- Bradley Burston :Israel under Trump: Welcome to the new home of Nazi denial *** haaretz.com
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haaretz.com
Welcome to Israel under the influence of Donald Trump.
As Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu maintained silence over the U.S. president’s having
equated neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members with the leftist
counterprotesters who came under deadly attack in Charlottesville,
Virginia, the prime minister’s hand-picked communications minister
declared that Israel’s relations with the White House take precedence
over condemning Nazis.
“Due to the terrific
relations with the U.S., we need to put the declarations about the Nazis
in the proper proportion,” Communications Minister Ayoub Kara told The
Jerusalem Post.
“We need to condemn
anti-Semitism and any trace of Nazism, and I will do what I can as a
minister to stop its spread,” said Kara. “But Trump is the best U.S.
leader Israel has ever had. His relations with the prime minister of
Israel are wonderful, and after enduring the terrible years of Obama,
Trump is the unquestioned leader of the free world, and we must not
accept anyone harming him.”
Even for Israel,
where Beyond Belief is another name for the place all of us live in all
the time, there seems something impossible, something bordering on
science fiction, about this country lending a home to, well, Nazi
denial.
It was much in evidence during the country’s most-watched news broadcast on Wednesday night.
What we saw was, in essence, a four-minute-long promotion of a Nazi.
It was an interview
with Richard Spencer, the same idol of the so-called “alt-right” white
nationalist movement who celebrated Donald Trump’s victory by declaring, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail Victory!” while his followers made Nazi salutes.
This is the same
Richard Spencer who has branded the mainstream media with the term
lugenpresse (the lying press), which Nazi Germany propagandists used to
attack Jewish and opposition media outlets.
And this is the same Richard Spencer who praised Trump for aiding in the “de-Judaification” of the Holocaust by omitting any mention of Jews from his statement marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Maintaining a
mystifying and at times frightening level of professional politesse,
Channel 2 anchor Danny Kushmaro asked Spencer whether he viewed white
supremacists in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” as
anti-Semitic and a hate crime.
Spencer, unfazed and
perhaps encouraged by the respect accorded him, argued that the chant
simply reflected the reality that “Jews are vastly overrepresented in
what you could call ‘the establishment,’ that is, Ivy League-educated
people who really determine policy, and white people are being
dispossessed from this country.”
There was more, much
more, culminating in Spencer’s admiring and unchallenged comparison
between white supremacism and the Zionist movement.
But the interview was
far from the only instance of an abhorrent phenomenon in an Israel
under the influence of Donald Trump. It is the rise of Nazi denial – the
desire among certain political and media figures associated with
Netanyahu to curry favor with the U.S. president by downplaying or
dismissing the dangers of the KKK, neo-Nazis and other white
supremacists who took part in the violence in Charlottesville.
Netanyahu, who waited for three long days – and for a cue from Donald Trump – to issue a pallid response to Charlottesville, set the tone for Nazi-washing.
But he left it to his son and corrosive mini-me Yair to step up and shout the real lesson of last weekend’s violence: that leftists are more dangerous than neo-Nazis.
“The neo nazis scums
in Virginia ... belong to the past,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “Their
breed is dying out.” At the same time, he continued, “the thugs of
Antifa and BLM who hate my country (and America too in my view) just as
much are getting stronger and stronger and becoming super dominant in
American universities and public life.”
To be sure, many
opposition leaders in Israel (and the press as well) have been vocal in
condemning both the white supremacists and Netanyahu’s tepid response.
But while most
Israeli newspapers ripped into Trump for the "SHAME," as the daily
Yedioth Ahronoth put in a one-word banner headline, of having equated
leftist counterprotesters with Nazis and Klansmen and offering that
there were “very fine people on both sides,” there was one conspicuous exception.
Sheldon Adelson’s
Israel Hayom, which vigorously promoted Trump's campaign and presidency
with front-page stories and a parade of exclusive interviews and photos
featuring the U.S. president arm in arm with the paper’s gushingly
pro-Trump editor-in-chief Boaz Bismuth, relegated the backlash over the
Tuesday news conference to a rock-bottom Page 24.
As blogger John Brown’s sardonic flowchart suggests,
Israeli and foreign Israel-hawk hardliners' propensity to brand all
critics of the Jewish State as tantamount to Nazis may have taken its
toll on their sense of judgment.
It may just be a matter of habituation over time.
After all, if you're
always busy looking for anti-Israel "Nazis" under every leftists' bed,
you may miss the real thing when, swastika and torch in hand, it
storm-troops down the street.
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