Israeli Parliament passes law allowing for revocation of citizenship for treason; radical leftists hysterically portray it as "undemocratic"

The Israeli Parliament has just passed a law allowing judges to deny citizenship privileges to someone convicted of espionage or violence on behalf of an enemy state.  If this sounds familiar, it should: dozens of other democracies around the world have similar statutes including the United States, France and that bastion of civic rights, the United Kingdom, where John Amery was executed in 1945 for making propaganda broadcasts for Nazi Germany and where disloyalty to the state still carries a potential penalty of life imprisonment.

Only in Israel of course is such a bill, passed by an overwhelming majority of 37 to 11, ludicrously decried as "undemocratic" and "discriminatory" by the radical left and Arabs who support the dismantling of the state.

Israel's Association for Civil Rights issued a statement in protest saying that "in a democracy you don't deny citizenship" and that the measure sends a "humiliating and discriminatory message that citizenship for Israeli Arabs is not automatic."[...]

"This is another law intended to wage demographic war against us," Hanna Sweid, of the Democratic Movement for Change [now defunct, ed.], said, referring to those Israeli ultra-nationalists who have voiced fears of Jews being outnumbered by Arabs in the future

And only at Reuters, where admitted radical leftists like Allyn Fisher-Ilan do the writing, can those who commit high treason be equated with "critics":

Israel has seldom revoked citizenship privileges in the past, and the measure's passage now seemed symbolic of how increasingly Israeli rightists see the nation's Arabs as well as leftist critics as a threat to their embattled country's future.

That same radical leftist then parrots a popular leftist charge against Israeli democracy:

Unlike Palestinians living in territory Israel captured in a 1967 war, Israeli Arabs are fully enfranchised though many complain of discrimination.

Yes, we've heard about that.

Fisher-Ilan demonstrates definitively that it is actually the left which brooks no criticism when she rushes to the aid of J-Street to insulate the group against censure by Israeli "ultra-nationalists":

Also last week, ultra-nationalist lawmaker Danny Danon held a hearing to upbraid the Jewish-American "J-Street," saying the group, which critises [sic] Jewish settlement-building in occupied land, should be shunned as "pro-Palestinian, not pro-Israeli."

As she fails to explain to readers that J-Street is not shunned by Israeli legislators for its criticism of Jewish settlement-building but rather for its ambivalent stance on Israel's right to exist.



As we've noted in the past, the radical left is not known for its critical thinking (nor its integrity).