Tag Archives: Al Jazeera

May 20 2013

An ugly disgusting rant: Joseph Massad and Glenn Greenwald attack ‘the usual Jewish suspects’

Shortly after Julie Burchill’s January commentary, titled ‘Transsexuals should cut it out‘, at the Observer was completely removed after thousands of readers complained that her piece was bigoted towards transsexuals, the Observer’s decision was defended by their readers’ editor,  Stephen Pritchard.  

Pritchard called the decision a rational one, based on his contention that Burchill’s essay was “needlessly offensive” and “gratuitously insulting”.

Though some in the media were highly critical of the decision by the Observer (a Guardian sister publication) to pull Burchill’s piece, Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian’s putative defender of free speech, was mostly silent on the Burchill Affair.  Indeed, his Tweet, on Jan 13, shortly after Burchill’s piece was published should give some indication as to why.

‘An ugly disgusting rant’ would certainly be one way to characterize Joseph Massad’s despicable essay in Al Jazeera on May 14, which argued the following:

  • Zionism not only equals racism, but the ideology itself is antisemitic.
  • Zionists cooperated and collaborated with the Nazis during the 30s and 40s.
  • Zionism should be understood as the fulfillment of the Nazis’ dream, and that the there is a strong “ideological similitude” between the two movements.

As Petra Marquardt-Bigman has argued, the writings of Massad (who has contributed to ‘Comment is Free‘ and Electronic Intifada) can easily be confused with material found on extremist racist websites.

There is one exception to this paradigm, however. Massad is of Palestinian origin, so his otherwise boilerplate extreme right narrative about Israel and Jews is compromised a bit by these howlers:

  • Unlike Zionists, who, by virtue of their Zionism, are antisemitic, “Palestinians have remained unconvinced and steadfast in their resistance to anti-Semitism“.
  • Unlike ‘Zionist anti-Semites’, “the Palestinian people have mounted a major struggle against…anti-Semitic incitement”.

Whilst there were no Tweets by Greenwald expressing outrage over Massad’s pseudo intellectual racist assault against Jews, the decision by Al Jazeera to remove the Massad article from their site sent Greenwald into a fury:

In case there is any doubt who Greenwald is referring to by “the usual suspects“, in the Tweet he links to a piece criticizing AJ’s decision (and defending Massad) by Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada – whose support for Massad is not surprising as he advanced the Zionism = Nazism narrative in a Tweet in 2010 – which accused Al Jazeera of caving in to “Zionists extremist” Jews, such as Jeffrey Goldberg, John Podhoretz and Rahm Emmanuel.

It really takes a mind occupied by the most crude antisemitic stereotypes about the danger of Jewish power to conjure a scenario by which a Qatari based pro-Sunni Islamist media group was strong-armed by a small gang of powerful Jews into censoring an otherwise meritorious essay.   

Greenwald is a Jew by birth, and though we don’t possess some sort of piercing mentalism which would allow us to see the bigotry which may lurk in his soul, it should be clear to anyone who has seriously studied the “liberal” Guardian’ commentator that his moral sensibilities are – at the very least – compromised by a callous indifference to even the most explicit and malicious expressions of Jew hatred. 

Feb 26 2013

Terrorist propagandizing – a beginners guide: By Ben White

Ben White, professional Israel hater, anti-Semite whisperer, and ‘Comment is Free’ contributor, may have landed a new gig.

logo_alqassam

White – a proponent of the one-state solution, and a Brit who’s arguably one of the the Guardian’s favorite BDS supporters - has previously romanticized about the bloodshed of Palestinian ‘martyrs’, so it’s not surprising that a commentary he published at Al Jazeera on Feb. 22, titled ‘What a period of relative calm looks like in the Occupied Territories‘, was recently cross posted here:

white at hamas

Hamas website

The piece highlights an “infographic” purporting to demonstrate the number of attacks in Gaza since the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel in November – data which, per White, “lay bare the daily reality for Palestinians and the power imbalance between the occupier and an occupied, colonised people fighting for their basic rights.”

Whilst it’s unclear if White consented to being cross-posted by Al Qassam Brigades or not, the decision by an official Hamas propagandist manning the site to promote his anti-Zionist, post-colonial agitprop represents a perfect example of the political synergy between the British anti-Zionist left and the Islamist reactionary right (what’s known as the Red-Green Alliance).

Of course, such antisemitic, misogynistic, homophobic and anti-democratic Islamist movements like Hamas don’t give a damn about political “power imbalances” or “basic [human] rights”, but are often willing to cynically employ tropes which evoke such Western values when it suits their purposes.  

Fortunately for Hamas, they can continue to rely on a steady stream of putatively “liberal” ‘Comment is Free’ contributors like Ben White to run interference for this absurd ideological charade. 

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Jan 13 2013

Harriet Sherwood falsely reports on alleged arrests of Palestinians at ‘Bab al-Shams’

Harriet Sherwood’s latest report, ‘Israel evicts E1 Palestinian peace camp activists‘, Jan. 13, about Palestinian protesters who set up a tent city, named Bab al-Shams, in the area between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim known as E-1, and were recently removed by Israeli police, began as follows:

“The Israeli state has swung into action against a group of Palestinian activists who established a tent village on a rocky hillside east of Jerusalem, with hundreds of security officials carrying out an eviction under the orders of the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in the early hours of Sunday morning.

According to activists, a large military force surrounded the encampment at around 3am. All protesters were arrested and six were injured, said Abir Kopty.”

Further in the report, Sherwood added the following:

Palestinian legislator Mustafa Barghouti, who was among those arrested, said the eviction was “proof that the Israeli government operates an apartheid system.

However, according to police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld, there were no arrests made — a statement which was accurately reported by several Arab media outlets and which Rosenfeld confirmed today to CAMERA. According to Rosenfeld, a few activists were detained briefly, then released.

Today, CAMERA prompted a speedy correction to a CNN report which also included false allegations about protester arrests.

