Tel-Chai Nation: Right-wing parties must avoid making themselves look like they favor religious coercion

Ron Jager writes that comments like Bezalel Smotrich's recent ones on Torah could jeopardize the right's chances for having any success in the coming election:

In today’s media generated public discourse, perception is everything. The last thing that Prime Minster Netanyahu needed ahead of the Sept 17 snap elections is the outrage of middle of the road non-religious voters over the remarks of United Right MK Smotrich this week.

In case you have been on the moon for the past two days and missed how the media relished at this unexpected media freebie to attack and politically weaken Netanyahu and the Likud party, Smotrich stated, speaking Sunday at the Jerusalem Day celebration at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, that "We want the justice portfolio, because we want to return the Torah to its foundation." On Monday, he told Reshet Bet radio in an interview, “My long-term desires are for the State of Israel to operate according to the Torah. This is how it should be. This is a Jewish state. The state of the Jewish people will return to being conducted as it was during the days of King David and King Solomon - according to Torah law.” (Of course, as he later explained, he was talking in a yeshiva, and everyone there understood his statements as not intending actual actions. He expressed the hope for the kind of Israel envisaged by Rabbi Yehuda Leib Maimon, Israel's first Minister of Religion, and others who wrote well-researched books such as The Case for Torah Civil Law in the Jewish State, but the media,and Avigdor Liberman predictably, pounced on the statement,)

Only 10 days ago we witnessed the political results of the breakaway New Right party failing to cross the threshold and enter the Knesset weakening the ability of the Likud party to form a coalition and sending the country to snap elections. If there is something that frightens away the secular middle of the road voting bloc is talk of religious coercion in the public sphere and transforming Israel into a Halakhic state, even though they have no idea what that really means.

Since the recent elections Bezalel Smotrich has become more confident in his position, showing an ill-advised disregard for the political reality that Israel is experiencing. In our era of partisan politics when new technologies spread and facilitate the laser-speed proliferation of inaccurate or out of context information, the damage can be extensive and at times even irreversible. Avigdor Leiberman, the arrogant politician solely responsible for preventing the formation of a right wing coalition by Netanyahu, didn’t lose a second running from studio to studio using the statements of Smotrich as evidence that only he and not Netanyahu can safeguard the secular rights of Israelis.

Smotrich, in one major swoop, has branded himself and his party as the party of unrepentant religious extremism and intolerance. On his climb up the political ladder he talks of being capable of uniting but is being pictured as Israel’s most uncompromisingly divisive politician. The upcoming elections may very well be about religion and the State of Modern Israel. The simmering tension in Israeli society between secular-religious-ultra orthodox will resurface and create the politically charged atmosphere that can only benefit the left and the sworn political enemies of Netanyahu and the Likud.

Based on his incredibly sloppy approach, I'd say that's why it was best Smotrich wasn't given the justice portfolio. And maybe it'd be better now if anybody who voted for the "United Right" party would vote for the Likud instead. But one thing's clear: anybody who recognizes why Smotrich's comments can be divisive and his attitude potentially dangerous electorally would do well to avoid it for the rest of the campaign until September 17. The way he went about it all was completely avoidable, and people like him are also going to have to rethink the arrogance they have a serious problem with to boot.

Labels: haredi corruption, islam, Israel, jihad, Judaism, Knesset, Moonbattery, political corruption, terrorism

“Today’s cultures are dying of apathy,
not by the swords of their enemies.”

SOURCE: How Civilizations Die
(chapter Introduction, page xiii) by David P. Goldman,
year 2011 CE, Regnery Publishing, ISBN 978-1-59698-273-4

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from: The Jew by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan:

Other faiths begin with a single individual
who claims to have a special message and
gradually gathers a following. His followers
then spread the word and gather converts,
until a new religion is born. Virtually
every major world religion follows this pattern.

The only exception to this is Judaism.

Here G*D gathered an entire people,
some three million strong, to the foot
of Mount Sinai and proclaimed His message.

Every man, woman and child heard G*D’s voice,
proclaiming the Ten Commandments, and
thus a bond was forged between G*D and Israel.

This was an event unique in the history of mankind.

SOURCE: The Aryeh Kaplan Reader
(page 165) by Mesorah Publications, 1983 CE

===================================

ONLY JUDAISM began when MILLIONS of people personally witnessed:

[1] the Ten Plagues in Egypt

[2] the splitting of the Red Sea

[3] G_D speaking at Mount Sinai

[4] 40 years of miracles in the Sinai wilderness:
the Clouds of Glory, the manna, the Well of Miriam, etc.

===================================

500 American Indian nations gave away
their land in exchange for peace.

THE RESULT: 500 American Indian nations have vanished.

===================================

Great Britain gave Adolph Hitler land
(Austria) in exchange for peace.

THE RESULT: WWII and the Holocaust.