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This is what you see when you go to the Guardian’s main landing page today.
If you place your cursor over the Jerusalem picture this is what drops down:
And clicking on the picture takes you to this article:
What makes this front page news is utterly beyond me.
And the Guardian chooses to make this a front page item the same week that it published Chris McGreal’s now debunked “revelations”, the same week a whole battery of articles were published in support of McGreal and the same week that Israel haters Rachel Shabi and Neve Gordon had articles in “Comment is Free”. And its only Wednesday night.
Now tell me the Guardian is not absolutely obsessed with painting Israel in the worst possible light.
This is a guest post by a CiF Watch reader who prefers to remain anonymous and has performed a stunning forensic analysis of evidence adduced by McGreal
Below is a copy of the second page of minutes from an ISSA meeting produced by Chris McGreal in his “memos and minutes that confirm Israel’s nuclear stockpile“.
This piece of “proof” adduced by Chris McGreal serves as the lynchpin to McGreal’s claims. Here are some observations:
1. This is the second page of a multi-page document. No inferences can be drawn from it without seeing the whole document, and particularly the first page. At the moment one cannot even see the date even though McGreal disclosed the date of an earlier meeting (June 30, 1975) in other minutes produced in his “memos and minutes that confirm Israel’s nuclear stockpile”. Is the entire document available?
2. It is plainly draft minutes, on which substantial corrections have been made. This is very common in the civil service of all countries. The original note was obviously not very accurate. It is full of mistakes and what originally appears there is plainly not an accurate account of what was said, and the same or another official has later tried to correct it.
h/t AKUS
First a story – a short excerpt from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield:
“….. ‘I wish you’d go upstairs,’ said my aunt, as she threaded her needle, ‘and give my compliments to Mr. Dick, and I’ll be glad to know how he gets on with his Memorial.’
“…… ‘Do you recollect the date,’ said Mr. Dick, looking earnestly at me, and taking up his pen to note it down, ‘when King Charles the First had his head cut off?’ I said I believed it happened in the year sixteen hundred and forty-nine.
” ‘Well,’ returned Mr. Dick, scratching his ear with his pen, and looking dubiously at me. ‘So the books say; but I don’t see how that can be. Because, if it was so long ago, how could the people about him have made that mistake of putting some of the trouble out of his head, after it was taken off, into mine?’ (emphasis mine).
“…. I was going away, when he directed my attention to the kite.
” ‘What do you think of that for a kite?’ he said.
“I answered that it was a beautiful one. I should think it must have been as much as seven feet high.
” ‘I made it. We’ll go and fly it, you and I,’ said Mr. Dick. ‘Do you see this?’
“He showed me that it was covered with manuscript, very closely and laboriously written; but so plainly, that as I looked along the lines, I thought I saw some allusion to King Charles the First’s head again, in one or two places.
” ‘There’s plenty of string,’ said Mr. Dick, ‘and when it flies high, it takes the facts a long way. That’s my manner of diffusing ‘em. I don’t know where they may come down. It’s according to circumstances, and the wind, and so forth; but I take my chance of that.’
“…’Is it a Memorial about his own history that he is writing, aunt?’
“…. In fact, I found out afterwards that Mr. Dick had been for upwards of ten years endeavouring to keep King Charles the First out of the Memorial; but he had been constantly getting into it, and was there now….”
In David Copperfield Mr Dick is depicted as a benign, harmless character who suffers from what would now be called intrusive thinking and preoccupation about how what he calls the nonsense in King Charles I’s head got into his own when the former’s head was cut off. Although Mr Dick seems not to be distressed by this, all his energies are bent towards keeping his preoccupation out of his “memorial” about his own life. Nowadays he might be recognised as perhaps having learning difficulties but left to himself because his obsession affected no-one but himself.
Israel, being the equivalent “King Charles’ Head” of the editors of the Guardian and CiF also keeps getting into everything – above and below the line.
That being the case, a far less kindly comparison can be drawn between poor Mr Dick’s affliction and the Guardian’s/CiF’s obsession with the wrongdoings of Israel. Mr Dick was, as I have said, a harmless character, but the Guardian’s/CiF’s obsession with Israel is damaging and dangerous because although the editors seem driven they also choose to vilify and misrepresent.
And unfortunately, their equivalent of Mr Dick’s kite does not take the distorted facts a long way. It leaves them to fester on line.
