Steve Apfel, a veteran authority on anti-Zionism, is also a prolific author of non-fiction and fiction. He blogs at Balaam’s curse and the serialisation of his new novel can be accessed at https://steveapfel.substack.com/p/what-man-proposes
In the debilitating war of words over judicial reform, one rather fundamental fact has been overlooked. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the disputants, anti-reformers skate on the skinniest of thin ice. Democracy and the justice system, the casus belli provoking the schism and incipient civil war, appear to have stifled perspective. How could it be otherwise when the mainly religious Right allowed the mainly secular Left to ring fence ‘democracy’ and justice’ thereby disarming its weapon of mass destruction. War, said Napoleon, is a contest of blunders. The side that commits fewer blunders wins the war. But for its blunder the Right could have occupied the high ground and reduced anti-reformers to a vanguard of ambivalent blusterers. The price paid, in the multifaceted fallout on chronically divided Israel, could not be steeper.
The long and the short of it is that the brittle backbone or Achilles heel of anti-reformers remains gaping and neglected. The Left’s major casualty could be Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and Biden mouthpiece, proclaiming that Only Biden Can Save Israel Now,
Meanwhile Biden and Secretary of State Blinken extend their clandestine attack on the Israeli government’s proposed reforms by enlisting the Democrats’ paper of choice which may as well be the trusty Soviet organ Pravda. Appealing to Biden in pre-arranged terms, Friedman writes:
“The Jewish democracy needs you to save it from being destroyed from the inside. It needs hard truths — something only you can provide....Something very important could break in our relationship with Israel. And once it’s gone, it will never come back.”
So it’s an ‘either or’ demand: stop the judicial reform or break our special relationship – a break begun, one may add, by President Obama and fertilized by his former VP, President Biden even as the two have energetically forged a new special relationship – the one with Holocaust-plotting Iran.
“Five days away from fundamentally transforming America,” declared Obama as the incoming President. The Trump and Biden Presidency were revealing of what Obama meant by “fundamentally transforming America”. The reign of Charles VI of France, remarked a Chief Minister, was “pregnant with sinister events and the grave of good laws and good morals.” Six hundred years later the regime of Biden of America is pregnant with that lugubrious baby. The most sombre assessment would put Biden’s Federal justice system on a par with some Latin American banana republic.
In the latest outrage of Biden’s dirty tricks agency, the Justice Department acted as Hunter Biden’s defence team, says John Ratcliffe, former Director of National Intelligence.
“The lawyers,” he points out, “who were supposed to be on opposite sides were on the same side. They worked together to hide from the judge a blanket immunity agreement.” https://youtube.co./shorts/jEn_hF4L-eQ?feature
That’s how desperately the White House needed the plea agreement to go through. Why? As Douglas Schoen explains, Hunter Biden’s problems are now Joe Biden’s.
https://themessenger.com/opinion/hunter-bidens-problems-are-now-joe-bidens-problems
Had the imposter President stopped at turning the justice system into a family protection racket it would be bad enough. Biden’s made it more than that. He turned the DOJ and FBI into agents of tyranny. Governor DeSantis has complained they are “going after pro-life activists and investigating parents at school board meetings who were concerned about critical race theory and forcing kids to wear masks.”
Had Biden stopped at turning the justice system into a protection racket and an instrument of terror, it would be bad enough. He’s done more than that. His FBI cronies colluded with tech companies to censor the 2020 election-altering Hunter Biden “laptop from hell.”
Had Biden stopped at self-protection censorship it would be bad enough. He employed disinformation for election rigging. On the eve of polling in the 2020 campaign some 51 federal security agents signed a letter declaring the Hunter Biden laptop to be a Russian hoax. Biden waved the fraudulent letter during his Oct. 22 debate with Trump, and dismissed his son’s laptop as “a Russian plant.” The Democrat media colluded with the lie.
After the New York Post tracked it down the media blocked the breaking story. And here’s the rub: the hoax letter signed by federal agents was arranged by....? It was by none other than Anthony Blinken, subsequently rewarded as Secretary of State for helping Biden get fraudulently elected. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/05/04/the_only_news_thats_fit_to_print.html
What it all comes down to is that Democrat uglies, Hilary Clinton to the fore, decided that Obama’s promise to radically transform America was too important to trust the electorate to vote for Biden.
If only he had had stopped at rigging the 2020 election. But Biden’s gone onto rigging the 2024 election by having his Republican opponent arrested and hounding Donald Trump through political prosecutions aimed at incapacitating Trump in the run-up to elections. Not even the government of South Africa, probably the most corrupt of democracies, goes that far with political opponents.
Anti-reformers, blocking out this reality, insist that Prime Minister Netanyahu give the mobster head of a crime family the audacious right to lecture him on judicial probity and democracy. What of Jewish Democrats and Jewish bodies like the ADL, and reform rabbis and other leading Jewish lights that voted for the mobster President and continue to cover for him while they pressure Israel’s leader to give up and give in? What gives them the right to call the end of Israel’s democracy? The kettle calling the pot black, would you say? Such is the brittle backbone of the anti-Reform movement.
“A vast majority of Israelis believe — rightly — that you are a true friend and that your advice came from the heart,” wrote Thomas Friedman from the bottom of his heart. What is more immoral: telling lies or lying by omission? That is for the New York Times and its Biden mouthpiece to answer, from the bottom of his deceptive heart.