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A guest post by Truthy Ruthie
I don’t know exactly when I made the transition from appreciatively eyeing up the gorgeous Israeli soldiers to uttering a silent prayer for heavenly protection over them.
I do not recall a defining moment for this transition; perhaps it was a gradual process born out of maturity and the gift of motherhood I have recently been blessed with. Perhaps it is because I’m in my thirties. Who knows? But there was at some point a shift in my attitude.
Don’t get me wrong, I can still marvel at some of these fine-looking youngsters with their golden tans and uber-cool aviator sunnies. But my primary instinct and concern is to will them a long life and utter a silent prayer that G-d sees them safely through their service and that they all come home in one piece.
Of course all this praying and inner well-wishing is done with a poker straight face, lest I be accused of over-anxiety. We should all be thankful that I leave it at the silent prayer and stop short of going over to give them a hug, buy them lunch and make sure they are getting the enough food. After all, I don’t want to scare the poor souls with these overt motherly expressions of love and appreciation.
Today marks Yom Hazikaron, Remembrance Day for our fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism. During the minutes’ silence throughout the whole country, everything comes to a standstill. Flags are flown at half-mast. The state’s official ceremony is held on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem where the founding fathers and mothers of this country and fallen heroes were laid to rest. Sad and mellow music is played on all Israeli radio stations. Countless other public and private ceremonies are held up and down the country to remember the fallen.
For me personally I take inspiration from the nation’s collective heartache and tears that are shed together with my own for our fallen brothers and sisters. Those who laid down their lives for the defense of the Jewish State tap into my innate need to do my bit in helping build this infant nation as a mark of gratitude to them and their bereaved families. I want to do my part in showing them that it wasn’t all in vain.
What right does any Jew who enjoys the countless wonders of this land have to walk about their business without the acute awareness that their steps tread on earth reddened with the blood of its fallen warriors?
And what right does any Israeli citizen have to not live in an existence of gratitude to the defenders of the land? I believe that thanks to the strict conscription laws of this country, many are all too aware of the high price paid to live as a free people in our own land and therefore do indeed have an attitude of gratitude.
After thousands of years of yearning and waiting to return home, whilst the joy is immeasurable, the pain of loss and remembrance remains constant.
Z”L for all my fallen brothers and sisters. May your memory be a blessing and may HaShem comfort the mourners of Zion.
Related articles
- Remembering Israel’s Fallen. (cifwatch.com)
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A guest post by AKUS
Read the caption to the picture below, captured off the Guardian’s website.
“Passengers on a tram in Jerusalem observe a two-minute silence for Yom HaShoah, when the nation remembers the 6 million Jews who died during the Holocaust”.
Apparently in the April 20th 2012 print edition, on page 24, a fuller version of the caption also correctly termed Jerusalem the Israeli capital.
Now read the following correction made by the Guardian on Sunday 22 April 2012, which is found on the web here. As I did, you may have to read it twice to realize what it says:
• The caption on a photograph featuring passengers on a tram in Jerusalem observing a two-minute silence for Yom HaShoah, a day of remembrance for the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, wrongly referred to the city as the Israeli capital. The Guardian style guide states: “Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel; Tel Aviv is” (Eyewitness, 20 April, page 24).
Did you need to read it again to grasp the “wrong reference” that the Guardian is correcting? In case you missed it, here it is again: the caption, the Guardian claims, violated its style guide by noting in passing that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.
This calls for a correction, since the Guardian style guide apparently decrees:
“Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel; Tel Aviv is”
The Guardian has decided that even though Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital since the founding of the state, its Parliament, Supreme Court and ministerial offices are there, it, the Guardian, believes that Tel Aviv is the country’s real capital. It has apparently enforced this absurdity by codifying it in its style guide.
Is there any other country in the world for which the Guardian’s style guide defines the capital as being other than the city that country has selected as its capital? If any newspaper’s “style guide” decreed that London is not the capital of England, would that not be ludicrous? Is the next step for the Guardian style guide to decide that Israel is not a country but Palestine is, even though exactly the opposite is true?
More than anything else this absurd refusal to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital demonstrates the utter perversity of the Guardian’s reporting about Israel. It shows in their own words, in print, the Guardian’s cringing acceptance of Arab propaganda that is rewriting the history of Jerusalem, the attempts to write the Jewish history out of the history of Jerusalem, and the Guardian’s attempts to delegitimize Israel and deny its right to exist.
If they had any shame, the people running the Guardian should be ashamed of their style guide and this ridiculous “correction” of a truthful statement. But they have no shame.
Related articles
- What the Guardian should have posted about Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel (cifwatch.com)
- Yom HaShoah: ‘Unto every person there is a name’. (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s duty to Jews on Yom HaShoah? Don’t publish accusations that we’re “supremacists”! (cifwatch.com)
- Follow-up post about Guardian Travel site’s curious omission of the nation known as “Israel” (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian, Raed Salah and Yom HaShoah. (cifwatch.com)
- Seth Freedman’s attack on Israel’s Jewish nature: Classically Guardian egregious absence of context (cifwatch.com)
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A guest post by Anne, who blogs at Anne’s Opinions
Last week the Guardian slaked its anti-Israel obsession with an article written by Phoebe Greenwood focusing on a proposed detention center for refugees and illegal infiltrators into Israel.
The tone of the article is immediately apparent with the title “Huge detention centre to be Israel’s latest weapon in migration battle“. The use of the contentious word “weapon”, the lack of the word “illegal” in referring to the migrants reflect the automatic bias of the Guardian against even the most innocuous Israeli acts.
Addressing the article itself (all highlights are mine), it begins innocuously enough:
A vast detention complex is rising from the sandy grounds of Ktzi’ot prison in the Negev desert, close to Israel‘s border with Egypt, which will become the world’s largest holding facility for asylum seekers and migrants.
When it is completed, at an initial cost of £58m to the Israeli government, it will be capable of holding up to 11,000 people.
Greenwood then immediately takes on a sneering tone towards Israels’ very real concerns about illegal immigration, implicitly accusing PM Binyamin Netanyahu and his coalition of paranoia:
Despite unprecedented protests at rising costs of living, and increased threats to national security in a volatile, post-Arab spring Middle East, immigration is of such paramount importance to Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition that it has skimmed a minimum of 2% from every ministry’s budget to fund the construction and start-up costs of the building.
Despite Greenwood returning to factual reporting for a couple of paragraphs, quoting Israeli government spokesmen and officials about the numbers and implications of illegal immigration, she returns to her disdainful attitude towards Israel’s legislation:
In January, the Knesset passed a controversial bill categorising anyone attempting to enter the country through its southern border as an “infiltrator” who can be detained for three years – longer if they are from a “hostile state” such as Sudan.
“If we find any bona fide refugees, some will be able to stay and others will be sent to a third country that accepts refugees,” said Regev.
Greenwood goes on to compare the numbers of refugees allowed in to the UK with the numbers allowed in by Israel, ignoring the vast differences between the two nations. For instance, Britain does not have any hostile nations on its borders, let alone the 4 or 5 bordering Israel, not counting the assorted terrorist organizations, all of whom have an interest in flooding Israel with refugees, both to hamper it economically and socially, and in order to smuggle in terrorists amongst the refugees.
She then evokes an emotive tale of a teenage refugee from Sudan:
Mubarak, 18, arrived in 2009. He fled Darfur in western Sudan when the Janjaweed militia destroyed his village. The militiamen pursued families as they fled to nearby villages, looking for children to fight with them. His parents told him to run for his life.
He was 15 when he arrived in Israel and was held at a detention camp for women and children for 22 days, with up to 30 children in one small tent. He says the days in detention were the longest of his life.
“I didn’t know what would happen to me. No one said when I was going to be let out. That was the worst thing, not knowing. When you aren’t able to move, to go anywhere, you have too much time to think,” he said. “It’s not a good place to be. To think people would be staying there for three years, they would all be driven crazy. We are refugees. We aren’t supposed to be in jail.”
