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This is a guest post by Professor Geoffrey Alderman
CiF Watch aficionados may be aware that I am currently involved in a spat with CiF resulting from Matt Seaton’s ultimatum to me, that if I write for CifWatch I shall be barred from writing for CiF, coupled with the sanction of “pre-moderation” that has apparently been imposed on me for allegedly comparing Palestinians to Nazis in a CiF thread dating from 22 January last.
Just for the record, I did no such thing. During the course of an online discussion on the balance to be struck between compassion for one’s fellow human beings and the need to destroy an enemy intent on destroying oneself, I indicated that the fact that the Nazis were human beings did not deter the wartime allies from destroying the Nazi state. I might have added that the destruction of the Nazi state undoubtedly involved the killing of innocents – think of the children burnt alive during the RAF’s attack on the port of Hamburg in 1943, or the deaths by drowning caused by “Operation Chastise” – the attack on the Ruhr dams (the famous “Dambusters” raid) the same year.[1]
Whether by accident or design, the CiF censors interpreted this analogy as a comparison, and (without giving me the right to defend myself first) summarily sentenced me to be “pre-moderated” – a sort of probationary status. Matt Seaton himself appears to have been unnerved by this, because as soon as the sentence had been imposed he emailed me “to say that our moderators report that they have had to place your posting in ‘premod’ because of a rather intemperate remark comparing Palestinians to Nazis … I hope the mods will swiftly be able to restore you to full rights.”
Well, Matt, they haven’t – yet. But, be that as it may, just suppose, purely for the sake of argument, that I had compared Palestinians to Nazis. Would there have been any possible justification for such a statement? I think there might have been.
From the thread following an article by Carlo Strenger entitled “The silence of Israel’s liberals“:
Before…
After…
Just when you think “Comment is Free” couldn’t get any worse, it now emerges that below the line commenter, William Bapthorpe, is back with what appears to be the explicit approval of Guardian management.
For readers that are new to CiF Watch, William Bapthorpe made the following comment last month:
While this comment was deleted and Bapthorpe eventually banned, Matt Seaton, editor of “Comment is Free” went to great lengths to try and prevent his banning.
Well it now turns out that William Bapthorpe has been posting since January 20th under a new moniker, LavartisProdeo, and he is unashamedly admitting that he is indeed William Bapthorpe.
Here’s a sneak preview of what you might find.
This is a cross post of an article by Professor Steven Plaut originally published in Front Page Magazine on Feb 16, 2010
Jewish anti-Semitism. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron or a Jackie Mason joke. If only this were the case.
Jewish anti-Semitism is all around us, part of the political air we breathe, a modern disease. In the twenty-first century the world is experiencing an explosion of it, a virtual plague. Among the most malicious and venomous of all bigots, the Jewish anti-Semites are at the forefront of every smear campaign against Israel and every attempt to cow Jews of America and the West into guilty support for those in the Middle East who would like to annihilate them. Jews today are leaders in the campaigns to boycott and “divest from” Israel, and in the leadership of the “Solidarity with Terrorists” groups. They make pilgrimage to the camps of Hamas and the Hezb’Allah, cheering on terrorists and their atrocities against Jews. They pioneered the smear campaigns to paint Israel as an apartheid regime and to stigmatize it as the moral equivalent to Nazi Germany.
Western campuses are crawling with Jewish anti-Semites. Some even hold leadership positions in Hillel houses. Many others are tenured professors. An anti-Semitic Jewish judge (Richard Goldstone) chaired a UN commission demonizing Israel. A Jewish member of Britain’s Parliament (Gerald Kaufman) compared Hamas terrorists to Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto and denounced Israel as a Nazi entity. Nor is this only an American phenomenon: a shockingly large number of Jewish anti-Semites are Israelis or ex-Israelis.
Most Jews dismiss such people as “self-hating,” but this term is misleading at best. These rogues do not hate themselves. Indeed they are narcissistic to the core. They hate other Jews and wish them harm. Nor are these Jewish anti-Semites simply assimilationists of Jewish descent who have lost interest in their heritage, become indifferent towards the history of their people and therefore casually alienated from Israel and its travails. On the contrary, anti-Semitic Jews are intensely involved in their “roots” and use them adroitly as protective coloration from which they advance their treasonous notions. In some extreme cases they collaborate with Neo-Nazis, Islamist terrorists, and even Holocaust Deniers.
