Dear friends,
as you will be aware, 16 year old Ahed Tamimi, along with her mother Nariman and her cousin Nour are currently under arrest by the Israeli military and state for the crime of humiliating the masculinity of Israeli soldiers (see my previous post here).
In response to Ahed's defiant stance and her arrest, Zionists fueled by the Israeli media has been baying for her blood. Both are more outraged that Ahed would have the audacity to slap an occupying soldier than by the fact that her 14 year old cousin was shot in the face by the Israeli military less than a half hour before or that the Israeli military were acting illegally by attempting to enter her house.
One of the worst incidents of the hypocrisy and utter bankruptcy of the Israeli media is the call by prominent Israeli journalist, Ben Caspit who in an article for the Israeli daily Maariv wrote in regard to Ahed and Nour:
“In the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras”.
This has, unsurprisingly, been widely interpreted as incitement to rape and sexual assault of the two young women (and/or any young women who defy Israel's occupation forces). Caspit,who also writes for Al-Monitor, has since tried to back track and claim he was making no such suggestion.
Israeli writer and activist, Jonathan Ofir has been covering Caspit's comments for Mondoweiss and I have included both of his articles below.
In solidarity, Kim
*****
***
‘We should exact a price’ from Ahed Tamimi ‘in the dark,’ Israeli journalist says
Ben Caspit, from his twitter feed
The discussion amongst Israelis
became all about the humiliation suffered by heavily armed soldiers,
from a fearless 16-year old girl and her bare hands. Culture Minister
Miri Regev said:
“When I watched that, I felt humiliated, I felt crushed”. She called
the incident “damaging to the honor of the military and the state of
Israel.” She was echoing her own words from
2015, when Ahed also appeared in a viral video, wrestling a masked
Israeli soldier, who was holding her little brother in a headlock and
pressing him down on a rock, his broken arm in cast.
Then
Regev was “shocked to see the video this morning of Palestinians
hitting an IDF soldier,” adding that, “It cannot be that our soldiers
will be sent on missions with their hands tied behind their backs. It’s
simply a disgrace!….We must immediately order that a soldier under
attack be able to return fire. Period.”
There was a range of suggestions of what should happen with Ahed and the other girls. Education Minister Naftali Bennett suggested that they “spend the rest of their days in prison”.
But a prominent journalist had a somewhat more cunning suggestion:
“In the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras”,
Ben Caspit wrote in his article (Hebrew) on Tuesday.
What might this price exactly be,
considering that he is referring specifically to teenage girls? We are
left to wonder. Perhaps he wishes to leave it to the imagination of the
soldiers who would invade the home at night, ensuring that no cameras
are filming.
Ben Caspit’s suggestion is a sly
and wretched one, and it comes with the smugness of congratulating the
soldiers for their moral strength, as it were, for not having acted back
with force against the girls – on film, that is. “There is no stomach
which does not turn when witnessing this clip”, Caspit says, referring
to Zionist stomachs, that is. “I, for
example, if I were to encounter that situation, I would have long ago
been in detention until end of procedures”. In other words, Caspit is
saying he would run amok on the girls to a degree that would get him
arrested. That’s what he’s indirectly suggesting would be ‘normal’,
because he would do it…
We are again left to wonder what
it is exactly that the creep would do, especially if he thought there
were no cameras around. Caspit’s suggestion resembles that of Defense
Minister Lieberman, who also said
on Tuesday that “whoever goes wild during the day, will be arrested at
night”, adding that “everyone involved, not only the girl but also her
parents and those around them will not escape from what they deserve”.
Caspit hails the soldiers’ ‘restraint’, hardly believing they can manage it:
“The combatants stand there and demonstrate extraordinary restraint, do not respond, do not defend, do not speak.”
Caspit is actually speaking quite similarly to the Peace Now, who also hailed
the soldiers’ ‘restraint’ and their demonstration of “moral fortitude
in the face of an attempted stunt to blacken Israel’s image”. Note –
that’s the Israeli left right there.
