Yuval Dayan was discovered in the 2012 season of the Israeli show, The Voice, and her latest single, (לאסוף) Le’esof, released last month, has quickly climbed the Israeli charts.
A story in the Guardian by Jennifer Rankin on June 6th, titled ‘Israeli prison contracts take centre stage at G4S shareholder meeting‘, highlighted questions raised by some at the annual meeting of G4S – a British multinational security services company – regarding their business in Israel. G4S, Rankin notes, employs 620,000 people in 125 countries, including some in Israel, but that they recently announced they were pulling out of providing services in the West Bank beginning 2015. The company, however, will continue to run prisons inside of the green line.
Rankin quoted one wild accusation about the treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli prisons by one unnamed shareholder and provided an additional quote from shareholder John Hilary, executive director of the radical anti-Israel NGO War on Want. The story also featured the following photo from an anti-G4S protest outside the meeting.
However, the portrayal of a hooded inmate was only one part of this London street theater agitprop - a show which was organized by one of the Guardian’s favorite fringe anti-Zionist groups, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, as well as Hilary’s ‘War on Want’. Here’s an additional photo from the demonstration not published at the Guardian:
Note the reference to Mahmoud Sarsak on the sign to the far right.
Sarsak is a Palestinian ‘hunger striking’ (football playing) prisoner who has become a cause celebre among activist journalists (at the BBC, the Guardian and elsewhere) despite the fact that he has admitted being a member of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
War on Want not only helped publicize the event, but issued a June 4th press release about G4S by senior campaigner Rafeef Ziadah, which included the following :
“G4S provides equipment and services to Israeli prisons where Palestinian political prisoners, including child prisoners, are detained and tortured illegally inside Israel.”
As CAMERA recently documented, radical NGOs and Palestinian Authority sites often use the euphemism “political prisoners” to refer to even those Palestinians convicted of violent acts, including lethal terrorist attacks on innocent Israeli civilians – an egregious distortion of a term which is widely understood as referring to those imprisoned merely for their political beliefs.
Evidently, for these G4S protesters, other pro-Palestinian activists and the media outlets which regularly champion their cause, the ‘human rights’ of Israeli victims of Palestinian violence never quite seem to inspire such displays of “liberal” sympathy.
“If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”. – (Act III, scene I).” William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
The only revenge Israeli wrestler Ilana Kartysh exacted on her Egyptian opponent, Enas Mostafa, in the Golden Grand Prix tournament in Italy – after Mostafa refused to shake her hand and, during the match, reportedly bit her on the neck – was emerging victorious in the bout and, having secured the gold, basking in the sound of her national anthem as she stood on the podium.
Kartysh, 22, who competed in the the 67-kilogram (147.7 pound) weight category, experienced an incident unlike any other in her career.
Per Ynet:
“In wrestling you must shake hands at the beginning of a match,” Kartysh said. “But not only did [Egyptian wrestler Enas Mostafa] refuse to shake my hand, she even broke my fingers and bit me until I began bleeding.”
However, she continued, “Because of her dirty behavior my desire to beat her grew stronger.”
Kartysh said she felt “some kind of hatred” directed at her by Mostafa, but that she did not know whether it was political or personal.
“It’s never happened to me before,” the 22-year-old wrestler said. “She really attacked me.”
The gold medal that Kartysh won was Israel’s first in a Golden Grand Prix tournament.
At the end of the match, the Egyptian again refused to shake hands with her.
Unlike other sports-related news in the region which is contextualized as possessing wider political significance, this story of racism during an athletic competition wasn’t reported in the Guardian. Moreover, as I have argued previously, it is simply impossible to accurately understand the politics of the Middle East, and Israel’s relations with its neighbors, without fully appreciating the antisemitic venom which courses through the veins of otherwise sober Arab citizens.
No, this ugly episode on a wrestling mat in Italy was not, to be sure, merely an act of poor sportsmanship. Mostafa is the product of a culture with anti-Jewish racism so pervasive that the country’s President could, with total impunity, refer to Jews as “sons of apes and pigs” and sermonize to parents on the importance of “nursing their children” with Jew hatred .
The Jewish community in Egypt, which numbered 80,000 in 1948, is now all but extinct.
Indeed even such serious domestic problems as food shortages and an erosion of political freedoms post-Mubarak haven’t seemed to redirect the focus of their animosity. The ’Arab Spring’ hasn’t even minimally unhardened their hearts.
Kartysh’s comments after the match included the following.
“I can’t even describe how proud I felt hearing ‘Hatikva’ (Israel‘s national anthem) playing in the end.”
The Egyptian wrestler learned that when an Israeli Jew is pricked, she indeed bleeds, and that when she is so wronged she will avenge such an indignity by persevering and – in a display of pride, defiance and resilience – emerging victorious.
Kartysh pictured in the center. Mostafa is immediately to her left.
Yesterday, June 4, we commented on a report by Guardian football reporter Louise Taylor (‘England enter a politically loaded European Under-21 Championship‘, June 3) concerning boycott efforts targeting the 2013 European Under-21 Football Championship (UEFA U-21), hosted by Israel, from June 5th through the 18th.
Though BDS activists have failed in their efforts – by virtue of the fact that the tournament has already begun – Taylor devoted nearly all of her story on the football championship to the efforts of anti-Israel BDS campaigners who were evidently still hoping to persuade EUFA officials to cancel the games.
However, Taylor made an error when she wrote the following:
The hurdles faced by Palestinian footballers, who have their own, Fifa-registered national side, were highlighted in November when more than 60 players from Europe’s major leagues, including Arsenal’s Abou Diaby and Newcastle’s Sylvian Marveaux, Papiss Cissé and Cheik Tioté, signed a petition demanding Uefa relocate the Under-21 tournament.