In his CiF article of February 5th Adam Levick wrote “[t]o salvage its reputation as a non-partisan, charitable endeavour offering constructive approaches to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Christian Aid must attempt to develop greater accountability for such negative agendas within its organisation.” Unfortunately, I am not quite as magnanimous as Mr. Levick and frankly, I can’t see that Christian Aid has much of a reputation to salvage. For several years now Christian Aid has pursued a markedly anti-Israeli agenda and the objective evidence casts serious doubts upon the credence of CA Director of Marketing Matthew Reed’s response to the article in which he claimed that “Christian Aid has always been unequivocal in its support for the security of Israel and the rights of all Israeli people to live safely and securely”.
Christian Aid is part of the DEC which will be remembered by many readers here for its virulently anti-Israeli campaign this time last year which even the BBC found too partial to broadcast. CA offers teaching packs for use in primary and secondary schools in the UK which are hardly a model of a balanced view of the Middle East conflict. CA’s partners in Israel include Sabeel, Adalah (an organisation which calls for an end to Jewish immigration to Israel coupled with the right of return), PCHR, ICAHD, Ittijah, and the Alternative Information Centre which in 2006 received some 328,395 shekels from Christian Aid. Readers will remember that I covered the AIC and its links to a terrorist organisation proscribed by the EU and the US in a previous article. In short, whilst Matthew Reed is claiming to have the rights and security of Israel’s citizens in mind, CA’s mouthpieces on the ground promote anything but those aims – a fact of which CA must presumably be aware, and indeed condone, as it continues to pump money into these organisations.
Yesterday, Brian Whitaker penned a piece on the assassination of Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. As to be expected, such a topic generated no shortage of expressions of support for Hamas. For starters, we had this despicable comment from Berchmans who makes no bones about his support for Hamas as a resistance movement.
Yes. Peace to all indeed everyone except the Jews that this genocidal movement seeks to wipe out in the course of its “resistance”.
And look what jaw dropping comment it triggered (along with 22 recommendations!).
For the last three years my daughter has worked in the same country pub in a small English town in order to support herself whilst at university. By now, of course, she is very well known among the regular clients but also still something of a novelty in the local landscape due to her part North African heritage which has graced her with dark hair and eyes and the fact that her English, whilst good enough to both earn her a British degree and cope with the enigmas of the Yorkshire dialect, still has an Israeli accent. On Mondays she finishes work quite late and I always wait up for her to come home. This week she came in well after midnight and I could immediately tell that something had upset her. Over a hot drink she told me how her evening had been ruined.
A customer had come to the bar and as my daughter handed him his change after he had bought a drink he asked her “Are you sure you’ve given me the right change?”. She replied that she was sure, and asked if there was a problem. The customer then turned to the other clients at the bar and said in a loud voice, obviously designed to attract attention, “You can’t be too careful with these Jews, you know”.
This is far from the first antisemitic jibe my daughter has suffered whilst at work. Usually the offensive remarks are to do with Jews and money, but sometimes the subject matter differs. Once, a customer made a remark about her ‘kike nose’. Having grown up in Israel my daughter was not familiar with the word and had to ask me what it meant when she came home, but from the tone of the remark, she knew that it was meant to hurt and insult. What is significant in our view is that in none of the cases in which she has endured public abuse has any other customer ever stepped in to tell the abuser that such behaviour is unacceptable. Readers may wonder if we live in some BNP stronghold but no; this town is actually quite bohemian and is populated by well educated, reasonably affluent, middle class people with a definite majority lean to the liberal Left, including a high proportion of academics, artists, writers, musicians and actors. A reputation for progressiveness and tolerance has prompted the establishment of a large and thriving gay community in the town, and yet a young Jewish woman can be racially abused in public and no-one sees fit to object.
