What Israelis think of Obama

No Freudian slip - I don't deny that Israel's neighbours would like to destroy Israel.

Yes, Washington is united in support of Israel; I was just posing a hypothetical.

Yes again, unilateral concessions don't work.

I'll still stick with my hypothetical; Israel would not survive if she dropped nukes on the Arabs. Such an action would cause global economic chaos and Israel's economy would collapse just like everybody else's.

 

simply not true. they are building every day.

 

I absolutely agree with you. Unfortunately too many people pretend to believe that the only thing Israel's enemies want is peace and a two-state solution. I thought you were one of them and obviously I was wrong.

I do agree with the rest of your post, I think the primary benefit of the US backing is that it helps avoid nuclear confrontation between Israel and the arab world with unavoidable disastrous consequences not just for the region but for the entire world.

 

sure they are, they are building existing settlements, not new ones, just like they promised.


And you completely ignored the second part of my post, that the arabs have not made good on their end of the deal which makes the Israeli commitments nil and void.


It's truly ironic how the mentality of the anti-Israel left works. Israel signs an agreement with the Palestinians, the Palestinians never deliver the goods but you expect Israel to keep paying the price.

 

June 06, 2009
Blumenthal's video is a reflection of Lieberman's Israel
Max Blumenthal's latest video has created much controversy and debate that we'll try to cover here on the site. F.E.Felson sent us one response:

Not surprisingly, the skeptical response to Max Blumenthal’s latest video has been one of casual dismissal: OK, so he went and found some drunk frat boys hanging out together and filmed them making crude racial remarks. Not pleasant stuff, but not a huge deal, either.

“Man listen, hand me a fifth of Henny, a video camera, and an hour, and I'll show you Negroes claiming that God's messenger lives in a space-ship orbiting the earth,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his Atlantic blog.

Others have drawn a parallel to Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 movie “Borat,” in which a group of inebriated fraternity brothers from the University of South Carolina yuk it up about Jews, blacks and slavery. It wouldn’t be fair to call them representative of American society, the thinking goes, so why should we read anything more into what a handful of boozy Israelis and American Jews in Jerusalem say?

Well, I have one suggestion why we should: because the man who is Israel’s new foreign minister, and who very nearly became its new prime minister this spring, is an absolute, unqualified bigot. Avigdor Lieberman’s rise (along with Benjamin Netanyahu’s resurgence) is confirmation that the mood in Israel (and among its ardent American supporters) toward the Arab and Muslim worlds has darkened dramatically. His rhetoric is as nakedly racist as George Wallace’s was in America 40 years ago—and he is now Israel’s ambassador to the world.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the basic attitudes and instincts that the ignorant, drunk racists in the video express are products of the same culture—in Israel and among its American backers—that has given rise to Lieberman, a culture that de-humanizes Arabs and Muslims and vilifies anyone (especially a black American with a Muslim middle name) who would dare challenge the dominant “Israel good/Arabs bad” narrative. Their parents’ and grandparents’ generations mask the rawness of these attitudes with sterile-sounding terms like “demographic problem” and “security fence,” but beneath it all is the same basic de-humanization that these kids are expressing. I suspect this video is a symptom of that culture.

But who knows -- maybe some of these kids’ parents are actually enlightened on the Israeli/Palestinian question, and would be appalled to hear what their sons are saying. Maybe this really is nothing more than drunk guys trying to out-macho each other—just like in “Borat.” But even if that’s the case, we are still left with the fact that one of the most powerful and popular elected officials in Israel embraces the same racism that they are voicing. And unlike this video, his rise can’t be explained away as some isolated, meaningless aberration.

 

Oh, so it's a reflection of Lieberman's Israel today (Lieberman got 12% of the Israeli vote)...cause yesterday it was "a cross-sample" of the entire Israeli society.

In other words that the video you posted is manipulative, deceptive and dishonest is justified by the hard line views of the current Israeli government, right? LOL, why am I not surprised? It's a typical arab mentality - lying, believing their own lies and then blaming others or circumstances for their own lying.

PS Oh and btw, other than a few totally uncalled for racist slurs the kids in the video do make perfect sense. They made no anti-american statements (unlike typical anti-american rants of your arab brethren and their fringe leftist supporters), they said that they owe nothing to Obama, won't take orders from Obama and that Obama does not care about them and is not going to be there to defend them if Israel is attacked. What's wrong with that?