As we noted back in December, the original list of 62 included some footballers who didn’t in fact sign the petition and, as CAMERA and others reported at the time, after publicity about the ‘faux endorsers’ began generating attention the ‘official’ list shrank to 51.
Shortly after our post yesterday, we contacted Guardian editors to alert them about the error, and within the last hour we were informed that the passage has been corrected to reflect the actual number of signatories, and the following had been added:
On a final note, at the time of this post Israel was tied with Norway 2-2 in the tournament’s opening match which is being held at Netanya Stadium.
Taleb Twatha (R) of Israel is challenged by Anders Konradssen of Norway during their UEFA European Under-21 Championship Group A match on June 5.
Harriet Sherwood’s April 9, 2013 Guardian report, about efforts by John Kerry to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, discussed concessions demanded of Israel by Mahmoud Abbas before he’ll agree to resume negotiations, and included this passage:
The Palestinians also want the release of 123 political prisoners who have been in jail since before the Oslo accords were signed almost 20 years ago, and for Israel to present a map showing proposed borders. [Emphasis added]
After CiF Watch complained to the Guardian readers’ editor – demonstrating conclusively that the pre-Oslo prisoners were all convicted of violent/terrorist-related crimes and can not honestly be characterized as “political prisoners” – the language in Sherwood’s report was revised to note that it is only the Palestinians who view them as “political prisoners”.
However, use of such euphemisms and biased terminology is only part of a larger problem involving the mainstream media outlets’ whitewashing of the terrorist acts and violent crimes committed by ‘Palestinian prisoners’, who often fail to mention the crimes at all or significantly downplay the degree of violence.
The following report on the media’s highly misleading (often ideologically motivated) coverage of the ‘Palestinian prisoner’ issue includes data released by Israel’s Ministry of Justice on the pre-Oslo prisoners – detailed information which has been translated from the original Hebrew and is being published for the first time exclusively at CAMERA.
Cross posted by A. Jay Adler at the Algemeiner
Glenn Greenwald
Apologia in the rhetorical tradition is not a common apology, in the simple sense of “sorry,” though it may fulfill that purpose. It may decidedly not. Apologia is a defense against accusation. Plato gave us Socrates’s Apology, which was not. In the religious tradition, apologia is known as apologetics. Apologetics are a defense of doctrine, certainly not an apology for it. One of the features of apologia as a rhetorical form is its variety of type, from outright apology to outright rejection of any need for one.
In between we may see explanation or justification, evasion of responsibility, minimization of the offense, and more. One tactic of the apologia seeks to draw convoluting distinctions, or conversely, to eliminate clarifying distinctions, in order to redefine the terms of the offense so as to rationalize it away.
The post 9/11 era has been a veritable golden age of terrorist apologia. Of course, we have always had it. “Let them eat cake,” in the context in which it was purportedly said, even before the French Revolution, is a form of terrorist apologia: it seeks, as one type, to reduce the offense. And today’s golden age stands on the shoulders of the classical age of Marxist-Leninist apologia. Got a problem with dictatorship as a form of terror? How about bourgeois dictatorship to justify the supposed proletarian replacement for it?
“The most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class,” said Lenin at the First Communist International.
It is the “no more” that is really rich. One tactic of terror apologia, the muddying of distinctions, attempts to turn the solid ground of complexity into the swamp of confusion. Terror apologia does this in order to erase the useful meanings of the words that can be used against the source of the terror. So Marxists attacked the meaning of democracy. They defanged the threat of dictatorship. Slavoj Zizek authors a book entitled Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? in defense of – guess. Now, whereas Marxists in their revolutionary ascendance championed revolutionary terror, terror apologists frequently argue that the word, used these days against the interests they defend, has no meaning.
Events of recent weeks – the Boston bombings and the savage murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in London – have delivered a new round of rank and ill-reasoned apologias for terrorism, offered in the same low and recognizable style that took shape immediately after 9/11. They provide a source for some rough notes toward a rhetoric of terror apologia. As it happens one source readily serves to provide much of these early notes. England’s Guardian, apparently intent on establishing not only that it has hit the bottom of the barrel in its political commentary, but is determinedly scraping it, hired away from Salon Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is that terror apologist who has yet to encounter the hackneyed thought he will not think or the trite articulation he will not utter. A former civil liberties attorney, he refers to himself these days as a writer, but surely that is only in the mechanical sense.
Any nascent rhetoric of terrorist apologia has to begin with the key term itself.
“Terrorism” is a meaningless term
Greenwald and his confreres assert this regularly. Last year, in his final column for Salon, Greenwald wrote,
That is what Terrorism is: a term of propaganda, a means of justifying one’s own state violence — not some objective field of discipline in which one develops “expertise.”
He concluded by affirming,
It is a telling paradox indeed that this central, all-justifying word is simultaneously the most meaningless and therefore the most manipulated.
Greenwald was writing there about what he and others refer to as a “terrorism expert industry.” He was drawing on the work of his favorite scholar on the subject, Remi Brulin, who has studied the use of the word terrorism post World War II and particularly beginning with U.S. counter-insurgency efforts in Central America in the 1980s under Reagan. Brulin also ties this development to Israeli adoption of the term after the Six-Day War to refer to Arab – well, excuse me, but I cannot find a more accurate word – terrorism against it.
