What would it take, I wonder, to make the elites that Ari Shavit so eloquently castigates pay the price of the cancer that they've cultivated in Israel?
A good place to start would be to seriously limit their access to public discourse. Indeed, just putting them in their proper place would be a major achievement. Others, however, those who advocate surrender and the destruction of Israel should be totally banned from the airwaves. We should bid goodbye to Ahmed Tibi, Muhammad Barakeh, Talib a-Sana, Barukh Kimmerling, Ilan Pappe, Gidon Levy, Amira Haas, Uri Avneri and the rest of their ilk. We should stop giving a prominent soapbox to Ilana Dayyan, Amnon Abramovitch, Menachem Klein, Moshe Negbi et al. They should, moreover, be balanced against their intellectual equals (or their betters- of which there are many, many, many more). [Oh, and here I should add intelectually-challenged, self-appointed airm-chair experts like the ever so forgettable MJ Rosenberg and the ever so arrogant and heavily problematic Stephen Cohen who will sacrifice untold numbers of Israeli Jews in the name of Peace. Do I have my religion wrong? I don't think Jews, even that Jew, are supposed to die for the redemption of mankind.]
Ah! You might object that this constitutes an infringement on freedomof speech? It might be. However, we are fighting for our very existence. In such circumstances, people who preach surrender and the slaughter of our innocents cannot be tolerated.
You want a precedent? In 1861, Maryland threatened to secede from the Union. This would have doomed Washington DC (and perhaps the Union). President Abraham Lincoln then suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and arrested the secessionist members of the Maryland Legislature. The Chief Justice of the United States, Roger B. Taney, ruled the action unconstitutional. Lincoln, relying on a careful reading of the constitution, ignored him. Inter arma silent leges (=In time of war the laws are silent). Lincoln was proved right. The Union was saved and the greatest democracy on earth continued to serve as a beacon to the world (and an anathema to the Islamic World and its Liberal apologists).
[NOTE: I am certainly NOT advocating incarceration but a more judicious definition of free access to the media. Indeed, the second half of my suggestion is an affirmation of Freedom of Speech.]
You're correct - but also wrong. I'm totally against suspending Habeus Corpus. It's wrong.
ReplyDeleteAs long as there's a conflation between the board of directors of the Israel Policy Forum and various schools at Yeshiva University, who are we to say that these people shouldn't have a voice? As long as S. Daniel Abraham is funneling as much money to Har Etzion and Yeshiva College as he is (illegaly?) to Shimon Peres, why should we deny the public voice to one side of his equation and not the other?
We have to do our own bedek habayit first. Write to Richard Joel - and your President Kaveh - and ask them to stop taking money from the Abrahams and the Bendheims and all the other people that fund Rosenberg and Cohen, and then we can start "banning" people from the airwaves.