Erel Segal – www.israelhayom.com https://www.israelhayom.com israelhayom english website Fri, 19 Sep 2025 16:26:04 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.2 https://www.israelhayom.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-G_rTskDu_400x400-32x32.jpg Erel Segal – www.israelhayom.com https://www.israelhayom.com 32 32 When progressives redefine speech as violence, murder becomes their response https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/09/19/when-progressives-redefine-speech-as-violence-murder-becomes-their-response/ https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/09/19/when-progressives-redefine-speech-as-violence-murder-becomes-their-response/#respond Fri, 19 Sep 2025 14:20:41 +0000 https://www.israelhayom.com/?p=1089891 Charlie Kirk's assassination was not a historical accident. It was the inevitable result of progressivism, which has turned self-hatred into a moral principle. An inevitable chapter in progressive madness. The assassin is a product of an ideology that has long ceased to argue and now seeks destruction. During the 2020 elections, an article appeared on […]

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Charlie Kirk's assassination was not a historical accident. It was the inevitable result of progressivism, which has turned self-hatred into a moral principle. An inevitable chapter in progressive madness. The assassin is a product of an ideology that has long ceased to argue and now seeks destruction.

During the 2020 elections, an article appeared on the cover of The New York Times under the headline: "The Problem with Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation." The logic was simple: free speech is dangerous, and therefore, it must be regulated. We need censorship, authorized voices, commissars of truth. The public, if left alone without protection, will be deceived all too easily. The newspaper proposed to protect us from ourselves.

Charlie Kirk's assassination must be read in this context. When speech is defined as violence, violence becomes the natural response to speech. The intellectual climate of 2020 progressivism, where censorship, boycotts, and silencing became a moral duty, created the social climate of 2025, where murder became a moral gesture. What was once an editorial became a sniper's bullet.

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk (Photo: AFP)

Western liberalism promised tolerance. This is its essence. Progressivism rapes liberalism and bears false witness to its name. In practice, it created an atmosphere where eliminating opinions is not a metaphor, but a daily fantasy on Twitter. The left, drunk on false moral superiority, has reached the point where murder has become an argument.

Not that this is new. Since Robespierre, leftist radicalism inevitably leads to violence. The left covers itself with false talk about compassion, about human rights, about freedom, about democracy. From its perspective, its moral superiority is unassailable; however, under the hood lies an ideological vacuum and a violent logic. First, they mock the opponent and declare him a failure on the verge of retardation. Then they turn him pathological and diagnose him as suffering from some kind of mental illness.

Kirk was not a complex intellectual. He was something more dangerous in the eyes of his opponents, who saw him as an enemy: Kirk made accessible ideas that opposed the West's self-hatred. He spoke about family, nation, religion, heritage - words that to the progressive consciousness sound like the devil's family. The Western left, the woke, the progressives, while intoxicated with a sense of righteousness, created an atmosphere where violence against opponents is not only tolerated but even admired.

In Western universities, they speak of progress, wisdom, dialogue - but these are empty words. Because there is no dialogue in universities and among the left, a culture of purification prevails. This is the entropic paradox of progressivism. To protect diversity, it destroys difference. To promote tolerance, it sanctifies intolerance.

This is progressivism. A religion of purity without transcendence, a cult of moral superiority that ultimately, inevitably, leads to violence.

A wreath laid by mourners outside the US Embassy in Pretoria on September 11, 2025 following the fatal shooting of US youth activist and influencer Charlie Kirk while speaking during an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, United States (Photo: Phill Magakoe/AFP)

Charlie Kirk believed the West could still be saved through affirming its identity. To reconnect to the mothership. The progressive consciousness, for which identity is the ultimate crime, could not allow it.

"The College Scam" is the last book Charlie Kirk published in his lifetime. In a nutshell: universities in America are not temples of knowledge, but rather debt and false consciousness production machines. The myth is sticky, the parties are good, the football games impressive - but the degrees are worth garbage.

Worse, the academic world has become a consciousness-shaping machine for progressivism. An endless production line of hollow leftist progressives. They did this with foreign money financing, mainly Qatar and China.