As recently as last week, as part of a back and forth with Andrew Sullivan over the murder of Rigby, Greenwald claimed that
it is difficult to devise a definition of “terrorism” that encompasses this attack while excluding large numbers of recent acts by the US, the UK and many of their allies and partners.
Later in the same piece, Greenwald referred to the work of another scholar, Harvard’s Lisa Stampnitzky, whose book
makes the argument indicated by its title: “Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented ‘Terrorism’”. The functional meaninglessness of the term “terrorism” and its highly manipulative exploitation are vital to several political agendas.
We see in these quotations, two of the primary tactics of terror apologia. The first is to muddy the waters so as to render the term terrorism ineffective in designating the barbarisms of contemporary Islamists and of other movements, such as the Iraqi and Taliban insurgencies and the Second Palestinian Intifada, that utilized for instance, the tactic of suicide bombing and, in some cases, beheading. By asserting that the term is misapplied, even purposely misused, and by repeating programmatically that it is thus meaningless, the intent is to render it just that.
At the same time, a covert counter effort is being pursued. When Greenwald says that “it is difficult to devise a definition of ‘terrorism’ that encompasses this attack while excluding large numbers of recent acts by the US, the UK and many of their allies and partners,” such a declaration aims at multiple effects. One is that terrorism is effectively disempowered as a meaningful designation of the automobile, hacking and beheading attack on Rigby. A contrary effect is that the referenced U.S., U.K. and allied war activities now become stuck with the term.
What are they talking about? the not unsympathetic reader of Greenwald thinks – look at those invaded countries, those dead children from Western air attacks. They’re the terrorists.
(Greenwald accompanied this commentary with, of course, a photograph of dead Afghan children. A whole other, visual rhetoric is developing around the use of dead children images.)
A third possible effect, no less possible because self-contradictory, is that the pure sense of the terrorizing nature of such acts as those by Islamists is diminished, the force of moral censure lessened – aided, additionally, by that claim that Islamist acts are “blowback” – even as the conviction grows that Western acts are themselves terroristic, and original, in nature. The definitional challenge, then, is actually quite a clever stratagem: to employ a chess metaphor, it is a move that sacrifices a rook (any claim to meaning for the word terrorism) with the prospect not only of capturing the Queen (loosening the connection to Islamist acts) but of checkmating the King as well (strengthening the connection to Western actions).
These are rhetorical strategies. Can we sight a true field of contest behind the screen of maneuvers? Yes, we can. Despite the efforts to obfuscate understanding of a concept and the distinctions among actual events to which a concept might apply, we can distinguish a clear concept – a meaningful definition – from faulty application.
Note, for instance this curious self-refutation. Greenwald’s go-to scholarly sources on the corrupted nature of terrorism as a concept aim their critiques specifically at expert “invention” and maintenance of the idea. Stampnitzky’s book is subtitled “How Experts Invented ‘Terrorism.’” Brulin, too, has focused his research on the role of experts in the modern development and promulgation of the idea. Greenwald titled that last post at Salon, “The sham ‘terrorism expert’ industry.
Now, what has Greenwald done in response? He has called in his own “experts” to offer a counter history and narrative. Well, fine, that is what intellectual discourse involves, in addition to the quality of the arguments and the raw evidence – the testimony, and its quality, of experts in a field. The deciding factors in any intellectual debate will not be derisory quotation marks around a word or the sham character of the experts, but the sham character – if that it be – of the arguments.
Experts that Greenwald and his sources disapprove make one set of arguments. Greenwald and his own experts make theirs. What we want to consider, particularly with respect to argument over a word and its meaning, is the coherence of the concept being considered. One of Brulin’s particular areas of focus, and his very special objection, is to the disqualification, as part of the meaning of terror, of state terror in application by those he believes manipulate its use today. He pays pointed attention to that U.S. support in the 80s for the regime in El Salvador, with its death squads, to which I add the U.S.’s material support for the Guatemalan government’s genocidal program against Mayan peasants during a similar period. Brulin argues that the one-sided application of the concept of terrorism only to non-state actors, in favor of the state institutions of power, diminishes the credibility of those who work with so slanted an application.
I agree. To the degree that anyone’s definition or application has been so slanted, it does diminish – fatally, I aver – that person’s credibility on the issue. Terror is terror, whoever inflicts it. “Terrorism is terrorism,” Brulin himself declared in Foreign Policy.
Ah, but according to Greenwald, that word “is simultaneously the most meaningless and therefore the most manipulated.” Notice, too, that Greenwald, crawling very far out on the phantom limb to which he is regularly drawn, does not say that the word is meaningless because it is manipulated – the common critique from his quarters – but manipulated because it is meaningless. The word, according to Greenwald, simply has no meaning. Yet even Brulin does not claim that.
In a 2010 interview with Greenwald, Brulin commented on the historical significance, in developing the contemporary understanding of terrorism as a concept, of the Israeli Jonathan Institute, named after Jonathan Netanyahu. In response to a question from Greenwald, Brulin offered,
Actually, it’s interesting, because they did come up with a definition which is more or less similar to one that you mentioned earlier in one of your pieces, meaning the one from the State Department, and it’s a very basic definition – I’m trying to find it here, yeah, it’s right here – “terrorism is the deliberate systematic murder, maiming and menacing of innocents to inspire fear in order to gain political ends.” So there is nothing that is controversial about that definition; it is very broad. It is nonspecific.
What Brulin means – what he should be meaning – when he says this definition is not controversial is that it is not political. It is not at all, as he claims, broad and nonspecific: it is clearly distinguishing of behavior and purpose, without ideological tendency, a characteristic of the definition with which both he and Greenwald should be pleased. Somehow, they are not. The distinguishing terms “deliberate,” “systematic,” and “innocents” are nonetheless vital to this definition.
