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As loyal followers of this blog know, we have been publishing “Postcards from Israel” each Friday for the past few weeks, posts based on photos taken by Israelinurse - virtual trips to different destinations, highlighting the diverse and eclectic beauty of the country.
Here’s a photo from the most recent edition on Israeli wild flowers.
Yet, despite the completely apolitical nature of such posts, one of our blog’s critics’ (who lurks beneath the line using the moniker “mostly harmless”) had this to say regarding the photos from the latest post.
Yes, clearly mostly harmless was able to see through Israelinurse’s supremely cynical Zionist hasbara tactic of FLORAL-WASHING.
Moreover, our critic’s query does raise some interesting questions which, though beyond my expertise, UNRWA’s Chris Gunness may wish to address – such as:
What is the precise population of indigenous Palestinian flora (and their descendants)?
Do they have a ‘right of return’?
And, finally, how many flowers, given the forced seed dispersal following the 1948 War (aka, the Plantae Nakba), can legitimately claim refugee status?
I imagine that such previously taboo discussions regarding Israeli cruelty will now give way to a new BDS protest movement.
Related articles
- Postcard from Israel: Wild Flower spotting (cifwatch.com)
- Ali Abunimah makes UNRWA Spokesperson Chris Gunness “Giggle” (cifwatch.com)
Like this:
Abu Qatada and his beard
I’ve been reading the Guardian every day since July of 2010 and I still marvel at their seemingly limitless capacity to both sympathetically portray even the most ruthless, reactionary and malevolent figures, while simultaneously chastising the West for its ethnocentrism – our failure to feel terrorists’ pain.
The most recent example, On Feb. 10, Jonathan Jones’ CiF essay (Abu Qatada and the portraits of hate), suggests the over-the-top polemics of a right-wing troll, rather than an earnest argument. That is, the theme explored by Jones seems to veer into parody, something you’d more likely find in the satirical sites, The Onion or The People’s Cube.
Jones (a Guardian Arts contributor) frames Qatada, a major al-Qaeda figure, as a victim of our culture’s irrational fear of unorthodox physical appearances – what Jones describes as his “expansive waterfall of facial hair.” [emphasis added]
Jones’ piece includes this passage:
Tremendous beards have for thousands of years been symbols of intense male spirituality in many religions. Qatada’s beard is not so very different from the outburst of chin hair sported by Pope Julius II in a 16th century portrait by Raphael, or the beards of Jewish elders in a painting by Bellini.
Jones, whose essay employed the words “beard” or “hair” 15 times – which, I’ll go out on a limb to suggest represents a record number of follicle references in an essay about terrorism – argues:
The best way to understand how supporters of al-Qaida…who present themselves in this way imagine their own appearance, might be to look at Michelangelo’s statue of Moses. Like Qatada, Michelangelo’s Moses has a grandiloquent beard that dominates his face, which in the case of Moses is both gentle and furious. Moses glares wrathfully at us sinners as we enter the church that houses Michelangelo’s sculpture. His beard is that of a prophet, close to God, who looks contemptuously on the deficiencies and sins of humankind.
Qatada, like Moses, is a holy man full of wrath [emphasis added]
Jones, seemingly obsessed with how Qatada’s beard has been used to unfairly vilify him – what will no doubt hitherto be know as ‘Ethnocentric Facial Hair Bias” (EFHB) – added:
His clerical dress and beard identify him as part of a subculture of radical Islamists and within that subculture signify spiritual grace. But outside that world they mean he is a terrorist, a fanatic, a violent zealot.
He is visually ostracised, and visually condemned.
Barbaric use of images to demonise others and so justify the deprivation of their human rights.
Of course, the “visually ostracized” Abu Qatada was also Osama Bin Laden’s right hand man in the UK, who, in 1999, issued a fatwa authorizing the killing of Jews, including Jewish children, and told his mosque congregation that Americans should be attacked, wherever they were; that in his view they were no better than Jews; and that there was no difference between English, Jewish and American people.
Yet for Jonathan Jones, the “progressive” brave, new man, refreshingly free of the intellectually-crippling biases infecting a Western mind unfairly imputing guilt to this devout, complicated soul, we are in no moral position to pass judgement.
While many among the crude, unenlightened masses will remain bereft of Jones’ transforming understandings of Qatada’s “spiritual grace” and his sublime, ineffable aesthetic strength, such profound, majestic truths will certainly not be lost on the Guardian Left.
Related articles
Here at CiF Watch we are enchanted by the diverse and eclectic beauty of Israel and we know that many of you are, too. So we thought it would be fun if now and again we invited our esteemed readers out on a virtual trip to different destinations.
All photos taken by Israelinurse
Like this:
An exquisite convergence of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism appeared in ‘Comment is Free’ today, written by Mark Weisbrot, perhaps the most prolific among CiF’s core of extreme left commentators.
Weisbrot’s sophistication and erudition, when expounding upon the U.S war against sadistic Taliban terrorists, was on display in his previous CiF entry, where he thriftily and pithily summed up the US campaign as “soldiers pissing on corpses [and] drones slaughtering civilians”.
He characterized the U.S. war against terrorism more broadly as arguably indicative of “a crusade against the Muslim world” – agitprop which seems to slip off Weisbrot’s tongue with the ease of someone schooled in the Noam Chomsky school of tyranny apologetics.
And, as I noted previously, Weisbrot quite explicitly accused the U.S. of committing a “Holocaust” in Iraq, accusing critics of such a characterization as guilty of “Holocaust Denial”.
