http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Electoral-reform-321836

Electoral reform

MK Muhammad Barakei (Hadash) started it. Opposition lawmakers from the Arab parties, from United Torah Judaism, from Meretz and from Labor followed Barakei’s lead. On the Knesset’s podium, they used the speaking time allotted to them to stand in silent protest against legislation that seeks to raise the minimum percentage needed to enter the Knesset from 2 percent of the total vote to 4%.

The opposition MKs’ message on Wednesday night was clear: Raising the electoral threshold would silence the smaller parties – particularly the Arab parties. It was a unique moment of unity that brought together the Belz Hassid MK Yisrael Eichler (United Torah Judaism) and the homosexual MK Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz) to defend the political rights of the Arab minority. The feeling of solidarity was so strong among the opposition members that Meretz chairwoman Zehava Gal-On was driven to tears.

But is the raising of the electoral threshold really worth crying over? Since its founding, Israel’s political stability has been undermined by an extreme proportional representation system. One of its main features is a remarkably low threshold for election to the Knesset. Among Western nations with proportional representation systems, few permit parties representing such as small percentage of the population to receive seats in the parliament. In fact, only the Netherlands seems to have a threshold lower than Israel’s.

Extreme proportional representation systems do not have an illustrious track record. The Weimar Republic had such a system.

In Israel the low threshold tends to encourage the creation of short-lived parties with narrow or radical agendas.

Kach or the Pensioners Party come to mind. It also encourages fractiousness and the splintering of smaller factions from larger ones over minor differences.

Government coalitions that are cobbled together inevitably become a patchwork of diverse factions. And these governments are weakened by chronic division and instability. In many cases, a single party – often a religious one – can bring down a government by abandoning the coalition, giving the party inordinate leverage.

Over the past few decades the sizes of the two largest parties – traditionally Labor and the Likud – have steadily decreased due to the creation of short-lived centrist parties.

Until 1996, the two largest parties together consistently held more than 70 Knesset seats. Since 1999, they have garnered fewer than half the 120 mandates.

Raising the threshold is one step – among others such as institution of a first-past-the-post system with regional representation – that would encourage parties with similar agendas to merge. Ideally, two large parties – one left-wing and one right-wing – that represent the two mainstream positions on cardinal issues such as security and socioeconomics should garner the vast majority of the votes.

Undoubtedly, the proposed change will hurt the small Arab parties – Hadash, Balad and United Arab List-Ta’al.

But clearly the intent of the lawmakers who support the reform is not to discriminate against the Arab parties.

(Shaul Mofaz’s Kadima would not have made it into the Knesset under the 4% rule either.) There might be validity to the Israel Democracy Institute’s claim that the threshold should have been raised incrementally to give smaller parties time to get used to the change. Still, the Arab factions have ample time to form a unified list that will easily pass the threshold. These are parties that represent a fifth of the population.

Ideally, our political culture will change to the point where it will be possible to incorporate haredi and Arab politicians into the largest political parties on the Right and on the Left and there will be no need for parties with narrow agendas that represent specific sectors of society.

The beginnings of such a change are apparent in Yesh Atid, which has managed to incorporate a diverse list of parliamentarians – haredi (Dov Lipman), religious Zionist (Shai Piron) and secular.

Haredi and Arab MKs working within a large political party – the Likud, Labor or some other – would represent the interests of their constituents much better, particularly if the party to which they belong is a member of the government coalition.

Raising the electoral threshold – combined with other reforms in our electoral system – encourages precisely such a change. It should elicit hope, not tears.

Thatcher and Israel

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Thatcher-and-Israel-309281



She single-handedly transformed post-colonialist Britain’s “sclerotic” economy; she bravely defended the United Kingdom’s interests in the Falkland Islands – in the process precipitating the toppling of Argentina’s ruling junta and restoring the British pride in nation; she is even credited, together with US president Ronald Reagan, with ending the Cold War and sparking the ascendancy of free-market capitalism throughout the Western world and beyond.

But when the late Margaret Thatcher was asked to share what she felt was her most meaningful accomplishment, she mentioned none of these many successes. Instead, Britain’s only female prime minister related her part in helping to save a young Austrian girl from the Nazis.

As related by British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould in an interview Tuesday on Army Radio and as told by Charles C. Johnson in a piece that appears on the Jewish news site Tablet, in 1938 Margaret, then just 12, and her sister Muriel, 17, set about raising the money and persuading the local Rotary Club to help save Edith Muhlbauer, 17, from Hitler’s Austria. They succeeded. For the next two years Muhlbauer stayed with more than a dozen Rotary families and for a time bunked with young Margaret.

