More on the complicity of the U.S. Right-wing in the Israeli Fascist/Settler war on Palestinians, and how it is verboten here to call them by their "true name":
"What will it take for British officials and other international actors to start taking Israeli leaders at their word and offer any meaningful pushback?"
BLUF: "The ideas, however, endured: “Globalism” was a journey to nowhere; the nation state must be sovereign; liberal individualism was diseased. These points were lovingly adopted, with more care and precision, by people with far less baggage than Bannon, who shared his passionate illiberalism but not his self-defeating spleneticism. The 58-year-old Yoram Hazony, an Israeli academic, continued to tend the hothouse flowers of National Conservatism in the US. He published windy paeans to nationalist virtue. He founded a think tank, the Edmund Burke Foundation, in 2019 and, with great near-Hayekian assiduity, he organised. Hazony triumphed where Bannon failed.
"By the third National Conservatism Conference in Miami last year, the roster included Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and potential presidential candidate favoured (in private if not in public) by the GOP’s elites; the Republican senator Marco Rubio; the former head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Rick Scott; Josh Hawley, the influential Missouri senator; and several Republican candidates for Congress.”
So here are a couple whose "true name" is forbidden to be used:
Last Wednesday, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich tweeted an extraordinary post on X. It showed him shaking hands with a figure who is not particularly well known in Israel, together with a statement in English: “Just finished meeting with @benshapiro. A fascinating discussion on various topics including economics, Judaism, Israel and more. Amazing the impact one man can have.”
Why was the tweet extraordinary? First because it was in English, a language Smotrich doesn’t often tweet in – and for a change the English was perfect. Second, because of the reach of the tweet: It received almost 500,000 views, 900 likes and 290 responses, figures that are something like 10 to 100 times more popular than an average Smotrich tweet. Thirdly, because of the man in the picture, someone who apparently left a deep impression on Smotrich.
Unsurprisingly, many of the responses to the tweet were about Smotrich’s English. Many made fun of him; the word “grandmeizer” appeared many times, as did the question of who wrote the tweet for Smotrich, and whether he used Google Translate.
Other responses had to do with the picture of the two: Smotrich is a short man and Shapiro is no taller than 170 cm (5 foot 5 inches). In the photo, however, he looks surprisingly tall. All of the above is of course completely unimportant. For Israelis, the real story is who the man in the photo who left such a deep impression on Israel’s finance minister is and why it received so much more traction than the average Smotrich tweet.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, please meet Ben Shapiro, 39, an observant American Jew and right-wing author, columnist and speaker. Shapiro is the founder of the online news site The Daily Wire and hosts a radio show and podcast called The Ben Shapiro Show.
According to Wikipedia, Shapiro described himself in 2016 as libertarian when it comes to the role of government and as conservative when it comes to social institutions. The Economist described him as a “radical conservative” and the New York Times as “extremely conservative.” Shapiro supports Donald Trump, is nationalist, religious, and anti-abortion – even in cases of rape or incest. He sees homosexuality as a mental illness, strongly supports the death penalty, and opposes gun control. He doesn’t deny climate change but argues that even a 4C degree rise in Earth’s average temperature isn't an emergency.
When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Shapiro supports settlements, opposes a two-state solution, and has said in the past that the transfer of Arabs in the West Bank and Israel is an acceptable solution, although he later said that this would be cruel and unfeasible.
Ben Shapiro on the set of "Candace" on April 28, 2021 in Nashville, Tennessee.Credit: Jason Kempin / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP
According to NPR, Shapiro and the content he ran in The Daily Wire in 2021 garnered more likes, shares and comments on Facebook than the New York Times, The Washington Post and other legacy news publishers by a "wide margin".
This explains the massive circulation of the photo of Smotrich and Shapiro. Shapiro has 6.1 million followers, and he retweeted the Israeli finance minister, reaching hundreds of thousands of people in Israel and the U.S. who wouldn't normally be exposed to Smotrich. At the same time, the extraordinary circulation of Smotrich’s post shows the success of the methods employed by the conservative, nationalist and religious right in America, Israel and elsewhere – and sometimes in international cooperation – in disseminating messages and propaganda.
Outrage as a business model
It’s a business model based on anger, polarization, and fanning hatred on social media. The title of NPR’s 2021 analysis of Shapiro’s business reads “Outrage as a Business Model: How Ben Shapiro is Using Facebook to Build an Empire.” After presenting the date for its content distribution, the report looks at how the right uses news as entertainment with one purpose: clickbait – in other words, creating headlines and content whose primary purpose is to get the public to click on the headline and share it with others.
One example quoted by NPR was a Daily Wire headline from 2021: “BOOK REVIEW: Proof That Wokeness Is Projection By Nervous, Racist White Women Who Can’t Talk to Minorities Without Elaborate Codes.” A quick glance at the Daily Wire shows many other examples such as “Pediatrician Group Launches New Initiative to Expose Danger of Transgender Procedures On Kids;” “Bidenomics! Average American Can’t Afford Homes In 99 % Of Country”; and “Los Angeles Will Spend Billions On Homelessness Under Lawsuit Settlement.”
The process has already begun
The deep impression Shapiro left on Bezalel Smotrich is frightening. While Shapiro is a commentator for whom conservative provocations are a business model for selling books, lectures and advertising inventory, Smotrich is Israel’s finance minister and a major actor in the judicial coup, Israel’s policies in the territories and pretty much every other matter. If, for example, Smotrich were to adopt Shapiro’s economic worldview, he would step us his efforts to crush and dismantle the Israeli civil service, and in particular various social institutions – this is a process that has already begun.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Channel 14.Credit: Screenshot of Channel 14
If Smotrich listens to Shapiro and adopts his positions, he will also abolish the minimum wage, encourage inequality (because that, in Shapiro’s view, is good and encourages people to make an effort), dismantle the Histadrut Labor Federation and the workers’ unions, and probably also the National Insurance Institute and the public medical and education systems. For most of the public, especially Likud voters (bottom deciles), Religious Zionism (in which many are employed in the government and public service), and the ultra-Orthodox, who have not acquired an education that would enable them to work in high-tech, Israel will then be hell on earth, if it still even exists.
Smotrich, at least in the short term, won’t be able to implement all of the above. He used public money to buy quiet from the Histadrut, and he still continues to subsidize fuel – this month he even increased the subsidy – because of the fear of public outrage against the cost of living. The real lesson he learned from Shapiro is about spreading right-wing propaganda and narratives through tools such as Channel 14 and the Galey Israel radio station, and in particular the Facebook and Twitter blitz of Gadi Taub, Yinon Magal and many others – a lesson he will warmly adopt.
The forecast for the autumn is simple: The Religious Zionists and their ilk will employ more craziness, lies, trolling and polarizing content on social media to connect them with the extreme right-wing movements in the United States and other countries.