This is a guest post by AKUS
The Guardian has gone nuclear (“postal” may be more accurate) over the “revelation” that South Africa approached Israel in 1975 in an apparent effort to obtain nuclear technology. Unfortunately, its sources are tainted, as usual, in its rush to judgment once again.
The case the Guardian tries to build against Israel (in the hope of “demonstrating” that Israel is an apartheid state and a nuclear proliferator) is that Israel offered nuclear weapons technology to South Africa in 1975, during the period when the Apartheid regime was in power. It bases its claim primarily on a new book, “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa”, by an American researcher – or a researcher at an American think-tank, at any rate – Sasha Polakow-Suransky.
However, there are massive flaws in the story the Guardian is trying to sell:
1. Listen to the following interview with Sasha Polakow-Suransky on Al-Jazeera. No matter how often the Al-Jazeera anchor tries to get him to say it, Sasha Polakow-Suransky will only say that South Africa may have approached Israel, but there is no document at all which actually states that Israel offered or agreed to provide nuclear weapons to South Africa in 1975. The closest he gets to claiming that Israel offered South Africa nuclear weapons is to say the documents show that “the South Africans perceived that there was a nuclear offer on the table” (at 1.02).
2. In a blog entry on the Guardian’s website, A responsible nuclear power? , Julian Borger provides the following which similarly rebuts the Guardian’s claims (my emphasis added):
Avner Cohen, the author of Israel and the Bomb, and the forthcoming The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb, has taken issue with the headline of the piece.
While there is no doubt (as the documents point out) that there was a SA probe to Israel for nuclear weapons, which stimulates a certain opaque Israeli response made by the Israeli Minister of Defense, Shimon Peres, there is no proof whatsoever that Israel ultimately officially OFFERED those weapons to SA. In fact, I know that Israel did not: Israel neither offered and passed along nuclear weapons (and materials) nor weapons designs to the South Africans. Whatever the SA discussed among themselves in memos, and regardless of what Minister Peres told them, Prime Minister Rabin and the people in charge of the Israeli nuclear program (Mr. Shaleheveth Freier) were never willing to pass along weapons components and/or designs to the SA. Nothing like that ever formally offered to SA, regardless of Peres’ reference to the “correct warhead.” At the end of the day South Africa did not ask and Israel did not offer the “correct payloads.”. Israel did behave as a responsible nuclear state.
3. Pik Botha, former Foreign Minister of South Africa and someone closely connected to the South African Atomic Energy Board, responded to the Guardian claims that Israel offered nuclear weapons to South Africa with this:
“I doubt it very much. I doubt whether such an offer was ever made. I think I would have known about it.”
4. One of the documents provided by the Guardian as “proof” includes the following:
Here are a selection of deleted comments from the Younge thread:
Before…
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Before…
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Nothing like a Guardian manufactured anti-Israel “revelation” to get the anti-Israel juices flowing. Check out these comments, in particular those from a poster called tinkerthinker123, from the Julian Borger thread.
Was anyone really surprised by the Guardian’s decision to publish Michael Mansfield’s open letter to Nick Clegg on May 20th? Ordinary standards of decency would suggest that in principle we should have raised an eyebrow at this editorial decision, particularly as Mansfield’s agenda is so blatantly transparent, but of course this would by no means be the first time that the Guardian has provided a platform for supporters of a terrorist organisation proscribed under British law.
Despite the respectable facade and the claim to be a defender of civil rights, Mansfield’s apparent blind spot when it comes to the civil rights of the citizens of Israel – in particular, the right not to be blown up – is adequately illustrated by his statements against the anti-terrorist fence.
“The UN and other bodies have passed resolution upon resolution about these matters as well as an extremely strong judgment by the international court of justice in The Hague concerning the wall. But nothing ever happens.”
No surprises there then; after all Mansfield has a record of acting for the Palestinians involved in the 1994 bombing of the Israeli embassy in London in which 20 people were injured, of defending Tahira Tabassum, the widow of the ‘Mike’s Place’ British suicide bomber Omar Sharif and of acting for the families of Tom Hurndall and James Miller against Israel.
Mansfield has lent his support to the Boycott Israeli Goods and other anti-Israel campaigns and currently sits on the recently formed ‘Russell Tribunal on Palestine’ together with other such ‘objective’ figures as Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Ronnie Kasrils and Cynthia Mc Kinney. As president of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, Mansfield collaborates with employers of lawfare such as Daniel Machover and in his chambers (Tooks) presumably rubs shoulders with Michel Massih, initiator of the attempt to arrest Ehud Barak in 2009 under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Were there any doubts that Mansfield himself is involved in the lawfare campaign against Israel, this letter of his in the Guardian appears to have dispelled them.
