Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Drama Queens

No country produces drama queens, fabulists and obsessives quite like Israel. Here's Benjamin 'Bibi' Netanyahu, for example, in full-flight at the UN General Assembly in 2009. How his audience kept a straight face is beyond me:

"This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism that burst onto the world scene 3 decades ago after lying dormant for centuries. In the past 30 years this fanaticism has swept the globe with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice of victims. It has callously slaughtered Moslems and Christians, Jews and Hindus, and many others."

Lying dormant for centuries!? Schlock horror at its best!

Reading Israeli 'journalist' Uri Dan's Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait (2006) only confirms the impression. When it came to bravura performances, Sharon, Israel's prime minister from 2001 to 2006, was more than a match for Bibi. The porcine war criminal had bullshit in buckets and chutzpah in spades.

Only Sharon, for example, could get away with this one:

"Lebanon is also strongly determined to obtain nuclear weapons." (p 229)

Lebanese nukes! And his faithful PR flak, Uri Dan, didn't even bat an eyelid!

And here's Sharon on the subject of the Holocaust. (Now I know what you're thinking: there couldn't possibly be anything I haven't already heard on that subject, right? Wrong!) Forget the antics of the Grand Mufti, according to Sharon, the Palestinian people itself is collectively responsible for the Holocaust. Here's how he spins it:

"The Shoah itself is linked to Arab terrorism of the 1930s since it encouraged the British government, then masters of the country, to publish the White Paper of 1939 that limited the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine to 75,000 people over 5 years. Those were precisely the years that saw the horror of Nazism. There is no doubt that without that White Paper hundreds of thousands, even millions, of European Jews could have been saved. At the time when Jews could still escape, the doors of Eretz Israel were closed to them!" (p 139)

Get the drift? Instead of engaging in a desperate revolt for independence from the British, whose declared mission since 1917 had been to hand their country over to Zionist colons, the Palestinians should have sat on their haunches, pondered the plight of Germany's Jews, and thought first and foremost about what they could do to help them. Yeah, right.

And talk about obsessed. Captain Ahab, in mad pursuit of Moby Dick, was a model of rationality compared to Sharon. For Sharon, Yasser Arafat was "the greatest enemy that the Jewish people have known since the end of World War II" (p 102), "a modern pharaoh" (p 134) who dwelt (at least until 1982) in "a kingdom of terror" in Lebanon (p 95).

And if ever you wanted a rationale for a land grab, try topping this one:

"I voted against ceding Hebron to the Palestinians; this would endanger the Jewish community resettled in the town. The number of deaths among those heroic Jews who have continued to live in Hebron since then has justified my fears. King David spent seven and a half years in Hebron, where he was crowned, and the town is mentioned 1,023 times in the Bible. And this what we are asked to give up?" (p 172)

A mere eight and a half years and it's yours for all time!

But if you think it's just Sharon who's crackers, listen to his biographer/buddy, Uri Dan:

"When Sharon, full of life, humor and energy, climbed into his jeep with his soldiers headed for the battlefield, I saw historical figures: the Jews fighting for their freedom against the Greeks, Romans and others; David confronting Goliath; the Judges of Israel; Gideon and Samson." (p 18)

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