Springtime for Netanyahu
Shakin’ that ass for Israel!
Before we venture into this latest morass of manipulative manure, a couple of preliminary remarks:
Preliminary Remark 1: The Players and The Played
I am now primed to think in terms of a certain distinction i.e. that between spooks and stooges. The spooks are the players and the stooges are the ones being played. I sometimes visualise it as one of those old seaside entertainers who spin plates at the top of poles. The trick is to get the system up and running. Once that has been done, you can leave it for a few seconds or perhaps a minute. But once one of the poles starts to run out of momentum, you need to give it a little tweak. Thus the system you set up can be mostly self-maintaining though in need of the occasional corrective. The spinner is the spook, the poles and plates are the stooges.
Admittedly it’s not always easy to distinguish between spook and stooge what with the best propagandists being the ones who actually believe the bullshit they spout.
And so perhaps, Philip K Dick style, a spook can co-exist with a stooge in the same cranium? These are the days of miracle and wonder.
Preliminary Remark 2: Crazy Yanks and Envious Brits
I have to admit that as a repressed Brit I stand open mouthed – and admittedly with a little envy – at the American eagerness to get up there and give ‘em the old razzle dazzle. It seems that everyone in The States lives for a microphone to bellow into, a stage to demolish, and a grin to split a face. Meanwhile, the moment anyone attempts any of this, there’s always an audience willing to shred the palms of their hands with clapping.
As one example of American ebullience against British miserabilism, consider the yawning abyss that opens up when viewing Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s take on Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light”. The story goes that Bruce was eager to hear this cover of his song. He stuck it on the turntable, listened for half a minute and then tore it off and threw it out the window, remarking, “I’ll never understand British pop”.
Easy to figure out that reaction. Bruce’s original has a vibrant upbeat tempo with a rising chord sequence. Despite a misleadingly chirpy keyboard chatter, the MMEB version is slower and has gloomy descending chords like one of those lumbering concert anthems. You know. “Hey Jude”, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”. [1] That kind of thing. You have to hand it to The Beatles. As with most other later trends, they were the initialisers. In fact, with the “Jude” song they not only anticipated the candle swaying concert phenomenon but parodied it with that endless fade out.
This is an important point to make because I’m focussing on what seems a very American brand of propaganda i.e. this glitzy brash heart-on-sleeve stuff which would either embarrass a Brit or make him guffaw. Which is not at all to say that us Brits have a right to feel smugly superior. We have our own brand of bullshit. And in any case, the beginning of our story lies in a very self-aware American cultural artifact. And a very prescient one too.
So, to the main matter …
Mel The Prophet
In retrospect Mel Brooks’ deservedly celebrated The Producers was not so much a satire on the Nazis but a satire on crass commercialisation which knew no boundaries and where all concerns of taste were irrelevant. So much so that an engineered flop, whose gross insensitivity was presumed to guarantee failure, could become an unintended hit.
The fact that such woeful cultural degradation now comes across from a purportedly anti-Nazi position is one of our more dazzling ironies. To be sure, this is disguised by the fact that the Nazis were probably the most highly visually stylized political movement ever and so the kitschy aspect lampooned by The Producers is obvious.
The central conception in The Producers is that a couple of chancers plan to raise an enormous stash of funds for a stage production that was meant to bomb so that they can keep the remaining cash for themselves. To pick a script that is bound to fail, they find a fanatical Nazi who has written a play called Springtime for Hitler, a paean to Hitler. The overture has dancing stormtroopers who form a Busby Berkeley–style swastika. And that’s just the start.
The money-grubbing scheme fails because the audience take it to be a satire and it becomes a huge hit.
The whole concept rests on the perfectly reasonable assumption that a scene with dancing stormtroopers is bound to make anyone guffaw. Nobody could be taken in by such dismal adulatory vulgarity. Surely!
Umm…
Here we have two glamorous hostesses. Let me introduce them.
First up, one Montana Tucker. I mean – is that name for real? It recalls a spoof name which me and my old schoolmates made up for a typical American: Elmer Chuckwagon.
