On Iran, listen to the euphony between crackpot right-wing raving in Israel and the crackpot raving of the American Likudniks

Haaretz illustrated the Yossi Verter piece referenced below with this remembrance of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu addressing Congress last March at the invitation of aspiring American Likudnik House Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner.

"Sometimes it’s hard to know where Sheldon Adelson, the biggest Republican donor, ends and Netanyahu begins."

-- Haaretz's Yossi Verter, in "Netanyahu lost his
Iran bet, but his next gamble may be disastrous"

by Ken

The braying jackasses of the American Right take on a somewhat different rhetorical character when their chorus is led by the Likud-firsters whose primary allegiance is not to the American Republican Party but to the Israeli Likud. The rhetoric tends to take on a graven-on-Mt. Sinai character, with an in-our-face confidence in and commitment to the lies and delusions the American Likudniks pull out of their stinky behinds which pretends to biblical certainty. (If you need to have your image refreshed, check out any post by washingtonpost.com's designated right-wing gargoyle, Jennifer Rubin.)

Not surprisingly, the nuclear deal with Iran came into the world as an automatic target of the jenniferrubinites. Since most of these people are as lazy as they are stupid and dishonest, which is to say plenty lazy, they probably still don't know what's included in the agreement, but that never mattered. As I was saying the other day, they don't have to know what's in it to know that it's the awfulest agreement in the history of agreements, and the parties to it -- well, let's be blunt, that Kenyan dupe-or-devil Obama -- have either stupidly or knowingly betrayed all decent folk, not to mention striking a dagger to the heart of Israel.

All of this was a given. Does this sound familiar at all?

Even before the details of the agreement were known, and without having any idea what was or wasn’t included, senior Likud officials were firing cannon shells through the electronic media. Talking points that had been sent to them in advance contained three main points: 1. The agreement is bad, terrible, and awful; 2. If not for Netanyahu, the situation would have been much worse, much earlier; 3. The opposition is to blame and ought to be ashamed for not being supportive enough/for being critical now/for not standing tensely quiet at the side of the prime minister, meaning the State of Israel.

The specifics here relate to Israeli politics, and so isn't familiar because the jenniferrubinites don't acknowledge Israeli politics, only the politics of the crack-brained devils of Likud.

The paragraph is from a piece written midweek last week by Haaretz's Yossi Verter, headlined "Netanyahu lost his Iran bet, but his next gamble may be disastrous," with an even more provocative deck: "After the deal was announced, the prime minister's appearance was that of a desperate gambler who had lost everything. But now he wants to wreck what’s left of U.S.-Israel relations."

Here's how Yossi began his piece:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looks defeated. He was ashen-faced on Tuesday next to the Dutch foreign minister at their joint press conference in Jerusalem; his appearance was that of a desperate gambler who had lost everything. The Iranian nuclear agreement, against which he had vigorously and repeatedly warned, had become a fait accompli. The deal over which he had declared political war on the president of the United States, while breaking all the rules of diplomatic relations between friendly countries, had become a reality, for better or worse.

Now I don't suggest that Haaretz represents views that are held universally in Israel, but I suspect that anyone conditioned by the bullying rhetoric of the American Likudniks may be surprised to learn that on Bibi Netanyahu's home turf he's not regarded as a biblical sage but as a grubby and often dangerous politician.

"The prime minister himself," Yossi wrote, "hastened Tuesday to call on the opposition to 'put petty politics aside and unite for the State of Israel's national interests,' as if the Iranian nukes hadn't served as an effective political weapon for him during every recent election campaign." Does this sound familiar? With the American Right too, if you're beating the drum for hard-core right-wing ideology, you're speaking truth on behalf of the national interest, whereas any disagreements are dismissed as "petty politics." (Of course if such disagreements happen to touch on any possibility fallibility in the Likud worldview, you're also automatically branded an Enemy of Israel.)

Yossi actually gives Bibi "credit for stubbornly putting the nuclear issue on the global agenda, significantly contributing to the intensified sanctions on Iran."

On the other hand, he lost his brakes when he did not hesitate to hook up with the Republican Party in its campaign against U.S. President Barack Obama. Sometimes it’s hard to know where Sheldon Adelson, the biggest Republican donor, ends and Netanyahu begins.

Which brings us to what Bibi is up to now.

Netanyahu’s spokespeople said he plans to “kill himself” pursuing the last remaining option for scuttling the deal – preventing its ratification by the U.S. House of Representatives – by persuading Democratic congressmen to defect to the Republican camp and vote against their president. The destruction and devastation he avoided inflicting on the nuclear facilities scattered throughout Iran, he now wants to wreck on what’s left of U.S.-Israel relations. Here we again see his compulsive gambler syndrome: After losing his pants, he’s now putting his underwear on the roulette wheel in a move that experts on American politics say hasn’t much of a chance.