But Mubarak is not recognised as a refugee in Israel. Immigrants from Sudan and Eritrea are currently offered “group protection”, which means they cannot be sent back to their home countries – but nor are they afforded any rights or state support.
Yes, Mubarak’s story is indeed very sad, but this all ignores the unfortunately very real risk that refugees from countries hostile to Israel may include terrorists in disguise. Phoebe Greenwood does not see fit to include any reaction from Israel’s defence and security echelon who could give some much-needed background and context to Israel’s fears. For example in this Ynet article from last year:
The IDF officers told Netanyahu that al-Qaeda and its offshoots may attempt to send Sudanese refugees across the Egyptian border and into Israel with the aim of setting up terror cells in the Jewish state.
A senior military official told the PM that the terror group may attempt to recruit people in Sudan and train them. Al-Qaeda will then have the recruits infiltrate Israel, set up terror cells and recruit other refugees to carry out attacks in Israel, according to the army official.
Netanyahu was told that the past four years have seen 20 attempts by terrorists to infiltrate Israel through the breached Egyptian border.
Returning to the Guardian’s article, Greenwood allows Israel’s authorities to defend the quality of the centre (the new detention facility will have libraries, teachers, day care, basketball courts and several hairdressing salons) but cannot resist the hectoring derision from human rights group and of course, good old Amnesty with its in-built bias against Israel:
Following pressure from human rights groups, the space allocated per person has been increased from 2.5 square metres to 4.9, including bathrooms. According to EU standards, the “desirable” size is 7 square metres. A high-ranking official involved with overseeing construction of the centre says: “It will be very comfortable. But at the end of the day, we are dealing with people who have entered Israel illegally. I am not making them a hotel – although it’s not too far from one.”
Amnesty Israel’s position is that however much the conditions are improved, the prolonged detention of refugees is still illegal. “Detention should never be used as a deterrent. Asylum seekers should not be treated as criminals,” it argues.
The article concludes with a complaint from Israel’s civil rights organization:
Oded Feller, a lawyer for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, is among the activists opposed to the construction of the Ktzi’ot complex. Detention centres, he argues, are places where asylum applications are processed and people should be held only for a matter of months.
“It doesn’t matter if they have places to learn and play, they will be held there,” said Feller. “It will be a prison for people from Africa. The Israeli government is building a refugee camp, not a detention centre.“
I can’t see that there is much difference and I don’t understand what Feller’s complaint is. Does he really want Israel flooded with hundreds of thousands of foreign migrants with all the economic, social and security problems that will accompany them?
Besides the egregious tone of this article, we have to wonder once again at the Guardian’s microscopic focus on every action and decision by Israel’s authorities. Does the Guardian bring as much outrage and faux-concern for the well-being of refugees who are trying to enter Britain for example?
How many articles have there been on Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre? A simple search of the Guardian shows no opinion pieces and only a couple of news items since 2010! In fact there are several refugee and migrant detention and removal centres throughout Britain, but none of these provoke the same outrage as does one single such centre in Israel.
Let’s also examine other refugee centers around the world and how the Guardian reports on them. The Guardian itself published an article this month on “Asylum seekers around the world – where did they come from and where are they going?”. Interestingly, Israel is not mentioned in the entire article. Obviously it is not such a huge refugee detaining center as one would imagine from Greenwood’s article.
A search of the “refugees” tag in the Guardian reveals that there is very little negative reporting of any refugee detainment center anywhere in the world besides Israel.
I eagerly await an outraged and emotional articles from the Guardian on the United States Immigrant Detention Centers, the various European immigrant detention centers in Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Ukraine (besides the UK), not to mention Australia.
The implication in Phoebe Greenwood’s article that Israel’s detention centre is somehow inhumane and racist portrays once again the bias that is inherent in Guardian reporting on Israel.
When one considers the fact that there is hardly a country without an illegal immigrant detention centre, plus the numbers of migrants relative to population size and the regional and geopolitical facts on the ground in Israel, one can only but shake one’s head in dismay once again at the Guardian’s obsessive focus on the Jewish state.
Related articles
- Phoebe Greenwood manages to vilify Israel in story about tragic auto accident (cifwatch.com)
- Lost in anti-Zionist translation? Guardian misquotes Noam Shalit on Palestinian hostage taking (cifwatch.com)
- The Washington Post’s Coverage of Israel: Slouching towards the Guardian at Easter (cifwatch.com)
- Flagman: Arab ‘Spring’, the Guardian & the glorification of a nation’s anti-Zionist obsession (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian removes letter on Jews’ ‘Ghetto’ mentality: Runs afoul of their “editorial guidelines” (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian contributor David Wearing’s Twitter pic: The Israeli Grinch who steals Christmas (cifwatch.com)
- Suzanne Goldenberg avoids mentioning her Jenin lies at the Guardian Open Weekend (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s duty to Jews on Yom HaShoah? Don’t publish accusations that we’re “supremacists”! (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s Phoebe Greenwood runs interference for Global March to Jerusalem organizers and rioters (cifwatch.com)
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A guest post by Joy Wolfe, StandWithUs UK chairwoman and co-President of the Zionist Federation
StandWithUs UK and many other UK organisations and individuals have applauded the high profile figures (Arnold Wesker, Ronald Harwood, Maureen Lipman, Simon Callow, Louise Mensch MP and Steven Berkoff) who have opposed calls for the Globe Theatre in London to disinvite the world-renowned Israeli Habima Theatre Company.
We also congratulate Howard Jacobson on his positive stand in supporting Habima.
Boycotts of any kind are totally counter productive and do nothing to help the Palestinians.
Hopefully the BDS brigade will think again about disrupting a performance that the majority of the audience wish to support and enjoy. However, if they do press ahead with their publicly declared threat to cause a disturbance I hope they will be quickly ejected and face legal consequences.
Cultural, academic and trade boycotts are particularly counter productive when Israel has so much to offer the international community.
Not only are they counter productive but often have the exact opposite of the desired effect as people often go out of their way to support companies and shops that are targeted. Recently in Canada, a targeted shop the boycotters were trying to disrupt was inundated with pro-Israel customers who previously had never even heard of the company.
Another example of a misguided attempt to help the Palestinians was the failed April 15th “Welcome to Palestine” flytilla, when over 1500 pro Palestinian protesters had planned to fly into Israel to disrupt Ben Gurion Airport before moving on to carry out alleged humanitarian visits to “Palestinian prisoners”.
In a brilliantly crafted response, Israel had alerted airlines to the fact that those denied entry into Israel would have to be flown home at the airlines’ expense. As a result, hundreds were refused boarding at a number of European airports and around 40 who did succeed in arriving in Israel were sent home with a pithily written letter noting all the genuine human rights issues around the world, not least in Syria, where their protests would be better directed.
In the meantime, despite the best efforts of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) campaigners, there are so many positives to prove just how unsuccessful they are. Israeli trade with the UK has never been at a higher level, academics from Israel and the UK are working together in many cooperative projects, Israel has just signed a new aviation agreement with the EU, and Israel and the UK have an extensive programme of business and academic joint projects.
We should reduce our efforts to counter BDS activists, and similar reactive measures, which give them the added oxygen of the publicity they seek, and concentrate instead on spreading the good news about Israel’s achievements and cooperation with grass-roots Palestinians, which are much more positive and effective ways to create an atmosphere more conducive to moving the peace process forward.
Related articles
- ‘Boycott Israel,’ the movie, starring actress Emma Thompson (cifwatch.com)
- I’m a Pro-Israel Muslim: So Why did UJS Ban Me? (cifwatch.com)
Cross posted by Alan A at Harry’s Place
In the Guardian’s op ed by Raed Salah, the following footnote has been added:
In the thread below, there has been some discussion about statements that Raed Salah allegedly made. The Comment editor Becky Gardiner has commented, setting out the judgement here and here. Raed Salah has also replied here.
This is what Becky Gardiner says:
Raed Salah’s amanuensis adds in his name:
After a 10-month legal battle, I have now been cleared on “all grounds” by a senior immigration tribunal judge, who ruled that May’s decision to deport me was “entirely unnecessary” and that she had been “misled”. The evidence she relied on (which had been given to her by the Community Security Trust, a British charity, and included a poem of mine about oppression which been doctored to make it appear anti-Jewish) was not, he concluded, a fair portrayal of my views. The judge said the one short passage in a speech that May used as evidence that I had repeated the so-called “blood libel” [the medieval accusation that Jews use the blood of Christian children to make bread] “was not a sample [of my views], or ‘the tip of the iceberg’: it is simply all the evidence there is.” In reality, I wasn’t referring to any such thing. I reject any and every form of racism, including anti-Semitism. I don’t believe in the “blood libel” against Jews and I reject it in its entirety. What I was really referring to in my sermon was the killing of innocents in the name of religion, including children, from the time of the Inquisition to as recently as Bosnia and elsewhere in Europe whose governments support Israel’s action. In fact, what May has neglected to consider in respect of the speech is that I also said in the speech ‘we are not malicious and we will not be malicious, thus we will also protect the honour of the Jewish synagogues.’ I have no doubt that, despite this, Israel’s cheerleaders in Britain will continue to smear my character. This is the price every Palestinian leader and campaigner is forced to pay.
So, that’s the Guardian’s position.
On Holocaust Memorial Day.
There is a whole bunch of evidence, unused in the trial and unquestioned, that shows the nature of Raed Salah. Becky Gardiner is very much aware of it herself, because I know that “a senior Guardian figure” took it to her, in an attempt to get her to publish just ONE piece explaining why liberals and progressives ought not to back Raed Salah.
Articles were written. They were submitted by a number of people to the Guardian. They weren’t even acknowledged.
Becky Gardiner’s view, I’m afraid to say, was that Comment is Free should not offer a platform to those who wanted to oppose Raed Salah’s incitement and racism. She saw opposition to Zionism as a sort of Manichean struggle, in which she was on the side of the angels.
The “senior Guardian figure” was quite surprised. But obviously, he did nothing about it because, you know, we mustn’t make a fuss.
This is the year in which antisemitism became a mainstream “progressive” cause. Fancy joining the fightback?
Related articles
- The Guardian, Raed Salah and Yom HaShoah. (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian again defends Islamist antisemite Raed Salah, attacks Community Security Trust (cifwatch.com)
- Why is the ‘liberal’ Guardian still rooting for a reactionary antisemitic Islamist named Raed Salah? (cifwatch.com)
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A Guest post by AKUS
In December last year I wrote a column headed The Washington Post’s coverage of Israel: Slouching towards the Guardian? about the unusual way the Washington Post covered Israel’s use of drones over Gaza and pointed out that “it seems to have become strikingly similar in content and tone to the Guardian”.
This was followed by Scott Wilson, The Washington Post’s anti-Israel attack dog: Slouching towards Harriet Sherwood?, which showed the resemblance between Scott Wilson’s coverage of Israel and the Harriet Sherwood‘s approach in the Guardian. Scott provided a polite rebuttal to the idea that he is the Washington Post’s “attack dog, but the tone and method employed in the article was strikingly similar to the typical Guardian article – inaccuracies, no context, and a half-hearted editorial apology after CAMERA called them out (which is more than the Guardian provides in most cases).
On April 4th, 2012, the Washington Post published a Guardian-like article by Richard Stearns about Easter in Jerusalem: “A dark Easter for Palestinian Christians” in its problematic “On Faith” section which was replete with … yes, inaccuracies, no context, and, in place of an apology, a furious rebuttal by Israel’s US Ambassador, Michael Oren.
The Washington Post’s “On Faith” section has been a fertile ground for anti-Semitic articles and below-the-line anti-Semitic commentary.
In March 2011 the paper instituted a moderation policy in order to clean things up below the line, but Stearns’ article shows that they have a long way to go in fixing what is wrong above the line. His article resembles the annual articles that appear in the Guardian at Easter and Christmas about the plight of the Christians in the West Bank. Their problems are always presented as Israel’s fault, rather than due to the widely reported policies and actions of the Moslem Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank intended to drive Christian Arabs out.
For example, last Christmas, the Guardian’s Phoebe Greenwood wrote ‘If Jesus were to come this year, Bethlehem would be closed‘ even though there were an estimated 100,000 visitors to Bethlehem – more than ever, and compared to 70,000 the year before – and accommodation was impossible to find.
In response to Stearns’ article, on April 5th, 2012, the Israeli Ambassador, Michael Oren, termed the article “libelous”:
“The claims made in a recent article by Richard Stearns (“A dark Easter for Palestinian Christians”) are completely without foundation and are libelous to the State of Israel.”
Stearns first bemoaned the need for security checks for Arabs entering Jerusalem from the West Bank (amusing to anyone who has had to pass thorough the security checkpoints to attend the July 4th celebrations on the Washington, DC Mall after 9/11) and followed with outlandishly incorrect data about the number of permits issued to West Bank Christians.
Stearns made no effort at all to explain why Israel maintains checkpoints and security barriers to protect the Christians and other visitors that flock to the Old City of Jerusalem year round, but especially during festivals such as Easter and Christmas. Instead, he describes the security measures and number of visitor permits (visas, in effect) in a way that makes it appear that Israel is deliberately trying to prevent Christians from visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Easter to witness the ancient “Holy Fire” ritual:
Because of travel restrictions in past years, the vast majority of Christians living in the West Bank have been stopped at checkpoints and prevented from attending one of the most important religious services of the year. Israeli authorities require permits for entering Jerusalem. Local Christians estimate that only 2,000 — 3,000 permits are provided, despite the overwhelming desire among the 50,000 Palestinian Christians to travel from the West Bank and Gaza for the Easter week celebrations in Jerusalem.
Those who make it across checkpoints and into Israel are still barricaded by numerous walls and other security obstructions. As a result, even many who have permits are unable to make it to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In 2010, a Palestinian colleague of mine at World Vision, who had warm memories as a child of the Holy Fire service, was able to return to the Holy Sepulchre. She described the scene for those able to gain entrance to the church: “The crowd, striving to stay joyful, could still feel the change of what Easter had now become and the dark cloud of checkpoints, police forces, and denial of entry that had obscured the joy of this holiday.”
Now, in fact, as Oren pointed out, this is libelous and the description of the celebrants is nonsense. First, the number of permits cited by Stearns is wrong by an order of magnitude:
“Israel has provided more than 20,000 permits this year for Palestinian Christians to enter Jerusalem for the Good Friday and Easter holidays. Five-hundred similar permits have also been issued to the remaining Christians of Gaza, though the area is under the control of the terrorist organization Hamas.
Second, the “dark cloud” he refers to is belied by the joyful pictures of the worshippers inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre during the “Holy Fire” ceremony
Yes, there were police on hand to keep order, and protect against any terrorists who might feel this would be an opportune time to create a massacre in a crowded church that would discourage Christians from visiting Israel.
Moreover, police have been required, upon occasion, to intervene in violent confrontations between Christians of different sects over some slight or perceived infringement on their historical claims to some particular section of the Church or its property, as shown in the conflict between Greek and Armenian monks in this clip from 2008 or this fight in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in December 2011, when Palestinian police had to intervene.
Third, I found particularly infuriating his insinuation that Israel is persecuting Christians, when in fact it is the only country in the Middle East in which Christians are not only free to practice their religion, but their numbers are increasing:
While the ancient Christian communities around Jerusalem await the miracle of the Holy Fire this week, I pray for another miracle — one that would give full religious freedom to the Christians in the West Bank and Gaza.
This is utterly outrageous. The reason that Christians in the West Bank and Gaza do not have religion freedom is because the Arab authorities there – the PA, Fatah, and Hamas – have made it their policy and practice to make it less and less acceptable for Christians to live there.
