President Rivlin: We must remember we are one country
My fellow citizens of Israel: I am very concerned about the difficult scenes we are witnessing on the streets. I call and plead with all leaders, citizens, parents - do everything in your power to stop the terrible thing that is happening. We are currently amidst the danger of rocket fire, yet are dealing with civil war for no reason. There are people need to let the police take care of things. Please stop this crazy madness.Noah Rothman: Progressivism’s Moral Atrocity in the Middle East
I call on all the rioters – stop and do not make things worse, we are one society, one country. You can not say I am a citizen but against it, and you can not say I am any more of a citizen. It's time to calm the public. Religious leaders, local leaders, ministers, MKs – we all need to wake up to the same country, the same jobs. These things are getting worse and God forbid, we could lose what we have created – the State of Israel.
Ours is not a simple country, but we have educated ourselves, despite the differences of opinion, among all parts of the nation. All of these things need to remain at the level of debate, God forbid we become enemies. There is a war between civilians. The country belongs to us all.
How hard was it for us to overcome and establish such a wonderful country. Sometimes there are arguments but it is our job to let the army do its job, and let the police make sure there is quiet. You can argue, but to get to this point? To the sights we see? I shout to the whole of Israeli society, to the silent majority - let us shout a cry and say in our house, in our city, everyone in the synagogue or in the mosque: Stop it. We live here, this is our future. There is no other way.
I call and plead with all leaders, citizens, parents: do everything you can to stop this terrible thing that is happening.
It isn’t so much the Arab world but an undiscriminating popular-front mentality that seems to animate much of the activist class’s obsessions. “As someone who has been brutalized by police, I continue to stand in strong solidarity with Palestinians rising up against military, police, and state violence,” Rep. Cori Bush insisted. “Congress must stop funding human-rights abuses by the Israeli military.” In all fairness, when it comes to public security, there aren’t many core functions of a modern state Bush doesn’t want to defund. It’s nevertheless noteworthy that the congresswoman seems incapable of distinguishing between non-lethal crowd-control tactics and the riotous crowd operating from within religious sites those forces were seeking to calm.With Israel under Attack, Watch for Progressive Anti-Semitism
The high priest of American socialism, Sen. Bernie Sanders, has also resorted to a noxious moral equivalence: “Once again, we are seeing how the irresponsible actions of government-allied right-wing extremists in Jerusalem can escalate quickly into devastating war,” he wrote. The notion that Israel’s government actually wants Israelis to die in a deadly rocket barrage is particularly craven. It’s an ugly presumption that colors coverage of the conflict in even mainstream media outlets.
Astonishingly, the New York Times reported, the bloodletting has “nevertheless bolstered” both Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After all, “the distraction of the war, and the divisions it creates between the disparate opposition parties currently negotiating a coalition to topple him from power, have given him half a chance of remaining in office, just days after it seemed like he might finally be on the way out.” The insinuation that, if he did not engineer the conflict, Netanyahu surely welcomes it, is a repulsive sop to the paper’s parochial progressive readership. But at least Sanders managed to make a note of the “Israeli children” languishing in bomb shelters. His leftwing compatriots couldn’t even muster that perfunctory nod in the general direction of decency.
The world has passed these progressives by. The Arab world is not erupting over the hostile actions engineered by Hamas and its Iranian backers, whom they regard as the real threat to their security. Nor do progressive arguments about oppression and the rule of law resonate—the rule of law was suspended mid-process as an intended consequence of the insurrection in Jerusalem. What progressives are arguing is pure will to power. And if it’s a contest of power they wanted, they’re sure getting it.
When George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, he declared that America should give "bigotry no sanction."
In 2021, that remains a tall order. Not only does history's oldest virus—anti-Semitism—today receive 24/7 assistance from social media, but it metastasizes as quickly as deadly new strains of COVID-19, spawning Jew-hatred and hate crimes here and abroad.
Ever since the infamous Charlottesville march, arson, desecration and deadly attacks on synagogues across the U.S. by white supremacists and neo-Nazis have increased. Lurid anti-Semitic and anti-Asian conspiracy theories about COVID-19 have spread online. It is appropriate that much of our attention has been focused on the extreme Right, here and abroad.
But we ignore, at our own risk, the high-profile anti-Semitism emanating from the self-anointed gatekeepers of the progressive Left, increasingly on display during these bloody days in the Holy Land.
With Hamas already hurling nearly 1000 rockets and missiles at Israeli civilian centers—200 of which landed inside Gaza, killing and maiming Hamas's own constituents—and Israel marshaling its military prowess to stop the onslaught, both sides struggle to promote their narratives across social media platforms and in the halls of power.
Left-leaning Americans have been happy to oblige. Here at home there is plenty of virtue signaling by Hollywood actors. Mark Ruffalo took time out from playing a make-believe hero fighting make-believe enemies to demand that the Jewish state face sanctions for defending its 9-plus million citizens from very real terrorists with very real weapons that cause very real people, including women and children, to bleed and die.
Oh, look, Hamas has an advertising supplement in the @NYTimes today: https://t.co/vitHov9ndM
— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) May 13, 2021