A Small Country with a Moustache: Why Amnon Dankner Sacked his Satire Columnist?
The following piece was published last week in Israeli daily Ma'ariv's chain of local magazines. Within 48 hours, Ma'ariv's editor in chief fired its author, columnist Yehuda Nuriel. The item, part of Nuriel's weekly column Midbar Yehuda (The Yehuda Desert), was titled "A brave and moving response to the refusenik pilots. A must read..."
Yehuda Nuriel 10 Oct. 2003
Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.
What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence of our people, the sustenance of our children and the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator. The world has no reason for fighting in our defense, and as a matter of principle God does not make cowardly nations free.
Our nation wants peace because of its fundamental convictions. We want peace also owing to the realization of the simple primitive fact that no war would be likely essentially to alter the distress in our region. The principal effect of every war is to destroy the flower of a nation. We need peace and desires peace!
The war against our enemies cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and will have to be
Related:
* The original Hebrew Version
<http://www.kedma.co.il/opinion/opinionfile/NurielYeoda121003.htm>
(from Kedma, Ma'ariv has removed the article from its own archive)
* Forum discussion
<http://e.walla.co.il/ts.cgi?tsscript=item.talkback&id=450214&max=0&path=214>
on Walla (also in Hebrew)
* Ma'ariv <http://images.maariv.co.il/> daily newspaper
* Journalists' Weakness
<http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=350207&sw=%F0%E5%F8%E9%E0%EC>,
from Haaretz (Hebrew only)conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. Man has become great through struggle. Whatever goal, man has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality. If you do not fight, life will never be won. The man who has no sense of history is like a man who has no ears or eyes. It must be thoroughly understood that the lost land will never be won back by solemn appeals to God, nor by hopes in any United Nations, but only by the force of arms.
A single blow must destroy the enemy, without regard of losses. A gigantic all-destroying blow. Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong.
There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Endeavor, Honesty, Order, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Sacrifice, and love of the Homeland. Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction. One of the worst symptoms of decay was the increasing cowardice in the face of responsibility, as well as the resultant self-hatred in all things.
In actual fact the pacifistic-humane idea is perfectly all right perhaps when one law rules the world. Therefore, first struggle and then perhaps pacifism. Pacifism as the idea of the State, international law instead of power - all are means to unman the people. They hold India up to us as a model and what is called 'passive resistance.' True, they want to make an India of us, a folk of dreams which turns away its face from realities, in order that they can oppress it for all eternity.
What food did our press dish out to the people before the violent events? Was it not the worst poison that can even be imagined? Wasn't the worst kind of pacifism injected into the heart of our people at a time when the rest of the world was preparing to throttle us, slowly but surely? Even in peacetime didn't the press inspire the minds of the people with doubt in the right of their own state? Was it not the press which knew how to make the absurdity of 'democracy?'
A concerted and all-embracing attack must be made on unemployment in order that the working class may be saved from ruin. Within four years unemployment must be finally overcome. At the same time the conditions necessary for a revival in trade and commerce are provided. Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea.
The required message does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way. This is the very first condition which has to be fulfilled in every kind of public relations: a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with. The best means of defense is attack.
Ours is not a warlike nation. It is a soldierly one, which means it does not want a war, but does not fear it. It loves peace but also loves its honor and freedom. We will never allow anyone to divide this people once more into camps, each fighting the other. The world will not help, the people must help themselves. Its own strength is the source of life. That strength the Almighty has given us to use; that in it and through it, we may wage the battle of our life. May God Almighty give our work His blessing, strengthen our purpose, and endow us with wisdom and the trust of our people. Lord God, let us never hesitate or play the coward.
If we are forced to send the flowers of the nation into the hell of war without the smallest fear, then surely we have the right to remove millions of another race that breeds like vermin. For we are fighting not for ourselves but for the whole country.
A. Schicklgruber*
*A. Schicklgruber was Adolf Hitler's original name. Ma'ariv's editors were ignorant of this fact, and also failed to notice that the entire article is composed of quotes from Mein Kampf, as well as other writings and speeches by Hitler. Learning of the "trick" nested in this article, Ma'ariv's editor-in-chief, Amnon Dankner, sacked Nuriel, and gave the following explanation: "This is an extremely repulsive satire, which means that anyone who opposes Sarbanut (Conscientious Objection) is Hitler, quasi-Hitler, or about to become Hitler. In my view, as an editor of a Jewish newspaper in Israel, it is a horrible act which can not be forgiven, and can not be protected by the right for a free speech."
