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“The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.” – from the definition of “Newspeak” in George Orwell’s dystopia, 1984.
Here’s a quintessentially Guardian headline, via a Reuters story, on the Palestinian policemen who opened fire without cause on Jewish civilians who had worshiped at Joseph’s Tomb:
For those unschooled in the Guardian Left strategy when events force them to report on innocent Jews murdered by Palestinians, see our previous post which listed and expanded upon the four main rules using, as a helpful illustration, Conal Urquhart’s report on the terrorist attack in Jerusalem.
Here are the rules:
1: Never use the word “terrorist” or “terrorism” as such language is inherently loaded, and influenced by one’s subjective opinion on how to define the word.
2. Use passive language which may obscure the fact that an intentional act of violence was perpetrated by Palestinians against innocent Israeli civilians:
3: Use vague language meant to avoid, whenever possible, reaching even the most obvious (politically inconvenient) conclusions regarding such attacks:
4. Deflect responsibility from the terrorists who everyone knows committed the act by changing the subject or blaming Israel and blurring the causality:
In looking at the headline the first thing which jumps out is rule #1, as you’d have no idea from reading the headline that the “Policemen” who murdered an innocent Israeli civilian was a Palestinian Authority Policeman.
Moving along, we see #3 employed in reference to the “West Bank Holy Site”. Unless there’s a hitherto unknown distinct West Bank religion, with its own sacred sites, it would seem that the “Holy Site” referred to is a site holy to Jews, Joseph’s Tomb.
Also, in the sub-heading, rule #4 applies, as we are told that Israeli victims who had gone to Joseph’s Tomb were there “without permission”, thus blurring causality and deflecting responsibility for the attack – the mere presence of Jews, of course, acting as sufficient provocation for Palestinian gunfire.
Finally, here’s what a headline (and accompanying text) about the incident would possibly look like if written by an editor free of such anti-Zionist ideological conditioning.
To all of our friends celebrating Easter, CiF Watch wishes you a joyous holiday!
Which anti-Israel blogs do the Guardian’s editors read? Whilst the comprehensive answer to that question remains a mystery, we may have been privy to a little insight on that subject this weekend.
On April 24th an article was published on CiF by one Mohammed Talat. All well and good, except that the very same article appeared four days previously on the virulently anti-Israel blog ‘Mondoweiss’. Different title, a few minor editorial changes, but essentially this is exactly the same piece.
Who is Mohammed Talat? According to his CiF bio, he is “an assistant professor of civil engineering at Cairo University and a UC Berkeley alumnus”. If he is the same Mohammed Talat as this one, (as appears to be the case) then he is also a member of the benign-sounding ‘March 9th Movement for Egyptian University Independence’. Hamdy Qandil, founder of the March 9th movement, is a supporter of Hamas and Hizbollah and an opponent of normalisation with Israel. Dr. Mohammed Abdul-Ghar, its leader, is also an official of the ‘National Association of Change‘ which advises Mohamed ElBaradei and the Muslim Brotherhood.
For the fortunate few who have yet to become acquainted with the ‘Mondoweiss’ blog, it describes itself thus:
Mondoweiss is a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective.
It has four principal aims:
- To publish important developments touching on Israel/Palestine, the American Jewish community and the shifting debate over US foreign policy in a timely fashion.
- To publish a diversity of voices to promote dialogue on these important issues.
- To foster the movement for greater fairness and justice for Palestinians in American foreign policy.
- To offer alternatives to pro-Zionist ideology as a basis for American Jewish identity.
Biography
This blog is maintained by Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz. Weiss is 55 and lives in New York state. Horowitz is 37 and lives in New York City.
We maintain this blog because of 9/11, Iraq, Gaza, the Nakba, the struggling people of Israel and Palestine, and our Jewish background.
So ‘progressive’ is the anti-Zionist fringe blog ‘Mondoweiss’ that it promotes BDS and its high priest Omar Barghouti, is a major advocate of the Goldstone Report and has defended Max Blumenthal, who recently threw in his lot with the Iranian government’s ‘Press TV’, and routinely advances anti-Semitic tropes about the injurious effects of Jewish power on American foreign policy.
In fact, it is precisely the sort of far Left anti-Zionist port of call that is a gift that keeps on giving to those who aspire to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel, particularly if some self-flagellating faux-kosher back-up is required.
So it would probably have been more surprising to discover that Guardian staff were not reading this blog, but the question that remains is why CiF gave no credit to ‘Mondoweiss’ for this article by Talat. Surely they can’t be worried that their reading habits would make them a laughing-stock among their own audience?
The demonization of Israel in the Middle East is so pervasive – bigotry embedded in the very fabric of their societies – that even relative liberals can’t avoid expressing hateful invectives against the Jewish state even as they nominally support the implementation of Israeli-style democratic values.
In “Jailing Maikel Nabil betrays the Egyptian people’s revolution“, CiF, April 24, Mohammad Talat, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Cairo University, condemns the arrest and conviction of Egyptian blogger, and pro-Israel activist, Maikel Nabil, who was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment on 10 April by a military tribunal on the charge of “insulting the army.
