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We’re trying something new at CiF Watch: we’re running our first competition.
Over the next week, tell us why the Guardian sucks in 140 characters or less.
Entries must begin with the words “The Guardian sucks because” and can be posted either in the comments sections of this post, or by tweeting your reply @cifwatch in Twitter using the hashtag #cwcomp. If you’re minded to do so, tweet your answer also to chief editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, @arusbridger.
The best entry as selected by the CiF Watch judges wins a whopping $50 gift card.
Yes, I know. This is really unfair, but – given the limits of Twitter – not only are we asking that you kindly reduce your litany of complaints about the Guardian to just one answer, we’ve also got the gall to require that you limit your response further to no more than a miserly 140 characters.
While we’re a comparatively small organization, and the winning entry will only net you a $50 gift card (and, no, we didn’t accidentally omit another zero in that sum), think of how good you’ll feel getting out all of that frustration – the groans, gasps, and grumbles elicited by even a casual glance at the Guardian – and knowing that your thoughts will be on record, prompted by the site which, day after day, truly speaks truth to power.
(h/t to Chas for the inspiration)
Our latest newsletter has hit the stands, and highlights our efforts to combat the latest assault on Israel’s legitimacy in the Guardian – their highly biased, and ideologically driven, contextualization of selected Palestinian documents known as the “Palestine Papers.”
This edition also highlights “CiF Watch in the News”, and provides ways you can assist us in carrying out our vital mission.
Read it below, but you can sign up to have our monthly e-newsletter delivered to your inbox, here.
Message from Managing Editor, Adam Levick
Friends,
The Guardian’s release of selective notes taken by Palestinians during the course of their peace negotiations with Israel, referred to as “Palestine Papers”, revealed more about the Guardian than it did about the negotiations themselves. CiF Watch posts revealed that, throughout their commentary on the “Palestine Papers”, the Guardian perversely framed even the hint of compromise and flexibility by the Palestinians as “craven”, continually used quotes out of context to grossly mischaracterize the views of Israeli negotiators, and gave license to commentators who explicitly called for a return to terrorism. In short, the Guardian’s release of the Palestine Papers represented an (extremist) agenda in search of evidence to support it. Perhaps the only positive development to arise from the Guardian’s “expose” was an increasing realization, from across the political spectrum, as to just how egregious the Guardian’s anti-Israel bias truly is.
Recent Highlights
Guardian’s verdict upon release of “Palestine Papers” announced upon publication: Israel Guilty
CiF Watch was among the first blogs to comment on the Guardian’s release of the “Palestine Papers”, and observed early on how their framing of the “expose” was actually a window into how entrenched their anti-Israel agenda has become. The Guardian contextualized thousands of documents in a manner which just so happened to be consistent with their increasing support and legitimization of the most extreme voices within Palestinian society. (Read post, here.)
Guardian again legitimizes voices openly justifying terrorism
CiF Watch commented on the Guardian’s decision to publish a letter by a UK professor which morally sanctioned the use of terrorism by Palestinians against Israeli civilians. (Read original, and related posts, here, here, and here.)
Guardian PaliLeaks unleashes disturbing volume of hate in reader comment section
While virulent anti-Israel hatred, and outright anti-Semitism, is nothing new in the readers’ sections of Comment is Free, the degree and quantity of such hatred noticeably increased as the result of the Guardian’s “Palestine Papers.” (Read some of the worse comments,here.)
Guardian publishes cartoon by notorious anti-Semitic cartoonist, Carlos Latuff
One of the Guardian’s “Palestine Papers” included the following illustration by one of the most prolific anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic cartoonists, Carlos Latuff. Here’s the cartoon, depicting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as a sinister looking (gun wielding) Orthodox Jew:
(Read our post on Latuff, here.)
Seumas in Wonderland
In this post, Israelinurse provides an illuminating take on Guardian Associate Editor, Seumas Milne, whose support for the most extreme movements within Palestinian society is expressed without the slightest inhibition.
Recent Press
CiF Watch Managing Editor Adam Levick had an editorial published in Jerusalem Post
Adam Levick’s Jan. 3rd Jerusalem Post editorial meditated upon the new, and largely under-reported phenomenon of increasing anti-Semitism on progressive-left political blogs, such as the Guardian’s Comment is Free. (To read, click here.)
Adam Levick was interviewed on a popular Internet radio show about the Middle East
Adam Levick was interviewed, on Jan. 31st, on an Internet radio show – which focuses on the Middle East – called The Bibi Report. Adam answered questions on a range of topics regarding CiF Watch’s work exposing and combating anti-Semitism, and the assault on Israel legitimacy, at the Guardian. (To listen to the interview, go here.)