That it was this episode in her long life of political activism that stood out for Thatcher is revealing. Nazism and other variants of totalitarian forms of government, such as Communism – under which Jews, more than any other people, suffered – were the antithesis of Thatcher’s worldview.

By contrast, the Jewish people, who thrived wherever they were given freedom and an equal playing field, represented all that Thatcher believed in: meritocracy, the ability of individuals to excel if given the chance, and self-help.

Thatcher witnessed these traits firsthand as an MP representing the north London borough of Finchley, prominently populated with middle-class, entrepreneurial Jews.

“In the 33 years that I represented [Finchley],” Thatcher later wrote, according to Johnson, “I never had a Jew come in poverty and desperation to one of my [town meetings].”

Thatcher was impressed by the tremendous achievements of the plucky Jewish state as well, though she was consistently critical of Israel’s policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians and opposed the Begin government’s airstrike on the Osirak nuclear facility in 1981 as well as its decision to invade Lebanon in 1982.

Thatcher’s admiration for Israel is expressed clearly in her memoirs: “The political and economic construction of Israel against huge odds and bitter adversaries is one of the heroic sagas of our age. They really made the desert bloom.”

It would not be an exaggeration to argue that the 1985 Economic Stabilization Program, implemented by a Likud- Labor (Alignment) national unity government, was inspired – at least in part – by the increasing dominance of neo-liberal economic thought popularized by – among others – Thatcher. After the “iron lady” proved that it was possible to transform a failing economy with a tyrannizing labor union, anachronistic, nationalized industries and suffocating bureaucracy, Israel could follow in Thatcher’s footsteps and take many of the same steps.

Fiscal discipline, later enshrined in the Deficit Reduction Law, was implemented, bringing down three-digit inflation to around 20 percent; monetary and capital market reforms were instituted, gradually opening the Israeli economy to foreign investments and competition; privatization reduced state involvement in the economy and the weakening of the Histadrut.

All of these factors, combined with the waves of immigration from the Former Soviet Union, resulted in a new spurt of economic growth and the explosion of the Israeli hi-tech industry. The majority of Israelis rightly continue to believe in capitalism, judging from the January 22 elections.

Thanks to the demonstrations of two summers ago, for the first time in decades socioeconomic issues were brought to the forefront during an electoral campaign.

Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party, with its platform of free market capitalism, was the big winner. So was the revamped religious-Zionist Bayit Yehudi party under the leadership of hi-tech entrepreneur Naftali Bennett. Like Thatcher, Israelis understand that competitive markets and less government intervention create incentive which leads to innovation.

Throughout history Jews have prospered and excelled in countries where they were given a fair chance. The same holds true today when Jews have their own state.

Only by fostering a competitive, productive economy can the formerly stateless Jewish people ensure that they will continue to flourish in the land of Israel. This is Thatcher’s legacy for Israel.

Persistent anti-Judaism

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Persistent-anti-Judaism-309124

The first ghetto in recorded history was set up in Alexandria in 38 CE at a time when Caligula was emperor of Rome, according to Robert Wistrich, an eminent historian of anti-Semitism. Ever since, and perhaps even before Caligula, anti-Semitism has been the most persistent hatred known to Western society. And this “lethal obsession” is not showing any signs of disappearing any time soon.

In 2012, there were 686 threats, acts of violence and vandalism, including physical attacks – with a weapon (50) or without (89) – perpetrated against Jews because they were Jews, according to a report published on Holocaust Remembrance Day by Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry.

As dependable as the changing of seasons, anti-Semitism may, like the weather, fluctuate, but never does it dissipate.

There are hotter years, such as 2012, when violent incidents rise, and there are years such as 2010 and 2011 when expressions of enmity for Jews fall.

The ebb and flow seems to have its own internal rules.

When Israel defends itself – whether against Hezbollah aggression on the Lebanon border or against Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in the South – Jews living in places like Toulouse or the Bronx are inevitably targeted.

And deadly attacks, like the one on the Ozar Hatorah School in Toulouse in which a rabbi and four children were murdered by Salafist Mohamed Merah, encourage more violence. The carrying out of such atrocities breaks a psychological barrier, paving the way for more.