As CAMERA noted in their post about the original CNN error, even  Al Jazeera, “hardly a source known for reporting skewed in Israel’s favor” reported the story accurately, writing the following:

“Several activists were detained during Sunday morning eviction, including Mustafa Barghouthi, Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative, Al Jazeera’s correspondent, reporting from Jerusalem, said.

Al Jazeera’s Jane Ferguson, reporting from Jerusalem, said the activists who were detained were driven to Qalandiya checkpoint and then released.”

Additionally, here’s how the Arab News reported it:

“Hundreds of Israeli police came from all directions, surrounding all those who were in the tents and arresting them one by one,” Palestinian legislator Mustafa Barghouti told AFP.

But police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP that no arrests had been made.

And, here’s the relevant passage from a report by the Egyptian site, Ahram Online:

“Hundreds of Israeli police came from all directions, surrounding all those who were in the tents and arresting them one by one,” Palestinian legislator Mustafa Barghouti told AFP.

But police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP that no arrests had been made.

“They were told they were trespassing and carefully escorted from the site one by one,” he said. “Nobody was hurt on either side.”

It appears as if Sherwood merely took the statements by Palestinian activists at face value without even attempting to corroborate their claims.

Please consider writing a respectful email to the Guardian’s readers’ editor, Chris Elliott, asking for a correction to Sherwood’s false claim.

reader@guardian.co.uk

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Oct 19 2012

This is not an attack on Abdel Bari Atwan

This essay was written by Arnold and Frimet Roth and originally published at their blog, ’This Ongoing War‘

Nearly two years ago, here on this blog, we posted an article we called “4-Dec-10: Should this man be accorded the respect due to an objective, professional journalist?” It opened with these words:

“As newspaper editors go, Abdel Bari Atwan gets more than the average amount of prominence. Given the nature of his political views, he gets a surprisingly respectable degree of respect from such mainstream media channels as NPR, Sky News, CNN and the BBC (who call him Abdel-Bari Atwan) which have hosted him frequently and which, for reasons which can only leave us wondering, present him as an objective observer on events in this part of the world…”

We then quoted a small handful of offensive, racist and/or hate-based statements attributed to Atwan over a period of some years. (There are plenty to choose from.) We ended this way:

“Atwan said the March 2008 point-blank, cold-blooded shooting-massacre by a Palestinian Arab gunman of eight unarmed high school students, most of them aged 15 or 16, at Jerusalem’s Mercaz HaRav yeshiva “was justified“… Atwan says the celebrations in Gaza that followed the massacre symbolized “the courage of the Palestinian nation.” [Source: The Jerusalem Post] Depending on where you stand, justifying a terrorist massacre is not the worst of crimes. On the other hand, given what is at stake when it comes to defeating the practitioners of terror and their supporters, is Abdel Bari Atwan the kind of person who should be given public platforms in highly prominent settings? Or is Abdel Bari Atwan simply the innocent victim of some atrocious misquoting?”

To be blunt, any intelligent observer reviewing the work product of this toxic man realizes it’s not about misquoting. On his Wikipedia page, there’s this revealing anecdote:

“Following an October 2003 article in which Atwan claimed that the U.S. is to blame for the Arab world’s hatred of it, a Yemenite journalist and columnist for the London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Munir Al-Mawari, stated: “The Abd Al Bari Atwan [appearing] on CNN is completely different from the Abdel Bari Atwan on the Al Jazeera network or in his Al Quds Al Arabi daily. On CNN, Atwan speaks solemnly and with total composure, presenting rational and balanced views. This is in complete contrast with his fuming appearances on Al Jazeera and in Al Quds Al Arabi, in which he whips up the emotions of multitudes of viewers and readers.” [Wikipedia's source]

Now, today, there’s a report [Times of Israel] that Atwan’s London-based daily paper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, one of the world’s leading Arab-language dailies and a news channel that focuses on Palestinian issues (the name literally means ‘Arab Jerusalem’), has run an editorial entitled “The only thing left is to send them to the gas ovens.”

The piece is unsigned, but the Twitter handle of editor-in-chief Atwan (@abdelbariatwan) appears at the bottom. He dominates the paper as its editor since 1989. Here’s a taste:

‘The Israeli army, through its inhumane treatment of over two million Palestinians besieged by land, sea and air, reminds us of similar treatment by the Nazi army of Jewish inmates in the Nazi camps. The only difference is that the Israeli army hasn’t sent the Palestinians to the gas ovens, at least not yet’

Holding out Israel’s defence forces as equivalent to the Nazis, and their intentions as genocidal, is not his invention. Other foaming-at-the-mouth polemicists and unadorned antisemites do it a lot and have done for years. And as our title suggests, we’re not attacking Atwan here. The man is what he is.

What we are taking this opportunity to criticize, this time with the disgusting Nazi analogy of today’s Atwan editorial in mind, is the way in which this unpleasant individual with his noxious views continues to be given public platforms in respectable places.

We think this can only be because the people in those places (a) don’t know what he writes in Arabic, (b) don’t care or (c) share Atwan’s self-opinion (on his website) that this is actually a function of his “lively and passionate debating style“.

Examples of the respectable places that give Abdel Bari Atwan a platform? His website lists some of them here: BBC News (as recently as two weeks ago); Al Jazeerah; BBC Dateline; BBC News Review; RT (“Russia Today”); Chatham House London. His website describes him as “a regular contributor to a number of UK, US, Middle Eastern and Turkish publications including ‘The Guardian’, ‘The Scottish Herald’, ‘Gulf News’ and ‘Star Gazet’“. 

These are the people who need to be criticized. We don’t say Atwan should be shut up or shut out. Many of us live in free societies, and obnoxious views like his are part of the price. What we do say is that presenting him as a sober and objective stakeholder in the robust public marketplace of ideas is irresponsible, dishonest and disingenuous.

His viewpoints on terrorism alone should have taken out of the mainstream broadcast media years ago. The fact that he keeps on popping up suggests a serious degree of systemic prejudice at work inside Bush House and other such places of huge global influence.

Aug 5 2012

Bad taste at the Guardian: Coleslaw with a pinch of Polonium

Cross posted by Petra Marquardt-Bigman at The Warped Mirror

Under the memorable headline “Making Cole-slaw of history,” Martin Kramer documented some years ago just how hilarious it is that Juan Cole calls his blog “Informed Comment” (and for “Cole-slaw”-fans, there is in fact a rich archive of additional helpings).  However, it’s apparently no joke that Cole, who is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, encourages the readers of his blog to send him money because “Informed Comment is made possible by your support.”

 

In any case, it’s arguably hardly surprising that editors at the Guardian are fans of Juan Cole, and when the professor recently vented his displeasure at Mitt Romney’s visit in Israel, the Guardian secured Cole’s “kind permission” to cross-post the piece on its Comment is Free (CiF) site.

The Guardian made a minor change to Cole’s original title – which read on CiF: “Ten reasons Mitt Romney’s Israel visit is in bad taste” – and added a sub-title: “The Republican presidential hopeful is holding a fundraiser and playing war enabler in Israel – it’s wrong on so many levels.”

The astonishing claim that Romney was “playing war enabler in Israel” is taken from Cole’s reason #7, which reads in part:

“Romney is promising his donors in Jerusalem a war on Iran. When George W Bush promised his pro-Israel supporters a war on Iraq, it cost the US at least $3 trillion, got hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, destabilised the Gulf for some time, cost over 4,000 American soldiers’ lives and damaged American power and credibility and the economy.”

Of course, Cole’s link to an AP report does not show Romney “promising his donors in Jerusalem a war on Iran” – indeed, why should this blood libel be different from all the other invented accusations against blood-thirsty Jews over the centuries?

What Cole is claiming here is plainly that Romney’s “donors in Jerusalem” want a war on Iran, just like the “pro-Israel supporters” of George W Bush wanted and got an incredibly costly and bloody war on Iraq. It’s really just another version of a paragraph from Article 22 of the Hamas Charter:

“They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. […] There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.”

The day after the Guardian featured Cole’s fantasies about Israel’s insatiable appetite for bloody wars and its mysterious ability to get the US to fight them, it was time for a Guardian-sponsored rehash of Al Jazeera’s pathetic attempts to revive rumors about Yasser Arafat’s death.

 

Some four weeks earlier, Al Jazeera had announced with great pomp and circumstance that it had conducted an “investigation” that pointed to poisoning with radioactive Polonium; however, conspiracy theories about Arafat’s death have been around ever since he died in November 2004, and even the specific claim that he was poisoned with Polonium is nothing new. While Al Jazeera’snew program succeeded in unleashing a veritable “orgy of conspiratorial theorizing” – with Israel as a favorite target – the people behind Al Jazeera’s“investigation” are apparently hoping to get yet more mileage out of this story, and the Guardian seems only too willing to provide a platform to the assorted conspiracy theorists.

There have been already countless reports and commentaries refuting the Al Jazeera “investigation,” but it’s perhaps worthwhile to add one particularly interesting testimony on Arafat’s death from a long and fascinating Atlanticreport that was published in September 2005 under the title “In a Ruined Country: How Yasir Arafat destroyed Palestine.” One of the people interviewed for this report was the Palestinian billionaire businessman Munib al-Masri; here are the relevant parts of the report:

“Talk of Arafat’s last illness makes al-Masri sad again. “Every morning I used to go see him and give him the medicine because he would not take it from anybody else,” he remembers, looking moodily out over his lawn. “Yeah, and I never thought he would die.”

“How long did you know that he was sick?” I ask.

“For the last year. Last year in September he told me he doesn’t feel well. So, and he felt that something was not right, and it looks like he had the same symptoms again, but the last time he had enough immunity. Yeah, he knew.”

I am struck by al-Masri’s use of the word “immunity,” which is a word characteristically associated with aids. Rumors that Arafat died of “a shameful illness” spread quickly through the West Bank and Gaza. […] The Palestinian leadership denounced reports that Arafat was a homosexual as lies spread by Mossad, the Israeli foreign-intelligence agency. Accounts also circulated that a secret agreement had been reached between the Israelis and Arafat’s heirs, stipulating that the truth about Arafat’s fatal illness would not be released, the Palestinian leader would be buried in Ramallah and not in Jerusalem, and the wanted men who had accompanied him in his captivity would not be pursued by Israeli forces.

“He knew that it was the same disease that he had a year ago?” I ask. Al-Masri nods his head.

“Same symptoms,” he answers. “But look how strong he was. I mean, when Abu Mazen came,” he says, referring to Arafat’s longtime deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, “we brought him from one bed in his small room to a bigger room where we could sit. I sat on the bed. Abu Mazen sat in front of him and Abu Alaa sat in front of him. He said, ‘Ah, Mazen.’ His face was very red, and you know that he was very sick, but he wants to show that he was still in control of the details with Mazen, you know? He said, ‘I have this flu, ah, ah. I have this flu. Came and went to my stomach.’”

There is another very interesting part from the meeting with al-Masri in this report:

“The money he [Arafat] spent to buy the loyalty of his court, al-Masri gently suggests, could easily have paid for a functioning Palestinian state instead.

“With three hundred, four hundred million dollars we could have built Palestine in ten years. Waste, waste, waste. I flew over the West Bank in a helicopter with Arafat at the beginning of Oslo, and I told him how easy we could make five, six, seven towns here; we could absorb a lot of people here; and have the right of return for the refugees. If you have good intentions and you say you want to reach a solution, we could do it. I said, if you have money and water, it could be comparable to Israel, this piece of land.”

But if you don’t have good intentions and don’t really want to reach a solution, you can always blame Israel – as is regularly done on Al Jazeera, the Guardian, and Juan Cole’s blog…

Related articles
Jul 5 2012

On the death of a terrorist named Arafat and a CiF Watch Tweet which went viral

After Yasser Arafat died in 2004, the Palestinian Authority refused to release medical records which would have shed light into the cause of death.

