The true believers and Netanyahu

by Caroline Glick
September 1, 2005 

From the hills of Jerusalem and the ruins of Jewish Gaza, 
the dog-and-pony show being orchestrated by the bereaved 
mother and antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan couldn't seem 
more detached from reality or from the real challenges facing 
the Jewish state today. As I wrote a friend in America in an 
angry and misconceived e-mail late last week, "She's your 
problem, not mine." 

And yet, the international attention that Sheehan has garnered 
points to a universal problem that plagues Israel more, not less, 
than America. The problem is that in its quest to maintain its 
absolute faith in its pagan god of peace in our time, the Left 
internationally and in Israel has abandoned reason for rage and 
has exchanged rationality for mocking paranoia and hatred. 

Given the hatred in which the Left is presently submerged, 
it is not the least surprising that its new darling Sheehan is 
a raging Jew-hater. Her statements to the adoring international 
press corps have included such gems, as "Am I emotional? 
Yes, my firstborn was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was 
killed for lies and for a neocon agenda to benefit Israel. 
My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel." 

The good news in America is that voices like Sheehan's are not 
the only ones being heard. Real debate on the acute problems 
besetting the US in Iraq is fostered openly by news outlets like 
FOX News, The National Review, talk radio and The Wall Street 
Journal. And the result of the debates is an informed and 
educated public and a government that is forced to respond to 
constructive ideas in a manner that advances its ability to 
succeed in its mission in Iraq and beyond. 

The fact that such debate exists in America even leads those 
members of the Left who have not completely abandoned their 
faculties to begin to contend with the fact that their camp has 
been taken over by hate-filled bigots and opportunistic, 
anti-American idiots. 

In a column this week in The Los Angeles Times, Susan Estrich, 
a leading Jewish leftist feminist and consultant for the Democratic 
Party, railed against her camp's silence in the wake of Sheehan's 
anti-Semitic outbursts. In her words, "I will not stand silent and 
see anti-Semitism masked as opposition to Israel and Israel 
blamed for George Bush's mistakes, if that's what they are." 

Sadly, IN Israel, we have no diversity in our media and therefore, 
we have no public debate. To the extent that Sheehan's 
escapades have been reported here, the coverage has been 
mindlessly sympathetic. 

The Pravda-like uniformity of the Israeli media was nowhere 
more apparent than in its coverage of Binyamin Netanyahu's 
press conference on Tuesday, where he announced his 
candidacy for leadership of the Likud Party against Prime 
Minister Ariel Sharon. Wednesday morning's headlines 
screamed out against the man the media elite wish the 
Israeli public to view as a demonic usurper. 

Yediot Ahronot published the results of a bizarre poll on its 
front page claiming that Sharon was ahead Netanyahu by 
31 points. The poll's oddity stems from its irrelevance. 
In Israel the prime minister is not directly elected. Unless 
Sharon leaves the Likud, where Netanyahu enjoys a firm and 
large margin of support over Sharon, the two will not compete 
in national elections. 

Aside from that, the poll's questions ignored the fact that 
Israel is a democracy and in a democracy, elections are a 
natural and wholly legitimate process. The first question put to 
the sample population is a case in point. It asked, "Do you 
think that the Likud ought to begin a process of dismissing 
Ariel Sharon?" That question, like the media's uniform 
portrayal of the call for new elections as an illegitimate 
usurpation of power, exposed its author's abject refusal to 
accept the plain fact that a call for new elections is not a 
coup d'etat. Rather, it is a wholly legitimate action in a 
parliamentary democracy when a political leader has lost the 
support of his party. 

The repeated, distorted polls are geared toward creating a 
sense among the general public that we have nowhere to turn 
except to Sharon and his friends on the Left. This attempt to 
demoralize the public is backed up by the lead columnists 
and political reporters in all the major newspapers and 
electronic media outlets who have taken it upon themselves 
to convince the Israeli public that Netanyahu - like Cindy 
Sheehan's Jews and neoconservatives for Americans - is their 
enemy. As Maariv's Ben Caspit hinted on the front page of his 
paper's edition on Wednesday, a vote for Netanyahu is a vote 
for supposedly primitive gorillas who sell vegetables in the shuk. 
How unaesthetic. Who would want to support the leader of a 
group of gorillas? 