The tradition of publicizing data related to anti-Semitism on Holocaust Remembrance Day is liable to lead to despair. Even the Shoah failed to shock humanity into abandoning its most ancient hatred. And a new book by historian David Nirenberg titled, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, leaves little room for optimism.

In his work of extraordinary erudition, Nirenberg traces enmity toward Judaism from ancient Egypt through the modern era in thinkers such as Karl Marx. He chooses the term “anti-Judaism” as opposed to “anti-Semitism” because the deployment of Judaism as a force of evil that purportedly threatens Egyptian, Christian, Muslim and modern society, takes place irrespective of the existence of living and breathing Jews, whether in Shakespeare’s England, 16th-century Spain, Martin Luther’s Germany or elsewhere.

Manetho, an Egyptian historian who lived in the third century BCE, transformed Moses and the Hebrews into lepers who spread diseases as a means of making sense of his people’s history of subjection to foreign powers.

Early Christians used the term “Judaism” or “Pharisee” to describe those who rejected Jesus and who attached an overly literal reading of the Bible, in the process destroying the “spirit” of the gospels. Muslims portrayed Judaism as a force that corrupted holy texts. And when Luther rebelled against Catholicism, he attacked the church’s “legalistic understanding of God’s justice” as “Jewish.”

Nor did the age of secularism usher in a more positive perception of Judaism. Marx’s insistence on the abolishment of private property emanated from his desire to emancipate society from Judaism’s spiritual slavery and alienation from the world. It was, after all, the essential “Jewishness” of money and property that produced the despicable Jewish qualities in the gentiles who used them.

Anti-Judaism is, therefore, not solely a negative attitude toward Jews. Rather it has evolved through the ages as an intellectual apparatus for engaging with and/or criticizing the world. This negative mode of thinking about Judaism’s impact on perceptions has persisted after the Holocaust. As Nirenberg points out at the end of his book, “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the arguments that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel.’”

Notwithstanding the calls to “combat” expressions of anti-Semitism throughout the world, the fight against hatred of Jews seems doomed to failure. Zionism’s response, tragically belated in implementation, was, and still is, the most pragmatic to this disheartening reality.

Jewish political self-determination has, admittedly, created problems of its own. But when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu vows, as he did at Yad Vashem on Sunday night, “never again will there be a Shoah,” even Israel’s most virulent detractors take him seriously – or they should.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/israels-capitalist-election/

Israel’s Capitalist Election

Mati Wagner — March 2013

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As the Israeli elections loomed in January, reporters and pundits, biased by their own ideas about Israel and Israelis, failed colossally. Reports and analyses in a wide range of publications and media outlets—from the New York Times and the New Yorker to theIndependent, the Daily Telegraph, and Sky News—made doomsday forecasts about “right-wing entrenchment,” lamented the end of the two-state solution, and even predicted that the dramatic strengthening of a hawkish, xenophobic right would mean the end of Israeli democracy. 

Then, when the election results became known, the international media erred yet again, interpreting the surprising rise of the new Yesh Atid party as a victory for the left. In reality, the truly significant facts about the 2013 Israel elections were the predominance of domestic issues and the complete breakdown of the old dichotomy between right-wing hawks and left-wing doves that usually characterizes Israeli politics. Not since the 1965 elections, the last before the Six-Day War, was attention so completely focused on matters such as socioeconomic policies and draft-dodging by a rapidly growing ultra-Orthodox population. And because the vote was so heavily determined by internal issues, it revealed that a strong majority of citizens in a nation designed and built by socialists has moved decisively away from the dogmatic economic faith of its founders. Indeed, the heads of the three largest parties—Likud-Beytenu, Habayit Hayehudi (“Jewish Home”), and Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”)—were outspoken in their support for smaller government and market capitalism.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud Beytenu is, for many Israelis, the deliverer of an American-style neoliberal capitalism. As finance minister under Ariel Sharon from 2003 to 2005, he implemented some of the most extensive economic reforms in Israeli history. Welfare transfers were cut, the pace of privatization was quickened, income taxes were lowered, and fiscal discipline was tightened. Netanyahu continues to advocate small government, low income taxes, fewer regulations, and less bureaucracy.

Two types of voters tend to support the sorts of economic policies championed by Netanyahu—the rich who want to protect their savings, and the poor but ambitious who want to take advantage of the freedoms capitalism has to offer. The second variety seemed to make up a large percentage of Likud’s voters. In 26 of 27 “development towns”—places like Lod, Beit She’an, and Sderot with low per capita income—Likud received a plurality of the votes. 

In contrast, a higher-end constituency voted for the television personality Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, which rose from nowhere to become the second-largest party after Likud-Beytenu. In many ways, Yesh Atid is no less pro-capitalist than Likud. The party’s platform advocates weakening Israel’s strongest unions (longshoremen, airport workers, Israel Electric Company) and lowering customs taxes in order to increase competition and lower consumer prices. Lapid took care not to scare away upper-middle-class professionals such as corporate attorneys and accountants who have benefited from Israel’s impressive economic growth: When Yesh Atid’s platform calls for cheaper housing or lower bank fees, it also promises to protect banking interests.

Lapid’s “third way” packaging was sophisticated. While praising free markets for encouraging business initiative and innovation uninhibited by government bureaucracy, he also criticized “cold-hearted” capitalism, noting the importance of “balanced regulations” that protect society from the “greed and rapaciousness” of individuals and conglomerates that would, given the chance, gladly shirk their responsibility to society. At the same time, he reassured those in the higher income brackets that he would not run his social program by taking their money. He emphasized the importance of equal opportunity and access to high-quality education, not welfare transfers.  

Lapid’s party won a plurality of votes in some of Israel’s affluent secular towns and neighborhoods surrounding Tel Aviv. And he did very well in middle-class towns as well. Yesh Atid received over a quarter of the votes in municipalities rated in the top fifth when it comes to factors such as per capita income, the number of new cars per family, and high school graduation rates. As the fact that it won only 16 percent of the vote nationally indicates, Yesh Atid performed disproportionately well with this key constituency. Indeed, in a survey of workers in the high-tech sector conducted before the election by the economic daily Globes, 35 percent said they would vote for Yesh Atid, by far the highest of any party.

In the same Globes survey, Naftali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi came in second with 26 percent of the vote. This flew in the face of pre-election commentary suggesting that Bennett, a former Netanyahu deputy, was only doing well because he was a fresh new face for the settler movement. In fact, Bennett had appeal in the high-tech world in part owing to his reputation as a software entrepreneur whose company, Cyota, a developer of anti-fraud security software for financial institutions, was sold in 2005 for $145 million.

Nor can Bennett be so easily characterized as just another peace-treaty rejectionist. His rise marks the sea change that has taken place in the last two decades among religious Zionists. After serving in Sayeret Matkal, the most elite combat unit in the Israel Defense Forces (once totally dominated by Israel’s secular elite, including Netanyahu and his storied brother, Yoni, killed in the daring Entebbe raid), Bennett made the transition to a successful private-sector career before entering politics. Many of Bennett’s supporters are the religious equivalent of Lapid’s: an educated, upwardly mobile constituency. This new generation of modern Orthodox Zionist Israelis is made up disproportionately of doctors, lawyers, engineers, or high-tech workers. (Many even work in the media.) Like Bennett, a high number of religious Zionist men served in the IDF’s elite units or graduated from officers’ training. Military service provided these young men with unparalleled leadership experience, important contacts and social networking, and staggering responsibilities not only for the lives of the soldiers serving under them but also for multimillion-dollar military equipment. All of this made for a smooth transition to the business sector—particularly in the realm of high-tech. Like Bennett, who lives in Ra’anana, a town north of Tel Aviv with a high percentage of religious professionals and software engineers, many of Habayit Hayehudi supporters live in bourgeois neighborhoods inside the 1967 borders.

The election results are proof that the most significant sociological phenomenon in recent Israeli history—the economic protests that began sweeping the nation in the summer of 2011 and mobilized record numbers of protesters—were largely misunderstood. Leaders of the protests articulated decidedly left-wing economic views, calling for larger welfare transfers and attacking Netanyahu’s policies as being tilted in favor of the rich. But the vast majority of Israelis who took to the streets were not demanding more government spending. Consumer rights were in the forefront. They demanded that major food producers cease colluding with the large supermarket chains, and complained about the tremendous bureaucratic obstacles making anything from starting a business to building a house a headache. The Israeli middle class was fed up with the market inefficiencies, red tape, and unfair competition that artificially jacked up the cost of everything from cottage cheese to housing. They were not lamenting the breakdown of the welfare state.

