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Chief Minister (5k+ posts)
Born Free
According to the Bayit Yehudi MK, “Every Arab is a potential terrorist, and at minimum, [they] are not legitimate members of Israeli society.”
Bezalel Smotrich.. (photo credit:Courtesy/Regavim)
As if in the weeks before Passover we needed yet another reminder that we were once strangers in a strange land, along comes a parliamentarian to show us how outdated such a moral concept is.
Ironically, the incident that aroused the nation over the past week was a report of racism in Israel’s hospitals, amplified into a threat that alien babies in maternity wards would grow up into an enemy from within – not unlike Pharaoh’s plan for eliminating the threat of Jewish babies.
This threat perceived and publicized by Bayit Yehudi MK Bezalel Smotrich is, however, not limited to mixed maternity wards, but reflects an escalating extremism of views. He set off a firestorm of condemnation of his remarks and interviews last week, in which he supported segregating maternity wards to keep Jewish mothers from suffering the allegedly raucous behavior of Arab families.
But it soon became clear that he considers such segregation necessary to protect Israel’s Jews from terrorism – which he defines as being perpetrated by Arabs against Jews, and not vice versa.
For example, Smotrich has proclaimed that “the murder in the village of Duma, with all its gravity, was not a terrorist attack. Period.” The arson murders of three members of the Dawabsha family, allegedly by convicted Jewish terrorists in July 2015, could not have been perpetrated by Jews, by Smotrich’s definition: “Terrorism is only defined as violence enacted by an enemy in the framework of war against us.”
Unfortunately, Smotrich’s racism is not confined to the maternity ward. Nearly three decades after the activities of the Jewish Terrorist Underground, the 2015 arson murders at Duma and the kidnapping and burning to death of Arab teen Muhammad Abu Khdeir by Jewish terrorists in 2014 demonstrate that lethal racism persists among some Jews.
According to the Bayit Yehudi MK, “Every Arab is a potential terrorist, and at minimum, [they] are not legitimate members of Israeli society.”
That being his warped worldview, his various tweets in response to criticism followed logically: “It is natural that my wife would not want to lie down next to someone who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby in another 20 years.”
Smotrich said that the alleged hostility of Jewish women who give birth toward Arab women is natural and understandable, because of what he termed the blood feud between the two peoples. This is because, he told Israel Radio, the Arabs of Israel, although they have equal rights, traitorously support our enemies.
Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, speaking at the Bar Association Conference in Eilat last week, said he rejects Smotrich’s remarks. “This is just a symptom of increasing hostility to minorities. This has been going on for many years. We are in a bad place regarding racism and hatred of the other,” he said.
However, Rabbi Elyakim Levanon, a prominent rabbi in Samaria, said on Galei Israel, a regional West Bank radio station, that “MK Smotrich expressed the opinion of most of the public, and the media do not reflect the majority.”
The Health Ministry denied the Israel Radio report of “segregation” of Jewish and Arab mothers in a number of hospitals, asserting that it “prohibits all separation as a result of discrimination.”
Ministry director-general Moshe Bar Siman Tov told The Jerusalem Post he will invite hospital heads to discuss reports of systematic separation of Jewish and Arab new mothers in maternity wards.
Despite ongoing terrorist attacks, hospitals have managed to remain islands of sanity and calm. Anyone who has spent time in an Israeli hospital knows that they manifest the vibrant, defiant and – yes – sometimes noisy voice of democracy.
With Arab doctors treating Jewish patients and vice versa, the focus is on healing. And as the Post’s Ben Hartman wrote late last week after a visit to the maternity ward at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, most patients are far more concerned with their newborn than with their roommates and their visitors.
As Hartman wrote, to put an end to the validity of Smotrich’s divisive statements, “There’s no ethnic component that determines whether someone is inconsiderate or a pain in the neck – it’s an equal opportunity gene that affects members of all the Abrahamic religions.”
Source
When somebody begins a sentence, ‘I’m not a racist, but...’