Naturally, as part of his broader anti-American ideological package, Weisbrot is necessarily as hostile to Israel as he is sympathetic to Arab despots.
Weisbrot – whose output of anti-Zionist and (mostly) anti-American vitriol, at Znet and CiF, is quite impressive – today published “Why American ‘democracy’ promotion rings hollow“, Jan. 31.
While the broader narrative, mocking American democracy promotion in the Arab world is itself a work of political sophistry worthy of scrutiny, the following passage about Israel is a much repeated, if banal, narrative within Guardian-Left circles, and represents yet another casual assault on the Jewish state’s legitimacy.
Write’s Weisbrot:
Nowhere is [the hypocritical U.S. claim to promote democracy] more obvious than in the Middle East, where the US government’s policy of collaboration with Israel’s denial of Palestinian national rights has put it at odds with populations throughout the region. As a result, Washington fears democracy in many countries because it will inevitably lead to more governments taking the side of the Palestinians,
The notion that the Arab world, which continues to be defined by increasing intolerance towards religious and ethnic minorities, extreme antisemitism, and the denial of basic human rights – in stark contrast with Israel’s unique and enduring democratic prowess - possesses any moral credibility in denouncing the U.S. is a political inversion of the first order.
Arabs of Palestinian origin, whose rights are systematically denied throughout the (non-Jewish) Middle East, have become the propaganda tool of choice for far left ideologues such as Weisbrot – activists who similarly fail to mention the absence of such democratic values in Palestinian ruled territory.
The reason why Western liberals fear the upheavals in the Arab world is the increasingly clear slouch towards Islamist political movements which are, by definition, decidedly reactionary and illiberal, and at odds with true democratic values.
The romaticization of the Arab Spring, the edifice of a “democratic” revolution, is becoming increasingly difficult for those who claim intellectual integrity to maintain.
The Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists in Egypt, the Enhada Party in Tunisia, or major parties vying for power in Libya, can largely be defined (or may likely, one day, be defined) by a greater adherence to (in spirit or letter) Sharia law, and an atavistic, ideological antisemitism which bears little if any connection to the plight of the Palestinians.
As a report on antisemitism in the Arab world in the context of the ‘Arab Spring”, written by scholars at the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, noted:
[While] the popular uprisings in the Arab world do not represent a general change in attitude towards Israel, Zionism and the Jews it seems the anti-Semitic discourse and incitement have become more extreme and violent,”
Charges of an international Jewish conspiracy have been a central motif in the anti-Semitic propaganda that has accompanied the Arab Spring uprisings. This motif has been emphasized in each of the countries especially by way of pointing a blaming finger towards Israel, Zionism and Jews conspiring against Arabs and Muslims
Of course, the continuing Arab antipathy towards Jews is not at all surprising to those who study the politics of the region, and the habitual denial of this endemic Judeophobic dynamic by Guardian reporters and commentators is documented continually on the pages of this blog.
But the mere ubiquity of voices like Weisbrot, at ‘Comment is Free’, who are willfully blind to the most malign anti-Jewish racism, makes it no less deserving of critical scrutiny, nor, especially, any less morally repugnant.
Related articles
- Reinforcing Prejudices: Mark Weisbrot’s subtle meditation at CiF on why America is so vile (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian publishes letter by supporter of Gilad Atzmon, refuses to publish rebuttal (cifwatch.com)
- The Perils of Self-Deception on the Root Cause of Antisemitism (cifwatch.com)
- Arun Kundnani, & a Guardian dog-whistle about the injurious effects of a wealthy American Zionist (cifwatch.com)
- The ‘Humanitarian Racism’ of Harriet Sherwood and the Guardian Left (cifwatch.com)
This was written by our friend Chas Newkey-Burden, and originally posted at his blog, OyVaGoy
It is Holocaust Memorial Day [today]. You can read more about this year’s theme here.
On days such as this I am reminded of the words of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who wrote the following:
‘What cannot help but astound us is that the Hasidim remained the Hasidim inside the ghetto walls, inside the death camps. In the shadow of the executioner, they celebrated life. Startled Germans whispered to each other of Jews dancing in the cattle cars rolling towards Birkenau; Hasidim ushering in Simchat Torah. And there were those who in Block 57 at Auschwitz tried to make me join in their fervent singing. Were these miracles?’
What a passage: it is haunting and inspiring, harrowing and uplifting all at once. Similar emotions are provoked by a recording made at Bergen-Belsen shortly after it was liberated in April 1945. It includes weary Jewish survivors singing Hativkah (The Hope), the song that became the national anthem of the state of Israel. You can find a link to the recording on the right-hand side of this page. (Or, see YouTube clip below)
‘Never despair! Never! It is forbidden to give up hope,’ wrote Rabbi Nachman, a century before any of these events took place. These are wise words, yet not always easy to live up to.
Yet consider the Hasidim who celebrated life in the death camps, and the survivors who sang of hope at Bergen-Belsen. Stories such as these remind me how even in the darkest moments it is possible, and essential, to maintain hope.
On Jan. 9, the Palestinian Times reported that Fatah arrested 8 Hamas members, including a journalist, in the West Bank over several days. The report also alleged that Fatah arbitrarily extended the detention of other Hamas members, and of firing a teacher who is a member of the group.
Fatah arresting Hamas members in the West Bank
On Jan. 19th, Israel arrested one Hamas member Aziz Dweik , on suspicion of involvement with terrorist activity.
On Jan. 20th, Harriet Sherwood rushed to advocate on behalf of the Hamas terrorist arrested by Israel, posting a piece titled “Israeli jails Palestinian parliament speaker without trial“. However, further in the article, even Sherwood acknowledges that Dweik is a Parliament speaker in name only, as the Palestinian Legislative Council has not sat since the summer of 2007, when Hamas – which had won elections the previous year – took control of Gaza in a bloody battle with Fatah.
The Guardian also posted a video on Jan. 20 championing the cause of the Hamas speaker of the non-existent Parliament.
Yet, strangely absent from the Guardian’s Israel, Palestinian Territories, or Gaza pages are any mention whatsoever of Fatah’s arrest of eight Hamas members. Nor mentioned, in service of providing background to Sherwood’s story, was the fact that in 2008 PA security forces aligned with Abbas arrested hundreds of Hamas members and supporters and, further, in 2009, nearly all Hamas-controlled municipal officials were replaced by Fatah officials.
Context similarly missing from Sherwood’s report is the fact that Hamas arrested thousands of Fatah loyalists in Gaza in 2010 alone, including PA legislators. And, a report in the Palestinian Press as recently as Dec. 30, 2o11 noted that such arrests of Fatah members continued through 2011.
Sherwood characterized the arrest of Dweik as an effort by Israel “to undermine democratic institutions in Palestine”, and hinder reconciliation between the two groups.
Yet, the Palestinians, by any measure, have failed miserably on their own at establishing anything resembling genuinely democratic institutions, as President Mahmoud Abbas is currently serving the seventh year of a four year term, and, per Freedom House, the PA is listed as “not free“.
“In the Palestinian Authority administered territories, political rights rating declined from 5 to 6 [7 is the worst score] due to the expiration of President Mahmoud Abbas four-year term in January 2009, the ongoing lack of a functioning elected legislature, and an edict allowing the removal of elected municipal governments in the West Bank.”
So, while the arrest of one Hamas member by Israel elicits a storm of criticism by the Guardian, scores of arrests by Fatah of Hamas officials, and Hamas members by Fatah officials, is evidently considered insignificant to contextualizing the lack of a functioning democracy in the Palestinian controlled territories.
More broadly, both this latest report, and Sherwood’s continuing reports from the region, seem to possess a unique capacity to blame Israel in some manner for every conceivable Palestinian failure, while similarly denying Palestinians basic moral agency (the definition of liberal racism) – a journalistic dynamic which prevents honest reporting on the I-P Conflict.
Related articles
- Question to Harriet Sherwood: How are Gazans living in sovereign Palestinian state still “refugees”? (cifwatch.com)
- The ‘Humanitarian Racism’ of Harriet Sherwood and the Guardian Left (cifwatch.com)
- Hamas, Harriet Sherwood and the Guardian Left’s continuing antisemitic sins of omission (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood Gets 2012 Off to a Shoddy Start (cifwatch.com)
This is cross posted by Benjamin Weinthal, and originally published at the Jerusalem Post
There has been a wave of violence targeting Iranian and Syrian Christians over the past month, say Christian news reports.
In addition, Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who has been on death row since 2010 for seeking to register his home-based church, refused to renounce his Christian beliefs in exchange for his release from prison.
He was also jailed for questioning the role of Islam as the dominant form of religious instruction in his children’s school.
According to a report on the website of the International Christian news agencyBosNewsLife, “Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani has rejected an offer to be released from prison if he publicly acknowledges Islam’s prophet Mohammed as ‘a messenger sent by God,’ well-informed Christians and rights activists said” earlier this month.
While Iran’s opaque judicial system coupled with the lack of access for most Western media makes it difficult to verify the new coercion against Nadarkhani, the reports are considered reasonable in light of the Iranian regime’s intense crackdown on its Christian population over the years.
In an e-mail to The Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio and author of the book A New Shoah, wrote “After the ethnic cleansing of Jews in 1948 from the Arab countries, Islamic fundamentalism is now trying to push away the Christians from the region. They want to establish a pure Islamic environment and the mass exodus already began under our noses.”
Meanwhile, the Pakistan Christian Post wrote last week on its website, “The Christian community in Syria has been hit by a series of kidnappings and brutal murders; 100 Christians have now been killed since the anti-government unrest began. A reliable source in the country, who cannot be identified for their own safety, told Barnabas Aid that children were being especially targeted by the kidnappers, who, if they do not receive the ransom demanded, kill the victim.”
The Pakistan Christian Post website noted “Two Christians were killed on January 15 as they waited for bread at a bakery. Another Christian, aged 40 with two young children, was shot dead by three armed attackers while he was driving a vehicle.”
The Post could not independently verify these allegations.
Meotti, the Italian Journalist who has written extensively on Christians in the Mideast region, told the Post “In Syria Christians will be persecuted after Assad’s eventual fall, since they were the most loyal allies of the Baathist regime. Christians will be slaughtered or squeezed. From Cairo to Damascus, Arab Christian era is near to its end everywhere.”
Many critics of Assad’s regime, however, view Assad as exploiting sectarian conflicts in Syria to solidify his repressive security apparatus, which has resulted in the killings of over 5,000 pro-democracy supporters in Syria.
“Of course Assad is using the power of fear to manipulate the Christians. He is directing these bishops and patriarchs to say what suits him,” Pascal Gollnisch, a Catholic priest and director of l’Oeuvre d’Orient, told the French news organization F24 in December.
The Paris-based organization seeks to shield Christians from persecution mainly in the Middle East region and is part of the Archdiocese of Paris.
Christians make up 10 percent of Syria’s 22 million population.
Clifford D. May, the president of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former New York Times reporter, has long argued the persecution of Christians in numerous Muslim-majority countries is the most pressing news story ignored by the mainstream media.
He told the Post “If the situation were reversed, if such a war were being waged against Muslims, it would be the top story in every newspaper, the most urgent item at the UN, the highest priority of all the big-league human-rights groups.”
The US-based media watchdog organization the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) held on Saturday a conference titled “The Persecuted Church: Christian Believers in Peril in the Middle East.”
Dr. Richard Landes, an associate professor of history and director and cofounder of the Center of Millennial Studies at Boston University, who spoke at the CAMERA event, wrote the Post on Sunday: “there’s a bizarre, eery, indeed terrible (a-)symmetry between the nearly hysterical concern of the media and the ‘progressive’ NGOs etc. about Israeli violations of the Palestinian ‘human rights’ and the nearly total silence about the horrendous things happening to Christians in Muslim majority countries, not necessarily at the hands of their neighbors but of Salafists, Jihadis, etc.”
Landes added that “it all illustrates Charles Jacobs’ notion of human rights complex – the thing that gets western ‘human rights’ folk indignant has nothing to do with the victims of their sufferings, but the [perpetrators]. If white, hysteria; if of color, embarrassed silence.
“There’s a racism inherent in this – we don’t expect anything from people of color, we hold whites to a much higher standard – and the result is that truly horrendous stuff gets ignored.”
There has been a wave of violence targeting Iranian and Syrian Christians over the past month, say Christian news reports.
In addition, Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who has been on death row since 2010 for seeking to register his home-based church, refused to renounce his Christian beliefs in exchange for his release from prison. He was also jailed for questioning the role of Islam as the dominant form of religious instruction in his children’s school.
According to a report on the website of the International Christian news agencyBosNewsLife, “Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani has rejected an offer to be released from prison if he publicly acknowledges Islam’s prophet Mohammed as ‘a messenger sent by God,’ well-informed Christians and rights activists said” earlier this month.
While Iran’s opaque judicial system coupled with the lack of access for most Western media makes it difficult to verify the new coercion against Nadarkhani, the reports are considered reasonable in light of the Iranian regime’s intense crackdown on its Christian population over the years.
In an e-mail to The Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio and author of the book A New Shoah, wrote “After the ethnic cleansing of Jews in 1948 from the Arab countries, Islamic fundamentalism is now trying to push away the Christians from the region. They want to establish a pure Islamic environment and the mass exodus already began under our noses.”
Meanwhile, the Pakistan Christian Post wrote last week on its website, “The Christian community in Syria has been hit by a series of kidnappings and brutal murders; 100 Christians have now been killed since the anti-government unrest began. A reliable source in the country, who cannot be identified for their own safety, told Barnabas Aid that children were being especially targeted by the kidnappers, who, if they do not receive the ransom demanded, kill the victim.”
The Pakistan Christian Post website noted “Two Christians were killed on January 15 as they waited for bread at a bakery. Another Christian, aged 40 with two young children, was shot dead by three armed attackers while he was driving a vehicle.”
The Post could not independently verify these allegations.
Meotti, the Italian Journalist who has written extensively on Christians in the Mideast region, told the Post “In Syria Christians will be persecuted after Assad’s eventual fall, since they were the most loyal allies of the Baathist regime. Christians will be slaughtered or squeezed. From Cairo to Damascus, Arab Christian era is near to its end everywhere.”
Many critics of Assad’s regime, however, view Assad as exploiting sectarian conflicts in Syria to solidify his repressive security apparatus, which has resulted in the killings of over 5,000 pro-democracy supporters in Syria.
“Of course Assad is using the power of fear to manipulate the Christians. He is directing these bishops and patriarchs to say what suits him,” Pascal Gollnisch, a Catholic priest and director of l’Oeuvre d’Orient, told the French news organization F24 in December.
The Paris-based organization seeks to shield Christians from persecution mainly in the Middle East region and is part of the Archdiocese of Paris.
Christians make up 10 percent of Syria’s 22 million population.
Clifford D. May, the president of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former New York Times reporter, has long argued the persecution of Christians in numerous Muslim-majority countries is the most pressing news story ignored by the mainstream media.
He told the Post “If the situation were reversed, if such a war were being waged against Muslims, it would be the top story in every newspaper, the most urgent item at the UN, the highest priority of all the big-league human-rights groups.”
The US-based media watchdog organization the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) held on Saturday a conference titled “The Persecuted Church: Christian Believers in Peril in the Middle East.”
Dr. Richard Landes, an associate professor of history and director and cofounder of the Center of Millennial Studies at Boston University, who spoke at the CAMERA event, wrote the Post on Sunday: “there’s a bizarre, eery, indeed terrible (a-)symmetry between the nearly hysterical concern of the media and the ‘progressive’ NGOs etc. about Israeli violations of the Palestinian ‘human rights’ and the nearly total silence about the horrendous things happening to Christians in Muslim majority countries, not necessarily at the hands of their neighbors but of Salafists, Jihadis, etc.”
Landes added that “it all illustrates Charles Jacobs’ notion of human rights complex – the thing that gets western ‘human rights’ folk indignant has nothing to do with the victims of their sufferings, but the [perpetrators]. If white, hysteria; if of color, embarrassed silence.
“There’s a racism inherent in this – we don’t expect anything from people of color, we hold whites to a much higher standard – and the result is that truly horrendous stuff gets ignored.”