If anything, mainstream Israelis were making it clear they were tired of paying too many taxes to support a population that did not work, while they served in the military and performed reserve duty from which others were exempt. By popular demand, one of the most burning issues facing the new government is the tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox who do not perform mandatory military service, are not schooled to integrate into the labor market, and inevitably end up becoming a drain on the rest of society. Thus the protests, and this election, found a way to connect the anger at big government with the anger at the special privileges granted to the haredi. Demonstrators resurrected Netanyahu’s analogy of “the skinny guy carrying the fat guy,” on which he ventilated in 2003 when he was finance minister. The “fat guy” represented the inefficient and wasteful public sector; the “skinny guy” was the productive, innovative private sector. 

In this atmosphere, the resourceful new leader of the Labor party, Shelly Yachimovich, was doomed to fail—and she did, adding just two seats to the 13 garnered in the 2009 elections under Ehud Barak, despite polls showing Labor getting as many as 17 seats. Yachimovich sought to retain Labor’s position as the party of social welfare while tacking to the center on diplomatic issues. She declared that settlements are not a “sin or a crime” and that state funding of them should not be abandoned. 

This conscious decision not to blame the country’s problems on the settlers or the settlements enraged many in Labor’s peace camp and may lead to her ouster, but the election results suggest she was on to something. Like Yachimovitch, Lapid sought to reassure voters he was not a leftist on security and statehood matters. He said he opposed the division of Jerusalem into two capitals, supported holding on to the large settlement blocs in the West Bank as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians, and chose to make his signal foreign-policy speech in the settlement of Ariel. Polls showed that between 40 and 50 percent of those who voted for Lapid defined themselves as “right-wing” on security matters. Yachimovitch was right to attempt to tap into this constituency. Her mistake was to advocate more spending for welfare. 

This total victory for market capitalism is all the more striking considering Israel’s socialist roots. Labor Zionism, which dominated Israeli politics in the pre-state era and for the first decades after the creation of the Jewish state, was openly antagonistic to free trade and commerce. The Jewish state’s founding fathers, such as Russian Labor Zionist ideologue A.D. Gordon, believed manual labor—particularly agriculture—bound a people to its soil and to its national culture, while capitalism was wasteful, unproductive, parasitic, and the source of Jewish suffering in the Diaspora. The Marxist Ber Borochov, another Labor Zionist ideologue, believed that a productive national existence required the creation of a Jewish working class. The view that Zionism was a social revolution driven by the collective farmers of the kibbutzim and moshavim and that the state should be directly involved in construction, agriculture, and industry was adopted by both Chaim Weizmann, the most important early international leader, and David Ben-Gurion, the state’s most important early political leader. 

Indeed, the impact of Israel’s socialist roots continued to be felt decades after the Jewish state ceased to be dominated by the Labor party. In 2003, while serving as finance minister, Netanyahu told the Israeli daily Ma’ariv that Ben Gurion “made the huge mistake of establishing a socialist state, and we have had to work for years to dismantle that faulty construction.”

However, the extent to which all walks of Israeli society adhered to socialist ideals has been both exaggerated and overrated. As historian Jerry Z. Muller pointed out in his book of essays, Capitalism and the Jews, “while the pre- and post-independence history of the State of Israel was ideologically stamped by socialist Zionism, the reality was more complex—and more capitalistic.” Two waves of immigration following the First World War brought thousands of entrepreneurs and professionals to the Jewish settlement in Palestine. First came Polish Jews, many of whom were owners of small businesses escaping the growing anti-Semitism of the early 1920s. They were followed in the next decade by German Jews fleeing the Nazis. These immigrants came with capital and skills they used to set up small factories in the cities.

As early as 1951, capitalist sentiments and a rejection of Ben-Gurion’s hardline socialism catapulted the General Zionist party—one of the parties later incorporated into Likud that ran on a platform of private enterprise and free markets—from seven to 20 Knesset seats in the election that year with the campaign slogan “Let us live in this land.” Even before it was joined by the Sephardim and Oriental Communities Party and the Yemenite Association, the General Zionist Party was the second largest after Ben-Gurion’s Mapai.

Another party, Herut, challenged Mapai’s political hegemony and eventually metamorphosed into Likud, which finally ousted the Labor Party (the successor to Mapai) after nearly 30 years of uninterrupted rule in 1977. From the first days of the state, Herut rejected Mapai’s socialist romanticization of the working class, valued the role of Jewish entrepreneurship, and argued that the future belonged to the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat. In a speech in Jerusalem in 1977, shortly after Likud won the elections and brought Herut leader Menachem Begin to the premiership, Nobel prize–winning economist Milton Friedman noted that “two Jewish traditions” seem to be at war in Israel. There was the new socialist tradition, characterized by belief in paternalistic and coercive government and rejection of capitalism and free markets. And there was a millennia-old tradition, developed out of the necessities of the Diaspora, of self-reliance and voluntary cooperation, of ingenuity in getting around government controls.