Moreover, in the main section of its own paper, not the problematic “On Faith” section, the Washington Post had the following article which describes the visit to Jerusalem this Easter by Copts from Egypt:
Defying church ban, Egyptian Christians defy church ban and travel to Jerusalem
JERUSALEM — After the death of their spiritual leader, more than 2,000 Egyptian Copts have poured into the Holy Land for the Easter holidays, defying a ban he imposed on visiting Jerusalem and other Israeli-controlled areas.
The influx — after decades when Egyptian pilgrims were a rarity — adds a new element to the already diverse mix of languages and faiths in Jerusalem’s Old City during the holy season. The pilgrims are clearly distinguished by the Egyptian accent of their Arabic and long cotton robes worn by many of the men.
…
The Copts, mostly middle-aged or senior citizens have been busy milling around the Holy Sepulcher throughout the week. They have trundled to Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, built on the site where they believe Jesus was born. They have shopped and haggled on the way, charming many Palestinians with their Egyptian accents and humor, made familiar throughout the Arab world through generations of popular Egyptian movies and soap operas.
So what is going on at the Washington Post?
Once again I am left wondering, since it still has relatively frequent articles that fairly represent Israel from columnists like Jackson Diehl and blog extracts from right-wing bloggers like Jennifer Rubin and even occasional editorials that fairly represent Israel’s positions and concerns. There is even an Easter article by a Christian woman with a Jewish aunt pointing out the dangers that Easter has posed for Jews, At Easter, remembering Passover, due to the reading of the story of the crucifixion:
As at many churches, my church had just read the Passion narrative according to the Gospel of John: “[T]he Jews . . . cried out, ‘Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!’ ” The vilification of “the Jews” in John’s Gospel has had murderous consequences through the ages — and although Christians turned on Jews at many times of year, the Triduum was especially violent. As the 15th-century Rabbi Joseph Cohen said about Good Friday, “Every year we live in fear of this day.”
As I left church on Friday, I was worrying about what we have forgotten: the killing that our ecclesial forebears undertook on Good Fridays past. We have forgotten that sermons and liturgies prompted this killing.
Yet the editors seem to be unaware of how articles like Stearns’ Easter article, usually found in the “On Faith” section, are put forward to revisit old Christian antagonisms to Israel and Jews and a Guardian-like view of Israel and the Palestinians.
Data about Israel and the West Bank are copious and easy to find, and errors of a factor of ten and obvious bias and misrepresentation should not be tolerated. The Washington Post needs to tighten up its reviews of articles about Israel Judaism, especially in the “On Faith” section.
It should institute clear policies that demand accuracy, truthfulness, and lack of bias from all its contributors and journalists writing about Israel and Judaism if it is not to become a copy of the Guardian in its treatment of the Middle East and Israel in particular.
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Cross posted by Raheem Kassam atThe Commentator
Noam Chomsky and Ross Caputi
The title of this piece is a summary of events that no doubt sensationally portrays what has happened between the Guardian, Tarek Mehanna and Ross Caputi. But this scenario is worthy of serious contemplation for the security services, justice system and for all the individuals involved.
To bring you up to speed, Tarek Mehanna was recently found guilty of conspiracy to kill Americans overseas and of giving material support for terrorism.
He was sentenced to 17 years in prison. While his lawyers tried to represent him as a modern day Martin Luther King or even more spuriously, Nelson Mandela – a jury of his peers returned the verdict of ‘guilty’, acknowledging his role in criminal conduct.
It is reported that Mehanna travelled to Yemen in December 2004 to seek training at a terrorist camp, after which he planned to go to Iraq and fight against U.S soldiers. The judge in the case stated that he was “concerned about the defendant’s apparent absence of remorse” and when Mehanna was sent down, his family and friends delivered him a standing ovation.
I have my own concern about lack of remorse based on a recent Guardian Comment is Free article written by an Iraq War veteran who, as free as he walks, insists that what he did in Fallujah was ‘terrorism’ and writes openly in the Guardian, “I, too, support the right of Muslims to defend themselves against US troops, even if that means they have to kill them.”
This shocking statement from Ross Caputi is the kind of dangerous nonsense from someone tied up with the Stop The War Coalition, who recently introduced Noam Chomsky at an event and who seems to have become a Guardian poster boy since his article entitled, ‘I am sorry for the role I played in Fallujah’.
Firstly, if Caputi is indeed adamant about his role in ‘terrorism’ then one wonders why he hasn’t marched himself down to the local police station, courtroom or military tribunal demanding the ‘justice’ he so vehemently campaigns for on behalf of convicted terrorists. It seems the Iraq vet thinks he can alleviate this double standard by writing a groveling letter of apology to The Guardian, where he apologises for attacking Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaeda operatives who he claims were ‘defending their city’. In reality, these groups were attacking as many Iraqi civilians and security forces as they were coalition forces in the city and just to be clear, The Guardian is not, despite what its editors may think, a part of the justice system or somewhere Caputi should be able to alleviate his guilt publicly.
Next, Caputi goes on to write about the murder of his friends in a romantic fashion – glorifying their killers, “How can I begrudge the resistance in Fallujah for killing my friends?” He classes himself as an ‘invader’ and ‘aggressor’ but makes no mention of the fact that it was al-Qaeda who fought in amongst civilians, oppressing them, using home and mosques and civilian areas as munitions stores. I’m inclined to agree with one of his opening statements where he claims he had no idea what was going on in Fallujah – it appears he still does not.
By no means am I excusing the killing of civilians and the use of depleted uranium or white phosphorus as weapons, by the way. But it is important to keep a level head on these issues and perhaps through no fault of his own and some would argue understandably, Caputi cannot. When reading his work, it is evident to anyone with even a vague sense of the importance of factual evidence and strategic realities that Caputi cannot reconcile the geopolitical and moral imperatives with the memory of the war in his own mind.
He links to the ‘Iraq Body Count’ website which in fact does little to back up his claims that U.S. troops were mainly to blame for civilian deaths. They played a major role for reasons given earlier, as well heavy-fire tactics used during the invasion years – but insurgents and post-invasion criminal violence caused the lions share of civilian deaths. The website, the very same that Tony Blair cites in his recent memoir, states, “Killings by anti-occupation forces, crime and unknown agents have shown a steady rise over the entire period”. Yet these are the forces that Caputi supports when he writes, “I’m not afraid to profess my support for Tarek Mehanna, or to advocate for his ideas”.
Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. sentenced Tarek Mehanna to 17 years in prison (less than the 25 called for by the prosecution) and while Ross Caputi’s confused and dangerous rants can be dismissed as the misguided, angry and stress-related consequences of war, it is less apparent why The Guardian should see fit to print such a piece which not only advocates terrorism and supports a convict, but is also factually flawed and fuels incitement to violence against foreign troops abroad.
Even one of the more sympathetic jurors who laments Mehanna’s long prison sentence acknowledges that he was a radical obsessed with violence, jihad and on the killing of U.S. troops. Perhaps Caputi’s defense of Mehanna would be less robust if it had been he that was targeted – or perhaps in such an extreme case, it would have driven him even further.
But ‘free speech’ is always the elephant in the room in cases like this. What is to stop The Guardian, Ross Caputi or even Tarek Mehanna from speaking their minds on such issues – even if it leaves the bitterest of tastes in our mouths?
The legal implications are complex, but in Britain, Caputi’s statements of support for Mehanna, including we assume from his words, his trip to Yemen and interest in fighting in ‘the resistance’ in Iraq is not just endorsement of terrorism but also proliferation, glorification and tantamount to incitement. His piece supports the killing of American soldiers abroad and could indeed be criminal under USC 2339A – ‘providing material support to terrorists’ and in Britain ‘inciting murder for terrorist purposes overseas’.
In Mehanna’s case under U.S. law, a 1969 Supreme Court case which the ‘Brandenburg test’ is derived from sets a precedent. For criminality of speech to be inferred, you have to be able to show that it would lead to ‘imminent lawless action’. Mehanna’s defence argued that he did not do this, but rather he was prosecuted for conspiring to kill American soldiers and supporting Al-Qaeda – far more heinous crimes.
