Larry Derfner, Jerusalem Post, January 3:
By rights, Binyamin Netanyahu, who every poll says is by far the most popular politician in Israel, should be ranked with Jean Le Pen, Jorge Haider and the rest of the Western world’s racist demagogues.
But he won’t be, because anti-Arab racism in Israel is either supported or strategically ignored by the mainstream of the Jewish world, and pretty much taken for granted by the gentile world.
What Netanyahu said Tuesday night was not new for him; he was reported to have made the same appeal to the same sort of audience – haredi political leaders – a couple of years ago as finance minister.
Then, as now, he was apologizing for the way his child welfare cuts had hurt large haredi families, while at the same time asking the haredim to look at the bright sides of that policy.
“Two positive things happened,” he told a conference of haredi government officials in Nir Etzion this week. “Members of the haredi public seriously joined the workforce. And on the national level, the unexpected result was the demographic effect on the non-Jewish public, where there was a dramatic drop in the birth rate.” (Quoted in Ynet, Yediot Aharonot’s Web site. The speech was also reported in Haaretz.)
The once-and-possibly-future prime minister of Israel says publicly that he’s sorry his welfare cuts made life harder for Jewish families who are “blessed,” as he put it, with many children, but isn’t it “positive” that these cuts resulted in fewer Arab children being born? Then Netanyahu went on to suggest a national remedy for the victims of his economic policies – but for Jewish victims only, not Arab victims.
“I don’t think that the Jewish Agency should refrain from helping part of the Jewish public in the state,” he said, “and it is possible that additional non-governmental bodies could have done so.”
Imagine if any gentile government official in the world cited the lowering of the Jewish birthrate in his country as an accomplishment, then recommended that his country’s founding institution raise money to help poor gentile families, but not poor Jewish families. How would the Jewish world, starting with Israel, characterize such an individual? What sort of pressure would the Jewish world apply to get him or her fired, blackballed and, if possible, indicted?…