“If the Minister of Defense knows what a remix is, then I can go to bed peacefully at night,” Noy Alooshe commented humorously as he posted the above clip on Facebook yesterday. The video is taken from an interview Ehud Barak gave to Israel’s Channel 10. In it, Barak shows host Guy Lehrer his smart phone and tells him that he is learning Chinese from an online app. When Lehrer asks him to say a sentence in Chinese for him, the Minister of Defense demurs, saying that he’ll sound silly and “they’ll just make one of those remixes out of it.”

When the host then asks Barak if he really is familiar with Noy Alooshe’s remixes, he answered “of course,” and proceeds to sing a few autotuned lines from Alooshe’s YouTube hit “Zenga Zenga.” Forward readers will recall that “Zenga Zenga” parodied the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Barak is surely aware that Alooshe has parodied plenty of Israeli leaders as well, so he isn’t taking any chances. He was careful to compliment Alooshe, saying that “Zenga Zenga” was “huge, a real classic.”

It is not known whether Barak has already seen Alooshe’s newest remix, this one of sound bites taken from the Channel 2 news report from Beit Shemesh that has galvanized thousands of Israelis to protest against gender segregation and discrimination in that city.

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