The would-be autocrats of the world seem to have found a champion in Donald Trump.
As reported by Ishaan Tharoor for the Washington Post, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s seemingly irremovable Prime Minister is not taking kindly to the fact that a coalition of his erstwhile allies and opponents have collectively arranged to give him the boot, so to speak.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to lose his job in the coming days. A coalition of adversaries and former allies is hoping Israel’s parliament will sign off on its new government within the next week that would boot the long-ruling prime minister out of office. But after looming over his nation’s political scene for a quarter-century, Netanyahu is not going without a fight.
No, he’s not. In fact he’s channeling the words of his equally (if not more corrupt) BFF, Donald Trump, in a last-ditch effort to retain power.
As Tharoor, the Post’s Today’s WorldView columnist, observes:
In language redolent of his close friend, former U.S. president Donald Trump, Netanyahu accused his opponents of being the architects of “the fraud of a century” and cast himself as the victim of plots by Israel’s “deep state.” This conspicuous demagoguery has suffused Netanyahu’s political rhetoric in recent years, as he sought to evade corruption charges while plunging the country into a seemingly interminable spiral of four elections in two years...[.]
If it weren’t so serious this kind of tiresome, copycat rhetoric would be embarrassing. But the fact that it now seems to be the go-to avenue for all autocrats faced with public rejection of their corruption should give us all some perspective on how damaging the placement of someone like Donald Trump at the pinnacle of power in the community of nations really was.
The head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, issued a rare warning about “extremely violent and inciting discourse” aimed at lawmakers opposed to Netanyahu. A Shin Bet official told Vice News that the agency, which is usually far more focused on the threats facing Israel from the Palestinian territories, is alarmed by the upheavals within the Israeli right. “We are seeing threats and schisms within radical groups that need to be closely monitored because of fears extremists could act violently,” the official said.
Believe me, Shin Bet, the majority of voting Americans sympathize with your country’s plight. Tharoor quotes Alon Pinkas of Haaretz:
“With his brother-in-arms Trump out of power, consumed by incoherent ranting and mumbling in Mar-a-Lago about how the election was stolen from him by Democrats and the media, Netanyahu has one last page to copy from Trump’s playbook: creating his own ‘January 6,’ ” Alon Pinkas wrote in the left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz.
Pinkas notes that as a result of Netanyahu’s rhetoric, “judges, prosecutors and now also the leaders of the opposition” are now living under constant threat against their lives“ from the (soon to be former) Prime Minister’s “cultlike supporters.”
Hopefully Israel will take another lesson away from our country’s unfortunate experience: The only real way to get rid of these abominable people is to put them behind bars for a long, long time.
Tharoor cites the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser who succinctly put it: