An American translation of Netanyahu’s racist GOTV speech | Mondoweiss |
The Republican leadership is in danger.
Black voters are coming out in droves to the polls
Left wing organizations are busing them out.Get out to vote, bring your friends and family,
vote Republican in order to close the gap
between us and the Democrats.With your help and the help of God,
We will build a nationalist government
that will protect the United States of America.At the end Halper asks “Can you imagine if an American politician said that?” There’s been an excess of commentary about the racist nature of the speech on social media with many wondering how it would fly in this country. Of course all hell would break out in the press if during a U.S. presidential campaign one of the leading candidates warned blacks, or Jews, were flooding to the polls funded by foreign interests and we should all go out and vote to counter them.
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The issue here is that Netanyahu did exactly this in 2015, and in a place like Israel it works. Why is that? And what does it say about the supposed shared values between Israel and the United States?
An Israeli has just sent me some very compelling evidence I hadn’t yet seen about Bibi’s election day shenanigans. In the sturm und drang over his anti-“Arab” tirade, another important Bibi-meme has gotten lost. In my election post, I translated the PM’s infamous video exhorting Jews to vote because the Arab masses were storming the election booths. Bibi also claimed in the video that “foreign governments” were funding his defeat. This was clearly a reference to V15, the Zionist Camp campaign team consisting of former Obama campaign operatives.
But until now I didn’t realize that the Likud explicitly blamed “American money” for getting all those “angry Arabs” to the polls. “American” is code for “Obama.” Linking Obama to the Arab vote is itself racist since it links a Black American president to Israeli-Palestinians (Obama=Arab) in the minds of Israeli Jews. Yes, Bibi Netanyahu played the race card not just in an Israeli election, but in the American political arena as well.
