Disgusting and Horrific! Israeli Minister Claimed Fascism Part of Israeli Identity

This really shows how twisted and vile Netanyahu and his coalition are. Yesterday the Jewish anti-Fascist, anti-Zionist activist Tony Greenstein, put up a piece about how he’d been contacted by an Israeli academic, Avraham Oz. Mr Oz is professor of Theatre at Haifa University and a long-standing supporter of the Israeli left. The professor was appealing for funding for the Alfa Theatre in Haifa. It is in danger of losing its state funding following allegations made by an informer, Shai Glick, to the government. Netanyahu’s vile administration is not only determined to expropriate and eventually expel the indigenous Arabs, but also to silence and harass dissenting voices in Israel. I gather from previous posts that it has launched attacks intended to stifle criticism and reporting of atrocities and other crimes against humanity from groups like Breaking the Silence, a veterans’ organisation, and the Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem. Regev has been part of this campaign in her capacity as Israeli Culture Minister. Last year she attempted to pass a ‘Cultural Loyalty’ bill, which would have denied funding to any work that did not respect the symbols of the state of Israel, viewed Independence Day as a day of mourning, or incited violence and terrorism. Tony points out that this would mean that any play about the Palestinian Nakba – their term for massacres and ethnic cleansing against them that was an integral part of the foundation of Israel as an independent state, would lose its state funding. And such a play may even face banning altogether.

It’s the kind of cultural repression found in Communism and Fascism. And what is truly sickening is that Regev actually said that she was proud to be a ‘Fascist’, and that Fascism was an integral part of Israeli culture! She also made a speech in 2002 declaring Sudanese immigrants to be a ‘cancer’ in Israel’s body. Not surprisingly, her critics produced mock images of her in Nazi uniform, which is anti-Semitic under the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, and Regev herself got upset.

Tony puts her remarks into context with the Zionists’ policy of allying themselves with real gentile anti-Semites in order to encourage the foundation of a Jewish state and Jewish immigration to it. He shows this went as far back as Chaim Herzog, who wrote that the Jews had been too hard on groups like the British Brothers’ League, which had campaigned against Jewish immigration to Britain in the early 20th century.

He also quotes Jewish authorities on the rabbinical condemnation of tell-tales like Glick. I’ve used similar quotes in some of my pieces attacking groups like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Gnasherjew troll army, who go through people’s social media posts looking for material they can use to accuse them falsely of being anti-Semites.

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2019/11/israels-kulturkampf-culture-minister.html

Anti-Labour Jewish groups launch fact-free attack on Jeremy Corbyn

But it’s Regev’s comments applauding Fascism that utterly astonish me. I can only imagine the disgust and horror it must have caused self-respecting Jews everywhere, and indeed anyone, who had ever lost people in the struggle against Fascism. A Jewish philosopher described the ultra-nationalist ideology of the Israeli state as ‘Judaeonazism’. Obviously it’s a highly controversial term, but when ministers like Regev describe themselves as ‘Fascists’ and claim that Fascism is part of Israeli national identity, then it’s entirely justified. Buddy Hell in post about Zionism a few years ago at Guy Debord’s Cat described how one of the early Jewish settler groups in the 1920s were the Maximalist Legalists, who wanted to create a Fascist state similar to Mussolini’s in Italy. Regev’s comments about Fascism, consciously or not, hark back to them.

And now I see Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has decided to spout lies against Corbyn once again, accusing him of having not done enough against anti-Semitism.

The Labour leader certainly has and more than enough, as some of those allegations, such as those against Mike, Tony, Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni, Ken Livingstone and so on were unfounded and malicious. They were a cynical attempt to smear and purge decent anti-racists from the party as part of a wider campaign to oust Corbyn. Since Mirvis opened his mouth, and his mendacious splutterings were published in the Times, a number of left-wing bloggers have put on the Net the countless instances where Corbyn and his party have supported Jews against discrimination and racism.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/11/26/heres-the-real-reason-chief-rabbi-mirvis-attacked-jeremy-corbyn-and-labour-hes-a-tory-and-a-racist-it-seems/

And Mirvis and his predecessor, Jonathan Sacks, also have questions to answer themselves about racism and bigotry.