For 2,000 years, Jews have lived as a minority – we should know better how to treat others.
Bezalel Smotrich.. (photo credit:Courtesy/Regavim)
For a secular Israeli ,Passover is the festival that still resonates. Rosh Hashana and Succot provide a good time to go away at the end of a hot summer, the specialness of Yom Kippur centers on the lack of traffic on the roads while Shavuot seems mainly to be the festival of Tnuva and other dairies. Passover, however, is different.
The annual retelling, in a family setting, of the ancient myth concerning the Exodus from Egypt and the creation of the Israeli nation inside the Land of Israel not only creates a bond stretching back generations but also inspires hopes for a better tomorrow – if we learn the lessons of this compelling narrative.
In a radio interview last week, Likud MK Ze’ev Binyamin (Benny) Begin, once regarded as one of the most right-wing members of the Knesset but today viewed as a beacon of moderation given the ugly wave of fascism sweeping over the Israeli Right – Begin himself recently used the term “fascist” when decrying the Im Tirzu campaign against Israeli artists associated with left-wing organizations – made a crucial point that should be the focus of any serious discussion at Seder night.
Condemning the outrageous racist remarks of Bezalel Smotrich, the Bayit Yehudi MK who advocated separate maternity wards for Jewish and Arab women, Begin pointed out that one of the central tasks facing the Jewish majority in the State of Israel today was how to behave toward the country’s large Arab minority. For 2,000 years, Begin noted, Jews have been the minority in the countries in which they lived. Now that we have our own state, he said, we should know better how to treat others.
When somebody begins a sentence “I’m not a racist, but...,” you know the following phrase is not going to be pleasant, and so it was with Smotrich. First of all, he said, “My wife really isn’t a racist, but after giving birth she wants to rest and doesn’t want those mass parties that are the norm among the families of Arab women after birth,” and then went on to make the ridiculous claim, “It’s natural that my wife wouldn’t want to lie next to someone whose baby son might want to murder my son.”
Chances are, of course, that that Arab woman’s baby son is more likely to save his son’s life than harm him. According to a 2011 report by the civil service commissioner’s office, 12.5 percent of Israel’s doctors in the public health system are Arab, as are 11.3% of nurses. A 2015 study by Tel Aviv University meanwhile indicated that Arabs account for 35% of all pharmacists.
Not that this would mollify the Smotrich family. In a chilling Channel 10 television interview, his wife Revital, when asked if she would agree to an Arab doctor delivering her baby, answered: “The moment of birth is a sacred moment, a pure moment.
It’s a moment that is very Jewish. I’d be very pleased if Jewish hands were to touch my baby the moment it enters the world.”
Let’s just imagine, for a moment, the outcry that would have followed say, the deputy speaker of the German Bundestag and his wife making similar comments, talking about not wanting shared maternity wards with Jews and only German doctors delivering “German” babies. Our prime minister would not have missed the opportunity to seize the moral high ground and lecture the world on the dangers of anti-Semitism.
But you can search the Internet in vain for any condemnation by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Knesset’s deputy speaker’s remarks.
A counterpoint to this depressing tendency of those on the Right to view any culture outside our own with, at best, suspicion, comes a fascinating exhibition now showing at the Israel Museum, “Pharaoh in Canaan: The Untold Story,” which chronicles the rich cross-cultural ties between Egypt and Canaan during the second millennium BCE, the time of the biblical narrative of Joseph and Moses. An empty room, save for a video presentation, is devoted to the story of the Exodus from Egypt, pointedly reminding visitors that there is no archeological evidence for the biblical story.
Instead, the exhibition highlights the fact that the during the Canaanite settlement in the eastern part of the Egyptian Delta during the Middle Bronze Age and the consequent period of Egyptian rule over Canaan during the Late Bronze Age, there was a clear cross-fertilization of ritual practices and aesthetic vocabularies between the two distinct ancient cultures.
This message of different cultures, remaining true to their own beliefs while interacting with others, is one from which we can learn, because our society will only flourish if it has the confidence to be open and tolerant of others.
Source
According to the Bayit Yehudi MK, “Every Arab is a potential terrorist, and at minimum, [they] are not legitimate members of Israeli society.”
Bezalel Smotrich.. (photo credit:Courtesy/Regavim)
As if in the weeks before Passover we needed yet another reminder that we were once strangers in a strange land, along comes a parliamentarian to show us how outdated such a moral concept is.
Ironically, the incident that aroused the nation over the past week was a report of racism in Israel’s hospitals, amplified into a threat that alien babies in maternity wards would grow up into an enemy from within – not unlike Pharaoh’s plan for eliminating the threat of Jewish babies.
This threat perceived and publicized by Bayit Yehudi MK Bezalel Smotrich is, however, not limited to mixed maternity wards, but reflects an escalating extremism of views. He set off a firestorm of condemnation of his remarks and interviews last week, in which he supported segregating maternity wards to keep Jewish mothers from suffering the allegedly raucous behavior of Arab families.
But it soon became clear that he considers such segregation necessary to protect Israel’s Jews from terrorism – which he defines as being perpetrated by Arabs against Jews, and not vice versa.
For example, Smotrich has proclaimed that “the murder in the village of Duma, with all its gravity, was not a terrorist attack. Period.” The arson murders of three members of the Dawabsha family, allegedly by convicted Jewish terrorists in July 2015, could not have been perpetrated by Jews, by Smotrich’s definition: “Terrorism is only defined as violence enacted by an enemy in the framework of war against us.”
Unfortunately, Smotrich’s racism is not confined to the maternity ward. Nearly three decades after the activities of the Jewish Terrorist Underground, the 2015 arson murders at Duma and the kidnapping and burning to death of Arab teen Muhammad Abu Khdeir by Jewish terrorists in 2014 demonstrate that lethal racism persists among some Jews.
According to the Bayit Yehudi MK, “Every Arab is a potential terrorist, and at minimum, [they] are not legitimate members of Israeli society.”
That being his warped worldview, his various tweets in response to criticism followed logically: “It is natural that my wife would not want to lie down next to someone who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby in another 20 years.”
Smotrich said that the alleged hostility of Jewish women who give birth toward Arab women is natural and understandable, because of what he termed the blood feud between the two peoples. This is because, he told Israel Radio, the Arabs of Israel, although they have equal rights, traitorously support our enemies.
Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, speaking at the Bar Association Conference in Eilat last week, said he rejects Smotrich’s remarks. “This is just a symptom of increasing hostility to minorities. This has been going on for many years. We are in a bad place regarding racism and hatred of the other,” he said.
However, Rabbi Elyakim Levanon, a prominent rabbi in Samaria, said on Galei Israel, a regional West Bank radio station, that “MK Smotrich expressed the opinion of most of the public, and the media do not reflect the majority.”
The Health Ministry denied the Israel Radio report of “segregation” of Jewish and Arab mothers in a number of hospitals, asserting that it “prohibits all separation as a result of discrimination.”
Ministry director-general Moshe Bar Siman Tov told The Jerusalem Post he will invite hospital heads to discuss reports of systematic separation of Jewish and Arab new mothers in maternity wards.
Despite ongoing terrorist attacks, hospitals have managed to remain islands of sanity and calm. Anyone who has spent time in an Israeli hospital knows that they manifest the vibrant, defiant and – yes – sometimes noisy voice of democracy.
With Arab doctors treating Jewish patients and vice versa, the focus is on healing. And as the Post’s Ben Hartman wrote late last week after a visit to the maternity ward at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, most patients are far more concerned with their newborn than with their roommates and their visitors.
As Hartman wrote, to put an end to the validity of Smotrich’s divisive statements, “There’s no ethnic component that determines whether someone is inconsiderate or a pain in the neck – it’s an equal opportunity gene that affects members of all the Abrahamic religions.”
Source
When somebody begins a sentence, ‘I’m not a racist, but...’
For 2,000 years, Jews have lived as a minority – we should know better how to treat others.