A guest post by Richard Millett
I have an admission to make. You see the place where I live, and in fact the place where I am writing this piece, I have no rights to. That’s right I’m a trespasser, a squatter, a thief, or whatever you think is an appropriate word for a rogue such as me.
You see it all happened about 20 years ago. I had nowhere that I really wanted to live until I spied a nice little place in a London suburb one night. The light was on and pensioners Roberta and George Smith had just settled down to watch Coronation Street with a hot cup of cocoa in their hands.
As soon as they became engrossed in Corrie I barged in and told them to leave. I gave them 10 minutes to pack up their belongings and get the hell out.
I have been living here ever since and very nice it is too. The local council has passed a motion that the Smiths have a “right of return”, but I refuse to budge. You see it isn’t my fault, I tell the council. The problem is I’m Jewish and that is what us Jews do. If there is something we want, we just take it.
I mean we did it in 1948 too, I tell them. There was this already fully functioning state called Palestine full of millions and millions of people who had lived there since the dinosaurs, and the Jews (who hadn’t lived there since the dinosaurs) suddenly appeared from absolutely nowhere and took over their houses, farms and businesses and told them to get the hell out.
But it wasn’t those Jews’ fault either, I said. Just like a Tourette’s sufferer can’t help himself when swearing so us Jews just can’t stop ourselves from thieving.
Thanks to Nicholas Lezard, literary critic for The Guardian, I have recently discovered an explanation for all this; thieving might actually be in our DNA.
Lezard has uncovered a dirty little secret that has been kept hidden from us Jews and which explains a lot; one of our great forefathers, Moses, was a bit of a tea-leaf himself.
In his Guardian review (Jan. 3) of Intolerable Tongues, which describes Dr Donald McCollum’s journey through British Mandate Palestine towards the end of the 1930s, a novel by Ellis Sharp (and which is classed as “history” by The Guardian), Lezard concludes:
“And beneath all this rumbles history – not only that which is yet to come for the area, but all that has gone before. ‘I have always found it a bit rum that Moses parcelled out land that already belonged to others,’ muses McCollum at one point, which might seem like a piece of thumpingly unsubtle irony; but then sometimes that’s how history works, and it’s important to be reminded of it from time to time.” (added emphasis by me)
So now, thanks to Lezard, the truth is out; Moses, like me and probably you if you are Jewish, also stole land that wasn’t his.
You see when Moses led the Jews out of slavery in Egypt he led them to this already fully functioning state called Canaan full of millions and millions of people who had lived there since the dinosaurs and the Jews suddenly appeared from absolutely nowhere and took over their houses, farms and businesses and told them to get the hell out…..
A guest post by Sam Westrop (A version of this essay originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post)
In 2000, Norman Finkelstein published his book, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitations of Jewish Suffering, which posited that the accepted account of the Holocaust is merely a Zionist narrative, which is cynically used to justify putative Israeli ‘cruelties’. Finkelstein frequently invokes his family’s suffering during the Holocaust as a premise to sanitise his obsessive demonisation of Israel, and frequent use of antisemitic tropes.
Finkelstein’s method is not lost on a new breed of anti-Israel activists, who often employ the memory of the Holocaust to sanitise their abhorrent views on living Jews.
Enter Gary Spedding.
Garry Spedding
Spedding is chair of the Queen’s University Belfast Palestine Solidarity Society, the group which orchestrated the attack upon Solon Solomon, a former legal adviser to the Knesset Foreign Affairs committee, who was invited to speak to law school students at Queen’s University. Solomon was heckled by members of the university’s Palestine Solidarity Society (PSS) and the youth wing of Sinn Féin (the political wing of the Irish terrorist organisation the IRA) during a lecture, and the protesters then attacked the car in which Solomon escaped, attempting to smash its windows.
After being contacted about the attack, Spedding stated he does ‘not condone violence’, yet is evidently proud of his relationship with Holy Land Trust Director, Sami Awad - characterizing him as his ”Best Friend, Mentor, colleague and leader” - who certainly does not condemn terrorist violence. Wrote Awad:
“[non-violent resistance] is not a substitute for the armed struggle. This is not a method for normalization with the occupation. Our goal is to revive the popular resistance until every person is involved in dismantling the occupation.”
Spedding’s mentor Awad has also hosted the extremist Greek Orthodox priest Atallah Hanna – who can be seen here condemning the “Satanic” and diabolical Zionism, and promising that Palestine will be free “from the river to the sea”- at the Holy Land Trust.
Sami Awad and Atallah Hanna
In fact, both Sami Awad and Atallah Hanna have defended the quite reactionary Raed Salah, and Hanna has expressed support for suicide bombings.
Further, about Awad, Spedding has written:
“Sami you have taught me so much and I hope that I have represented you in a good way in my writings, you are a light to me in this time much as Jesus Christ is a light for all of us! … My deepest love goes out to you, my thanks and appreciation nothing can really substantiate in words what you mean to the people here or what you mean to me!”
Spedding also has echoed Deborah Orr’s claims that Jewish supremacism guided Israel’s deal with Hamas to exchange over 1000 Palestinian terrorists to secure the release of Gilad Shalit. :
“There is a point that needs addressing in the use of language by media outlets because of the specifics in the deal surrounding Shalit’s release especially in the mainstream media in the USA and Israel reporting along the lines of ’1000 or more terrorists to be exchanged in prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit’ this viewpoint is highly inaccurate it degrades the Palestinian prisoners being swapped for Gilad Shalit whilst reinforcing the current view among many right wing Zionists and their supporters that 1 jewish life is of more value than say 1000 Arab lives which is incredibly racist in and of itself.”