While it was reported that AIDS was a possible cause, as Challah Hu Akbar observed, “conspiracy theories relating to Arafat’s death have been around since the beginning.”  

These have included the accusation that he was poisoned by Polonium 210, the same substance which killed Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.  The Polonium theory was also advanced, for example, by antisemitic extremist Israel Shamir in 2006.

Interestingly, a report in 2005 by The New York Times (which had access to Arafat’s medical records) concluded that he died of “a stroke that resulted from a bleeding disorder caused by an unknown infection,” but noted that the “findings argued strongly against poisoning”.

However, just yesterday, July 4, Al-Jazeera revived the story, and claimed that the results of “a 9 month investigation” of the death of Arafat “uncovered radioactive polonium on [Arafat’s] final belongings,” a story which has spread across the web.

Of course, many of us at CiF Watch have been more concerned with the absence of information, in most of the coverage of these “revelations”, regarding Arafat’s death toll – the casualties resulting from a terrorist war against innocent civilians which he helped to revolutionize.

Arafat’s long reign of terror included orchestrating the start of the 2nd Intifada, a four-year campaign of violence which claimed the lives of over 1100 Israelis. (See CAMERA’s “Yasir Arafat’s Timeline of Terror” for a summary of the terrorist violence the Palestinian leader was responsible for – attacks which date back to the 1960′s.)

So, yesterday, we Tweeted the following which, as of this post, has been ReTweeted 88 times:

Hopefully, the success of our (under 140 character) observation about the legacy of Arafat indicates that the notoriety of the man (known as “The Father of Modern Terrorism“) will not soon be forgotten.

Mar 15 2012

The anti-Zionist malice of ‘Comment is Free’ contributor Mya Guarnieri

At an October protest against legislation commonly referred to as the loyalty oath – a bill that would require non-Jews seeking Israeli citizenship to pledge allegiance to a “Jewish and democratic” state - Gavriel Solomon, a prominent academic and peace activist, likened Israel to Nazi Germany, circa 1935...That was the year that the Nuremberg Laws – racist legislation that led to the systematic and deadly persecution of Jews – were created….There were no [concentration] camps yet but there were racist laws,” he said. “And we are heading towards these kinds of laws.” [emphasis mine] – Mya Guarnieri, Al-Jazeera, Feb. 6, 2011

Mya Guarnieri is nothing if not ambitious.

In a 2010 ‘Comment is Free’ piece she characterized the bigoted comments of a few dozen Israelis as an event which portends the rise of a Jewish state lurching towards fascism. Her polemical crusade aspired to nothing less than saving the “very soul Judaism” – a quite messianic ambition for a secular Jew like Guarnieri, and even more impressive when you consider that our Hebrew-speaking activist’s goal of earthly salvation was executed in a quite thrifty 636 words!

It’s important to note that Guarnieri seems intent on saving “Judaism”, not Israel – the Jewish state whose stubborn wish to exist she fiercely opposes in the name of all that is sacred to her understanding of progressive values.

She supports, instead, a quite modest proposal: the radical reconstitution of the world’s only Jewish state into the 51st majority Muslim state, with Jews living as the minority.  

When Guarnieri isn’t calling for the demise of the 3rd Jewish Commonwealth, she can be seen, on the pages of Counterpunch all but calling for a new Intifada, warning that Israeli Jews are engaged in a ‘war of attrition against non-Jews‘, and suggesting that anti-BDS legislation passed by the Knesset was arguably “proto-fascist“. 

Guarnieri has even published an essay accusing Israel of institutionalized ”destruction of Muslim religious properties” in the pro-Hezbollah propaganda site, Al-Akhbar.

So, it wasn’t at all surprising that ‘Comment is Free’ provided Ms. Guarnieri a platform to criticize Israel’s anti-terror operation against Zuhair al-Qaissi, in a manner thoroughly consistent with the Guardian’s recent egregiously biased coverage of both the IDF action, and subsequent Gaza rocket fire.

In “The killing of Zuhair al-Qaissi exposes Israel’s attitude to its supreme court” CiF, March 14, Guarnieri criticizes the killing of al-Qaissi - a senior Popular Resistance Committee operative responsible for planning a multi-pronged terror attack that was to take place via Sinai within a few days.

Guarnieri’s complaint centers around the fact that Israeli intelligence on the planned terrorist attack by al-Qaissi – who was among the leaders who planned, funded, and directed the combined terror attack that took place on Route 12 in August 2011, in which 8 Israelis were killed and 40  injured - was based on “secret evidence”.

Guarnieri’s piece deals with what she claims are Israeli violations of supreme court rulings more broadly. However, she argues, about the attack on the PRC leader, that though the court has indeed ruled in favor of such preemptive acts to prevent terror attacks, on a case-by-case basis, “depending on the evidence”, she counters that “…without seeing the security forces’ secret evidence, it’s impossible to know if al-Qaissi was indeed planning an attack.”

Of course, to treat Guarnieri as a serious interlocutor, and assume good faith in her query about Israeli intel on the PRC terrorist, would be an act of supreme foolishness – as most of what the “progressive” journalist writes represents merely anti-Zionist conclusions in search of supporting evidence. For Guarnieri, Israel’s sin is original and immutable – her polemical inquiries merely representing an edifice by which to impute guilt.

However, just as a point of comparison about a democracy’s right to protect its citizens from terror groups intent on murdering its citizens, the U.S. presents a good example.

The U.S. military, from 2004 till 2012, carried out 290 drone strikes in northwest Pakistan against al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders (attacks which have significantly increased in the Obama years), and killed between 1,778 and 2,764 people, of whom around 1,485 to 2,293 were terrorists. (So, roughly 17% of those killed are believed to have been civilians).

It’s important to note two things: First, such attacks (controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities Division) are largely based on the desire to prevent potential attacks, as opposed to actionable intelligence that an attack was to be imminently launched on U.S. soil; And, evidence regarding the terror affiliations of the roughly 2000 terrorists killed are not made public by the U.S. military, nor subject to review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

However, beyond the specious legal arguments she puts forth, Guarnieri concludes that the IDF targeting of such PRC leaders represents “a war on Palestinians – and anyone that Israel deems an ‘other‘” [emphasis added] – that is, further evidence of Israeli racism.

About the Palestinian “other”:

The Popular Resistance Committees are trained, funded and provided weaponry by Hamas, refuses any form of reconciliation with Israel, and acts as a sub-contractor for Iranian and Hezbollah agents in Lebanon, carrying out terror attacks against Israelis in return for funding.

According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, PRC is split into three factions, two of which collaborate with Hamas and operate under its auspices. The third faction, called the Army of Islam, is affiliated with global jihad movements.

PRC has a radical Islamist ideology similar to Hamas, argues that Muslims are obligated to wage violent Jihad, and specifically believes that killing Israelis is the only way to “liberate” Palestine.

Finally, to further contextualize Guarnieri’s politics, she, in a piece for Mondoweiss in May of 2011, described Israel as “a place that is Jewish in numbers but utterly lacking a Jewish soul.” Zionism, she argues, “in [claiming] that the Jewish people cannot exist without [a Jewish] state, denies hundreds of years of Diaspora history, culture, and languages”, and is, therefore, itself, a form of antisemitism. 

The moral inversion is now complete. 

Guarnieri’s malign obsession with Israel is so intense that she views Zionists as the true antisemites – representing, by definition, a reactionary element which should inspire moral outrage – while terrorist groups who openly advocate the murder of Jews evoke progressive sympathy.

If you want to know how debased the anti-Zionist left has become, simply follow the supremely callous musings of Mya Guarnieri – whose lazy stereotypes (crude, ugly caricatures) about Israel, and Israelis, embody a movement’s hateful, and simply insatiable, fixation on the sins, real and imagined, of living Jews. 

Nov 29 2011

Wadah Kanfar promotes the progressive virtues of radical Islam at ‘Comment is Free’

November 27th saw the publication on CiF of yet another promotion of ‘moderate, democratic Islamism’, this time written by Wadah Kanfar who resigned from his eight year post as director general of Al Jazeera in September – but not before collaborating with the Guardian on the Palestine Papers affair last January.

Kanfar’s Muslim Brotherhood sympathies and affiliations are well known and indeed were the cause of the resignations of numerous journalists from Al Jazeera under his directorship.

It was also Kanfar who brought the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘spiritual leader’ Sheikh Qaradawi to Al Jazeera and gave him a regular slot where he promotes his anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynistic ideologies.

The Guardian’s provision of a platform for Kanfar to extol the virtues and advantages of the work-in-progress rise of Islamists to power throughout the Middle East and North Africa is therefore akin to inviting the Master of the Hunt to write an article on how absolutely spiffing fox-hunting really is.

I’m not going to deconstruct Kanfar’s arguments here myself because as it happens, the Azure magazine recently published an excellent must-read article by Dr. Uriya Shavit – a lecturer in Islamic history and theology at Tel Aviv University – which explains at length precisely why Islamist rule is inherently incompatible with democracy.

“According to the Islamist worldview, Allah has given mankind a complete and perfect doctrine of life: Islam. Democracy and individual rights follow from and are mandated by this doctrine—and are consequently subordinate to its divine injunctions.

Since Islamists believe that the legitimacy of the political order is founded on a divine decree, they utterly reject any possibility of rebellion, whether in the name of democracy or individual rights, against other religious precepts. Hence, they would not allow a parliament to pass laws that contradicted the explicit commands of Allah, as conveyed to humanity through the Koran and the example set by the prophet. As al-Qaradawi and others have explained repeatedly, human beings cannot permit what Allah has forbidden, nor can they ban what Allah permits. For example, the Koran denounces abortion and the consumption of alcohol; consequently, a human parliament has no authority to grant them legislative sanction. Similarly, for particular offenses the Koran stipulates harsh penalties—capital punishment or amputation of a hand, for example—that no human legislator may repeal, nor may the prohibition of idol worship be overturned in the name of freedom of religion.”

…….

“Western observers therefore miss the point when they wonder whether the Muslim Brotherhood supports free elections and civil liberties. To predict the character of the regime that the Islamists will establish, if and when they are given the opportunity, only one question is relevant: Will Islamic democracy take the Koran as its highest authority, with religious scholars as its sole authorized interpreters? An answer in the affirmative—whether clear or implicit—carries within it the unmistakable seeds of theological despotism.”

……..

“The challenge facing the Arab Spring can thus be summarized as follows: Democracy without the Muslim Brotherhood is impossible, but so is democracy under its leadership. There is no doubt that the Brotherhood enjoys broad support in every Arab country that has undergone democratic revolutions or uprisings in the last year. Elections in which the movement is not allowed to participate will therefore lack popular legitimacy. Moreover, the Brotherhood’s liberal and democratic rhetoric will make it difficult for the legal establishment to disqualify the movement. The inevitable result of its electoral victory, however, will be the formation of a theocracy. It will not permit the scientific and technological revolution of which Arab societies are in such dire need. Simply put, the future of Arab democracy hangs by a thread: The Muslim Brotherhood must be permitted to run in elections, but not gain power.”

However, as we are already seeing across North Africa, the Islamists are gaining power and any hope of the emergence of true democracies from the upheaval of the ‘Arab Spring’ is fast waning.

Rather than confront that fact, the Guardian elects to sell out the real liberals in the MENA regions who risked their lives in the attempt to achieve genuine democracy and to bury its editorial head in the sands of the Islamist double-speak.

As Dr. Shavit points out:

“For democracy to strike real and lasting roots in the Arab world, the United States and its allies must free themselves of the influence of multi-cultural and post-colonial theories and determine—first for themselves, and then for others—the distinction between truly enlightened regimes and their imitators.”

