A message to those wishing leftist Israelis would move to Syria

As police brutality against leftist demonstrators intensifies, right-wingers call on them to “go to Syria.” Why don’t the right-wingers emigrate instead?

Over the weekend, Israeli police publicly displayed for the first time a favorite method of torture among cops: the use of electric shocks against demonstrators. As can be seen in this clip (from 1:35 onwards), the demonstrator are sitting on the ground and refraining from violence against the cops, and yet a cops shocks one of them anyway. Stun guns and shocks are intended to replace lethal weapons in order to allow police to subdue violent people without causing them serious harm. However, many policemen use them as a tool of punishment – which is to say torture – against people who piss them off.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgB527Z2j1s&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Right-wingers commonly call upon Israeli leftists to “go to Syria.” That’s code for, “See, see what a lovely democracy we have here. Would the Syrian regime allow you anything like it? You’d be shot like dogs. So please, pretend we’re in Syria, shut your mouths as if you were there, thank us kindly for not shooting you, and let us continue pretending Israel is a democracy.”

So no, we’re not going to Syria. You wanna live in Syria, you go there. There are plenty of dictatorships in the Middle East. Our goal – we’ll probably fail, but it’s our patriotic duty to try – is to prevent Israel from becoming another Syria. If you wish to integrate into the rest of the Middle East, there’s probably nothing we can do to prevent it. But, please, stop pretending it’s a democracy. A free country does not torture civilians or shoot at them. Take your pick: It’s either Syria or democracy. You want the latter? You’ll have to wean yourself off of longing for a strongman, preferably mustachioed, who would torture, kidnap or simply liquidate the people you don’t like, on behalf of the motherland. So, gentlemen, you’re liable to like the Syrian regime much more than we would. Why don’t you emigrate instead?

Those who believe that there is something special about Jews might mumble at this point something about it being incomprehensible how people who went such dark periods ™ can do this to their own. Those who know that Jews are just like any other people, just much more traumatized, aren’t at all astonished to see human beings acting human.

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