The question now arises of what happens to Caputi, since it was he himself writing in the Guardian Comment Is Free (America) who originally wrote, “I have done everything that Tarek Mehanna has done, and there are only two possibilities as to why I am not sitting in a cell with him: first, the FBI is incompetent and hasn’t been able to smoke me out; second, the US judicial system would never dream of violating my freedom of speech because I am white and I am a veteran of the occupation of Iraq.”
Here, Caputi sets himself up as a hero – his status as a veteran of the war in Iraq he argues, precluding him from the arms of the law. Neither of the stated reasons is accurate, as Caputi did not travel to Yemen looking for terrorist training, nor did he conspire to assist al-Qaeda. To the best of our knowledge, he also never conspired to kill American soldiers overseas – unless he knows something we don’t know? However he does raise a valid point. Since he is in fact, openly inciting terrorist acts abroad, what do British and American courts intend to do about it?
Typically, going after someone like Caputi would not be worth the time and money it would the government to prosecute him, even if they could be sure of a conviction. What makes this incident even more telling for the rational amongst us is Caputi’s own admission of being somewhat of a less than perfect soldier – not the ‘hero’ the FBI would have to think he was in order to, as he asserts, violate his freedom of speech. In fact, reading his blog it is easy to see that Caputi is indeed not the prim and proper Iraq veteran he masquerades as, nor was he privy to the kind of primary source information one might think The Guardian editors would look into:
“My unit got called into Camp Fallujah a couple of weeks before the 2nd assault. I was a buck private at the time and had recently been demoted for a number of charges from underage drinking to theft to general conduct unbecoming of a Marine. I was even moved out of my old infantry platoon because I just was not listening to anyone in charge of me, and they made me the Company Commander’s radio operator instead.”
This Chomsky-fanatic, who has only just surfaced in the mainstream, poses a serious threat to rational and evidence-based discourse about the war in Iraq, its consequences and the ongoing terrorist threat. Since he’s so adamant that he was a terrorist in Fallujah – I’m tempted to suggest that Caputi should be frog-marched to the nearest courtroom and forced to stand trial under his own admission of guilt. The reality is though, as he conveniently leaves out of his Guardian articles, he was scarcely ever around to witness what happened. “Most of the time” he admits, “I was perfectly safe with the officers, and there was no fighting within my immediate vicinity”.
Raheem Kassam is the Executive Editor of The Commentator. He tweets at @RaheemJKassam
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A guest post by AKUS
The controversy over Gunter Grass’ “poem”, “What Must Be Said”, available in English translation at – of course – The Guardian, has taken a new twist. Gunter Grass has been admitted to a hospital suffering from heart problems.
After searching the New York Times and Washington Post in vain for any reference to the reason for Grass’ hospitalization of course the Guardian was only too happy to provide the information – in fact, it was the only English language mainstream paper I could find on April 17th to provide a detailed report.
Although the Guardian article, Günter Grass admitted to hospital for ‘scheduled investigation‘, reports a spokeswoman as saying his hospitalization was for a “scheduled investigation” and asking “who doesn’t have any health problems at [age 84]?”, the Guardian mentions that there is speculation that the controversy over Grass’ poem has “taken a toll on his health”.
In other words, it appears that some speculate that three events are connected – the poem is published, the author is condemned by those he accuses, the author goes to hospital shortly afterwards with heart problems.
But have not cause and effect been reversed?
Rather than assuming that it might be bad for the health of an 84-year-old man to publish a poem which hysterically accuses Israel of planning to “direct nuclear warheads toward an area in which not a single atom bomb has yet been proved to exist” (when it is Iran that has threatened Israel with nuclear annihilation) apparently some believe that the fact that Israel fiercely objected to being libeled in this way is really the proximate cause of Grass’ heart problems!
In a strange way this reminds me of the way women are blamed for being sexually assaulted. “If she hadn’t dressed provocatively, I would never have done it. If women dressed modestly, men would not be tempted to assault them”, is the way the theory goes.
In the same way, we are asked to assume that if Israel had not objected to Grass’ poem accusing it of contemplating genocide, he would be in better health.
Better still, if Germany did not provide Israel with nuclear-capable submarines to counterbalance what Grass believes are imaginary threats it faces from an Iranian “loud-mouth” who “subjugates” his own people (and if he subjugates them, what has he planned for the Jews?) there would be no need to write a poem, the 84 year-old Grass would not have to worry about the future of the world, he would be feeling fine, and everyone would be better off.
Wouldn’t they?
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A guest post by AKUS
Goldenberg with Guardian's Middle East editor Ian Black at 'Open Weekend' 2012
While looking once again at the disgusting role the Guardian, and, in particular, Suzanne Goldenberg, played in disseminating the lies about the so-called “Jenin massacre” I came across a videoclip of a workshop held by the Guardian for the paying faithful (Weekend pass: £60) called the frontline debate at Guardian Open Weekend. The Guardian lined up Suzanne Goldenberg, Emma Graham-Harrison (just recruited from Reuters), Martin Chulov, and Ian Black, in what they referred to as a “debate” moderated by Lindsay Hilsum (International Editor for Channel 4 News and frequent contributor to the Guardian and Observer – 2002 TV story of the year runner up for Jenin reporting) for this event.
Actually, it was not a debate – it was a panel discussion and exercise in group-think amongst an incestuous group of mainly Israel-bashing reporters who have known each other for decades, with the exception of Graham-Harrison who seemed a little uncertain about her role in the event. There was no debate, there were no opposing views about anything, and it was attended by,I would estimate from the videocam pictures, as perhaps 20 Guardianista groupies.
If you do not think “groupies” is a fair term to describe the attendees, and have the energy to watch it all the way through, you will see one middle-aged person, worried about the digital age, expressing her undying love for the print version of the Guardian (“I’m an avid consumer of the print version. God, I love the print version. It gives me an enormous amount of pleasure every day”). I was left wondering what strange views of the world this woman must have, since reading every word, every day, in a paper like the Guardian, must surely create an alternative world view that most of us outside the Guardian bubble can hardly begin to comprehend.
Well, feeding straight into the carefully-crafted GWV of people like this we had the Goldenberg view of the ME. She managed to refer to the Middle East (Israel and Iraq were once her beats) without once mentioning her despicable role in creating the Jenin massacre libel (along with, of course, Brian Whitaker and the entire stable of anti-Israeli Guardian journalists, including weekend panelist Ian Black).
Goldenberg, like Judge Goldstein for his Gaza report, should never be forgiven for the damage she did to Israel with her reporting about Jenin. While she and the Guardian were not the only sources of the libels, and the BBC and CNN have much to answer for, her articles set the tone. In 2002, after leaving Israel for the US (see below), she won Journalist of the Year award with the BBC’s John Kampfner for her reporting from Israel and his from Gaza– awards, surely, in a minor way, as little deserved and cynical as Yasser Arafat’s Nobel Peace prize.
On the Guardian’s website, Goldenberg is shown as the Guardian’s “US Environment Correspondent”. Links to her other reporting activities avoid a link to her reports from Israel.
She left Israel after then head of the Israeli government press office , Daniel Seaman, denied her access to Israeli briefings after accusing her (and several other reporters) of acquiescing to control of her reporting by Yasser Arafat in order for her to get access to West Bank and Gazan sources (“fixers”). The manipulation of journalists and media in this way by the PA has been extensively documented by Stephanie Gutmann in her important book, “The Other War”. Although Rusbridger denied this was the reason for Goldenberg’s withdrawal, clearly she was no longer useful in her position in Jerusalem. The Guardian has never retracted her reports and has never apologized in print for its coverage of the battle in Jenin. Rusbridger has only made a verbal retraction in a barely noticed comment on March 3rd, 2008 (six years later!) at the Jewish Book Week’s closing session in London.
There are two clips recording her comments that the Guardian extracted from the panel discussion. The first is:
In which she recounts how sad she was when, as a result of the first intifada, barriers went up between Jerusalem and Ramallah, due to the mistrust between Israelis and West Bank Arabs. She ignores the horror, deaths, and brutality of the suicide bombings. Her theme for the weekend was “How the contacts (between Israelis and Palestinians) withered and how that fed the conflict” – never mentioning how her virulent reporting contributed to the bitterness.