Yet in all the column space devoted in the papers to demonizing 
Netanyahu and his supporters, one thing was brazenly absent. 
No attention whatsoever was paid to the points he made in his 
presentation on Tuesday. Netanyahu spoke at length about the 
lack of public debate in Israel over the most pressing issues of 
our times. He spoke in detail about the need to restore 
responsibility for Israel's security to the army rather than to 
the Palestinian militias and the Egyptian military. 

Perhaps most significantly, Netanyahu stated flatly, and for 
the first time since last week's expulsions, the truth that the 
monolithic Israeli press in its babbling leftist bubble and their 
champion Sharon has refused to admit: The State of Palestine 
was established last week in Gaza. 

Calls today for the establishment or nonestablishment of a 
Palestinian state were rendered irrelevant by the expulsion of 
all Jews from the Gaza Strip and the planned turnover of the 
border between Gaza and the Sinai to Egyptian and Palestinian 
forces in the coming weeks. 

Gaza is now sovereign Palestine. It has all the ingredients 
required by international law to be treated as a sovereign state. 
It has a government, territory, a population and the capacity to 
conduct foreign relations. It is a state. This is significant both 
for Israeli and international future dealings with the now-defunct 
Palestinian Authority (which must now be viewed as the 
government of Palestine) and for the Israeli Left. 

It is true that the Palestinians continue to deny that they are 
a state. These arguments are both ridiculous and irrelevant. 
The statements to the effect that they still live under the 
so-called occupation elsewhere, or even somehow in Gaza, 
have neither legal nor rational grounding. They have a state. 
And now it is their turn to act like a state and build something 
constructive for their citizens. 

If they choose not to act like a state but rather, as was the 
case with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in 
Iraq, they decide to use their sovereign territory as a base for 
terrorism and war against Israel or any other state, then their 
inevitable and well-deserved fate will be that of the Taliban and 
Saddam. 

Rather than acknowledge this simple fact, the Left in Israel, 
led today by Sharon, has abjectly ignored it. Both the media 
and Sharon today speak openly of further expulsions of 
law-abiding Israeli citizens from their homes in Judea and 
Samaria and of the need for negotiations with the Palestinian 
Authority. The general sense being propagated by the likes of 
Nahum Barnea in Yediot Ahronot and Yoel Marcus in Haaretz 
is that anyone who doesn't support continued land giveaways 
and expulsions of Jews for the benefit of the PLO is an extremist. 

The pathetic aspect of the enduring insistence of the Left that 
a Palestinian state can only be established after Israel has 
ceded all of Gaza, Judea and Samaria and east Jerusalem to 
the PLO is that for the past 12 years its leaders - from Shimon 
Peres and Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Barak and now Sharon - 
have ignored the plain fact that the Palestinians themselves 
have expressed no interest in establishing Palestine. Their 
message, repeated ad nauseum, is that their goal is to liberate 
Palestine - that is, to destroy Israel. 

The Left has taken to shooting every messenger who tells 
them this unpleasant truth, a truth which lays bare the lie at 
the foundation of their messianic faith in the god of peace in 
our time. Netanyahu, for these true believers, is the ultimate 
messenger and thus the ultimate enemy. 

A recent entry in the brilliant Web site The Belmont Club 
recalls the experience of the current Left's forefathers in the 
Bolshevik movement who were victimized in Stalin's purges. 
Drawing from Piers Brendon's history of the 1930s, Dark Valley, 
the entry notes, "The most common scrawl left by doomed 
Old Bolsheviks at Lubyanka prison were the words 'What For?' 
But more poignant yet was the refusal of some Party members, 
exiled to Magadan, the worst camp of the Gulag, to smuggle 
news to their comrades of their fate. One said, 'At least now 
they still have hope in Communism. If I let them know the 
truth then they will have nothing.' Even in Magadan the Left's 
deepest need was to believe. Having abolished the God of their 
forefathers and finding themselves prostrate before the false god 
they fashioned for themselves, as [they stood] between 
extinction and despair they chose extinction." 

The lies we are told today by the Left, in Israel and 
internationally, become more and more shrill as the reality of 
the world we live in and their own irrationality become 
increasingly difficult to sweep under the rug. Cindy Sheehan is 
an anti-Semite and should be dismissed for her hatred. 
Netanyahu is an imperfect human being, but is also a leader 
with a rational approach to policy and politics and a healthy 
regard for democracy. And the Left, filled with hatred and blind 
faith in lies, must be exposed and defeated in the battlefield of 
ideas before its false prophets land us all in a new version of 
the gulag.