By Gideon Levy
Ward Churchill in a yarmulka
Ram Caspi has written an article. From the heights of his apartment in Tel Aviv's David Towers, the prominent lawyer has suggested strangulating the Gaza Strip. In the financial daily Globes of May 25, he called for, "neither a land incursion nor an aerial attack, but the creation of a noose ... From the moment that rocket number eight is fired, the government of Israel will act to cut Gaza off from the essential infrastructure systems of fuel, water, electricity and telephones, and will prevent others from providing these utilities to Gaza."
Wow! Someone who actually "gets it".
In other words: to cut a million and a half people off from the sources of life.
Why, yes. Just like they want to cut short the lives of some seven million Israeli Jews
Caspi is a successful attorney, who comes and goes in the tabernacles of justice and rule, a man who moves about in the highest reaches of Israeli society. Not a hair on his head has been mussed as a result of his satanic proposal.
Maybe that's because it isn't "satanic".
This man of the law who incites for the violation of international law has not been chastised.
Stuff yer, "international law". It doesn't apply to a nation of avowed terrorists, emkay?
No one has shunned him in the wake of his words. The season for racism, collective punishment and verbal violence is at its height.
Why yes, how did you notice? "The season for racism, collective punishment and verbal violence" has been "at its height" for some time now in the Palestinian territories. Collective punishment is something that Islam does best. What do you call the last several decades of seasons during which the Palestinians have inflicted constant collective punishment upon Israel with bomb vests, car bombs and rocket attacks?
What was once the reserve of nutcases on the right, the talkbackers and the loony listeners to the call-in radio programs, is now politically correct, in the heart of the consensus, the dernier cri in the violent and overheated Israeli discourse.
And your suicidal hand wringing was once reserved for nutcases on the left. Somehow, Olmert has managed to make it mainstream.
Caspi is not alone. Satan is no longer to be found only in Tehran --- he is alive and kicking here in our midst. Israel is being inundated by a murky stream of little blue-and-white Ahmadinejads: If the president of Iran proposes to destroy Israel, they, who are smaller than he, are proposing only to "eradicate" villages, "flatten" them, starve entire populations and in fact to kill them.
Strange that you neglect to make note of how these "villages" have all vowed to kill every last Jew on earth. But that wouldn't fit in with your program of extreme self-loathing, now would it?
There is no difference, in principle or morally, between the Iranian original and his Israeli imitators.
Well, not unless you have a brain.
The racist and bullying philosophy of Minister of Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman and his ilk has unleashed its malignant tentacles into the heart of society. Meir Kahane, who made proposals more moderate than these, found himself shunned; Caspi continues to advise the top people in the country on legal matters.
I guess this means that the majority of Israelis have finally woken up, no?
This ugly and appalling phenomenon had its beginnings last summer, during the Second Lebanon War. "We are allowed to have another Kfar Kana, we are allowed to destroy everything," said the justice minister at the time, Haim Ramon, the man who was in charge of maintaining the law.
Works for me.
Trade and Industry Minister Eli Yishai, a representative of a religious party that has a "spiritual" leadership, did not lag behind him: He proposed targeting infrastructure in Lebanon and "flattening" villages.
It's pretty hard for a flattened village to fire any more rockets, now isn't it?
These two calls to commit war crimes did not emerge from the mouths of representatives of the extreme right.
No mention of the Palestinians' incessant string of "war crimes", of course.
Ramon and Yishai have remained legitimate spokesmen. Nor did the generals keep quiet: "Grind Lebanon. Turn it into a museum of the incubation of terror," proposed a former chief of Northern Command headquarters, Brigadier General (Res.) Rafi Noy, a desired interviewee in the studios.
What's not to like?
The Qassams on Sderot presaged the disgusting continuation, this time in poetry as well. "If not the roof beams, destroy the foundations ... Attack Lebanon and also Gaza with plows and with salt, destroy them so no inhabitant remains. Transform them into barren desert, piles of rubble ... kill them, spill their blood, frighten the living," wrote poet Ilan Scheinfeld, who has recently published a novel whose boycott no one has called for.
Why boycott something if it actually works?
Former chief rabbi Mordechai Eliahu has called for returning fire on homes; Minister of Pensioner Affairs Rafi Eitan has proposed that Israel manufacture a domestic version of the Qassam and launch it on Gaza; Public Security Minister Avi Dichter has said that targeted assassinations are not enough; his successor at the Shin Bet security service, Yuval Diskin, has complained that "in Beit Lahiya and in Beit Hanoun they are living in tranquility;" our old acquaintance Lieberman has proposed a hit on the quarter where Gaza City's well-off reside for every hit on Sderot; Major General (Res.) Amiram Levin has called for dividing the Gaza Strip into squares, and after every Qassam destroying one; former justice minister Yosef Lapid supported this proposal; former chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, the progenitor of the theory of "consciousness-searing," has proposed "cleansing the territory;" Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal has said that he prefers "a dead child in Gaza to a dead child in Sderot," and a bereaved father from the Second Lebanon War, Ami Schreier, has called for the wiping out of a neighborhood in Gaza, with advance warning of three hours, for every Qassam. Not one of them has been castigated for his words, not one of them shunned.
This is what happens when people finally purchase a clue with respect to Islamic terrorism. No, it's not a nice picture, but then images of the collapsing Twin Towers aren't either.
This is what we look like. This is our moral portrait.
Go piss up a rope you sanctimonious moralizing bastard.