Indeed, also for Caspit, this
‘restraint’ is worthy, not because of itself (in the dark and with no
cameras it would be a different story, remember), but because of the PR
value:
“Sometimes also restraint is power, and in the case before us, the combatants are worthy of a medal of honor, not reprimand. To keep one’s restraint in this impossible situation is far more difficult than applying force, especially when the bitter enemy in front of you is three girls who do everything to get beaten up, knowing fully well that any laying of a hand by armed combatants upon supposedly innocent girls will serve as a deadly propaganda weapon in the endless war fought for hearts on social media.”
Caspit is exalting the image of
the ‘good soldier’. Those soldiers were doing nothing – the girls were
just asking for a beating. Yet as Orly Noy writes in +972 Magazine, shattering the ‘good soldier’ myth:
“The two soldiers may have acted according to their consciences in refusing to beat Ahed Tamimi, but the army in which they serve later broke into the Tamimi home in the middle of the night to arrest Ahed, and then arrested her mother when she accompanied her daughter to the police station. In other words, regardless of their best intentions, their encounter with the Tamimis began with violence and ended with violence. From the moment they put on their uniform, their ethical sensibilities ceased to be a factor.”
The IDF was unsatisfied with this
image of ‘restraint’. It was too emasculating. The soldiers were
repeatedly being called “gays” and “trannies”. Like when Elor Azarya wrote in July 2014, near the beginning of the onslaught
on Gaza: “Bibi you transvestite what ceasefire? Penetrate their
mother!!!” So when the IDF arrested Ahed on Monday, they filmed it and
posted it publicly with official logo (a highly irregular practice in
such cases) – to show everyone that the IDF is masculine, as it were.
The IDF can arrest 16-year-old girls if it wants to, and we’ll film it
ourselves, just watch us…
But this is not exactly what Ben Caspit had in mind. His suggestions were a bit more insidious, and not for filming.
Caspit’s remarks have been
noticed in mainstream media, but they have not received the seriousness
they deserve. These are not just words. It’s like when last year, an
Israeli former chief educator suggested
in a Sheldon Adelson paper that Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot
Wallström might get the ‘Bernadotte treatment’ (assassination), for
daring to suggest that Israel might be applying a policy of
extrajudicial assassinations. The author, Zvi Zameret, later said that
he didn’t actually suggest her assassination. Just like Caspit was not
actually saying Ahed Tamimi should be beaten or raped. The details of
the crime can be left to the wild imagination of those perpetrating it,
“in the dark, without witnesses and cameras”.
P.S. Ofer Neiman is calling on al-Monitor
to stop publishing Caspit’s work. “He can’t have it both ways– writing
for a liberal peace-oriented outlet and inciting rape/murder/violence.”****
Israeli journalist who called for unspeakable acts against Ahed Tamimi tries, and fails, to backpedal
Jonathan Ofir on
Prominent Israeli journalist Ben Caspit caused international furor last week, when he wrote in his Maariv
article that “in the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some
other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras”.
Caspit has certainly felt the heat in response to
his insidious suggestions, and probably began fearing not only for his
reputation, but possibly for his job, which besides Maariv also includes the respected Al-Monitor.
Israeli activist Ofer Neiman tweeted: “He can’t have it both ways–
writing for a liberal peace-oriented outlet and inciting
rape/murder/violence.”
Caspit’s article was in Hebrew, but now he is trying to backpedal and ‘clarify’ in English – in a Jerusalem Post article from yesterday.
Caspit titles his piece “Fighting a shaming campaign
with the truth”, framing himself as a victim who has simply been
misunderstood. He describes his ‘ordeal’:
“Within hours you discover that you’ve turned into Public Enemy No. 1, a modern day pariah; a man who calls for the rape of young girls and destruction of families; a contemporary Nazi. A rare combination of circumstances, a phrase taken out of context, an inaccurate translation and a great deal of evil intention have planted in your keyboard things you never said, and in your brain, things you never thought. All that is left it to chase after the eternal wind in the cyber willows.”
I am proud to say I am one of those who have publicly and critically referred to his first article,
though not the first. The critical and most egregious sentence
mentioned above, had appeared in mainstream media a day later – for
example AP and CBS.
The translation was accurate and furthermore, in my article, I provided
a greater context than was available otherwise, precisely in order to
relate to Caspit’s greater message of incitement, and how that phrase
played into it.