Spedding also wrote this about the brutal murder of the Fogel family:
“The J’post article sickening invokes the cloudy and unclear death of the Fogel family an attack which I have the report and pictures of in my email inbox from the day after it happened. I find it sick that the J’post is still using this attack for political gain suggesting Palestinians are to blame when there has been no further information, news or otherwise released about the murders since the IDF conveniently caught two Palestinians kept them in torture for a month until they ‘confessed’ and then announced they had caught the killers despite the evidence and speculation of it being the work of a migrant worker from asia.”
This was published months after the murders, when it was clear that Palestinian terrorists were responsible for the murders. The theory about a migrant worker was put forth by the Palestinian Authority’s propaganda unit, and was discounted as agitprop months before Spedding’s comments.
Finally, here’s Spedding expressing support for Finkelstein’s unique understanding of Israel.
“Ah but Anny, I do live in Palestine and i know a lot about this conflict! accusing people of not knowing about the conflict by the way just because they don’t live there is silly really, theres countless middle east experts who don’t live in Israel who know about the conflict in great detail, my friend Norman Finkelstein for one…. i would agree with my friend Norman Finkelstein when he describes Israel as a lunatic state.”
And, evidently inspired by Finkelstein’s example of invoking the memory of the Holocaust in the service of legitimizing extreme anti-Israel politics, Spedding has recently decided to volunteer with Holocaust Memorial Day Trust - a charity which works to raise awareness of Holocaust Memorial Day.
Interestingly in the context of Finkelstein’s critique of the “accepted” Zionist account of the Holocaust in Israel as a ploy “to justify putative Israeli ‘cruelties”, Spedding’s flirtation with antisemities and proponents of terror attacks against Jews would suggest this his association with such a Shoah remembrance organization is itself a supremely cynical attempt to sanitize his alliances with those possessing a decidedly Judeophobic orientation.
You can visit the FB page of Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (or email them at enquiries@hmd.org.uk) if you wish to express your displeasure with their association with Spedding, whose presence is an insult and abuse of genuine Holocaust memory.
Related articles
- Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 2011 Top 10 anti-Israel and antisemitic slurs (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian gratuitous anti-Israel photo of the day (& a story about the photojournalist behind the lens) (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian, PalFest and the ‘culture’ of anti-Israel activism (cifwatch.com)
- Tell us why you love Israel…in as many words as you like! #WhyILoveIsrael (cifwatch.com)
- The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman and the Guardian’s increasing notoriety (cifwatch.com)
- Antisemites, terror supporters, & Holocaust deniers: aka, just another Palestinian Solidarity Campaign event (cifwatch.com)
I was thinking of how best to convey sincere Christmas greetings to our many wonderful Christian friends and then suddenly remembered my fond memories growing up in America watching the film “It’s a wonderful life“, with James Stewart, each year on December 25th.
No matter how many times I see the movie, it never fails to evoke a profound appreciation for all of those to whom the commemoration of Christ’s birth evokes the hope, wonder and ineffable beauty of life’s second chances.
Here’s the ending to one of the best movies of all time.
Merry Christmas!
A Guardian Archive story (which they republished today) from 1995, titled “Big day in the little town of Bethlehem” begins with the following celebratory passage:
There will be no star over Bethlehem this Christmas. The Israeli flag, which has flown over Manger Square for 28 years, was lowered yesterday for the last time, as the town was handed over to the Palestinian self-rule authority.
As the last small contingent of paramilitary forces moved out, Manger Square was filled with wildly celebrating crowds
On the outside a thick crust of spectators responded gleefully to every [sign of Israeli withdrawal]
Jewish withdrawal from Christian Bethlehem: What’s there not to love?
Brown continues:
Last year the mayor of Bethlehem threatened to cancel Christmas because the Israelis would not let him fly one small Palestinian flag from the town hall. Now, the hall and most neighbouring buildings are all but obliterated by the national colours.
Yes, the Jews who almost stole Christmas.
Finally, Brown acknowledges Christian fears of Muslim rule:
There has been speculation that the coming of the PLO to Bethlehem will speed the exodus of Christians from the West Bank. But there was little sign of rivalry yesterday. Samir Sharer, one local Christian, said he was convinced that this year’s Christmas would be joyful. “Everything will be OK…”
As we can be assured that a follow-up report by the Guardian won’t be forthcoming, here are the sad demographic facts of Christian life under Palestinian/ Muslim rule.
Due primarily to religious persecution, the Christian population in the Palestinian Territories has dropped dramatically.
For instance, the persecution of Christians in Bethlehem has caused the population to slump to 7,500 from 20,000 in 1995, the year the IDF left the city. (Since Israel’s withdrawal Bethlehem and its surroundings also became hotbeds for Hamas and Islamic Jihad supporters and members.)
Today, Christians make up just 1% of the mainly Muslim population of the Palestinian territories, down from around 10% in 1948.
Inversely, the Christian population in Israel proper has risen from 34,000 in 1948 to over 150,000 today.
That the only growing Christian population in the entire Middle East exists in the sole country in which Islam does not prevail is essential to understanding the fate of Christianity in that part of the world – context about the contrasting religious freedom, tolerance and democratic values in the only Jewish state the Guardian will never report.
