The Daily Kos Reaction to THE SPEECH (Part Deux)

Michael L.

I was going to move on, but this is too much fun to let pass so easily.

I think that I want to start, this morning, with the piece written by fladem entited, Bibi: I am over Israel.

Basically the piece, such as it is, can be summed up by these words:

"Israel wants my son to fight in their war.   Fuck them."

My, my.  Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have irked some people, just a tad.

I find it interesting that while no country has ever sent "flesh and blood to fight by its side," as Bob Dylan memorably put it in "Neighborhood Bully," there are many millions of people who seem to think that Israel is responsible for dragging other countries, such as the United States, into war.




It's one of those things that reveals the racist nature of many in the West when they pontificate about the Jewish State of Israel.

The Left, for the most part, is responding to Netanyahu's speech as if it was a call to war.

It wasn't.

He even addressed that issue preemptively in the speech, itself.  Netanyahu said:

Now we are being told that the only alternative to this bad deal is war.  That's just not true.  The alternative to this bad deal is a much better deal.

The reason that so many "Kossacks," such as the genius above, think that Netanyahu called for war when he precisely did no such thing, is because that is what they want to believe.  When most of these people think about Israel or Netanyahu, they are not thinking about the actual country, nor the actual man.  Instead they are addressing the malicious fantasy that they have created within their own minds grounded in hostile anti-Israel / anti-Jewish propaganda.

Well, the neighborhood bully, he's just one man

His enemies say he's on their land

They got him outnumbered about a million to one

He got no place to escape to, no place to run

He's the neighborhood bully.

All Netanyahu wants - and he was exceedingly clear on this - is that Iran reform itself before it be allowed into the nuclear club.  That's it.  That's all.  Sanctions should not be lifted unless, or until, Iran ceases aggressions against its neighbors, ceases supporting terrorism abroad and ceases calling for the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel.

Is that honestly too much to ask?  And this makes Netanyahu a "warmonger"?  I don't think so.  They are not addressing anything that he actually said.  All they are doing is spewing hatred toward Israel, toward Netanyahu, and thus, inevitably, toward Jews, in general... which eventually contributes to the kinds of joyous little moments that we've been seeing recently in Europe to cries of "Alahu Akbar" and the rat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire.

Let's take a gander, shall we?

If you do a keyword search you will see that the word "war" comes up, presently, 105 times in a diary with a respectable 150 comments.

Most of those comments suggest that either Israel or Benjamin Netanyahu want war - apparently for no reason whatsoever - whereas they, being good people, want peace.  Israel and Netanyahu represent bad people who wish to visit suffering on others, while they represent the good people who would not hurt a fly.

Well, he's surrounded by pacifists who all want peace

They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease

Now, they wouldn't hurt a fly. To hurt one they would weep

They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep

He's the neighborhood bully.

Karl Rover suggests that the United States has "no common cause with the war-crazed prime minister and his toadies."

txdoubledd helpfully reminds us that Netanyahu is a "liar" and that "Israel needs us we do not need them."  What a deeply compassionate and progressive point of view.  By the way, they keep calling Netanyahu a liar and, yet, almost never actually tell us just what it is that he is lying about.

If Netanyahu is a liar then just what, exactly, is the lie?

Heart of the Rockies progressively notes that Netanyahu needs "a big slap in the face, metaphorically speaking. Leave the war mongers their on their own."

Whereas nosleep4u is content to call Netanyahu a "warmonger" merely once, Waryliberal trots out the warmonger charge four times in a single comment.

Good for her!  That's telling him what's what.

Meanwhile jayden thinks that Netanyahu is a "war-mongering liar" and the moderate noofsh merely thinks that he has a "warmongering policy."

And, as always, not everyone over there is entirely clueless on this subject:

I can't wait (0+ / 0-)

to make friends with a country that give the death penalty to the gays.  I mean, we're not friends with enough countries like that already.  That liberals are calling for it is completely nauseating.

by leftynyc on Wed Mar 04, 2015 at 05:03:22 AM PST

Nauseating it is, indeed... as I can attest to on pretty much a daily basis.

Now, jasan, is mighty pissed-off.  All that asking-for-a-better-deal-stuff really got his gander, which is why he decided to go the "fucking war criminal" route.  He writes, "Ask them exactly what boots on the fucking ground means to them and if they are willing to do Israel's bidding.   Lets just see how many will take up the cause with their own kids and kin tossed into the cannon fodder."

If you change the word "Israel's" to the word "Jews'" - and if you put your ear to the ground and listen with the right kind of ears - you can practically hear the echos from eighty years ago in Germany.

A number of people, including bruddaone, want the US to abandon Israel entirely. "Yea, fuck Israel...but most importantly stop the aid to Israel, and let them truly go it alone...."

Meanwhile cybrestrike drags out the apartheid slander.

The brooklynbadboy thinks that the neocons - those wraith-like demons from the recent past - are preparing a major comeback.  Just why he thinks this is rather hard to say, but there it is, pixelated in black and white.

However, raptavio, reasonable as ever, says that he will continue to support Israel, but on condition that Israelis reject Netanyahu at the polls.

Anyway, this little exercise is losing its charm, but I think that it exposes something deep within the progressive-left psyche in regards Israel, Israelis, Netanyahu, and the Jews.

So many of these comments are just soo over-the-top that there is nothing within The Speech, itself, to explain it.

The last thing that the speech was, was a call to war.  Netanyahu is not seeking for the United States to institute a draft or wage war against Iran, for chrissake.  Netanyahu is trying to do whatever he can do to see to it that Iran, as it is currently constituted - as an Islamist state - never gets the bomb.

What he suggests is that there should be no sunset clause on sanctions until Iran ceases its imperial projects in places like Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iraq.

The deal as it stands, if the terms that we know of are accurate, is a betrayal of Obama's promise to make sure that Iran does not gain a nuclear bomb.  

I am sorry if this is inconvenient for Obama supporters or Israel Haters, but Benjamin Netanyahu has responsibilities that transcend currying favor with misty-eyed western progressives who will despise the man no matter what he does or does not do, if for no other reason but that he is the leader of Likud.

It was a good speech, powerfully delivered, with exceedingly important points that needed to be made.

The sheer unbridled rage that it elicited from the base of the Democratic party is a disgrace and tells us much more about them than it does about either Israel or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu may be no Churchill, but I bet Churchill would have approved of the speech.

What has he done to wear so many scars ?

Does he change the course of rivers ? Does he pollute the moon and stars ?

Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill

Running out the clock, time standing still

Neighborhood bully.

It should also be understood, of course, that Netanyahu is no pacifist, either.

If the current US government is content with an Iranian nuclear bomb sometime in the not too distant future - sometime not long after United States President Barack Obama leaves office - then it might be that Israel will have to do the West's dirty work for it, even while enduring their self-righteous condemnations.

This, by the way, received one of the bigger standing ovations of the morning:

I can guarantee you this, the days when the Jewish people remain passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those... days... are... over.

Indeed, they are.