Brulin then goes on to speak about how the term was politicized at the 1979 conference of which he speaks, and at a second in 1984. However, this raises the distinction once again, which Greenwald is always at pains to smear, between definition and application. It is not a distinction that, Noam Chomsky, for instance, in so many respects in sympathy with Greenwald and Brulin, fails to recognize. Well before 9/11, in 1991, Chomsky contributed to a collection, Western State Terrorism, the essay “International Terrorism: Image and Reality,” in which he began by observing, in different words, this distinction.
There are two ways to approach the study of terrorism. One may adopt a literal approach, taking the topic seriously, or a propagandistic approach, construing the concept of terrorism as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power.
The “literal” approach is toward a clear, accurate, and unbiased elucidation of a concept. The “propagandistic” approach is political, in the determination to corrupt the definition by restricted application. Chomsky’s further, explanatory “exploited in the service of some system of power” is entirely gratuitous. Exploitation of a concept in service of a biased end requires no system of power, merely an exploitative actor of any kind, like a columnist for a British daily. That addition is Chomsky’s own ideological bias irresistibly distorting his pretense of explanatory clarity. Still, the point is made again: misapplication of a concept, distortion or manipulation of a concept, is distinct from the absence of a meaningful concept. To misuse a word by restricted application is not to rob the word of meaning, unless, that is, some people will grasp at the opportunity to achieve that end, for their own purposes.
Brulin’s purpose, in part, joined by Greenwald, was well summed by the latter in that final Salon post.
From the start, the central challenge was how to define the term so as to include the violence used by the enemies of the U.S. and Israel, while excluding the violence the U.S., Israel and their allies used, both historically and presently. That still has not been figured out, which is why there is no fixed, accepted definition of the term, and certainly no consistent application.
This description serves several ends. Again, though the distinguishing language of “definition” and “application” appear, Greenwald is incapable of holding them in his mind in clear and distinct relation to each other. More, since the purpose of this exposition is to establish the role of Israel and of “neocons,” in creating the current ideologized understanding of terrorism, there is also the subtle contribution of asserting of this role that it “still has not been figured out” – a clear call to those inclined to nefarious conspiracy mongering, which, of course, inevitably leads to this
Most importantly for this consideration, the description returns us yet once more to that apparent effort to render the word and the notion of terrorism meaningless. There is, Greenwald will repeatedly declare in differing formulations, “no fixed, accepted definition of the term.”
Is there, then, one wonders – just to choose a comparative example – a fixed and accepted definition of so profoundly important a word as “justice,” which is not yet to address any “consistent application of the concept? Just try attaching the word “social” to the notion of justice and see the arguments that ensue.
Yet the 1979 conference organized by the Jonathan Institute did arrive at a clear definition – a definition, I assert, that is the one most people, encountering or using the term, more or less have in mind. Has such a definition not been fairly applied in some quarters, and by institutions of power, to all the various manifestations of terrorism in the world? Fair and trenchant criticism. But, then, what is the goal of this criticism? To perform a balanced corrective or to, in actual effect, reverse the charge?
If we review that answer Brulin gave Greenwald on the definition of terrorism devised at the ’79 Jontahan Institute conference, we see that Brulin claimed that it “is more or less similar to … the one from the State Department.” However, this is the U.S. State Department definition:
premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.
Note that the State Department definition does, in the manner objected to by Brulin, Greenwald, and many others, restrict the understanding of terrorism to violence perpetrated by non-state actors. By this definition, the Stalinist purges (“The Great ‘Terror’”), China’s Cultural Revolution, the Argentine and Chilean disappearance campaigns of the 1970s and 80s under the Generals and Pinochet, the Killing Fields campaign of slaughter by the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, the wide array of genocidal campaigns against the world’s indigenous populations could none of them be labeled terrorism. The State Department’s definition is clearly formulated to focus attention on one kind of terrorism and away from state terror. Noam Chomsky’s description, we saw, was pointedly directed in an opposing manner, toward (“systems of power”) state terror only. The Jonathan Institute conference definition erred in neither of these directions. Yet Brulin and Greenwald quickly dismissed it.
Recall that Glenn Greenwald, in sympathy with many like him, wrote just days ago that
it is difficult to devise a definition of “terrorism” that encompasses this attack while excluding large numbers of recent acts by the US, the UK and many of their allies and partners.
How little Greenwald pays attention, even to himself. The Jonathan Institute definition referred to “the deliberate systematic murder, maiming and menacing of innocents.” However much some may think the U.S. and others screwed the pooch in Iraq or misapplied themselves at some point or other in Afghanistan, do they truly wish to argue that just as Al Qeada and its varied Islamist affiliates and sympathizers, and just as the Iraqi insurgency and the Taliban today, these Western nations engaged or are engaging in “deliberate,” in “systematic” attack on innocents? (Does Glenn Greenwald wish to claim that the images of dead children he exploits for the purpose of ideological contest in a daily newspaper were the victims of “deliberate, systematic murder”?) Well actually, some people do. We know that. Some people do argue that.
In which case, well and clear. We can argue that instead and for real, or, in some cases not – standing, we recognize, at uncorrectably cross purposes to one another. But let us not pretend, then, that the difference is over the meaning of the word terrorism. Let us not pretend that the disagreement is fundamentally definitional, linguistic, or rhetorical. There is, indeed, a rhetorical war in progress. But to reverse Clausewitz, as politics can be the continuation of war by other means, rhetoric is a continuation of politics by other means. Among its varied uses, it can smoke the battlefield and screen our movements. Some people blow a lot of smoke.