Talat – in an essay curiously cross posted by the Jewish anti-Zionist hate site, Mondoweiss – noted Nabil’s “crime”,
“On 4 February, he uploaded a YouTube video asking his “Israeli friends” to support the Egyptian people’s demand for democracy, because “democracy, human rights and women’s rights are basic Israeli values”. He promised that this would end the cold peace and usher in a new era of real peace, concluding that “democracies do not fight each other”.
Talat then condemned Nabil’s persecution:
In post-Mubarak Egypt, I like to think that dissent gets treated by reason, not silencing. Maikel Nabil deserves a live TV interview, not a prison cell.
But then pivoted to distance himself from Nabil’s political apostasy.
I’d like to see how he’d reconcile his praise of Israel’s democratic values with its reality of systematic ethnic discrimination; his claim of pacifism with Israel’s perpetual militarism; his call for abolishing the one-year mandatory service for non-exempt Egyptian male college graduates…with Israel’s two to three-year service for all high-school graduates, male and female, in which their innocence is wasted humiliating and shooting at civilians” [emphasis mine]
Talat then lists the ways Israel can reconcile with Egypt:
The only meaningful way Israelis can build bridges with post-Mubarak Egypt is by invoking justice, not power….come clean and pay reparations for the murders of Egyptian PoWs in the six-day war of 1967; for the subsequent pillaging of Sinai resources; for the bombing of Bahr el-Baqar primary school in 1970; and push for renegotiating the Camp David accords, which most Egyptians regard as instituting an unfair and undignified power dynamic.
Clearly, to maintain any credibility in Egyptian society one must continue to rewrite history as to avoid learning even the most obvious political lessons of their destructive past. Such fictions include presenting Egypt as the victim of the Six Day War, a war they initiated in cooperation with five other Arab states, the aim of which was spelled out by Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser to cheering masses in Cairo days before the conflict:
“Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight . . . The mining of Sharm el Sheikh is a confrontation with Israel. Adopting this measure obligates us to be ready to embark on a general war with Israel.” – Nasser, May 27, 1967
But, in the alternative reality inhabited by even relatively progressive voices like Talat, there is never even a slight learning curve. Arabs are immutable victims of Israeli aggression.
As, seemingly, the “humiliation” associated with the mere suggestion of Jewish or Israeli superiority is too much to bear for a true Arab nationalist, Talat closes by lecturing the Jewish state:
“[Israelis need] to take inspiration [from the Arab masses revolting against their despotic leaders] and reject the racist fear-mongering apparatus that rules them”.
“On Passover, I usually fast to celebrate the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt. Wouldn’t it feel right to celebrate one day the deliverance of the Israelis through Egypt? Since 25 January, millions of Egyptians have taken their fate in their hands and are on the march with it. Seize the day, take yours, and come meet us down the road.”
You hear that? Israel, who leads Egypt, by leaps and bounds, in every conceivable political, social, and economic measurement, is in need of political inspiration from the streets of Cairo – and a new Passover narrative.
The new Haggadah which Talat envisions will one day tell the tale of a Jewish people set free from the cruel democracy, insidious liberty, and unbearable prosperity which enslaved them in Israel, and which delivered them (with an outstretched Egyptian military arm) to the promised land of religious intolerance, despotism, and economic failure - a Passover tale which could only be told by the Guardian Left.
PA policeman opened fire on 15 Israelis as their vehicle exited Joseph’s Tomb, where they had attended a prayer service. Among those who survived the attack, one person was in serious condition, one in moderate condition and two others in light condition.
The death of a 25-year-old male was pronounced at the scene, and was identified as Ben Yosef Livnat, the nephew of Minister of Culture and Sports Limor Livnat. Livnat was married, a father of four and was a resident of Jerusalem.
“A man whose only goal on the second eve of Pessah was to pray, was murdered in cold blood in a hateful manner,” Limor Livnat said in a statement, “and has now left a woman and three orphans behind.”
Initial reports suggest that while driving back from prayers, early in the morning, the group (all Breslov Hasidim) came across a checkpoint and then came under fire from a Palestinian jeep. The fire continued even after the vehicles began to escape. The injured were able to make it to a nearby military base after the shooting, where the man who suffered mortal wounds succumbed to his injuries.
Israeli Radio was reporting that, several hours after the incident, dozens of Palestinians rioted near Joseph’s Tomb and set tires on fire.
Update
The inspiring Chas Newkey-Burden has a thoughtful post on this tragedy over at his blog OyVaGoy.
This Report was published by NGO Monitor.
- An op-ed by Human Right Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Director Sarah Leah Whitson, “A Matter of Civil Rights” (Huffington Post, April 15, 2011), blatantly exploits the US Civil Rights Movement to vilify and demonize Israel.
- Abusing the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King: “In a week when the U.S. paused to recall the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, President Peres might have considered King’s message — an end to segregation — and why such a system of racial inequality remains in place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
- This op-ed contains 23 references that abuse civil rights rhetoric in this way, including accusations of “laws and policies [that] strictly segregate Jews from Palestinians,” “blatant racial inequality,” and “racial discrimination and segregation.” This is Whitson’s dominant theme.
- In previous statements, Whitson has abused the term “apartheid” to further the assault on Jewish self-determination and equated Israeli policies to “Jim Crow laws of the American south.” This type of rhetoric was condemned by African-American student leaders who called it “as transparent as it is base.” Similarly, Dr. King decried discriminatory attacks on Israel, declaring, “When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews.”
- Crude propaganda replacing a complex ethno-national and territorial conflict with the false narrative of racism: “[N]ot only do Israeli laws and policies strictly segregate Jews from Palestinians, they deliberately deprive Palestinians of the most basic needs, in many cases forcing them out of their communities.”
- “Jewish only roads” and other myths: “And security concerns do not justify systematically separating Palestinians from Jews, with shanties and dirt roads provided for the one, and spacious villas with swimming pools and paved highways provided for the other.”
- Race baiting U.S. Jews: “And why should American Jews, who have a history of deep engagement with the U.S. civil rights movement, support settlements built on these kinds of laws and policies in Israel?”
- Leadership in anti-Israel BDS (boycotts, divestment, and sanctions): “This is why Human Rights Watch, which extensively documented these discriminatory practices in a report, has called on the EU to clearly label settlement-produced goods, on businesses to review their activities in the settlements, and on the US to cut aid to Israel equal to what Israel spends on the settlements and to investigate tax exemptions for settlement charities.”
Analysis
HRW’s Middle East and North Africa Director Sarah Leah Whitson’s op-ed “A Matter of Civil Rights” (Huffington Post, April 15, 2011) further highlights this organization’s central role in exploiting universal human rights to promote anti-Israeli discrimination. This is a continuation of HRW’s December 2010 unsourced “report” entitled “Separate and Unequal,” which also abused the legacy of the US Civil Rights Movement to single-out and advance hatred towards the Jewish nation-state.
In the op-ed, Whitson replaces the complex national and territorial conflict with invented claims and legal myths in order to accuse the Jewish state of “a system of racial inequality remains in place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” “laws and policies [that] strictly segregate Jews from Palestinians,” “blatant racial inequality,” and “racial discrimination and segregation.” Whitson also abuses the language of the US Civil Rights Movement to further vilify Israel: “We do no honor to [Dr. Martin Luther] King’s legacy by supporting policies that promote racial discrimination and segregation.” (Half the article is devoted to this false analogy, with the terms “segregate,” “race/racist,” “discrimination,” and “equal/unequal” appearing 23 times: “segregate” – 3; “race/racist” – 4; “discrimination” – 8; “equal/unequal” – 8.)
Whitson continues by employing stereotypes, generalizations, and crude references about American Jews: “And why should American Jews, who have a history of deep engagement with the U.S. civil rights movement, support settlements built on these kinds of laws and policies in Israel?”
These dishonest attacks reflect deep prejudices and hatred. Such fictitious allegations of Jewish race-hatred of Arabs are part of the incitement program produced by the PLO’s Negotiation Affairs Department, which invented the myth of “Israel’s plan to segregate the Palestinian People while continuing the colonization of Palestinian land.”
Whitson and HRW’s obsessive focus on Israel is evident in the different language employed when referring to other contemporary conflicts, in which history, territory, security, and other factors are as or more significant. In the op-ed, she tries to claim that: “Most governments have long since stopped trying to justify separating people based on race or national origin . . . .” HRW often erases systematic discriminatory and repressive practices – for example, in Saudi Arabia, where Whitson participated in a 2009 trip raise funds to combat “pro-Israel pressure groups.” HRW’s role in the use of human rights to attack Israel, and close cooperation with Arab and Islamic regimes, has been cited by HRW founder Robert Bernstein, who condemned his own NGO for turning “Israel into a pariah state,” while ignoring the human rights violations of totalitarian regimes.
Whitson’s distortions and falsehoods are also used to advance BDS (boycotts, divestment, and sanctions) targeting Israel. This is a key part of the strategy developed at the infamous NGO Forum of the UN’s 2001 Durban Conference, in which HRW also played a central role. Since then, Whitson and HRW have been leading voices in this campaign.
Whitson, who has in the past abused the term “apartheid” to further the “Durban” assault on Jewish self-determination rights, equates Israeli policies to “Jim Crow laws of the American south.” This misappropriation of civil rights and apartheid rhetoric for anti-Israel campaigning was recently condemned by a group of African-American student leaders who called it “as transparent as it is base.” Similarly, Dr. King decried discriminatory attacks on Israel, declaring, “When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews.”
Sarah Leah Whitson was hired as HRW’s MENA director (2004) after having worked as an anti-Israel activist. As thisHuffington Post article and many other statements demonstrate, and as documented in an article in The New Republic, she has abused her position at HRW to pursue this activism. That profile cites Whitson praise for the notorious anti-Israel campaigner Norman Finkelstein — “I continue to have tremendous respect and admiration for him, because as you probably know, making Israeli abuses the focus of one’s life work is a thankless but courageous task that may well end up leaving all of us quite bitter.”
