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=> In a Dance Remix of Netanyahu’s Speech, Two Words Echo: ‘Iran — Haman

In a Dance Remix of Netanyahu’s Speech, Two Words Echo: ‘Iran — Haman
Posted by Marcello (Guest) - Sunday, March 8 2015, 17:59:56 (UTC)
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Website: http://www.us.mg1.mail.yahoo.com/dc/launch?.gx=1&.rand
Website title: Document Has Moved

--- I guess Israelis have forgotten about Kourosh-e-Kabir (Cyrus the Great) as the "savior" of their ancestors from the "evil" Babylon, where they were cultured, since Babylon was the Berlin of the 1920's; the Paris of the 1930s; the New York of the 1940s-'50s... NO wonder only a handful went back to rebuild the Temple. The Israelis and their P.M. either are ignorant, or refuse to know that an Iranian diplomat saved a number of Jews during the Second World War: http://newsworthiness/2015/02/10/how-the-schindler-of-iran-saved-hundreds-of-persian-jews/ ... . Aside from these few stories, there are those of Arab Palestinians and other Muslims who were not genocidal against their Jewish brothers and sisters... One should read about the Lavon Affair (a disgrace). So, what is now happening is this: In so many speeches which shape the consciousness of the Israeli masses are two terms: Amalek: Meaning Arab Palestinian genocide; and now since the Netanyahu speech: Haman: Meaning Persian genocide. "The enemies of Israel must be wiped out!"

--- (Meanwhile)There are somewhere around 10-20 thousands Jews still living in, and are not leaving, Iran, as they immediately turned down money's offered them by the state of Israel, to move to the "Jewish State".


In a Dance Remix of Netanyahu’s Speech, Two Words Echo: ‘Iran — Haman
MARCH 6, 2015
Open Source
By ROBERT MACKEY
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/07/world/middleeast/in-a-dance-remix-of-netanyahus-speech-two-words-echo-iran-haman.html?referrer&_r=0


As the debate continues over this week’s address to Congress by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, an Israeli video blogger’s dance remix of the speech seems to suggest that it can be boiled down to two words: “Iran — Haman.”

Those words, clipped together and set to a techno beat by the video producer Noy Alooshe, are drawn from a passage of Mr. Netanyahu’s speech on Tuesday in which he said the current aims of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, echoed those of “a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jewish people some 2,500 years ago,” at least according to a legend from Hebrew scripture passed down in the Book of Esther.



Watch short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Txrcpl49GQ


In Mr. Netanyahu’s condensed version of the tale recounted every year on the Jewish holiday of Purim, he told Congress that the plot was foiled when “a courageous Jewish woman, Queen Esther, exposed the plot and gained for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies.”

This is not the first time Mr. Netanyahu has tried to persuade officials in Washington to take that same scripture into account when formulating policy. During a visit to the White House in 2012, the prime minister handed a copy of the Book of Esther to President Obama as “background reading” on Iran. “Then too, they wanted to wipe us out,” Mr. Netanyahu explained.

This year, however, his interpretation of the story was challenged by Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Asked by NBC News this week to respond to Mr. Netanyahu’s contention that Iranians should be placed, with the Nazis, among the “genocidal enemies” of the Jewish people, Mr. Zarif began by pointing out that the Israeli leader had left out a key detail of the story.

“Well, it is unfortunate that Mr. Netanyahu now totally distorts realities of today,” Mr. Zarif told Anne Curry of NBC News. “He even distorts his own scripture. If you read the Book of Esther, you will see that it was the Iranian king who saved the Jews.”


In his telling to Congress, Mr. Netanyahu did indeed leave out a central detail from the story, failing to mention that it was Queen Esther’s husband, King Ahasuerus of Persia, who acquiesced to her plea to spare her people and had the plotters put to death.

According to Rabbi Shai Held, the chair in Jewish Thought at the Mechon Hadar center for Torah study in New York, Mr. Zarif’s objection is well founded, if somewhat “cynical.”

By leaving out that the Persian viceroy’s plot against the Jews was blocked by the Persian king to whom Queen Esther was married, Mr. Netanyahu was indeed guilty of “shaping the narrative to his own rhetorical needs,” Rabbi Held said in an interview. But, he pointed out, Mr. Zarif himself had left out another part of the story: that the same Persian king had initially agreed to the plot, before finding out that his wife was Jewish and reversing himself.

“When you bring scripture into politics, you lose nuance,” Rabbi Held observed.

Mr. Netanyahu’s use of the tale was also criticized by some American and Israeli Jews who noted that his description of Queen Esther gaining “for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies” elided the bloody end of the story.

Naomi Dann, an American activist with Jewish Voice for Peace, wrote in The Huffington Post that Mr. Netanyahu had “avoided mentioning what happens at the end of the story, a horrible massacre.”

After the Jews are saved from impending elimination by Esther’s courage and King Ahasuerus’ mercy, Esther and her Uncle Mordechai, Jews who have attained power, decree that the Jews may preemptively kill those who they think pose a threat — 75,000 enemies of the Jewish people are killed. By invoking this story while leaving out the grisly ending, Netanyahu implied that Jewish security and survival was worth the cost of the loss of other people’s lives.

Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, a professor of comparative literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began by noting that “although Netanyahu implies otherwise, the Book of Esther is a fantasy – not recounting any historical event.”

Ms. Ezrahi also drew attention to the end of the story, in which Esther, “having thwarted Haman’s evil plot, is not satisfied with the public hangings of her arch-enemy and his 10 sons – but is granted permission to preemptively slaughter all who have received the order to kill the Jews.”

By invoking Esther, Ms. Ezrahi argued, Mr. Netanyahu seemed to be subtly suggesting, on the eve of the Purim holiday which celebrates her deeds, that a pre-emptive war against Iran would be justified.

The text he cites is the chronicle of how a people, shocked into seeking to thwart the evil decree, wind up using the excuse of preemption to justify vengeful, rampaging violence. (It is a universal story in this sense, not just a Jewish one: what genocidal act is not justified as retribution for some great or imagined grievance?) The historic persecution of the Jewish people has been real enough. But Jewish suffering has also engendered a fantasy of demon-enemies, of Jewish attacks as nothing but deterrence.

In a comment posted on Facebook, Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, suggested that there was a very different way of reading the Book of Esther. Contesting what he called the “gaudy Zionist spin on the story, of which you heard a piece the day before yesterday from Netanyahu in the U.S. Congress, this magnificent Biblical story is actually the evidence of the ancient roots of Iranian Jews and their long and proud history in their homeland — to whom and other Jewish friends I wish a happy and healthy Purim!”



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