A year or so ago, Sacks led a contingent of British Jews to participate in the March of the Flags. That’s when the Israeli equivalent of Nazi boot-boys parade through the Muslim part of Jerusalem waving Israeli flags, banging on doors and vandalising property. Sacks had been asked not to go, but he still went. And I also remember the anger he caused when he declared that Reform Jews were ‘enemies of the faith’ – which is the language of religious persecution. Mirvis and the Board also turned up to the mass demonstrations against Corbyn a few years ago, when they tried smearing him as an anti-Semite because he had not fully adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. That’s the definition that’s been criticised by Kenneth Stern, who formulated it, as chilling reasonable, genuine criticism of Israel.

There’s absolutely no substance to Mirvis’ recent sputterings. It’s just more noise from a Tory, writing in the Tory press, and an arch-Zionist afraid of reasonable criticisms against Israel.

Like what is the country doing appointing a self-identified Fascist as its Culture Minister?

Now I realise that Regev may have made her comments well before Mirvis became Chief Rabbi, but you have to wonder what his reaction to Regev’s words were. He is, after all, a friend of Netanyahu’s as well as Boris Johnson, and while British Jews aren’t responsible for what the Israelis do, the Chief Rabbinate and Board of Deputies have shown themselves to be staunch Zionists. So it has to be asked of them how they saw Regev’s statement and what they did, as supporters of Israeli, to protest against it.

My guess is that Mirvis and the Board did nothing. They’re quite content to let Israel behave like a Fascist state, and Israeli ministers call themselves Fascists, so long as it isn’t reported and they aren’t criticised for it.

And David Rosenberg, another Jewish anti-Fascist and critic of Israel, published a post in which he recalled how, when he was growing up in ’70s and ’80s, the Board tried to stop Jews from joining the marches then against the NF and BNP by groups like the Anti-Nazi League. Or go to meetings and concerts by organisations like Rock Against Racism. The Board claimed it was to stop them being exposed to anti-Zionist propaganda, but others suspected that there was more than a little of real racism against other minorities there as well.

And that’s why they hate Corbyn: because he is a genuine opponent of racism and anti-Semitism, while they just want to stop criticism of Israel.

 

Israeli Politico’s Fascist Campaign Ad

This disturbing video comes from The Michael Brooks Show. Brooks was a co-host on Sam Seder’s Majority Report, and, like him, is Jewish. They have the same stance on Israel, attacking the Israeli state and its persecution of the Palestinians. Brooks’ criticism of this ad is all the more acute because he is partly of German Jewish heritage, the people, who first suffered the horrific persecution under the Nazis that led eventually to the attempted extermination of the Jewish people across Europe.

Brooks simply says that this is one of the most disturbing political ads ever. It’s for Ayelet Shaked, the Justice Minister in the current Likud coalition government. He describes her as far, far Right, because of the horrific comments she’s made about the Palestinians. She’s recommended killing Palestinian children, so that the ‘snakes’ don’t grow up and try to avenge their parents’ deaths by the Israelis. This is a truly Fascist statement. Himmler and the Nazis made almost exactly the same comment to justify their extermination of whole communities, which defied them. Like the Czech village of Lidice, where all males over the age of 13 were hanged. Brooks states he came to it after he was on Israeli television discussing apartheid.

The advert, in Hebrew with English subtitles, shows Ayelet spraying on perfume from a bottle marked ‘Fascism’. At the end of it, after she finishes spraying herself, she says, ‘Smells like democracy to me’.

And after further brief statements about how disturbing the ad is, that’s how this segment of The Michael Brooks Show ends. I don’t think the message behind Shaked’s video could be anymore explicit: she is actively embracing Fascism. Or if not quite that, it’s a piece of Orwellian Doublespeak where words have the opposite meaning, like ‘War is peace’. Perhaps it’s meant as rebuff to her critics, who are denouncing her as a Fascist. She might be trying to claim in a twisted way that she’s a democrat. But it’s still appalling, even if that’s the case, as it seems to suggest that what others call Fascism, she calls democracy. Which just means she’s still embracing and supporting Fascism.

