(dani doron-Jpost)."Bibi took your pensions away. He threw them into the financial market jungle, ruining your future. He imported a failed capitalist ideology to Israel and destroyed the economy." So charge Binyamin Netanyahu's adversaries.
.........But why not exploit the crisis to destroy what little freedom Netanyahu's reforms brought to the economy? Why care if the country will lose its only hope of deliverance from the economic retardation caused by our statist heritage?
To discredit Netanyahu, our left-leaning media are inventing spins that convert day into night and night into day. They are trying to convince us that Netanyahu - whose reforms in 2003 saved workers from massive unemployment and the Histadrut-despoiled pension funds from collapse - is the enemy of workers and pensioners; that he who broke the banking cartel, the stronghold of our oligarchy, is working for the rich.
They are trying to brainwash us into believing that an economic reform that generated a tremendous five-year rapid growth (5% average), after two decades of no growth and deep recessions, a reform that created 400,000 new jobs and reduced unemployment from 10.4% to 5.9% was "a catastrophic failure."
THE CYNICAL operators who got Ehud Olmert elected have been ruining Israeli democracy by distorting information vital for critical voter choices. They were not even ashamed to boast on camera (in a TV documentary All the Campaign's Men) that in the last elections they acted "like sharks smelling blood and going for the kill," that they were determined "to put their foot on their adversary's throat and press until they strangle him." Now they are waging a similar campaign on behalf of Tzipi Livni, a candidate who vowed to bring us new, clean politics.
It is scandalous that politicians aspiring for the highest offices, Livni, Ehud Barak, Haim Ramon, Avishay Braverman, Ronnie Bar-On and many others gleefully participate in this culture of lies. Before the term "spin" was born people used to call the distortion of the truth cheating, and "spinners" cheaters. To heal our sick body politic we should return to such simple language.
