Parody

...Parody Foreign Affairs THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Bibikampf I have been struggling sleeplessly to make sense of the Israeli elections, to understand what could have driven a country that is supposed to be what the Bible calls "a light unto the nations" into breaking the bright, warm halogen bulb of peace into a million smithereens...

...She, it turns out, is the owner of a sports team whose performers play a game similar to cricket...

...Am I suggesting that Bibi Netanyahu is like Hitler...

...Maybe...

...I believe now that I did Zyuganov an injustice...

...So perhaps he isn't like Hitler...

...At a recent Bilderberg conference in Toronto, where sages such as myself gather to discuss foreign policy issues, I found myself in an interesting breakfast discussion on the Israeli elections with noted author David Irving and a woman previously unknown to me named Marge Schott...

...Indeed, his party did not even have a majority, but had to go into a coalition with others, just as Netanyahu will with the Orthodox, or "smelly," parties...

...As the candidate of the old Stalinists, Zyuganov at least represents a secular alternative to Boris Yeltsin...

...Think about the possible parallels: Hitler was the candidate of fear...

...Netanyahu has had his house painted...

...These elections are such a momentous event-more momentous, even, than my trip last year to Japan to uncover the new truth about the world economy-that we will all benefit from my musings about them for another three weeks, at least...

...A year later came the Nuremberg rally and the burning of the Reichstag...

...Would that the same were true of Netanyahu, whose voters are ultra-ultra-ultra Orthodox fundamentalists and therefore, to quote the former head of the Israel lobby in Washington, "smelly...

...Netanyahu is the candidate of fear...

...Netanyahu wrote a book...

...Hitler wrote a book...

...We don't know yet if Netanyahu is going to kill every Palestinian and throw the planet into a world war that will result in the destruction of 60 million people...

...In retrospect, I wish to apologize for my column comparing the right-wing, anti-peace, pro-settler, admitted philanderer Benjamin Netanyahu to Russian Communist presidential candidate Gennadi Zyuganov...

...But, in the end, the analogy doesn't quite hold true...

...Schott said she saw some telling parallels between Netanyahu and a world figure she has made a lifetime study of, Adolf Hitler...

...Goebbels...

...Irving pointed out that Hitler, too, won an election by a narrow margin...

...But if Zyuganov is not the appropriate analogy, then who is...

...Hitler was a house painter...