In November, the right won the election in Israel and then, upon assuming power in January, began to implement the policies on which it ran. At which point, some of the losers of the election took to the streets. Ever since, those in ideological agreement with the losers have expressed continual wonderment and pride at the fact that 8 or 9 percent of the population of the small country is out in the streets on a weekly basis. Yes, but more than 50 percent of the electorate in Israel voted the other way. Imagine if they took to the streets. But you can’t, because they won’t, because they shouldn’t have to. Democracies exist to make street action unnecessary…
You could say this about other countries as well.
The parallels with Trump continue. The Israeli left is attacking Netanyahu exactly as the American left attacked Trump. The Mossad is reported in the famous “Leak” as siding with the left, just as the CIA does here. Maybe Israel has a Deep State too.
1) Agreeing with Mike K above.
2) Disagreeing in part with Podhoretz. A pure democracy would have constant street actions as each side tried to prove or seize the appearance of a majority. A constitutional republic with a democratic form of government does not need the constant street actions assuming that the law is enforced equally for all.
In both the Israeli and US cases, the issues are in doubt.
Subotai Bahadur
They are not in doubt. The Israelis finally are showing that they are not the new Nazi state, and protesting hard.
I am surprised and pleased by all this.
The troll lectures us while Canada becomes a real Nazi state.
I used to predict that Israel would be gone by the early 2020s–obliterated by the Muslims once the latter got their acts together for the couple of weeks it would take. I did not anticipate that the Muslim neighbors would prove so inept, incompetent, and divided.
Of course, it remains true that Israel has every major city in the area–and many outside it–targeted with nukes, as insurance.
In the long run, diving headfirst into a sea of Muslims may turn out to have been fatal to the
Zionist experiment.
“The troll lectures us while Canada becomes a real Nazi state.”
It is certainly true the right wing yahoos that did the Freedom Convoy are doing very well. It is social media that drives this kind of thing. I am interested to see if this actually has legs. If it does, you may have a point.
Since I grew up in Canada and always had close interest in Britain, I don’t get how any of Netanyahu’s measures would make Israel a Nazi state. Certainly not the judicial stuff, which would bring Israel into line with traditional Westminster norms.
In an ideal world, the politics of judicial selection and the legislative and executive influence would be behind the scenes for the most part, with sufficient harmony among the political and judicial castes AND the electorate for it to work smoothly. When the demands for transparency and the divisions in society make that impossible, the solution is NOT to make the judiciary a self-selecting caste with no outside input and to redefine anything else as “Not the Rule of Law”. The rule of judges is not the rule of law.
Also, when did Podhoretz come around? He had turned into a pretty hysterical borderline leftist there some years ago.
The parallels are astounding. I am still amazed at the riots in various cities last year and the Democratic mayors apparently given “marching orders” to keep the police at bay.
And how many of those rioters were bussed in from elsewhere?
Its a very small tail wagging a very large dog.
And it is true; what the left can’t win by the ballot box their next resort is the courts and then the streets.
Arnold J. Toynbee
I think that, in the Zionist movement, Western Jews have assimilated gentile Western Civilization in the most unfortunate possible form. They have assimilated the West’s nationalism and colonization. The seizure of the houses, lands, and property of the 900,000 Palestinian Arabs who are now refugees is on a moral level with the worst crimes and injustices committed, during the last four or five centuries, by gentile Western European conquerors and colonists overseas.’
The Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz introduced the term “Judeo-Nazis. He argued that continued military occupation of the Palestinian territories would lead to the moral degradation of Israeli Defense Force (IDF), with individuals committing atrocities for state security interests.
I could go on for a long time.
Did someone say Trucker Convoy?