What Can You Do?
There are 3 simple actions you can take to make our work more effective:
(1) Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
(2) Forward this newsletter to at least 5 friends and as many others by clicking here.
(3) Email us at contactus@cifwatch.com if you see something in the Guardian that makes your blood boil.
CiF Watch’s Managing Editor, Adam Levick, will be interviewed on an internet radio show – which focuses on the Middle East – called The Bibi Report.
Adam will answer questions from the hosts (and callers) on a range of topics regarding CiF Watch’s work exposing and combating anti-Semitism, and the assault on Israel legitimacy, at the Guardian.
The show begins at 9:00 PM U.S. Eastern Standard Time, and Adam’s segment will begin at 9:25.
For once, we have some good news to report: despite pressure exerted by the BDS movement on Macy Gray to cancel her concert performances in Israel in three weeks, Macy Gray has decided that she is still going to go. Challah Hu Akbar has the scoop.
In the meantime, enjoy a classic from Macy Gray and if you’re on Facebook be sure to click the “like” button on her fan page.
I can’t help wondering… with Georgina Henry’s obsession with all things bad Israel, will Guardian readers ever find out about this?
Update: Jan. 23
Per Elder of Ziyon: Macy Gray replied to a recent critic of her decision to perform in Israel. The commenter tweeted the following:
@MacyGrayslife supports aparthied….and entertains the muderous IDF…BDS..boycott this lover of filthy israeli lucre…..#boycott
In response, Gray Tweeted:
@bahebakyagaza See I’m willing to listen – really listen – but some of you so called boycotters are just assholes.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
This is a guest post by Jonathan Hoffman
Some ten days ago I wrote here about the acquittal in the UK of seven defendants who admitted to causing £187,000 of criminal damage at the EDO MBM armaments factory in January 2009, at the time of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. The factory was exporting military equipment to Israel.
Until today I did not have the 87 page transcript of Judge Bathurst-Norman’s summing-up in the case (Lewes Crown Court, 28/29 June 2010). Remember that these are his comments to the Jury, prior to their deliberation in the Jury room which acquitted all seven defendants.
Earlier, many people suspected that the Judge’s comments were biased and this transcript proves the case conclusively. On the evidence of his summing-up, Bathurst-Norman was a member of the defence’s legal team, rather than the Judge.
If you do not have time to read this long article, just consider two excerpts:
The Judge illustrates the concept of “chain reaction” thus:
Page 9: We will all have read of Israel’s attack upon a ship on the high seas, killing nine people on board, and somehow, as the aggressors (puzzling for a lawyer like me) seemed to claim that they were acting in self defence. But the result of all that, of course, is that the nature of the blockade on Gaza changed, because for once there was such a huge outcry of world opinion that Israel thought it had better try and regain face in the situation. (Pause)
Our friends over at The Brothers of Judea are reporting that they received the following threatening email from anti-Zionist as-a-Jew Mya Guarnieri.
The purportedly offending posts of The Brothers of Judea that Guarnieri is complaining of can be viewed here and here. As can be seen, these are nothing other than run of the mill blogposts thoughtfully debunking Guarnieri’s anti-Israel screeds and I challenge anyone to find anything that is even remotely defamatory.
So who is Guarnieri (as I’m sure like me you’ve never heard of her)? Describing herself as a “tel aviv-based journalist and writer, huffington post columnist, regular contributor to the national (abu dhabi) amongst many other international publications,” she firmly establishes her anti-Zionist credentials with the following from an article published in the Huffington Post:
Only after the Palestinian right to return has been acknowledged and a shared, bi-national country has been established can we expect to see a truly democratic state emerge.
These credentials are further bolstered by an Al Jazeera article entitled “Israel’s street apartheid“, the title of which speaks for itself.
While a visit to her website reveals that not only is she a fan of the likes of Israel-haters, Phillip Weiss and Richard Silverstein, but even Brian Whitaker’s al-bab blog features in her blogroll!
In a guest post for the Sabbah Report, “Israel Cracks Down on the Press“, Guarnieri, reporting on the detention of Maan News Agency’s Jared Malsin, writes
When considered within a larger context, Malsin’s detention seems to point to a government intent on silencing dissent.
So there you have it. Guarnieri complains about “silencing dissent” yet is guilty of the very same thing with her ill-thought out email to The Brothers of Judea.
The fact of the matter is that this is precisely how the anti-Zionist left works. While professing to uphold progressive values, they manipulatively use the threat of lawsuits in an attempt to chill speech that is at odds with their views at the same time as playing the victim card whenever anyone has the audacity to call them out on their own bigotry.