Bezalel Smotrich.. (photo credit:Courtesy/Regavim)
For a secular Israeli ,Passover is the festival that still resonates. Rosh Hashana and Succot provide a good time to go away at the end of a hot summer, the specialness of Yom Kippur centers on the lack of traffic on the roads while Shavuot seems mainly to be the festival of Tnuva and other dairies. Passover, however, is different.
The annual retelling, in a family setting, of the ancient myth concerning the Exodus from Egypt and the creation of the Israeli nation inside the Land of Israel not only creates a bond stretching back generations but also inspires hopes for a better tomorrow – if we learn the lessons of this compelling narrative.
In a radio interview last week, Likud MK Ze’ev Binyamin (Benny) Begin, once regarded as one of the most right-wing members of the Knesset but today viewed as a beacon of moderation given the ugly wave of fascism sweeping over the Israeli Right – Begin himself recently used the term “fascist” when decrying the Im Tirzu campaign against Israeli artists associated with left-wing organizations – made a crucial point that should be the focus of any serious discussion at Seder night.
Condemning the outrageous racist remarks of Bezalel Smotrich, the Bayit Yehudi MK who advocated separate maternity wards for Jewish and Arab women, Begin pointed out that one of the central tasks facing the Jewish majority in the State of Israel today was how to behave toward the country’s large Arab minority. For 2,000 years, Begin noted, Jews have been the minority in the countries in which they lived. Now that we have our own state, he said, we should know better how to treat others.
When somebody begins a sentence “I’m not a racist, but...,” you know the following phrase is not going to be pleasant, and so it was with Smotrich. First of all, he said, “My wife really isn’t a racist, but after giving birth she wants to rest and doesn’t want those mass parties that are the norm among the families of Arab women after birth,” and then went on to make the ridiculous claim, “It’s natural that my wife wouldn’t want to lie next to someone whose baby son might want to murder my son.”
Chances are, of course, that that Arab woman’s baby son is more likely to save his son’s life than harm him. According to a 2011 report by the civil service commissioner’s office, 12.5 percent of Israel’s doctors in the public health system are Arab, as are 11.3% of nurses. A 2015 study by Tel Aviv University meanwhile indicated that Arabs account for 35% of all pharmacists.
Not that this would mollify the Smotrich family. In a chilling Channel 10 television interview, his wife Revital, when asked if she would agree to an Arab doctor delivering her baby, answered: “The moment of birth is a sacred moment, a pure moment.
It’s a moment that is very Jewish. I’d be very pleased if Jewish hands were to touch my baby the moment it enters the world.”
Let’s just imagine, for a moment, the outcry that would have followed say, the deputy speaker of the German Bundestag and his wife making similar comments, talking about not wanting shared maternity wards with Jews and only German doctors delivering “German” babies. Our prime minister would not have missed the opportunity to seize the moral high ground and lecture the world on the dangers of anti-Semitism.
But you can search the Internet in vain for any condemnation by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Knesset’s deputy speaker’s remarks.
A counterpoint to this depressing tendency of those on the Right to view any culture outside our own with, at best, suspicion, comes a fascinating exhibition now showing at the Israel Museum, “Pharaoh in Canaan: The Untold Story,” which chronicles the rich cross-cultural ties between Egypt and Canaan during the second millennium BCE, the time of the biblical narrative of Joseph and Moses. An empty room, save for a video presentation, is devoted to the story of the Exodus from Egypt, pointedly reminding visitors that there is no archeological evidence for the biblical story.
Instead, the exhibition highlights the fact that the during the Canaanite settlement in the eastern part of the Egyptian Delta during the Middle Bronze Age and the consequent period of Egyptian rule over Canaan during the Late Bronze Age, there was a clear cross-fertilization of ritual practices and aesthetic vocabularies between the two distinct ancient cultures.
This message of different cultures, remaining true to their own beliefs while interacting with others, is one from which we can learn, because our society will only flourish if it has the confidence to be open and tolerant of others.
Source
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