Israel Responds to Time

Bibi's senior advisor Ron Dermer responds to Time Magazine's latest scurrilous attack on Israel. Time condemned Israel's reasonable proposed measures against those trying to undermine the Jewish state from within. However, contrary to Ron Dermer's claim, this sort of trash is precisely worthy of the standards of Time, which has no standards at all. Is it any wonder that the lamestream media's circulation and ratings are going down the toilet.

Time:

A Response from the Office of Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu
By Ron Dermer, Senior Advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2011




Dear Mr. Stengel,

I wanted to bring to your attention a recent article in Time entitled "Israel's Rightward Lurch Scares Some Conservatives." I hope that you will agree that the article's obvious bias and numerous distortions are not worthy of the standards of your prestigious magazine.

Israel is depicted in the article as essentially sliding towards fascism. Your correspondent refers to Israel's Shin Bet (the equivalent of the FBI) as a "secret police," claims that the Israeli government "increasingly equates dissent with disloyalty," and accuses the Prime Minister of "taking a page from neighboring authoritarian states."

The evidence offered for these outrageous allegations includes a preliminary vote in our parliament that would require naturalized citizens to make a pledge of allegiance, a proposal to strip citizenship from Israelis convicted of espionage and terrorism, a motion to investigate foreign government funding of local NGOs, calls on Jews to not rent property to Arabs, and demonstrations demanding prohibitions of Arab boys from dating Jewish girls.

But your correspondent did not find it necessary to inform your readers of a few facts.

Oaths of allegiance are commonplace in most democratic countries, including the United States. Naturalized citizens in America swear an oath to its Constitution and to defend the country against "all enemies, foreign and domestic." Israel's proposed pledge would require naturalized citizens to swear an oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, words taken directly from our Declaration of Independence.

Moreover, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy are just some of the many countries where citizenship can be stripped for various infractions that are defined as undermining "national interests." Are these European countries not democratic?

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