In attempting to whitewash Whitson’s deep prejudice, HRW program director Iain Levine falsely claimed that activism does not play a role: “…when they come to the door of this organization, they park [their solidarity backgrounds] behind.” Clearly, for Sarah Leah Whitson and the Middle East division, this is not the case.
The only thing even remotely funny about comedian Mark Thomas’s account of his tour along Israel’s security fence, in My travels: Mark Thomas on walking Israel’s West Bank barrier, Guardian Travel Section, April 23, is his comical historical comparison between the barrier and the Great Wall of China.
Israel’s security barrier, which he casually refers to as a “military folly”, is a source of amusement for Thomas, and, indeed, Thomas’s comedic travel diary prose assumes a sense of emotional detachment consistent with the reports on the region from the Guardian’s “serious” journalists, such as Harriet Sherwood.
The irreverent tone of Thomas’s narrative is best illustrated when he mockingly suggests that Israeli soldiers stationed along the fence’s parameter act to prevent infiltration according to their whims and moods:
“A buffer zone exists on the Palestinian side of the barrier and the degree to which it varies in size, and the rigor with which it is enforced, depends on the mood of the soldiers.”
Of course, the fence, and the soldiers he refers to deployed along its parameter, has led to a 90% reduction in the number of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis. And, indeed, the decision to construct a security fence in and around the West Bank in order to protect Israelis from suicide bombers was taken during the height of the 2nd Intifada, in March 2002 – a month in which there were 32 separate Palestinian terrorist attacks, including 8 separate suicide bombings, as a result of which 135 innocent Israelis were murdered, and a further 721 were injured.
Thomas’s travels take him to Jenin, where he finds the Freedom Theater, and speaks to director Juliano Mer-Khamis, who he later casually notes “was assassinated…by a Palestinian gunman.”
Yet, remarkably, Thomas somehow not only fails to connect the dots between the threat posed by deadly terrorists on the Palestinian side of the fence who would murder a Jewish peace activist in cold blood with Israel’s decisions to construct the security barrier, but cooly “recommends” the walking tour to his UK readers as a “tourist activity.”
Thomas’s account, like the Guardian’s reporting on Israel more broadly, reminds me of the main character in Anne Tyler’s book, The Accidental Tourist, a writer of travel guides for people who don’t want to travel but must, and who tries desperately not to really interact or engage with the people of the country he’s visiting, nor reflect upon the real differences between his life and theirs – the hopes, fears and dangers which are profoundly different than his own.
As such, Mark Thomas’s walking tour of the fence didn’t include a glimpse into the Jewish lives extinguished before the protection afforded by Israel’s security barrier, the gnawing grief of family and friends who still mourn their loss, as well as hundreds disabled and disfigured by the cruel, callous, and inhumane acts of those who penetrated the state’s porous border.
Nor, of course, did Thomas’s tour include a visit with the hundreds of Israeli men, women, and children whose lives were saved by what he terms a “military folly”.
No, as there’s nothing even remotely funny about such accounts of Israeli humanity, nothing that his penetrating ironic prowess can dissect, if such a tour existed Thomas would likely not “recommend” it.
We’re spending Shabbat with friends in Kochav Hashachar, a national-religious community of 300 families, comprising Kochav Hashachar itself, Maaleh Shlomo and Mitspe Kramim within the jurisdiction of the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council. The population is roughly 1,500.
Kochav Hashachar is located on the “Allon Road” some 18 miles North of Downtown Jerusalem. The yishuv is situated toward the Eastern edge of the Judea-Samaria Mountain Range, overlooking the Jordan Valley.
We’re staying with the Rabbi and Rebbetzin (and their four children) who mentored my wife on her journey to a more religiously observant life. Though Rabbi Hillel is from the US, and his wife Aliza, is from South Africa, they met in Israel after making Aliyah and only later returned to the town of Port Elizabeth to serve as the community Rabbi for the town’s dwindling Jewish population.
I’m sitting on a quiet hill overlooking vineyards – grapes grown in Kochav Hashachar are purchased every year by Carmel Mizrachi for their red Fantasia Sparkling Wine – and, beyond that I can see the Jordan valley.
Israelis who live in communities beyond the green line differ in their motivation. Some are secular and others religious. Some are ideological and others motivated by the religious significance of Judea and Samaria in the context of Jewish history, and yet others induced by more practical reasons such as the lower cost of living relative to the major urban areas. Still others find comfort in small town life, where they know all of their neighbors, and where parents feel safe allowing their children play and roam within the community.
What strikes me also about life here is the quiet, the stillness.
Occasionally when I read accounts of life in such Moshavim in the Guardian, the words I read conjure pictures of a place which seem to represent not life as it is, but life as a parable – stories and fictive illustrations in the service of satisfying popular and conventional mores.
I often wonder whether what many in the affluent, post-nationalist West find so alien about Israelis, particularly those who have settled across the green line, is their passion for place, the reverence we possess for this particular place over all others – an apt illustration of the failure of many to understand Jewish particularism more broadly.
To discriminate, in the positive sense of the word, means to distinguish accurately; to elevate some places over others. To discriminate means to choose.
When you choose to identify with a particular religious community, you choose that faith and that community and not others. When you marry, you choose your mate over everyone else.
Residents here have chosen Kochav Hashachar over all others.
Shabbat Shalom.
This video, produced by Aish.com, is a couple years old but still relevant, accurate and inspiring.
Yaacov Lozowick, in his blog, Yaacov Lozowick’s Ruminations, recently commented on the reaction to the Itamar massacre by the Israeli radical left:
For years I’ve believed…that for all my disagreements with far-left Israelis, they were a legitimate voice and deserved respect for criticizing from inside the war zone: if proven wrong, they’d be here to pay the price; when Palestinian or Hezbollah murderers do their best to kill random Israeli Jews, the far-left Israelis are here along with all the rest of us. This creates a qualitative distinction between them and their foreign fellows in malice.
I’m no longer convinced…the contribution Israel’s radicals make to the Big Lie against Israel is immense; sometimes the entire anti-Israeli argumentation comes from them.
This week we’ve had a further example which to my mind crosses all the lines of simple human decency. The Hebrew part of the Internet has been all a-buzz about the story of the Israeli radicals who went to the West Bank town of Awarta to give succor to the families of the murderers of the Fogel family, while disseminating unforgivable slander against the IDF.
Lozowick continues:
Immediately after the murder trackers identified tracks of the suspected murderers from Itamar to the nearby town of Awarta. We now know that the two suspected murderers walked back home after the massacre of the Fogel family, where a number of their friends and relatives burned their clothes and hid their weapons near Ramallah. The investigators, who had reason to believe the murderers and potential accomplices were in town, but couldn’t yet have known who, how many, how well armed, and if they intended to murder again, sealed off the town and began to investigate….At one point they collected DNA samples from most of the men. Had anyone come forward and admitted their part in the massacre the investigation would have been greatly expedited, but this didn’t happen, so the investigators had to find their men in a hostile environment. They succeeded in less than a month. The week before the gag order was lifted the suspected murderers were brought to Itamar to re-enact the murder, so everyone in Itamar knew they’d been caught; soon, everyone else who cared knew, too, even if the precise identities of the murderers were not yet known.
…At this point a delegation of radical Israeli leftists visited the town: after the investigation, mind you, since, as they openly said in their subsequent reports, during the investigation itself they couldn’t get in.
Hagit Beck, a member of [the NIF funded group] Machsom Watch, describes on her blog how she and some other women went to visit “the 2 homes which had been ransacked”. The second of the two was the home of Hakem Awad. The blog-post has been put up also on the Machsom Watch website: they’re obviously proud of it. While in the house, Raya Yaron, the Machsom Watch spokeswoman, tried to comfort Shama Awad, mother of suspected murderer Hakem Awad, and wife of one of the men suspected for destroying the evidence. If proven in court, this will mean Shama Awad hid her murderer son from the police for most of a month, knowing fully what he had done. This is the woman Raya Yaron is embracing (below), and Hagit Beck is celebrating.
If there’s a photo more illustrative of the Israeli radical left’s moral and political pathos, I haven’t seen it.
You simply can not wear the mantle of “peace activist” or even “progressive” when you continually demonize Israel, ignore or excuse the murder of innocent Jews at the hands of Palestinian terrorists, and provide comfort to accomplices of such brutal attacks.
Characterizing Israelis who engage in such shameful and destructive behavior as a “Fifth Column” is not an overstatement.
April 21st saw the publication in the Guardian of yet another letter from members of the ‘Free Vanunu’ campaign.
As was the case in previous letters from the same organization (here, here, and here), Vanunu is benignly referred to as a ‘whistleblower’, despite having broken the Israeli Official Secrets Act during wartime.
Considering that the Guardian itself has in the past used this erroneous term to describe a man who illegally publicized state secrets in a foreign newspaper as a victim, it is not surprising that its editors see fit to print yet another letter which promotes this false impression.
The ‘Free Vanunu’ campaign is better understood when one considers its full title: ‘Campaign to Free Vanunu and for a Nuclear Free Middle East’. Its efforts on the latter subject however appear to be confined to one country only: no indignant letters to the Guardian from these folks on the subject on Iranian or Syrian nuclear designs.
The core intentions of the UK branch of the ‘Free Vanunu’ campaign are revealed by the role it plays in lobbying the British Parliament to call for “an end to Israel’s WMD”.
That lobby is jointly organized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and is supported by Al-Awda, the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, the Campaign Against Arms Trade, the Campaign to Free Vanunu and for a Nuclear Free Middle East, Friends of Sabeel, Labour Action for Peace, Pax Christi, Stop the War Coalition and the World Court Project.