I'm not so sure that this gamble is a sure loser. The American Likudniks and the rest of their right-wing brethren, not to mention the great Right-Wing Noise Machine, know how to press buttons with the American public which can whip up a lot of influential hysteria. It's Yossi's judgment, though, that "in this context, the call by Likud ministers for 'internal cohesion that's been lacking until now' sounds pathetic." And he asks:

Why exactly is Netanyahu demanding that Labor’s Isaac Herzog, Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid, Meretz’s Zehava Galon and Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman join him? So they can share responsibility for the worsening of the fight between Israel and the leader of the free world?

Yossi proceeds to describe a political moment in Israel that again sounds grubbily familiar:

Herzog and Lapid were competing with each other on Tuesdayto show whose patriotism was greater. Lapid drew first with an interview he gave to a foreign television network. But Herzog landed a crushing blow on him by tweeting that he had spoken with the prime minister and would soon be traveling to the United States “to advance a package of security measures to suit the new situation.”

Perhaps Herzog has been named defense minister and nobody told us. Perhaps something else is going on between him and Netanyahu, and under the pretext of the “new situation,” the chairman of Zionist Union plans to bring his party into Netanyahu’s government.

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Jen Sorensen: "If cops treated bankers the way Ferguson cops treat black people" (Plus: What does Ferguson have to do with racism in Israel?)

Daily Kos Comics [click to enlarge]

by Ken

I love this cartoon. The premise is so simple, even obvious, that it almost doesn't matter how it's actually executed -- the basic point is made, and the fact that it is so simple and obvious doesn't make the point any less important to make: If there's one thing we learned from -- or were reminded by -- the events at Feguson, it's that inequality of all sorts, economic as well as social (I totally love the way Jen Sorensen has neatly tied them together here), is now so firmly entrenched in our society that the "nuts" and "troublemakers" and, yes, "outside agitators" are the people who dare to say, "Now wait a minute there. When did this become not merely okay but the basic way our society is now structured?"

I suppose it was smart of Jen Sorensen to include "A pre-emptive alert for the satire-challenged":

This strip is obviously not endorsing violence against bankers. It is saying that many in the financial world are real thugs who are never treated the way police often treat black citizens in Ferguson and many other places. The devastation caused by white-collar criminals — the loss of so many people’s homes and life savings, leading to broken families, poor health, depression, and suicide, has caused suffering on an immense scale. Yet bankers have to try very, very hard to get themselves arrested, and even then they usually aren’t successful.

With this cartoon, I am also trying to show just how annoying and unreasonable Ferguson cops must seem to people who live there.

I haven't had anything to say till now about the events in Ferguson, because the things that seemed to me to need saying were being said. It's a situation that was crying out for something like this to happen, and it happened, and the underlying situation remains unchanged, and is probably awfully similar to that of places all over the country.

And beyond that, what's really scary is the reaction of such a large, or at least vocal, segment of the country: that none of that matters, and what really matters is that finally the authorities have done something about it, namely shoot one of the [expletive deleted] bastards. I can't tell you how much this sickens and frightens me.

I want to come back to the "economic inequality" side of the issue tomorrow. Meanwhile, if you haven't read Harold Meyerson's Washington Post column "In corporations, it’s owner-take-all," you should do that now.

IN THE MATTER OF ETHNIC AND SOCIAL RIFTS
BETWEEN "US" AND "THE OTHERS" --

The point to stress is what an easy and relatively efficient solution it is for powers-that-be and other status-quo-ers -- almost embarrassingly easy and efficient, if these people were capable of embarrassment. It harnesses vast qualities of free-floating resentment and disappointment and turns it against your enemies while relieving you of any obligation or even fleeting inclination to deal with actual grievances and problems.

And by way of example, I come back to a recent piece from Haaretz forwarded by a friend, "Israeli teenagers: Racist and proud of it," which portrays a situation way worse than I had imagined -- and I was imagining a situation that's pretty darned bad.

It's a report by Or Kashti based on the forthcoming book (in Hebrew) Scenes from a School Life by Idan Yaron and Yoram Harpaz, "based on anthropological observations made by Dr. Yaron, a sociologist, over the course of three years in a six-year, secular high school in the Israeli heartland -- 'the most average school we could find,' says Harpaz, a professor of education." Kashti highlights this paragraph:

“For me, personally, Arabs are something I can’t look at and can’t stand,” a 10th-grade girl from a high school in the central part of the country says in abominable Hebrew. “I am tremendously racist. I come from a racist home. If I get the chance in the army to shoot one of them, I won’t think twice. I’m ready to kill someone with my hands, and it’s an Arab. In my education I learned that . . . their education is to be terrorists, and there is no belief in them. I live in an area of Arabs, and every day I see these Ishmaelites, who pass by the [bus] station and whistle. I wish them death.”