When I first came to Britain in late 2006, aside from the practical reasons for our being here, one other thing I was rather hoping to get from our stay was a little respite from the tumult of the Middle East. A few months previously we had spent over four weeks under constant attack from Hizbollah rockets and prior to that of course there had been the traumatic years of the Second Intifada. I was looking forward to a ‘time out’ from being a target of aggression simply because I am Israeli, and there was in my mind no reason to think that I could not achieve that in the small, quiet English market town in which we had come to live, where the biggest crises seemed to relate to the local council’s tardiness about collecting the recycling. It took about six weeks before I encountered my first ever meeting with antisemitism – a verbally abusive PSC campaigner blocking the exit from the supermarket – and I must confess that I was so shocked by this totally unexpected experience that I had no idea how to deal with it. What I did understand however was that just like back home, I had been a target of aggression simply because of what I am.
Reading Yoav Shamir’s recent CiF article last month I could not help finding some of his statements very problematic precisely because I know exactly how insignificant a role antisemitism plays in day to day Israeli life. Because one does not experience it personally, even when hearing about an attack on Jews in France or reading an article about pre-war Germany, it is still very difficult to relate to it on a deep personal level. Until, of course, out of the blue, it happens to you too. But according to Yoav Shamir, we have only ourselves to blame. “[b]ut she is a reminder of the vicious cycle that Zionism became caught in – the state that was supposed to be a cure for what antisemitism started, as both Foxman and Finkelstein are actually saying, has ended up generating antisemitism.”
This is a guest post by Bataween of Point of No Return
Leopold1904 must be a bewildered man. His comment, on the Uri Dromi thread, stating the facts of the 1840 Damascus blood libel – which Dromi had invoked in his piece on the Jenny Tongue ‘Israel harvests organs in Haiti’ affair – was deleted by the Comment is Free moderator.
Does Leopold’s comment breach Comment is Free guidelines? Does it contain offensive or personal attacks? No. Is it defamatory? No. Is it irrelevant? No, it simply seeks to expand on Dromi’s cursory description of the Damascus blood libel. Its conclusion, that the affair ‘restoked the fires of European antisemitism’, is unassailable.
I wonder what Seth’s next article will be about? Maybe this.
This is a guest post by Sherlock AKUS
Sometimes, Dr. Watson, some people try to be so fair-minded they trip over themselves. For example, take the curious case of “BeautifulBurnout ”, a CiF contributor, self-styled “Beautiful bubbly burntout buddhist barrister” and, it appears, one of the most prolific of CiF commenters (roughly one comment every three minutes on a huge variety of threads), commenting on Uri Dromi’s article about the Tonge affair, A Lib Dem and a blood libel.
“beautifulburnout” nurtured a belief that the Jewish media was responsible for the Baroness Tonge scandal …
But, to be as fair-minded as she would like to be, let’s start from the last of her comments (or, at time of writing, most recent – it’s hard to keep up).
“beautifulburnout”makes a sort of back-handed, rueful apology that manages at the same time once again to cast doubt on Uri Dromi’s impartiality regarding what, Dr. Watson, certainly seems to this investigator as an open and shut case – as “beautifulburnout” reluctantly admits:
Let’s follow the long and winding road that led “beautifulburnout” to this reluctant admission of guilt (I am going to cut ‘n paste rather than paste a screen shot of every comment from this point on but if you care to go through the dozens of comments this poster makes every day you’ll find them at here (although by the time you read this, if she stays on pace, you’ll need to get to page 6 or 7 or 10 of her comments). I have occasionally bolded significant comments I wish to admit in evidence.
In an article by Nick Cohen on torture that has nothing to do with Israel and nothing to do with Jews look what creeps in:
This is a guest post from AKUS
A new variation on an old age tactic of antisemites is now surfacing. I refer, of course, to the demand that Israel be required to form commissions of inquiry to refute any accusation, no matter how vile and unfounded that is hurled against it. Similar to the well-known accusation: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” thrown at someone not even married, Israel now is being asked to clear its name for any number of deeds it never committed.
We have four recent examples to choose from, but, in the spirit of painting Israel as badly as possible, why choose at all? Three at least have become part of the accepted anti-Israel dialog, and the Tonge affair fits right in:
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
Protecting Berchmans
February 23, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: Antisemitism, Berchmans, Comment is Free, Guardian | by Hawkeye | 48 comments
Look how “Comment is Free” allows Berchmans to post his revisionist views of history to fit his anti-Israel agenda.
Yet when this is challenged, guess what happens?
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