Israeli Freeman Movement's Continued Saga: Recruiting the Masses to the Cause Fails Miserably
Credit: see below |
For comparison purposes, I checked near my own location for all events, and discovered that tomorrow (Sept. 3rd), one "local" (Facebook seems to ignore international border and considers only distance) event is a group that is going swimming on the beach in El Biyada, Lebanon. This one has 263 people interested. For the less adventurous, a lecture by a visiting German artist in Tel Aviv's 'House of Modern Ceramics' has 15 coming and 78 interested.
In any case, Lior seems to have gone "full sovurn", as quatloos! calls it. He actually has an 'I am a Freeman' ('Free Man' in his version) declaration for people to sign (in English). Looks quite familiar -- it's the same nonsense as with American or other 'freemen'.
It goes without saying that this declaration, or petition, has no legal effect; but however meaningless, how popular is it?
Well, it is hosted on the website https://www.atzuma.co.il/ ('atzuma' means 'petition' in Hebrew). According to the statistics page of this petition, here, (scroll down a bit for the numbers - link in Hebrew), it has been up on the website since 28/8/2016 -- more than a year -- and reached a grand total of 100 (online) signatures and one Facebook comment.
Looking around at the 'atzuma' website for comparison, this is less than the number of signatures collected by a petition opposing the closure of a coffee house in Ramat Gan (109), or one asking the Jerusalem city council to 'Improve the 88 bus line's route' (183).
This is not because the site is obscure: it is perhaps Israel's most prominent social-activism site, and the most popular petitions on the website achieved nearly half a million (464,000+) signatures. Many others achieved tens or hundreds of thousands of signers.
It is rather typical of "sovurn" types to think, that if only they got out the word, everybody will agree with them, and that the Internet will cause the revolution. This isn't true, as can be seen by the utter lack of interests in Lior's claims. People don't agree with them because they are speaking nonsense, not because of "evil government brainwashing".