Anyway, she is “an American dancer, singer, and social media activist” and “(a)s of 2024, Tucker’s online presence reportedly included a following of over 9 million followers on TikTok and 3.1 million followers on Instagram”. This from Wiki and I love that “reportedly”.
Also from Wiki:
When Tucker was 8, she began modeling and appeared in music videos, television shows including Barney & Friends, E-Venture Kids, with Ariana Grande, and commercials including for Ovaltine, Skechers, BMW and Wendy’s. At 11 years old, Tucker won the World Hip Hop Dance Championship. When she was 13, Tucker was a featured backup dancer for Ashanti and Ashlee Simpson. At age 14, Tucker had her first public performance at the 2007 Super Bowl Pre Game.
Now I’ve never been one to indulge in “conspiratorial” musings on mind-controlled slaves who are groomed for intelligence stoogery from childhood. But that programme Barney gave me the willies. This big purple Tyrannosaur wafting his little moral lessons to kids who look as if their smiles have been staple-gunned on. So perhaps Montana was one of those traumatised juniors. And since the grown-up Montana has a glassy glitzy android vacancy, she is a perfect demonstration of stoogery.
On the other hand, her interlocutor here, one Noa Tishby gives out a spooky vibe. But we’ll get to her in a moment.
Now one thing I have noticed about the current propaganda is that it ain’t subtle. Miss Tucker helpfully spells out her purpose. She tells us, “This is unfortunately a necessary watch for all generation”. This goes beyond the arrogance of some snake oil senorita telling you what’s “necessary”. Because that last word “generation” is not a typo. It’s what she says. Slips in grammar are becoming increasingly prevalent and may in themselves indicate a massive cultural decline. But in this case, there is an amusing “unintended” (?) implication. After all, perhaps the speaker doesn’t mean “generations” as in waves of descendants. Perhaps she means the singular “generation” as in generating the continuing process of indoctrination.
After which, we get the bizarre juxtaposition of two svelte young goddesses climbing their way through rubble. Whether these figures are the same two on the couch is dubious. But then it’s easy to get the impression the video factory behind this lot has an endless supply of these willowy wonders.
Montana then goes on to confess her sense of awe-infused contrition before the heartache from these children. Watch how the children we see are clearly in good health but looking a bit down – even going so far as to stroke their eyes as if brushing away a tear. Compare that with the scenes of post-apocalyptic devastation from Gaza and ponder on a matter that is becoming increasingly apparent i.e. that signs of the horrors and atrocities we are allegedly being shown here on the Israel side are … well, to be frank, curiously absent.
And then Montana says this:
I’ve done a lot with kids and I feel like very a special connection to kids. And I was so grateful that the kids felt comfortable enough sharing their testimonies with me.
As with the grammatical slip, there is an odd dissonance here. Note how she starts with “kids” in general. And then slides into that “the kids” i.e. the ones sharing their testimonies. Over this part we get the videos of our Montana grooving with various ecstatic youngsters. Perhaps the same doped up troupes she mingled with on Barney?
But are we truly to assume that these youngsters she’s rehearsing Saturday Night Fever with are the same youngsters who suffered the unutterable? (Though also bear in mind that this unutterable is indeed being uttered a lot!) Did anyone think there might be a little incongruence between this twee toddler tap dancing and the alleged atrocities suffered?
Next up is mention of one kid called Ella. Ella is important because she goes into the attic where her father was murdered. Maybe. Well, there’s certainly an attic. We see it. And attics get mentioned again from both our hostesses who are anxious to emphasise the historical connection.
What historical connection? I jest. We all know. After all, it seems our two presenters come from families that had to hide in attics because …yeah, you got it! And if you haven’t well, let me say they were German attics.
And at this point let me introduce some of the background. Montana is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. She took time off from her ecstatic dancing with the kids to do a tour of Poland. See here:
Now I don’t know if this personal family history is true or not and far be it from me to make light of genuine tragedy. But, even making allowances for all that, I would say that all this is part of what Norman Finkelstein has called The Holocaust Industry. I watched the first few minutes of the resulting film and we get the quietly tragic piano music and lots of shots of Montana wiping the tears from her eyes.
