An obscure 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, should be particularly compelling to Israelis. Its author, the late Neil Postman, made a sound case for his contention that Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World accurately predicted our current lifestyle.

Our judgment is crippled by an overpowering addiction to entertainment and news presentation constitutes merely another showbiz feature. Complexities are conveniently diluted and events of the day are offered as a packaged commodity, almost like the drugs with which the denizens of Huxley’s future medicated themselves into bliss. Shallow stimulation and immediate gratification have replaced thought and remembrance.

Cyber-wizardry only exacerbated these already preexisting inclinations. But unlike Postman, who lamented the decline of logic and knowledge, there are those who actually celebrate the loss. Foremost among them is our own president Shimon Peres, always ever-eager to lead the vanguard of what he promotes as progress. Continue reading →

One day before US President Barack Obama touched down here and began to beguile us, flamboyant French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy was reportedly barred from Libya’s Tripoli because of his Jewishness. On the face of it, these two episodes are wholly unconnected. But, on closer inspection, they’re not.

Lévy had been an avid Obama fan since 2004, gushed about him unreservedly and even crowned Obama the “Black Kennedy.” However, there’s way more that ties the two men. Obama and Lévy are both hyper-hyped photogenic trendsetters and charismatic superstars. Foremost, though, both have compelling reason to reevaluate their strongly held maxims.

Both believed in the Arab Spring, in heralding a new free-thinking and broadminded Arab orientation. Each in his own way contributed to what he trusted was a defining historic makeover. Continue reading →

How American President Barack Obama stroked our ego with all those smiles, all the photos he obligingly posed for, all the seemingly folksy chitchats, all that backslapping, all those effusive flatteries, all the facile historic allusions, all the Hebrew words he was painstakingly taught to enunciate by his Jewish aides – most of them left-wingers with well-known Peace Now sympathies.

It worked, at least for the short haul – like it did for Pal Joey in his very calculated and cynical pursuit of older-woman Vera Simpson. In the Rodgers and Hart 1940 musical adaptation of John O’Hara’s joyless book, Joey is a manipulative but charming heel. He starts out by insulting Vera but then plots with sly sentimentality to wow her. Vera, no ingénue, knows that Joey’s sweet nothings are insincere but she nevertheless surrenders to them because she loves to be loved.

Owning up to her own frailties, she belts out:

“I’m wild again,

Beguiled again,

A simpering, whimpering child again,

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I! …

Seen a lot.
I mean I lot,

But now I’m like sweet seventeen a lot.
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I!”

Too many Israelis who should have known lots better were likewise reduced to the infatuation of a bewitched, bothered and bewildered teenager. Continue reading →

It was a PR windfall for Hamas when 11-months-old-Omar Misharawi was killed by a rocket that hit his family’s home on November 14, 2012 – at the very outset of Operation Pillar of Defense.

During that confrontation, thousands of Hamas missiles and mortars rained on Israel. The long-range ones reached all the way to Tel Aviv but were still depicted in news reports abroad as crude homemade projectiles with minimal damage potential.

Omar’s misfortune dealt Israel’s image a particularly nasty blow – probably the worst since the bogus Muhammad al-Dura episode. Newspapers the world over featured what became an iconic AP photo of Omar’s weeping father, Jihad, cradling the little corpse, his agonized face turned skywards as he plaintively exclaimed: “”We’re only civilians. So why did Israel do this?”

It was a damning question resonated unquestioningly around the globe. Continue reading →

If our soon-to-arrive visitor, US President Barack Obama, truly fancies himself the harbinger of new tidings to this region – as he has tirelessly promoted himself in the past – then it’s high time for him to take the truly bold tack and think out of the box.

Had Obama by happenstance peeked over the edge of the conventional box, he’s have recoiled in horror from the two-state sham. He’d have realized that it will unleash all manner of mayhem and misery – as surely as the last vestiges of stability are right now brutally being expunged from the Arab realm in the traumatic wake of what’s still extolled as the Arab Spring.