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- Jews to build new bridge. Guardian characterizes it as a provocation. (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian discovers the injustice of denying people the right to national self-determination (cifwatch.com)
- An alternative tour of Palestine for Guardian readers (cifwatch.com)
This is cross posted by our good friend, Richard Millet
Last night I was enjoying the warm glow of first night Chanukah, having lit the candles and having gone to a public lighting (see my clip above), when later in the evening I read a tweet from Richard Burden MP, Labour MP for Northfield, which simply stated “Happy #Hanukkah everybody”.
Mr Burden is no friend of Israel so why is he wishing Jews a “Happy Hanukkah”, I thought. Many of Burden’s tweets (or retweets) are aimed at demonising the Jewish state.
He has recently been demanding, via Twitter, that Israel release all Palestinian “child prisoners” and when I asked him who he classed as a “child” he answered anyone “under 18″.
Now, as you can imagine, even a Palestinian aged 16 or 17 is capable of inflicting severe casualties on Israel’s civilian population.
So can a “child” like Izzedine Abu Sneineh who was arrested when 15 and convicted of “weapons training; attempted murder” and possession of “weapons/ammo/explosives” (as you can see from Elder of Ziyon’s link the New York Times wrongly reported that Sneineh was arrested for throwing stones and hanging Palestinian flags).
Abu Sneineh was freed in the second tranche of Palestinian prisoners as agreed in the Gilad Shalit exchange deal.
When I asked Burden what he thought of Sneineh’s release and whether Britain should also release ALL of its prisoners who were under 18 he simply referred me to his previous answers to my questions.
These answers, via Twitter, were:
I looked at DCI_Palestine, an “NGO devoted to defending the rights of children living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1992″ (www.dci-pal.org) and read a description of the arrest of 16-year-old Rasheed J by the IDF. It was, allegedly, a brutal arrest in which Rashid J spent many days in isolation and was told that:
‘You Arabs like to fuck camels and donkeys and go to brothels to fuck whores. You have no honour because your mother’s a whore.’
This would be unforgivable if it were true but it is uncorroborated and I just don’t believe it based on many similar lies.
The other main accusation in the piece about Rasheed J’s arrest is that Palestinian prisoners, like Rasheed J, are kept in custody in Israel “in violation of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits transfer out of occupied territory”.
But who, with any properly constituted legal authority, has declared it “occupied territory” for the purposes of Article 76? No one. This is because there is no Palestine and so Palestine cannot be “occupied”. Article 76 is, therefore, totally irrelevant.
Furthermore, Burden likes to retweet a horrendous story about Israel, whether it’s true or not.
On 16th December he retweeted The Guardian’s story that Israel had hastened the death of the Palestinian Ambassador to the UK’s wife by forcing her back to Jerusalem to renew her residency rights while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, despite denials by Israeli officials that this was the case.
The allegation levelled at Israel was that she became “infected by a virus on her plane journey back to London in May and died three months later”; basically, Israel was now responsible for her sad demise.
In fact, as CiF Watch states, the reason for her visit to Israel was to “seek a second opinion on her condition from doctors at Hadassah Hospital”.
So does anyone really believe that Burden sincerely wishes Jewish people a “Happy Hanukkah” when the rest of the time he makes every effort to demonise the Jewish state with its five and a quarter million Jews, some of our family and friends included, while calling for the release of Palestinians like Abu Sneineh who planned their murder?
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A guest post by AKUS
Citizens of most countries are often identified by country of origin, ethnicity, religion, or race. In America, for example, we commonly refer to Irish Americans, or Hispanics, or Catholics, or Asians. But it takes the Guardian to invent an entirely new kind of British citizenship, driven by its warped views about the Middle East.
When ‘Comment is Free’ was at its worst in its obsessively negative coverage of Israel, it was edited by Georgina Henry. This woman parlayed her fanatical and obsessive hatred of anything to do with Israel and passionate admiration for anything that can be ascribed to Palestinians to an endless stream of negative articles about Israel, preferably written by disaffected “as-a-Jews”.
Henry was shunted aside to the seemingly innocuous siding of the Guardian’s culture section. However, even there she has made it the Guardian’s business to puff up any and everything that could remotely be considered “Palestinian culture”. That is, “culture” emanating from the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River that excludes anything that could be construed in a positive sense about Israeli culture.
In its eagerness to over-emphasize the contributions of “Palestinian culture” to the world, and Britain in particular, the culture department at the Guardian has created a new category of British citizen. No longer is it enough for a British writer to merely be “from Palestine” or “of Palestinian origin” or “born in Palestine”.
No, looking at the article published on December 21, 2011, Selma Dabbagh’s top 10 stories of reluctant revolutionaries , we learn that Selma Dabbagh is not merely British, nor merely Palestinian, nor even “former Palestinian”, nor “born in Palestine” (she was actually born in Scotland to a Scottish mother – see below). Dabbagh is a member of an entirely new category of British citizenry.
Selma Dabbagh, according to the Guardian,” is a British Palestinian writer of fiction based in London”.
So let me see if I understand this. Suppose, for example, frequent Guardian contributor and British citizen Jonathan Freedland, who always has a great deal to write and say about Jews and Israel, had actually been born in Israel. Would his Guardian bio read: “Jonathan Freedland is a British Israeli based in London”?
I think not.
If, like me, you had never heard of Selma Dabbagh before this, you can find a more thorough bio in a review of her book by Metro news.