The Guardian remains mired in its own long tradition of failing to do precisely that, and therefore aids and abets existing and future religious tyrannies rather than being the beacon of liberalism it claims to aspire to be.

Related articles
Sep 8 2011

The Guardian’s “democratic” Islamist leader: Kill every last Jew on earth

H/T Just Journalism

We have posted previously about the Sunni cleric, Sheik Yousuf al-Qaradawi - a radical religious extremist, and Holocaust supporter, who’s also considered to be the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader. 

However, al-Qaradawi’s extremism was characteristically white washed by the Guardian in their Middle East Live Blog back in February.

“Al-Qaradawi might be familiar to many in Britain. The government was criticised back in 2008 by moderate Muslim groups after it banned him from entering Britain and branded him an extremist.

Qaradawi, who was banned from entering the United States, had previously visited the UK in 2004 at the invitation of the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, sparking protests from Jewish groups and gay people, who regard him as anti-Semitic and homophobic.

However, he is also arguably the most influential Sunni Muslim cleric in the world and has regularly spoken in the past in support of democracy.

A  March 18, 2011 post by the Guardian’s Middle East Editor, Ian Black, included this benign description:

Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular preacher who appears regularly on al-Jazeera,

Back in 2005, a Guardian column by   characterized al-Qaradawi, thusly:

“[al-Qaradawi is] a widely regarded as a moderate and one of the most respected scholars in the Muslim world.”

She further noted that describing him as an extremist – merely because he supports Palestinian suicide attacks against Israelis -is “absurd.”

Now, per a recently released WikiLeaks cable:

‘In a Friday, January 9, sermon broadcast on Al Jazeera Arabic, Imam Yousef Al-Qaradawi condemned Jews for spreading “corruption in the land,” and for victimizing the Muslim people. He cited the Babylonian Captivity and the Roman conquest as historical examples of God’s punishment of Israel. He said “We wait for the revenge of Allah to descend upon them, and, Allah willing, it will be by our own hands…Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.” [emphasis mine]

No doubt, al-Qaradawi’s CiF column, contextualizing his explicit call for genocide against Jews, will likely appear soon. 

Related articles
Aug 16 2011

Guardian moderators inexplicably delete comment beneath post by Roy Greenslade

Roy Greenslade’s post, Al-Jazeera bureau chief arrested in Israel, Guardian, Aug. 16, produced a paltry number of comments, but it did elicit this by “Sorcey“.

In response to Sorcey there was this by HushedSilence:

HushedSilence16 August 2011 11:28AM

Re: “The only things that have occurred recently is more building by Israel in the West Bank and East Jerusalem”

Jews building houses in an area where Jews already live, is a matter for international concern.

Re: “IDF strikes on Gaza.”

Though of course you wouldn’t be aware that this is in retaliation for the rockets and mortar strikes on civilian areas in Israel and the damage and injuries done because that’s so unimportant that the Guardian doesn’t report them.

And, then.

So, apparently, glib accusations of Israeli racism and brutality – in response to a story where few details are available – are perfectly acceptable, but a rebuttal to the defamation, which also dares to criticize the Guardian, runs afoul of their “community standards.”

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Jul 31 2011

Tel Aviv homeless upset at (Mya Guarnieri-style) far left hypocrisy

This is cross posted at Point of No Return

Kfar Shalem - the common man's struggle against encroaching redevelopment

With Israelis camping out in the streets in protest against a chronic shortage of affordable housing, who should jump on the bandwagon but Mya Guarnieri, al-Jazeera’s woman in Tel Aviv [and occasional CiF contributor]. Guarnieri wonders why the media have been ignoring the good citizens of Kfar Shalem, an area of south Tel Aviv threatened with demolition which she wrote about in February.

Kfar Shalem may not be familiar to most Israelis but it is certainly known to readers of this blog, when Point of No Return covered the mostly-Mizrahi residents’ struggle to fight eviction in 2007.

Young anti-Zionist radicals like Guarnieri can’t resist politicising what is essentially nothing more sinister than the common man’s universal fight against encroaching urban gentrification and redevelopment.

In her article for +972 blog, Israel has manipulated the poor Mizrahim for political ends, exploiting them to keep Palestinians from reclaiming their homes:

Now an economically depressed neighborhood of South Tel Aviv, Kfar Shalem, was once a Palestinian village, Salame. Jewish forces ran the Arab residents out in early 1948, months before Israel was established and (what some refer to as) the War of Independence began.

The young state gave the empty Palestinian homes to impoverished Mizrachi Jews. The idea, some residents of Kfar Shalem admit today, was to discourage dispossessed Palestinians from returning. The Jewish occupants were to “guard” the houses.

These new residents also created facts on the ground and, after the 1948 War, the municipality of Tel Aviv annexed Jaffa and Salame—both of which were destined for a Palestinian state under the partition plan approved by the UN in November of 1947.

Not a word of course, about the Arab aggression that caused the ‘War of Independence’. Nor is Guarnieri remotely troubled by the thought that the impoverished Mizrahi Jews could have themselves been dispossessed of their homes in their Arab countries of birth. For Guarnieri, Arabs can only ever be victims.

This blog has already drawn attention to the double standard among far-leftists for whom Arab property rights invariably trump Jewish rights, for example in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah. These leftists are only ever exercised by injustice against Jews when the Ashkenazi-dominated ruling elite can be blamed.

Curiously enough, however, this form of leftist hypocrisy has not escaped some of the residents of Kfar Shalem themselves: they obviously find the attentions of anti-Zionists like Guarnieri rather irksome. She herself admits, but was too cowardly to include in her report for Al-Jazeera:

.. many of the Jewish Israelis I interviewed were upset with their fellow citizens for not doing more to help them in their battle against homelessness. Some also expressed frustration with the Israeli left because they felt that such activists reserve their sympathies only for Palestinians and foreigners.

Good for you, residents of Kfar Shalem, for making a stand against the leftist manipulation of your grievances to advance their own political agenda.

