Bryan
http://coteret.com/2009/12/10/israeli-cover-story-antisemites-how-human-rights-activists-become-public-enemies-with-call-for-support/ -------------- * “Anti-Semites”*
*How human rights activists became public enemies*
*Their families disown them, the universities persecute them, the Shabak wiretaps them, police harass them and the Knesset curtails them. Who will take care of the human rights of the human rights activists? *
Shai Greenberg and Neta Ahituv, Ha’ir [Haaretz Tel-Aviv weekly], December 11 2009 [cover story]
A month and a half ago, Noa Kaufman, an activist for the organization Israeli Children, fighting to regulate the status of the children of migrant workers, was woken by the ring of her cell phone at 4 a.m.. On the other end of the line was a male voice: “the public is not against the expulsion, you bitch.” He hung up. He called again, and when she didn’t answer he left a message: “you filthy Ashkenazi bitch, too bad Hitler didn’t finish you off. Come to the Shapira neighborhood and just watch what we do to you. We’re going to catch you tomorrow and kill you.”
Another recipient of that kind of invective is Tel Aviv Council member Yael Ben Yefet, who acted in City Hall against arresting the children and banishing them from central Israel. Ben Yefet, who is also the director of Hakeshet Hademocratit Hamizrahit, received an anonymous fax to her office saying: “if you knew what was going on these days in the southern neighborhoods, you would be ashamed of yourselves, you token Sephardic ass kissers of the Ashkenazi racists who hate you. We are talking to you too, Yefet, you wimp. It is nice and warm in the Ashkenazis’ butts, but doesn’t it stink?”
Eitan Bronstein, CEO of the Zochrot organization, also received death threats. “We called on the public to join a march of commemoration of the Nakba and I received an anonymous phone call: ‘by April 17 you will no longer be alive. We are going to make sure of that.’ Then there were other calls, to my cell phone and the office.” Bronstein is already used to being cursed on the phone. In the last year he was interviewed a few times on Shmuel Plato Sharon’s program on Radio Radius. “Plato, who has very nationalist opinions, called me throughout the interview ‘murderer,’ ‘anti-Semite,’ and he even said: ‘I hope they throw you out of the country.’”
It looks as if that kind of talk has become legitimate in Israel, 2009, as long as it is aimed at human rights activists, of course. There is a consensus that it is okay to abuse them with violent talkbacks, rabid radio programs, graffiti polluting the public thoroughfares and of course also personally, individually, as shall be demonstrated below. The truth is we should not be surprised by that vulgar treatment. Recently several official parties have given support to the delegitimization of those organizations. The Interior Ministry spokesperson, Sabine Hadad, for example, who in an opinion piece she published on the Walla website last August called the demonstrators against expelling migrant workers “precious children who do not understand the reality of life but insist on calling themselves human rights activists;” or the official Yitzhak Drexler, head of the guarantees unit in the Interior Ministry, who wrote in his answer to a request by the Elem organization on behalf of the son of a migrant worker: “try not to defend criminals and attach them to our people and the Land of Israel.” The same Drexler wrote to the Hotline for Migrant Workers that they “represent criminals and help them extinguish morality from the Land of Israel.”
[...]