Happy Birthday Madonna!

Peres Cultivates a Cult of Personality
August 16, 2005
by The Perescope

Guess who celebrated a birthday on August 16? Madonna did, but so did another international pop star.

In case you didn't remember the megalomaniacal gala at Tel Aviv's Mann Auditorium two years ago on that date, attended by the likes of Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan and Mikhail Gorbachev, which cost the indulgent celebrant and the hard-pressed Israeli taxpayer hundreds of thousands of shekels, you would have been reminded by an advertisement on the front page of the August 16th edition of Ha'aretz, the Hebrew daily that arrogantly proclaims itself to be the newspaper for "people who think" -- a self-flattering and overly-generous euphemism that Israeli leftists apply to themselves.

Ran Rahav, a celebrity Israeli PR guru, took out the expensive ad to wish a happy birthday to his friend Shimon Peres. Although he didn't find it necessary to level with Ha'aretz readers by admitting in the ad that he's Peres's long-time buddy, Rahav did pay for enough ink and column inches to thank Peres for his role (or, more accurately, what Peres claims to have been his role) as the father of Israel's nuclear program.

Now we're not talking here of an ad placed by Madonna's PR agent on the front page of Variety. This was an ad signed by one of Israel's leading image makers on the front page of what likes to think of itself as Israel's version of The New York Times.

When was the last time you saw a personality cult like this in a democratic country? The custom of publishing an ad on the front page of a newspaper to wish The Great Leader a happy birthday used to be something worthy of Pravda. The tradition undoubtedly continues with Kim Jung Il in the so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and, for all I know, maybe even with Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. The custom of holding an expensive birthday bash broadcast on TV, like Peres did two years ago, otherwise probably died out with Nicolae Ceaucescu, if not with Stalin himself.

Nowhere in the Western world does a political leader cultivate this sort of cult of personality. What's particularly repugnant in this unique case, however, is that the newspaper for "people who think" doesn't criticize it editorially. Instead, it lends its front page to panegyric expressions of flattery and puff. When it comes to The Great Leader, Ha'aretz, like Pravda, prefers for its readers not to think at all. Would they be as slavishly subservient to Madonna?