Israel’s Lefty Rag Haaretz Defends Treason and Espionage
Yisrael Hasson, a former deputy head of the Shin Bet and a Knesset member from the center-left Kadima Party, called on people to cancel Haaretz subscriptions until Blau is fired and returns all the documents. Ronit Tirosh, also of Kadima, said: “It is infuriating that on the eve of Holocaust Day [Sunday evening and Monday] we find that displays of anti-Semitism exist even in our midst. Justice must be meted out to all those involved in this story, and the media and especially Haaretz must take careful stock.”
And yet, amid the storm, Haaretz is sticking to its guns and to its reporter. On Sunday it published a piece called “Haaretz Answers Four Key Questions on the Anat Kam Case” that shows how low Israel’s security actually ranks in its priorities. “Haaretz,” the article states, “believes that it cannot pass on all the documents Blau has to the defense establishment because its senior officials may use them to trace his sources.” The article also accuses the Shin Bet of “reneging” on its agreement with Blau — even though it was Blau who hoodwinked the Shin Bet by handing over only a fraction of his contraband. Yet Haaretz admits that it “decided to instruct Blau to remain abroad” despite the danger entailed. (It’s even speculated that Diskin, out of desperation, sought to scare Blau into returning.)
Also on Sunday Haaretz ran an op-ed by its columnist Yossi Sarid, a former leftist politician, arguing that what Kam did was fine because the institutions and country whose laws she violated aren’t worth much anyway. “Let every Israeli mother decide,” Sarid intoned,
if she has entrusted her sons to an army and government worthy of her trust. … Let the parents judge whether exposing the debates in the General Command is more dangerous than the corruption and hedonism in high places. Perhaps the rift between Israel’s prime minister and the U.S. president is a greater threat to state security, because it disrupts, among other things, the effort to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat.
Ergo, why not steal top-secret documents from the army? But even this remarkable inanity was surpassed by yet another op-ed that Haaretz ran on Sunday. This one, by its notorious radical-left commentator Gideon Levy, portrays Kam and Blau as little less than heroes, claiming: “These two youngsters, each in his own way, wanted to contribute to the state. They saw evils and would not keep silent. This should be described and portrayed as patriotism and love of one’s country.”
With such patriots, Israel won’t need many enemies.
By Monday Kam had waived her journalistic immunity, and her lawyer was trying to convince Blau to return to Israel and hand over the documents on the understanding that he wouldn’t be charged. But even if such a deal is reached, Haaretz, for the bulk of the Israeli public, won’t smell like roses in this affair.
Indeed, the Israeli left as a whole has fallen on hard times lately. In the 2009 elections the two parties that most embody it, Labor and Meretz, won a total of 16 seats out of 120. Last February it was revealed that the New Israel Fund, a major and wide-ranging left-wing NGO, had supplied most of the false information enabling the Goldstone Report — recognized as an anti-Israeli calumny across the Israeli spectrum, that is, except for the far left.
The Kam affair, with the role played in it by Haaretz, the Israeli left’s main journalistic bastion and, through its English website, an endless source of fodder for Israel-bashers and haters the world over, already has the makings of another severe blow to the left. And that, for all the harm done and yet to be done, is the silver lining.
Meanwhile another Knesset member has demanded to close down Haaretz unless it shapes up.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/136974
The comments section of Haaretz, as usual, tells the tale of the publication.
Haaretz, huffpo et al: write a reasoned opinion not radical left; forget about seeing posted in the comments = (equals) never click the rag again.
So, what is the goal of the Israeli “far left”? Is it kill me last?
In reply to No. 3–more like–don’t kill me, I’m one of the good ones.
Let me as a Tel Avivian give my five cents worth, the rot is deep at Ha’Aretz and among the Israeli far Left and not just the far Left, none of this surprised me when the story broke. When Dave Landau was editor at that rag, he infamously remarked that Israel deserved to be raped by America, a self-loathing Jewish masochistic fantasy if ever there was one. He got his wish, hope he’s happy. Shortly after the Gaza War just over a year ago, there was the infamous Danny Zammir affair, when the male version of Anat Kamm, also serving in the IDF accused the IDF of war crimes in that war, which it turned out were completely bogus. Ha’Aretz published his bogus claims on their front page, the only newspaper here that took him seriously, without bothering to investigate any further or check his background. Ha’Aretz made a retraction when his charges totally unravelled on this front but the damage had been done. And the paper remained in business, it is still in business not inspite of this but because people here don’t care. They don’t even notice, they are apathetic, they are busy trying to pay the bills and raise their families. So the far Left remain removed from the common man and the common experience in Israel, a navel-gazing clique with no accountability (because they never pay for the consequences of their actions) to anybody but themselves, and living in a parallel reality. The rot is in the Israeli universities, Kamm was a student of the anti-Zionist prof Shlomi Sand at TAU, it is in the schools where they are not taught anything substantial and relevant on this front. I have told anybody who will listen to boycott the rag for over a year now.
