Meretz Demands Limits On Natural Disasters To Prevent Distraction From Corruption News

The law would require that any such calamity receive approval from an independent oversight committee before it be permitted to strike Israel.

Jerusalem, November 28 – Lawmakers from the Meretz Party are preparing legislation to outlaw fires, earthquakes, and other large-scale calamities when national and media attention is already focused on possible misdeeds of right-wing officials, a party spokesman announced today.

MK Ilan Gilon pointed to the series of fires last week that riveted the population on the fate of the hundreds of families and their homes, as well as the vast ecological damage wrought by the flames, and noted that as a result of the constant coverage of those developments, precious little airtime and column space has been given to the all-important stories of possible wrongdoing by people associated with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He told reporters that in the coming days he and another MK from the Opposition will submit a proposal to prevent recurrences by placing sweeping restrictions on earthquakes, fires, epidemics, floods, volcanic eruptions, landslides, and other disasters both man-made and natural.

The law would require that any such calamity receive approval from an independent oversight committee before it be permitted to strike Israel. Under the law, the committee would consist of a panel of experts convened and chaired by a justice emeritus. The panel would assess the degree to which the planned disaster is likely to disrupt ongoing media coverage of right-wing corruption or other misconduct, and only grant approval to disasters whose timing and intensity would not significantly detract from the attention already devoted to the corruption.

“We all saw how Bibi exploited the fires to divert the public from discussing the submarine mess,” explained Gilon, referring to suspicions that a confidant of Netanyahu might have misused his association with the prime minister to profit from arranging the purchase of submarines for the navy from Germany. “We might have been on the verge of something big that could only happen with sustained media attention, but then boom, so to speak, the fires started breaking out, and there went the corruption stories, right off the front page and right out of the social media news feeds. That can’t be allowed to happen again.”

Gilon and Hadash MK Dov Henin will co-sponsor the legislation. “We have to take a cue from the dearly departed Fidel Castro,” added Henin, referring to the late Cuban strongman who died last Friday. “Even if we cannot control every disaster, despite the known capabilities of the Mossad and Elders of Zion, we can at least control the media. I mean, in any enlightened country such as Cuba or North Korea, there would be proper media control. We have  a long way to go before we achieve that kind of paradise, but at least in the meantime we can take these measures.”

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