Published by The Freeman Center
The Maccabean Online
Political Analysis and Commentary
on Israeli and Jewish Affairs
"For Zion's sake I shall not hold my peace, And for Jerusalem's sake I shall not rest."
Cooties (Israel's Leftist Neo-Fascist Police)
by Steven Plaut
Israel’s leftwing fascists are escalating their campaign against
freedom of speech and democracy.
In Biblical law there is a hierarchy of types of impurity. The
worst form of impurity is the human corpse (it is curious that it is a
worse form of impurity than an animal corpse!). Those who touch it or
come into contact with it voluntarily or involuntarily become impure
for ritual purposes (they cannot enter the Temple) until they go
through a cleansing process. The corpse is the “grandfather of
impurity.” “Fathers of impurity” are less severe and are conveyed
under less stringent circumstances, and are purified in easier ways.
They include those who become impure not from touching a corpse but
rather from touching objects that have been in contact with a corpse
or under a roof with a corpse. Lesser forms of impurity involve
touching the carcass of a dead animal, or experiencing other sorts of
things. These lower forms of impurity are “less contagious” and do
not necessarily require that those in contact with the impure undergo
any purifying ritual. Grandfathers of impurity can create and convey
fathers of impurity, which in turn can convey and create regular
simple impurity.
Or to translate all this into modern teen and facebook terms, it is
all a bit like the cooties. Someone deemed by his or her high school
comrades to have the cooties can transfer those cooties to others by
touch, and they can then transfer them further.
Now I mention all this because Israel’s radical Left, and its
captive Prosecutor’s Office officials, are expanding their assault
against freedom of speech using the theory of cooties.
It all began with a book called “The Teaching of the King,” which
purported to examine the Rabbinical laws and rules governing
circumstances under which non-Jewish civilians could be targeted in
times of war. The Prosecution declared that book to have not only
cooties, but also to comprise racism and criminal incitement.
Then the cooties spread. Anyone praising the book, meaning
people who had not been involved in its composition but who simply
thought it was a book worth reading, were proclaimed racists and
inciters by the cootie hunters in the Prosecutor’s office. Rabbis
have been arrested and interrogated under this jihad against cooties,
rabbis whose only “crime” was that they dared to exercise their
freedom of speech. Leftists by the way who call for murder or the
annihilation of Israel or the world boycott of Israel NEVER get
cooties, in the view of the Prosecutor. The latest victim was Yaakov
Yosef, son of the eminent Ovadiah Yosef, who was arrested on Friday
for praising the book, interrogated and released. In addition, Rabbi
Dov Lior was arrested last week for praising the book. Some of his
hotheaded followers then rioted in violent rage at their Rabbi being
arrested for having cooties.
But now the Israeli Left’s campaign against cooties has escalated.
Now anyone who protests against the suppression of the freedom of
speech of Rabbis Lior and Yosef and other harassed rabbis is guilty of
the next level of incitement, racism and cooties.
The anti-democratic Left, led by several tenured leftists, has
organized a petition against David Rotem, a religious right-leaning
Member of the Knesset from Lieberman “Israel Beiteinu” party. Rotem’s
crime? He expressed disapproval of the arbitrary arrests of the
rabbis for their exercising their freedom of speech. For the record,
I also denounced this suppression of the freedom of speech of those
rabbis so if you do not hear from me for a while, check to see if I am
being held in the cooties wing of the prison system. The petition in
question demands that Rotem be removed as chairman of the Knesset’s
Committee on constitutionality and law. Why? Because he has the
cooties. Because he denounced the anti-democratic suppression of the
freedom of speech of those rabbis.
Among the organizers of the petition demanding that Rotem’s
freedom of speech be suppressed are Prof. Yaron Ezrachi (or Ezrahi), a
radical leftist professor of political science at the Hebrew
University and a leading figure in the leftist think tank, the “Israel
Institute for Democracy.” Ezrachi likes to claim that Israel is
“going fascist” (see
http://www.isracampus.org.il/
For more on him see
http://www.isracampus.org.il/
Naturally he is one of those demanding that the Simon the Righteous
neighborhood of Jerusalem be kept clean of all Jews, judenrein:
http://www.israelnationalnews.
Another initiator of the petition to fire Rotem is Prof. David Harel,
a leftist from the ordinarily sane Weizmann Institute. An additional
initiator is the bigoted author Sefi Rachlesvski, who writes
Bash-the-Orthodox religious-baiting books and articles and has never
once been indicted for this bigotry and racism under Israel’s law
against racism. See this:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-
What will be next? Why, obviously it will be the arrest of those who
criticize Ezrachi and his gang for their anti-democratic jihad against
David Rotem!
Cooties can never stay dormant, they have to be on the move and can only spread!
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