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This essay was written by Hadar Sela, and published in The Propagandist
The recent incidents on the streets of countries as far apart asLibya and Bahrain, Tunisia and Iran have riveted the Western world to its television sets and Twitter accounts. The sight of authoritarian regimes gunning down their own people as though they were swatting flies has us outraged. Western politicians and human rights activists issue sober statements. Western journalists devote indignant column inches to the question of ‘how could they?’ But one thing is conspicuous by its absence; any honest and thorough appraisal of how the West has been complicit for years in ensuring that such human rights abuses could come about.
To our disgrace, we in the West have largely stood by silently whilst the world’s premier human rights institution, the UN Human Rights Council, has been monopolised by nations which belong to the cadre of those today firing on their own civilians in the streets of Benghazi and Tehran.
The Human Rights Council currently includes members such as Libya, Bahrain, China, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that its resolution of establishment demands that “members elected to the council shall uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights”. Iran sits on the UN’s ‘’Commission on the Status of Women along with Zimbabwe. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the UNHRC has been busier attempting to push resolutions on the subject of the ‘’Defamation of Religion than it has in upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in some of its member countries.
The dysfunctional nature of the UNHRC is all too apparent when one considers that human rights in Darfur, Tibet, North Korea or Zimbabwe have never been discussed in that forum or that the best it could come up with regarding Sudan was an expression of “deep concern”. In fact, the only country to have ever been specifically condemned by the UNHRC is a multicultural democracy with equal rights for women, homosexuals, religious and ethnic minorities which has a free press and an independent judiciary system – Israel.
That country alone was the subject of no less than 15 condemnations during the period since the UNHRC’s establishment on March 15th 2006 and January 24th 2008 – nine of those within its first year of functioning. Three months after its establishment, the UNHRC voted to make a review of alleged human rights abuses by Israel a permanent feature of every Council session. No other country on earth was deemed deserving of such intense scrutiny.
And so women continued to be stoned to death and homosexuals hung in Iran. Young girls continued to suffer female genital mutilation in Egypt and forced marriages in Pakistan. Women’s suffrage is still denied in Saudi Arabia and conditioned in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. Freedom of expression and the press continues to be severely limited in China, Iran, Syria, Libya and Yemen, to name but a few.
Meanwhile, the liberal Western world has stood by and watched these and many other human rights abuses continue and even exacerbate. In the wake of the killing and execution of hundreds of Iranians who demonstrated against the stolen elections in their country in June 2009, it was not the UNHRC which issued a (non-binding) condemnation of those human rights violations, but the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly.
Only months later, the UNHRC completed its ‘universal periodic review’ of human rights in Iran. Its conclusions were as follows:
“The Human Rights Council…Adopts…the report of the Working Group on the Islamic Republic of Iran, together with the views of the Islamic Republic of Iran concerning the recommendations and/or conclusions, as well as its voluntary commitments and its replies presented before the adoption of the outcome by the plenary to questions or issues that were not sufficiently addressed during the interactive dialogue in the Working Group.”
During the process of this review, the UNHCR heard from Iranian representatives, one of whom informed the council that:
“A salient feature of our constitution is its explicit and extensive reference to…the main pillars of human rights… Iran [has a] firm commitment to the promotion and protection of human rights …Iran is one of the prominent democratic states in the region.”
Female Iranian representatives at the review claimed that:
“The significant advancement of Iranian women’s status in the society during the period of 30 years after the victory of the Islamic revolution under the auspices of the strategic national policy and programs is undeniable.”
And even a token Christian was brought along in order to inform the UNHRC that:
“Under the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, race, ethnicity, and religion do not distinguish among people, bestowing superiority to one group over another.”
Read the rest of the essay, here.
This is cross posted by the blog of The CST
The Guardian (24 February 2011) carries a lengthy letter jointly signed by CST, Board of Deputies and Union of Jewish Students. The paper was under no obligation to carry the letter, especially given its length, but regrettably it has been framed on the letters page in a disconcerting manner.
Put simply, the letter was riskily headlined and lumped in with a wholly unrelated letter from the Israeli Embassy. (The entire letter and the Israeli Embassy letter are in full at the foot of this post.)
The CST / BoD / UJS letter was prompted by the Guardian having carried a pathetic quote from an unnamed source relating to Jewish concerns about campus extremism. Our letter began:
Your coverage of the report by Universities UK (Universities must engage and debate with extremists, report says, 19 February) quotes an unnamed“source familiar with the report” as saying: “If someone is saying all Jews should perish, that’s inciting hatred; if someone is fundamentally opposed to Israeli foreign policy, that’s a view.” This seriously misrepresents Jewish concerns. Most cases occur in the huge space that lies between genocidal calls against Jews and opposition to Israeli policy.
Our letter then went on to give recent examples from “the huge space that lies between genocidal calls against Jews and opposition to Israeli policy”.
Nevertheless, the Guardian headlined the letter as:
The space where anti-Zionism becomes anti-Semitism
The Guardian could easily have headlined it as “The space between anti-Zionism and antisemitism”. This would have been more consistent with the letter and no problem whatsoever (although it still would not have validated inclusion with the separate Israeli Embassy letter). However, they chose not to do so, opting for“becomes” rather than “between”.
The alteration is not huge, but it carries an unnecessary risk of misleading Guardian readers into thinking that this carefuly worded letter from us was a case of ill-motivated Jews playing the antisemitism card: which it explicitly is not. Indeed, the whole point of the letter is to show the complexity, porous nature and elasticity of the problem: all of which risks being lost when the letter is headlined in this way.
In this, there is another nagging concern, which is namely that the alteration is not simply accidental (or semantic, or pedantic, or however else you would put it) but that it also indicates institutional attitudes at the newspaper.
The question is made yet more appropriate by reference to an article three days previously, by Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott on the subject of “Misleading pullquotes”. (i.e. those juicy bits from larger articles that are plucked out from the body of the text to indicate the article’s content and entice the reader.) Chris Elliott explained that the Guardian had run a pullquote from senior Israeli politician, Tzipi Livni, “seemingly proving the case against Israel”, when actually the full quote (run in the Guardian) “is very different from that implied”. He concluded
To suggest that the pullquote represented an example of some institutional animosity towards Israel on the Guardian’s part is nonsense, but in this case it’s a pity that we gave, so unnecessarily, an opportunity for such views to be expressed once again. A salutary lesson for writers of both pullquotes and clarifications.
There will, of course, be those who take this “becomes…between” case as further proof of “institutional animosity” at the Guardian. In the opposite direction, there will be those who take it as further proof that the Guardian’s critics are both paranoid and impossible to ever satisfy. Personally, I feel that this particular instance is firmly in that Scottish legal no-mans land known as “unproven”: but I am struck by the fact that Chris Elliott and I have both used the expression “unnecessary” in describing how easy it would have been for the Guardian to avoid risking offence.
What, however, of the Israeli Embassy letter, that was carried under the CST / BoD / UJS letter, sharing its headline and sharing the same text box on the letters page? (Other batches of letters sharing text boxes on the letters page included those under general headlines such as “We need an election on the cuts” and “Cameron’s message of war and peace”.)
Is it just really straightforward: that the two letters basically belong together, because they are about Jewish and Israeli things – and that’s all there is to it? Nothing more, nothing less. Or, ought more, i.e. something deep and negative, be read into it? Again, it strikes me that both attitudes could easily be taken, but I wish that the question did not even arise; and that it had just been avoided by not sticking the letters together in the first place.
It is impossible in this not to actually cite the Israeli Embassy letter, which criticised a Guardian editorial (ironically from 21 February, the same day as the above “pullquotes” article) on Middle East turmoil that had included the claim
the cockpit of the crisis is Palestine
The Israeli letter replied (in part)
It [crisis in Palestine] is certainly the cockpit for those in Israel, but to extend this flight of fancy acros the world is simply pie in the sky…problems in Libya will certainly not be solved in Jerusalem
Perhaps at a stretch, an extremely long stretch, you could argue that the Guardian headline writer perceived the Israeli Embassy letter to be a diplomatically coded claim that the Guardian’s editorial had been so anti-Zionist as to be antisemitic. (i.e. “Enough already with the Ziocentrism, please stop placing Zion at the centre of your universe, its gone so far as to now be antisemitic.”) But really, the Israeli letter says no such thing. It is careful and precise in its use of language, just as the CST / BoD / UJS letter was: and just as we intend to continue being.
The sooner that the Guardian’s headline and pullquote staff follow suit, the better for all concerned.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned headline and letters, in full:
The space where anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism
Your coverage of the report by Universities UK (Universities must engage and debate with extremists, report says, 19 February) quotes an unnamed “source familiar with the report” as saying: “If someone is saying all Jews should perish, that’s inciting hatred; if someone is fundamentally opposed to Israeli foreign policy, that’s a view.” This seriously misrepresents Jewish concerns. Most cases occur in the huge space that lies between genocidal calls against Jews and opposition to Israeli policy.
For example, a recent speaker was advertised as talking about the “Zionist lobby” in the US, but repeatedly referred to “the Jewish lobby”, affording it conspiratorial power and reach. Week after week, students are subjected to tirades from resident and visiting academics who equate Zionism with racism, apartheid and sometimes even Nazi Germany – this, when most Jewish students are indeed Zionists, in the only real sense of the word, believing in the Jewish right to a state. Sometimes, visiting speakers are permitted to advocate or excuse terrorism, including suicide bombings, so long as Israel and Israeli civilians are to be the target, doubtless leaving their audiences to contemplate as and when such terrorism might be permitted in Britain also.
Universities UK claim that this is about freedom of speech, but this is at best disingenuous. Put simply, if a speaker is in line with prevailing political orthodoxy, then they will be afforded the benefit of doubt and be permitted to speak. If a speaker contradicts that orthodoxy, then they will often be run off the campus. Ultimately, it is mob rule, as the Universities UK report itself demonstrates with its final sentence, “permission [for meetings] may be withdrawn if adequate arrangements cannot be made to ensure that good order is maintained”. It is to the credit of the National Union of Students that it deals with these issues respectfully and consistently. If only their elders could do likewise, then campus would be a more inviting place for all students, including those who have the courage to speak out against anti-semitism and anti-Zionism.
Jonathan Arkush Board of Deputies of British Jews, Mark Gardner Community Security Trust, Carly McKenzie Union of Jewish Students
• Nations containing 187 million people, who have been under autocratic rule for 177 years combined, angrily take to the streets in areas thousands of miles from Tel Aviv. Yet apparently, “the cockpit of the crisis is Palestine” (Editorial, 21 February). It is certainly the cockpit for those in Israel, but to extend this flight of fancy across the world is simply pie in the sky. The situation with our Palestinian neighbours can only be solved at the negotiating table – not on the streets of Tunisia, while the problems in Libya will certainly not be solved in Jerusalem.
Amir Ofek
Embassy of Israel
This is cross posted by J. Christian Adams at Pajamas Media. Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. His website is www.electionlawcenter.com.
Today marks an anniversary of true bravery for the cause of liberty. On February 22, 1943, Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and Christoph Probst were executed by guillotine in Munich, Germany. Their crimes? Anonymously distributing leaflets criticizing the German government at the University of Munich. They were members of the White Rose, an underground student group that should inspire every American who loves the cause of liberty.
The three who were executed on February 22, 1943
The White Rose was comprised of a dozen or so University of Munich students, including Probst and the Scholls. They were active when very few participated in opposition to the Nazi regime. After German defeats at Stalingrad, many Germans silently feared for the future of Germany, but scant few ever put their lives on the line through deeds.
It is no coincidence those who were willing to actively oppose the Nazis were motivated by devout religious views. Like the martyrs of early Christendom and the American civil rights movement, those who have nothing to fear in this world are well suited to oppose evil and injustice.
The religious origins of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s active opposition to the Nazis are well-known and inescapable. But even Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who planted a bomb that almost killed Hitler, was a devout Catholic. He was active in a religious and philosophical dissident group called the Kreisau Circle. He struggled with the questions and contradictions of taking a life to oppose black hot evil. Of course Hollywood devotes exactly zero screen minutes to the religious motivations of von Stauffenberg.
Active opposition to Hitler inside Germany was a deadly and lonely affair. Yet today, we view these few souls, most of whom would meet gruesome deaths, as plainly right and heroic. Pope Benedict XVI captured this idea of justice revealed over time when he observed: “usually it is the creative minorities that determine the future” — another lesson for today’s defenders of liberty.
Between March 1942 and February 1943, the White Rose wrote and secretly produced anti-Nazi leaflets. They copied them on mimeograph machines and literally left them lying all around Munich. They stenciled anti-Hilter messages on the sides of buildings. The Gestapo went wild. Nobody else in Germany was doing anything of the sort.
White Rose leaflet four captures the totalitarian corruption of language as well as a view of Hitler justified by hindsight:
Every word that proceeds from Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war. And when he names the name of the Almighty in a most blasphemous manner, he means the almighty evil one, that fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the stinking maw of hell and his might is fundamentally reprobate. To be sure, one must wage the battle against National Socialism using rational means. But whoever still does not believe in the actual existence of demonic powers has not comprehended by far the metaphysical background of this war.
In March 2001, Justice Clarence Thomas spoke at James Madison University. He said he was fascinated by the history of German resistors. Thomas’ concurrence in the McDonald gun rights case most certainly was informed by a deep appreciation of what recourse free men have when mayhem, evil, and oppression rule. Thomas’ tour de force describes the plight of recently freed slaves reliant on guns to protect their new freedoms. He recalled the Massacre of 1876:
There, a white citizen militia sought out and murdered a troop of black militiamen for no other reason than that they had dared to conduct a celebratory Fourth of July parade through their mostly black town.
The lessons of the White Rose are not confined to Nazi Germany. We are not many generations removed in this nation from oppression, and in other places, a single generation. Our Constitution was designed first to prevent oppression, but also to resist it.
The fourth White Rose leaflet spoke of a need for a continuous watch, because we will never reach the End of History:
Everywhere and at all times, the demons have waited in darkness for the hour in which mankind is weak; in which he voluntarily abandons the position in the world order that is based on freedom and comes from God; in which he yields to the force of the Evil One, disengaging himself from the powers of a higher order.
Implicit in this assessment is that the world cannot escape a struggle between moral polarities in foreign affairs.
Today’s anniversary offers a multitude of other lessons. For starters, the power of language, truth, and courage are potent weapons to defend liberty. The central recognition of human dignity drew them to the active opposition to Hitler. The power of anonymous political speech also cannot be overlooked. In civilization’s darkest hours, anonymous political speech serves as a check on tyranny as our own founders presumed the right to bear arms also does.
So today, one might consider three young lives cut short in Stadelheim Prison in Munich and the courage they had to attack one of the most evil regimes of the 20th century. The courage to act and risk everything is a prerequisite for liberty to flourish. Remembering that they were not endowed with any particular human trait we don’t ourselves possess makes their sacrifice all the more extraordinary.
If we lived in a just world, where people didn’t stand idly by in the face of the continuing assault on Israel’s moral legitimacy, Author Ian McEwan would have reacted with outrage at demands by Palestinian groups that he participate in a boycott of Israel by refusing to accept the Jerusalem Prize for Literature.
In such a world, McEwan would have passionately denounced the letter to the Guardian from a group called British Writers in Support of Palestine, which urged him to decline the award which they characterized as “a cruel joke and a propaganda tool for the Israeli state” and which went on to denounce the Jerusalem Municipality as complicit in the “illegal colonisation of East Jerusalem.”
McEwan, in such a scenario, would have responded by noting that Israel, whatever its imperfections, remains a small bastion of freedom in a region plagued by despots and tyranny, and is in fact the last nation in the Middle East deserving of such opprobrium and sanctions.
In short, he would have turned the charge around and expressed to his Palestinian interlocutors how appalled he was at the mere suggestion that Israel, the nation where freedom of political and artistic expression is most arduously protected, should be isolated by the artistic community.
But, as we’re all too aware, the moral discourse about Israel often has little or no relationship to truth or decency.
McEwan, in accepting the award, found it necessary to condemn the Jewish state and – both in his original defense of his decision to go, as well as in his acceptance speech in Jerusalem – engage in the morally and intellectually unserious equivalence between Israel and Hamas.
In his defense of his decision to accept the award he said:
“I am not a supporter of the Israeli settler movement, nor of Hamas.”
Then, in his acceptance speech in Jerusalem:
“Hamas has embraced the nihilism of the suicide bomber, of rockets fired blindly into towns, and the nihilism of the extinctionist policy towards Israel [but] its [Israeli] nihilism to make a long-term prison camp of the Gaza Strip. Nihilism has unleashed a tsunami of concrete across the occupied territories.”
I have no doubt of Ian McEwan’s literary prowess, and am sure his honor, in receiving the Jerusalem Prize for Literature, was well deserved.
However, when it comes to making sound decisions relating to the continuing assault on a progressive democracy under siege – often waged by the most reactionary movements in the world – McEwan has shown that he is a political and moral amateur.
Project Interchange (An institute of the American Jewish Committee) has been doing stellar work engaging in soft Israel advocacy – bringing people from all over the world to see Israel for themselves, so they can view the nation as it truly is, rather than the though the biased, ideologically-driven, filters of the MSM.
If you like the film we ask that your distribute it widely.
The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker, unlike us mere mortals – preoccupied as we are with such banal concerns as human rights abuses and totalitarianism – “gets” Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
Whitaker, in today’s CiF, acknowledges that the Libyan dictator’s actions may seem a bit eccentric before insisting that there is, indeed, a method to his madness.
Though falling considerably short, on the political lunacy scale, of colleague Simon Tisdall’s passionate apologia for Sudan’s Omar al-Bashar, Whitaker’s sympathetic take on Gaddafi (who has ruled Libya since 1969) represents a classic example of the moral inversion which informs so much of the Guardian Left.
The following passage is typical:
“…mad as [Gaddafi] may seem, his actions usually have some kind of logic, even if it’s a logic that others, not attuned to the Gaddafi way of thinking, fail to recognise.”
Yes, clearly those of us who aren’t blessed with Whitaker’s sophistication, and penetrating empathy, tend to be distracted by such mundane concerns as (per Freedom House) Libya’s notoriety for possessing one of the worst human rights records in the Middle East – a very crowded field of competition.
In Libya:
- Political parties are banned and membership in such entities is punishable by death.
- Anyone trying to engage in political or civic activity is liable to severe penalties including arrest, detention, and possible torture.
- Abortion is illegal and punishable under the penal code. Anyone who procures an abortion is liable to imprisonment.
- Freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, and religion are restricted. Independent human rights organizations are prohibited.
Gaddafi, whose official title is “Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution”, has but one sin, according to Whitaker:
“he has lost touch with his people.”
Yes, Gaddafi has become so alienated from his national brethren that he ordered his Air Force to bomb, and direct artillery fire on, citizens peacefully protesting his 42 year rule.
In a 882 word meditation on the Libyan strongman, Whitaker didn’t even once mention Gaddafi’s brutality, nor was there even a cursory mention of “human rights”.
Yet, in fairness, Whitaker did acknowledge that Brother Muammar may not be perfect, and allowed that reasonable people may certainly view his sense of fashion as “bizarre”.
Whitaker’s empathy for brutal Arab dictators isn’t limited to the aesthetically challenged Gaddafi, as he’s also penned a sympathetic portrayal of Syrian despot, Bashar al-Assad – and, naturally, he’s nurtured by a visceral dislike of Israel.
In short, Whitaker’s fanciful musings represents another Guardian tale fit for a king or, at the very least, a Colonel.
The Guardian has recently been crusading against large donations from the London financial sector to the Conservative Party, describing in ominous tones the hedge fund managers who have passed millions to Tory coffers, and asking if such donations may influence the policy decisions of Prime Minster David Cameron’s Government.
Typical is a Guardian picture gallery, which portrayed, in unflattering profiles, some of the largest donors – often darkly noting their hedge fund ties.
Well, according to Guido Fawke’s Blog, it looks like the Guardian Media Group (GMG) has quite a cozy relationship with such fat cats, and indeed invested over £223 million in Hedge Funds during the height of the banking crisis, netting a cool £39 million – investments largely off shore from the UK and managed by an enormous, and highly secretive, assets management company (Cambridge Associates) whose client list includes billionaires and foreign governments.
Even more revealing, however, these funds are in addition to GMG assets held in Cayman Islands corporations where the rate of corporation tax is zero. Sources from Guido Fawke’s Blog suggest that GMG has between £300 million and £500 million held offshore. Such tax haven corporate vehicles are used to shield assets from tax.
Alan Rusbridger, Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief, by the way, sits on the Board which approved these investments – authorizing tax avoidance tactics which his paper has crusaded against, noting that such investments costs the UK billions in lost revenue.
In one Guardian expose, Brendan Barber, TUC (Trade Union Congress) general secretary, said:
“Tax avoidance is hollowing out the tax system. With the rest of us having to fill the tax gap left by Britain’s most wealthy, there is a real threat to the future of public services – especially as the recession takes its toll on normal tax flows.
The hypocrisy here is exquisite: a crusading “progressive” activist newspaper which routinely peddles in populist rhetoric about “afflicting the comfortable” and “comforting the afflicted” turns out to be quite comfortable failing to pay their fair share of taxes, thereby playing a major role in diluting the UK Treasury of funds necessary to alleviate the social problems they are always campaigning about.
I guess we can sum up the Guardian’s social mission this way: Do as I say, not as I do.
The Limousine Liberal’s defining modus operandi.
The following commentary on Peter Kosminsky’s documentary series, The Promise, was provided by the British-Israel Group, and is being posted in its entirety. (Also, see CW open letter to Peter Kosminsky, here.)
Channel 4 TV in the UK is currently broadcasting a 4 part documentary series “The Promise”, a dramatisation of the founding of Israel, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today, which is attracting 1.5 million viewers. The organization Beyond Images has issued a briefing to counter many of the statements and claims made in this inaccurate and misinformed documentary.
We, at BIG, feel that this information should be circulated as widely as possible.
Channel 4′s landmark TV series ‘The Promise’ is built on a serious historical falsehood about Israel
British TV channel Channel 4 has been broadcasting ‘The Promise’. And it is a landmark piece of television. ‘The Promise’ is a four-part, six-hour dramatisation of the founding of Israel, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today.
We have been watching it. And it is gripping. We are not surprised that it has been receiving very good reviews, and is a likely candidate for future broadcasting awards. Over 1.5 million viewers in the UK have been watching its two episodes to date, including – we assume – most people with an active interest in the conflict: politicians, academics, students, members of human rights groups, writers and intellectuals, diplomats and civil servants.
The production is superb. The acting is excellent. It is meticulously observed and staged..And it is also built on a major historical falsehood. A falsehood so severe that it undermines the credibility of its messages. Its director Peter Kosminsky claims that he “told both sides of the story”. But episode 1 reveals that he does not even know what the Israeli side of the story is……
‘The Promise’ describes the events of 1945-8 through the eyes of Len, a British sergeant who had witnessed the liberation of the Jews at Bergen-Belsen, and is later posted with British forces to Palestine. At a crucial moment in that first episode Len, together with other British army officers, receives a briefing from their British army commander on the purpose of their mission in Palestine, and the history behind it. This takes place shortly after the second world war.
The commander’s words are not intended as a partisan speech. It is the moment at which the British soldiers (and by extension 1.5 million viewers) are provided with the background to the conflict, and indeed the subsequent episodes of ‘The Promise’. Indeed it is the only piece of the script which endeavours to tell the story of how the Jews, the Arabs and the British found themselves in three-way conflict.
Here is what the British commanding officer in The Promise says:
“The Jews and Arabs have been living here in relative harmony for thousands of years. But our victory over the Germans has turned the trickle of Jews coming to this land into a flood. You must understand, the Jews see it as their holy land. But the Arabs, who have been here for over a thousand years, see them as stealing their land. Our job is to keep the two sides apart…..”
There you have it. The historical narrative of Israel. And it is a narrative which does not operate to resolve the conflict, but to perpetuate it. Ever since World War Two, the Arabs have seen the Jewish national enterprise as the consequence of Nazism. Without indigenous roots. And without historical legitimacy.
They build their sense of victimhood on the argument that they are “paying the price” for European fascism. Far from challenging this mindset, Kosminsky’s so-called ‘balanced’ narrative has reinforced it. Kosminsky makes no mention of the steady return to Palestine of Jews which had been carrying on since the 1880s. Kosminsky does not hint at the Balfour Declaration or other international commitments to support a Jewish national home.
Kosminsky does not recognise that Jewish national life had existed thousands of years ago in the land of Israel, and that the connection is a national connection.
Kosminsky does not pay any attention to the Jews’ state-building efforts in the period before the Second World War. And Kosminsky perpetuates a complete falsehood that the Jews and Arabs had been living in “relative harmony”. Kosminsky reportedly researched The Promise for over a decade. But has he heard of the Arab riots against the Jews of the Yishuv in the 1920s or 1930s?
Has he heard of the incessant violent assaults upon Jews building up Palestine? Has he heard of the Hebron massacre of 1929?
The idea that there was “relative harmony” in Palestine till World War Two is a fiction. It’s a fiction which Hamas and other rejectionists and ideologues readily embrace.
Meanwhile, the claim that the Arabs had been living there for a thousand years is also a massive over-simplification. Even the most partisan historians have to admit that Palestine under the Ottomans and then the British was not exactly a hub of Arab nationalism, or a focal point of Arab pride and economic endeavour.
While ‘The Promise’ is brilliant drama – and we will be highlighting its strengths as well its weaknesses in the future – there are plenty of other major flaws in its so called ‘balanced’ narrative and in its framing of the conflict. In subsequent weeks we will be explaining them. For now, here is a link to the programme website. We have quoted just one short extract from episode one. See for yourself: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-promise/4od (Not available outside the UK)
Like this:
A guest post by AKUS
I had to rub my eyes in disbelief and re-read the following in an article about the US veto in the UN.
on Ynet:
Nevertheless, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stressed that the PA will not boycott the US.
The PA will not boycott America? Initially, I thought the sentence had been written backwards. It appears it was not. The PA seems determined at all costs to alienate the Obama administration, swept up with delusions of grandeur in the euphoria of the events in Cairo and elsewhere.
Apparently, despite this fearful threat from the PA, withdrawn at the last moment, America bravely stood its ground and vetoed the resolution.
If ever a group of people seemed intent on doing as much damage to their own cause as possible, it is the Palestinian Authority. I do not think of the Palestinians as lions, but clearly they are led by donkeys.
H/T Harry’s Place and Just Journalism
In a previous post on the leading Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, we failed to note a speech he gave in 2009 where he argued, to a rapt audience, that Hitler’s annihilation of the Jews should be seen as Allah’s punishment for their evil ways.
Here’s the quote, and you can see the video below:
‘Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the (Jews) people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.’
But, it’s all cool, because the Guardian yesterday blogged the following:
‘Qaradawi…who was banned from entering the United States, had previously visited the UK in 2004 at the invitation of the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, sparking protests from Jewish groups and gay people, who regard him as anti-Semitic and homophobic.
‘However, he is also arguably the most influential Sunni Muslim cleric in the world and has regularly spoken in the past in support of democracy.’ [emphasis mine]
So, in the moral world inhabited by the Guardian, since he’s popular in the (Sunni Muslim) “Arab Street” how bad could he possibly be?
Further, it seems, Qaradawi’s endorsement of the Holocaust simply isn’t sufficient to confirm with any degree of certainty that he’s an anti-Semite and shouldn’t in any way detract from his democratic credentials.
(Also, see this profile of Qaradawi by The Investigative Project.)
“It’s the economy, stupid” is a phrase in American politics made famous during the 1992 U.S. Presidential Election campaign. Bill Clinton’s campaign manager had a sign with this phrase at their headquarters to stress to the candidate that, regardless of the issue being discussed, success in the election depended on making the conversation about the economy – which was in bad shape at the time, and represented former President Bush’s greatest political liability.
I sometimes wonder if Guardian editorial offices has something akin to Clinton’s campaign mantra – a note, not based on political calculations but, rather, maintaining an ideological edifice, reminding them where any conversation about the Middle East must preferably lead: “It’s about Israel, stupid.”
While such a scenario is, of course, meant in jest, I am at a loss to account for how, in the course of a new Guardian editorial (“The Middle East: People, Power, Politics“) on Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal and deadly crackdown against Libyan protesters, and the broader political upheavals in the region, they somehow managed to throw in this line:
“the Libyan leader may still be considered too valuable to lose, as US influence in the region decreases. Nowhere is that truer than in the cockpit of the crisis, Palestine.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” may adequately, albeit cheekily, describe the dynamic whereby otherwise reasonable people can attribute the cause of nearly any political crisis in the world to the behavior of the Jewish state, but doesn’t seem nearly strong enough of a term to characterize the Guardian’s obsession with Israel.
Arab citizens throughout the Middle East are rebelling and (for various reasons, some noble, and others, it should be noted, decidedly illiberal) attempting to throw off the yoke of despotism that has ruled the region, and the Guardian is convinced that the one state in the region which has, since its birth, proven itself impervious to this totalitarian impulse, is indeed the prime mover of the political malady.
Our previous post, cross posted by Divest This!, described anti-Semitism as more than a “simple” hatred of Jews as such but, more accurately, as a broader ideology – one which continually sees the nefarious effects of world Jewry in seemingly unrelated political phenomena.
Similarly, it seems, the Guardian’s continuous framing of events in the Middle East – which attributes most political maladies to Israel’s injurious effects on the region – is more than “mere” political hostility to Israel. It needs to also be seen as part of a broader ideological framework, one which continuously shows itself impervious to facts, logic, and new information – the self-correcting empirical mechanisms found in those not held hostage to such a rigid political orientation.
While engaging the Guardian in a battle over facts and logic certainly has its time and place, the Jewish community’s fight with the Guardian must proceed without illusions – free of the assumption of reasonableness which typically informs civil debate between two rational political actors.
The Guardian’s myopic and increasingly extreme political orientation can not be coaxed or persuaded but, rather, must be aggressively confronted and fought – free of puerile optimism in what will assuredly be a long and grueling battle.
This is cross posted at Divest This!
Given how often the topic is brought up in the comments section of this blog, readers might be surprised to know that in the hundreds of articles and blog entries I’ve written over the years on the subject of BDS, I have yet to accuse those involved with the so-called Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment “movement” of being motivated by anti-Semitism.
Part of the reason for this is metaphysical. After all, to truly know the motivation of those I oppose politically would require the ability to look into someone else’s soul, a gift I have been denied along with the rest of humanity. How much easier it is to simply point out the dishonest, selfish and bullying actions of BDS practitioners and allow readers to draw their own conclusions (or, if they prefer, guess at the boycotter’s internal motivations).
Another reason is practical. For in the last few decades, the Israel-disliking community has developed and honed a narrative that says every criticism leveled against them (regardless of its content or accuracy) is really nothing more than direct or masked accusations of anti-Semitism, designed to shut them up and smear their noble cause. The fact that this is simply another projection (since BDSers routinely accuse their opponent of bigotry at the tiniest provocation, such as using the word “Arab” in a sentence) does not change the fact that accusing BDSers of anti-Semitism (in addition to being un-provable) runs the risk of triggering this well-rehearsed martyrdom defense.
But the biggest reason I avoid such accusations is philosophical and to describe it I must again draw from that unending font of wisdom on this and other subjects, Harvard’s Ruth Wisse.
In Wisse’s groundbreaking work “If I am not for Myself” (the controversy around its subtitle subject: “The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews” put aside for purposes of this discussion), Wisse posits two different phenomenon traveling under the name of “anti-Semitism.”
The first is a garden variety personal hatred of Jews, comparable to other forms of bigotry directed at blacks or similar minorities, a loathing (like all bigotries) formed of ignorance and insecurity, either at an individual or cultural level.
But “anti-Semitism,” according to Wisse, also describes a fully-formed ideology, comparable not to other types of racism, but to the nastiest ideologies of the past, notably the Twentieth Century’s totalitarian movements such as Fascism and Communism.
Like these movements, ideological anti-Semitism provides its adherents with a full-fledged world view, one in which all of history can be boiled down to a struggle between those in whom all virtue is held (normally the groups adhering to anti-Semitic ideology) and the shadowy evil – the Jews – standing behind everything wrong on the planet.
As an ideology, anti-Semitism is a call to action, not simply a paranoid delusion. And this action involves organizing, empowering and (frequently) arming oneself to fight this hideous evil that threatens all mankind.
While cultural factors clearly play a role in this dynamic, a much more critical motivation behind anti-Semitic ideology is the huge gap between the power of the mystical Jews in the anti-Semites imagination and the actual highly limited power of real Jews. This disparity allows the anti-Semite to arm him or herself for a struggle against a foe whose actual power to resist is highly limited in real-world (vs. imaginary) terms. And thus, anti-Semitic ideology allows the anti-Semite to play the hero, while actually living as a bully. And once forces have been gathered far in excess of what is needed to keep down real-world (vs. fictional) Jews, it’s a simple matter of using that force to seize wider, even ultimate, power.
This is why the last century’s totalitarian movements, whether Nazi or Marxist, were either born or died steeped in anti-Semitic word and deed. And this is why this century’s remnants of those movements (in the form of Arab dictatorships struggling for survival over the last month) and the Islamist totalitarians who hope to unseat them all compete with one another as to who can brand their opponents as tools of the all-powerful Jews.
The classical Jew-hating vitriol spewing from the Middle East like a modern day Vesuvius (including widespread publication and belief of classic anti-Semitic text such as Mein Kampf and theProtocols of Zion) is not simply a throwback to 20th century or even Medieval hatreds. Rather, they are practical means of uniting people in opposition to (and arming against) “The Jew,” then turning those gathered weapons against any and all opponents who (as it always turns out) are secretly in league with Hebraic evil.
As I join the rest of you watching the melt-down in the Middle East, bewildered by what might come next, the most critical metric to watch is whether the parties that come to power do so based on a platform of opposition to Zionism (the latest metaphor for Jewish wickedness). For this will truly dictate whether the millions who dwell in the Middle East are on a pathway towards positive change, or another violent and bloody Dark Age.
Given this profound reality, one more reason to avoid accusing BDSers of anti-Semitism is that they are such small beer in a much more profound struggle. That being the case, why give these self-centered losers credit for ideology that may very well be beyond their ability to comprehend?
“If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” – Rabbi Hillel
Yesterday, Jonathan Hoffman, in a blog post titled “Just What Does it Take?“, asked the following of Mr. Vivian Wineman, who heads the Board of Deputies and Jewish Leadership Council in the UK:
Ron Prosor recently wrote: ‘Never has a British broadsheet so openly served the agenda of Middle Eastern extremism. The Guardian must be commended for its transparency — readers can no longer doubt its affinity for Hamas.’ Will you now call on the community to shun the Guardian, including withdrawing advertising?
The response:
We don’t support boycotts. Deputies can be trusted to choose their news sources accordingly.
An understandably exasperated Hoffman noted that such a response will be “taken by Rusbridger, Milne, Freedland and Co to mean that they can vilify and lie about Israel as much as they want – without major commercial consequences.”
In contrast, The Jewish Chronicle reported in September that, after leaders of Melbourne’s top Jewish bodies – Jewish Community Council of Victoria president John Searle and Zionist Council of Victoria president Dr Danny Lamm - attempted, without success, to address the “strident line” against Israel by the city’s major broadsheet, The Age, with the paper’s editor-in-chief, the community decided to sever ties with the newspaper, accusing it of “clear and consistent vilification of the world’s only Jewish state”.
Lamm and Searle said there was no one incident that triggered the boycott, but the paper’s coverage of the Mavi Marmara in May was the final straw. A front-page article in The Age on June 4 said the Israeli naval commandos “hunted like hyenas” before “tightening the noose.”
Of course, such incendiary remarks by The Age pale in comparison to what’s routinely peddled in The Guardian. During the “Palestine Papers” series alone, the Guardian likened the Jewish state to a “Moldovan nightclub bouncer“, provided a platform to a Hamas member (who issued a thinly veiled threat of violence), posted a political cartoon from a notorious anti-Semitic extremist, and published multiple letters explicitly justifying the use of suicide bombing against Jewish men, women, and children.
No longer merely a vehicle for anti-Israel activism, the Guardian (as this blog consistently demonstrates) is shamefully tempted by the most lethal political orientations – those which fetishize political extremism, and, most dangerously, sanitize, even romanticize, the use of violence against civilians to achieve political ends.
While reasonable people in the British Jewish community can certainly disagree over what tactics, on a case by case basis, are warranted in the continuing war against Israel’s legitimacy, when it comes to the Guardian the words of Charles Jacobs, co-founder of The David Project – an organization created in 2002 in response to the Jewish establishment’s failure to address anti-Israelism on America’s campuses – are especially apt.
The problem, as we saw it, was that Israel’s adversaries were portraying perpetual attacks on Israel as honest criticism – but were in fact carrying out well planned campaigns of vilification.
In fact, campaigns to delegitimize the Jewish state are impervious to facts, logic and reason; they actually thrive upon the Jewish community’s instinctive response, which is to defend and “explain” Israel’s conduct.
[Israel's] adversaries have no interest in honest discussion. Indeed, each time you prove a claim to be wrong or an overreach, another claim is manufactured. This would have been obvious to Mark Twain, who remarked that “lies can travel around the world before truth puts its pants on.”
The most natural and effective response to a campaign of vilification is to announce to the world that you are being vilified, and to turn the finger of accusation back on the defamers. Who are these people who tell lies and photoshop the truth under the banner of journalism and academic freedom and human rights? To win, one has to break the silence about them, the defamers.
It’s heartening that the Melbourne Jewish community decided to break the silence about their defamers in the media, and we wait impatiently for the day when the British Jewish community will reach the conclusion that their strategy until now (though well-intentioned) simply has not worked, and decide to shift gears and boldly confront, without apologies or qualifications, the clear and present danger they’re facing.
The potential consequences of inaction, to both Israel and the UK Jewish community, are simply too dire. The time for debate and reflection has reached its end.
The time to act is now!
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Telling the Truth
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Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
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Hadar Sela
The malice of the BDS movement
February 25, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: anti-Zionism, BDS, Boycott, Comment is Free, Delegitimization, Ghada Karmi, Guardian, Jerusalem Prize, Mona Baker, Nir Barkat | by Adam Levick | 5 comments
It seems that the pro-BDS group, British Writers in Support of Palestine, is quite angry that their efforts to influence Ian McEwan into boycotting the Jerusalem Prize weren’t successful, and wasn’t the least comforted by McEwan’s soothing anti-Israel rhetoric delivered at his acceptance speech, in which the esteemed author opined that Israeli settlements offend his sophisticated moral sense as much as Hamas’ genocidal founding charter.
Signatories of the letter include CiF contributor, Ghada Karmi, Mona Baker (best known for freely acknowledged firing two Israeli Academics from a journal she ran in 2002 due merely to the fact they were Israeli), and Shir Hever (of the radical NGO Alternative Information Center, a group whose leaders have employed Nazi rhetoric against Israel, and whose policy director was the former editor of a journal published by the terrorist group, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), to name just a few.
Their latest missive, the second such letter dutifully published as a full-page, stand alone, letter in the Guardian, lambasted McEwan for merely characterizing Israel’s policies as nihilistic, when he should have noted the Jewish states “colonialist zeal”.
But, by far, the worst passage in the letter, the one which shows the BDS movement’s malice and dishonesty, is the following:
While they fail to note which “activists” they are referring to – perhaps foreigners from groups such as International Solidarity Movement who enter the country to aid and abet known terrorist groups – a narrative which would deny that Israel is a nation which fiercely protects the rights of its citizens to freely express themselves politically and artistically can only be advanced by those whose capacity for reasoned political thought is subservient to a fierce anti-Israel ideology.
While reasonable people can of course disagree over settlements – or any other Israeli policy deemed inconsistent with the political aspirations of the Palestinians – those who would deny the progressive political nature of the Jewish state are not merely rational political actors whose views are deserving of respect.
There is a certain point where reasonable criticism of Israel devolves into hatred and vitriol; there’s a time when political and historical analyses of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict give way to distortions and rank dishonesty; and there is a space where pro-Palestinian advocacy morphs into anti-Israel demonization and just pure malice.
The BDS movement continually shows itself compromised by such illiberal political pathologies, and should be named and shamed accordingly.
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