Where men are women and women are men.

By Ted Belman

Gil Ronen outdid himself in his latest article on NewsRealBlog, Has Israel Been Emasculated By Pacifist Feminist Bullies?, which he starts as follows,

Two opposing revolutionary streams are locked in a death struggle, and nowhere is this struggle more palpable than in the Jewish State. One stream is intrinsically Jewish: it was created by Jews, for Jews, and is about Jews. Its relationship with Jewish religion can be described as both close and troubled. The other stream opposes Jewish religion and nationalism – and arguably, all religion and nationalism – but boasts an inordinately large proportion of Jews among its founders, leaders and activists.

What interested me in the article was his conclusion of its impact on Israel’s fighting spirit.

Shortly after the gender feminist pacifist movement came to prominence in Israel, in the 1980s, the country seemed to lose its essential self-confidence and stray from its trademark military ethos of toughness. It ceased thinking of its soldiers as men and adopted a public discourse that referred to them as “children.” The successful use of this discourse by the chattering classes made it easier to tempt Israel’s leadership into embarking on a series of disastrous, morally bankrupt and humiliating security-related decisions, compromising Israel’s ability to maintain its deterrent posture in the Middle East.

The dynamic I am talking about is a very Israeli one, and it packs extra punch in the case of the Jewish state, because it also seems to tap into a more ancient eastern-European Jewish character problem. I am talking about the excessive and unhealthy power of the Jewish mother figure and the complementary figure of the emasculated Jewish man-boy. This matter is too embarrassing to be studied by academics, but it is an open Jewish secret, having been floated and ridiculed in books like Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, in Woody Allen films, in quite a few sitcoms over the years, and lately on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. It is, perhaps, the more intimate aspect of the problem that Nordau was addressing politically, in that speech in Basel.

To get a preliminary glimpse of what I am talking about, take a look at this recently made cartoon (with English subtitles) mocking the Israeli Left’s behavior in the matter of abducted soldier Gilad Shalit. Pay extra attention to the overbearing pacifist woman who appears at 1:33.

The current threats to Israel appear to be the result, in no small part, of the power attained within Israel by the gender feminist pacifist establishment, which has smashed the vital Israeli ethos of pride and deliberately sapped the Israeli fighting spirit.

The Israeli psyche, and large swaths of Israel’s government, academia and press, are currently under gender feminist pacifist occupation. Everything that the original Zionists grew up on and believed in, the gender feminist pacifists despise and undercut. The image of the fighting man is vilified. Men are demonized for being men, and maleness is criminalized. Through a series of legislative changes that were rammed through the Knesset unopposed in the 1990s and 2000s, rape and lesser sexual crimes have been redefined in ways that probably make Israel’s brand of gender feminist rule the most draconian in the world. At the same time, gender feminists have mounted a decades-long insidious effort to change the definition and perception of the term ‘violence,’ gradually blurring and widening it to include hybrids such as “verbal violence,” “emotional violence,” “economic violence,” and even “litigious violence” – but simultaneously narrowing its use only to cases in which the alleged perpetrator is a man and the victim a woman.

While being shackled by gender feminist legislators and judges, Israel’s men – the soldiers and officers of the IDF, the heroes of yesteryear – have grown used to being routinely and rudely henpecked and mocked by gender feminist journalists, academicians and politicians. In the worldview peddled by these women, male pride – the root force behind national-military fighting spirit – is condemned as primitive; normal male sexuality is perceived as borderline criminal at best, and virtually all male assertiveness vis-a-vis women is framed as a form of violence. While being expected to fight for his country at serious risk to his life at moments’ notice, from young adulthood until middle age, the Israeli man is also trained from birth to become a non-aggressive “new man” or risk facing the full force of the gender feminist enforcement machine.

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