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A Strange Experiment

Israel Shamir, a “Russian-Israeli intellectual” and journalist, writes on the “Nazification of Israeli society,” for Arab News.

Apparently, in response to the controversy surrounding IAF refuseniks, Maariv ran an op-ed condemning the pilots and supporting Israel’s military actions. The op-ed was later discovered to be wholly composed of lines written and spoken by Adolf Hitler.

The article attracted very little attention, for it was an exact match to the rest of the write-up produced by Messrs Dankner and Barnea. Only a few days later, a sharp-eyed retiree paid notice to the by-line: The article in question was signed A. Schickelgruber, a real-life name of Adolf Hitler, and every single sentence was taken from Hitler’s speeches and books. This new posthumous career of the Nazi leader as a Zionist columnist served a sterling proof of advanced Nazification of Israeli society. The Zionist sympathizers affect their indignation whenever their black deeds are compared with those of Nazis, but publication of Hitler’s article and following lack of response by the Israeli public staged a convincing experiment: The Israeli discourse fully inverted and appropriated the Nazi propaganda.

While Shamir himself may be a questionable source, this is pretty fucked up right here, no?

12 thoughts on “A Strange Experiment

  1. Yeah, this is very interesting. I was recently reading about how the American right wing appropriated communist (eastern bloc style) ideological tactics to win the cold war. Thus, the American right was anti-communist in substance but counter-communist in tactics . Perhaps one could make similar observations in this case.
    An interesting question to pose might be: where does the line between tactics and ideological substance blur?

  2. Furthermore – what if assassinating Arafat did NOT make things better ?
    It seems like Likud thinks its a scientific fact that assassinating him would result in a better leader and more willing Palestinian public.
    Or, what if Likud assassinates Arafat and then Sharon still doesn’t want to make peace until the Palestinians meet his totally unrealistic demands (which the PAlestinians will not meet) ? What then ?
    What if it set back the peace process 20 years and built up whole new levels of violence and resentment that would result in the unnecessary deaths of thousands?
    How is this better than the Geneva agreement

  3. Reading through, I’m thinking this guy (Israel Shamir) needs to stop speaking, writing, or lecturing in English and stick to Arabic. i.e. someone needs to shut this guy up, the American public and the world are not educated enough to disregard what a lecturer tells them.
    We cannot educate the world, at least not before this guy’s time has passed. These are hateful words and an indictment for war. This is who needs to be locked up in Guantanamo, a terrorist of words with more power than a single man hangin gout at a bus stop strapped with dynamite.

  4. commentator, i think you’re being extremely excessive.
    i respect everyone’s freedom of speech. shamir is an israeli citizen and a russian jew. he has every right to be critical of his government and the path his people have walked in the name of self-defense. it is necessary for people of that ilk to participate in every democracy–every government–so that we have the proverbial canary in the coalmine to let us now when the air’s run too thin.

  5. “Russian-Israeli intellectual”??? I don’t think so!!! He maybe from Russian and maybe even a Jew who now lives in Israel, but he is not an intellectual and will never be mistaken for one. I have read a lot of his writing and not only does it border anti-Semitism it is also abnormally self hateful. You know there is something wrong when even Arabs think of him as an anti-Semite.

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