Acknowledging that there always were strong pro-capitalist forces within Israeli society, and in Jewish culture before Israel, can help us better understand the remarkable transformation of the Israeli economy, from a quasi-socialist, centrally controlled economy to a vibrant market economy driven by private enterprise. It also helps explain the 2013 election results. Long ago a majority of the Israeli public rejected the dovish position of the left on matters of diplomacy, security, and the settlements (though out of pragmatism most support some form of a two-state solution). The January 22 elections showed unequivocally that the left’s socioeconomic policies have been rejected as well. 

Diaspora Jewry as a whole—including the Jewish refugees who arrived in Israel—is strongly predisposed to the capitalist ethos. Jews were acutely aware that wherever they were given a chance to compete on a level playing ground, such as in western and central Europe before the war and, of course, in America, they have excelled. What works for individuals should also work for an entire nation.

Israelis understand that in order for a country without natural resources to thrive in a hostile environment, it must tap into its human capital. Doing so requires competitive markets and smaller government, both of which free up Israelis to innovate and give them an incentive to initiate. A.D. Gordon was wrong to propose that agriculture or other forms of unproductive manual labor bind a people to its soil. Only dynamic growth can produce the competitive, productive economy needed to ensure that the formerly stateless Jewish people can flourish in the land of Israel.

A nation with a population of less than 8 million that is capable of getting more companies listed on the major New York stock exchanges than any other country in the world aside from the United States, Canada, and China—as Israel has—will triumph, provided the conditions that enable such astounding productivity remain in place. On January 22, Israelis went to the polls and supported political parties that will ensure that the triumph of the Jewish state’s economy continues.

About the Author

Mati Wagner is the editor of the Jerusalem Post‘s editorial page.

Inglorious Oscars

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Article.aspx?id=305095

This year’s Academy Awards host, the self-satisfied animator, producer, voice actor and director Seth MacFarlane has been lambasted on a number of fronts. Women criticized MacFarlane for his ugly sexism and blatant misogyny: In MacFarlane’s “We saw your boobs” number, the serious acting of women in films such as Silkwood, Brokeback Mountain, Monster’s Ball, Monster, The Accused and Iris was reduced to nothing more than the pleasure derived by men from viewing their anatomy; when MacFarlane presentedDjango Unchained he joked about Chris Brown’s abusive relationship with Rihanna; and his quip about nine-year- old Quvenzhané Wallis, nominated for best actress, was “To give you an idea how young she is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too old for [George] Clooney.”

MacFarlane’s line about not caring that he couldn’t understand a word that Penelope Cruz or Salma Hayek said because they were good to look at was directed as much at Latinos as at women, since he also mentioned Javier Bardem.

And MacFarlane also targeted the Jews. Just one minute was set aside for the borderline anti-Semitic comment out of a three-and-a-half hour Oscar telecast.

But for many that was enough. In the short segment “Ted,” a racist, foul-mouthed animated teddy bear created by MacFarlane suggests that it is best to be Jewish if you “want to continue to work in Hollywood.”

Actor Mark Wahlberg, who is also on stage, calls Ted an idiot. But Ted advises Wahlberg, who admits that despite his Jewish-sounding name he is Catholic, to keep his religion a secret unless he wants to ruin his chances of working in Hollywood.

MacFarlane’s crudeness – befitting the creator of Family Guy – was equally offensive to women, Hispanics and Jews (he also voiced racial insults against Denzel Washington and Eddie Murphy).

There were, however, those who claimed Jewish exceptionalism.

In a statement released on Monday, the day after the Oscars, the Anti-Defamation League, which usually does not make distinctions among varieties of bigotry whether directed against Jews or others, was arguing that MacFarlane’s jokes about a Jewish cabal running Hollywood out of a synagogue were worthy of special censure because “upwards of two billion people” were watching the ceremony, including many who would come to believe “the age-old canard about Jewish control of the film industry.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, took a similar tack, hinting that Mac- Farlane should have been censored. “Every comedian is entitled to wide latitude, but no one should get a free pass for helping to promote anti-Semitism,” he said.