The time when Justin Trudeau invoked the modern-successor to the War Measures Act so that he could assume sweeping powers to clear Ottawa streets of tractor trailers and bouncy castles when it turned out all that was needed was some extra out-of-town police and tow trucks (you know you like how the border blockades were opened)? Yeah but where was the fun in going that route? After all Trudeau had spent the previous months basically running the convoy members out of Canadian society by citing their crowds were riddled with Confederate battle flags and swastikas and that they were desecrating Canadian symbols.
I noticed in that none of the Canadian media outlets I followed that were reporting on the protests (CBC, CTV, Ottawa Citizen, Globe and Mail, Toronto Sun) actually did any reporting inside the barricades by talking to the protestors themselves so everyone just simply took Trudeau’s defamations at face value as opposed to walking a few hundreds down the street and talking to people. To paraphrase Neville Chamberlain for the media the protests involved people far across the street of which we want to know nothing about. Why? Because that makes it easier to crack down on them later. I laughed when I saw Elon Musk’s crack about the CBC and “government-funded media” but really go and read N.S. Lyon’s post about state media (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/of-course-npr-and-the-bbc-are-state)
I found 1 or 2 blogs that did a few posts from within the barricade but really the only on-site reporting from a professional reporter was over on Spiked involving an Ottawa-based freelancer, someone who was appalled by both the media and Trudeau in their sliming of Canadians. https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/18/the-truckers-have-changed-canada-forever/
I can just imagine people pleading to Trudeau to stop the Convoy insurrection, for him to intervene and crush their infernal honking and the great man simply responded “Just watch me” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_watch_me
During my confab last November back in Arizona, we had a long discussion on the Convoy. The one aspect that really stood out for us was Trudeau conducted a perfect information warfare campaign. He placed the protesters outside of the Canadian mainstream through lies and slanders, had his allies in the media cover for him by simply regurgitating government talking points and reusing to do any honest reporting, and then when the time was ripe went in and did what should be done to all enemies of the state and assumed dictatorial powers. Yikes. Read the story of the Convoy and learn from it because that’s the playbook.
We (we had a few NDPers who down from Manitoba joining us) decided that one of the key lessons from Ottawa, Jan. 6, and Nicholas Sandmann was that no protests should be undertaken without a specific information auxiliary attached to it. For every protest there should be 2 groups. The first involves people who would look specifically for agent provocateurs, either those looking to disrupt the gathering or more likely smear it by trying to inspire it to commit violent acts or wear offensive (Nazi) regalia and symbols. The second would be a trained media component using social media to document the protests, attendees, and build a specific video narrative of the events to counteract smears from both the government and media on the Left. You know the lines of attack, deal with it.
As far as Israel and Nazis and all of that. Give me a break. That’s just lazy talk and no, citing other people using that term in a reckless manner doesn’t work either. You can be adamantly against what Israel is doing in regard to the Palestinians and view it as a atrocity, but Nazism is a specific identity linked to a specific moment in time. Whether its Israel or the guy who lives down the street from me, unless the party in question wields specific Nazi symbols, pledges allegiance to Hitler, and either wants to build bases on the dark side of the moon or live in Illinois let’s call them something else. Words mean something
I promise that when Canada starts invoking MAID to cut down on health care costs I will not call it “Nazi.” Atrocious perhaps, certainly Hegelian, but not Nazi
For every protest there should be 2 groups. The first involves people who would look specifically for agent provocateurs, either those looking to disrupt the gathering or more likely smear it by trying to inspire it to commit violent acts or wear offensive (Nazi) regalia and symbols.
The TEA Party pretty much did that. At this rally the crowd saw a agitator with a sign that was antithetical to the group’s policies and several people followed him around holding a sign over his head until he left.
The troll sort of serves that function here,
Conquering people and taking their land and stuff and making them refugees is an infamy, but one practiced by all people throughout history on every continent to whatever scale they were capable, at some point in their history. Even the Tibetans and the Uighurs have done it. The Arabs certainly have done this many, many times. The Canaanite ancestors that ultimately the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs have in common [with admixture] may not have done so- they enter history all across the Levant of unknown origin. Though the Phoenicians did a bit overseas and the Aramaeans did it too, and so on. Degrees and precise viciousness of violence varied, but always present.