Kirk chose to stand against them. He sat facing students and professors, did not raise his voice, did not disqualify, and did not hate. Socratic dialogue par excellence. And that was exactly the danger: truth, when spoken quietly, without hatred, with facts, becomes unbearable.

The left's official response to the murder was predictable. Leaders of the progressive camp, former presidents, former candidates, establishment voices, condemned the murder. This was the super-ego of progressivism. But on social networks the id erupted. Anonymous and non-anonymous users mocked the widow's hair, laughed at the corpse, turned mourning into a joke. Tens of thousands cheered with likes.

In Israel it was particularly wretched. Channel 12 continues to believe the world revolves around them. They had never heard of Charlie Kirk. Danny Kushmaro smiled with contempt. That's the level, that's what they're capable of giving. Kirk was among two or three figures who influenced President Donald Trump to the greatest extent. He shaped the tone of the election campaign. He embodied an ideological style. Not recognizing his work and disparaging the Israeli right that mourned his death is provincial ignorance disguised as sophistication.

Kirk died as a martyr of free speech. He did not die for money, not for power, but for the very act of speaking in public. The ideological right, despite all the other things it hates, cannot tolerate violence against free speech. Because the moment speech is eliminated - nothing remains.

After the murder came the numbers. According to The New York Post, 37,000 applications were received to open new branches of Turning Point USA, Kirk's life's work. In colleges, in high schools, in community churches. Before the bullet there were only 900 branches in universities, and 1,200 in schools. Now this number is expected to soar. Even if only a third of the applications are approved - this is unprecedented expansion.

And more than a third will be approved. Charlie Kirk had already created one of the largest conservative grassroots organizations in the world. His death as a martyr is expected to amplify it even more. In religion, the death of saints begets saints - in politics it begets movements. Applications are now also coming from Europe. The contagion is global.

The progressive left responds differently. It invests its energy in insults on Twitter, in defacing monuments, in destroying posters. It celebrates its hatred in digital rituals, without influence, without continuity. The contrast tells it all. On one side - building institutions, flourishing, hope. On the other side - a performance of destruction and identification with Hamas rapists.

In this contrast I see the light. Death did not silence, it amplified. It turned one man's voice into the architecture of a movement, which will outlast him. The bullet was supposed to end the story - instead it opened a new chapter.

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The Israeli Left woke up to find it had no progressive friends https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-israeli-left-is-left-without-progressive-friends/ Tue, 14 Nov 2023 09:49:22 +0000 https://www.israelhayom.com/?post_type=opinions&p=919351   Israeli left-wing supporters are in shock. The day after the massacre they discovered that worldwide left-wing activists had abandoned them. The so-called shared values, say, against infanticide, against rape, against burning people, proved to be very flexible for the Western left, and within a week of the massacre, their stance turned into a united […]

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Israeli left-wing supporters are in shock. The day after the massacre they discovered that worldwide left-wing activists had abandoned them. The so-called shared values, say, against infanticide, against rape, against burning people, proved to be very flexible for the Western left, and within a week of the massacre, their stance turned into a united attack against the right of the State of Israel to exist. If it weren't sad, it would be entertaining.

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The global Left turned out to be very progressive in its antisemitism. In the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, for example, many were deeply offended. There are many editorials from left-wing supporters explaining their disappointment with the global left-wing community. Suddenly they discovered that Western universities are a poison swamp and of twisted incitement against Jews in the name of universal justice.

This leads us to the most-watched sketch on "Eretz Nehederet" history (the Israeli version of Saturday Night Live). The sketch depicts queer students from Columbia University protesting with a Palestinian flag wrapped in a pride flag. This could have been something on "Latma" (a right-wing satirical news show) a decade ago.

After seeing the sketch, I tweeted that if a month and a half ago I had appeared in a monologue on TV with an LGBT and Palestinian flag – I would have been slaughtered. The truth is that it is frustrating: No matter how many articles have been written about the sick woke culture and about the campuses that had become addicted to anti-Western theories and no matter how many clips we bring showing the destructive progressive mutation – the Israeli Left continued to call the Right fascists, messianic, homophobes, etc.

