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On June 15 and 16 respectively, the Guardian’s CiF site lent its hospitality to Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, the Northern Irish catholic activist who campaigned against the British government in 1969 at the onset of the troubles, and Chris Doyle, of CAABU, the organisation whose remit is to present the Arab world to us in touchy feely loveable terms, and to constantly remind us of Israel’s villainy.
Bloody Sunday: Put Britain in the dock by Bernadette Devlin
Before getting to the article, here are some things we should know about Devlin:–
1) As an MP in the British parliament in 1972, she crossed the floor of the House and punched Reginald Maudling, whom she accused of lying, in a statement about Bloody Sunday.
2) She has a prison record,of which she is, no doubt proud, because of her involvement in what became known as the Bogside barricades.
3) On a visit to New York, she was given the honour of being given the keys to that city by the mayor, which she then passed on to the Black Panthers, in a deliberately provocative act against her hosts.
Devlin is given free reign by CiF, to paint the British government in the worst possible light, following the Saville enquiry into whether the 14 peaceful, unarmed demonstrators at what became known as the Bloody Sunday massacre were killed deliberately by the British government, whose “anonymous and brutalised soldiers of its alphabet army should be in the dock at the international court of justice in the Hague” and whether the “British government committed a war crime in 1972 and in so doing started a war”. The Saville inquiry took some 12 years, and cost the British taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds, and it was set up because the initial inquiry by Widgery was considered a whitewash.
This is a cross post by Andrew Pessin from American Thinker (h/t Akiva)
-Satire-
Israel breathed this morning. There was a quick intake of air, and then a gentle exhalation. World condemnation was instantaneous.
P.A. President Abbas decried the Israeli attempt to commandeer the Middle East air supply, and demanded a prompt return to the 1967 air distribution which Palestinian leaders had previously violently rejected. Iranian President Ahmadinejad interrupted his weekly call for the destruction of Israel in order to blast the Zionist entity for its blatant oxygen grab and call for its immediate destruction.
Egyptian newspapers detailed the malicious Mossad plot to exhale germs into the air and then spread the poisoned air via high-tech windmills directly into the lungs of Muslim children. Exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshal announced that in response to the Israeli aggression, Hamas would not let the Red Cross visit captured soldier Gilad Schalit. When it was pointed out that they hadn’t allowed such visits in the four years prior to Israel’s action, he snorted, “And now you see why!”
Turkey announced it would be withdrawing its ambassador, only to retract that announcement in slight embarrassment when it realized it had already withdrawn him last week, in response to some other Israeli outrage it could no longer quite recall. The United Nations General Assembly, after meeting for an all-night emergency session, called for another all-night emergency session. And the Security Council demanded an immediate impartial investigation, only to backtrack when it was informed that all its available staff were already tied up in ongoing impartial investigations of other Israeli actions.
Indeed, outrage at Israel’s action was heard around the globe. People everywhere exclaimed that Israel’s aggression was against international law, and then asked for a copy of the newspaper so they could see just what it was, in fact, that Israel had done this time. Others, more intellectually-inclined, asked for some links on “international law,” curious to find out, at last, just what was this special code which apparently all non-Israelis had secretly agreed upon. And, of course, there were numerous calls for Israel’s leaders to be brought up on charges of war crimes.
Loudest of these were from regimes as diverse as China, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, which took time off from their busy schedules oppressing Tibetans, Darfur civilians, women and all religious minorities, and their own citizens respectively to make their pronouncements. In fact, Israel’s action this time was so offensive that Muslim extremists actually paused from their work installing massive explosives in each others’ mosques in order to condemn Israel’s attacks on Muslim civilians.
The criticisms could even be heard within Israel itself. “How can Israel call itself a democracy,” Haaretz asked in an editorial, “while allowing its Jewish citizens to consume 75% of the air?” Arab-Israeli MKs signed a petition demanding that the Israeli constitution, guaranteeing their right to sit in the Knesset despite their repeated calls for Israel’s destruction, should be dissolved, preferably in favor of something more totalitarian. “On this day I am ashamed to be a Jew,” proclaimed one prominent left-wing leader, a man who had repeatedly urged all peoples to be proud of their ethnic and religious identities, except for Jews.
The other day we posted a cartoon entitled “The World’s Favorite Sport” featuring soccer players kicking a ball labeled Israel with an Israeli flag on it.
Well over at Elder of Ziyon,we’re directed to the following cartoon from Palestine Today that puts a completely different spin on things.
On June 18th, Friday, Jose Saramago died. He was a Nobel Laurate, writer, poet, communist and Jew hater. Saramango symbolized what happens when the line between anti-Zionism and all out antisemitism is blurred and in fact crossed.
In “Death of a Jew Hater” David Frum writes:
But unlike other European anti-Zionists, Saramago explicitly connected his dislike of Israel to his feelings about Jews.
In a speech in Brazil on Oct. 13, 2003, Saramago reportedly unburdened himself of this thought about the world’s Jews: “Living under the shadows of the Holocaust and expecting to be forgiven for anything they do on behalf of what they have suffered seems abusive to me. They didn’t learn anything from the suffering of their parents and grandparents.”
It was Judaism itself that Saramago blamed for everything he disliked in Israel. He wrote in the Spanish newspaper El Pais on April 21, 2002:
“[C]ontaminated by the monstrous and rooted ‘certitude’ that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God … the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Israel seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: ‘Vengeance is mine, and I will be repaid.’”
A few weeks previous, Saramago had visited Ramallah. The visit occurred shortly after the Passover 2002 suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya, Israel that killed 30 people and wounded 140 more. Saramago expressed no grief for these murdered innocents. Instead, he toured areas damaged during fighting between Israeli and Palestinian armed forces and pronounced to a Portuguese radio interviewer: “[I]n Palestine, there is a crime which we can stop. We may compare it with what happened at Auschwitz.”
Sounds like a familiar mind. Compares Israel to the Third Reich, pisses on Judaism from the perspective of an atheist sophisticate (makes no mention of the monstrous certitudes in Islam) and makes excuses for leftist dictatorship. The perfect personality for a Guardian eulogy which came promptly.
…He was born into a humble rural household in the small village of Azinhaga. The family moved to Lisbon when he was two, and Saramago left school early to contribute to the household bills by working as a mechanic. Gradually, he progressed through numerous jobs towards his central literary interest. He worked as a draughtsman, publisher’s reader and freelance translator, and in the editorial and production departments of a publishing house. He also worked on several newspapers, including a stint as a literary reviewer for Serra Nova and, after the death of the dictator António Salazar in 1970, as political commentator on the Diário de Lisboa…
…Political wranglings, and Saramago’s own uncompromised and uncompromising communism, were at least partly responsible for his being fired in 1975. The following year, he devoted himself exclusively to his books. “Being fired was the best luck of my life,” he said. “It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.”…
This is a cross post by GS Don Morris of Writing the Wrongs
Oceans of ink have been poured about the flotilla incident. By now, with the copious documentation and viewing of the video clips, the facts about the aims of those on board, their terrorist links and about what really happened on board, are gradually emerging. But the speed and intensity by which the world recklessly rushed to blame Israel, and only Israel, and the scale and venom of the reaction, has left me speechless. Until now.
I don’t know how to depict a world that clamours to indict Israel while exonerating its enemies, that uses double standards in promoting false and baseless accusations, and that has forgotten history so as to use the language of the Holocaust to portray Israelis as the epitome of evil. I don’t know what to make of a world that is silent when Israelis die in homicidal bombings or rocket attacks, or a Europe that tries to seek forgiveness for its colonial past by defaming Israel time and again and is silent when atrocities are committed against Israelis. I am still shocked by intellectual and cultural figures who ceaselessly denounce Israel, leading the charge for boycott and divestment, and seek Israel’s isolation.
It’s hard to understand why countries, journalists and commentators have turned a blind-eye to the obvious provocative nature of the flotilla, the role Hamas plays in the suffering of Gaza, or to its charter that calls for the destruction of Israel, or to the fact that when Egypt opened its borders with Gaza shortly after the incident, thousands of residents massed at the border, hankering to get out – only to be stopped by Hamas. It’s hard to fathom why TV channels, radio stations and newspapers have sought to paint a one-sided picture that takes no account of Israel’s account and defensive needs.
A clear-eyed examination of the facts would ask: if the Turkish convoy was only interested in delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza, why did it not accept Israel’s offer to peacefully off load the relief in the Israeli port of Haifa for transport into Gaza? After all, Israel ships into Gaza 15,000 tonnes of food and medical supplies every week.
This Friday marks Gilad Shalit’s fourth year in captivity. The Jewish Community Relations Council of New York has set up a website where you can send a personal message to Gilad which will be delivered to the International Red Cross. Copies of the messages will also be sent to Gilad’s parents, Noam and Aviva. Take a few moments to tell Gilad that you care by clicking here.
A Friends of Israel initiative has been launched setting forth seven core convictions. Here’s conviction number two:
Israel´s right to exist should not be questioned. In the face of a uniquely campaign of deligitimation, we remind all people of goodwill of the true historical context in which the State of Israel was re-established following United Nations Resolution 181 in 1947. We state emphatically that that decision to recognize the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination was not merely a gesture of compassion following the horrors that had befallen the Jewish people during the Holocaust. It was, above all, a recognition of the right of the Jewish people to establish a sovereign state on land in which they have had an enduring presence and to which they have had a historical claim for thousands of years.
