August 11, 2016, Forward http://forward.com (US)
Yoav Eliasi, the Israeli rapper known as “The
Shadow,” has suggested on his Facebook page that Israel should castrate dead
Palestinian attackers in order to deter Muslim “martyrs” who believe they will
meet 72 virgins in heaven. He also said that medical teams responding to terror
attacks should “cut out the organs” of dead Palestinians for transplant in
Jewish bodies.
For anyone familiar with Israel’s notoriously
extreme “talkback” culture — in which online comments sections spiral into
hateful discourse — Eliasi’s comments might seem
par for the vicious course.
But with one of Israel’s most popular Facebook pages with almost a quarter
million followers, Eliasi has a platform like no other in Israel (the country’s
population is just 8 million). Now, Knesset Member and notorious party boy Oren
Hazan is seeking to capitalize on Eliasi’s popularity by signing him up to be a
member of his ruling Likud party.
“The public is fed up with the fawning,
cowardly leftist dialogue,” Hazan said, according to media reports. “Not for
nothing does Yoav have a quarter of a million followers on social media
networks.”
Eliasi responded by saying he wanted to “throw
dollars at every word” of Hazan’s Knesset speeches, vowing to recruit a “Likud
Guard” from his followers, known as “The Shadow’s Lions.”
Eliasi’s new membership in Likud prompted a
reaction from Likud’s more moderate wing, as Tzachi Hanegbi, a minister in
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, reportedly requested Eliasi be
disqualified from joining the party with Likud party director Gadi Arieli.
Born in Safed in northern Israel and raised in
Tel Aviv, Eliasi began his rap career in 1990s. After serving in the army,
Eliasi began performing with childhood friend Kobi Shimoni, also known as
“Subliminal.” The Israeli paper Haaretz described the group’s music
as “unapologetically right-wing Zionist, hyper-nationalistic, populist and very
angry.” The music spoke to an Israeli public fed up by the failed Oslo peace
process and the raging Second Intifada, and the duo’s first 2002 album went
double platinum, “turning the Star of David into a symbol of cool among the
Israeli rap crowd,” Haaretz wrote. (Today, Eliasi has an image of a fist giving
the middle finger breaking through a Star of David on his Facebook page.)
After a short run in the spotlight, the group
split up and Eliasi mostly disappeared from public view. In 2011, he took to
Facebook and began to post from a provocatively extreme right wing view point
about Palestinians and the Israeli left, quickly amassing a following. At
times, Eliasi has taken his movement offline and into the streets. In the
summer of 2014 during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, he called
upon followers to disrupt an anti-war protest. Eliasi showed up with hundreds
of counter protesters, who beat the left wing demonstrators with clubs. At
least one person was sent to the hospital. According to Haaretz, none of the
assailants faced charges.
Haaretz reported that Eliasi’s Facebook page is consistently ranked as one
of the Israeli sites with the highest incidence of “hate speech” by the Berl
Katznelson Foundation, a democracy education group.
Eliasi said he is not seeking public office at
the moment, but he could change his mind in the future. He said that he wanted
to affect change from within the party.
“Likud is moving to the left all the time,” he
said, according to the Times of Israel.
“Sometimes I want to vomit on some of the people [in the party]. The time has
come for change in Likud.”
Contact Naomi Zeveloff at zeveloff@forward.com
or on Twitter @naomizeveloff
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário