The news of a woman’s acceptance into the Joint Chiefs of Staff patrol resulted in a burst of misogynistic publications and calls for the exclusion of women in the media and social network accounts identified with Netanyahu supporters. The message page of the mechanism called the “poison machine” was refined by Yanon Magal, presenter of the “Patriots” program on Channel 14, the broadcaster Regular government propaganda.
According to Magal, there must not be equality between women and men in the army because it is not possible for a woman to demonstrate higher physical abilities than a man, and because men are unable to overcome their sexual urge and therefore the presence of women near them must be reduced. In addition, the fight for equal rights in the army is a plot designed to weaken it, a plot that is being operated behind the scenes by unknown forces.
Magal does not reveal who the hidden forces are and only uses the general name “Progress”, a common name in the bibist-evangelical movement in Israel for people, organizations or movements that work to promote human rights.
“Here, because of progress, they are starting to mix all kinds of nonsense,” Magal began his monologue with “the patriots on 28.11. The “nonsense” is the idea of equality between women and men, which is unrealistic for two reasons. First, a woman will always be physically inferior to a man, a fact he deduces from his personal experience.
Yitzhak Mirilshvili, the declared controlling owner of Channel 14 (screenshot from a Chabad video)
In Magal’s words: “A woman, a woman! Passed patrol day, and a week ago she also passed the formation of the patrols and was accepted into a general patrol… I don’t have the strength for these things. I have no strength. I’m primitive, I’m an anachronist, I’m a baboon, I don’t understand it. I don’t see the route I did in the Defense Forces patrol, which with my last strength I managed to finish the route. It’s crazy efforts. Crazy. You walk with crazy weights of tens of kilograms on your back, navigating every night 30 km in the field, alone…”
Second, as mentioned, according to Magal, men are unable to control their passions. According to the presenter from Channel 14, women are not allowed to serve equally with men because they are a distraction for the men.
Magal himself, it should be noted, is known to have a dismissive and dismissive style towards women. For example, he previously wrote on Twitter to a young girl who posted that she had been harassed, “Soul, thirty years ago I would have loaded dozens of people like you into trucks on trucks.” On another occasion, he wrote to Knesset member Naama Lazimi: “Honey, I wouldn’t load a moron like you even with a pitchfork.”
Magel has also been accused in the past by several women of sexually harassing them in several incidents over several years. Some of the complaints reached the police, who closed the case due to lack of guilt, but Magal, who was then a member of Knesset on behalf of the Jewish Home, was forced to resign.
“In my opinion,” Magal continued the monologue on the “Patriots” program, “putting men and women in the same unit, in the same military event, is a mistake. Young people, we know where the thoughts are, not only young people, we know people where, at least most of them, their thoughts are, sure At a young age. In my eyes, it’s introducing a matter that is not his business.”
Magal is not content with analyzing why equal rights between women and men in the army is wrong, but also discredits those who try to promote such equal rights. According to the bibist message page, promoting equal rights is not just a wrong idea, but a conspiracy against the State of Israel. “This is progress. To destroy the army. That’s how I see it, to destroy the army.”
This is not, of course, a conspiracy invented by Magal. The connection theory about “The Progress”, similar to that about the “Deep State”, is a central part of bibist propaganda, which is copied almost one for one from the extreme right in the USA. In fact, on Channel 14 there is a permanent corner dedicated to this: “The Progressive Troll” presented by Itamar Fleishman in the program “Ricklin and Co.”
As part of this corner, as well as in other programs on the channel, messages of misogyny, LGBTphobia, transphobia and other anti-liberal attitudes are spread.
The page of messages against women’s equality in the IDF is criticized by Magal on the grounds that it offends the religious. And what about the doss who want to be in the unit, are they nothing? You say you want to be ultra-Orthodox, aren’t you ultra-Orthodox?”
On the same day he delivered the monologue “I am in Bonn” on Channel 14, Tweeted on Twitter that the inclusion of women in the Matkal patrol will result in religious recruits not going through the formation for the patrol because they will not be ready to stay by the side of women. The next day he posted on his Telegram channel: “I doubt if Emanuel Moreno the 14th would have enlisted in the Matkal patrol if he had known that the team is mixed with women. Thank you Herzi.”
Magal’s monologue “I’m a baboon” is carried against the background of the inscription on the screen: “Do you really want ultra-Orthodox in the IDF? Incorporating women into the combat units arouses criticism among the religious.” In practice, of course, ultra-Orthodox recruitment is not directed to the general frameworks of the IDF anyway, certainly not to the special units, but to specific frameworks prepared for them.
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