 

Why do people keep bringing up what Christinas used to do? I don't care what happened 1000 years ago, Christians used to kill nonbelievers but they evolved in spite of the old testament, and don't do that crap much anymore. Islam has not evolved, Islam is still a brutal and primitive religion.

I can hand out atheist pamplets in in large american city and I would not worry about my safety. If I hand out atheist pamplets in Saudi Arabia or Iran, I am a dead man because the Saudi sharia oriented government would punish me.

Please stop trying to make parallels, it's quite stupid.

 

If necessary, Obama would defend Israel, but it's extremely unlikely that this would be necessary given Israel's overwhelming military superiority. That, in addition to the fact that Obama's immediate objective is to improve relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world is probably why Obama doesn't emphasize support for Israel.

In addition to winning new friends and influencing Muslim people, multi-tasking Obama probably hopes to secure Israel by weaking the resolve of her enemies.

 

On Wednesday, I walked around central Jerusalem with my friend, Joseph Dana, an Israel peace activist who has lived in the country for three years. We interviewed young people on camera about the speech President Barack Obama planned to deliver to the Muslim world the following day in Cairo. Though our questions were not provocative at all – we simply asked, “What do you think of Obama’s speech” – the responses our interview subjects offered comprised some of the most shocking comments I have ever recorded on camera. They were racist, hateful, and incredibly ignorant, and were mostly couched within a Zionist context – “this is our land, Obama!” The following day, we edited an hour of interviews into a 3:30 minute video package and released it on Mondoweiss and on the Huffington Post.

Within a few hours, I received an email from a Huffington Post administrator informing me he had scrubbed my video from the site. “I don't see that it has any real news value,” the administrator told me. “For me it only proves that one can find drunk people willing to say just about anything. Especially drunk, moronic people.” For the first time, the premier clearinghouse for online news and opinions had suppressed one of my posts.

Other bloggers and commenters criticized the video on similar grounds. Their complaints generally went like this: In order to advance an agenda, Max Blumenthal exploited the wild remarks of a bunch of drunk Jewish frat-boys innocently showing off in front of their friends. The footage contained in his video in no way reflects what the Israeli public thinks. If Max went to a bar in any college town in the United States he would find the same level of ignorance and racism. Ron Kampeas at the JTA has written that I need “to grow up and put [my talents] to good use.” (While Kampeas praised some of my other video reports exposing right-wing Christians, this latest video revealing the extremism of some Israeli and American Jews seemed to hit too close to home.)

The criticism of my video raised an interesting journalistic issue: Is reporting any less credible when interview subjects are drinking alcohol? Of course not. Journalists interview people at bars all the time, especially in broadcast packages. Beer does not, to my knowledge, contain a special drug that immediately infects drinkers with white supremacist sentiments, violent rhetoric, and anti-democratic tendencies. I get drunk as much as any social drinker and I have never called for “white power” or declared, “fuck the niggers!” as one of my interviewees did. No amount of alcohol could make me express opinions that were not authentically mine. If anything, alcohol is a crude form of truth serum that lubricates the release of closely held opinions and encourages confessional talk.

The notion that the racist diatribes in my video emerged spontaneously from a beery void is a delusion, but for some, it is a necessary one. It allows them to erect a psychological barrier against acknowledging the painful consequences of prolonged Zionist indoctrination. And it enables them to dismiss the disturbing spectacle of young Jews behaving like fascist soccer hooligans in the heart of the capitol of Israel and the spiritual home of the Jewish people.

The people in my video were not white trash, nor were they the “extreme right-wing fringe” as some bloggers have called them. They were the college-educated sons and daughters of middle and upper class American Jews from cosmopolitan metropolises and genteel suburbs. Some had come to Israel on vacation, some had made aliyah, and some told me they were planning to move to Israel in the near future. Many were dual citizens of America and Israel. They may have behaved in a moronic way, but they will not grow up to toil in the custodial arts. Many of these kids will move into white-collar jobs and use their influence to advance Israeli initiatives. Programs like Birthright Israel -- a few of those in my video were on Birthright tours -- exist for the exclusive purpose of indoctrinating American Jews into unyielding, unthinking supporters of Israel. Thus the kids in my video represent at least one aspect of the Zionist project’s future base of political sustenance.

