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Jerusalem Post’s Self-Censorship Protects Leading Religious Leader, Cleanses Israeli Racism

By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | December 20, 2012

… A Jerusalem Post report from 2010 featured some especially noxious remarks by Shas founder, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, likening non-Jews to donkeys whose job was to serve Jews in the days of the messiah.  This Nana-Channel 10 report features video of the former chief rabbi’s original statements.  Here are a few passages translated:

The Goyim were only created to serve us.  If that wasn’t the case they [Goyim] would have no place in the world.

… Jews earn eternal life in the days of the messiah.  Goyim don’t.  Like all people, they must die.  But they earn long life.  Why?  Think about someone’s donkey.  If it dies, he loses it, the money.  The same with a servant [ or “the one who serves you”].  You also lose money [when he dies].  That’s why Goyim are given long life so they may work well for the Jews.

… Why do Goyim exist?  So that they work [for Jews].  They thresh, they plant, they harvest, while we [Jews] sit like effendi and eat [our fill].  That’s why Goyim were created.

The remarks are especially important in the context of the Israeli work force which is filled with poor migrant labor from around the world, but especially from Asia and Africa. Without this cheap, victimized work force, Israel’s economy (especially the agricultural sector) couldn’t function.

It’s no accident that some of the most virulently racist language attacking African refugees in Israel has come from the Shas interior minister and disciple of Rabbi Yosef, Eli Yishai.  In this sense, Yishai is giving license to his followers to incite such hate through sermons like this one.

In the past few weeks the Post article, which had been publicly-accessible since publication, vanished.  When clicked, the old link brought a reader back to the Post’s main page.  There wasn’t even a Page Not Found message.  Just gone.  … Full article

Google cache version of the Jerusalem Post page

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December 21, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jerusalem Post’s Self-Censorship Protects Leading Religious Leader, Cleanses Israeli Racism

What’s the difference between Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Israel’s Rabbi Yosef?

By Alan Hart | August 31, 2010

Short answer. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad did NOT call for Israeli Jews to be annihilated. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Israel’s Shas party, HAS called, more than once, for the Palestinians (and, in fact, all Arabs) to be exterminated.

As reported by the mainstream Western media, Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map”. What that meant, it was asserted, was the destruction, the driving into the sea, of Israel’s Jews.

What Ahmadinejad actually called for was the de-Zionization of Palestine. His actual words were to the effect that he wanted the Zionist state to disappear as the Soviet Union had done. In other words, there would be a place in a de-Zionized Palestine for all Jews who wanted to stay and live in peace with their fellow Arab citizens.

As has been widely and accurately reported, Rabbi Yosef called on 27 August for the Palestinian Authority, its President Mahmoud Abbas and “all these evil people” (the occupied and oppressed Palestinians) to “perish from this world.” How was this to happen? “God should strike them with a plague.”

And what if God doesn’t act in the way Rabbi Yosef wishes?

He gave his own answer to that in 2001 when his subject was the Arabs. He said: “It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You (the Israeli government and the IDF) must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.”

But let us give credit where credit is due. Rabbi Yosef, unlike most others in Israel’s political, military and spiritual leadership, is being honest. I mean only that he dares to say in public what he really thinks.

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August 31, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , | Comments Off on What’s the difference between Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Israel’s Rabbi Yosef?

The Rise of Ultra-Semitism in Israel

By M. Junaid Levesque-Alam, on August 30th, 2010

A prominent Israeli rabbi whose party shares power in the Netanyahu government called for the extermination of Arabs in a recent sermon.

The 89-year-old Ovadia Yosef urged God to strike “these Ishmaelites and Palestinians with a plague; these evil haters of Israel.” He then singled out the Palestinian leader of Fatah, exclaiming that “Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this earth.” Yosef is the spiritual leader of the Shas Party, an ultra-Orthodox right-wing outfit that governs in concert with other parties, including Likud.

In religious terminology, the Ishmaelites are the descendants of Ishmael, who was Abraham’s elder son. As the rabbi doubtless knows, the Ishmaelites are considered the descendants of the Arabs in Islamic tradition.

In response to the genocidal exhortation, Netanyahu issued a mild non-rebuke; his office meekly offered that the rabbi’s ravings “do not reflect” the views of the prime minister or the government. The lukewarm criticism is not surprising, since Netanyahu may harbor genocidal views of his own.

In May, a Netanyahu advisor told the American-Israeli “journalist” Jeffrey Goldberg that Netanyahu is serious about striking Iran and considers the Islamic Republic the modern-day equivalent of Amalek.

For those unfamiliar with the Old Testament narrative, the Amalekites didn’t make out too well. God commands the Jews to utterly exterminate them—“Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”

But returning to Rabbi Yosef: what elicited his angry declamation? It seems that the approaching peace talks are the culprit. Yosef and the rest of the far-right, who now loom large in Israeli society, loathe the prospect of “conceding” any lands they have stolen from the Palestinians, including the vast swath of Jewish-only settlements.

Of course, the far-right doesn’t see the land as stolen. For one thing, what’s commonly called the “far-right” in Israel-polite media parlance is best described as proto-fascist. This is, after all, the crowd that wants to impose state loyalty oaths on Israel’s Arab citizens—or even better, purge them from Israel altogether, lest the precious racial purity of the “democratic” Jewish state be further diluted. This is also the same crowd that seeks to erase history by making banning references to refer to Israel’s creation as “Al-Naqba”, or “The Disaster.” That’s the term used by Palestinians—and rightly so: even Israel’s own historians have conceded that their state was established through mass terror and ethnic cleansing.

But that doesn’t matter to Rabbi Yosef and friends. For them, the Palestinians are an annoyance, inserted by the irritating hand of history into lands that were ordained as Jewish by a divine real estate agent. Hence the favored Zionist slogan of “redeeming” the land.

What all this confirms is the hardening of hatred in Israeli society. Israelis have grown increasingly indifferent to the fate they mete out to their victims. The public did not question the obscene one-sided massacre in Gaza in 2008, (euphemistically called a “war”) in which Israel slaughtered 1,000 Palestinians, half of them women and children, putatively in “response” to unguided rocket fire that had all but ended.

Nor did the public quiver over the 2006 assault on Lebanon, during which Israel shattered Lebanese civilian infrastructure because Hezbollah kidnapped two soldiers. All told, 1,000 Lebanese were killed and entire neighborhoods were flattened; compare that with the Israeli death toll of 43 civilians and 117 soldiers.

Even the recent flotilla massacre elicited scant moral outrage in Israel. The national media indulged in the tired victimhood narrative, peddling the awesome claim that the Israeli soldiers were defending themselves from the crew. Never mind that the soldiers boarded an aid vessel in international waters and shot people in the face; pirates with public relations, you see, are completely different from regular pirates.

And what public relations it is. As Netanyahu smugly observed to a settler audience some years ago, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.”

Yes, the “right direction”—as determined by Israeli fanatics who openly clamor for genocide and Israel-first lobbies who suppress criticism with hysterical charges of “anti-Semitism.”

And so long as Americans adhere to the fiction of Israeli victimhood, Netanyahu’s boasts will remain well-grounded.

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August 31, 2010 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | 4 Comments