Unsurprisingly, several of the above organizations are coincidentally dedicated to undermining Israel’s existence and the names attached to this letter provide an interesting glimpse of the tip of the iceberg of co-operation between anti-Israel organizations.
That the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) should work hand in hand on this subject is hardly surprising.
As well as having been a major figure in the CND in past years, Bruce Kent – one of the signatories of this letter – is today its Honorary Vice-President. He is also a patron of the PSC and Vice-President of Pax Christi. He was also previously connected to the charity ‘War on Want’ and is a trustee of the ‘Free Vanunu’ campaign.
Another signatory, Ben Birnberg, is company secretary for War on Want, as well as a trustee of the ‘Free Vanunu’ campaign. He is also a signatory of an anti-Israel pro-BDS campaign by “prominent British Jews”.
A third signatory, Jeremy Corbin MP, is also a patron of the PSC and infamous for his pro-Hamas stance.
Signatory Jim Boumelha, President of the International Federation of Journalists, was quick to issue condemnation and call for a “full inquiry” into the events aboard the Mavi Marmara last year even before the true nature of events had become clear. The IFJ has been criticized by Israeli journalists, some of whom withdrew from the organization, due to its support for the Hizbollah Television station Al Manar during the 2006 Lebanon war, and during 2009 some eight hundred Israeli journalists were expelled from the IFJ, though later readmitted.
One of the more interesting organizations supporting the CND and PSC led lobby against Israel is ‘Friends of Sabeel’. The Palestinian Christian organization Sabeel has ‘friends’ organizations in many Western countries including the UK, North America, Scandinavia and Australia and many of its members are also involved in anti-Israel campaigning, such as the Rev. Nicola Jones who was instrumental in last year’s decision by the Methodist Church in the UK to adopt BDS.
It is no coincidence that Sabeel, which campaigns for a one-state ‘solution‘, was born in the very church in which Mordechai Vanunu has been living since his release from prison in 2004 – Saint George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem. Sabeel’s founder and director, Naim Ateek is a former minister of that establishment and Sabeel conference speakers have repeatedly lauded Vanunu, with his American adoptive parents being the star turn at its 2004 session.
The former bishop of Saint George’s Cathedral and the man who offered Vanunu a home there, Bishop Riah El Assal, is well-known for his apologetics for suicide bombers, Hamas and Hizbollah, as well as his anti-Israeli rhetoric.
In addition to these connections to anti-Israel groups, the PSC and Stop the War Coalition go even further: both these organizations are supporters of the annual Al Quds day held in London and organized by the pro-Iranian regime ‘Islamic Human Rights Commission’.
Far from being concerned about the human rights of ordinary Iranians imprisoned, raped and tortured by their own government or the dangers of the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a theocratic dictatorship headed by a Holocaust-denying messianic, the PSC and StWC – partners of the ‘Free Vanunu’ campaign – actually celebrate the type of rampant anti-Semitism promoted by the Iranian regime, along with its support for proscribed terrorist organizations in the form of Hamas and Hizbollah.
In conclusion, it is all too apparent that the ‘Free Vanunu’ campaign is not the harmless peace-loving organization it claims to be, but part and parcel of the concerted multi-fronted effort to deny Jews their basic human rights of self-determination and self-defence.
It is therefore fitting that its campaigners repeatedly choose to publicise their epistles in the newspaper which so frequently promotes others with the same agenda, including members and sympathisers of Hamas.
Conal Urquhart’s story in today’s Guardian on the murder of Israeli actor Juliano Mer-Khamis by five masked terrorists in Jenin on April 4th legitimized the intolerance which inspired his killing, and even seemed to suggest that Mer-Khamis was to blame for his own death.
The story (Juliano Mer-Khamis – a killing inspired by drama, not politics: Jenin residents claim public opinion turned on director for performing plays that went against Islamic conservative values) is largely based on a “fatwa-style leaflet circulated in Jenin this week and seen by the Guardian” but Urquhart’s intent to cast blame on Mer-Khamis is revealed in the opening few passages:
“He wanted to create an “art revolution” to help liberate the Palestinian people, but he only managed to alienate those he most wanted to inspire”
“It has emerged that the residents of the camp had serious grievances against the actor-director that may have provided the excuses for an unknown gunman to kill him.”
“…many camp residents found his activities offensive.”
So, here we see the tone and tenor of Urquhart’s analysis – that the actor, director and peace activist (born of a Jewish mother and Palestinian Christian father) was a divisive figure who offended the sensibilities of those he devoted much of his life trying to help.
Urquhart then contextualizes the story further:
“His death and attitudes to the theatre highlight the conflict of interest between western donors, local elites and the populations they aim to aid; between liberal western values of freedom of expression and a more conservative, traditional world view.”
The words employed by Urquhart are important to note, as they suggest a moral equivalence between “Western values” which promote freedom of expression, and those who don’t – with Urquhart characterizing the latter culture, an Islamism which opposes freedom of expression, not as reactionary, unenlightened, or intolerant but, instead, employing terms which denote respect, such as “traditional”.