Related articles
May 5 2011

The Guardian’s Seumas Milne: Cowardly in Qatar

For several years now, the Guardian’s Associate Editor Seumas Milne has been attending the annual ‘Al Jazeera Forum’ in Doha, Qatar.

This year the event was held between March 12th -14th at the Sheraton Hotel in Doha and according to the advance publicity, its aim was to “explore the significance of the revolutions and unrest sweeping the Arab world and examine their impact on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict”.

Milne spoke at a plenary session entitled “Leaks: the future of journalism” along with several other interesting figures. Two other Guardian employees were also among the 500 conference attendees flown out to Doha by Al Jazeera for this all expenses paid event. Matt Wells and Francesca Panetta produced a subsequently published podcast on the subject, including some blandly sycophantic coverage of the Al Jazeera TV station.   

Al Jazeera produced video interviews with some of the conference participants, including Seumas Milne who was in clear self-congratulatory mode as he talked about the Guardian-Al Jazeera joint project which became known as the ‘Palestine Papers’.

Milne describes his newspaper as one engaged in “pushing boundaries” due to the fact that, like Al Jazeera, it is not a “profit maximizing” organization and therefore enjoys “freedoms that other media organisations don’t have”. However, like Al Jazeera itself, the Guardian is extremely selective on the subject of where exactly it chooses to push boundaries and exercise its “freedoms” and for both these organisations, the subject of human rights in Qatar is a self-censored no-go area.

Ironically, even as Egyptian, Tunisian and other bloggers and social media revolutionaries were being feted at the Qatar government-funded Al Jazeera Forum, a Qatari blogger was being held incommunicado by that same government, prompting Amnesty International to launch an appeal to its members to act for his release.  Whilst the gentleman concerned does not, according to his blog, seem to be my idea of a human rights activist, his incarceration is symptomatic of the lack of media and internet freedom prevalent in Qatar.

Al Jazeera has been frequently criticized by some in the Qatari press for not addressing domestic issues liable to embarrass its patrons. An editorial in the’ Peninsula’ stated that:

“Al Jazeera is hailed as an epitome of free media in the Arab world and beyond but critics say its so-called freedom and boldness would actually be put to test when the channel begins covering local issues. Al Jazeera has, of late, been at the receiving end on Qatari social networking sites for focusing attention on the outside world and ignoring issues in the country of its birth. Its coverage of events in neighbouring Bahrain and Oman has also left many viewers wondering if it is really objective in its treatment of developments in those countries .Praised the world over for its boldness, the channel lacks the guts to cover sensitive issues in Qatar, for instance, say critics. Al Jazeera is also accused of practicing double standards. A website which sometime ago talked of some appointment in the channel’s administration had to be closed down and its owners were taken to court. So the local Arabic and English-language newspapers score over Al Jazeera in that they sometimes show the guts and can cover issues like corruption. Al Jazeera is thus not a good example at all while discussing media freedom in the Qatari context, say critics.”

International organisations monitoring press freedom have also criticized the archaic Qatari laws which make criticism of religion, the army and the royal family punishable offences and the fact that many of the journalists working in Qatar are foreigners who, by law, cannot hold citizenship and are therefore very vulnerable to state pressure.  As pointed out by ‘Reporters without Borders’, Qatari journalists are also at a distinct disadvantage due to the fact that all trade unions are illegal in that country. A new press law was promised by the end of 2010, but so far has failed to come into effect.    

One would think that both as a journalist and a life-time socialist, as well as a person claiming that investigative reporting performs a public service, Seumas Milne and his Guardian colleagues would have been keen to take on the subject of the dire situation in which Qatari journalists and bloggers operate. Apparently not.

Neither has the Guardian paid very much attention to the subject of human rights in general in Qatar, despite some of its staff paying fairly frequent visits there. The 2010 Amnesty International report on Qatar makes for grim reading and exposes  institutionalized discrimination and violence against women, prison sentences for ‘insulting Islam’, continued illegality of homosexuality, severe abuses of the rights of migrants and continued use of cruel punishment such as stoning, flogging and the death penalty. In 2010 Qatar rejected a series of recommendations made by the UN Human Rights Council to correct some of these human rights abuses.

And yet, when one takes a look at the ‘Qatar’ page in the Middle East section of ‘Comment is Free’, one finds that a grand total of sixteen articles on Qatar-related subjects have appeared there since August 2006, of which only one – not written by a Guardian journalist – can be classified as critical.  

Now of course all this raises an awful lot of chicken and egg-type questions. One wonders why Guardian journalists are so keen to take part in a conference celebrating revolution against dictators and what they perceive as a ‘Arab Spring’ of democracy in the Arab world which is generously and exclusively funded by an equally non-democratic hereditary dictatorship which controls every aspect of life in a country rated ‘not free’ by Freedom House.

One ponders as to why their ‘brave new journalism’ does not extend to investigative reporting on the subject of the many human rights abuses taking place right outside the front door of the luxury hotel in which they were wined and dined by the regime perpetrating those abuses.

One also asks how these ‘liberal progressives’ manage to reconcile their ever-increasing collaboration with a government-owned and funded TV station which provides a regular slot for one of the most offensive racist and homophobic hate preachers on the circuit – Yusuf al  Qaradawi – and if they privately raised any eyebrows at the fact that the ‘Qatar Foundation’ – funded by the same government – supplies student scholarships in his name.

One may even wonder if the Guardian management has any qualms about accepting luxury all expenses paid trips for some of its staff from a dictatorship which also funds terrorist organizations which murder innocent civilians in another part of the world, for whilst there may be no legal grounds for refusing such favours, there certainly should be moral ones.

The fact that yet again the intrepid investigative reporter Seumas Milne finds himself suddenly struck by a distinct lack of curiosity whilst in Qatar actually shows that contrary to his claims in the above video, he and his newspaper are far from being graced with “freedoms that other media organisations do not have”.

