This morning, I admit, my first thought was the Supreme Court's decision in the Ehud Olmert case. I thought for a moment about going there, to see up close what discrimination, or God forbid - boundless arrogance, looks like.<\/p>\r\n
I lost my mind and settled for connecting to one of the channels via the computer, and very quickly preferred to settle for the radio broadcast: the feeling of disgust and the desire to get as far away as possible from someone who had become a symbol of everything that is wrong with us. Or almost everything.<\/p>\r\n
It is customary to attribute good qualities to Olmert (such as the well-documented, perhaps too well-documented, concern for the family of his former deputy, Shmuel Meir, after his death in an accident), and yes, I can understand what some people mean when they describe him as a "charming" man.<\/p>\r\n
But that really doesn't matter.<\/p>\r\n
Olmert is greedy. He is hedonistic to the point of nausea. He exploits his power and position for his personal needs. He is corrupt!<\/p>\r\n
Well? So what? Is he the only one? He has a long line of teachers and students, some of whom are still roaming freely outside.<\/p>\r\n
There are those who enjoy it, and those who lie about it, and those who are raised in trust by it.<\/p>\r\n
That's not the point.<\/p>\r\n
What's different about Olmert, in my opinion, is his disruption of every standard of basic morality. For this man, nothing is sacred.<\/p>\r\n
\u00a0\u2022<\/p>\r\n
For a year and a half I was a welfare affairs reporter for the newspaper 'Kol Ha'ir' and then for four and a half years I wrote about municipal affairs for the newspaper 'Kol Ha'zaman' (of Maariv) in Jerusalem - during Olmert's time as mayor.<\/p>\r\n
True, he has some management skills (less than he is given credit for) and he has presence (some call it charisma) - but what are these compared to his other, darker skills?<\/p>\r\n
Olmert became mayor thanks to the first accolade he ever received: an alliance with the ultra-Orthodox. But\u00a0It would be much more accurate to say, in my opinion, that Olmert is responsible for the abysmal hatred of secularists for the ultra-Orthodox in the city.<\/span><\/p>\r\n Olmert knew exactly what the outcome on the ground of this alliance would be.<\/p>\r\n He did not have the welfare of the Haredim (whom no one cared about until then) in mind, nor did he have the basic desire to forge an alliance in order to win (legitimate to a certain extent). In my opinion, he knew very well that bringing the Haredim into his coalition would have mainly one result \u2013 an overflow of hatred towards the Haredi public in the city.<\/p>\r\n \""Selling the city to the Haredim" - this is a terrible sentence that was born in Olmert's sinful seminary. The hatred for the Haredi public remains to this day, an unsightly legacy of his days here.<\/p>\r\n He was quick to attribute the severe neglect in his day on the streets of the Old City to the residents' poor cleaning habits.<\/p>\r\n His blatant disdain for elected officials from other parties was tempered with the gentleness of a Roman centurion, calling them derogatory names that are difficult to repeat.<\/p>\r\n Since Olmert initially saw the Jerusalem municipality as merely a stopover on his way to his next destination, he did nothing for the younger generation there, and in his day the hemorrhage of negative immigration from the city reached frightening heights.<\/p>\r\n And of course \u2013 everyone was guilty, everyone except him.<\/p>\r\n \u00a0\u2022<\/p>\r\n You could write a doctorate on his attitude towards the media, especially the local media. Haaretz newspaper devoted a cover story to this a few years ago, as did the Seventh Eye.<\/p>\r\n I also suffered from his arm rest (almost literally, by the way).<\/span>\u00a0The persecution of me, and of my teacher and rabbi, journalist Eyal Harauveni from Kol Ha'ir, was insatiable. He did not rest until he managed, through his connections in the Maariv editorial team, to remove both of us from the newspapers in which we wrote.<\/span><\/p>\r\n There was no need for this step - it was evil revenge for its own sake.<\/p>\r\n So for me, the person who was sent to prison this morning is not just a former prime minister who screwed up.<\/p>\r\n In a significant sense, he is the embodiment of the sick evils that have permeated Israeli society \u2013 wickedness, vindictiveness, and the desire to do evil at all costs.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 Peggy Sidor is a journalist at the Jerusalem Post.<\/strong><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The one who was sent to prison is not just a former prime minister who has gone rogue. He is, in a significant sense, the embodiment of the sick evils that have permeated Israeli society. \u2022 Journalist Peggy Siddur of the Jerusalem Post, formerly a correspondent for 'Kol Ha'ir' in Jerusalem, writes in a special column for Haredim 10 about the man who, in her opinion, has fueled hatred towards Haredim","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[138],"tags":[294,5436],"class_list":["post-239241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-138","tag-294","tag-5436"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n