The other quote, which Caspit does not refer to at all in his ‘clarification’, is this, as I had written:
“There is no stomach which does not turn when witnessing this clip”, Caspit says, referring to Zionist stomachs, that is. “I, for example, if I were to encounter that situation, I would have long ago been in detention until end of procedures”. In other words, Caspit is saying he would run amok on the girls to a degree that would get him arrested. That’s what he’s indirectly suggesting would be ‘normal’, because he would do it…
You see, Caspit’s unspecified suggestion for a
“price” to be “exacted”, is conditioned by his incitement mentioned
here. We don’t know the details of the actions which Caspit imagines
would get him arrested. And do we even want to know them? If Caspit
suggests he would do those unspeakable actions in the daytime, even if
there were cameras filming – what are we to think of the things he, or
the others influenced by his suggestions, might do in the dark?
Caspit seeks to portray himself as a ‘man of peace’,
who couldn’t possibly suggest that such insidious things be done to
Palestinian girls:
“No one bothers to ask him/herself whether or not you’ve devoted your entire career to the peace cause, supported and continue to support the peace agreements and proposals, support the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, see the settlements an enterprise that has caused more harm than good and is considered in Netanyahu’s office as one of the right’s greatest media enemies”, he bemoans.
In other words, Caspit is trying to point out that
all these “leftist” points should count, and that if they were counted,
they would ostensibly outweigh any ‘misunderstanding’ of his text. Yet
as I have pointed out earlier this month, an Israeli ‘leftist’ general,
interviewed extensively on the same Maariv, was calling
for ‘tearing the Palestinians apart’ and ‘tossing them across the
Jordan’. Being an Israeli leftist proves nothing of the kind that Caspit
seeks to prove.
Caspit reduces the whole filmed episode of the soldiers occupying the Tamimi lawn to a “meeting”:
“What’s this all about?”, he asks. “A meeting between two IDF soldiers and the Tamimi family from the village of Nabi Saleh that was leaked to thee Israeli media last Monday”, he answers himself.
One is almost persuaded to think that the Tamimis
sat at their kitchen table with two IDF soldiers, perhaps discussing
politics and daily trivia. But no, this was not it at all. As Ahed’s
father, Bassem, wrote in his excellent piece in Newsweek two days ago,
“Less than half an hour earlier, a soldier shot Ahed’s 14-year-old cousin in the face at close distance with a rubber coated steel bullet, causing severe injuries and leaving him in a coma. Then, two soldiers had jumped the wall of our backyard and forced their way on to our property when Ahed confronted them in an effort to make them leave.”
For Caspit, the video of Ahed slapping the soldier
was infuriating: “The video made every Israeli’s blood boil, regardless
of his/her political inclinations”, he writes. But this is not true. I
am an Israeli, and it was not the video itself that caused my blood to
boil. Rather, it was the madness and incitement sweeping across Israeli
society, leadership and media – including, in particular, Caspit’s vile
incitement.
Caspit is arguably more dangerous than the rightists
who regularly bark racist statements against Palestinians (like for
example lawmaker Oren Hazan, Likud, who yesterday got on an ICRC bus of
Palestinian family relatives from Gaza traveling to an Israeli prison, calling
their children “dogs”). It’s precisely because Caspit wears the cloak
of a respectable, leftist journalist, that such suggestions coming from
him can carry weight also for those ‘peaceniks’ (whose blood nonetheless
boils when 16-year-old girls provoke them…)
Caspit tries to argue that actually, he wasn’t
inciting at all, quite the opposite, as it were. He claims that the
essence of his article was hailing ‘restraint’:
‘In the article itself, I praised the IDF soldiers, for their “superhuman restraint” against Palestinian provocation’, he writes.
There is of course no provocation whatsoever in all
this, from the soldiers, in Caspit’s rendering (let us also put aside
the seldom mentioned slap from the Israeli soldier which hit Ahed 5
seconds before she slapped him). Anyway, in Caspit’s original Maariv article, he wasn’t actually hailing their restraint for itself, but rather for its PR value:
“Sometimes also restraint is power, and in the case before us, the combatants are worthy of a medal of honor, not reprimand. To keep one’s restraint in this impossible situation is far more difficult than applying force, especially when the bitter enemy in front of you is three girls who do everything to get beaten up, knowing fully well that any laying of a hand by armed combatants upon supposedly innocent girls will serve as a deadly propaganda weapon in the endless war fought for hearts on social media”, he wrote last week (as I had also quoted in my earlier piece).
