Bibi backs law to ban loudspeakers at mosques (!!!)

Larry Derfner By Larry Derfner December 12, 2011 | Edit

“We don’t have to be more liberal than Europe,” says Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Believe it or not, Bibi wants to prohibit mosques from using loudspeakers to broadcast the muezzin’s daily calls to prayer – which, as everyone knows, is the identifying sound of the Middle East, where Israel reportedly is located. According to Haaretz, Netanyahu told Likud cabinet ministers on Sunday:

The same problem exists in all European countries, and they know how to deal with it… Such a ban “is legitimate in Belgium; it’s legitimate in France, why isn’t it legitimate here? We don’t need to be more liberal than Europe.” He said he’d received “numerous requests from people who are bothered by the noise from the mosques.

What do you say to this? The guy’s crazy. He thinks this is Europe. He thinks we were here, then the Muslims moved in and started making noise. I really thought he was smarter than this. He is smart, but the egocentrism of the way he looks at the world – personally and nationally – makes him stupid, makes him say and do things that people who don’t share his worldview find bewildering.

So far, it doesn’t look like this latest atrocity is going to pass the Knesset. Bibi doesn’t even have a majority for it among Likud ministers; for that reason he postponed the debate in cabinet until next Sunday. But he says he’s going to be talking about “this noise from the mosques” in the coming days. Dumbass.

These people, these ultra-nationalists. They may have high IQs (Bibi surely does) but the wildness of their beliefs just stupefies them; they can’t see what effect their words and actions have on reasonable people because they’re blinded by ideological fever. The bill’s author, Anastassia Michaeli, who is sort of the dominatrix figure of Yisrael Beitenu, sent out an e-mail complaining that the law has been unfairly nicknamed the “muezzin law,” when it’s really “an environmental law that deals with noise nuisances of all kinds, with an emphasis on houses of worship (including those of Jews and Christians).”

Any synagogues or churches use loudspeakers to call the faithful to prayer? Stupid vixen. She goes on: “I am trying to gain the support of Arab MKs…” Who, Haneen Zoabi, the one she called a “terrorist” and “traitor” and looked like she wanted to strangle? She also hopes to win the backing of the “minister of environmental affairs…” (a Likudnik, so it’s possible) “…and the NGO Man, Nature and Law,” which is Israel’s leading environmental group. God, you don’t know whether to puke or die.

I really, really don’t think this bill is going to pass. It probably won’t get to the Knesset at all – not because the Right is against it, God forbid, but because most of them, I imagine, realize that Bibi just lost it, he was tired or something and the truth slipped out, but now it’s time to bury this thing. Still, it will get publicity – when the prime minister of Israel wants to muffle the sound of the muezzin throughout the country, that’s news. So Bibi has hurt himself and his cause, and he’s made the civilized world that much more aware of what a radical, Muslim-bashing temper much of this country is in. And that’s good. This whole wave of crazy right-wing legislation is good. Let the fascists have all the rope they want.

Larry Derfner

I was a columnist and feature writer for The Jerusalem Post, as well as the correspondent in Israel for the U.S. News and World Report, for many years. I wrote feature articles for the Sunday Times of London during the second intifada, and have been writing for American Jewish publications since 1990. Politically, I would describe myself as an ultra-liberal Zionist; as journalist Bradley Burston put it, I’m “probably as far left as a centrist can be.” I was born in New York, grew up in Los Angeles and moved to Israel in 1985.