But so far Obama has never dared venture outside his confining worldview container. His self-acclaimed innovative statesmanship wasn’t ever genuinely innovative. Continue reading →

There might not be any point to responding if it were only Shaul Mofaz who wondered why we need harp on Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

Mofaz has just barely managed to cross the Knesset entry threshold (having started out not too many months back with a 28- member parliamentary contingent). Since he nearly failed to hold on to his own seat, it’s safe to conclude that he doesn’t represent a powerful or even a relevant political camp. Therefore, what does any of his kibitzing matter?

Ordinarily it indeed wouldn’t, except that Mofaz’s professed failure of comprehension might reflect the intellectual indolence of others, alongside the trendy heedlessness popularized by assorted opinion-molders.
To hear them, it’s perfectly fine to embrace this particular incomprehension – be it expediently feigned or an actual inability to grasp the basic cause for the war waged against Israel. Continue reading →

It’s not every day that news broadcasts open with a lament for what did not actually happen. But this anomaly is occasionally recurrent in our little insular setting. Periodically at this time of year the top item on our news purveyors’ agenda is likely to be what isn’t new: yet again no Israeli entry was awarded the coveted Oscar.

It’s as if the whole international community was holding its breath for some obscure Israeli documentary or film short to get the ultimate nod. All else in Tinseltown’s annual pageant is marginal.

And so Monday morning’s news announcers mournfully informed us that there would be no Oscar for Israel this year.

Neither Israeli nominee for best documentary – 5 Broken Cameras or The Gatekeepers – won. That, of course, afforded commentators their opportunity to ruminate and spew such time-tried clichés as “what a disappointment,” “it hurts” and “it’s a blow to our national pride.”

It’s here that a sanity check is called for. Continue reading →

Not all refugees are created equal. This is an incontestable fact – regardless of prevalent propaganda fronting as humanitarian indignation. Some refugees are the world’s darlings and have unremittingly been tugging hard at its heartstrings for decades. Others got a passing glance at most, accompanied – for a fleeting moment – by quasi-compassionate handwringing.

Selected unpopular refugees were altogether treated as perennial pariahs, whose agony plainly disturbs global peace.

It’s not the objective distress and misery which count but the identity of the refugees in question – to say nothing of the identity of their alleged persecutors. When given factors converge, given refugees are considered more deserving of support from the dysfunctional family of nations.

Occasionally, news headlines serve up unpleasant reminders of the hypocrisy, not that most news consumers are inclined to pay attention and focus on the double standards. Take the plight of the refugees from Syria. Continue reading →

The nature of arm-twisting in statecraft is that it’s practiced but always denied. No powerful leader anywhere will readily acknowledge having resorted to even a subtle form of arm-twisting. Likewise, no less-powerful leader – the object of concealed coercion – will ever admit that his arm was twisted.

Arm-twisting is something which both twister and twistee have an inherent interest to deny.

This is so elementary that that there is no point trying to ferret out indications that US President Barack Obama’s upcoming visit to our land is anything but an expression of syrupy sympathy and support. Both the White House occupant and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will swear up and down that it’s the culmination of a wonderful friendship.

But to put the touchy-feely photo-op into context, we might be well advised to rewind to the generic George Mitchell extravaganza of four years ago. Continue reading →

Ever since my column, “That unwitting indecency,” saw light two weeks ago, I’ve needed to occasionally consult the mirror to make sure I hadn’t morphed into a hideous monster that feeds on Irish tots.

The column recounted my encounter in Cahersiveen, a tiny Irish township, with pupils hoisting “Save Palestine” placards and soliciting funds for supposedly oppressed Palestinians – all on a school-day morning, as part of an organized school event. Their familiarity with Israel’s ongoing struggle to avoid annihilation can safely be judged as less than minimal.

That column created quite a stir throughout the Emerald Isle and generated discussions on national radio, as well as blaring newspaper headlines, like “Principal hits back at writer who said pupils anti-Jewish” (Irish Independent), “Kerry school denies anti-Semitism” (The Irish Times) and “School ‘shocked’ by anti- Semitic claims” (The Kerryman).

Apart from two later follow-ups which I initiated, the news reporting was astoundingly uniform. Everywhere the principal of Cahersiveen’s single secondary school was quoted at length and in full. He contended that the motif of my piece was to accuse his school of anti- Semitism. That it wasn’t so didn’t matter. Shooting the messenger proved expedient. Continue reading →