I do not and have never claimed that the characters that appeared in my video were representative of general public opinion in Israel. They reflect only a slice of reality, which is reality nonetheless. On the other hand, a new Yedioth Aronoth poll finds a vast majority of the Israeli public holds a negative opinion of Obama and believes he is biased toward the Palestinians. A top minister in Israel’s government has compared Obama to Pharaoh, claiming his call for a settlement freeze is like casting Jewish children into the river. A group of rightists have launched a campaign against “the anti-Semitic Obama,” apparently convinced they can make inroads with the general public.

Behind the Israeli view of Obama lies a climate of extremism that exploded into the open when the country attacked Gaza. Today, extremist sentiment hovers well above the surface. A groundbreaking study of Israeli attitudes published in the wake of the Gaza war by the Tel Aviv University political psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal, who I recently interviewed, found that “Israeli Jews' consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering.” Bar-Tal commented to me that the army is the primary vehicle for stoking the nationalism of young Israelis. “Some countries are states without armies,” he said. “But Israel today is an army without a state. There is no civilian institution capable of restraining the army’s influence.”

In an interview with me two days ago, the famed Israeli author David Grossman echoed Bar-Tal’s findings, remarking, “The country is trapped in one legitimate narrative: that of the government, which is of paranoia, and every event serves this narrative. Those events that don’t are simply overlooked.”

I have been in Israel for over a month; almost every day I hear expressions of paranoia about Arabs, historical delusions, and the constant refrain that “the world is against us.” I hear this even from some close friends -- young, cosmopolitan Israelis living the good life in the so-called “bubble city” of Tel Aviv. Last week, a friend I play basketball with in a working class suburb of Tel Aviv (he is a high-tech worker from a fifth generation Israeli family) calmly informed me while we sat in the shade by the court: “I’m a Zionist, so of course I prefer the bloodshed on the other side.” While sitting at a bar with an elegant and otherwise charming young woman, she described to me while sipping a mixed drink how she arbitrarily shot at Arabs while serving in the army because “they want to come and steal my house.” On a leafy Tel Aviv street, a friend of a friend who splits time between spinning at local hip-hop clubs and patrolling the streets of Gaza City told me if Israel has to kill 800 Palestinians to save one Israeli Jew, then so be it. “If we wanted to, we could completely wipe Gaza out,” he said. “But we don’t because the IDF is pure.”

Since Gaza, vocal opponents of the Occupation have found themselves increasingly marginalized and are hounded by the authorities (see the New Profile raid, Ezra Nawi, Sami Jubreir, and on and on). Meanwhile, Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteynu party’s unapologetically racist campaign has taken the form of a stream of bills working through the Knesset that would criminalize observance of the Palestinian Nakbah, ban public discussion of a bi-national state, and allow towns to ban people from entering their limits who do not subscribe to Zionist ideals. The bills keep coming like a flood; already, the Nakbah ban has passed a committee vote.

A straight line can be drawn from the rhetoric depicted in my video to the rise of Lieberman, a proto-fascist who draws a startling degree of political strength from Israel’s youth by channeling their innermost fears and resentments. In fact, the author of the Nakbah ban is a 28-year-old named Alex Miller – the youngest ever member of the Knesset and the chairman of Beiteynu’s youth wing. In an interview, Miller told me he introduced the bill simply because, “the Israeli public believes in loyalty.” He added, “Since the founding of our party we have grown in strength. We have never changed our platform and we are seeing increasing support from the public.”

Despite the Huffington Post’s rejection of my video report, it has exploded across the blogosphere. Even the rapper 50 Cent posted it prominently on his official website. It two days it has garnered 100,000 views. I hope those who have watched it, especially those predisposed to dismiss it as anti-Israel propaganda or shock video with “no news value,” will at least ask how vitriolic levels of racism are able to flow through the streets of Jerusalem like sewage, why the grandsons of Holocaust survivors feel compelled to offer the Shoah as justification to behave like fascist street thugs, and how the sons and daughters of successful Jewish American families casually merged Zionist cant with crude white supremacism. The willful avoidance of these painful questions by self-proclaimed supporters of Israel is setting the stage for the complete delegitimization of the country they claim to love. As Obama said, “any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners of it.”

 

More people are killed by Islamists each year than in all 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition combined.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition

The stench of dishonor is strong with these muslims and all hold their noses.