poured on the “social gap” molasses ad nauseam. He stopped short of anointing Silman a martyr for the oh-so-just cause of toppling a system in which a man who loses his business and therefore cannot pay his mortgage might find himself without a place to live. (He never mentioned that Silman’s sister, who was weeping for TV cameras at the hospital and blaming the government for the fact that her brother had no apartment, never offered her sibling refuge in her own home.)

The real clincher was when Nahari — like the rest of his peers in the Israeli press — invoked Bouazizi, and then played Pete Seeger’s “Little Boxes” in the background.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with metaphors, but those employing them ought to do their homework. Nahari sure didn’t bother doing his.

Anyone familiar with the 1960s political satire song, written by Malvina Reynolds and made mega-famous by Seeger, knows that it is a scathing attack on the middle class — the very group that Nahari and company are supposedly championing. “Little Boxes” makes mince meat out of families who work to have a modest mortgage on a house in the suburbs and send their kids to camp and college. It oozes disdain for people just trying to make a living and provide a better life for their families.

If Nahari had deigned to listen to the lyrics, instead of using the music for purposes of pathos, he would know it, too. They are as follows:

Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes made of ticky tacky

Little boxes

Little boxes

Little boxes all the same

There’s a green one and a pink one

And a blue one and a yellow one

And they’re all made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same

And the people in the houses all go to the university

And they all get put in boxes, little boxes all the same

And there’s doctors and there’s lawyers

And business executives

And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same

And they all play on the golf course and drink their martini dry

And they all have pretty children and the children go to school

And the children go to summer camp

And then to the university

And they all get put in boxes, and they all come out the same

And the boys go into business and marry and raise a family

And they all get put in boxes, little boxes all the same

Ironically, the only thing actually common to Bouazizi and Silman is that both would have liked nothing better than to live in one of those “little boxes on a hillside” — you know, the kind that Nahari and his cohorts occupy.

Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring,’” now on available on Amazon.

To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the “Arab Spring” by Ruthie Blum (Aug 2, 2012)

• $17.95 Paperback