According to The Forward’s J.J. Goldberg, what made MacFarlane’s Jew jokes alone worthy of censorship was their potential for inciting violence. “Freedom of speech does not include the right to make public utterances that may be reasonably expected to cause immediate danger to others,” wrote Goldberg. “It’s entirely reasonable,” he continued, “to suppose that some Mohammed Merah jihadi wannabe somewhere in Toulouse or Antwerp or Copenhagen will see the clip and find that it’s just the extra push he needed to go and do something about it.”

This position is untenable for a number of reasons. First, if one believes, as Goldberg, Hier and perhaps the ADL’s Abe Foxman apparently do, that we in the West should curtail our own freedom of speech out of fear that “some Mohammed Merah jihadi wannabe” will kill someone, why restrict our fears to extremist Muslims? 

Won’t MacFarlane’s objectification of women or crude sexism push a violence-prone male chauvinist over the edge? Or is this a culturally biased statement about Muslims’ unique tendency to mistake bad jokes for a license to kill? We doubt the next Merah is waiting for MacFarlane or anyone else to give him an excuse to murder.

More fundamentally, it is abhorrent to entertain the thought that we in the West will be bullied into imposing restrictions on our freedoms out of fear of violence perpetrated by a reactionary jihadist in the name of Islam.

One may or may not have found MacFarlane offensive, tactless, crude or just plain not funny and, therefore, not someone to be asked to host the Oscars again next year.

Perhaps, in contrast, MacFarlane did a good job by generating controversy that made this Oscars ceremony more memorable than most. But clearly the decision to use or not to use MacFarlane as host should never be made out of fear. Doing so would constitute a victory for the jihadists as well as for the bigots, the sexists and the racists.

Wrong Cause

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Article.aspx?id=304390

Many injustices plague Palestinian society, few of which can be blamed on the Jewish state, even by the farthest stretches of the imaginations of Israel’s enemies. These are self-inflicted injustices.

In the Gaza Strip, an Islamic quasi-state ruled by the totalitarian regime of Hamas has in the past few weeks arrested or summoned for interrogation at least 16 journalists as part of a campaign aimed at intimidating the local media, as reported by The Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh.

These journalists’ only crime is daring to criticize Hamas’s leadership.

And the situation for journalists in the West Bank, which is ruled by the “moderate” Palestinian Authority, is not much better. Just last week, a PA court sentenced 26- year-old Anas Said Awwad to one year in prison for “insulting” President Mahmoud Abbas on Facebook.

Awwad was found guilty of depicting Abbas as a member of the Real Madrid soccer team.

In both Gaza and the West Bank the Palestinian political leadership has suffered from a fundamental lack of legitimacy for the past four years. Besides municipal votes, the last democratic election in Gaza and the West Bank took place in 2006. Palestinians were supposed to hold elections again in 2009. But after Hamas’s victory in the last election, Palestinian leadership was split.

With Western support, the Fatah-led PLO managed to maintain control over the West Bank. In Gaza, Hamas launched a violent and successful putsch in which Fatah members were shot down in the streets or thrown off buildings. Warnings by Israel that if Hamas were allowed to participate, Palestinians’ first truly democratic election (Hamas boycotted the 1996 vote) would be their last were not heeded by then-US president George Bush.

Yet, neither the jailing and intimidation of journalists (and other human rights abuses), nor the lack of democratic representation in their political leadership, has mobilized Palestinians in a significant way. At best, rallies are occasionally organized under the vague banner of “Palestinian unity.”

Instead, Palestinians – and Arab citizens of Israel – are rallying under a different banner: the rights of Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails. Palestinians and Israel’s Arabs, threatening a third intifada, have been demonstrating against the “injustice” of Israel’s rearrest of terrorists who are among the 1,027 Palestinian prisoners released in October 2011 under the Egypt-brokered deal between Hamas and Israel for the return of IDF soldier Gilad Schalit.

Samer Tariq Ahmad Essawi, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is one of the rearrested terrorists. Essawi was captured in April 2002 and later sentenced to 30 years for possessing weapons and for helping to form terrorist cells in the Jerusalem area. He was one of many terrorists arrested during Defensive Shield, the military operation carried out under thenprime minister Ariel Sharon that essentially ended the second intifada and restored security to Israelis who had been regular victims of suicide bombings and shootings.

