Thursday, February 23, 2023
From Ian:
Jonathan Tobin: Golda Meir would agree with Netanyahu on this one
Book Launch - "Can 'The Whole World' Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad"
Jonathan Tobin: Golda Meir would agree with Netanyahu on this one
Mirren’s claims about what Meir would think about this issue demonstrate complete ignorance of the subject matter at hand.Obama gets his revenge
During her entire time serving in and then leading Israel’s governments during its first quarter-century, the country’s Supreme Court did not exercise or claim to have the powers that contemporary left-wingers now assert are essential to democracy. On the contrary, the governments led by Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol did not recognize the right of the court to act in the manner it has done for the last 30 years. Neither did Meir.
The idea that founding father Ben-Gurion or Meir—or anyone in their Labor Zionist-led coalitions—would have tolerated for a single minute the court weighing in on every decision that the cabinet, ministers or the military made is laughable. They didn’t believe that any Israeli court had the right to override their decisions on appointments, policies or military operations without even establishing their standing to do so. The judicial revolution initiated by former Chief Justice Aharon Barak didn’t begin until many years later.
Meir was a hard-core partisan, and despised the Israeli right and its leader Menachem Begin. But the assumption that Netanyahu’s reforms would end democracy in Israel would mean that the country wasn’t one before Barak’s power grab. That happened more than a decade after Meir was driven from office in 1974.
That Mirren doesn’t know any of this is not surprising. But that anyone would listen to her on this question or give credence to her uninformed opinions in order to promote the “resistance” to Netanyahu says more about the Israeli left than it does about the object of their ire.
Whatever we may ultimately think about the current movie about Meir, Mirren’s comments about judicial reform should remind all of both the pitfalls of celebrity culture and the perils of historical ignorance.
Democrats have not forgotten what they viewed as an insult and a betrayal. For Obama retreads like Blinken and Nides, it’s payback time. Even staunch pro-Israel Democrats in Congress are openly criticizing Netanyahu, and they can do so with some impunity because many of their liberal Jewish constituents are equally upset with the direction Israel is going.
Israeli opponents of the government have been encouraging intervention by the U.S. government and the American Jewish community. It’s a dangerous tactic that they will likely rue when a government more to their liking comes to power and the tables are turned.
We’ve seen this before. It started when the Labor Party began agitating for Americans to oppose the government led by Yitzhak Shamir. The Likud was outraged. When Yitzhak Rabin came to power and signed the Oslo Accords, it was the right’s turn to lobby Americans to attack the government and the left’s to be indignant.
Most people engaged in the current debate probably don’t remember that in 2016, the left also asserted that democracy was in danger when Netanyahu’s government introduced the relatively benign legislation to require nongovernmental organizations to report foreign funding they received because some of them were using the money to promote the boycott of Israel. The left was also upset that Netanyahu was not prepared to trade land for peace—a formula discredited by the disengagement from Gaza. Then, as now, Netanyahu’s detractors called on the U.S. government to save Israel from itself.
The campaign was unsuccessful because Donald Trump had just become president, and Obama’s acolytes left to cash in on their government positions and plot their return to power.
The Democratic Party symbol is a donkey and that is appropriate for the stubborn obsession with the two-state solution (which should have the symbol of a unicorn). In the case of the Biden administration, the Republican elephant is just as apropos as it reflects the long memory of the Obamaites who were frustrated by their inability to bend Netanyahu to their will.
At the end of Obama’s term, when it made no difference, they took out their infuriation by abstaining rather than vetoing a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlement activity and declaring the Jewish communities illegal. This was followed by Secretary of State John Kerry’s farewell speech, which, instead of a review of his diplomatic record, was a tantrum devoted to attacking Israel.
Book Launch - "Can 'The Whole World' Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad"
In his hugely detailed, extensively researched and important new book, Professor Richard Landes documents how a radical inability of Westerners to understand the medieval mentality that drives Global Jihad, prompted a series of misguided reactions that have shaped these early years of the 21st Century. These radical disorientations have created our current dilemma of pervasive information distrust and its attendant proliferation of conspiracy theory, deep splits within the voting public in most democracies, the politicization of science and tribalization of politics, and the inability of Western elites to defend their civilization even as they adopt increasingly self-destructive ideologies.
As the world comes closer to the second quarter of this century and the political arena has become more polarized and distrust in the media has become more pervasive. Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad offers original and compelling insights into our current trajectory.
At this official launch in Jerusalem, Professor Landes was joined in discussing the book and the issues it raises with renowned journalist and columnist with the Times of London, Melanie Phillips; Yossi Kupperwasser, former director general of Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs; and Adam Levick, co-editor of media monitoring organization CAMERA-UK.