As if this wasn't terrifying enough, the book's message apparently is that this isn't an aberration, it's now typical of young Israelis, and it hasn't happened by accident. Kashti writes:

Yaron’s descriptions of what he saw at the school show that such hatred is a basic everyday element among youth, and a key component of their identity. Yaron portrays the hatred without rose-colored glasses or any attempt to present it as a sign of social “unity.” What he observed is unfiltered hatred. One conclusion that arises from the text is how little the education system is able – or wants – to deal with the racism problem.

This is such an importantly eye-opening piece that for the benefit of those who may fall afoul of Haaretz's paywall, I'm appending the whole of it, if only to make clear that the reporting here isn't cherry-picking "nasty bits" for sensationalization. But this much of the piece should already have a nastily familiar ring. It's the sense and tone of the right-wing response to the events in Ferguson.

FOR NOW, YOU CAN CLICK THROUGH
TO READ OR KASHTI'S HAARETZ PIECE

Read more »

"Israeli racism has a new and original justification: The people love it" (Gideon Levy in Haaretz)

Haaretz caption: Beitar Jerusalem fans holding the flag of the outlawed racist Kach party at Teddy Stadium

by Ken

Probably there will be a lot of Americans who bristle at the idea that Israelis have broken new ground with the discovery that bigotry is good for business. Certainly Chick-fil-A CEO doesn't need any lessons from around the world in making bigotry pay -- although he does seem to have some killjoy traitors in his organization who leaned on him to delete the tweet he sent out decrying the Supreme Court decisions on same-sex marriage.

Israel has its killjoys too, among them Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, who unaccountably isn't thrilled by the idea of using anti-Arab bigotry to sell soccer. Can you imagine? My friend Leo passed this along to me, and I couldn't resist sharing it.

The Haim Revivo racism project

The new representative of Beitar Jerusalem's owner announced last week he wouldn't sign Arab players.

By Gideon Levy | Jul.07, 2013 | 4:41 AM |  7

Israeli racism has a new and original justification: The people love it. When there is racism, Arabs are prevented from joining sports teams, so the teams can find sponsors. If once we had political, practical, spiritual and religious Zionism, now we have ideological racism and racism stemming from the need to sign sponsors. The person who thought this idea up, the ideological successor to Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha'am, is an ex-soccer player, someone who made the list of greatest Israelis of all time: Haim Revivo.

The new representative of Beitar Jerusalem's owner announced last week that he wouldn't sign Arab players. "We do not seek to bring in an Arab player and provoke the fans," Revivo said. "It wouldn't be the right thing to do." He also told the fans to tone it down because "these things make it hard to get sponsors" - he was referring to the spate of racist slurs, stone-throwing, spitting and other violent acts by Beitar fans.

Revivo's new deal, as clear as the whistle of former star referee Pierluigi Collina, is that racism is good because the fans like it. The fans must not be provoked because then there will be no sponsors and no money. Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jorg Haider never thought of that.

It's a fine thing to hear from Revivo, of all people, such base justification for racism. He reached the height of his glory when he played in a Muslim country. From 2000 to 2003, Revivo was the king of Turkey. He played for the two finest teams in Istanbul, Fenerbahce and Galatasary, scored lots of goals and was voted the best foreign soccer player in Turkey. To this day there are taxi drivers in Taksim Square who, if you say "Israel" to them, will respond "Revivo," their eyes glistening.

No "representative of the owner" at those two clubs ever said he wouldn't sign Jewish (or Israeli ) players so as not to provoke the fans. Nor was there any problem with sponsors. It's not hard to guess what would have happened if a problem had come up with the Jew Revivo. A top-of-their-lungs chorus would have emerged from Elie Wiesel, the Wiesenthal Center, Yad Vashem, the Anti-Defamation League and Benjamin Netanyahu against the Turkish anti-Semitism that was calling for our destruction. But Turkey simply loved Revivo, judging him only on the number of goals he scored, not where he came from.

Revivo has forgotten this. He is a coward, with the reality shows "Dancing with the Stars" and "Eyal Golan is Calling You" and chairmanship of the Israel Football Players' Association under his belt. He knows the soul of the beast - the fans of his new club - which is the soul of many Israelis, just more crude and violent. So sometimes I love the Beitar fans; they shout what Israelis are thinking. It's not for nothing that Eyal Golan sings: "Who casts out the demons? / It's us, the Beitars. / Who's the queen? / Who's the champ? / Beitar Jerusalem on top."

This tune just goes on and on; words of praise for Yitzhak Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir, and words of hatred for Rabin and his late wife, Leah. "It happened in the square / The SWAT team was helpless / It didn't stop Amir / And suddenly, a red stain / We don't want a peace treaty." (The next part, about Leah Rabin, is unprintable ). And they sing: "We swear by the menorah / To the racism that is our dream / The whole world is our witness / There will be no Arabs here."

