Dror Feiler may embody the most extreme red-diaper baby deformation but those who haven’t gone quite as far as he did, nevertheless gravitate in the same direction.
By SARAH HONIGSelf-satisfied Dror Feiler on board the ‘Marianne’: He is a classic red-diaper baby.(photo credit: JERUSALEM POST ARCHIVE)
Israeli expat Dror Feiler, domiciled in comfortable and smug Sweden, has helped organize many of the “humanitarian flotillas” to Gaza, including the 2010 Mavi Marmara provocation, the 2012 Estelle follow-up and the latest foiled Marianne misadventure. He is a classic red-diaper baby.In his pro-Hamas fervor, Feiler never mentions that Israel regularly (and quite dementedly) supplies Gaza with goods, electricity, fuel and water, whereas Gaza uses its resources to subjugate its masses and stockpile weapons of indiscriminate destruction.Feiler either justifies or omits from discourse Gaza’s many and flagrant sins. He grotesquely exaggerates Israeli responses and willfully twists them out of all context. Feiler delights in painting Israel as intrinsically and irredeemably evil. Don’t look for Jewish empathy or a soft spot for the old homeland in Dror. That would contradict his red-diaper upbringing. That’s not where he comes from.He’s a trusty unquestioning chip off the old block – his mother, Pnina, who spent a lifetime crusading for Palestinian causes and defaming Israel with relish. She hails from Yad Hanna, Israel’s sole Communist kibbutz. It was named in 1950 after heroic WWII paratrooper Hanna Szenes, whose memory and legacy have of late been targeted by artsy leftwing iconoclasts. Self-sacrifice for a Jewish cause and Zionist dedication have become unbearable in their enlightened milieu.Among other groups, Pnina Feiler was active in the pro-Arab Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (in her professional capacity as a nurse). In May 2001, after terrorists sadistically crushed the skulls of two hooky-playing schoolboys near Tekoa, PHR-Israel’s founder, psychiatrist Ruchama Marton, reacted angrily towards the underage victims. “The settlers,” she fumed, “raise little monsters.”That’s the moral wellspring from which Dror drank. That’s the intellectual and ideological pool in which he waded and where he learned that pools of Jewish blood form an aesthetic background against which to highlight the glorified features of Hanadi Jaradat. She blew herself up next to a baby in her buggy at Haifa’s Maxim Restaurant in 2003 (murdering 21, among them three generations of two separate families).A few months post-atrocity, Dror and his Scandinavian wife created the Stockholm-exhibited “work of art” that presented Jaradat as “Snow White” sailing in a red-liquid lake. The image goaded Israel’s enraged then-Ambassador Zvi Mazel to damage it.Dror exuded the same artistic orientation which had earlier inspired a gloating art show in Nablus featuring bloodied pizza slices and a baby stroller inside a model of Jerusalem’s Sbarro eatery after the 2001 terrorist blast (which killed 15 innocents including nine children and five members of a single family). Nevertheless, Dror enjoys unstinting succor and friendly publicity in his adopted country.The inexorable march of time has caught up with red-diaper babies like Feiler. They are no longer tots, not even spirited youths. Their days as annoying adolescents are also far behind them. But red-diaper baby-boomers had endowed the world with their own red-diaper babies who carry on from where their progenitors had left off.In some ways, some red-diaper sorts are more influential than ever. They mold our opinions and dictate our politically correct fashions. They mess with our minds and call the shots beyond the wildest expectations of their original red grandparents.
To be sure, today’s aging red-diaper babies can no longer be accused of awaiting direct orders from unseen handlers who operate on party instructions from Moscow. The centralized manipulative movement is, alas, no more. But the abhorrence for all things which communism once opposed still seethes in red-diaper psyches.In this sense, the more militant and dogmatic among them increasingly resemble the anarchists of old rather than sleeper agents loyal to a stern dictatorship of the proletariat far away.Red-diaper terminology was first coined in the US in reference to the offspring of communist or fellow-traveler parents, imbued from infancy in the radical ways of mom and dad. Barack Obama is sometimes referred to – not without justification – as America’s first red-diaper president. But the red-diaper phenomenon, as Feiler shows, is hardly restricted to America’s halls of power, halls of justice, halls of academe or one-dimensional newsrooms.If any country’s red diapers ever made their American counterparts pale in comparison, it’s Israel’s. Our red is outstandingly brighter. Perhaps this results from the fact that during its pre-independence decades and for its nearly first three decades thereafter, Israel was a socialist stronghold – which America never was.Our socialism, while relatively benign and democratic, was nonetheless strangulating and economically disastrous. It also generated a still-unbroken control on the judiciary, universities and the media. Israel’s leftist sway isn’t only still bon ton but it is the only legitimate way to think. The public is constantly exposed to it and it postures as the voice of sanity. All dissenting sounds are insane, inferior and inherently detrimental to one’s upward-mobility aspirations.Israel thus has created a unique precedent in the annals of political science – it’s the only known example worldwide in which the party of government is excluded from the sociopolitical establishment.The voting public keeps rejecting the Left and relegating it to the Knesset’s opposition benches but the Left still maintains its unchallengeable grasp on the real hubs of power. Our Supreme Court is a mind-boggling case in point. Its unelected justices espouse the Meretz ethos and thus the Meretz way rules despite the fact that Meretz is a shrinking marginal mini-faction.This perforce breeds a confounding incongruence between power and influence on the one hand and the electorate’s rebuff on the other. This to a large extent accounts for the Left’s inability to accept electoral verdicts and for its penchant to extenuate political defeat by defaming political rivals as lowbrow louts.The frustrated Left is consumed by the need to rationalize the failure of the citizenry to be converted to superior outlooks. Undesired voting patterns are analyzed as one would a disease and haughty diagnosticians take it upon themselves to determine what’s wrong with the great unwashed and why the people behave so aberrantly.The sense of disenfranchisement from what is their due birthright tugs the entire Left ever-leftward. Yesteryear’s Zionism, nationalism and activism of Labor are all but gone and all but indistinguishable from the Meretz variation. Labor’s founding fathers, like the ardently Jewish Berl Katznelson and David Ben-Gurion, would have been shocked to see their professed torchbearers lurch ever closer to the Marxist fringe that they had vehemently combated back in their day.Feiler may embody the most extreme red-diaper baby deformation but those who haven’t gone quite as far as he did, nevertheless gravitate in the same direction. From their red-diaper milieu arise most of the Israeli literati and glitterati who jet-set around the globe and besmirch Israel as lustily as any of its enemies and far more effectively so.From the red-diaper milieu come Israel’s self-acclaimed “peace activists” who essentially do what Feiler does but without setting sail or leaving home turf.They ostensibly only record and resonate every last Arab slander and they avidly disseminate falsehoods to the international press, to UN forums and to foreign Israel-bashers. Collectively they do us much greater harm than Feiler’s flotillas ever could.They participate in Arab protests, amplify them and fan the flames. They work hand- in-glove with our most implacable foes under the guise of seeking accommodation and this masquerade earns them generous contributions from the EU and individual European governments. Thus Israel becomes the only democracy in whose destruction Europe heavily invests – all supposedly in the name of democracy.And just as the red-diaper babies abet our enemies, so they boost any cause that weakens Israel.It was in the name of sustaining Israel’s Jewish majority that the Left inflicted Oslo upon us in 1993. Yet few Israelis are aware that as part of its Oslo undertakings Israel had admitted 150,000 Palestinian Arabs seemingly to facilitate “family reunions.” Needless to say their numbers have since swelled and massively inflated Arab population proportions within Israel proper – all in the name of safeguarding the Jewish majority.Now the red-diaper progeny bitterly battles legislation geared to prevent a further Arab influx into the Jewish state in the fraudulent guise of “family reunions.” The very notion that Israeli/Arab-Palestinian couples can “reunite” and reside beyond the Green-Line grievously offends red-diaper sensibilities. Red-diaper agitators hanker for the migration of ever-greater numbers of Arabs into our Jewish-majority midst – all in the name of that hallowed Jewish majority.Simultaneously, red-diaper radicals cannot abide the notion that Israel require its so-called peace partners to recognize its legitimacy as a Jewish state rather than as an undefined de facto entity and candidate for future Arabization.However perceived, the common denominator between disingenuous red-diaper slogans and contradictory red-diaper actions is the weakening of Israel as a Jewish state.It’s time to acknowledge that anything which weakens Israel is eagerly championed by the red-diaper set – be it yielding territory to genocidal enemies, importing hostile Arabs, opposing legislation to reduce the danger of being overrun by would-be annihilators or even undermining efforts to counter the illegal (mostly Muslim) deluge from Africa.Red-diaper provocateurs demonstrate on behalf of opportunist African infiltrators they dub refugees. They inflame passions among Ethiopian immigrants. They were the moving force behind the 2011 Occupy Rothschild Boulevard happenings.Their latest pet-project is sabotaging Israel’s emerging status as a major gas producer. This, of course, parades under the populist banner of upholding the rights of the people to natural resources that belong to us all. Never mind the minor detail that we all didn’t risk our capital to find it, drill for it and extract it from the depths of the Mediterranean.The old-style red outcries about the property of the masses are seductive and deceptive. The hidden red-diaper agenda - for which numerous well-meaning useful idiots sadly fall – is to deny Israel prosperity and power (because “worse is better”) and to discourage foreign investments in its economy. This campaign complements BDS aims to divest investments from Israel.The methods and rhetoric may differ but not the bottom line.The anti-capitalist hullabaloo that grips Israel nowadays may fool many of populism’s local dupes who miss the bigger picture. They may be surprised to hear themselves lumped with red-diaper babies or likened to Dror Feiler. But, taking the broad view, their zeal meshes with his. Their squeals chime with his propaganda. Red-diaper babies delight in making a mess.www.sarahhonig.comDebunking the Bull, Sarah Honig’s book, was recently published by Gefen.