There’s A Warm Cozy Place Awaiting Gideon Levy
Varda Epstein
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Gideon Levy. Does he live in a parallel universe? Or does he actually believe the lies he spouts as truth?
All I know is that thousands of people read his words and that there is a good chance that most of them believe what he writes, without any further exploration or consideration.
That is why I know he’s going to Hell.
But that doesn’t solve the problem of having him out there now, continuing to spread the worst sort of lies about my country and my people, lies people believe.
Take, for instance, the opening paragraph of his piece entitled, Yes, Israel Is Executing Palestinians Without Trial, (http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.697788) published January 17th. Now that title is what we bloggers and journalists call “link bait.” It’s so shocking, it stops you cold in your tracks and forces you to click the link to read the whole darned thing. Variously, it’s such a tease, like the tiniest taste of something delicious, and you must have more.
In short, it’s irresistible.
I think carefully about my titles. I think most writers do. I am not above using my titles to entice the reader into clicking open my pieces to read them, because I know how much stuff is out there, competing for the reader’s eye. If you want to get read, you gotta draw in the reader somehow, and the title works as well as anything else.
But the thing is, I don’t use my title to spread falsehoods. I don’t use my titles to damage Israel and incite Israel’s enemies. And unfortunately, that is exactly what Gideon Levy did with his link bait title: he made out as if Israel is randomly executing Arabs without benefit of trial. That’s as opposed to stopping TERRORISTS IN MID ATTACK. Which is what really happens.
Now, I don’t doubt that Gideon Levy looked into the facts before he made his assertion. He well knows that Israel is NOT executing Arabs without trial, but killing terrorists when it appears there is no other way to stop them from killing civilians. And yet he puts out that damaging title out there for all to read.
What can be his psychosis? Why does he so badly want to damage his native land and his people? He must be either quite ill or quite evil.
And things do not improve when one taps on the mouse, intrigued or outraged, in order to see the rest. Here is the opening paragraph:
We should call it like it is: Israel executes people without trial nearly every day. Any other description is a lie. If there was once discussion here about the death penalty for terrorists, now they are executed even without trial (and without discussion). If once there was debate over the rules of engagement, today it’s clear: we shoot to kill – any suspicious Palestinian.
Now, if I were one of the millions of people who hate Jews, I’d need nothing further to make my blood boil. And if I were in a murdering frame of mind, why I’d likely go out there with a knife and stab some settler woman in her kitchen in front of her children as she is cooking supper. Or alternatively, I’d walk into a shop in a settlement and stab a pregnant settler woman. It would be a release, you know, for all that pent up tension after reading about how Israel executes “Palestinians” (not terrorists, mind you), without trial.
But let’s say I’m not just your average run-of-the-mill Jew hater. I need more than that to convince me that Israel is just going out there on a rootin’ tootin’ shoot ’em up boy, rampage—that they’re just a-going out there to shoot them up some A-rabs, whooee, boy howdee. So holding back my skepticism, I look to see what else Mr. Levy has for proof.
Actually, Mr. Levy has no proof, but he has plenty of imagination. He takes a quote by Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan and makes wild assertions about its meaning:
Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan outlined the situation clearly when he said, “Every terrorist should know he will not survive the attack he is about to commit” – and almost every politician joined him in nauseating unison, from Yair Lapid on up. Never have so many licenses to kill been handed out here, nor has the finger been so itchy on the trigger.
Erdan is warning terrorists away. He is telling them that we will not look the other way when they attack and they may very well lose their lives. His intent is to convince them not to commit acts of terror.
But Levy? He purposely misconstrues and skews Erdan’s words and claims they prove that the security establishment has been given carte blanche to just go out there and slay Arabs in the street if they so much as look at one wrong. He claims our communal finger is “itchy on the trigger.”
Actually, this is an inversion of the truth. Jews value life, while the terrorist knows that he may well die in the act of trying to kill Jews and doesn’t much care. Life just isn’t a value supreme for him. He thinks that dying in the act of attempting to kill Jews is more valuable than leading a blameless happy life just earning a living and having a family.
Terrorists are twisted that way.
