Enemies, a hate story
The all-clear was sounded as soon as the news came that the school bus was Palestinian.
Only the most perceptive viewers of Thursday's accident - in which nine children and one adult were killed when their bus collided with a truck north of Jerusalem - could make the distinction. But something in the manner of the coverage intimated at it immediately.
But what came next cannot be excused. The Internet roiled - not with the usual anonymous comments, the last refuge of boors and perverts. This time they revealed their names and their Facebook photos, spewing forth nauseating, hate-permeated racism that seemed to exceed anything seen here previously.
"Relax, these are Palestinian children," Benny Dazanashvili wrote on Twitter. To which Tal Biton responded, "It seems these are Palestinians ... God willing." Itai Viltzig offered up a prayer: "I hope every day there is a bus like this." Dozens, if not hundreds, of Internet surfers said a prayer of thanks - for the terrible death by fire of young children on a school field trip - and the responses were featured on the web pages of the prime minister and the Israel Police and the Walla! web portal.
"They'll want money, because money is more important to them than the children who were killed," one person wrote. Others commented, "Can we send another truck?" and "I'd have sent a double semi-trailer to obliterate all those shits."
On the official Facebook page of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was actually quick to express his sorrow from faraway Cyprus over the accident, the comments are still visible like some mark of Cain on their authors and their host. From Yisrael Ohana: "I don't care; for my part every Palestinian child is a future suicide-bomber candidate. Tomer Ben Haim: "There is just one thing that anyone who attacks Judaism deserves." The only light came from Meira Baruch, who wrote: "I'm 63 years old. Only a few times in my life have I been ashamed to be a Jew. Today I am ashamed. How can anyone rejoice over the death of little children?"
http://www.haaretz.com/misc/search-results?view=results&sort_method=date&startDate=01%2F02%2F2012&page=0&search_type=site&endDate=19%2F02%2F2012&q=&author=1.402&submitBtn=Search
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...but in addition, he's seemingly oblivious to the constant stream of hate and incitement in Palestinian media that encourages and rewards murdering Jews.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/11343829#post90
Levy has nothing to say about any of that.
But he finds his voice when it comes to a couple twitter/facebook comments.
This links works as of now:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/enemies-a-hate-story-1.413424
This op-ed is one of the best illustrations of why nobody ought to take Gideon Levy seriously.
He magnifies the extent of the Israelis who are mean and nasty (by citing Facebook and Twitter posts) and pretends that similar nastiness does not even exist on the Palestinian side ("It is doubtful that Palestinians rejoiced over the Israeli deaths then in the way that Israelis are rejoicing over the Palestinian deaths now."
.
The level of preposterous to be found here is off the charts, even for him.
Maybe that's why Ha'aretz appears to be hiding the article.
I’ve always thought that Haaretz opinion editorials are proof, if you required more than the empirical studies done, that Israel is a democracy. The vile contempt that most of the left-of-centre columnists and writers show for Israel is truly a tribute to the cornerstone attribute of any civilised society: freedom of speech.
The news that eight Palestinian children had died in a bus crash is a tragedy to any decent-minded person. A sad loss of life believed to be because of adverse driving conditions.
For Gideon Levy, rather than sharing in the tragedy of the day’s events, it was a golden opportunity to stare into his crystal ball. Levy’s entire article is a crass condemnation of Israeli society’s supposed reaction to the bus crash.
In what must be the investigative skills of a teenager, Levy rages against crazies on Facebook and Twitter using the crash to spew their own bigotry. He writes:
He has a point. But bigoted people will, not surprisingly, be bigoted on open platforms such as social networks. But that’s just the starter. Levy’s greater condemnation is for wider Israeli society:
Enemies, a hate story. In the past few years, anti-Arab hatred and racism have reached monstrous proportions and are no longer restricted to a negligible minority. Many people dare to express it, and many more agree with them. All the discriminatory, separatist laws of the past few years are an authentic expression of that hatred.
Perhaps Gideon didn’t see this:
Some Israelis from the nearby settlement hung this sign over the site of a bus crash that killed 8 Palestinian children. It reads (in Hebrew and then Arabic): “The residents of the (nearby) Adam settlement share in the sorrow of the families, in their deep grief over the death of their loved ones and wish a speedy recovery to the injured.”
In a heartwarming show of solidarity, settlers have erected a sign over the crash site expressing their sadness and grief. This isn’t the product of some cosmopolitian Tel Aviv human rights group but of one group of settlers sharing their grief with the Palestinian people. If you ever needed evidence that the settler community aren’t a bunch of rabid, blood-lust devils then here it is.
http://hurryupharry.org/2012/02/21/enemies-a-made-up-story/