Yitzchak Herzog is so desperate for votes that he blamed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Saturday for a woman airplane passenger’s outburst at a flight crew that she didn’t get her promised chocolates.
The airplane incident was caught on YouTube last week, showing a woman having a fit at a bewildered stewardess
The passenger, later joined by her family, screamed in a wild rant at the flight attendants for not selling her duty-free chocolates.
She called the stewardess a “piece of trash” and a few other unprintable expletives.
One would think that no one would justify the family’s behavior, which provided American Jewish media with a great opportunity to show Israelis as rude and brash, if not insane.
Herzog thinks differently.
With polls showing that despite his party and media outlets throwing everything at Netanyahu, including the most picayune and petty insults at his wife Sara, the voters are not changing their minds so quickly.
If elections were held today, Herzog and his political partner Tzipi Livni might eke out a tiny victory over the Likud, but they would have no chance of forming a government.
Herzog, reaching at the bottom of the electoral pit, said on Saturday that the woman’s behavior actually is Netanyahu’s fault.
Herzog is copying Obama’s logic that if the ISIS terrorists were given good jobs, they might stop decapitating victims, and Kerry’s logic that Palestinian Authority Arabs would be friendly to Israel if Netanyahu would simply surrender half of the country and expel 10 percent of the Jewish population from Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.
The woman’s rant on the Israeli flight was a “result of the division and arguments that Netanyahu caused,” he said, apparently with a straight face.
Things will be different under Herzog, he said. He will unite the people, who no longer will scream at flight attendants because they didn’t get their desserts, just or not.
Livni also tried to use the in-flight incident for political points. She wrote on Facebook that it was an “ugly incident” but took credit that as Justice Minister for promoting transparency that allows for publishing incidents, especially ugly ones, in the government.
It is no wonder that Herzog and Livni are not gaining any ground in the polls.
Dozens of Arabs, the ones who are full-fledged Israelis complete with citizenship, greeted Yitzchak Herzog and Tzipi Livni Saturday with catcalls, slurs, Palestinian Authority flags and fights when the duo visited the area of Wadi Ara, a hotbed of Islamic Movement radicals.
Protesters called the new faction, a merger of Livni’s HaTnua and the Labor parties, “radical right-wingers” with “blood on their hands.”
Bujie and Tzipi are tied up in the age-old bleeding heart philosophy that if you simply show the Arabs you really aren’t so Jewish and Zionist, they will hug and kiss you without a knife in the back.
The demonstrators on Saturday southeast of Haifa were more honest than that. Herzog and Livni’s “Zionist Camp” gimmick is the last thing that is going to convince Arabs who openly want a “one-state” solution that they can be partners for peaceful co-existence so long as there is a Jewish government.
There were many Arab supporters for Herzog and Livni during Saturday’s campaign stop, but they and the “Members of the Homeland” protesters literally fought with each other, leading to six arrests.
“We do not want anyone from the Zionist Union to come here. They are accomplices to murders against the Palestinian nation,” one protester said, according to Yediot Acharonot.
The Arab parties have merged in the campaign to make sure no smaller faction will be left out of the Knesset. Arab leaders smell a chance to increase their numbers in the Knesset and are in the midst of full-scale campaign to encourage Arabs to change their habit of not voting in national elections.
There are 10 Knesset Members from the two Arab parties and one Jewish-Arab party. Polls indicate they will have 12 or 13 MKs after the votes are counted next month.
If the polls are more or less correct, the only way Herzog and Livni can form a government is if the Arab or Haredim join the coalition. Neither scenario is likely to happen.
There is a limit to how far the Arabs can pretend to be Zionists. As for the Haredim, Shas leader Aryeh Deri said he won’t join a government with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party.
With all of these enemies within the leftist camp, who are their friends?
The State Comptroller and Ombudsman will release his report on the housing crisis at 6 p.m. (11 a.m. EST) Wednesday night.
The report will cover the Olmert and Netanyahu administrations, letting Tzipi Livni and Yitzchak Herzog off the hook. They were Ministers of Housing in the Sharon government.
The Likud party is concerned that the report will blame Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for the constantly increase in the price of housing.
The Herzog-Livni “Zionist Camp” also is anxious to read the report, which they hope will boost their popularity in the pre-election polls that so far show Netanyahu as the only one who would be able to form a government coalition.
Israel’s anti-Netanyahu media, which include all of the largest networks and newspapers, already have published speculation that Netanyahu will be blamed. If the report is less dramatic than expected, it will be a major blow for Herzog-Livni, and the media will have to find some other way to undermine Likud’s popularity.