As much as that DOES sum up the Western imperial heritage, in many ways, they did a few things way, way worse than that. All that stuff is just par for the course and everybody has done it. Even slavery, which is worse than what was done to the Palestinians, was pretty common in the world. Some nastier stuff happened in scattered locales and in a big way in places like the Congo.
Of course, in Toynbee’s time the Germans and the Russians were rapidly and massively redefining the “worst crimes and injustices committed” in history, and pretty much against people of their own races [the more so now we know the genome of the Ashkenazim is half Italic], just as the Chinese were doing to people of their own or near kindred at many times in history.
tl:dr- Palestinians not as bad as the worst sins of colonialism, which in turn was never that much of a standout. Timur would laugh.
I’m much, much more sympathetic to the Palestinians and less so to Israel than I was in the 80s. The Palestinians had been taking too much Russian money, allying with Eurotrash terrorists, and blowing up stuff in Europe. They picked their side for good reasons, and not for the first time, but still. Now I take a gentler line but after a while I just want them to stop moaning. Others have faced such fates and moved on, dispersed, or accepted smaller political rewards as the price of repeated military defeat. Only they remain forever refugees, forever claiming all or nothing. Let them channel the presumably superb Palestinian physics community, invent time travel and: accept the Peel plan in 1937; or accept the UN plan in 1948; or pressure the Jordanians for sovereignty over the West Bank circa 1960 and the Egyptians for Gaza; or petition the Israelis for sovereignty on those lands in alliance with Israel by the end of June 1967. Chose war every time in hope of complete victory.
The Palestinians never learned from the Sudeten Germans. Lose a war you started and then get on with life.
Every square inch of this planet is owned by right of conquest.
Trudeau is an idiot. It was obvious that just enforcing laws that are on the books already, would have dismantled the halfwit truckers convoy. It was not theirs anyway. This is the antivax movement co-opting the half smart for their own purpose.
You should understand I am not on anyone’s side. I don’t vote anymore because there is no one I can endorse.
well they are the tools of qatar and iran, as they were that of the soviets and the saudis at one point according to pacepa, arafat (haj amin husseinis nephew was grus’ asset, sakharovsky, whereas haddad and mahmoud abbas (the last is the survivor was kgb)
I don’r endorse the notion, hes fidels’ son, his parents were stupid enough for both of them,
so this largely a proxy war with qatar and turkey in the sunni islamic bloc, and iran in the shia one, the former explains the interminable war in yemen, with the houthis the aqap, and the islamic state remnant in israel proper there is palestinian islamic jihad (thats the outfit that had sami al arian at the university of south florida) there are others,
their allies in the west are the likes of Robert Malley who tells Blinken what to say, (he and effendi khashoggi were of like minds on the Taliban, Hamas and the Algerians, he drove Egypt and now Sudan into the Russian orbit (a short drive considering long standing ties with both)
You can be adamantly against what Israel is doing in regard to the Palestinians and view it as a atrocity, but Nazism is a specific identity linked to a specific moment in time.
You can be adamantly against what Israel is doing in regard to the Palestinians and view it as a atrocity, just as you can be adamantly against Trump because of his collusion with Putin.
Just saying.
He parallels between the German Nazis and their treatment of the Jews, and the Israeli Nazi and their treatment of the Palestinians are too much to ignore.
He parallels between the German Nazis and their treatment of the Jews, and the Israeli Nazi and their treatment of the Palestinians are too much to ignore.
Bullshit. If the similarities were strong you would have listed them. OTOH, the treatment of Jews by Arab govts, the treatment of gays by the Palestinian Authority, the treatment of Christians in areas dominated by Islamic fundamentalists. . .
I think I need a new keyboard. I said “too much to ignore”, you may take that any way you want.