Then comes someone from the same ideology who curses us, the progressive Muli Segev who creates the content for "Eretz Nehederet," and says the same things that we said, and does not admit that he is actually part of the same global problem, with the same progressive disease that had taken over the Left. During Operation Cast Lead, "Eretz Nehederet" gave then-IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi a Phosphoric Globe Award as a means of criticizing the military for killing children. If Israel's "flagship TV program" said this – what do you want from ignorant students in LA?

To understand why the people of the Israeli Left are confused today by the conduct of their counterparts in the West, to understand why students at Harvard are Hamas supporters who blame Israel for the massacre, and how this has to do with transgenders, one must review the history – especially that of Marxism and its various iterations.

Let's start with the French Revolution – which promised Liberté, égalité, fraternité – and then delivered blood, murder, and terror. Then came Marx, communism, and the class warfare. According to the thesis, the working class, the Western proletariat, will be the subject of the revolution and will overthrow the bourgeois democracies. It did not work. By World War I, the British working class no longer saw the German working class as equals but instead as their bitter enemy. Nationalism beat the class war.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky understood this perfectly as shown in the parable of the human orchestra. "Each instrument has its own unique sound, and each nation has its own special spiritual structure. These unique tones of each nationality must be cherished and perfected – a violin should not be played like a trombone, nor the Czech should be like the French. The meaning of life is not a uniform haircut for everyone – but versatility and harmony for countless people of individual character, who are very different from one another. Nationalism is an expression of the individuality of nations."  So, if there is no working class that is right for a class war that will save the world from capitalist oppression, what will the Marxist thinkers do? They will find some other group to carry the flag.

Now we jump to the 1950s and 1960s when Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School (Jews, of course) enter the fray. In a nutshell, they made a switch: The oppressed Western working class, which, as previously stated, does not want a class war, has been replaced by the ultimate "oppressed", the "weakened" nature of the Third World. This is the point where the idea was born that the weak and the poor and the screwed up are always right, even when they commit heinous crimes.

​After 9/11, after al-Qaida and ISIS, this line of thinking weakened. It's hard to blindly support millionaires who destroy towers, or monsters who rape Yazidi women and sell them as slaves in the market in Mosul.

But fear not – another branch of the Marxist lineage, postmodernism, came to the rescue. From now on, the liberation from the oppressive Western democracy is done through a personal and physical journey. Not just ethnic identity politics, but gender identity politics.

I'm talking about the large increase in gender adjustments in the Western world in the last decade and a half, and the fact that the progressive academic establishment encourages all the madness surrounding it, including re-education for those who refused to accept the negation of nature, including through woke-oriented sex education for preschoolers.

Today it is the symbol of the Enlightenment, but actually, the movement is a virus of the Marxist revolution, which seeks to dismantle the West.

But then came the October 7 massacre, and suddenly everything came together. The red and the pink met the green of Hamas, and the global left-wing movement joined – and not for the first time – with animalistic antisemitism in its most monstrous form. For the ignorant students, whose values and cognitive world are rooted in the universities poisoned by Qatari money funding, supporting Hamas is like bullying Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro into silence. A revolutionary act.

Nor is it surprising just how many Jews are part of this. It is impossible not to recall Berl Katznelson's speech on May 1, 1936: "As long as it is possible for a Jewish child to come to the Land of Israel, a child nurtured by the suffering of generations and the burden of the soul of generations, and here he will be infected with self-hatred bacteria, of 'slavery within the revolution', and devour his mind to such an extent that he will see social redemption in the Palestinian Nazis, who managed to concentrate here in Israel the zoological antisemitism of Europe and the desire for violence in the East – our conscience will know no peace."

But I am optimistic because of Europe. The government's support for Israel indicates that perhaps Europe is finally waking up from the progressive dream. The West is beginning to understand that an ideology that seeks to create a world without identities, nationalities, languages, or historical connections will collapse in on itself.