Let us be clear, instead, about where we stand, who we stand with, or against, and what we stand for.
(Next time: more notes, more rhetoric, more nonsense.)
As we reported on May 28, the 2013 European Under-21 Football Championship (UEFA U-21) will be hosted by Israel beginning tomorrow, June 5th, through the 18th, bringing national football teams from all over Europe to compete – with England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, the Netherlands and Norway, alongside Israel, all vying for the title of champion.
Additionally, we noted in our post that the Guardian, unsurprisingly, has provided free PR to a failing BDS campaign calling for the tournament organizers, even at this late date, to reverse their decision to choose Israel as the venue, publishing a pro-boycott letter (signed largely by activists affiliated with Palestine Solidarity Campaign) and a story, in their sports section, reporting on the publication of the very same letter the paper had just published.
The latest publicity provided for those calling for a sporting boycott of the Jewish state was provided by Guardian north-east football correspondent, Louise Taylor, in a piece titled ‘England enter a politically loaded European Under-21 Championship‘, June 3.
After explaining that Uefa’s award of the European Under-21 Championship to Israel is “politically loaded” Taylor then proceeds to devote nearly all of her 770 word report on the football tournament to the efforts of BDS campaigners who, she claims, regard Israel’s hosting of the games “as another kick in the teeth for Palestinians in the occupied territories.”
Though Taylor mostly sticks to the script, in reporting details of the boycott movement which has been reported elsewhere at the Guardian, she makes an error in the following passage:
The hurdles faced by Palestinian footballers, who have their own, Fifa-registered national side, were highlighted in November when more than 60 players from Europe’s major leagues, including Arsenal’s Abou Diaby and Newcastle’s Sylvian Marveaux, Papiss Cissé and Cheik Tioté, signed a petition demanding Uefa relocate the Under-21 tournament.
However, as we noted back in December after the Guardian’s Chris McGreal first reported news of the footballers’ “Declaration of support for Palestine“, the original list of 62 included some footballers who didn’t in fact sign the petition. As CAMERA noted at the time, shortly after the petition was first published the list of endorsers magically shrank.
Here are the ”signatories” who actually never ‘signed’ the petition:
Indeed, the petition currently posted on the website of former Tottenham and Sevilla striker Frederic Kanoute only shows 52 names. (Eden Hazard is still listed on his site despite the fact that the Chelsea star denied signing it, bringing the actual number down to 51.)
We can only hope that following this story Louise Taylor will avoid politics and return to writing about sport, where she may be less prone to committing such unforced errors.
Cross posted by London-based blogger Richard Millett
A group of 30 extremists failed to dampen spirits as some 3,000 Jewish and non-Jewish pro-Israel supporters came out to show their support and appreciation for the Jewish state at the Closer to Israel 65 event in London’s Trafalgar Square today. Even the sun finally shone!
The 30 extremists were from the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), the tiny Jewish religious sect the Neturei Karta, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Jews For Justice For Palestinians.
A favourite racist chant of those from the IHRC was “Judaism yes, Zionism no, the State of Israel must Go”. How awfully nice of Islamic Human Rights Commission members to allow Judaism to be practiced. Now, all one needs to know is how much tax British Jews must pay to be allowed to continue practicing their Judaism.
Here are some IHRC members allowing Jews to practice Judaism in the UK in 2013. We can only thank them:
The hate of the extremists was drowned out by the words of Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks who declared that if the Jewish people had to choose between world criticism of or sympathy for Israel they would choose world criticism rather than be homeless and defenceless with the sympathy of the world:
Here are the photos of the day with some commentary. First, the good people:
The coolest person at Closer To Israel 65. Dig the glasses.
A Spurs “Yiddo” at CTI65. It’s not racist, it’s an affectionate nickname!
Harif’s lovely Michelle Huberman doing what she does best at CTI65. Bellydance!
The brilliant and handsome Kasim Hafeez at CTI65.
Yours truly and superb political commentator and author Carol Gould at CTI65.
This cool lady was spotted just dancing to the extremists’ racist chanting.
A packed and sunny Trafalgar Square for CTI65 listening to the Chief Rabbi.
Taking a break from CTI65 to face down the extremists.
Israel supporters come face to face with extremism on the streets of London.
An Israel supporter defiant in the face of hate and lies.
The extremists:
Praying for the Jewish people to experience more bloodshed just because Israel wasn’t directly created by the Messiah?
I agree with this placard. But the Palestinian children are being murdered by the Hamas government.
As I was saying this Palestinian father’s grief (see placard) was finally proven by the UN to have been caused by a stray Hamas rocket that killed his young son.
I wonder if this lady is standing up against real evil currently taking place in Syria.
I actually felt sorry for this poor kid. He looks unhappy being pushed to do the vile bidding of his elders.
Thanks for coming. I hope you all managed to fit into the minivan for the trip home.
An anti-Israel agitator pointing out yours truly to a new recruit.
Yes! We’ve also had enough of Jews For Justice For Palestinians!
For well over a decade now the U.S. has been “a nation at war”, explains Andrew Bacevich in a May 28 essay at ‘Comment is Free’, before asking: “Does that war have a name”?
Bacevich employs the opening query to lament that the ‘Global War on Terror’ which began on September 11, 2001 is nameless, writing thusly:
When it comes to war, a name attached to a date can shape our understanding of what the conflict was all about. To specify when a war began and when it ended is to privilege certain explanations of its significance while discrediting others
After providing a bit of background on the imperfect names given to other wars – such as the Civil War, World War I, and World War II – Bacevich considers some possible monikers for the current military enterprise “we’ve been waging…in Iraq and Afghanistan [and] other countries…across the Islamic world”. He proposes names such as “The Long War”, “The War against al-Qaida”, “The War for the Greater Middle East”, and even “The War Against Islam” or “The War for/against/about Israel“.
Bacevich devotes a bit of space making the case for each possibility, and writes the following as a possible justification for the latter Israeli-centric title:
It began in 1948. For many Jews, the founding of the state of Israel signified an ancient hope fulfilled. For many Christians, conscious of the sin of anti-Semitism that had culminated in the Holocaust, it offered a way to ease guilty consciences, albeit mostly at others’ expense. For many Muslims, especially Arabs, and most acutely Arabs who had been living in Palestine, the founding of the Jewish state represented a grave injustice. It was yet another unwelcome intrusion engineered by the west – colonialism by another name.
Recounting the ensuing struggle without appearing to take sides is almost impossible. Yet one thing seems clear: in terms of military involvement, the United States attempted in the late 1940s and 50s to keep its distance. Over the course of the 60s, this changed. The US became Israel’s principal patron, committed to maintaining its military superiority over its neighbors.
In the decades that followed, the two countries forged a multifaceted “strategic relationship”. A compliant Congress provided Israel with weapons and assistance worth billions of dollars, testifying to what has become an unambiguous and irrevocable US commitment to the safety and wellbeing of the Jewish state. Meanwhile, just as Israel had disregarded US concerns when it came to developing nuclear weapons, it ignored persistent US requests that it refrain from colonizing territory that it has conquered.
When it comes to identifying the minimal essential requirements of Israeli security and the terms that will define any Palestinian-Israeli peace deal, the US defers to Israel. That may qualify as an overstatement, but only slightly. Given the Israeli perspective on those requirements and those terms – permanent military supremacy and a permanently demilitarized Palestine allowed limited sovereignty the War for/against/about Israel is unlikely to end anytime soon either. Whether the US benefits from the perpetuation of this war is difficult to say, but we are in it for the long haul.
This remarkably ahistorical account of the Israeli-Palestinian (and Israeli-Islamist) Conflict – which erases over six decades of Arab wars, terrorism and belligerence – is provided to buttress the argument that the ‘Global War’ against Islamist extremism is arguably rooted in an understandable grievance against Israeli policy.
Bacevich’s facile analysis of course ignores Islamism’s expansionist and reactionary political pedigree (the Muslim Brotherhood movement which gave birth to modern Islamism seeks the universal imposition of Sharia law, and proclaims that violent jihad and martyrdom is their path), as well as the obvious timeline (the Brotherhood was founded twenty years before Israel’s birth, and by the 1930s was already calling for boycotts against Jewish owned businesses in the Middle East).
However, even if we were to give credence to such specious ‘Zionist root cause’ arguments for modern terror (which ignore both chronology and ideology), proponents of such arguments often go further than merely asserting causation, suggesting that there’s in fact something reasonable, or even just, about such ‘grievances’ about Israel’s very existence.
No, the ‘War on Terror’ – or whatever Bacevich prefers to call the West’s battle with global jihadism – isn’t about Israel. However, even if a malign obsession with Israel did indeed represent the root cause of their violence, its difficult to understand how any truly liberal commentator could implicitly assign blame to the Jewish target of such antipathy.
Indeed, Bacevich – quite interestingly in light of his gig at ‘Comment is Free’ – has also contributed to Pat Buchanan’s paleo-conservative magazine, the American Conservative’, and penned a piece there in 2012 titled ‘How we became Israel‘. His essay includes a characterization of the US ‘War on Terror’ – and America’s willingness since 9/11 to use force around the globe – as a dangerous sign that “U.S. national-security policy increasingly conforms to patterns of behavior pioneered by the Jewish state”, what he terms the ”Israelification of U.S. policy”.
The Zionist footprint on the war on terror, for Andrew Bacevich, is simply undeniable, and arguably global.
In our previous post about a report by Phoebe Greenwood in the Guardian (‘Golan Heights braces for war as tensions rise between Syria and Israel, May 31) we exposed two errors. The report grossly inflated the number of Druze in the Golan Heights (there are 20,000, not 80,000 as Greenwood claimed), and also falsely alleged that Druze is an “Islamic sect” when it is in fact a unique monotheistic religion which departed from Islam around the 11th century.
As we noted in our last post (as a bit of background), Majdal Shams is one of the four Druze communities in the Golan Heights, with a population of about 9,000. After capturing the Golan Heights during the Six Day War, Israel offered all the Druze people living there citizenship—an offer most turned down. However, they all carry Israeli ID cards and are free to live, travel, work, and seek higher education anywhere in the Jewish state.
Majdal Shams (Photo courtesy of Hadar Sela)
However, in addition to these factual errors, Greenwood’s report on the precarious position of residents of the Israeli-Syrian border town of Majdal Shams – in the context of a Syrian civil war which has already spread to Lebanon and now threatens Israel’s northern communities – relies largely on a Druze who she fails to fully identify.
Greenwood writes the following:
“We are in a very special situation. We are lucky our village wasn’t destroyed in 1967 because Israel considers us Druze so we are not a target for them. We are Syrian so we are not a target for Syria or for Hezbollah. We are like an island in this region,” explains Dr Maray Taisseer [sic], a consultant at the Majdal Shams medical centre and community spokesperson.
Leaving aside the risible claim that the Syrian Druze community in the Golan wouldn’t ever be targeted by the Iranian sponsored Shiite Islamist movement or the regime of Bashar Assad because neither would dare target ‘Syrians’, it’s misleading to refer to Dr. Taisseer Maray (Greenwood conflated his first and last names) as a “community spokesman”.
Maray, Greenwood primary source, is in fact the director of a highly politicized, pro-BDS NGO, Golan for Development, and has stated his opposition to the existence of a Jewish state within any borders.
Greenwood then quotes Maray further:
The war, if it comes, may not be a disaster, Taisseer suggests, if it delivers Golan back into Syrian hands.
“Whatever happens in Syria, everyone agrees we should be liberated – it doesn’t matter whether it’s by regime or rebel forces. This is Syrian land and that is clear,” he states unequivocally.
However, as my colleague Hadar Sela (a longtime resident of the Golan) observed, it’s clear to those who have truly gotten to know the Druze of Majdal Shams over a number of years that ‘everyone’ does not agree. The vast majority of Druze there have family in Syria and they’re likely terrified about their safety. Hence, every word they say, Sela argued, “is likely measured because they know full well that a wrong word in the media may have serious consequences.”
Further, as Middle East analyst Michael Totten has observed about the Golan Druze in World Affairs Journal:
[Druze are] loyal to whoever is in charge of the country they live in…The Druze on the Golan are no different from Israeli or Lebanese Druze in this way, but their political geography is different. Though they’re governed by Israel now, they may be governed again by Syria later. So even though Israel offers them citizenship, most haven’t taken it. They’re afraid of the consequences if Syrian rule ever returns.
Also quite noteworthy are comments by the mayor of Majdal Shams, Dolan Abu-Salah, who suggested in an interview in 2012 that living in Israel was a “privilege”. Abu-Salah went on to boast that, by living in the state of Israel, “we [Druze] enjoy all the benefits of a very democratic regime. We pay taxes. And we get excellent social benefits.”
Shefaa Abu Jabal, a prominent Majdal Shams Druze spokesperson (and anti-Assad activist) explained in an interview with Dissent Magazine last summer that though her heart may long emotionally for Syria, she is “100 percent aware that thanks to my education that I received here in Israel I can express my opinion more freely”. Indeed, last July Abu Jabal passed the Israeli bar after graduating from Haifa University Law School—the first Syrian Druze woman resident of Israel to graduate from an Israeli university.
Shefaa Abu Jabal in Majdal Shams
Just two weeks after Abu Jabal uttered those words, she emailed the journalist at Dissent to say that she had deactivated her Facebook page. She needed to “be out of the spotlight” for a while, and “to protect her allies living under Assad“.
Whilst it may be difficult to determine with any degree of empirical certainty how “most” Druze in Majdal Shams feel about the war in Syria, or their Israeli identity, Greenwood’s story – and her reliance on selected “spokespersons” – represents a good example of the risks of taking reports by Guardian journalists who are compromised by preconceived narratives about the region at face value.
Phoebe Greenwood’s May 31 report in the Guardian, ‘Golan Heights braces for war as tensions rise between Syria and Israel‘, contained two false claims regarding Israeli Druze in the Golan Heights town of Majdal Shams. (An additional post will fisk the broader misleading narrative advanced in Greenwood’s report.)
A brief summary of Majdal Shams and the Druze population in Israel
Factual errors in Greenwood’s report:
False population statistics
Greenwood makes the following claim:
The Golan Heights is home to more than 80,000 Druze…
This is not accurate. There are only 41,800 people living in Golan in total, of which 20,300 are Druze according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics.
Mischaracterization of the Druze religion
Greenwood makes the following claim:
[Druze represents] an esoteric Islamic sect whose insular, self-governing communities are accommodated by governments across the Middle East.
Greenwood’s claim that Druze is an “Islamic sect” is also flatly untrue. Druze is a unique monotheistic faith which emerged during the 11th century from Islam and consider their faith to be a new interpretation of the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In addition, Druze incorporates several elements of Gnosticism, Greek Philosophies and other ideologies. The Druze community in Israel is officially recognized as a separate religious entity with its own courts (with jurisdiction in civil matters), and spiritual leadership. The Druze religion is secret and closed to converts.
Whilst the second post we’ll publish on Greenwood’s report will detail the misleading narrative regarding the political views of the Druze of Majdal Shams, these last two specific claims noted above are unambiguously false and not open to interpretation.
Twenty-one year old Moran Mazor rose to fame as the winner of the first series of the Israeli reality show “Eyal Golan is Calling You”, and sang the following song, ‘Only For Him’ (Rak Bishvilo), at the semi-finals of the 2013 Eurovision competition in Malmo, Sweden in March. Though Mazor didn’t take home the top prize, Israel has won the international contest three times: in 1978, 1979 and 1998.
Conscientious objectors have been with us as long as there have been wars, and the fact that there are a few Israelis who claim this status in an attempt to exempt themselves from the state’s universal conscription is not at all surprising. Yet the story of one such objector, Nathan Blanc, seems to have especially captivated the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent, Harriet Sherwood.
Blanc is a Haifa resident who, in 2012, reported to the IDF induction center but refused assignment to an army unit due to his objections to Israeli policies. Blanc has been imprisoned for a total of 177 days at a military prison (based on ten separate arrests for continuing to refuse to serve) before the IDF recently allowed him to do alternative non-military service instead.
Over a two month period Sherwood has published three reports and over 1500 sympathetic words about Blanc’s case, including a piece yesterday about the decision by the IDF exemption committee “to allow Blanc to undertake a period of civilian service in lieu of a three-year stint in the army”.