The spiritual leader of the Shas Sephardi Haredi party told party supporters Sunday night that the “HaTikvah” national anthem is “stupid,” reported the Walla! website, which also provided an audio of the rabbi’s remarks.
Rabbi Shlomo Cohen’s aides defended the observation he made when describing a meeting with Shas’ founder and late spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef in 1955.
Rabbi Yitzchak Nissim had been appointed Chief Sephardic Rabbi at the time, and Rabbi Cohen said people stood up and started singing HaTikvah at the end of the inaugural ceremony.
Rabbi Cohen told listeners at Netivot that he said at the time, “What a bunch of nuts! Is this the Prime Minister?” He said he did not stand and asked Rabbi Yosef why he stood. Rabbi Yosef replied, “I was saying “Aleinu,” the prayer recited while standing at the end of morning, afternoon and evening prayers.
Rabbi Cohen explained that the Rabbi Yosef “didn’t want this ridiculous song to influence him.”
That shows the difference between Rav Ovadia – who had the good sense not to insult the majority of Israelis, religious as well as secular – and Rabbi Cohen, who does not have the sense to shut up.
Rabbi Shimon Baadnie, a member of the Shas Council of Sages, tried to explain that Rabbi Cohen really did not intend to say that HaTikvah is stupid but that it simply “is sung in a stupid way.”
However, there was no explanation to justify or rationalize Rabbi Cohen’s vicious attack on the national religious community. The good rabbi compared the “knitted kippa” Jewish community with the influence of Amalek, Israel’s eternal enemy.
Shas is stinging from the desertion the influential Sephardi Rabbi Yoram Abergil, who has announced he is supporting the Yachad party led by former Shas leader Eli Yishai.
Here are the words from HaTikvah that Jews all over the world sing and with which Rabbi Baadnie has a problem:
As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart,
With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion,
Then our hope – the two-thousand-year-old hope – will not be lost:
To be a free people in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem
Rabbi Baadnie said, “People say words and don’t understand what they mean.’Free in our land.’? Where is our freedom when we have sorrow from Arabs. The People of Israel are not free because Arabs, Americans and Europeans drive us crazy.”
It would have been more impressive if Rabbi Cohen had said something like, “We are not free because the Third Temple has not been built” but how could he think of such a thing with politics on his brain?
Nevertheless, the rabbi is right to a certain extent, but being “right” often is being stupid, even more so than the song may seem to Rabbi Cohen.
That is exactly what Shmira Imber, daughter of HaTikvah composer Naftali Herz Imber, told Walla! in response to Rabbi Cohen’s remarks:
“It is stupid to say that,” she said.
Below is a Barbara Streisand’s rendition of HaTikvah, stupid or not.
The Likud and the Herzog-Livni “Zionist Camp” parties attached each other for being soft on security only hours after a Palestinian Authority Arab stabbed a Haredi man in his stomach near City Hall in Jerusalem.
Mayor Nir Barkat was at the scene and helped tackled the attacker, whose victim suffered moderate wounds in his stomach.
The terrorist attack and Barkat’s action did not interest the two major parties in the election. Instead, they continued to stab each other below the belt with personal insults, continuing a campaign absent of reason and logic.
The Likud started the verbal free-for-all by suggesting that the terrorist attack was a result of Tzipi Livni’s remarks that dividing Jerusalem is an option.
The Likud’s statement declared:
If Tzipi and Bujie [Yitzchak Herzog] form a left-wing government – Hamas will be in the heart of Jerusalem.
That is the way this campaign has been going. The price of water, determined by experts in the bureaucracy, goes down, and everyone takes credit. An Arab terrorist attacks, and all of a sudden it is because someone said something, or did not say something.
It didn’t take long for Herzog-Livni to react on Facebook, writing that the Likud disseminated “another lowly and despicable lie from the man who is personally responsible for the loss of security in the capital.”
Here we go again. Netanyahu is “personally” responsible? And was Livni “personally responsible” for every terrorist attack when she was acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert quit?
And do Israelis feel any less secure now than they did when Livni was Prime Minister.
Livni, who still acts like her figment of a politician, as usual could not restrain herself from showing everyone that she is as lowly and despicable as Netanyahu. She accused him of “dancing on the blood” of the victim of the stabbing attack and using it to win more votes, which may be true but is exactly what she is doing.
The good news is that we are less than four weeks away from the end of this disastrous campaign.
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