The ideology of selection turned out to be an illusion. We don't choose our name, our native language, or the words we sing in the national anthem at the end of the ceremony. Humans are born into an identity context – historical, national, and familial –- and they make their choices among these.

Huge demonstrations in European capitals of Islamists who support infanticide and rape of women are arising panic among sane Europeans. The scene is so frightening that it is enough to overpower even traditional antisemitism.

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Aliyah laws could change, but will US Jews really be affected? https://www.israelhayom.com/2023/01/22/aliyah-laws-could-change-but-will-us-jews-really-be-affected/ https://www.israelhayom.com/2023/01/22/aliyah-laws-could-change-but-will-us-jews-really-be-affected/#respond Sun, 22 Jan 2023 08:06:28 +0000 https://www.israelhayom.com/?p=867253   About two weeks ago, seven heads of important Jewish institutions in the United States sent an urgent letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning against changes to the status quo on sensitive issues such as conversion and the Law of Return. The focus of their ire: a possible change to the grandchild clause in […]

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About two weeks ago, seven heads of important Jewish institutions in the United States sent an urgent letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning against changes to the status quo on sensitive issues such as conversion and the Law of Return. The focus of their ire: a possible change to the grandchild clause in the Law of Return.

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Today, only around 28% of immigrants to Israel are Jewish; in other words, over 70%are not Jewish. Over the past year, around 40,000 non-Jews have immigrated to Israel, most of them from Russia. Over the past decade, thanks to the grandchild clause, some half a million non-Jewish immigrants have come to Israel. How many of them arrived from the United States? All told, 67 out of half a million! Should we continue to import assimilation into Israel for the sake of 67 people?

There is a mendacious myth that has emerged in the wake of the debate over the grandchild clause. This myth is that the clause is somehow connected to the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. The journalist Zion Nanos tweeted, "It's a shame no one retroactively updated Hitler that the Nazis also sent to the camps grandchildren of Jews; that was one of the justifications for the grandchild clause in the Law of Return." Nanos isn't alone; many people believe in this myth.

In reality, under the infamous Nazi race laws enacted at Nuremberg, grandchildren of Jews weren't considered Jewish, unless that is, three of their grandparents were Jewish. This explains the inconceivable number of Jews in the Nazi army, the Wehrmacht.

The grandchild clause was adopted after the Reform movement in America sought to allow mixed families to make aliyah. The historian Bryan Mark Rigg was the one to smash one of the greatest taboos of the Holocaust. In his book, "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers", based on his doctorate at Cambridge University, Rigg estimated that some 60,000 soldiers with one Jewish parent served in the Wehrmacht and around 90,000 more who had a Jewish grandparent.

In January 1944, the Wehrmacht issued a secret document that listed 77 generals and senior army officers "mixed with the Jewish race or married to Jewish women." All of them had certification from Hitler – 23 colonels, five major generals, eight lieutenant generals, and two generals. According to Rigg, "a further 60 names of generals and senior offices in the Wehrmacht can be added to that list, along with two field marshals."

As incomprehensible as it may sound, according to Rigg's introduction to his book, such soldiers served the Reich with distinction, while their relatives burned in Auschwitz."

Rigg, who served in the US Marine Corps, and even volunteered with the IDF, began researching the topic after discovering his own Jewish roots when looking into his family history. He interviewed some 400 former Nazi soldiers in the course of his research.

An image of Werner Goldberg appeared in Wehrmacht recruitment posts as an advertisement for the "ideal soldier". He was blond, blue-eyed, and had an upturned nose, the Aryan fantasy of the Thousand Year Reich. The posters forgot to mention one minor detail. Werner Goldberg was half Jewish.

Colonel Walter Hollander, who was awarded the German Iron Cross and the Gold Cross, was born to a Jewish mother yet received personal certification from Hitler in which the Fuhrer certified the Aryanism of this Halachic Jew.

Wehrmacht Major Robert Borchardt, the son of a Jewish father, and the commander of the armored reconnaissance battalion 341 received the Knight's Cross for breaking through a tank formation on the Russian front. Shortly before his death in 1983, Borchardt told German schoolchildren, "Many half-Jews who fought for Germany in World War II believed that they should defend their fatherland while serving in the army."