Now on that topic, let me say that I have always been maximally suspicious of any reportage that tells you what you should be feeling. And even more suspicious of footage where you are shown others reacting in the way you are supposed to. To go to the opposite extreme and risk facetiousness, I would compare it to canned laughter accompanying a sit-com. This is shameless manipulation. But it also displays a possibly fatal weakness. When you are shown emotion, it signals that the reporters don’t have the confidence to simply let the events themselves influence the watchers.
If you can take it, the film is here:
Anyway, let’s leave Montana who will probably need a lie down after all that. Let’s look at the other one.
Over to Wiki (emphasis added):
Noa Tohar Tishby …is an Israeli actress and activist. She appeared in a variety of American television shows and movies, including The Affair, The Island, Nip/Tuck, Big Love, NCIS, and others. She is the co-executive producer of the HBO series In Treatment, which is an adaptation of the Israeli series BeTipul. Her production company Noa’s Arc was responsible for selling several other adaptations of Israeli programs to American networks.
Tishby focuses on Zionist activism, founding the advocacy organization Act for Israel in 2011, which was revealed in 2025 to have collaborated with the Israeli government to shape coverage of Israel in American media, in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). In 2021, she published her first book, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth. She served as the Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and the Delegitimization of Israel for one year, from 2022 to 2023.
That last bit about the “Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and the Delegitimization of Israel” tickles me. Once again note the sheer absence of subtlety.
Perhaps I’m being presumptuous here but, whereas I have granted a certain sympathy to Montana in assuming she’s more stooge than spook, I get definite ghostly, if not downright vampiric vibes from Noa. Look at that steely luminosity searing from those eyes. And I apologise for the assault you are about to undergo but I really had to link in to this:
Our sassy lass with nary a flicker of hesitation (or conscience) struts her stuff on the stage and proves beyond a doubt that you can be the proverbial consummate professional and totally unlistenable at the same time. It also stands as a tribute to the possibly fatal damage done to the music industry by Mariah Carey who seems incapable of holding a straight note for more than a microsecond. As Mark Steyn once asked: Does the word “love” convey more sincerity if you sing it as “lo-o-o-o-o-o-u-u-u-u-ooo-ooo-ooove”?
But even all that won’t prepare you for the final seconds where the kitsch soars to such stratospheric regions that even Mel Brooks’s dancing stormtroopers would fall into a silent motionless awe. And I was going to describe what happens but I too am in a state of awe!
(Possibly pause here for 5 minutes before regaining some kind of sanity and proceeding.)
By this time, you will be undoubtedly salivating to get your eyeballs wrapped around the actual Children of October 7 movie. Well, here’s a trailer for you:
Thundering soundtrack with spooky Exorcist type choral ululations. And note that segue between documentary footage and what a cynic might suspect to be totally scripted and directed performances.
The whole movie lasts for 35 minutes. I presume you can access it somewhere. But I wouldn’t be brave enough to see it. I have the feeling that if you watch it to the end, the phone will ring and a voice will tell you that you only have seven days left to live.
*
[1] “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” is a Bob Dylan song and Dylan is American. But even when Americans are miserable, they are glamorously miserable. Dylan sings from a strident apocalyptic Biblical perspective that is totally alien to the reserved Brit. As Roger Waters once noted, hanging on in quiet desperation is the British way. With gleeful righteousness Dylan tells us that the cities are on fire with the burning flesh of men. The average Brit moans that life is shit because he’s not getting any. But even if he was, life would still be shit anyway.
Yikes. Noa Tishby gives too many details to mention in a brief note. Here's just one:
That flight suit she's wearing has been altered to add pleats at the shoulder and thigh, yet the sleeves and legs were not shortened, so she can roll them up with big uwu boyfriend cuffs (so smol so pick-me-up-boys-carry-me-away).
If she were carried off like a prize, I suspect the last thing the victorious lieutenant would see is her nighthag form waking him to sleep paralysis as she swoops down for the trachea.