Likud MK David Bitan, the chair of the Likud faction in the Knesset, is one of those big, fat Mafia type enforcers who roam the ranks of political parties throughout the world. Or alternatively, I suppose you could liken him to an obese, overeager poodle. Bibi’s poodle. The Facebook image posted here compares him to a different animal: a sewer rat. Besides his girth, he has a big, fat mouth as well. The latest spew emitted from it came, ironically, on the day of the Yitzhak Rabin memorial in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square.
The Likud hated Rabin in life and continue to hate him in death. In fact, Bibi Netanyahu is directly responsible for Rabin’s death as a result of a bloodthirsty speech he made from a balcony in Jerusalem’s Zion Square only two week’s before Yigal Amir assassinated him (Amos Gitai’s most recent film, Rabin: the Last Day, portrays that fateful day–Amazon download ). The Israeli far right detests every memorial to Rabin, every event marking his death or honoring him. So today of all days, Bitan tells all Israel in a speech that Rabin’s murder “was not political.” Instead, it was meant to “stop a process.” Of course, the “process” was peace with the Palestinians, which the far-right felt was worth killing for. Bitan refuses to consider turning the memorial into a state event because, he claims, it’s been hijacked by “leftists.” Leftists like the plain vanilla Labor pols who offer their bromides about peace at these events which have long since lost any real significance.
Honoring Rabin is something like the way many American’s commemorate Martin Luther King Day. Many of us don’t honor him or what he stood for that day. And there are far too many tepid statements made about brotherly love, peace and harmony. Instead of dealing with the cold, hard, facts of ongoing American racism. It’s just the same with Rabin. Israeli liberalism died with Rabin. Amir killed it. But Shimon Peres nailed the coffin shut by abandoning Rabin’s goals as his successor. And the rest is history, written by the far-right victors.
But Bitan has opened his big mouth on another important subject. Like Sen. Joe McCarthy, the Likud firebrand has discovered leftists lurking in the new state media enterprise which is scheduled to replace the existing Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA). Just as McCarthy waved supposed lists filled with the names of “card-carrying members of the Communist Party” working in the State Department and U.S. military, Bitan, according to Haaretz, gave a speech yesterday in which he:
Withdrew a note from his shirt pocket containing the names of IPBC staff members, saying “we are following their Facebook posts. Tomorrow, I will tell the media what they’ve published.”
Scandal in the heart of the Israel Public Broadcasting Corporation. Traitors, seditionists, Israel haters and, worst of all, Arab lovers. We await the news with bated breath and will join him for the hangings in Rabin Square.
This would all be hilariously funny if it weren’t so pathetic. But there’s yet another odd twist to the story: Bibi waged a massive campaign against the current IBA, claiming during and after the election that it was out to “get” him and riddled with, you guessed it, leftists. He vowed to bring the media to heel and exert control over it is much the same way that he defanged the Israeli independent media when his mob patron, Don Adelson founded Israel HaYom (Bibiton), all-Bibi-all-the-time.
Now, all of a sudden, Bibi has fond feelings for IBA and wants to ditch the new initiative. However, there are other MKs who still support the new venture. So Bibi and his mafia henchman, Bitan, cook up this new scheme to prove the IPBC is even more riddled with leftists than the old IBA. I tell you, you can’t tell the conspiracies without a scorecard!
That was one of the stupidest comments ever!!!
He tried to explain himself but the original is so retarded that nothing can explain it.
But there is no ironny in talking about the subject in the days before it occured. On the contrary, that is exatcly when you expect people to talk (and make their dumbest comments).
Bitan’s comment was definitely stupid and cynical. I believe that the political right, much more than the left, has turned the memory of Rabin into a political and polarizing issue.
While it is true that some on the left use the event to repeatedly indict the entire right wing movement, it is the right which uses the “failure” of the Oslo process to “prove” how wrong Rabin and the left was, and who provoked the right wing at the time. They do this out of defensiveness and cognitive dissonance. How could the right wing religious, who claim the mantle of moral superiority based on Judaism, have produced such a monster as Amir?
So they come up with idiotic transparent excuses– either it was a conspiracy by the left wingers in the Shabak to frame the right, or they explain it away by saying the Amir was just a misguided outsider. Of course, they employ no such excuses when “explaining” Palestinian lone attacks– that, of course, happens because of “incitement”, terrorism, etc.
When the right wingers are stupid or hypocrites I am more than happy to point it out, not just on the left.
@ Yehuda: And indicting the entire right wing movement for Rabin’s murder is wrong? Of course it isn’t. The entire Israeli ultra nationalist right is culpable for his murder. And they own the state and will be culpable for its eventual fate. Eventually, the Israel you know will go the way of East Germany and the former Soviet Union.
My only concern is that when Israel becomes a unitary state in which power is shared based on democratic principles, the Palestinians will have learned the lessons of corruption & nepotism so well from their Israeli Jewish MK counterparts, that they will be as good or better at thieving as the Israel Jews were.
What was it Ben Gurion said: when there are Hebrew speaking thieves and prostitutes, then we will know that Zionism has succeeded & Jews have become a nation like all others. A dubious achievement to be sure. But certainly realized in latter day Israel.
