HOWARD EPSTEIN: SEASONAL GREETINGS AND JEWISH-ISRAELI ANGST
As 2016 draws to a close, we look back with anxiety, as this was the year when:-
- Bibi Netanyahu, with great perspicacity, noticed that the Israeli media was left-wing – yet failed to notice his conflict of interest in acting as Minister of Communications.
- We discovered that our submarines are made by a company in which the majority shareholders are those who tried to liquidate us, while the minority shareholders are those (the Iranians) who still aspire to do so.
- The PM’s cousin, who is an absolutely hot-shot Israeli lawyer, who negotiates on our behalf with this company, apparently made no such discovery.
- President Assad, on presiding over mass slaughter in his second city, Aleppo, spoke of his aspirations for the Syrian nation – yet failed to notice it no longer existed.
- Abu Mazen agreed he had over extended period of his stay in the Mukataa by eight years, so – at only 811/2 years of age, and 11 years into his four year term – so did the decent thing, and got himself re-elected (on November 29) for a further four years – perhaps the crowning achievement of his premiership so far.
- President Obama threatened to get even with President Putin for extravagantly hacking Democratic Party websites – some four months after he first drew attention to it, thereby giving rise to speculation that if Hillary Clinton had been elected president he would have tolerated it.
- J-Street protested the nomination of David Friedman as US ambassador to Israel – thus almost certainly clinching for him the approval of an overwhelmingly Republican Congress.
- Yet more luminaries in upper echelons of the Israeli military and public life were accused of serial sexual harassment or worse – causing us to hope for better powers of observation on their part of enemy action than of Israeli social mores (not to mention the criminal law).
- We made up with the Turkish President, Erdoghan, whose subsequent anti-Semitic pronouncements suggest he didn’t make up with us.
- The French, who should have understood, from several massacres dans la Patrie, the inevitable outcome of financing terrorism (by EU funding of the Palestinians), showed no sign of having done so.
- The British PM made a pro-Israel speech that we could not have written better ourselves, but when, just a few days later, a leading British politician (Michael Gove) condemned anti-Semitism in The Times (of London), it generates hundreds of vitriolic anti-Semitic responses in 24 hours, thus suggesting that anti-semisitism is alive and well in the UK.
- Hill said to Bill, “What do think? A woman across the desk in the Oval Office,” and Bill said the thought hadn’t crossed his mind in years.
And:-
- We look forward to a French presidential election in 2017 in which the formerly deeply-anti-Semitic Marine Le Pen will slug it out with the casually anti-Semitic Francois Fillon.
- … and to a German election for Chancellor, with the thoroughly-decent Angela Merkel’s supremacy under threat from right-wing elements (not called Nationalsozialists), because of her somewhat tardy discovery that not all the one million plus immigrants she invited into Germany are Syrian dentists.
More next week.
© Howard Epstein – December 2016
