Sunday, June 10, 2007

Little Ahmadinejads


By Gideon Levy

"......The Qassams on Sderot presaged the disgusting continuation, this time in poetry as well. "If not the roof beams, destroy the foundations ... Attack Lebanon and also Gaza with plows and with salt, destroy them so no inhabitant remains. Transform them into barren desert, piles of rubble ... kill them, spill their blood, frighten the living," wrote poet Ilan Scheinfeld, who has recently published a novel whose boycott no one has called for.

Former chief rabbi Mordechai Eliahu has called for returning fire on homes; Minister of Pensioner Affairs Rafi Eitan has proposed that Israel manufacture a domestic version of the Qassam and launch it on Gaza; Public Security Minister Avi Dichter has said that targeted assassinations are not enough; his successor at the Shin Bet security service, Yuval Diskin, has complained that "in Beit Lahiya and in Beit Hanoun they are living in tranquility;" our old acquaintance Lieberman has proposed a hit on the quarter where Gaza City's well-off reside for every hit on Sderot; Major General (Res.) Amiram Levin has called for dividing the Gaza Strip into squares, and after every Qassam destroying one; former justice minister Yosef Lapid supported this proposal; former chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, the progenitor of the theory of "consciousness-searing," has proposed "cleansing the territory;" Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal has said that he prefers "a dead child in Gaza to a dead child in Sderot," and a bereaved father from the Second Lebanon War, Ami Schreier, has called for the wiping out of a neighborhood in Gaza, with advance warning of three hours, for every Qassam. Not one of them has been castigated for his words, not one of them shunned.

This is what we look like. This is our moral portrait. "

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