As my colleague Hadar Sela observed in a post about Sherwood’s previous report on Blanc, in contrast to the Guardian, the story has barely registered on the radar of the Israeli media, but has been “energetically promoted by a plethora of fringe far-Left Israeli [groups], including Amnesty International Israel, ‘New Profile‘, ‘Kibush‘ and…the anti-conscription group ‘Yesh Gvul‘“.
In comparison, Sherwood only saw fit to devote one report on the lethal terrorist attack, in late April, on an Israeli man named Eviatar Borovzky – whose human rights were violated when he was stabbed to death by a Palestinian as he waited for a bus – and even that managed to refer to the victim in the pejorative, in both the text and in the strap line.
The report also devoted a majority of the text to the unrelated IDF killing of a global jihad-affiliated terrorist in Gaza, with only 6 of 21 passages (encompassing 316 words) focusing on the murder of Borovsky.
We’ll of course never know how much additional coverage Sherwood would have devoted to the case of Nathan Blanc if the IDF didn’t allow him to opt out of regular military service, so whilst Israel’s Military Prison Number 6 has lost an inmate, it seems that Harriet Sherwood has lost an Israeli protagonist.
Along with my CAMERA colleagues, I’ve been participating in the Global Forum for Combating Antisemtism, a three-day conference in Jerusalem organized to allow activists from around the world the opportunity to strategize on best practices in combating the various manifestations of anti-Jewish racism.
During one of the plenary sessions, I was able to ask Itamar Marcus of Palestinian Media Watch if he could shed some light on a phenomenon addressed often at this blog: the Guardian’s consistent failure, when reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, to report on the pervasive antisemitism within the Arab and Muslim Middle East – what we’ve characterized as their glaring antisemitic sins of omission.
Marcus replied to my query concerning the putatively liberal media group’s silence in the face of such bigotry by suggesting that Guardian contributors may find it easier to accept the ‘grievance excuse’ rather than acknowledging the existence of hateful, violent ideologies. Those who embrace the ‘grievance excuse’ argue, with varying degrees of explicitness, that it is indeed Jewish (or Israeli) behavior which often incites anti-Jewish racism and violence.
One moral corollary of the grievance excuse for antisemitism pertains to the similar tendency to contextualize terrorist attacks by radicalized Muslim citizens of Western countries as understandable responses to U.S. or UK foreign policy – a narrative advanced, among others, by Glenn Greenwald, Seumas Milne and Rachel Shabi.
Though the lethal terror attack against Lee Rigby in London by Michael Adebowale did not have an antisemitic component, the failure by these Guardian commentators to deal honestly with the extremist, reactionary interpretation of Islam which inspired his unimaginable savagery follows the same antisemitic logic, denying moral agency to the perpetrator while demanding a moral accounting from the victim.
‘Jews’, the Israeli Holocaust Studies professor Yehuda Bauer insisted during his keynote speech at the Forum, just a few minutes ago, “don’t cause antisemitism’. ’Only antisemitic logic and ideology causes antisemitism’, he declared.
While we should acknowledge our inability to know with any degree of certainty whether Judeophobia haunts the thoughts of the Guardian contributors we scrutinize, the intellectual poverty which feeds their polemical obfuscations and moral abdications in the face of even the most grotesque expressions of Jew hatred is undeniable, and shameful.
On April 10, we commented on a Guardian report by Harriet Sherwood, titled ‘John Kerry: talks with Netanyahu and Abbas very constructive‘, about efforts by US Secretary of State John Kerry to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Sherwood’s report included several passages about concessions demanded of Israel by Mahmoud Abbas before he’ll agree to resume negotiations, including the following:
[Abbas] also wants the release of 123 political prisoners who have been in jail since before the Oslo accords were signed almost 20 years ago, and for Israel to present a map showing proposed borders. [emphasis added]
As we attempted to demonstrate at the time, using merely open source information, the Palestinians she was alluding to were all convicted for their involvement in murder, or attempted murder, and that the characterization of them as “political prisoners” – suggesting that they were imprisoned merely for their beliefs – seemed to be flatly untrue.
Additionally, some time after our post CiF Watch was able to obtain detailed information on the pre-Oslo prisoners from Emi Palmor, the Director of Pardons at the Israeli Justice Ministry, which included the crimes, dates of conviction and other relevant facts on every Palestinian prisoner in question. Palmor’s information proved conclusively that all of the prisoners consisted of common criminals convicted of murder and (mostly) terrorists who murdered or attempted to murder Israeli civilians, soldiers, or foreign tourists.
Some time after providing the Guardian with proof that the Palestinians in question can not fairly be referred to “political prisoners” they agreed to revise the passage, which now modifies the claim to note that the pre-Oslo prisoners are merely described as “political prisoners” by the Palestinians:
The Palestinians also want the release of 123 prisoners, viewed as political prisoners by the Palestinians, who have been in jail since before the Oslo accords were signed almost 20 years ago, and for Israel to present a map showing proposed borders.
As we noted at the time of our original post, many Palestinians regard even compatriots convicted of deadly terrorist acts euphemistically as “political prisoners”, and that Sherwood’s text, intentionally or otherwise, served to legitimize the Palestinian narrative which glorifies even terrorists convicted of the most gruesome crimes as ‘victims’ of Israeli oppression.
Our efforts to secure the definition of the term “political prisoner” – which is clearly understood to mean ‘those who are imprisoned for their political beliefs’ - represents an attempt to fight back against the manipulation of language, in the service of an egregiously pro-Palestinian agenda, which is routinely advanced by the Guardian and their fellow political travelers.
This Guardian revision represents one victory within the larger cognitive war.