The second refers to her shameless attitude to misreporting and creating the news:
‘Your job is to make people connect to the story’ – video
“I can’t predict accurately what will make a big impact and what will not”.
Fair enough, if what she reported is really what happened. But in fact the hallmark of her reporting from Israel, culminating in her lies about what happened in Jenin as a result of the second intifada, was the creation of a story with “big impact” by grabbing onto and reporting every rumor and lie spread by the likes of Saeeb Erekat and other Palestinians such as Nabil Shaath without any serious attempt at corroboration from the IDF.
Israel’s Defensive Shield operation in Jenin ran from April 1 – April 11, 2002. In an article from April 9, Toll of the bloody battle of Jenin, she recounted the fierce opposition met by Israeli forces. The article carries the almost certainly incorrect sub-header
“Suzanne Goldenberg in the West Bank town that has seen a ‘victory’ for militiamen bought at the terrible price of 13 Israelis and 100 Palestinians dead”
Since reporters were not allowed in by Israel, she herself wrote
What little independent information has trickled out of the camp has arrived through the accounts of Palestinian men, who were detained and released by the invading Israeli forces, or through sporadic telephone phone calls with residents of Jenin camp and town.
But as time went by, to get the “impact” she needed and make “make people connect to the story”, the description of events became more and more reliant on the wild exaggerations of the PA spokesmen.
For example, in the article Disaster zone hides final death toll, even when it was apparent that the death toll in Jenin was dozens and not hundreds, and even she referred to only 16 confirmed Arab deaths (later to rise to 52) she continued beating the drum of anti-Israeli lies.
She continued the attempt to give the impression of hundreds of innocents had been massacred. To help “people connect to the story” and give it “impact”, she added unsubstantiated “accounts” of “scores of bodies beneath the ruins”:
There are also accounts of scores of bodies beneath the ruins – especially at the centre of the camp where some 200 homes were crushed by Israeli army bulldozers – reputedly with people inside – in a frenzied demolition campaign on the last two days of fighting.
As her stories developed, references to Israeli casualties disappeared, and from the start there was no context provided by mentioning the reason for the Defensive Shield action, of which Jenin was one battle, (increasing terrorist attacks culminating in the real massacre of innocents at the Park Hotel Seder). In fact, Goldenberg is credited with only one article about the Park Hotel massacre, Suicide bomb kills 16 Israelis in hotel, co-written with Graham Usher while she was in Beirut. She was reporting there on a now long-forgotten meeting where the Saudis laid out their peace plan while preventing Arafat from participating by satellite link. She reported, ironically in light of the events we are witnessing in Syria a decade later, contemporaneously (March 27, 2002) with the Park Hotel massacre:
“Syria’s Bashar Assad called on Arab leaders to support the Palestinian uprising, and condemned the Jewish state as a “living example” of terrorism.”
The Guardian reader was left with the utterly false impression that what happened in Jenin was an event at least on the scale of a Bosnia visited for no reason at all on defenseless, peaceful people. In fact, the claim was immediately uncritically repeated by the Guardian’s own Jonathan Freedland, writing from London – Parallel universes– who compared the Jenin battle to the Christian massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila:
The streets are strewn with corpses, and there are more underneath the wreckage. Palestinians say bodies were piled up and taken away in trucks; that men were lined up, thinking they were under arrest, and shot; that homes were hit by helicopter gunships even as civilians cowered inside. Among the dead are the elderly and the very young, left to die, it is said, because no ambulance was allowed to get near. For Palestinians, Jenin 2002 is a tragedy on a par with Beirut 1982, when Christian Phalangists massacred hundreds in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, unhindered by the Israeli army which then ruled the city.
An account of the battle on Wikipedia, adds information which provides context for the limited number of civilian casualties. This background was not mentioned by Goldenberg, who, like other journalists, was not allowed access until after the fighting had ended:
According to Efraim Karsh, before the fighting started, the IDF used loudspeakers broadcasting in Arabic to urge the locals to evacuate the camp, and he estimates that some 11,000 left. Stephanie Gutmann also noted that the IDF used bullhorns and announcements in Arabic to inform the residents of the invasion, and that the troops massed outside the camp for a day because of rain. She estimated that 1,200 remained in the camp, but that it was impossible to tell how many of them were fighters. After the battle, Israeli intelligence estimated that half the population of noncombatants had left before the invasion, and 90% had done so by the third day, leaving around 1,300 people. Others estimated that 4,000 people had remained in the camp. Some camp residents reported hearing the Israeli calls to evacuate, while others said they did not. Many thousands did leave the camp, with women and children usually permitted to move into the villages in the surrounding hills or the neighbouring city. However, the men who left were almost all temporarily detained. Instructed by Israeli soldiers to strip before they were taken away, journalists who entered Jenin following the invasion remarked that heaps of discarded clothing in the ruined streets showed where they were taken into custody.
Not a word of this was ever reported by Goldenberg, nor, as far as I have been able to discover, by the Guardian.
Ian Black, also on the panel, co-authored which indicates how quickly the media disinformation had infected the political ranks in Europe, and repeated the exaggerations of the Palestinian Authority:
A senior Palestinian, Nabil Shaath, accused Israel of carrying out summary executions and removing corpses in refrigerated trucks. He said close to 500 people had been killed. Israel says 70 Palestinian fighters died in the fighting. “The Israeli army took six days to complete its massacre in Jenin and six days to clean it up,” Mr Shaath said.
In a speech published by then editor of Ha’aretz, Hanoch Marmori about a Jenin-inspired libel, the Abu Ali affair, Digging beneath the surface in the Middle East conflict , Marmori said:
While preparing this address, I made some inquiries about Abu Ali’s case. First, final numbers indicate that three children and four women were killed during the fighting in the Jenin refugee camp. Second, Abu Ali’s children were not among them. And third, the [influential European] magazine did not bother to tell its readers of this relatively happy end to its story. Perhaps because they are tired of writing editor’s notes on Middle East stories.
The past 20 months of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have created a real crisis of values for journalism. I believe I can compress the enormous volume of coverage and comment into four fundamental sins: obsessiveness, prejudice, condescension and ignorance. The story of Abu Ali conveniently exemplifies all four.
…
One day, historians examining this period of crisis will have to consider the circular process by which the media were transformed from observers to participants. From covering the story to playing a major part in it, to stimulating and sometimes agitating the environment for their own media purposes. The media in this cruel Israeli-Palestinian conflict are like a very rich junkie, who parks his Mercedes on the high street of a slum. You can be sure that in no time at all, everyone will be out there, pushing a whole variety of merchandise.
Change “Mercedes” to “Rolls Royce” and you have an excellent summary of the way Goldenberg covered, and the Guardian with Harriet Sherwood and Phoebe Greenwood continues to cover, the Israel beat. There are no apologies, no retractions, just an on-going effort to shovel the suspect merchandise to their loving groupies.
—
Apropos the panel discussion, Robin Shepherd’s “Commentator” had this interesting article:
4. GUARDIAN TO CHARGE 9K FOR JOURNALISM COURSE
The Kraken isn’t going away without a fight.
Having made losses before tax of £33million last year, Guardian News and Media had already announced plans for a possible Hotel Guardianista ventureNow, it seems, education is their next port of call with the group looking at plans to start a digital journalism course.
Seeing as its current crop of hacks is incapable of presenting well-reasoned journalism, one has to wonder what’ll be on the syllabus – presumably tips on how to obfuscate a lost back-and-forth in order to evade embarrassment in a manner that would leave even Harry Houdini scratching his head.
And what’ll the damage be? £9000 per year.
Perhaps now its readers will be weaned off their current force-fed diet of attacks on rising tuition fees…
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- Jenin. Ten Years Since Something That Never Happened: A Learning Moment for the Guardian (cifwatch.com)
- Another blow against propagandists still advancing the Al-Durrah Hoax (cifwatch.com)
- Why is the ‘liberal’ Guardian still rooting for a reactionary antisemitic Islamist named Raed Salah? (cifwatch.com)
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A guest post by AKUS
Since it is Passover, and organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, and a country like Iran, have thousands of rockets which they launch into Israel with great regularity, you may have been wondering why this single North Korean rocket is different from all other rockets.
If you’ve been able to avoid the endless repetition on US TV of the Trayvon saga, you have probably been watching the media obsessing over the North Korean rocket launch.
For example, this is the headline in the Washington Post:
Our friends at the Guardian also reported the launch, pointing out that the North Korean have defied “international warnings” about this “provocation”:
This is what Time Magazine had to say about it in the build-up to the “scarier than you think” launch:
North Korea’s Space Threat Is Scarier Than You Think
But just the idea of North Korea aiming for space — and having the missile muscle to get there — led to hair-on-fire panic in east Asia and a more measured but very real angst in the rest of the world. A loonytoons country with nuclear weapons and global reach is no one’s idea of a good thing. The key questions — still unanswerable — are whether North Korea may soon have the technical chops to reach orbit and if they do, does that mean anything?
But, for example, this blasé mention of 300 Israeli casualties is how Guardian ace reporter Harriet Sherwood reported on the threat Hezbollah’s thousands of Iranian-supplied rockets represent to Israel:
So why is one rocket from North Korea creating such panic, while thousands aimed at Israel are not?
Well, you see, it turns out that Hezbollah’s rockets cannot reach Europe or the USA.
But North Korea’s rockets, eventually, will be able to.
It’s funny how attitudes change when the possibility of a rocket crashing through your roof becomes more real.
Lest I forget – the issue being hyped up now that the rocket launch failed is that in the past this kind of show-piece has been the lead-up to an underground nuclear test by North Korea.
It’s also funny how upset some countries seem to be about this, while being rather complacent about Iran’s nuclear program and assistance from North Korea to various Islamic countries. But perhaps they feel that Iran’s nuclear threat is, shall we say, more local at this time. It will be interesting to see if that changes when Iran launches its first intercontinental ballistic rocket and conducts its first underground (we hope) nuclear test.
And that, dear reader, is why a North Korean rocket, launched coincidentally during Passover, is different from all other rockets.
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- BDS, the most irrelevant story ever told: The unbearable vapidness of being Emma Thompson (cifwatch.com)
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A guest post by Gidon Ben-Zvi, a freelance Israeli writer
I recently celebrated my third consecutive Passover in Israel.
True, this historical tidbit may lack the dramatic resonance of a hike up Masada or an excursion into the Western Wall Tunnels. Still, I am but a scion of restless Diaspora gypsies, a vagabond collection of characters and scoundrels who hustled pool in halls around Coney Island and attempted to topple Disneyland by getting in on a fun little footnote by the name of Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica, California.
Passover in the United States is instantly synonymous with The Ten Commandments, filmed in glorious Technicolor and featuring a memorable performance by Edward G. Robinson as Dathan, the cruel Israelite overseer of the Hebrews who moonlighted as informant for the Egyptians.
Since the 1956 premier of this visually arresting epic, the Jewish world has turned, turned, turned. A slew of presumptive Pharaohs, including Gamel Abdel Nasser and Leonid Brezhnev, have sought to complete the good works initiated by Rameses II – by way of expulsion, persecution and imprisonment.
Yet, neither Dathan’s whip nor Joseph Stalin’s “forgotten Zion”, Birobidzhan, succeeded in foiling the Hebrews’ tryst with destiny – in a land called Canaan, at a time ordained in heaven.
A powerful cast, dazzling special effects (for the day) and, above all, a compelling narrative is at the root of The Ten Commandments’ timeless appeal. In the years since Charlton Heston led thousands of Paramount Picture extras to the Land of Milk and Honey, however, an insidious form of historical narrative has laid claim to popular perceptions about Israel and its place among the family of nations. Even the phrase ‘right to exist’ is applied in reference to only one nation on Earth.
When the telling of a rollicking good tale supplants the rigorous pursuit and accumulation of facts, the result is historical relativism. If truth differs over time and bends over space, then all notions of objectivity are lost. This is the United Colors of Benetton School of Historical Inquiry: non judgmental, superficially egalitarian and incessantly self-righteous.
At first, this diluting of history’s richness and depth into a tepid stew of bumper sticker catch phrases was confined to the hallowed halls of academie. It took a few years, but history-as-you-like-it eventually received the full red carpet treatment. And in no corner of society has relativism been more warmly embraced than in the arts – a subculture noted for its garish sentimentalism and ersatz tolerance.
A recent incident of fashionable bigotry masquerading as politically courageous theater was that of Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson’s call for the exclusion of Israel’s Habima Theater Company from Globe to Globe, a renowned international festival being held at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London.
The elegant Ms Thompson cites ‘policies of exclusion practiced by the Israeli state’ as fuelling her moral outrage.
When I clicked on to the Globe to Globe website, then, I naturally assumed, based on the effervescent Emma’s righteous indignation, that the festival would consist of the tried and true assemblage of British Commonwealth nations: Australia, India, Jamaica and of course the United Kingdom. A cross-section of enlightened societies with an appreciation for the Bard of Avon was a safe bet, no?
I stand corrected. Here’s just a partial list of nations that have “partnered” with the World Shakespeare Festival in some way, shape or form, along with some of their own state-sponsored ‘productions’:
*China: “Forced Abortions: One Child Left Behind”
* Palestinian Authority: “All in the Family: Murder Most Honorable”
*Oman: “No Comment: Of Jailed Journalists and Pesky Freedoms”
*Russia: “Now Steal This II: Putin’s Revenge”
*Tunisia: “The Rise of Moderate Jihad and the Twilight of Liberty”
While Emma Thompson’s intellectual dishonesty and selective outrage is certainly sufficient to induce a temporary spike in one’s blood pressure, I must hereby admit that I couldn’t care less.
Thing is, life is quite a bit about timing. I happened to hear about Ms Thompson’s casting her lot in with butchers and tyrants right as I was heading out, with my very pregnant wife in tow, to have our pots and pans, forks and knives kosherized prior to the onset of Passover, 2012.
At some point on the short walk from our Nachlaot apartment to the site of the holy boiling, feelings of anger at a misguided British thespian melted away like so much fermented grain from a freshly steamed pot.
Then, my mind wandered to stories my father would tell me about he being the son of a bona fide hustler…and owner of the Ocean Highway Ride at Pacific Ocean Park. Emma Thompson and Sabba Harry…no obvious connection, right?
Not so fast.
Ms Thompson’s rant actually bares a remarkable resemblance to my grandfather’s blue and orange ride. Both rumble and hiss at exaggerated decibels, making an instant impact on anyone in earshot. And both will eventually be forgotten but for the tired recollections of a few old peddlers and faded theater impresarios.
Ill fated ideas, be they Pacific Ocean Park or boycotting Israel, are slated for disposal into the trash bin of cold, objective, inevitable history.
By the way, Operation Zero Chametz (Thanks Chabad!) was a success and I’m proud to say that our floors were so clean, Elijah himself could have eaten off them.
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- ‘Boycott Israel,’ the movie, starring actress Emma Thompson (cifwatch.com)
This is cross posted by Ben Cohen, and originally appeared at Jointmedia News Service.
If Hollywood ever makes a movie about the movement to boycott Israel, I can think of no one better suited to the starring role than Emma Thompson.
I imagine Thompson’s character as a schoolteacher or a librarian, dowdy looking with just a hint of prettiness. She lives alone in a cozy apartment filled with potted plants and books on personal growth, third-world politics and vegetarian cookery.
Her significant other is a fluffy cat that nestles in her lap every night as she sits in front of her computer reading the latest dispatches from occupied “Palestine,” her face etched with righteous disbelief.
She doesn’t have time for a boyfriend, but that won’t stop her would-be suitor, an equally self-righteous, mildly kooky Jewish writer—think Peter Beinart—from trying to win her heart.