What is the motto of Ha’Aretz and their ilk here? Honestly I can’t say, a few guesses, ‘reality is what we say it is’, ‘the enemies of my enemies, conservative Zionists, are my friends and that would therefore include jihadists’ perhaps? Liberalism is a mental disorder, Ha’Aretz is proof of that. Think about this, the only reason these self-loathing afuch (cappucinno in Hebrew, kind of) drinkers in TA’s coffee shops can lounge around enjoying themselves in relative safety, is because twenty year old boys are risking their lives every day guarding checkpoints, borders and making arrests of dangerous terrorists, which these self-same loony leftists look down upon as “oppressive” actions. Without the IDF, these loony leftists would not see out the year, make that the month before some jihadist slit their throats. So why should young men risk their lives for Ha’Aretz staffers, crazy TAU profs and the loony Left as a whole? This is why I boycott the rag, it is an insult to the boys who risk their lives every day and those of course who have been killed and wounded, to support such a newspaper. It spits on the graves of our killed soldiers, our killed civilians, to support a newspaper that sells deceitful propaganda on behalf of our enemies who make no secret of the fact that they want us all dead.
In a sane or even semi-sane society such loony liberals, Anat Kamm included would be institutionalised and be under 24 hour care and observation. Paranoid schizophrenics and those hospitalised here suffering from Jerusalem Syndrome have nothing on these guys, I am not even saying this in jest. Instead these crazies are in charge of our “paper of record”, they are our leading “intellectuals” and they dominate the university campuses. Reality means nothing to them. Kafkaesque doesn’t begin to cover it. The lunatics are in charge of the asylum, it’s not just the USA with the abominable Obamination.
Larry in Tel Aviv.
Thanks for an excellent post, I couldn’t agree more.
First, I am bothered by the fact that the legislation is threatening a newspaper. How would people here feel if Obama threatened to shut down fox. There would be a nonstop hissy fit, and appropriately so. T Even just empty political rhetoric by legislators creates the danger of chilled free speech. “The stories involved assassinations of terrorists in the West Bank who, allegedly, could have been arrested; the Israeli Supreme Court had ruled that in such cases, the terrorist has to be arrested rather than killed.” So the Lefty provided documents showing the military was conducting illegal assassinations and she is the bad guy? What about the fact that the military was embarking on illegal actions.
Do the universities in Israel teach the kids to hate their countries too?
Haaretz does great damage to Israel. People like Gideon Levy and Hess write blatant lies which most Israelis recognize as such, but Israelis laugh it off unaware that these stories are believed all around the world by gullible people. Last year Levy wrote a tear jerker article about how Palestinian kids are so deprived of water that they don’t even have a single swimming pool in the entire West Bank. An Israeli colleague published numerous photos of olympic sized municipal pools throughout the West Bank filled with playing Palestinian children. Of course Haaretz did not correct Levy’s story, because if Haaretz corrected errors, the list would be longer than the paper itself.
Every ideology is based on information that it chooses to ignore. The Left ignores Jewish history and its accumulated wisdom. It ignores the very concept of “truth,” seeing no value in it. There are no facts that don’t comport with Leftist ideological constructs. If a “fact” is not in accord with preconceived notions, then it cannot be useful and must be jettisoned. Even human life itself is unimportant in the face of Leftist dogma. In that sense Leftists are no different than medieval Christianity that insisted upon complete confession of the faith even if extracted under torture. To wit, the unity of the common man will be accomplished even if that entails the deaths of millions.
In the case of Anat Kam, she believed falsely that the Jews needed to be disarmed by her and those who agreed with her in light of their planning to protect themselves and their society with whatever means was available to them. She sought the humane treatment of those who would harm her and her family if given the chance. She denied the Jewish truth that those who are kind to their enemies will in the end be cruel to those who meant them no harm. She fell for dogma, poor dear.
Perhaps the word got out at Haaretz that to get along you had to go along.
From the Sept.2006 issue of The Atlantic Times, a monthly newspaper from Germany -
” The Ideal Partner. Cologne’s DuMont publishing house buys into Ha’aretz in Israel. By Rainer Burchardt
Sixty years after the Holocaust, it is a German publishing house that has bought shares in the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz. This has caused no waves among the Israeli public.
A wealthy man of the world. The Cologne publisher Alfred Neven DuMont, one of the hundred richest people in Germany, has just landed yet another coup. Barely six months have passed since public accusations that the family business profited from “Aryanization” during the Nazi period, and now the liberal-minded but vanity-stricken lion of Rhenish high society has announced a partnership with the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz. Only a scoundrel would see a link between the two events. ”
I guess Im a scoundrel.
I happened across this article while searching for something else and got involved in reading it. Unlike the other comments here, which I gather are made by people who agree with the writer and therefore read him, I can’t help but comment on the manipulative and totalitarian style and content here. Obviouisely the writer and his fans here wish Israel to become a totalitarian state where there is no free press and no criticism of policy. Haaretz certainly has the right to defend and hold it’s position and Anat Cam’s attempt to expose what appear to be illegal and undemocratic policies in the army.
The fact that the writer and knesset members have the audacity to link this with the Holocaust and refer to political criticism as anti semitism is downright sickening, and I say this as a child of holocaust survivors.
It’s this sort of writing and opinion that make it difficult of decent people to remain faithful to Israel and the forces that now support it, and I say this as an Israeli.