You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2010.
If your answer is “None”, then:
- You’re not a citizen of Israel.
- You may actually take the Israel section of The Guardian seriously.
This is cross posted by the blog, This Ongoing War:
Far, far from the attentions of the analysts and the reporters and the photographers and the editors and sub-editors, some 30 rockets and mortars were fired into Israel from Gaza in this past week.
The intentions of the jihad-minded terrorists are to wreak injury and damage, and very fortunately those intentions were barely fulfilled: a teenage girl was injured Tuesday in a Qassam rocket attack on Kibbutz Zikim in the Ashkelon Beach area (don’t feel bad if you were not aware – almost no one is, thanks to the minimalistic reportage). That missile exploded in an open field near a kindergarten, causing two other people to be treated for shock and damaging and damaging a number of buildings in the area.
The outcome could easily have been unthinkably worse. The jihadists aim to sow fear and insecurity. And in this they succeeded this week, as they always do.
Traveling outside of Israel this has meant we have not been updating this blog as often as circumstances justify. Hope to get back on track in the next day or two.
I was tempted to simply post the following image created by Elder of Ziyon without comment.
However, upon reflecting on the significance of the message Elder was conveying, it seemed more fitting to provide a bit of context.
Much of the American hard-left intelligentsia always seem so baffled by the fact that the U.S. has historically been so steadfast in their support of Israel. They simply can’t understand why, in poll after poll, Americans overwhelmingly side with Israel over the Palestinians.
Some, in an effort to “understand” this dynamic, resort to answers which call upon historic anti-Semitic tropes – such as the injurious “power” of organized Jewry (their control of Congress, the media, etc.)
However, for the overwhelming majority of Americans – who don’t read the Guardian, aren’t smitten with Walt and Mearhsheimer, and aren’t seduced by the vitriol of Glenn Greenwald – the answer is a simple one.
Though Israel, like every Western democracy, of course isn’t perfect, most average Americans instinctively know the difference between a democracy under siege and a reactionary movement whose values simply do not reflect their own.
Per Elder of Ziyon:
Americans are, far more than Europeans, a proudly and passionately patriotic lot, aren’t crippled by moral relativism and, most importantly, know the difference between a friend and a foe.
Yes, some things in life really are that simple.
To our all our friends who celebrate Christmas, have a very merry one!
I hope you’ll join us in sending Christmas greetings to the American, British, and other Allied troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Christian soldiers serving in the IDF who are defending freedom, passionately serving a cause greater their own self-interest.
Please enjoy the following short video, which maps out the very first Christmas through the eyes of social media.
This is cross posted from Richard Millett’s Blog
One of the main campaigners for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was arrested outside Ahava last night. After being taken to Holborn police station it was decided that no further action would be taken against him.
Pro-Israel activists went to Ahava on hearing that anti-Israel protesters have been congregating outside the shop for the past week without informing the police.
The protesters have been handing out anti-Israel leaflets, discouraging shoppers from entering the store and pressuring the employees.
Normal procedure is for the protesters to inform the police of an upcoming protest.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaigner approached the cameraman (me) and tried to stop him taking footage of the protest.
There is no prohibition on public filming and, as you will see, the cameraman (me again) was the one who was approached.
Then the campaigner inexplicably threatened to knock the camera out of the cameraman’s hands (20 seconds into footage).
The police asked to see the footage after which they felt there were grounds for the arrest:
The campaigner has never been camera shy before. He frequently allows himself to be filmed handing out anti-Israel leaflets outside various establishments that sell Israeli products.
He recently chaired a Palestine Solidarity Campaign meeting with Ben White and in the summer gave this interview where it is blatantly obvious, when he talks of 63 years of occupation, that his main concern is not “the occupation” but Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state:
Anyway, a very Merry Christmas/Festivus to everyone, including the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the other anti-Israel lobbies which, while claiming to be concerned for the Palestinians, just want to tear down the only Jewish state in the world.
You can try but you will be wasting your time, just like all those that have gone before you.
This was published by Hadar Sela at The Propagandist
About four years ago I happened to be sitting in a threadbare pub in a northern English mill town on a dank winter evening when two middle-aged, middle class couples sat down at the next table. One of the women was evidently a teacher at the local high school and she was describing to her friends a wedding which she had recently attended. The bride was one of her pupils – a young woman whom she repeatedly described as “my little Palestinian girl”.
Enthusiastic and detailed descriptions of exotic dress, food and ceremony were eventually interrupted by the other woman in the party who somewhat hesitantly expressed discomfort with the fact that such a young girl had taken part in what was, according to the raconteuse, an arranged marriage. Flicking the ends of her fuchsia pink and silver tasselled ethnic-style scarf impatiently, the teacher silenced her friend with the standard debate-killing, politically-correct slogan of last resort employed so often by those afflicted by normative relativism: “But that’s part of their culture!”
Earlier this month twenty-six Europeans of note, including Javier Solana, Mary Robinson, Helmut Schmidt and other former heads of state and dignitaries, sent a letter to European Union capitals and institutions demanding, amongst other things, that EU Foreign Ministers state as doctrine that the EU “Will not recognize any changes to the June 1967 boundaries, and clarify that a Palestinian state should be in sovereign control over territory equivalent to 100 percent of the territory occupied in 1967, including its capital in East Jerusalem.” The letter also specifies a time limit:
“It also asks ministers to set an ultimatum of April 2011 for Israel to fall into line or see the Union seek an end to the existing US-led peace talks in favour of a UN solution.”
Days later, European Union Foreign Ministers expressed their “readiness, when appropriate, to recognize a Palestinian state”; a move which was swiftly followed by a request from leaders of the Palestinian National Authority for a number of individual countries within the EU, as well as the EU envoy to the peace process, to join Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, the Arab world and some African nations in recognizing a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood without a peace agreement.
This is an HSBC Financial Service Company ad currently on display at the Athens airport. (h/t Noah Pollak)
Apparently the ad’s suggestion that women have more opportunities in Iran than in the United States isn’t meant as a joke, as I found another version of the ad online:
I guess HSBC considered, and then decided against, using the following photos (of Iranian women being beaten for participating in a peaceful womens rights demonstration) for the ad:
And, HSBC, no doubt, considered, and then rejected this one, too.
Thirty three women’s rights advocates were arrested that day in 2007 for staging a peaceful gathering in front of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran – a move, no doubt, motivated by the Revolutionary Court’s sincere concern that such protests would conflict with their film making.
This should of course not come as a surprise when HSBC, a leader in Shari’a finance, apparently lent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past to the Iranian government, is the bank of choice of terror funder, Viva Palestina, and is the subject of ongoing investigations into anti-money laundering and bank secrecy act violations which so far have resulted in a consent order with the US Treasury Department.
Oh and HSBC just happens to be one of the Guardian’s advertisers. How coincidental.
As a follow-up on our earlier post regarding the recent “martyrdom”(via a NATO airstrike in Afghanistan) of British al Qaeda leader Mahmoud Abu Rideh, note the astonishingly sympathetic piece the Guardian did on him in June 2009 entitled “A Day in the life of a terror suspect.”
Here’s some background:
- Abu Rideh had been detained by the British government in December 2001 for having links to al Qaeda. In 2005, after a British high court ruling, Rideh was released from prison but was subject to a “control order” – a house arrest which restricted his movements.
- In July 2009, Abu Rideh, with the help of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, succeeded in having the control order lifted.
- Rideh was said to have had close ties to the senior leadership of al Qaeda, including its deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and former leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, along with Abu Hamza, the radical preacher.
The portrayal of Rideh (who was then under house arrest) as a victim of government oppression by the Guardian – and NGOs like Amnesty and Human Rights watch – once again demonstrates that much of the British intelligentsia possess a seemingly unlimited capacity to cast reactionary jihadists as victims, as well as what can only be described as a willful blindness to the threat posed to Western society by radical Islam.
We may never know how many Americans and Brits lost their lives as a result of Mahmoud Abu Rideh’s involvement with al Qaeda, and his wish to become a “martyr.” But, what we certainly do know is that those who continue to make excuses and even advocate for such jihadists are not innocent in the crimes committed by those whose freedom they assisted in securing.
A Guest Post by AKUS
Not since 1967, when arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat invented the Palestinian nation, has such a discovery been made!
In the thread to an article mourning the Obama administration’s decision to finally see the light and accept that building apartments in Jerusalem is not the reason for the Palestinians’ obduracy, notoriously anti-Israeli Guardian contributors Hussein Agha and Robert Malley (I get the impression they always appear in twos – perhaps one reads and the other writes?), These concrete constraints have quashed any hope of peace, a remarkably revealing comment was posted by one “junglederry”, apparently in all sincerity:
It is not often that the sheer, abysmal ignorance of those sucking at the teat offered by the Guardian to legitimize the delegitimization of Israel is so blatantly apparent. So most “palistanis” are dead? Killed by Israel, no doubt?
Postscript:
Where, I wondered, is “palistan”*? Checking the atlas, I came to the conclusion that the remaining “Palistanis”* live in Balistan*, located on the West Bank of the Air Mikhail river that runs in Baluchistan. Most are dead, of course. So, as “junglederry” asks, what is it that we are all arguing about?
(*There is no “p” in Arabic, so so E. Ty. Mologi informs me that the “Palistanis” are properly referred to as “Balistanis”)
Like this:
This is cross posted from the blog, Sad Red Earth, by our friend A. Jay Adler.
Back in May I wrote about Gita Saghal and her eventual resignation from Amnesty International because of its unseemly association with Moazzam Begg and his Cage Prisoners organization. You can catch up on that story here, too. Now, Harry’s Place reports on one of the AI and Cage Prisoners poster boys, Abu Rideh, a UK resident who was under a restrictive “control order” from 2005-09, until AI’s “action file” campaign was successful in winning Rideh’s release.
Mahmoud Abu Rideh
According to HP:
CagePrisoners, whose Director Moazzam Begg believes that “securing the release of Muslim prisoners” captured during jihad is “obligatory” on all Muslims, devoted significant campaigning resources towards this case.
A few days ago, The Daily Telegraph reported:
Mahmoud Abu Rideh, 39, was said to have been closely associated with the senior leadership of al-Qaeda, including its deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and former leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, along with Abu Hamza, the radical preacher.
He was allowed to travel to Syria in September last year after promising that he would not return to Britain.
But an Arabic jihadi web forum associated with al-Qaeda reports that he has become a “martyr in Afghanistan” and was with a group of fighters when he died, the Daily Telegraph has learned.
HP gives a full account of what AI had every reason to know about who Rideh was. My May post was entitled “The Future of the Human Rights Movement.” For a movement as resistant to self-examination and altered behavior as any nation its organizations report on, that future continues to look a sorry one.
Honest Reporting has released its annual “Dishonest Reporter” awards, noting the worst anti-Israel bias throughout the year in the press.
The Guardian was one of the recipients due to this memorable photo, which accompanied the headline:
Eyewitness: Palestinian youth run down
Honest Reporting (which wrote an expose back in October persuasively arguing that the incident reeked of a set-up) noted in their recent Dishonest Reporters report:
When David Be’eri’s car came around the bend, AP, Al Jazeera and EPA camermen (among others) just happened to be “in the right place at the right time” too. Photographers and stone-throwing kids fed off each other’s presence, giving new meaning to ambush journalism.
This take down of Henning Mankell’s piece today at CiF was posted at Robin Shepherd Online.
Just sneaking in before the December 31 deadline, I think we have a winner for the 2010 Politically Correct Idiot Of The Year competition. Writing in today’s Guardian (where else?), we have the celebrated Henning Mankell, crime writer and dramatist. He is assessing the motivations of Taimour Abdulwahab, the Islamist terrorist radicalised in Britain who self-detonated in Stockholm last week, but thankfully failed to kill anyone but himself. What is so impressive about this piece is its all round, no-stone-left-unturned, right-from the get-go, cretin-level stupidity.
It all begins with the headline, and the subheading explaining that headline: “Stockholm bombing: We need action not just words to prevent it happening again“. And now the subheading: “In the wake of the Stockholm bomber, all of us Swedes must unite against Islamophobia“‘
If it looks like a dog, smells like a dog and barks like a dog, chances are it’s a dog. But this is no ordinary dog. This is the Hound of the Baskervilles.
The first two paragraphs simply sum up what happened. By paragraph three he is ready to outline his thinking:
“This is the first suicide bomber in Scandinavia and I am surprised that so many are – surprised. It reminds me of when the passenger jets crashed into the towers in New York. I never understood the surprise that followed. Wasn’t this exactly what we had expected? A situation where the extreme, the desperate and the furious attacked the western world that for so long had humiliated Muslim countries. An attack that would be understandable but nevertheless wrong and worthy of condemnation”.
Just ponder on those concluding words: “understandable but nevertheless wrong and worthy of condemnation.” It’s the quintessential statement of western grovelling: “Please don’t hurt us, please! But if you do, we quite understand. After all, you’re only doing this because we provoked you into it.”
Since the publication last week of CiF Watch’s special report on the situation in southern Israel, further escalation has occurred, but a search on CiF’s Middle East section – as well as the Guardian’s World News, Israel, page – this morning shows a total absence of any attempt whatsoever to inform Guardian readers of these significant changes.
Yesterday, Israeli media outlets buzzed with the news that Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi had reported that two weeks earlier a Russian-made Kornet anti-tank missile had been used against IDF forces patrolling the border with Gaza for the first time. This is the same type of missile which was used by Hizbollah against Israeli tanks in the second Lebanon war of 2006 and which is thought to have been supplied by Syria.
A Kassam rocket exploded near a kindergarten in Kibbutz Zikim at 8:00 am on Dec. 21, injuring a 14 year old girl.
On the morning of Tuesday, December 21st, catastrophe was narrowly averted when a Kassam rocket exploded near a kindergarten in a kibbutz close to the Gaza border just as the children were arriving. We are, of course, grimly familiar with this tactic of targeting educational establishments at crucial times of the day as used so often by the terrorists in Gaza for many years now.
The day before seven mortar shells were fired into the region surrounding the Gaza Strip and on the Sunday night, four mortars exploded near Ashkelon. In the three weeks since the beginning of December, thirty-one mortars and five Kassam rockets have been fired at civilian targets in southern Israel and the number of border incidents has doubled.
We can search in vain for the Guardian’s outraged article about the targeting of pre-school children peppered with references to International Law and Geneva Conventions.
We can sit and accumulate cobwebs waiting for Harriet Sherwood’s ‘human interest’ story on the psychological effects of years of living in the shadow of Islamist terror upon Israeli civilians.
We can look forward to the CiF expose of the smuggling route of weapons from Iran, via Syria, to Hizbollah and then to Gaza in much the same way as for years my little sister was convinced every birthday that she would awake to find a pony tethered to the end of her bed.
If this current escalation continues and gets out of hand, Israel will of course have to respond forcefully at some point in order to meet its obligations regarding the protection of its civilians. To the millions of Guardian readers throughout the world this will of course come totally out of the blue, just as Operation Cast Lead did at the time, because they will yet again have been denied the background knowledge which is so essential to a complete understanding of the difficulties facing Israel.
One does not have to be proficient with a crystal ball to know that the result will be a barrage of anti-Israeli sentiment and opinion which the Guardian will have helped engineer by means of its deliberate neglect of the obligation to “fair and balanced” reporting from the Middle East.
Among those few Jewish voices in the UK who go against the tide to fearlessly defend not only Israel but Western civilization itself from the rising tide of moral relativism and Islamism, Melanie Phillips is simply in a league of her own.
I was priviledged to be in attendance to hear Phillips speak at the Honest Reporting conference, in Jerusalem, on December 14. Here is her address:
We are living through a global campaign of demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel in which the western media are playing a key role.
The British media are the global leaders of this campaign in their frenzied and obsessional attacks on Israel. In the BBC in particular, such virulence attains unparalleled power and influence since it is stamped with the BBC’s global kitemark of objectivity and trustworthiness.
Israel’s every action is reported malevolently, ascribing to it the worst possible motives and denying its own victimisation. Instead of the truth, which is that every military action by Israel is taken solely to protect itself from attack, it is portrayed falsely as instigating the violent oppression of the Palestinians.
Tyranny around the world — such as the 20-year genocide in southern Sudan, or the persecution of Christians in Africa or Asia — goes almost unreported, as does Palestinian violence upon other Palestinians.
Yet Israel is dwelt upon obsessively, held to standards of behaviour expected of no other country and, with its own victimisation glossed over or ignored altogether, falsely accused of imposing wanton suffering.
Time after time, otherwise cynical, reality-hardened journalists have published or broadcast claims of Israeli ‘atrocities’ which are clearly theatrically staged fabrications or allegations. The false narrative of Arab propaganda is now so deeply embedded in the consciousness of journalists that they cannot see that what they are saying is untrue even when it is utterly egregious and indeed absurd.
The war against Hamas in Gaza in 2008/9 was a case in point. The British media had scarcely reported the constant rocket bombardment from Gaza. Most of the public were simply unaware that thousands of rockets had been fired at Israeli citizens.
But when in Operation Cast Lead Israel finally bombed Gaza to put a stop to the attacks, it was denounced for a ‘disproportionate’ response and for wantonly and recklessly killing ‘civilians’ — even though, according to Israel, the vast majority were targeted terrorists. Nevertheless, the media gave the impression that the Israelis were a bunch of bloodthirsty child-killers.
Israel is further accused of causing a humanitarian catastrophe in maintaining a blockade of Gaza. But there is scant mention of the many supplies Israel does allow through, nor the steady stream of Gazans being routinely treated in Israeli hospitals, nor the fact that it is Egypt which maintains a much tougher blockade on its own Gazan border.
This is because Israel’s crime is to defend itself militarily. To much of the media, Israel’s self-defence is regarded as intrinsically illegitimate. It is routinely described as ‘vengeance’ or ‘punishment’. Thus Sir Max Hastings wrote in the Guardian in 2004: ‘Israel does itself relentless harm by venting its spleen for suicide bombings upon the Palestinian people.’
Israel’s attempt to prevent any more of its citizens from being blown to bits on buses or in pizza parlours was apparently nothing other than a fit of spiteful anger. The Israelis were presented by Hastings not as victims of terror but as Nazi-style butchers, while the aggression of the Palestinians was ignored altogether.
In short, Israel is presented as some kind of cosmic demonic force, standing outside of humanity.
To what should we ascribe such unique malice towards an embattled and besieged people?
The first thing to say is that this phenomenon is characteristic not just of the media but the wider intelligentsia and political class.
In Britain, the established church, the universities, the Foreign Office, the theatrical and publishing worlds, the voluntary sector, members of Parliament across the political spectrum, as well as the media — have signed up to the demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel.
It’s the home of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
A Guest Post by AKUS
Having a friend who grew up in Sarajevo I was drawn to a Guardian article about the Kosovo elections, not normally something of great interest to me -Former US diplomat backs Albanian nationalist in Kosovo elections – in the hope of learning a bit more about a conflict that has always left me completely confused about who was doing what to whom.
Leaving the politics aside, I noticed that, curiously, the Guardian inserted quotation marks around the misspelled word “massacre” in the sub-header:
Perhaps this ‘massacre’ was not a massacre but something else?
The article included a picture of William Walker, with a caption that once again placed quotation marks around the word:
Now there was a bit more detail – at least 39 villagers were killed in a ‘massacre’. Unless killing 39 villagers is not a massacre.
However, the first paragraph in the story continued in the same way:
The reason I found this curious was because the Guardian, led by the Theobald Jew Suzanne Goldenberg, was at the forefront of reporting the imaginary “Jenin massacre” in the English-language press. The lie they promulgated continues to circulate on the Internet.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
Do Guardian reporters, who consistently demonstrate an egregious bias against Israel, truly believe what they’re saying is true?
December 26, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: Comment is Free, Guardian, Harriet Sherwood, Yaacov Lozowick | by Adam Levick | 27 comments
A few weeks ago, Yaacov Lozowick linked to, and commented on, Israelinurse’s widely read 6 Month Overview of Harriet Sherwood’s articles in the Guardian.
Lozowick argued:
But then asked:
He then reflected on the broader question:
I think this is a very interesting question, so, we’ll leave it to you. In addition to participating in the poll below, feel free to express your opinion in the comment section.
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