The review reveals that this “British Palestinian” has only a generational connection to “Palestine”. UNRWA’s definition that the child of a Palestinian refugee and their children, down the generations forever, will be considered Palestinian refugees forms the basis for her claim to be a Palestinian. Her father was one of those (generally wealthier) Arabs who fled to the West during the 1947-1948 fighting, landing up and marrying, apparently, in Scotland.
“Part of the Palestinian diaspora by birth, she was born in Scotland to a British mother and a Palestinian father”.
Moreover:
While she spent time in the West Bank in her twenties, she has never been to Gaza. ‘My Gaza is an imagined place,’ she says. ‘A place constructed from exile.’ Dabbagh grew up in many places (‘I think I’ve moved 30 times’), but spent her teenage years in Kuwait.
Not surprising, a review by the Independent notes the vagueness of her description of an imagined Israeli attack in Gaza:
The story centres around a pair of twenty-something boy-and-girl twins, Iman and Rashid. We first meet them in Gaza in the midst of an Israeli barrage (although the precise details of place and political context are curiously obscured).
Of course, she was well taught to regard Israel as evil:
‘One of the first things we did in geography class was scribble out the word Israel on the map and replace it with Occupied Palestine,’ she says.
‘When I first went to Israel I almost expected the ground to cave in. I remember being very shocked by seeing roller skaters in Tel Aviv. The normality of this evil other.’
Just in case her Palestinian street cred is not enough she has to make sure her readers know where she stands by comparing Israel to Nazi Germany as the review of her book by the Independent notes:
She also has an authoritative university professor make the lazily racist – and quite inexcusable – comparison between the Nazis and the Jewish pioneers who founded the state of Israel (he says that the Jews used “the same tactics against the Arabs” as the Nazis had used against them). This claim is offensive rubbish, and one which the author makes no attempt to defuse.
No wonder the Guardian Culture section adores her.
Related articles
- The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins is tired of our “obsession” with Nazism and the Holocaust (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian discovers the injustice of denying people the right to national self-determination (cifwatch.com)
- Palestinian Guardian propaganda photo of the day (Soldier vs. child) (cifwatch.com)
- An alternative tour of Palestine for Guardian readers (cifwatch.com)
- UK philosopher Ted Honderich repeats his Guardian refrain that Palestinians have the right to murder Israelis (cifwatch.com)
- A small victory against Palestinians’ continuing “mission” to wipe Israel off the map (cifwatch.com)
- What the Guardian won’t report: Palestine will be Jew-free (cifwatch.com)
- Newt Gingrich, the Guardian, and the invention of a moral outrage. (cifwatch.com)
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CiF readers blast Jonathan Freedland’s critique of Guardian Left orthodoxies on Syria, Iran & Israel
February 13, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Comment is Free, Delegitimization, Guardian, Iran, Jonathan Freedland, Seumas Milne, Straight Left, Syria | by Adam Levick | 20 comments
Jonathan Freedland may be the closest thing the Guardian has to a sane, non-ideologically extreme, liberal voice on Israel.
Sure, his views on Israel are closer to the European Left brand of Zionism – convinced, it seems, that peace with the Palestinians would be at hand if not for the obstinate obstructionism of the leadership in Jerusalem, and buying into the leftist chimera of an Israeli democracy under siege – but, from what I’ve read, Freedland seems squarely in the Zionist tent.
Freedland has also not shied away from condemning antisemitism, seemed to acknowledge the malice which drives much anti-Zionist activism and, based on what I hear from those who know him, he is no AsaJew, and seems to identify genuinely, and unapologetically, with the British Jewish community.
As such, Freedland’s quite heterodox polemic in CiF on Feb. 10, “Syria is not Iraq. And, it is not always wrong to intervene“, quite clearly bucked Associate Editor Seumas Milne’s “Straight Left” inspired concern for the survival of the Syria-Iran anti-imperial resistance, by arguing that the West should consider intervention to stop the bloodshed in Syria.
Moreover, Freedland launched a broadside on the belief among many on the left – terming it “nonsensical” – held with something approaching religious intensity, that true “progressives” must oppose the use of military force in every case.
Freedland also condemns “similarly blanket thinking on Iran…[which] refuses to recognise there might even be a problem, namely the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon”, and derides their myopic view which “dismisses all talk of the issue as neoconservative warmongering.’
Adds Freedland:
Of course, as Freedland may have guessed, his over 1000 word missive, so openly challenging Guardian orthodoxy, produced a fury of attacks beneath the line.
Thus far, Freedland’s piece has elicited 888 comments.
Here’s a quick accounting of the most frequently used words:
Israel: 782
Jew: 126
Zionist: 34
Total number of references to Jews , Zionism, or Israel: 942
Syria: 553
Iran: 467
Here is a brief sample of the comments posted below the line thus far:
Freedland is a war-monger (566 Recommends)
Bashar al-Assad inspired conspiracy theory (291 Recommends)
Freedland’s commentary represents a Trojan Horse to furtively advance his Zionist views. Israel would like to see the world destroyed.
Berchmans’: It’s obvious that Syrian rebels are being set up by the West, Saudis, and Israel (41 Recommends)
And, finally, a commenter using the moniker “aljabha”, whose profile includes a photo depicting the Soviet Hammer and Sickle in a Palestinian Flag (A Seumas Milne or PFLP production, no doubt), with the requisite “Zionism is Racism”.
One of my standard quips to folks who aren’t familiar with the degree of anti-Zionism at the Guardian is that the paper makes the New York Times look like Arutz Sheva.
Similarly, I may have to add that Guardian readers increasingly make Jonathan Freedland look like Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
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