There were also senior officers. For example, General Field Marshal Erhard Milch, a Nazi war criminal who was the deputy of Herman Goring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, was the son of a Jewish father.

Just to make it clear, were Goldberg, Borchardt, Hollander, and Milch to request Israeli citizenship today, the Law of Return in its current form would have accepted them. Fact, not myth.

The grandchild clause of the Law of Return enables even a person who has just one Jewish grandfather to make aliyah. The status allows him to bring to Israel his children, grandchildren and their partners. One Jew enables the immigration of five non-Jews.

So now that we have disproved the lie upon which Clause 4A is based and according to which the clause in the Law of Return is a mirror image of the Nuremberg Laws, the question is: Why did the State of Israel introduce the clause?

A perusal of the protocols of the debate over the grandchild clause held in 1970 reveals a completely different reason. "There is currently no physical threat to the existence of the People of Israel," said then prime minister Golda Meir. "But there is another danger, and it is real and imminent... the rate of assimilation has reached threatening dimensions."

Golda, from the Alignment left-wing bloc, not United Torah Judaism, was afraid of intermarriage, just like her fellow secular colleagues.

In other words, the reason the grandchild clause was added to the Law of Return was not as a response to the Nuremberg Laws, but to enable Jews married to non-Jews to make aliyah with their families. One should note that this was done following pressure from the Reform movement in the United States that wanted mixed families to be able to make aliyah in view of the soaring assimilation figures.

One could suspect that the real reason for American opposition to an amendment to the Law of Return is that it is quite possible that some American Jewish leaders have grandchildren who are not Jewish.

I am convinced that as Zionists and supporters of Israel with a warm Jewish heart, they feel the pain of having grandchildren who are no longer Jewish.

They are not alone. Over 50 percent of new couples among the Jewish community in the US are no longer Jewish, this despite the ridiculous attempts to redefine who is a Jew in America. Unfortunately, they ignore the implications: If we don't amend the grandchild clause, you won't be able to make aliyah in the future.

If most new immigrants to Israel aren't Jewish then there is no moral justification for the existence of the Law of Return. Left-wingers, liberals, how, from your perspective, will you justify immigration of grandchildren, their partners, and their children (great grandchildren) who are not Jewish?  Why should they be allowed to make aliyah, when Israeli Arabs are denied family reunification and the return of refugees?

If most immigrants continue to be non-Jews, we won't be able to defend the Law of Return in the world, and we won't be able to defend it at the High Court of Justice. Israeli democracy will not be able to live with such a distortion.

And neither will you, the Jews of the United States, be able to defend the Law of Return. You will lead to the end of the Jewish state, to the end of the Jewish reserve that is meant to be able to take you in if the hour of need arises.

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A war between morals and national interests https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/a-war-between-morals-and-national-interests/ Sun, 06 Mar 2022 20:01:30 +0000 https://www.israelhayom.com/?post_type=opinions&p=772631   Let's begin with the obvious: the Russian invasion of Ukraine is terrible and unacceptable. And yet, Israel's moral duty is to protect its fighters before anyone else. When morality and national interests clash, it is an opportune moment to discuss such things. Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram Although I personally love […]

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Let's begin with the obvious: the Russian invasion of Ukraine is terrible and unacceptable. And yet, Israel's moral duty is to protect its fighters before anyone else. When morality and national interests clash, it is an opportune moment to discuss such things.

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Although I personally love using historical examples to try to explain the current events, when it comes to the war in Ukraine, I must raise a metaphorical black flag.

Comparisons to World War II take away from the complexity of the reality, such as Russia calling Ukraine's Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelesnkyy, and his government neo-Nazis, while Ukraine compares Russia's Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler and the invasion to Operation Barbarossa. Putin is a brutal dictator, but he is no Hitler, and Russia's claim that they are fighting Ukrainian Nazis is pathetic propaganda.