Caspit is bewildered as to how people (of the “social media masses”) could possibly have misunderstood him so badly:
“Where, then, did the social media masses find the story, according to which I had proposed that the IDF should rape Ahed Tamimi under the cover of darkness? Where did the Satanic plan – accredited to me – to make Palestinian families disappear or to carry terrible crimes on them in the dark come from?”, he asks.
Well, I for one did not say that Caspit necessarily
suggested that the girls would be raped. But his suggestion, with its
insidious language (paired with the above mentioned additional
incitement), certainly left a huge open space for creeps and their wild
imagination. On this I wrote:
These are not just words. It’s like when last year, an Israeli former chief educator suggested in a Sheldon Adelson paper that Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström might get the ‘Bernadotte treatment’ (assassination), for daring to suggest that Israel might be applying a policy of extrajudicial assassinations. The author, Zvi Zameret, later said that he didn’t actually suggest her assassination. Just like Caspit was not actually saying Ahed Tamimi should be beaten or raped. The details of the crime can be left to the wild imagination of those perpetrating it, “in the dark, without witnesses and cameras”.
Caspit suggests that all this “misunderstanding” came exclusively from non-Israelis:
“No one in Israel understood my article in this light because it was read in the right context – regarding the argument over the timing of Ahed Tamimi’s arrest”, he writes.
Whoa. I’m an Israeli. I understood it “in this light” (or rather darkness). Ofer Neiman, who by the way recently started a petition to hold Caspit to Press Council discipline, has certainly understood it “in this light”. Shani Litman asks today in Haaretz (Hebrew):
“Did the hand of Ben Caspit tremble when he wrote these lines? In polished, clerk-like language, and without saying anything explicitly, the prominent journalist Ben Caspit managed to write a sentence which in its entirety is a threat of chilling violence against the young Tamimi women.”
Litman additionally quotes Caspit who wrote that “the IDF has sufficient capabilities, creativity and means to create such inputs, without paying an exorbitant public price”, and Litman then asks:
“Did the editor hesitate when they read this sentence, the thickness of the words “girls”, “in the dark, without witness and cameras” and “creativity”, and feel totally comfortable with it? How is it possible that no one stopped for a moment to digest these words, that no one’s stomach turned?”, Litman writes (echoing Caspit who wrote that “there is no stomach which does not turn when witnessing this clip”).
These are Israeli people, folks. We’re not that
stupid. And Caspit, in his desperate attempt to backpedal, is providing
an even more pathetic article, which suggests that its just the goyim
who didn’t understand Israeli jargon. So take it from us, the ‘other’
Israelis – you didn’t really misunderstand him. He is now trying to
convince us that his whole suggestion was just about timing – arrest
them in the night, rather than in the day, as it were (and remember, no
cameras, and be creative). Nothing to look at folks, move quietly on.
No, there’s a lot to look at here, and Caspit should
be doing a major soul-searching, rather than investing time in such
tiring self-apologia.
Towards the end of his Jerusalem Post article, Caspit shows his ‘reasonable’ and ‘merciful’ face concerning Ahed Tamimi:
“As this article is being written, it has been announced that Ahad Tamimi’s custody has been extended by four days. Just as I had originally thought that it was best to arrest her quietly, I now believe that it is unnecessary to keep her for so long in custody.”
So now Caspit is complaining that Ahed is being
treated too harshly! Crocodile tears? The system is simply being
‘creative’ – isn’t that what Caspit was suggesting? Ahed Tamimi has been
carried around
to various prison facilities, put in cold cells, and not even allowed a
change of clothes at least in her first 6 days of detention.
Israeli-Palestinian lawmaker Ahmad Tibi tweeted yesterday (Hebrew):
‘Ahed Tamimi aged 16 is detained for 6 days and despite the decision of the court President to provide her clothes, this has not been done. “The system” is exacting revenge’.
That ‘revenge’ is the ‘price’ that the system is now
‘exacting’ upon Ahed Tamimi and her family. It is happening in the
darkness of cold cells, where there are no cameras or witnesses. And Ben
Caspit has been a part of the incitement leading to all this.
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