@Richard
1. It is a mistake to vilify an entire section of the population for an act of political violence of the few. This is cheap populism and is a tool used by the darkest of regimes. Do you vilify all Christian opponents of abortion for the murders that occurred in the 1990s? Do you condemn all Islamists for the violent acts of a few? What about the 40% of the American population who support “Trumpism”?
2. What make you so certain that the only direction of history is your brand of secular progressive liberalism? What makes you so “optimistic”? Look what has happened in Russia, Turkey and elsewhere. Are you predicting their demise, too? Look at the Arab Spring and the Balkans. Granted, a few countries, such as Tunesia and Morroco, have fared well. But elsewhere, the trend is the opposite. Conservatism, tribalism and authoritarianism. Not that I am happy about this. But I don’t understand your certainty with regards to Israel. Is it wishful thinking?
@ Yehuda: It is not a mistake to blame the Israeli right (which constitutes close to a majority of the population) for Rabin’s murder. Only a nation which renounces hate & violence has the right to claim it is not guilty for it. Israel did the exact opposite after Rabin’s murder. It put the chief accomplice to, and inciter of murder into the prime minister’s seat only a year later. He has been PM for most of the time since then. That’s like Serbia electing Milosevic as president. Can a country with a war criminal as a leader claim it is not culpable as well for his crimes?
Yes, I do. Because they too largely did not vocally and unequivocally renounce the murder of doctors.
There are several hundred million Muslims in the world. There are several thousand militant terrorists among them, if that. There are 6 million Israeli Jews. There are tens of thousands of them who support violence against Palestinians. So the proportions are quite different. Further, most Muslims do vehemently denounce the violence of the few Muslims who are fundamentalist. Israeli politicians like Bibi who speak after a Jewish terror attack show clearly by their actions that their words of criticism are hollow & hypocritical.
Are you claiming that Turkey and Russia are brands of “secular progressive liberalism?” Really? In what way, shape or form? As for their demise–yes, Putin & his henchmen will fade from history just as the Soviets did before them. Erdogan also will not sustain his rule for long. I don’t know when they will fall, but they will. Injustice on this scale cannot be sustained forever. The same holds true for Israel.
I do not wish to get into a long drawn out colloquy on this subject. Move on to another thread.
OK, just to correct a misunderstanding. I did not mean to imply that Turkey or Russia are progressive— just the opposite. I was using them as examples of where the direction is of more conservatism, tribalism and religiosity.
Nothing is forever. And evidently that is happening in your country too. As I write this, from the news it seems that you should pack your bags.
@ yehuda: “Where is the direction of conservatism, tribalism & religiosity:” by which you mean Israel, I’m sure.
“Bibi Netanyahu is directly responsible for Rabin’s death as a result of a bloodthirsty speech he made from a balcony in Jerusalem’s Zion Square only two week’s before Yigal Amir assassinated him”
This is a statement is simply wrong. Yigal Amir was planning the murder months before Netanyahu’s speech (http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/732/984.html). he may have been influenced by prior incitement by Netanyahu but it is much more likely he was influenced by incitement from the ranks of the extreme religious right wing to him he belonged. In any event I surely think the Israeli right as a whole is responsible to the murder by creating the atmosphere.
I was a supporter of Rabin (who was a great men) and voted for him but in retrospect I would not say he was a great liberal or a man of piece. He went to Oslo because of Peres. Rabin was told about the negotiation with the PLO only after it started or likely he would have prevented it. Few years earlier he was the one that ordered the military to respond to Palestinian riots by intentionally and brutally breaking the bones of rioters. Israeli liberalism did not die with Rabin as he wasn’t its champion. The biggest step towards liberalism happened before Rabin with the passing of the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty and with the Supreme Court Justice Aaron Barak who used that law (mostly in the years following Rabin’s death) to considerably promote equality and preventing discrimination.
BTW, how is Bitan’s weight relevant here? He is yet another idiot the Likud brought to the Israeli politics but his size is entirely irrelevant and childish.
@ Amico:
I did not say that Netanyahu’d speech gave Amir the idea to assassinate Rabin. I said that Bibi’s speech was responsible for the murder. In other words, Bibi gave Amir the heksher he needed to justify the murder. Not to mention, as you said, that Likud inciters had been saying virtually the same thing for months. So they in effect programmed Amir, primed him for the assassination.
There is virtually no difference between Bibi & his Likud henchmen and the extreme religious right. Bibi doesn’t wear a kippah. But he shares their values and principles in every other way.
“Great man of peace?” No. But every person is entitled to do teshuvah for their past sins. Not that Rabin had become a bleeding heart peacenik by any means. But he was moving in a new & different direction that could have been exceedingly promising. That is one of the key reasons he was murdered.
Labor died with Rabin. Labor represented & still represents liberalism, which is dead as a doornail. Rabin, before he died, was definitely embracing a more liberal perspective on the conflict. I don’t pretend that he became Arafat’s best buddy or that peace was at hand. But it was a helluva lot closer the moment before he died than it is now.
The Israeli Supreme Court is not a primary state organ. It is an after thought. Even more so now than it was in Barak’s day.
As for Bitan’s obesity: Israel today is a the same obese slob stuffing its face with injustice, Occupation, corruption and hate. He is a perfect physical representation of Israel’s rotten inner psyche.
You are done in this thread.