Israel's news cycle has come to be dominated by sexual harassment scandals that keep exploding over the public's heads, like a never-ending barrage of PC-warfare cluster bombs.
The scandals follow a more-or-less fixed pattern. The targets are almost always right-wing politicians, or top military and police officers. The accusers almost always remain anonymous, even when their claims have been proven in court to be false and malicious.
The accusations always start out extremely lurid and bombastic, and end up in a soggy fizzle. In a recent case – that of Brigadier General Ofek Buchris, they went from multiple rape and sodomy charges to a plea bargain in which he admitted having a mutually consensual affair with an officer who was his subordinate.
Buchris is one of the highest-ranking IDF officers identified with religious Zionism, a war hero who survived serious injuries, and was seen by many as a possible future chief-of-staff. So much for that.
Magal resigns
In the case of ex-Jewish Home MK Magal, a reservist officer in the Sayeret Matkal commando and a former journalist, the accusations began with a Facebook post by a married woman who had worked with him in the Walla! news website, when he was its editor-in-chief. She claimed that during his going-away party, when he was no longer her boss, an inebriated Magal told her he had always been attracted to her, and specifically complimented certain parts of her physique.
Israel's hyper-feminist media made a huge scandal out of the accusations, and launched the standard hunting procedure that it employs in cases like these. Magal was described as a "sexual predator," and a media APB was put out for any and all women whom Magal may have harassed over the years to make their claims known.
Another woman from the Walla! website came forward and claimed that he had groped her. Neither of the women wanted to press charges, but the headlines kept coming and the police were involved. Magal knew full well he stood no chance against the bloodthirsty PC hordes and resigned. The police eventually closed the groping case after deciding Magal was innocent of any wrongdoing – but by then, the Jewish Home had lost a charismatic MK.
Slomiansky in the crosshairs
The latest scandal involves another Jewish Home MK, Nissan Slomiansky, who heads the important Law, Constitution and Justice Committee. Rumors of transgressions from years past were floated by a religious feminist journalist in a Facebook post. They were relayed to the Takana Forum, an unofficial group that includes rabbis and religious feminists, which was created to deal discreetly with charges of sexual impropriety by authority figures in the religious Zionist world.
Takana reportedly decided that Slomiansky should suspend himself from activity in the Knesset committees for some time and apologize. Meanwhile, however, the police have been involved, and it is unlikely that the hyper-radical feminists in the media will be satisfied by anything less than his resignation. Slomiansky has announced that he is suspending himself from chairing the Constitution and Justice Committee.
What is Slomiansky accused of doing? Heaven help me, I do not know. Nor does 99.99% of the public. There are rumors of various kinds. That is all you really need, these days. The women involved do not want to press charges, but if sufficient pressure is applied by the omnipresent and omnipotent "women's organizations" and the police, that may change.
These are only three of the dozens of high profile harassment scandals that Israel has been rocked by, incessantly, since the gradual PC takeover of Israel's media and justice systems in the 1990s. The first top politician to be brutally decapitated by the feminist machine was former general and war hero Itzik Mordechai, formerly of Likud, in 2000. The most famous case was that of ex-president Moshe Katzav (Likud), who was released from prison last week after serving five years for rape.
Ramon sent to equine therapy
The only left-wing politician to be targeted over the years was then-justice minister Haim Ramon (Labor), who made the mistake of trying to reform Israel's justice system and found himself in the crosshairs of then-Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch.
The process of conviction, in all of these cases, was characterized by gross miscarriages of justice, and incessant, violent intervention by militant feminist journalists and politicians. To give just one example: Ramon was accused of kissing a female soldier in the Prime Minister's Office in 2006. The kiss appears to have been consensual but Ramon apparently took advantage of the situation and turned it into something more sensual than what the soldier had in mind. To top it all off, this happened on the day in which the Second Lebanon War was launched.
The soldier, identified only as H., refused to file charges. This prompted a top female police officer, Assistant Commissioner Miri Golan, and an IDF general, Gadi Shamni, to summon H. to a meeting in a coffee shop. The two told her – preposterously – that if she did not file charges, Ramon would sue her for libel.
H. persisted in her refusal and embarked on a post-military service hiking trip to South America. The police did not give up and sent investigators to South America in order to interview her. Ramon was forced to resign. He wound up doing several months of community service in an equine-therapy center and returning to politics with a much lower profile. The Supreme Court had been saved from reforms.
A presumption of blackmail
An important caveat is in place: all of the men involved in the cases mentioned above are apparently not saints. The question we are asking, however, is not whether they behaved improperly. The question is – did they receive fair treatment, or was the process by which they were publicly shamed and subsequently punished a travesty of justice? In all of these cases, the answer to the latter question is a clear "yes".
More worryingly, it is also increasingly clear that the PC police are a potent tool in the hands of the left wing, which created the feminist movement and controls its institutions. This means that there is a high potential for political blackmail here, too. We do not know who is being blackmailed at this very moment, and what he is giving away in return for not being shamed and prosecuted.
Israel's first radical feminist MK was the American-Israeli Marcia Freedman, who entered the Knesset in 1973. Now a prominent member of J-Street, she suggested, not very long ago, that Israel should cease existing as a Jewish state.
Fully fledged Political Correctness came to our shores in the mid-1980s as an American import, with disastrous consequences for Israel's political culture.
However, the times are a-changing. Donald Trump's victory is largely seen as a triumph against Political Correctness – with militant feminism at its core. Perhaps these winds of change will help save us from the feminist kangaroo courts and the blackmail mechanism whose existence we surmise. For MK Slomiansky, it will probably be too late.