Blue Suede Shoes

Carl Perkins was onto something when he co-wrote and recorded: you can do anything, but lay off my blue suede shoes. However innocuous those lyrics may be, one need only substitute: you can do anything but threaten to destroy Israel and you’ll gain a better understanding as well as appreciation to the speech along with its 44 seconds of silence given last week at the United Nations by the Prime Minister of Israel.
Say what you want to an Israeli about Israel viz. Israeli’s are unrefined, pushy, aggressive, blunt full of Chutzpah etc. The very worst response that it will evoke is: Sticks and stones will break my bones. It’s quite possible that some Israelis will not only agree with you, but will come up with additional self-deprecating observations that never even occurred to you. Threaten to destroy Israel however, and then you had better run for the hills. Fast. And that’s on a good day.
Prime Minister Netanyahu may have been born after the Holocaust, but no different than the author of this article, he possesses an Auschwitz mentality. Threatening to destroy Israel evokes nightmares replete with slogans such as Judenrein, Deutschland Uber Alles, Sieg Heil etc. which just won’t dissipate from our Jewish blood stream. Like a Stephen King horror movie, we are convinced that the spirit of the monster Der Fuhrer lives on in the Ayatollah Khomeini. And because of this we adopt the following attitude:
Just don’t tell me that you are going to destroy Israel. It makes me very angry.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s response of anger, indignation and even hurt along with his 44 second glare of silence was not directed solely against Iran. It was directed against the United States as well. Part and parcel of the above mentioned Auschwitz mentality is the fear that when push comes to shove, Israel doesn’t have a friend in the world. When the deal with Iran was concluded, the majority of Israelis felt that they had been stabbed in the back. No one likes to be stabbed in the back, especially by one who claims to be your friend.
Threatening to destroy Israel is an emotional taunt, not an intellectual taunt. Unfortunately, emotional taunts evoke emotional responses. When the Ayatollah Khomeini makes such a threat, he has no real intention of destroying Israel. The Ayatolla knows he doesn’t have such capability. If the Ayatolla had such capability and truly wished to destroy Israel, he would have already done so, without any taunts. The Ayatolla’s taunts however serve a twofold purpose: he is able to placate his fringe sector who is even more maniacal than he is, if that’s possible; he succeeds in arousing the ire of the Israel’s Prime Minister. And any day that the Ayatolla is unable to arouse the ire of the Prime Minister of Israel, is a day that the “sun don’t shine”. The Prime Minister of Israel then goes ahead and takes the bait. One would be hard pressed to speculate what would happen, if the Prime Minister of Israel would simply choose to ignore the taunts from Tehran. Is it possible that the Ayatollah would desist in taunting, now that he has no audience and “it’s no fun anymore”?
Does anyone know the Prime Minister’s shoe size? I just might order him a backup pair of blue suede shoes to keep in his closet, provided of course he doesn’t tell anyone about them.