When they are lectured day and night about a Jewish state, they understand the real meaning better than other Israelis. Do Netanyahu and Likud MKs Yariv Levin, Danny Danon and Miri Regev think differently? Would Habayit Hayehudi leaders Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked phrase it differently?

Beitar's racist singing raises up dark and hidden feelings, whose very raising the self-righteous reject. Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu of Safed and the Beitar fans known as La Familia are the only ones who still manage to disgust us. Our political, judicial and educational leaders, no less racist and much more institutionalized, harmful and systematic, don't disgust us. So maybe we should thank this project of Revivo's. At least it disgusts us.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Just when you thought you've heard everything: Now there are National Socialists FOR Israel!

A friend passes along this nugget from the English-language edition of the fine Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

German neo-Nazis: We're pro-Israel, condemn anti-Semitism
By Ofer Aderet, Haaretz Correspondent

Nazis against anti-Semitism? As bizarre as that sounds, a group of Germans which calls itself "National Socialists For Israel" launched its Web site in support of Israel.

"Stop the hatred of the Jewish people," the Web site reads. "The Jews are a healthy, strong nation."

The organization - whose members have yet to reveal themselves to the public - claims that Israel's right to exist is anchored in the principles of social Darwinism, the same principles which the Nazis adopted prior to the Second World War.

"Israel earned the right to live among the nations [after emerging] from unending wars," the group writes on the site. "Israel also has a right to exist. This nation also has culture... The nation of Israel is appreciated... It is our duty, as neo-Nazis, to defend this supreme success. Not just for the German people and the European cultural sphere, but also, especially, for Israel."

As such, "Nazis for Israel" also leveled criticism at their colleagues in the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), calling them "politicos, cowards, and reactionaries."

"Show us proof of a Jewish plot to dominate the world," they wrote in a rare manifesto which was posted on their Web site.

These unusual statements on the internet compliment the group's other public campaigns, including the dissemination of bumper stickers. One of the stickers features a picture of Reinhard Heydrich, the senior Nazi official who chaired the Wansee Conference where the Final Solution was hatched. Underneath the photo reads: "As a Nazi, I'm a Zionist."

Another sticker shows a photo of Israel Defense Forces soldiers during the Second Lebanon War under the heading: "2,000 years of struggling to survive - respect to those worthy of it."

In terms of the group's attitude towards the Holocaust, the organization says: "We must view what is referred to as 'the Holocaust' within the context of acts of self-defense undertaken by nations under threat." It added, however, "that there is no justification for it." Instead, the Nazis ought to have supported the Zionist cause, the group states.

The group claims it held its first meeting of activists in Berlin last month. It said the meeting touched on issues ranging from "solidarity with Israel, anti-Semitism, capitalism, and Islam."

The website, by the way, is http://nasofi.blogspot.com/.

Well, you have to say, this is something genuinely new!

I have to think, though, that these are pretty sorry excuses for Nazis. I can see that the guys (what makes me think that the membership is predominantly male?) wanted really badly to join a group -- you know, for the camaraderie, the sense of belonging, the beerfests, and so on, but I have to think they really didn't do their homework, or just didn't think the thing through.

I mean, I have to think that this isn't just me -- that hating Jews and blaming the Jews for all the world's ills have always been an integral part of the National Socialist package. Really, the Fuehrer would surely have been pretty insistent on that.

The good news for our German friends is that the Nazis aren't the only fascist movement around. Why, the actual "fascists," for example -- i Fascisti would be much more accommodating of non-Jew-haters. In a pinch, they can always start their own fascist movement. (They should try to make sure that at least one of the founding members has a really nice house, where they could have parties and such.) But what's the point of being a neo-Nazi when you just know that all the other neo-Nazis are just going to look down at you?

For what it's worth, we find this item in the political section of the Washington, D.C., sector of Craig's List:

"National Socialists For Israel"
Alleged German Group Upsets Jews

6/4/2008
Overthrow Staff

Berlin, Germany -- The Jewish press is puzzling this morning over whether a group calling itself "National Socialists for Israel" is real. The group, which appears to exist only as a blog hosted by Google, claims to support the Zionist occupation of Palestine and recommend that Germans fly the flag of the Zionist Entity at nationalist demonstrations.

Such political views are not uncommon in the "third positionist" scene, which is a term used to describe ideologies that support German nationalism as one manifestation of a universal nationalism that is valid for all people. Adherents of these ideologies, who tend to be few and divorced from any political movement, often refer to themselves as "national anarchists", "national bolsheviks" or with similar mixed left and right wing monikers.

Such movements originate in left wing tendencies in the German National Socialist movement of the 1920s and 1930s, a fuller discussion of which appeared in the November 2007 issue of National Socialist magazine, entitled "Nationalism in the Mud".

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