Right-wing campaign portrays human rights leaders as foreign agents

http://972mag.com/right-wing-campaign-portrays-human-rights-leaders-as-foreign-agents/114805/

One minute and nine seconds. That’s the length of the inciting video published this morning by right-wing activist Ronen Shoval. In less than a minute-and-a-half, Shoval manages to sum up all the reasons why an Israeli court deemed it okay to call “Im Tirzu” — an organization he founded — a “fascist” group.

The video is part of a campaign by the group against foreign governments “planting” activists and groups belonging to Israeli civil society. It begins with a clip of a Palestinian man moving his knife toward the camera, as if he is trying to stab the viewer himself, while horror film music plays in the background. The video then goes on to accuse four Israelis who work for human rights organizations — Breaking the Silence’s Avner Gvaryahu, Hamoked’s Sigi Ben Ari, Ishai Menuchin of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, and B’Tselem’s Hagai El-Ad — of being “planted.”
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Things I learned from the Weimar Republic

The enemy is no longer comprised of various anti-Israel groups. The enemy now has a name, his face is out in the open; these are the people fighting against us from within. These four are now connected to the knife-wielding Palestinian. They are the knife stabbing us in the back.

After watching Shoval’s video I immediately looked up the Hebrew Wikipedia entry for what was known as the “stab-in-the-back myth.” According to the myth, Germany’s loss in World War I came as a result of treasonous activities by Jews, Marxists, freemasons, and others who stabbed the nation in the back.” I also learned that “most of the German people accepted the myth as fact, and that placing the blame on Jews and Marxists for the German defeat became commonplace. Moreover, the myth was convenient in that it served certain psychological aspects of German society, at a time when powerful forces left over from the era of German Emperor Wilhelm II still strived for territorial expansion and had militaristic ambitions. Far-right völkisch parties made use of the myth, and after the Nazis came to power in 1933, the myth won official government support and became part of Germany’s history curriculum.”