"Eitan Haber is a consciously ”representative” Israeli. In his Yedioth Ahronoth columns, he’s cultivated himself as a ”voice of the people” – centrist, patriotic, worried about security, wishing for peace. He was Rabin’s spokesman and speechwriter, the impressario of those spectacularly un-Rabinesque speeches by his boss after the signing of the Oslo Accord and the peace treaty with Jordan. More than anyone except for Rabin’s family, Haber embodies the memory of grief over the assassination; his announcement that Rabin had died in the hospital is to Israel what Walter Cronkite’s announcement of JFK’s death is to America. Between his classic newspaper columnist’s style, his frequent references to people and events of the past, and his indelible association with Rabin, the Oslo period and the assassination, Haber, 72, is himself a nostalgia item, a salt of the earth Israeli and an insider at Camelot.
So what does it say when such an Israeli writes a column today that’s about as insanely Islamophobic as anything one is likely to read this side of Pamela Geller? It says the political mentality in this country is pretty damn dark.
The column is titled “And the president of France will be named Mohammed.” It says the murders in Toulouse were “just the preface to the forward to the introduction of this storm that is the burgeoning of Islam.” It goes on:
So what does it say when such an Israeli writes a column today that’s about as insanely Islamophobic as anything one is likely to read this side of Pamela Geller? It says the political mentality in this country is pretty damn dark.
The column is titled “And the president of France will be named Mohammed.” It says the murders in Toulouse were “just the preface to the forward to the introduction of this storm that is the burgeoning of Islam.” It goes on:
Historians will give this new era a name. I call it the ’era of Arabs riding high.’ For the first time, after hundreds of years, 1.3 billion Muslims feel they have the power to run the world and bend it to Islam’s laws and customs. Where are they headed? As yet there are no defined directions, except Islamic rule – and if necessary, by the sword."
