1. The person the Isareli Left most loves to hate these days is Minister of Education Limor Livnat. Livnat is a feisty trench-fighter, intolerant of political correctness and of the Treason-Chic leftist fads her predecessor in the job had been inculcating in the curriculum. Among her first acts as Education Czarina was dumping a Revisionist history text that made the entire Middle East conflict the Jews’ fault and made the Cold War all the fault of the US.

   Now the Left is being driven to new heights of frothing at the mouth, because Sistuh Limor is proposing to base school funding in part on loyalty to the country. This means that Arab schools encouraging treason, flying PLO flags, teaching violence and terrorism, and openly identifying with the PLO and other enemies of the state will have their funding cut.

   Atrocious, screams the Left. Now lest you misunderstand, it is not that the Left is outraged because someone in the government has the temerity to question whether all Israeli Arabs are loyal to the state of Israel. Instead, it is because it is so obvious to all that the bulk of Israeli Arabs (but not ALL) are proudly DISLOYAL to the state and identify with its fascist enemies that the Left is upset. The bulk of Arab schools will be in danger of losing funds under the Livnat Plan.

   All of which is in such sharp contrast to the educational funding policies of Meretz Commissar Yossi Sarid, the Far-Leftist who held the post before Livnat. His idea was to deny funding to anyone showing LOYALTY to the state of Israel, especially if they were in a religious Jewish parochial school. The Sarid mantra has long been "Israel - Hate it or Leave It", and he did everything to teach hatred of the country when running the schools. The "poetry" of PLO terrorists was taught in the schools, there were proposals for days in which both Arabs and Jews could mourn the tragedy of Israel’s creation, the Arab "narrative" of events (meaning, Arab falsehoods) were taught as history, etc.

   The same Israeli Left that never had any problem with the politicalization of the school curriculum under the Barak junta is now suddenly screaming "Fascism" when the schools teach patriotism and loyalty to country. Labor’s ever-McCarthyistic Ofer Pines, the man who submits petitions weekly to prosecute anti-Oslo dissidents for expressing their views, attacks the new curriculum for threatening co-existence between Jew and Arab, unlike - say - teaching Arabs that Israel’s creation was a Naqba (catastrophe) that needs be reversed.

2. The other fad du jour here is wringing hands over unemployment - which is up and rising.

   Of course, the main culprit behind the rise in unemployment is the Histadrut trade union federation, Israel’s answer to organized crime. The Histadrut recently hiked the minimum wage, pricing oodles of workers out of the market. These people, mainly recent vets from the military, immigrants, or high school dropouts, are now prevented from working because employers are required to pay them more than their labor is worth (and so will not hire them). Leaving them with choices including emigration, living on the dole, or crime.

   The recent other atrocity of the Histradrut was getting a law passed by the Knesset, increasing resembling a meeting out of the new Planet of the Apes flick, in which all manpower "outsourcing" companies are essentially banned. To get around trade union hooliganism, many employers in Israel - like in the US, Japan and elsewhere - use "outsourcing", manpower agencies where people are hired as "temps" repeatedly, all to evade Histadrut extortion and wage hikes. To plug the hole, the Histadrut got its Knesset followers effectively to ban them by making all employment of such temps subject to the same terms as in the Histadrut extorted wage agreements. Meaning such people who were happily working are now once again to be denied employment thanks to the Histadrut.

3. More hate speech: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/news/story.html?in_review_id=443864&in_review_text_id=393406

4. As you know, Ted Turner, the ex-husband of Hanoi Jane Fonda and CCN owner, has been bashing Israel and Jews through his company. This did not stop my own university from handing him an honorary PhD last year, although Turner refused to come to Israel to get it so the university sent a delegation THERE to hand it over to him.

Copyright © 2001 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission