Blasting “post-modernism” and what he described as efforts to undermine Jewish identity and nationalism, MK Avi Maoz of the anti-LGBT Noam Party, a component of the Religious Zionist Knesset faction, delivered his maiden speech in the Knesset on Wednesday and promised to fight against these phenomena.
He decried “poisonous attacks on Jewish identity and nationalism, and the family, and said his party would seek to “expose and eliminate” the “foreign, destructive influences of post-modernism.”
Labor MK and Reform leader Rabbi Gilad Kariv, who walked out of the Knesset plenum to protest Maoz’s presence, condemned his speech through a spokesman as “Israeli fascism and Jewish fundamentalism.”
The Noam Party’s voters likely number no more than 20,000 from the ultra-conservative wing of the religious-Zionist community.
It is focused on opposing equal rights for LGBTs and what it describes as efforts to “indoctrinate” Israeli society and “normalize” homosexuality.
Noam united with the far-right Kahanist Otzma Yehudit party during the last election cycle, and that joint list then joined the National Union Party led by Bezalel Smotrich, labeled the “Religious Zionist Party.”
Speaking from the Knesset podium, Maoz offered an outline of Jewish history which, he said, was defined by a dream to establish “a kingdom of the Jewish people in its country,” the return of the Jewish people to its independence, its land, and its language.”
Said Maoz, “They did not dream of a state of all its citizens and of being the only democracy in the Middle East.”
The MK said that the new, “engineered public consciousness” determined that “there is no absolute truth or falsehood,” and that “ethics are similarly relative and dependent on context, time, and place, and therefore there is no good, and no evil.”
Addressing the issue of tolerance for the LGBT community, Maoz said that the “post-modernism effort” has “reached the pinnacle of poison and destruction because this world view seeks to obscure all identity – personal, family, and national – and at the same time make any other opinion illegitimate by silencing, besmirching, and demonization.”
He said this phenomenon “deals a mortal blow to the human race in general and aims its poisonous arrows against anyone and anything who expresses a Jewish and national identity, and against anyone who threatens its heresy with the concepts of truth and falsehood, good and bad.”
During his speech, Maoz attacked the High Court of Justice for rulings he said were “anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, and anti-national, and for advancing post-modern values such as dismantling the family structure.
He also condemned President Reuven Rivlin’s hypothesis about growing tribalism in Israeli society, between secular Jews, religious-Zionist Jews, ultra-orthodox Jews, and Arabs, He called his hope for greater coexistence between these sectors, as “consciousness engineering.”