A storm recently erupted at Leeds University when the Leeds Student, a student newspaper, published an interview with Sameh Habeeb, founder of the notoriously antisemitic Palestine Telegraph. When asked by Laura McKenzie, the interviewer, about whether the editors of CNN, BBC and Sky have a hidden agenda, Habeeb replied as follows:
“They are certainly pro-Israeli. I think you have to ask yourself who controls the media.”
The accusation that Jews control the media is pretty much standard fare for antisemitic discourse having its roots in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
However, when confronted with such a blatant example of antisemitsm, it should come as no surprise that a good portion of below the line commenters in the Guardian’s coverage of the incident were perplexed by the suggestion that Habeeb was being antisemitic (helped along by the fact that no mention at all was made of Habeeb’s connection to the Palestine Telegraph nor the latter’s virulent antisemitism):
This is a cross-post by Jon Haber of Divest This. This is one in a series of fascinating posts about the various strategies and tactics adopted by BDS’ers. For the rest in the series click here, here, here and here.
With the sides in the BDS conflict outlined in terms of numbers and organization, I’d like to turn the conversation over to the tactics used by those seeking Boycott, Divestment and Sanction against Israel.
Even through “tactics” appears in the plural, in fact the entire BDS project seems to be built around a single tactic with multiple manifestations. This tactic includes the following steps:
(1) Find an organization or individual that is self-identified with progressive or human-rights causes, preferably one with a history of taking stands on international matters. Ideally, these targets should have a track record of taking such stances after they hit “critical mass” in the media, rather than as the result of deep knowledge about the subject within the organization.
(2) Present the targeted group with the BDS case in stark black-and-white terms in which any information not directly related to Israeli villainy and Palestinian pristine innocence is removed from consideration.
(3) Push for the organization to take some kind of boycott or divestment stance, however small. Insist that the institution’s professed progressive and human-rights credentials leave them no choice but to do as the BDSers say.
(4) If an individual or institution says “Yes” to a boycott or divestment call (even in the tiniest way), broadcast across the planet that the group is now squarely in the BDS camp and is in full agreement that Israel is an Apartheid State alone in the world at deserving economic punishment
(5) Use the success obtained in steps (1)-(4) above to try to get similar organizations to take a similar stance in hopes that this will give the BDS project “momentum.”
“It takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.”
William Ralph Inge; Outspoken Essays: First Series (1919) ‘Patriotism’
There is so much that is just so fundamentally wrong about Azzam Tamimi’s CiF article of May 4th that by the time I had finished reading it for the third time, my built-in bullshit detector was in overdrive. In a way, this piece represents the essence of the Through the Looking Glass-style malaise which appears to have colonised worryingly large sections of contemporary British society.
Here the Guardian provides the sheep’s clothing which enables the despicable Tamimi not only to present himself as though he were some kind of moderate voice of reason, but also to play the victim card. Tamimi commences by recounting his version of a 2002 event recorded by the BBC, but no link to the programme or transcript of it is provided; a fact which does not appear to worry Matt Seaton in the slightest. In other words, the Guardian apparently has no problem publishing something it cannot verify, at least when it comes from this particular, but hardly uncontroversial, source – a fact which in itself speaks volumes.
From the recent whitewashing of Arab Holocaust denial thread:
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Then there is this comment deleted without a trace.
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Tainting Israel with the Nazi Label at “Comment is Free”
May 26, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: Antisemitism, Chris McGreal, Comment is Free, Guardian | by Hawkeye | 8 comments
This is a guest post by AKUS
The following is a fairly typical example of the attempt by the worst of the CiF commenters on the thread following a recent Guardian editorial dealing with the “revelation” of contacts between South Africa and Israel in 1975 to paint Israel as a supporter and practice of apartheid. “ibrows” (surely a misnomer for this ignoramus) even sneaks in the undeleted suggestion that Shimon Peres sympathized with someone who supported Hitler (and, by extension, so did and do Israelis):
This “Vorster-Nazi-Israel” theme may be becoming popular – it crops up in a similar post by “KMB” in a BTL comment to the article where Robin Shepherd debunks the Guardian’s “exclusive” story:
Unfortunately, of course, ignorance, bias and hatred are the alternatives to actually getting the facts for these commenters.
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