Another rearrested prisoner is Ayman Sharawna, who was arrested for helping carry out a terrorist attack in Beersheba. On the morning of May 11, 2002, two Palestinian terrorists placed an improvised bomb near a group of civilians in the Old City of Beersheba and fled. A technical fault prevented the bomb from exploding fully.

Eighteen civilians were wounded. Sharawna was sentenced to 38 years imprisonment.

Both men were released in the Schalit deal and both men subsequently violated the conditions of their release.

Sharawna returned to terrorist activities with Hamas, according to the IDF, and was arrested in January 2012.

Essawi, who was freed on condition he remain inside Jerusalem, left the city to visit the nearby PA town of a- Ram and was arrested in July 2012. Both men must now finish out their original sentences.

Inexplicably, Palestinians – and Israel’s Arab citizens – have chosen to champion the causes of these hunger-striking terrorists and others while ignoring the fates of journalists arrested, beaten, censored and arrested by their own political leadership, which for four years now has been ruling without democratic legitimacy. Under the circumstances, what prospects for peace can US President Barack Obama hope for when he visits the region next month?

Prisoner X

For many, the “Prisoner X” incident illustrates the desperate need to update our outmoded military censorship rules. But it also underlines the difficulties of conducting a clandestine war against terrorism in an age when Internet-borne social media and news media make it nearly impossible to keep anything secret for very long.

Australian media broke the story about the alleged former Mossad agent Ben Zygier, who reportedly committed suicide in Ramle’s Ayalon Prison two years ago.

And within a short time the story was being reported extensively locally as well.

Revamping the laws governing military censorship might help improve Israel’s image in the world. After all, attempts to maintain a gag order on a story that is being widely reported on the Internet by news outlets based outside Israel, and widely talked about inside Israel, makes little sense.

We should keep in mind, however, that it is not always an altruistic pursuit of truth that is behind the tremendous media coverage given to sensitive intelligence information potentially damaging to Israeli security.

Sometimes the motivation is a desire to hurt Israel.

Similarly, MKs Ahmed Tibi (United Arab List-Ta’al), Zehava Gal-On (Meretz) and Dov Henin (Hadash), who used their parliamentary immunity to bypass the gag order and broke the news about Prisoner X in the Knesset might have been genuinely interested in investigating the ethical questions surrounding the incident.

None of us should accept with equanimity that in Israel of 2013 a man can be arrested, imprisoned, die in prison and simply disappear without the wider public knowing anything about it. But as members of the opposition, it seemed that the three were no less interested in exploiting the imbroglio to attack the government and further their own political agendas.

To be effective in the battle against terrorism, Israel and other Western governments must work outside wider public scrutiny. Secrecy is the cornerstone of the West’s war against terrorism, whether it be the US’s clandestine drone attacks against al-Qaida operatives – including American citizens – in Afghanistan or Yemen; covert operations inside Iran such as the “mysterious” explosions or assassinations of nuclear scientists, aimed at setting back Iran’s atomic bomb program; or the elimination of the masterminds of terrorism such as Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyah in downtown Damascus in 2008 and Hamas’s Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel in 2010.

The same is true of the Prisoner X incident. As former Australian Secret Intelligence Service agent Warren Reed noted, judging from Israel’s desire to maintain secrecy surrounding the incident, Zygier probably committed treachery that endangers Israel’s security.

And his betrayal could have ramifications for future operations. Reed said that Zygier might have been involved with the maintenance of long-term, ongoing security programs that will be essential to Israel’s security for the next 20 to 30 years.

Channel 10 News said the exposure of the alleged agent and his movements on behalf of Israeli intelligence in Iran, Syria and Lebanon could have “very significant” consequences for ongoing work. In countries such as Iran and Syria, the authorities would now be checking through their records, working out if Zygier entered and if he did, who accompanied him, and whom he met with.

Apparently the potential for real damage to Israel’s security was so high that the Supreme Court, hardly suspected of taking lightly suppression of free speech, was convinced that a gag order was in order, according to Chief Censor Col. Sima Vaknin-Gil.

Perhaps, in hindsight, however, more thought should have been given to differentiating between aspects of the story that truly present a danger to Israel’s security and those that do not.

That in Israel of 2013 a man can be arrested, imprisoned, die in prison and disappear without the wider public knowing anything about it should make all of us take pause. But we should remember that decisions by democracies to use non-democratic methods such as imprisonment without trial are not made arbitrarily.

Rather, it is the price the societies of Israel and other Western countries pay as part of the never-ending war against terrorism.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Article.aspx?id=303357