THE CURS AND CURSE OF ISRAEL’S LOONY LEFT….STEVE PLAUT
1. I usually avoid mentioning Benny Zipper in my postings because he is such a pathetic Quisling that he makes the other writers for Haaretz look like serious patriotic thinkers. Zipper is the one Haaretz columnist who is even more enthusiastically pro-auto-annihilation for Israel than Gideon Levy. A half-witted subliterate, Zipper nevertheless utilizes his space at Haaretz to promote Israel’s destruction. (Here are Zipper’s comments on an Italian Holocaust Denial blog: http://peacepalestine.blogspot.com/2006/08/benny-zipper-kfar-qana-as-oy-oy-oy.html )
But now Zipper has an even better idea. He lays it out in the monthly Yakinton (meaning Hyacinth), a German-language magazine that has been coming out since 1932 serving German Jews living in Israel. In his article, cited at length in Hebrew in Makor Rishon, which ran there just before Rosh Hashana, Zipper outlines his plan for the peaceful future. He proposes that a new secularist leftist Jewish cultural center be established in Berlin, one that will battle against reactionary religiosity and fascism, by which he means Israel and Zionism. He argues that Israel will not serve in the future as the cultural heart of Jewry because it is so sunken into its obsession with blood and materialism. Hence, it only makes sense that Berlin emerge as the true center of progressive secularist Jewry.
In the article he cites approvingly his own father, a German Jew, who disliked the Ashkenazi Jews from Russia and Poland and Eastern Europe, the “Ostjuden,” and regarded them as violent and primitive. This is all a bit amusing; yes, it is true that 100 or so years ago some German Jews looked down their noses at Eastern European Jews, not only in Germany but also in the US. Some of the better known American Jewish institutions were set up in the 19th century by German Jews to try to teach the primitive Yiddish speaking newcomers from the Pale how to comport themselves in the New World. Be that as it may, for the Zipper, the snooty dislike for Yiddish speaking Jews is his “literary” way to express his own contempt for Zionists and Orthodox Jews. Zipper is the Israeli Helen Thomas, who wants to send all the Jews back to Berlin from occupied Palestine. You can imagine the fate he wishes to unzip for Israeli Jews.
This story would probably not be newsworthy except for the response to Zipper’s nonsense from Prof. Yehouda Bauer. He is one of Israel’s best-known academics and intellectuals. He is a world-class historian of the Holocaust. No one would ever confuse Bauer for a non-leftist. His scholarship and his leftism won for him the Israel Prize and numerous other awards. When asked what he makes about the Zippie’s new proposal, Bauer dismissed Zipper as a “leftist fascist” and as “anti-Jewish.”
Now I have long been using the term “leftwing fascist” to describe Israel’s radical Left and especially the leftists who are battling against freedom of speech in Israel for non-leftists. But when I use the term, no one thinks it extraordinary or newsworthy. When Prof. Bauer dismisses the Haaretz writer with the Ziplock brain as a leftwing fascist, you know that progress is being made.
2. You may remember the moans and screams when the Im Tirtzu students called Naomi Hazan, the chief of the New Israel Fund, names. They also showed her in an unflattering poster with a rhino horn on her forehead. You also may recall the self-righteous peacocking of the Left and its “intellectual” amen chorus whenever anyone uses a derogatory adjective to refer to leftist anti-Zionist Israeli academics. Sure, you can disagree with Neve Gordon and Ilan Pappe, they bellow, just do not ever ever ever refer to them as traitors!!
Well, all this self-righteous posturing by the Caring Left over the uses of adjectives has never extended to any shock or dismay when it comes to the adjectives used by the Left to smear and demonize non-leftists. We will not recycle here the endless list of Der Sturmer-like rhetoric coming from the Far Left when it comes to non-leftists. Settlers and Orthodox Jews earn their special venom. One could take old articles from Der Sturmer and replace the word “Jew” for “settler” and you would have a pretty good sample of what the Left and its captive media have to say. Arieh Stav once collected a set of these, but it is in Hebrew.
The best and most recent illustration of the rhetorical atrocities coming from the radical Left involves Yehoshua (or Joshua) Sobol. He is a far-Leftist playwright, the theatrical analogue in Israel to David Grossman. He has written and staged plays about Palestinians and promoting the Palestinian “narrative.” Many of these have been staged at the Haifa Municipal Theater and they explain why the last time I spent money going to see any plays at that theater was when Ronald Reagan was still president.
Sobol is now back and denouncing “settlers” as “ticks.” Not the clock type but the Lime Disease sort. He also calls them “metastases.” Those are his exact words. It is part of his throwing his support behind the Leftists in Israel and abroad boycotting the Ariel University for being positioned on the correct side of Israel’s pre-1967 Green Line. (Those moonbats have now been joined by Frank Gehry, the super-architect, and a host of Hollywood airheads.)
But Sobol’s Sturmer-like imagery has now cost him a job. He was on the teaching staff for the Maale Film School in Jerusalem (see http://www.maale.co.il/default.asp?PageID=66 ) . The school, which I believe is funded by the Israeli taxpayer, claimed it was feeling pressure to cut its ties with Sobol the same way one pulls a Connecticut tick off one’s scalp.
Meanwhile, get ready and get set for the new screams from the anti-democratic Left about “McCarthyism” and fascism. Sobol calling people ticks is simply progressive exercise of freedom of speech, but denouncing him for doing so is incitement and fascism.
3. Bill Clinton took a few moments off from his pursuit of interns in order to smear Russian Jews. Seems that old Bubba is upset because Russian Jews are opposed to the program for peace through appeasement and capitulation that the Israeli Left and its overseas supporters want to impose. That, in the mind of Bill the ex Borgia-President, makes them an obstacle to peace. See http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3958611,00.html
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