Image: Goebbels tells Benny Katsover: “Zoom in on the hanging Jew!” (courtesy Tukan Olam)
by RICHARD SILVERSTEIN
(Tukan Olam) – A follow-up on two videos I featured here in yesterday’s posts. Several NGOs have appealed to the State attorney general (English edition) to find the settler video violates Israeli law against incitement. Haaretz’s cartoonist, Biderman, has drawn a satiric “take” on the video, which features Joseph Goebbels as producer of the video and settler leader, Benny Katzover, as its editor. Katsover is chair of the Shomron settler council which produced the original video. In the caption, Goebbels tells Katzover: “Zoom in on the hanging Jew!” This accords completely with my own description of the video as Der Shturmer-lite.
Meanwhile, the actual settlers who produced the video have distributed their own entirely self-serving statement defending their piece of Nazi garbage. It’s so fatuous and self-serving it deserves to be translated:
Did we succeed in shocking you and arousing a public debate? That was the goal.
Dear friends, we’ve heard all the voices dissing us in the media today. We’re not surprised. We wanted to arouse public debate over what we see as self-destruction. Sometimes you have to do this in a way that forces people to look and listen to you.
We see thousands of Palestinian buildings being constructed illegally on State land and funded by anti-Semites [the EU]. We hear about investigations of defense ministry officials throughout the world and at the Hague. We see daily harassment by radical Leftists against our soldiers. We see bullying propaganda by the radical Left against settlements.
Bibi Netanyahu (middle), a noose and the casket (just over Bibi’s head)
Some do this out of ideology. Some out of greed. All of them are causing the world to harass us. Calls for boycott against Israel are increasing and delegitimization echoes everywhere.
When we turn to the world and ask: what have you learned? We hear back: “Look, Jews are saying this [supporting boycotts]. It can’t be anti-Semitism.” In this way, the poison seeps throughout. Through self-hatred, the radical Left will bring us all to self-destruction.
There is nothing in the video which was meant to incite against one group or another. It’s an attempt to show those who have been blinded by the caress of foreign money how he [sic] is really seen by his “patron.”
We Shomron settlers do not intend to remain quiet about delegitimization. We will remain here always to arouse our people. We simply love our land.
In the image: Bibi Netanyahu (from the back), a noose and casket (above and to the left of his head)
As I’ve written before, the appropriation of official government propaganda memes like “delegitimization” shows the settlers are part and parcel of official government policy. Bibi of course can’t advocate murdering Israeli leftists or calling them traitors. He can’t call the EU genocidal Nazis. But the settlers can. They are Bibi’s shock troops. They soften up the opposition for the real assault to follow.
In my last post on this I noted Bibi’s history of incitement which led to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. Thanks to Amiram Goldblum andYossi Gurvitz I’m displaying here three critical images which lay blame squarely at Bibi’s feet. One chilling image shows Bibi speaking from the infamous Jerusalem balcony at the rally which led directly to Rabin’s murder. Bibi’s gesture and knowing the context of the event itself brings chills when you consider if the lettering on the sign had been German and not Hebrew, the image could’ve been of another especially noxious leader who took his nation to the brink of destruction. The second image shows Bibi Netanyahu at a political rally in Raananah in 1994, a year before Rabin’s killing. If you examine the images closely you will see Netanyahu, a noose and a coffin. These political props constitute incitement of the rankest sort.
Netanyahu on Jerusalem balcony at rally shortly before Rabin’s murder
To further reinforce Bibi’s predilection for provocation, he announced that this week he will make a ‘pilgrimage’ to the settler enclave in Hebron. These are the 800 Jewish pogromists living among 25,000 Palestinians. They regularly spit and throw rocks at their Palestinian “neighbors.” They also use fraudulent, forged real estate deeds to steal Palestinian buildings and homes for themselves. From this cabal spring Baruch Goldstein, the settler mass murderer.
Since we’ve reviewed some Israeli history here, let’s also recall the Ariel Sharon insisted on his own religious pilgrimage in 2000 to Haram al-Sharif with a phalanx of 1,000 police and security personnel. This visit, coming a few months before an election, provoked mass riots among Palestinian worshippers in which scores were killed by Israeli security forces. That in turn led to the Second Intifada and Sharon’s victory in which he became prime minister. There can be no doubt this is what Bibi hopes for. A massive upsurge in Palestinian violence will, he believes, guarantee his return to power.
What’s ironic is that his victory in the election is guaranteed. There is almost no math that would lead to a center-left majority coalition. But none of this matters to Bibi, who isn’t one to employ a feather when a sledge hammer will do the job just as well.
The second video, a Likud campaign production claiming the left party was soft on terrorism, lifted a song from the Jordanian hip-hop group, Torabyeh. Since naturally Likud never got permission to use the music clip in the video, the group is seething mad and threatening a lawsuit for copyright infringement:
…The use of the song in the particular context cannot be considered anything but deliberate propaganda of the Zionist right for the purpose of electoral propaganda and attacking the so-called Zionist “left wing”. Furthermore, it implicates the Torabyeh group by containing serious accusations of terrorism and association with ISIS which is consequently putting the group’s members lives at risk.
We strongly condemn and reject this ruthless infringement of intellectual property rights and the distortion of the reputation of Torabyeh. What is more…Torabyeh group will take all necessary legal action against those responsible.
Victory for the Palestinian people…