Today we stand shoulder to shoulder with The Brothers of Judea and are sending a message loud and clear to bigots like Mya Guarnieri that we will not be cowed into silence for calling a spade a spade.
This is a cross post by Richard Landes. This article was first published in Pajamas Media on July 10, 2010
London is an amazing place, full of vitality, intensity, foreign tourists and residents, a patchwork of pluralism. Talk to the average person, and nothing seems amiss: this cab driver, having driven in London for 40 years, sees no significant change in the neighborhoods he travels through; this financier sees no signs of intimidation; this shopper, this tavern-hopper, this man on the bus, lives in an interesting and relatively normal world. A superficial walk through the [Regent’s] park gives the distinct sense of normality.
But talk to the Jews, and you get a different story. The International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists held a conference here this week. The topic: Democratic and Legal Norms in an Age of Terror. Panels discussed everything from the Goldstone Report, to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, to “universal jurisdiction” (lawfare against Israelis brought in foreign courts). Here, in the Khalili Lecture Theatre of the SOAS (School for Oriental and African Studies), Jewish lawyers discussed a grim reality whose only public appearance on an everyday basis is the drumbeat of calumny that a boisterous elite — NGOs, journalists, academics — rain down on Israel.
Perhaps the most startling of the sessions concerned the BDS movement. Jonathan Rynhold, from the BESA Center at Bar Ilan, and Anthony Julius, author of Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, both presented a picture of British anti-Zionist activity whose intellectual and moral foundations were profoundly irrational, a dogmatic will to stigmatize and destroy Israel that responded to no argument about proportion (what about other places?) or reason (you make no moral demands of the Palestinians). And behind that lies a much weightier volume of negative feeling, a kind of unthinking animosity that expressed itself in its most banal form when a woman explained to Julius: “We all know why the Jews are hated: you marry among yourselves and live in ghettos like Golders Green and Vienna [sic].” In so doing, she put her finger on the most widespread subtext for hostility to Jews – “they think they’re the chosen people.”
Child abuse that you’ll never hear about in the Guardian:
This is a guest post by Akiva
A couple of weeks ago, CiF raised some hairs with the question “Should religions compete?”
The prompt begins: “Almost all monotheisms are missionary religions. It is not enough to worship one God: it must be the right one, and in the right way.”
To translate the vague ‘Guardian-speak’, “almost all” must mean “two out of three”. Judaism, the original monotheism, is not a missionary religion. The question posed by CIF only applies to Islam and Christianity.
CiF claims otherwise: “Jews may not proselytise much in the outside world but they are happy to convert each other.”
This is just plain silly. A Jew is anyone with a Jewish mother. A Jew cannot convert to be any more or less of a Jew. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew, regardless of race, color, creed, or national origin. Regardless of whether they go to shul on Shabbat or only Yom Kippur or spend Yom Kippur playing soccer, a Jew is always a Jew.
As for the claim of Jews proselytizing to non Jews – you can read the Guardians “not much” as “never”. Unlike the other two monotheisms, Jews do not believe that everyone needs to be Jewish “get to heaven”. While this CiF piece insinuates otherwise, Jewish law and tradition is clear that non-Jews can be righteous, have a relationship with our common Creator, and be rewarded. Indeed, when a non-Jew comes to convert the typical first reaction is to talk him out of it. When Shlomo (Solomon) built the Temple in Jerusalem, he opened it to all. The prophet Isaiah referred to the Temple as a “house for all nations”. Sadly, the site of the Temple today is a house only for Muslims, who forbid other faiths from praying there, and have destroyed much of the archaeological heritage of the site with construction.
There are Jewish organizations (such as Chabad and Aish) that do seek out non-observant Jews to inform them of their heritage and encourage spiritual growth. They are not seeking converts – as there is no conversion required. They are combating the widespread ignorance of our 3000+ year old tradition among many modern and secular Jews. Their motivation is out of love for their fellow Jew. Unlike the others, the goal of Judaism is not to unite everyone under the banner of Judaism for the glory of heaven. Rather, we desire that everyone should have a meaningful relationship with The Almighty.
This is a cross-post by Denis MacEoin of A Liberal Defence of Israel
I’m going to start this by talking about anti-Semitism. You’re probably all aware that anti-Israel activists, when told they are anti-Semites, hotly deny the charge, saying they are just opposed to Israel and its policies. I don’t believe them, any of them. Let’s start with anti-Semitism itself. We know that for some 2000 years, Jews have been persecuted across Europe and the Middle East, and that this persecution culminated in the Holocaust. The Holocaust had all sorts of knock-on effects, especially in Europe. I was brought up in the shadow of it. All my generation were. One thing the Holocaust did was to make anti-Semitism unpopular. You couldn’t admit openly you were an anti-Semite. Only ex-Nazis in the comfort of their private homes in South America or Cairo could get it off their chests, that they still hated Jews, that they still longed for another Holocaust. Everybody else avoided any association with the Nazis and far-right politics. Of course, as time passed, little groups of far-right lunatics stood around in wet fields making the Hitlergrüss and saying Seig Heil, because it made feel better to be absolute nonentities in funny suits. People on the left became pro-Jewish and, for a time, pro-Israeli.
But gradually, mainly in the past twenty years or so, there came a point when people couldn’t keep their hatred of Jews pent up any longer. These weren’t fascist thugs any longer so much as self-proclaimed liberals and leftists. They became infected with anti-Semitism because they wanted someone to pity and the Jews were no longer pitiable. In Wanderings, Chaim Potok’s very readable history of the Jews, he says ‘there are no more gentle Jews’. This time round, he argues, the Jews will not let themselves be herded onto railway trucks and shepherded into gas chambers. The young men and women of today’s IDF exemplify Potok’s declaration perfectly. Pity the Nazi who tries to herd them anywhere.
For some reason, a lot of people don’t like this. But they still don’t like to be called anti-Semites, because anti-Semitism is a form of racism, and they aren’t racists. They think they aren’t racists because anti-racism is the keystone of modern right-on politics. But they are racists, so they have a problem. They have a lot of circles to square, and to do that they have employed a range of lies that cast a spell on the media and most of the general public. It goes something like this. The Jews are no longer suffering, but someone must be suffering in order to deserve our pity, and the obvious candidates for victimhood are the Palestinians, because those nice Arabs I met at our conference tell me they are. This must mean that the Jews are… A hard think here, I suppose, then the obvious answer. The Jews, sorry, the Israelis are Nazis. Not ‘like the Nazis’. They are Nazis. That sweet young Israeli girl doing her first year in the IDF and feeling pangs of homesickness every night is a Nazi. That boy with a kippa dovening in a field full of tanks is a Nazi. Gilad Schalit is a Nazi.
This is a cross-post by Michael Merrick of Outside In
Occasionally I pay a visit to the foreboding tundras of CiF, and reflect on the absurdity of the angry natives that I see. Well, specially for Stuart, here are those reflections nicely gathered together.
If anybody has any to add then please do; the more we can get the better.
Note to angry CiFfers – stating an opinion as a fact is not the same thing as stating a fact as a fact
Note to angry CiFfers – that fellow CiF commenters agree with you is not, in itself, evidence that everyone agrees with you
Note to angry CiFfers – it is churlish to mock the idea of revealed scripture whilst treating everything in the Guardian as unblemished truth
Note to angry CiFfers – shocking words and phrases lose their capacity to shock when constantly repeated, by everybody, all the time.
Note to angry CiFfers – holding contradictory opinions whilst vociferously asserting them both to be true undermines credibility somewhat
Note to angry CiFfers – being perpetually irrational does great harm to your claims of upholding reason in the face of religion
Note to angry CiFfers – buy a dictionary and look up the word ‘bigot’. Better still, buy a mirror
Note to angry CiFfers – swear words are not a convincing substitute for either logic or reason
Note to angry CiFfers - screeching personal abuse is not an intellectual trump card. It does not automatically win an argument.
Note to angry CiFfers – as unblemished as you undoubtedly are, people who disagree with you are not, by definition, evil
Note to angry CiFfers – by all means evangelise your gospel, but doing it online under a pseudonym is unlikely to be terribly effective
Note to angry CiFfers – employing biblical literalism to condemn Scripture is as silly as employing biblical literalism to defend it
Note to angry CiFfers – divinising Terry Sanderson is an ineffective means of arguing against religion and faith
Note to angry CiFfers – your general comments do great harm to your claims of enlightenment
Note to angry CiFfers – ‘left’ is not synonymous with good, and ‘right’ is not synonymous with evil
Note to angry CiFfers – mocking belief in flying spaghetti monsters is ineffective invective against those who do not believe in flying spaghetti monsters
Anybody else…?
(h/t Stuart of eChurch Christian Blog)
See why by clicking here.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
Why were these deleted?
July 30, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: Comment is Free, Deleted Comments, Guardian, Seth Freedman | by Hawkeye | 4 comments
From the Seth Freedman thread last month.
After…
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