Captive Audience / Dishonorable president

For a full hour yesterday, all the Israeli broadcast channels were the voluntary captives of the country's No. 1 citizen, who presented his defense arguments, a character statement in his own defense and a summation for a trial that has yet to begin. And he did this while engaging in an agitated, scathing and excoriating defamation of the vehicle that allowed him to bring his unusual performance to the nation.

Moshe Katsav was fighting for his life yesterday, as well as for his dignity and the trust he wants his family and friends to continue to place in him. He also used the opportunity to trample whatever remaining justification he may have had in continuing to remain in his post.

One can assume that there are people outside the media for whom Katsav's speech did strike a chord. His advisers, and perhaps Katsav himself, were aiming for the most populist effect, with the use of the term "the hostile media": a powerful institution with an elitist, destructive and arrogant agenda that exerts extortionist power over the police, prosecution and attorney general.
Katsav used the cameras of the journalists to speak directly to the "citizens of Israel" and portray himself over and over as a victim of an elitist, well-orchestrated plot.

Katsav did not hesitate to present himself as both a simple citizen whose basic rights have been denied him and as the president and a key figure in the Jewish world. This dual discourse was accompanied by an additional split: Half the time he was full of threatening descriptions of the ties between the media and law-enforcement authorities, and half the time he was pleading.

Katsav addressed the public as though cruel police investigators had tackled him one day as he was innocently walking in the street, dumped him and his friends in a room full of prosecutors and framed him. Katsav portrayed the women who testified against him as part of a witch hunt, who were taking revenge because they were fired.

Unfortunately, the latent message of Katsav's speech was that he is nothing but an innocent boy from the Kastina transit camp, whom no one wants to see in the President's Residence.

It wasn't the allegations of rape that were at the center of Katsav's heated tongue-lashing. It was the good versus the bad, the light-skinned versus the dark-skinned, the elite versus the undesirable others. Not since former Shas leader Aryeh Deri's "I am innocent" comments has there been such blatant manipulation by someone who reached the top and then, with the help of his lawyers and media consultants, depicted himself as a miserable victim of the arrogant elite, and in so doing terrorized the public.

The question isn't whether Katsav from Kiryat Malachi was wanted at the President's Residence in the upscale Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia, but whether he did what he is accused of doing. Either way, the honorable president proved yesterday exactly what he suspects people think about him: that he is not worthy of the exalted position.

By Avirama Golan