Not only are they in hock to a hereditary dictatorship of the type they repeatedly claim to abhor and oppose on grounds of principle, but they are also puppets to their own political ideology which obliges them to sell out any remaining vestige of integrity for the sake of ‘the cause’ and makes “pushing boundaries” no more than an empty mantra when coming from their mouths.   

Related articles
Apr 12 2011

Dhimmi-monde – The Guardian’s Political Prostitution

A guest post by Akus

What a wonderful description of the Guardian’s dhimmi-like obeisance to the Arab world – prostituting itself by partnering with the pro-Islamist Al-Jazeera, and now publishing articles in an English newspaper in Arabic like the one below.

Don’t worry if you cannot read it in the original – they helpfully provide a translation – at least, I suppose it’s a translation – for the dummies – that is, dhimmis – who cannot read the original.

So is this the dhimmi-monde world in which the Guardian is apparently finding most of its readership – or sponsorship? What’s next? The London School of Economics taking the hint and providing its courses in Arabic, with English translations for the dhimmis studying there in exchange for a small grant from an Arab despot?

But I have one note for the Guardian’s editors. The article’s date should read (in Arabic, of course) 4th Jumada I, 1432, not the Crusader date of April 8, 2011. Because if you are going to live in a medieval mental world of 1432, at least be honest enough tell us what media-evil world you are living in.

Mar 28 2011

2008 or 2011? Video of IDF Spokesman, during Cast Lead, lecturing Al-Jazeera broadcaster on simple lessons they clearly still haven’t learned

Here is a newly translated interview with Capt Avichay Adraee on Al-Jazeera which took place during or right before Cast Lead. Unfortunately given the current situation, practically all of his points are just as relevant today as they were a few years ago.

Feb 28 2011

Guardian journalistic “ethics”: Publish, & let others deal with the consequences

The Guardian’s pyromania-like tendency to publish information for its own gratification with no concern for the consequences for others has once more come to the fore. After its collaboration with Wikileaks on the US embassy cables and its collaboration with Al Jazeera on the Palestine papers, it last week published the claim that a US citizen being held in Pakistan in connection to a shooting incident is a CIA official.  The next day the Guardian also produced a photo gallery of pictures related to the story.  The photographs depict an atmosphere on the streets of Lahore which can hardly be described as illustrating any kind of commitment to a fair judicial process for Raymond Davis.

According to reports from other sources, AP declined to publish the same information:

“The Associated Press learned about Davis working for the CIA last month, immediately after the shootings, but withheld publication of the information because it could endanger his life while he was jailed overseas, with at least some protesters there calling for his execution as a spy.”

“The AP had intended to report Davis’ CIA employment after he was out of harm’s way, but the story was broken Sunday by The Guardian of London. The CIA asked the AP and several other U.S. media outlets to hold their stories as the U.S. tried to improve Davis’ security situation.”

No doubt the Guardian will justify its actions as it usually does – by invoking ‘the public’s right to know’, although that bench-mark appears to be applied rather selectively. Guardian editors apparently find ‘the public’s right to know’ rather more compelling when it comes with a side-dish of perceived embarrassment for the American or Israeli governments, although the Palestinian Authority has definitely joined that category of late too.

Recent questions surrounding the Guardian’s own tax arrangements and offshore bank accounts are apparently not included in what the public has a right to know.  When Prince Harry served a tour in Afghanistan, the Guardian – like the rest of the British media – was happy to comply with government requests for a news blackout on the subject so as not to endanger lives.

‘Ah,’ you may be thinking, ‘but here we are talking about a spy accused of committing a serious crime – this is different.’ Well let’s go back a few years to the mid 1990s when a Libyan ‘diplomat’ (and member of the Libyan External Security Organization) named Khalifa Ahmed Bazelya was declared ‘persona non grata’ and expelled from the UK on December 11th 1995 after the brutal murder of a Libyan dissident living in the UK.

Oddly enough, in 1997, the Guardian’s then associate foreign editor claimed never to have heard of Bazeyla. One would think that a foreign editor might take an interest in the rare diplomatic expulsion only two years previously of a man associated with the regime responsible for the murder of a British policewoman.  One would consider that particularly likely if that man had been transferring rather substantial payments to one’s own personal bank account, but Victoria Brittain claimed at the time that she had no knowledge of the source of the thousands of pounds landing mysteriously in her account by foreign transfer.

That is quite an impressive lack of curiosity by any standards, and particularly for a journalist. Brittain’s editor at the time, Alan Rusbridger, also appeared to be inflicted with a similar lack of curiosity regarding his employee’s financial arrangements and her personal connections to the Intelligence Chief of the human rights abusing Ghanan military dictatorship at the time, Mr. Kojo Tsikara, for whose benefit the money was transferred.  Despite the fact that the UK had no diplomatic ties with Libya at the time and that it was well-known that Ghaddafi’s regime was heavily involved financially in Ghana, ‘the public’s right to know’ did not prevail in that instance.

In fact, five years after Bazelya was expelled from Britain, the Guardian’s sister paper the Observer, ran a story on the subject in the wake of the leaking of MI6 papers related to the Libyan. Although those papers also contained references to Bazelya’s payments into Victoria Brittain’s personal bank account, that information was not deemed suitable for publication at the time. As Stephen Glover wrote in the Spectator at the time:

“There is no evidence that she [Brittain] knew Bazelya personally, though it is plausibly alleged that her friend Kojo Tsikata did, and had meetings with him in London on 17 September and 16 December 1993, and 25 March 1994. The point is that the Observer has decided, no doubt correctly, that Bazelya is a dangerous man. It fulminates against MI5 for letting him into the country and for not keeping a proper eye on him. But it deliberately leaves out Ms Brittain’s own links to Bazelya for fear that they might embarrass her and compromise the Guardian. It is as good an example as you will find of double standards and readers being short-changed.”

Plus ca change….it seems that at the Guardian, ‘the public’s right to know’ depends entirely upon whom that knowledge is likely to embarrass or compromise and the Guardian’s own resulting gratification.