Take, for example, the bombing of the TV tower located near the Babi Yar memorial. According to Ron Ben-Yishai, Yedioth Ahronoth's correspondent in Kyiv, the actual monument was not hit at all. Nevertheless, Zelenskyy leveraged this to mobilize worldwide Jewry to speak up against Russia, by tweeting, "what is the point of saying 'never again' for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babi Yar?"

Ukraine's Ambassador to Israel Yevgeny Kornichuk took it even further when he claimed that "Ukrainians helped save Jews during WWII." Actually, Ukrainians eagerly cooperated with the Nazis. When it comes to cosmic karma, if there is such a thing, Israel surely owes nothing to the Ukrainian people. Quite the opposite, we are returning evil with good. In no way does Ukraine's dark past make the invasion justifiable, but neither should it be misused

A week and a half into the war, things in Israel seem to be progressing as usual. The same structured but imaginary split of the government continues. On the "right-wing" side is Prime Minister Naftali Bennett who has remained largely quiet on Ukraine and won't mention Russia by name.

On the other side, we find Foreign Minister Yair Lapid. The Left always plays the good cop. Lapid, with his special connection to the democratic government, has joined in the global condemnation of Russia and promised to set up a team to examine the possibility of sanctioning the Kremlin.

All this is just theatrics. Lapid himself knows that he is shackled and cannot go completely against Israel's interests. He can talk about values as much as he wants, but Lapid too operates within a complex reality. After all, there are no Iron Dome shipments to Ukraine or a ban on Russian flights landing at Ben-Gurion International Airport.

By the way, when speaking about the historical connection between morals and national interests, let us remember that the United States only joined the fight against Nazi Germany after Japan attacked its naval base at Pearl Harbor.

In the current war, although Washington has expressed support for Ukraine's safety, it has not changed things much militarily. Ukraine is left to fight Putin alone.

The West cannot stand up to a nuclear superpower. One of the things I understand from this story is that it cannot be wrapped up elegantly. Putin is determined, even if it will take destroying all of Ukraine. The Russian leader is unlikely to retreat with his tail between his legs. The Cuban missile crisis is a child's play compared to Putin's nuclear threats today.

The historical reasons that have led us to this situation are numerous and diverse. From all sides. It takes two to tango. Even when it comes to blood tango.

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Should gatekeepers be left to their own devices? https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/for-5-years-we-asked-who-is-watching-the-guards/ Tue, 08 Feb 2022 05:18:28 +0000 https://www.israelhayom.com/?post_type=opinions&p=760479   I have dedicated the last five years to badgering my readers on how we are living in an Orwellian-Kafkaesque movie. I have told you that we are witnessing a political witch hunt and a judicial putsch to remove a prime minister from office and that we are transitioning from a start-up nation to a […]

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I have dedicated the last five years to badgering my readers on how we are living in an Orwellian-Kafkaesque movie. I have told you that we are witnessing a political witch hunt and a judicial putsch to remove a prime minister from office and that we are transitioning from a start-up nation to a Stasi nation.

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I am afraid this wasn't far from the truth.

This spyware scandal is not a question of the failure of an investigation or the fruit of a poisoned court that must be balanced out but a putsch in which they actively used cyber tools to attribute offenses to a prime minister.

Of course, the important reporting by financial daily Calcalist and the News1 website affects not just Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu, but all of us. The number of offenses is incomprehensible. The law enforcement system, emphasis on "system," has proven just how correct Lord John Dalberg-Acton was when he concluded that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

For five years, we have spoken out about state institutions being corrupt and rotten to the core. This unrestrained system operates like a criminal organization.

"Who is watching the guards?" we asked but received no reply. For five years we begged. We were told we were working to undermine democratic principles and the rule of law. We were accused of burning down barns to save our leader and terrorizing the legal system.

Most of my fellow journalists not only covered up the offenses. They presented any criticism of the Israel Police or the State Attorney's Office as a wild attack on the rule of law. Now it turns out that we were right, and the law enforcement system did in fact treat the prime minister like the head of a terrorist organization. One would have expected there to be a consensus across party lines that this is the most severe incident Israel has seen since the founding of the state, an occurrence the likes of which has not been seen in a Western, democratic country.