I don’t know any Jew who is twisted that way. I don’t know of a single Jew who lusts to kill and die in the attempt. Jews are the last people on earth to ever have a finger that is “itchy on the trigger.”
It’s why we say L’Chaim.
We are the people who value life above everything except for God. And our God isn’t telling us to kill. Quite the contrary.
But let’s say you’re not me, and you believe Levy’s skewing of a public servant’s warning to terrorists, so you read on, to read more about this “outrage,” these terrible Jews who are “executing Palestinians” without trial. You’re looking for the money quote.
You don’t have long to wait. Levy writes:
In 2016, one doesn’t have to be Adolf Eichmann to be executed here – it’s enough to be a teenage Palestinian girl with scissors.
Good job, GIDEON. Nice use of Godwin’s Law here, managing both to bring in the Holocaust, and how WE were mistreated by THEM, and the only execution that has taken place in Israel, that of one of the biggest baddest Nazis of all time, Adolf Eichmann. Not only that, but he makes light of that fact, by saying it’s no skin off our teeth: we execute people all the time, even teenage girls with nothing more dangerous than a pair of scissors. Yes, we treated that girl as though she were Eichmann, he seems to suggest.
Which is really silly, because Eichmann in fact, did have a trial. Quite a prolonged trial, as a matter of fact. That is not what happened with the girl with the scissors.
The girl with the scissors was not in need of a trial at the time she ran at people and stabbed them, including an Arab man she mistook for a Jew. She put him in the hospital. It took great effort to stop her and her friend from hurting others. In fact, the only way to stop her in the end was to SHOOT HER.
Our sweet little stabber (or rather, one of them).
You can watch a clip of the actual attack (something Gideon Levy omits to share with HIS readers) and read Aussie Dave’s coverage of the piece HERE, HERE, and (my personal favorite) HERE.
But rather than honestly represent the truth: that 2 teenagers went and put people in the hospital with scissors and that they had to be chased down and shot to stop them from injuring others, Gideon Levy LIES. He equates us, his own people, with the worst sort of evil doers and represents us as having the worst sort of intentions. In fact, he assigns to his own people, the motives of the terrorists who attack us every day. THEY are the death mongers who can’t be stopped, who use as their permission to maim and murder, government-inspired incitement that pours out of their televisions and from the mouths of their UN bankrolled UNRWA teachers.
THEY, the terrorists, are a great evil in Israel, just as they are a great evil in France and in Germany. Their motives are much the same. Only Israel is called on the carpet for stopping them in their tracks. Funny how the word “execution” was not used by Gideon Levy to describe what happened on January 7, in Paris, ten days before Gideon Levy wrote his Israeli Execution piece. That’s when a dude wielding a meat cleaver and wearing a fake suicide vest was shot dead for screaming Allahu Akbar outside a police station on the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
But you see, the difference here is that Gideon Levy doesn’t have any axe to grind with the policemen of Paris and alternatively, his pathology excludes all targets except for Jews, his own people. And he’s only getting started.
The firing squads are active every day. Soldiers, police and civilians shoot those who stabbed Israelis, or tried to stab them or were suspected of doing so, and at those who run down Israelis in their cars or appear to have done so.
Now isn’t that horrible of us? How dare we try to stop people from killing us? That is what Levy is saying here: that Jews have no right to self-defense. Our lives are meaningless because we are, frankly, a four-letter word beginning with s. We don’t deserve to be defended.
But the terrorists, now their lives are downright HOLY to Gideon Levy. We need to not only not stop them from killing us, we have to lie down in the street and die, or he will not be happy. He will not be happy at all.
In misrepresenting the defense of innocent civilians as summary executions, Gideon Levy supports the aims of Arab terrorists against his own people, his own blood. With his outright lies he incites more of the same.
And Haaretz carries his work.
So the next time someone says to you, “But I read it in an Israeli newspaper,” remember what you read here. There’s a reason that Haaretz is known as the “only Palestinian newspaper in Hebrew (also available in English translation).”
And there’s a reason people like me believe there’s a warm place in Hell, just waiting for the likes of Gideon Levy.
h/t Daniel Zahavi-Asa
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Varda Epstein