Urquhart then reinforces his narrative of a Westerner who displayed a callous disregard for the traditional mores of the community he worked in, by noting:
“…the final impetus for the murder was his plan to stage a controversial German play that explores teenage sexuality.”
And here, again, Mer-Khamis is characterized as flaunting traditional values.
“But while Mer-Khamis entertained thousands and inspired devotion among his disciples, his methods disturbed conservative groups in the refugee camp.”
Urquhart then quotes a member of the “Popular Committee” – often a euphemistic name for groups who engage in armed “resistance”:
“Adnan al-Hindi, the chairman of the refugee camp’s “popular committee” said that Mer-Khamis had very different values and ideas from the residents…”
Of course, Urquhart doesn’t deem it worthy to note that some of the “different values” al-Hindi was referring to was Mer-Khamis’s passionate advocacy for non-violence and Israeli-Palestinian co-existence.
Then, quoting al-Hindi further:
“[Mer-Khamis] said that his message was to liberate citizens from the authority of their leaders and children from their parents. Then there was mixing of sexes and dancing. We tried to discuss it with him and persuade him that he was mistaken but to no avail. Public opinion turned against him.”
Mer-Khamis is now no longer merely a moral renegade – someone who had the gall to support mixing of sexes and even dances, and the temerity to suggest that Palestinian leaders were not serving them well – but is a rabble-rouser who even tried to disrupt Palestinian family unity.
Urquhart’s final proof of Mer-Khamis’s sin, comes from a local butcher, who’s quoted as saying:
“We are Muslims. We have traditions. We looked for our children and found them at the theatre dancing. If he came here to bring jobs that would be good but instead he comes here to corrupt our girls and make women of our boys,”
The picture is now clear. Mer-Khamis: an imperious and arrogant cultural imperialist who was disrespectful of Palestinian traditional culture, and corrupter of the morals of youth. Yes, clearly he had it coming.
Yet, in a quintessential example of a journalist burying the lead, Urquhart acknowledges that the “fatwa-style” letter also complained of other traits the Israeli possessed.
“The leaflet attacks Mer-Khamis for his belief in co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians, ‘as if we could live with those who stole our land and killed our children’.”
And, finally:
“The leaflet describes Mer-Khamis as a Jew, a communist and an infidel.”
So, the real reason Mer-Khamis was killed is belatedly – and furtively – revealed.
As should be blatantly obvious to all but the most hardened anti-Zionist ideologues, the murder of Mer-Khamis was an act of vicious hatred by members of a reactionary, violent movement – Palestinian terrorists who gunned down Juliano Mer-Khamis in cold blood because he was a proponent of co-existence, a progressive, and not only an infidel but the worst infidel of all: a Jew.
It’s a simple and intuitive story about vile antisemitism in the Middle East – a stubborn, disturbing reality ignored continually in the pages of the Guardian.
This was published by Chuck Devore in Investors Business Daily
Signs of Israel's economic rise can be seen in the offices of Tel Aviv (shown here) and Jerusalem, home to dozens of high-tech startups
Israel, a New Jersey-sized nation of 7.5 million people (1.7 million of whom are Arab) filed 7,082 international patents in the five years ending in 2007. By contrast, 28 majority-Muslim nations with almost 1.2 billion people — 155 times the population of Israel — were granted 2,071 patents in the same period.
Narrowing the comparison to the 17 Muslim nations of the Middle East from Morocco to Iran and down the Arabian Peninsula, the 409 million people in that region generated 680 patents in five years.
This means that the Arab and Iranian world produced about one patent per year for every 3 million people, compared with Israel’s output of one annual patent for every 5,295 people, an Israeli rate some 568 times that of Israel’s neighbors and sometime enemies.
The awarding of Nobel Prizes in the quantitative areas of chemistry, economics and physics shows a similar disparity, with five Israeli winners compared with one French Algerian (a Jew who earned the prize for work done in France) and an Egyptian-American (for work done at Caltech in California).
This phenomenon is manifested in other nations as well, where bad government begets poverty. Free South Korea, with 48.8 million people, filed 24,200 international patents from 2003 to 2007. The 24.5 million people in the North Korean slave state managed to produce 14 patents in the same period.
But wealth isn’t the sole explanation for this disparity in intellectual innovation. Saudi Arabia enjoyed a per capita income of $24,200 in 2010. Yet the Kingdom averages an anemic 37 patents per year compared with Israel’s 1,416 per year — and there are 3 1/2 times more Saudis than Israelis, meaning that Israel’s per capita output of intellectual property is 132 times greater than Saudi Arabia’s.
My on-the-ground education in the Middle East began in 1984, when I attended school at American University in Cairo, Egypt. At the time, Israel was a socialist state, still very much mired in a planned economy focused on heavy industry and agriculture, replete with government subsidies and heavy regulation.
Israel’s per capita output stood at $6,749 (in current U.S. dollars), 41% of America’s — slightly less than the Soviet Union’s per capita output at the time.