Ha.

At first, there was shock. The sound of the explosion was deafening. Soon, however, the tweeting resumed once the government overcame its shock. Coalition members called the situation "grave" and said an investigative committee was the answer. "We must fix the system, not break it," they said, "in particular given the timing, which is not coincidental," they said, alluding to Netanyahu's ongoing trials. More importantly, they blamed the scandal on Netanyahu himself.

It's unbelievable, but a government based on a lie and whose existence was only made possible thanks to the unprecedented accusations we are now learning are the smoking gun, is now pinning the blame on Netanyahu as if he would have asked the government to spy on him, his family, and his close associates to ensure that he would be framed.

Morally and ethically, this government is illegitimate.

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A Woodstock of hatred https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-protests-are-a-woodstock-of-hatred/ Tue, 04 Aug 2020 06:17:14 +0000 https://www.israelhayom.com/?post_type=opinions&p=517883 Year after year, we – rightly – repeat the late Yitzhak Rabin's warning from Nov. 4, 1995, that "violence eats away at the foundations of Israeli democracy." "It must be condemned, criticized, isolated. That is not Israel's way. In a democracy, there can be disagreements, but the decision will be made in democratic elections," Rabin […]

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Year after year, we – rightly – repeat the late Yitzhak Rabin's warning from Nov. 4, 1995, that "violence eats away at the foundations of Israeli democracy."

"It must be condemned, criticized, isolated. That is not Israel's way. In a democracy, there can be disagreements, but the decision will be made in democratic elections," Rabin said.

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We need to oppose incitement against specific persons, calls of "traitor," the dehumanization of political rivals, and comparisons to past dictators and hints about their fate. For 25 years, the message has been sent out, but not received. And the last few years actually prove that not only does the Israeli Left incite, it refuses to condemn incitement.

The protests outside the Prime Minister's Residence are a Woodstock of hatred. They are not a rational political event, but an emotional one. They are a religious ceremony, a mass catharsis, in which hatred is celebrated at the barricades, a ceremony in which it is permissible to compare the prime minister to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu or Louis XVI, and we all know how they ended up.

It's a festival in which participants slander and attack thousands of people whom they hold in contempt. The terminology isn't political, it's one of revolutionary radicalism.

When you listen to the protesters, it turns out that the common denominator among them is pathological hatred for one figure. We hear this in the unification of the left-wing battles, which is basically a statement with a transparent subtext that it is more important to battle the enemy than it is to promote your own ideas (because each struggle has a different ideology, but they all have one enemy in common). That is the only explanation for the presence of signs that read "Liberate the Gaza ghetto," "Murderers in Uniform," and the red flags of tyrannical communism.

The Israeli media is fanning the flames of the protest movement for two main reasons. The first is that they identify with the protesters, with the political view of "Anyone but Bibi." It's not a deep ideology, it's a deep-seated loathing for the man and the Right. The second reason for the inflated coverage is prosaic – it's August, silly season, and both COVID and the media are looking for some action.

The media is treating the protests like it did the social justice movement of 2011 – as a sacred cosmic event of the first magnitude. The media follows the demonstrators with empathy and is outraged at the police, who are allowing the protests to go on into the wee hours of the morning and exercising selective enforcement the likes of which we have never seen. The media is forgiving of violence (an attack on a police detective), threats ("We'll pull you behind a truck … you're dead," they shouted at journalist Avishay Ben Haim), to crude insults against the prime minister and his family.

But back in 2005, the media treated protests against the disengagement as a direct threat to democracy, a threat to a decision by the cabinet and the elected Knesset.

Back then, every time protesters blocked off a road, and every anti-disengagement rally was treated as a challenge to governability and the nation's existence. The media enlisted to defend the realm, supporting an attack on the basic principles of law in a democratic country. When then-Attorney General Meni Mazuz threatened to sentence activists who blocked roads to 20 years in prison, no one reared up in defense of the right to protest.

I wouldn't buy a used car the Israeli media was trying to sell me.

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