Check out all seven convictions and add your name to the growing list of signatories. Click here for more.
Doris over at Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors has alerted me to another video just released by our brave Druze friend, Tiran Halabi. Check this out.
Summer is here, and the Guardian has turned its attention to the activities organised for the children of Gaza in the area’s various summer camps. In a collection of photographs the reader is shown summer fun with water, sea and sand which could be taking place anywhere in the world, but among those photographs we also see this one, accompanied by the benign description “A trainer helps Palestinian boys chant slogans during a summer camp run by Hamas at a school in Gaza City”.
However, the Guardian apparently sees no reason to inform its readers as to the nature of the slogans chanted, or the other kinds of activities in which children are encouraged to participate at the gender-separated Hamas-run summer camps, despite the ample evidence available.
No mention of the military training given to young boys, the mock kidnappings of Israeli soldiers, the promotion of Jihad and suicide bombing as an aspiration for immature and malleable minds. Not a whiff of the indoctrination and incitement which goes on every summer in recent years in camps named after dead or imprisoned Hamas terrorists , thereby raising the status of murderers of Israeli civilians to that of heroes and role models. No reminder of the fact that some camps are organized by terror groups of other affiliations and youngsters are encouraged to play with models of the types of missiles fired upon children of their own age across the border in Israel.
Here’s something from a brave Druze man, Tiran Halabi, that you will never see or hear in the Guardian. This is a must see.
This is a cross-post by Brendan O’Neill, editor of spiked. This article was first published in spiked on June 2, 2010.
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Gaza flotilla: invasion of the moral armada
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Many people are understandably concerned about the siege of Gaza by Israel. But the flotilla incident this week confirms that there’s a more pressing, profound and almost completely unquestioned problem today: the intellectual, moral siege of Israel by the Respectable World. There is nothing remotely progressive, far less radical, in the transformation of Israel into the whipping boy of a motley crew of Western moral entrepreneurs, radical Islamists and momentum-seeking left-wing activists. In fact it is fuelled by a quite intense hypocrisy and political opportunism, and it is warping the political dynamic in the Middle East, making life worse for Israelis and Palestinians.
Of course the invasion of the flotilla by the Israel Defense Forces, during which at least nine people were killed, was a deplorable and foolish act of violence. But few people have asked what is the real purpose of this ‘humanitarian flotilla’. The activists claim they’re only interested in delivering essentials to beleaguered Gazans. Critics describe the flotilla as an ‘armada of hate’, which is delivering materials, and possibly even weaponry, to Hamas. Both sides are wrong. These boats, which have been sailing to Gaza for the past two years, are best understood as a pompous, moralistic armada, fuelled by the self-righteousness of Western and Islamist activists keen to advertise their superiority over the new pariah state of the chattering classes: Israel.
The moralistic armada is a physical manifestation of the shallow Israel-bashing that has become utterly unexceptional and uniform in respectable Western circles in recent years. These ships combine the narcissism, self-promotion, pro-interventionism and, ultimately, the pro-imperialist bent to the anti-Zionism that is now widespread in polite society. The narcissism is captured in the fact that one of the ships is called the MV Rachel Corrie, named after the 23-year-old American activist who became a hero of the Western liberal media after she was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer during a Palestinian-pity trip to the West Bank in 2003.
This is a guest post from Margie in Tel Aviv
Even when Julie Burchill is being serious, her articles are delightful, filled with anecdote and personality . In an article last week in the Jerusalem Post assessing the attitude of the UK media to Israel I learned that “some of the broadsheet newspapers only really get excited – really excited, parasexual excited – about one thing: Israel behaving badly!”
Since the British media have taken the most negative possible view of the happenings in this part of the world since we defended our civilians from the Gazan missiles, I expect that they have spent the time being considerably excited which might explain the huge amount of time and space that the Guardian for one, has devoted to a negative take on Israel. The documenting of the ballyhooed voyage of the Mavi Marmara was given royal Guardian treatment until the evidence mounted up overwhelmingly that Israel was (as usual) telling the truth. This included an hour-long video which was released by the NYTimes where a bit of careful listening proved that the attack on the Israeli soldiers was pre-planned. Watch and listen to it here where AKUS has highlighted the voices and transcribed the dialogue. The Guardian, it seems, doesn’t ‘’do’’ apologies. Neither does it ‘’do’’ approval of Israel. It reverted to the subject with an accusation made only in print though not officially to Israel’s police that Israeli soldiers used some flotilla dupes’ debit cards.
I wonder whether anybody important approved Greenslade’s blog where once again the photographs discussed make it clear that it was Israel telling the truth and not Turkey or the media-struck dupes who gave interviews about the bad bad bad Israelis. Turks were angered to see what these photographs revealed about the jihadis on board, as Greenslade says
“Pro-government newspapers immediately accused the Dogan group of playing into Israel’s hands by publishing the photos.”
Watch this video of Mark Regev being interviewed by Jon Snow, also discussed by Ms Burchill.
Snow (‘’a rather strange man”), completely convinced of Israel’s guilt though the only information he had was what was in the public domain spiced generously by his own adherence to the UK media’s assessment of Israel, asks Regev in schoolmasterly hectoring tones whether Israel will behave as Snow would wish in the future.
Do yourself a favour and read Burchill’s description of the background to the interview. The whole article is at the same time refreshing common sense about the situation and an exposure of the ridiculous lengths to which the UK media will go in pursuit of their goal of the demonising of Israel.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
Putting things into perspective
June 22, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: Comment is Free, Emmanuel affair, Guardian, Rachel Shabi | by Hawkeye | 60 comments
This is a guest post from Davka
Last week some 100,000 orthodox Jews paraded through the streets of Jerusalem in support of parents wishing to set up a breakaway ‘Ashkenazi’ ultra-orthodox school in the town of Emmanuel – one of the largest demonstrations ever held in Israel.
Like much of the liberal press in Israel and abroad, Rachel Shabi’s Comment is Free piece has spun the Emmanuel affair as an example of ‘discrimination on grounds of skin colour’. While there is never any justification for racism, It is much more complex than that. Some 25 parents who are being ordered to jail for contempt of court are themselves Sephardi, indicating that the affair has more to do with fanatical religious observance than racism.
The tired old charge that this is another example of the ‘Ashkenazi’ establishment ‘s institutionalised discrmination against disadvantaged Sephardim no longer sticks: the Israeli establishment has long ceased to be Ashkenazi, and ethnic differences, with intermarriage running at 25 percent, are increasingly blurred. Jews from Arab and Muslim countries are not some marginalised minority. They account for fifty percent of the population. Sephardim or Mizrahim are broadly represented, have achieved high office in government and have held every ministerial post except prime minister. Neither does the accusation that Israel is hypocritically doing nothing to combat discrimination hold water: plenty of NGOS are working in Israel to bridge the economic and educational gap.
Let’s get some sense of perspective: the Emmanuel affair is a controversy that concerns an ultra-ultra-orthodox sect, the Slonim Hassidim. It affects the extreme ultra-orthodox fringe of Israeli society, one of the few sectors where Ashkenazi-Sephardi differences still matter. It is irrelevant to the vast majority of Israelis.
Cultural differences seem to be the main factor here – while more traditionally observant than Ashkenazim, Sephardim have always been more open to outside influences, while ultra-orthodox Ashkenazim have tended to look inward and cut themselves off from the outside world.
Maimonides, the great medieval rabbi and philosopher, was also physician to Saladdin. This sort of typical Sephardi synthesis of the spiritual and the worldly never existed in the shtetls of eastern Europe. Had Maimonides been alive today, he might well have used the internet and watched TV.
In the Emmanuel case, the ultra-orthodox Ashkenazi parents’ main gripe seems to be that the Sephardi girls, by and large, are not observant enough for their standards. It may all boil down to something as basic as whether the girls are being corrupted by watching TV at home, or whether they keep their blouses buttoned up to the top.
However, the intervention of the Israeli courts has polarised opinion, and politicised an issue that should and could have been settled well away from the glare of international publicity. They are right to insist that a state-funded school must abide by non-discriminatory admissions criteria. But the Israeli Supreme Court should be criticised for handing down draconian jail sentences and insisting on their enforcement. Their heavy-handed approach has only created martyrs. It has forced a confrontation between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’. No one doubts that this serious social faultline in Israeli society needs urgent attention. The ultra-orthodox are one of the fastest growing sectors, but are resented by secular Israelis for not serving in the army or holding down productive jobs.
The very root of the problem, highlighted by the Emmanuel affair, is this: the Sephardi orthodox simply do not have an adequate educational infrastructure of their own. Although the religious Sephardi party Shas has improved matters, Sephardim, driven out from Arab countries in the last 50 years, are still suffering the effects of the destruction of their orthodox heritage. That’s why many ultra-orthodox Sephardim have adopted Yiddish and Ashkenazi orthodox customs – they have become ‘lithuanianised’, as the academic Shmuel Trigano puts it. Religious Sephardim need to be empowered to teach their own Sephardi rich culture and brand of orthodoxy.
The Slonim Hassidim should be encouraged to set up their own private school. This school would have every right to its own admissions policy, but not at the Israeli taxpayer’s expense. This is broadly the line taken by the Sephardi orthodox party Shas . As one secular professor has pointed out, nobody objected to Shas setting up its own Sephardi-only schools: it’s positive discrimination, not racism.
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