When the budget committee tried to cut off the cameras and shut down her filibuster, Stav Shaffir turned to Facebook Live instead.
As unlikely as it seems, a debate in over the budget in Israel's parliament, called the Knesset, turned into a high stakes drama where Facebook Live played a crucial role.
It all started when the Likud party-dominated governing coalition put forward a plan to have Israel's budgets cover two years instead of just one to reduce the chances of gridlock preventing one from passing.
Ronen Zvulun / Reuters
But in the view of opposition lawmaker Stav Shaffir, there was a snag in that plan: the government would be able to move funds around in the budget's second year to cover shortfalls without getting approval from the Knesset.
"What I demanded was that every detail of the budget will have to go through Knesset vote — to promise that we'll be able to see the budget, approve it and protect public money from corruption, as it should be in a democracy," Shaffir told BuzzFeed News in an email.
For Shafir, a former activist, rooting out corruption was a big part of the campaign that led to her becoming the youngest woman ever elected to the Knesset.
Tsafrir Abayov / AP
When her suggestions were ignored, Shaffir and other members of the opposition launched a filibuster, attempting to keep the legislation from leaving the Finance Committee.
That meant flooding the committee with objections to every piece of the legislation, each of which had to be voted on before moving on to the next. By Thursday morning, she'd submitted more than 6,000 objections to the bill, enough that the Knesset's legal advisor was forced to step in to say that the committee had to be allowed to do its work.
Twelve hours after the session started, the governing coalition threatened to shut down the cameras broadcasting the debate, Shaffir said. That's when she began streaming the whole thing on Facebook Live.
"What they saw was a bunch of men in their 50s trying to make jokes of me, the youngest member of parliament," Shaffir, who lost her voice during the process of the filibuster, said in her email to BuzzFeed News. "They saw the coalition members attacking me personally and trying to scare me, using chauvinistic and racist language. Things like: 'you're just a kid, go play with your toys,' you're 'inexperienced,' 'you don't understand how things work here.'"
via BuzzFeed - World http://ift.tt/2ai47qB
Put the internet to work for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment