When Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s former and future Prime Minister, called former US President Donald Trump’s evening soiree with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes a ‘mistake,’ I was and I still am outraged.
A mistake is when I forget to take out the garbage or turn off the lights.
A mistake is not when I invite a man, who calls for the “Death of the Jewish People” to break bread in my home.
A mistake is not when I forget to vet the scum in Kanye West’s entourage. The scum who espouses that my country be turned into a Christian nation; denies the very existence of the Holocaust; who carried a lit torch down Charlottesville’s streets yelling, “The Jews Shall Not Replace Us.”.
Those ain’t mistakes.
They’re shondas—disgraces of the highest degree, total scandals, terrible embarrassments.
I’d like to give Bibi a little leeway because he’s a politician. But he knows that Jewish politicians are held up to a higher standard—one of repairing this world.
I pause to wonder, “What would Winston Churchill have called the Trump ‘mistake?’”
Who knows, but he would not have called it a ‘mistake.’
Bibi knows we Jews are wordsmiths.
We’re a people who for thousands of years we have studied words.
Bibi’s grandfather, who was a writer, must have shuttered at his grandson’s inability to come up with a proper phrase.
Why didn’t Bibi study the words of some of our modern authors like Malamud, Kafka, Roth or Singer?
Yes, Bibi knows that we Jews have written some of the greatest literature ever written.
And we know, that Bibi, as a kid, studied English in the Philly school system, where they teach how and when to use adjectives.
For example, Bibi could have said: a collossal mistake, a huge mistake, a terrible mistake but he didn’t.
And that was one helluva big mistake.