By the time we’re halfway through the film, Emma will have decided that she simply must visit the West Bank, despite the enormous dangers posed by the Israeli occupation forces. She comes to this awareness while attending a Passover seder hosted by her aspiring boyfriend, during which he pulls out a fading photograph of his great-grandmother who was murdered during the Holocaust.
Fighting back the tears, he confides that, “If she could see what Israel has become, she’d die all over again from the shame.” The two fall into each other’s arms, waking the next morning to a breakfast of matzo brei— as Emma tries to pronounce the name of the dish she’s eating, we giggle through the obligatory moment of light relief—before she’s whisked away in a taxi to the airport, and thence to the beautiful-yet-tragic land of Palestine.
In the West Bank, she cavorts with cute little kids—“just like the ones I teach back home”—drinks mint tea with effusive women who bear the daily humiliation of occupation with a smile and a shrug, and admires the steely-eyed men who stand up to the nasty Israelis with all the conviction of a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King.
Emma embraces their anger but concludes that violence is not the answer. Just before she leaves the Palestinian village that now feels like home, she regales the enthusiastically nodding villagers with a speech—tearful, of course—expounding on the importance of non-violence. “Don’t use bombs,” she exhorts. “Use boycotts.” Their applause can be heard all the way to the adjacent Israeli army base, where the commander is suddenly struck by the realization that the Palestinian aspiration for freedom can never be crushed.
Roll the credits. And don’t call it a chick flick.
With a movie like this one, art would be imitating life—to be precise, Emma Thompson’s life. Recently, the Oscar-winning actress joined with other darlings of stage and screen to protest the participation of Tel Aviv’s venerable Habimah Theater in a London festival that is performing the plays of William Shakespeare in 37 different languages.
In a letter published by The Guardian—a liberal newspaper with a long track record of publishing anti-Semitic material—Thompson and her cohorts slammed “Habima” [sic] for its “shameful record of involvement with illegal Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territory.” They ended with a demand to exclude the theater from the festival. No such objections were voiced concerning the participation of a Palestinian theater troupe, nor the involvement of the National Theater of China, which is directly funded by one of the world’s most repressive regimes.
In fact, there are many good reasons to ditch political objections and keep the festival open to all—which its organizers, to their credit, have done, in spite of Thompson’s fulminations. To perform Shakespeare is in itself a celebration of artistic freedom. Habimah’s version of “The Merchant of Venice,” the play that gave us the figure of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who embodies anti-Semitic canards even as he challenges them, is sure to be enticing. And I would genuinely love to see how actors from communist China interpret the story of “Richard III.”
For those like Emma Thompson, though, boycotts are predicated on supposedly universal principles and then applied to only one target—Israel. To understand the strategy here, it’s worth recalling the campaign in the UK for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Ten years ago, an article in The Guardian noted that Israel’s universities are victims of their own success:
“The nature of Israel’s academic pre-eminence,” the article explained, “makes it vulnerable to a boycott.”
The same logic applies to the flourishing arts scene in Israel. The excellence of a theater like Habimah, along with its enthusiasm to perform outside Israel’s borders, renders it a sitting duck for boycott campaigners. In their warped view of the world, Palestinian freedom can only be achieved by quarantining Israelis on the basis of their nationality.
Thus do apparently free-spirited artists echo the racist policies of the Arab League, which began its boycott of the Jewish community in Eretz Israel in 1945, three years before the state of Israel was born.
What, then, is the appropriate response to Emma Thompson and those like her? Certainly not to make the movie I described earlier. Instead, they should be given a taste of their own medicine.
We are often told that Jews run Hollywood—the same Hollywood that carried on casting Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson’s fellow Brit, in leading roles after she denounced so-called “Zionist hoodlums” in an Oscar acceptance speech in 1978. Will the studio moguls continue to indulge Thompson as they indulged Redgrave? Or will they show some gumption, and tell her that, for as long as she seeks to discriminate against Israeli artists, she will be banished from our screens?
I think I know, sadly, what the answer is. But I’d love to be proved wrong.
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A guest post by Hadar Sela
Roman Catholics at Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Photo: AFP)
How unfortunate it is that participants in last month’s ‘Christ at the Checkpoint’ conference in Bethlehem such as Stephen Sizer and Ben White did not extend their stay. What a pity it is too that the ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ folks didn’t hang around a little longer.
Had they done so, they would have had to confront the fact that despite GMJ organiser Sarah Marusek’s off the wall claims about “limitations on Christians and Muslims from accessing holy sites” in Jerusalem, thousands of Christians are currently celebrating Easter in the city including – for the first time in years – Egyptian Copts.
The latter were apparently prevented from worshipping at the St. Helena Chapel (the Egyptian part of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher) – although by church officials, not by Israeli authorities, so we will probably not be seeing any headlines on that subject in the ‘progressive’ Western media.
Ben White – a denier of Islamist persecution of Palestinian Christians – and his fellow Sabeel star turn and promoter of the ‘Israeli apartheid’ myth Stephen Sizer would have had to somehow explain away Israel’s provision of entry into the country to 500 Christians from Hamas-controlled Gaza and a further 20,000 from the PA-controlled territories in order to enable them to celebrate their holiday.
Would such a confrontation with reality have made a difference to the style and content of the rhetoric spouted by people such as Marusek, White and Sizer? Probably not.
After all, Sizer is one of the authors of the ‘Christ at the Checkpoint Manifesto’ which – inter alia – provides the magical ‘get out of jail free’ card in the form of the statement that “[c]riticism of Israel and the occupation cannot be confused with anti-Semitism and the delegitimization of the State of Israel”.
But at least the rest of us can be sure that just about the last subject of concern for the Whites, Sizers and Maruseks of this world is the right of people of all faiths in the Middle East to freedom of worship.
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Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
Guardian scrubs reference to ‘Jewish political establishment’ with no explanation
May 5, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: Boris Johnson, Guardian, Harry Cole, Ken Livingstone, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Raheem Kassam, Yusuf al-Qaradawi | by Guest/Cross Post | 12 comments
This essay was written by Raheem Kassam & Harry Cole for The Commentator
[Note: CiF Watch recently published posts pertaining to Hugh Muir, the Guardian writer who's the subject of the following Commentator essay, following Muir's smear of Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard. (See here and here) - A.L.]
The original text in print. Something that editor’s can’t delete
It seems that ever-wrong British newspaper The Guardian has made yet another blunder in what can only be described as a serious and continued internal confusion over ‘the Jews’. The Guardian, self-admittedly has form with ingrained anti-Semitism within the rank and file.
Following the Labour mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone’s loss to Boris Johnson last night, the print edition of The Guardian asserted that it was Ken’s own baggage that brought him down. We couldn’t agree more, but on a scan through the article and as highlighted by various people on Twitter this morning, we found this:
This could be interpreted quite innocuously at first, or conversely, be read into as The Guardian tarring the entire British political establishment as Jewish run. But putting the quote in context regarding Ken’s Nazi insult to Jewish reporter Oliver Finegold and the ‘embrace of Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi’ we see further into what The Guardianis getting at.
This appears to be a case of foot-in-mouth disease once again, painting an image of a London Jewry led by a cabal of high-power, high-profile men and women pulling the strings over every Jew in London, and quite possibly non-Jews like us as well. “Vote as we say!” The Guardian might imagine, “Or you’ll lose our your invite to the annual London Jewish gathering where we all talk about Iran and read passages from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion!” The Guardian has adopted a tone in its writing about British Jewry that actually, unintentionally, lampoons their own approach to this small but diverse community.
Perhaps we jest too much though and this was a perfectly okay thing to say. Why then, did The Guardian choose to scrub the text ’Jewish political establishment’ from the article on its website, without a hint of an admission, and replace it with the term ‘Jewish communal leadership’? Perhaps an editor at The Guardian took one look at the sentence, spat out his bagel and demanded a retraction? But there’s no such retraction on the website itself, and trying to erase from existence what found its way into the print edition is a faux pas more befitting Johann Hari than Alan Rusbridger. Or is it?
Read rest of the essay here.
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