Israeli Soldier Banned From Poetry Reading Because 'It Would Undermine The Status Of The Fighter'

An Israeli soldier has been banned from reading his poetry out on the radio – for fear it will undermine the army’s manliness.

Earlier this month, a combat soldier from the Israel Defence Force (IDF) Nahal battalion was invited to read some verse he had written on a weekly Army Radio programme entitled Books, Gentlemen, Books.

The unnamed soldier was en route to the studios when he was contacted by a brigade spokesman who told him he could not appear on the programme because it would “ruin the image of the combat soldier,” Haaretz reports.

Despite his arguments to the contrary, officers insisted it would “undermine the status of the fighter”.

As the Independent points out:

“Can anyone really say that John McCrae was a wuss when he wrote ‘In Flanders Fields’ and before dying of pneumonia on a French battlefield in 1918? Or that Wilfred Owen was a bit wet as he wrote his famous works before being killed a week before the end of the First World War?”

The IDF appears to be undergoing something of an image crisis of late, with a group of female recruits of the force being “disciplined” for posting raunchy pictures of themselves on Facebook.

And last week a video of half-naked female Israeli soldiers filmed dancing around a rifle emerged online.

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