Read the rest of the article, here.
H/T A. Jay Adler
On April 20, 1945, five days after their liberation and on the eve of Shabbat, with people dying daily, inmates at Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp sang the song which would become the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikva.”
It was recorded by the BBC.
Let this serve as a potent reminder of why we fight.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
The bigotry of Guardian columnist Gary Younge
April 25, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Comment is Free, Delegitimization, Gary Younge, Guardian | by Adam Levick | 43 comments
Gary Younge, a feature writer and columnist for the Guardian based in the US, went to visit the mythical land his colleagues had written so much about – a dark land of oppression, colonialism and racism.
Younge occasionally likes to prove that his rhetorical tool bag of leftist agitprop isn’t limited to the narrow, parochial issues of the US – as there are only so many stories you can file about the evils of the Tea Party and a limit to the number of times you can engage in race baiting - and thought he found a clever metaphor for the mendacity of the Jewish state in contrast to immutable Palestinian victimhood – “a faceless corporation ruthlessly pursuing small family businesses.”
Younge’s tale of Israeli villainy (For Israelis and Palestinians, the status quo is neither sustainable nor desirable, CiF, April 25) is a polemical epic, one which spans two continents, from Peru and Florida all the way to Jerusalem, but begins in territory much more familiar to Younge’s boilerplate Guardian Left populism, an evil US corporation, Disney.
After noting that the company filed a million-dollar lawsuit against a Florida couple (who, we are told, is on public assistance) who unwittingly purchased knock-off costumes of Tigger and Eeyore from an e-Bay site based in S. America, Younge asks why such a large and powerful corporation would engage in such heavy-handed tactics”, before opining:
Now that the theme has been established, the moral of his parable firmly planted, Younge pivots to the real object of his wrath, and takes the comically absurd road less traveled:
That his evidently horrific several hour wait to cross a border into a country besieged with terrorist threats is treated as a corporate public relations debacle is certainly precious, and my guess is that sometime during those agonizing hours Younge’s temper got the best of him, but was eventually able to channel his rage to summon all of the penetrating, anti-Zionist tropes at his disposal to detect, in one brief encounter, the moral temperature of the entire Israeli nation:
Of course, Younge’s brief sophomoric meditation on Israeli “whiteness” would come as quite a surprise to the Mizrachi, Ethiopian, and other Jews of color, who make up about half of the state’s population, but who needs such pesky, dry demographic data when you have three full hours of observation?
In fairness though, Younge is quite emphatic that it wasn’t personal, and that his main concern is for the locals:
Yes, Younge got only a “glimpse”, he acknowledges, enough to understand the “intimidation, humiliation and harassment” – the malevolence of Israeli “teenagers with guns” – but evidently not enough to see what those Jewish teens stubbornly defending their homeland more than occasionally glimpse – such as the young Palestinian woman, disguised as pregnant, who was recently sent to blow up a hospital in Israel. (Her explosive device, by the way, was found during a routine security check at Erez checkpoint, and captured on video.)
Younge, evidently working without the services of an editor, and not satisfied with the quantity of tortured Disney analogies in his laborious diatribe, reflects upon the fact that Israel and her supporters occasionally engage in spirited moral defenses of the Jewish state – those who have the gall to point out Israel’s breathtakingly obvious political advantages over her neighbors – and likens such efforts to “ Tinker Bells sprinkl[ing] their fairy dust to blur the view or to beautify the ugly.”
Of course, the dust which blurs Younge’s view, what his acute political myopia doesn’t allow for, is the necessity of contextualizing Israeli policies though a broader prism of regional threats such as Palestinian terrorism and incitement, or Hamas and Hezbollah’s increasingly sophisticated military arsenal (which occurred after Israeli withdrawals), and these groups’ explicitly anti-Semitic and even genocidal founding charters. No, assigning moral agency to Palestinians would be committing the single most egregious sin in his leftist post-Colonial paradigm: “To suggest that Palestinians are equally responsible for this state of affairs would suggest the two sides hold equal power to shape events.”
In Younge’s Middle East, its Israel, and only Israel, who is responsible for shaping events. If the anti-Semitic narrative of near omnipotent Jewish power conjures a tiny community with the cunning to shape world events to their designs, Younge’s equally fantastical political musings on the Jewish state’s malevolent hegemony proves the adage of Israel as “the Jew writ large”.
Younge closes by warning that Israel simply may not be a sustainable project, its “occupation” having irreparably ”nullif[ied] Zionism – a state, he implies, which may be morally beyond the pale, and which may soon forfeit international recognition of its very right to exist.
If Younge’s denial of Palestinian responsibility represents the soft bigotry of low expectations, his suggestion that Israel – alone among the nations of the world – may not have a right to statehood, and that Jews must continually morally justify its national enterprise, represents the hard bigotry of impossibly high expectations.
As has been codified continually:
Jews don’t require Gary Younge’s moral approval for the continued existence of their national homeland, but moral decency requires that those who peddle in such racist double standards be named and shamed as the bigots they are.
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