Not that factions within Israeli society haven’t explicitly supported Fascism in the past. Apart from the Israeli state’s Fascistic persecution of the Palestinians, Buddy Hell has pointed out on the Guy Debord’s Cat blog that in the 1920s the early Zionist pioneers had a Fascist party, the Maximalist Legalists, who wanted to create a Fascist corporative state like Mussolini’s Italy. And Fascists and apologists for dictatorship have claimed that their regimes are somehow more democratic than the democracies. Both Hitler and Mussolini used plebiscites to legitimise their regimes, and then claimed that this proved their governments’ democratic superiority. In the 19th and early 20th centuries a series of Latin American writers and philosophers drew on Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero-Worship to claim that the continent simply couldn’t be governed through Anglo-Saxon-style democracy, and needed the rule of great men – the caudillos, military dictators – in order to make progress. Two of these have titles which suggest their authors considered that personal dictatorship in Latin America somehow constituted a unique form of democracy suited to the continent. These were Las democracias latinas de America by the Peruvian author Francisco Garcia Calderon and Cesarismo democratico by the Venezuelan sociologist Laureano Vallenilla Lanz.

Brooks says of this video that it hasn’t been discussed much in America. There’s no need to ask why. The establishment in America, Britain and Europe supports Israel as an outpost of western democracy and culture in the Middle East. This support is strongest on the Conservative Right. In the 1970s American Conservatives claimed that Israel should be supported because of its Judaeo-Christian culture, declaring that ‘their values are our values’. A few weeks ago the wretched Katie Hopkins, who has now made herself so personally toxic that she’s been sacked from the Heil, made the same claim. Well, Mussolini also made a similar claim that he was supporting Christianity and specifically Roman Catholicism after he signed the Lateran Accords with the papacy in the late 1920s. the support Fascism received from large sections of the European Christian churches has been a stain on their reputation ever since, and has been one of the major causes of the massive growth in atheism in western Europe in the 20th century. That hasn’t stopped the religious Right in America continuing to support brutal right-wing regimes, like General Pinochet in Chile and the vicious Contras in Nicaragua. Ronald Reagan even notoriously declared that the latter were ‘the moral equivalent of our founding fathers’. Radical critics of America and its history of racism and the systematic repression of left-wing movements would probably agree. Thus the mainstream news organisations aren’t going to show or discuss this advert, because Shaked’s embrace of Fascism would immediately discredit Israel in the eyes of most severely normal people in America, Britain and elsewhere.

The advert is particularly damaging to specific examples of what may be considered anti-Semitic in the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism. This rules that it is anti-Semitic to compare Jews to Nazis, claim that Israel is a racist endeavour, or compare its persecution of the Palestinians to the Holocaust. Now Shaked in this advert hasn’t actually gone that far. She isn’t spraying herself with a perfume called ‘Nazi’, ‘Third Reich’, or ‘Hitler’. But she isn’t far off. Marxist historians would actually say that she has. Soviet historians did not refer to ‘National Socialism’ when discussing Nazism, in case this suggested that Hitler’s dictatorship was somehow similar to their own system of government. They referred to it instead as ‘Nazi-Fascism’. There are differences between Nazism and Fascism, but to most people the regimes are more or less synonymous. Nazism was a form of Fascism, and Mussolini passed racist and anti-Semitic legislation in imitation of Hitler’s Germany. If this was shown on TV and in discussed everywhere in the press, the Israel lobby could hardly try to silence those calling Israel racist and Fascist for its persecution of the Palestinians, when one of its leading cabinet ministers is shown in a campaign advert created by her own team fully embracing the accusation.

Whatever the Israel lobby now says, no matter how hard they deny it and try to silence those, who speak out about it, Shaked’s advert shows that she has no problem with Fascism, or at least being described as a Fascist. In the meantime Israel is supplying arms to real, extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic regimes like Fidesz in Hungary, the Law and Justice Party in Poland and the blatant Nazis of the Azov battalion in Ukraine. And Jewish bloggers like David Rosenberg have made their fears for these nations’ Jewish minorities very clear.

How overt does Israeli racism have to get before our media notices, or has the moral courage and integrity to report on it. And if Oswald Mosley returned to lead the BUF goose-stepping through the East End, would the Jewish Chronicle and Board of Deputies support him if he bought Israeli guns for his stormtroopers and paid his tributes to those murdered by his Nazi counterparts at Yad Vashem?