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This is cross posted by Richard Millett
War Horse writer Michael Morpurgo:
The film of War Horse, adapted from the novel by Michael Morpurgo (Contributor to ‘Comment is Free’), has just been released in the UK.
But as well as horses being killed on screen there is something else for filmgoers to cry into their popcorn over. Morpurgo is happy to repeat vicious lies about Israel without seeming to bother checking facts.
Last February Morpurgo was given the honour of reciting the Richard Dimbleby lecture, which has been delivered by an influential figure every year since 1972, and he chose to speak on the lack of childrens’ rights around the world. He pointed out that 8 million children a year die before the age of 5. As he said, “that’s a holocaust of children every year”. He also mentioned that “69 million children never go to school” and that “3.5 million children in our own country are still mired in poverty”.
Most of those 8 million children die from AIDS, war, malaria, malnutrition and other diseases in Africa. But Morpurgo failed to say anything about that instead choosing to spend a large portion of this high profile speech on the darlings of the left, the Palestinians, and invoking the modern day version of the anti-Semitic blood libel. He relied on statements of those with an anti-Israel agenda.
He said he went to Jordan 10 years ago and met Jordanian children “about eighty per cent of whom are Palestinian refugees”. They are not refugees by any normal definition, but are simply born and bred Jordanians.
He mentioned a teenage girl who said:
“I want to tell you something real and true. My family lives here in Jordan, but I do not belong here. I belong in Palestine. It is my home but I can’t live there because it is occupied.”
Obviously, her “Palestine” means Israel and this was a call for the destruction of the Jewish state with its hidden aspiration for all Palestinians to head for Israel and turn it into another Arab state.
Morpurgo soon mentioned Gaza and repeated Israel-hating Amnesty International’s figure that 300 children were killed during Operation Cast Lead. But Amnesty and the United Nations class a child as being “under 18″. So a 17-year-old Hamas fighter pointing a gun at an Israeli soldier being shot dead in self-defence is classed as “a child”.
Morpurgo also gave the impression that from the moment he entered Gaza to the moment he exited it two days later that the Israelis were hell-bent on killing Palestinian children.
No sooner did he enter Gaza when:
“Halfway down I heard the sound of a shot being fired – it sounded to a country boy like me as if someone was shooting rabbits. All around young Palestinian boys were racing around on their donkeys and carts whooping and shrieking. I had no idea what they were doing at the time. I was in another world. I didn’t know who was doing the shooting. In this other world I went the next day to visit a hospital for malnourished babies and then on to a project for blind children.”
On his way out of Gaza he described how “earlier that morning, before I got there it seems, some of the scavengers had ventured too close to the wall and had been fired at and wounded”, and while he was waiting to leave:
“It was then I heard shots, then screaming, saw the kids running to help their wounded friends. Now I really was outside the comfort zone of fiction. A doctor from Medicins sans Frontieres, waiting there with me, told me that the shots were probably not fired by marksmen from the watchtowers on the wall, but that these scavengers were sometimes targeted, remotely, electronically from Tel Aviv, which was miles away – ‘Spot and Strike,’ they call it. Like a video game – a virtual shooting. I don’t know if these claims are true but I do know the shots were real, there was blood, the boy’s trousers were soaked in it, the bullets were real. I saw him close to, saw his agony as the cart rushed by me.”
So there you have it, the modern day reincarnation of the anti-Semitic blood libel. In the old days this involved the accusation that Jews abducted and slaughtered non-Jewish children and used their blood in religious rituals. Nowadays it is Israelis, or Jewish Israelis to be more precise, who, allegedly, just kill them “like a video game”.
Morpurgo admitted that he didn’t know if the claims by a doctor from Medicins sans Frontieres that the shots came remotely from Tel Aviv were true, but he made them anyway. For Morpurgo it doesn’t matter because it sounds like a wonderfully sad story, which he is in the business of telling.
Morpurgo did make a weak attempt at partiality with the following:
“I know Hamas rockets had been landing in Israel for a very long time and that Israeli children have been dying there too. And I know it is absolutely the right of every nation to defend itself.So most certainly the Israelis have had their reasons. But I’m sure that most of them believe as we all do that a child’s life in particular is precious, any child’s life. Yet Palestinian children died. Collateral damage, some might call it.”
He mentioned his visit to a village where “Arab and Jewish children play together and learn together”, but this mention of “Jewish children” should raise alarm bells. Why were the Israeli children described by him in terms of their religion and not their nationality, unlike the Arab children?
But if Morpurgo was really concerned about the rights of Palestinian children he would have highlighted the child abuse prevalent in Palestinian society where children are used as human shields by Hamas, where Hamas destroys childrens’ summer camps in Gaza and where television programmes are regularly aired by the Palestinian Authority on which children claim a desire to grow up to become martyrs.
Instead he chose to believe the propaganda of those who have their own financial interests in spreading lies about Israel and his words should have been prefaced with the following announcement:
“No facts were checked in the making of this speech”.
What a waste of an important speech last February. Instead of bravely speaking up for Palestinian children like he could have, Michael Morpurgo probably only succeeded in adding a little more hatred of Jews into the world.
Richard Millett’s recent post on the subject of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine’s (RToP) book launch held at Amnesty International’s London premises (where else?) provides a good opportunity to take a look behind the scenes of such an event and to examine the connections of some of the various players and the manner in which some anti-Israel activists attempt to co-opt legitimacy to their campaign by intellectualising it.
The book in question is entitled ‘Corporate Complicity in Israel’s Occupation’ and is based upon the ‘evidence’ presented at the RToP session in London last year. Its editors are Asa Winstanley and Frank Barat and it is published by Pluto Press.
Asa Winstanley is heavily involved with the International Solidarity Movement and spent time in the PA controlled territories working on its behalf.
“The ISM training was yesterday and today. We had about eight new recruits, so it was a pretty good weekend session. At the end of today, we were planning how to spread ourselves around the regions that ISM covers and it was a really good vibe. We have some good activists here now and I am feeling more confident about the state of ISM. The majority of us here now are British, I think.”
Winstanley’s ISM links appear to have continued after his return to the UK and he has been involved in recruiting volunteers and fundraising for the organisation. He apparently considers his stint with the ISM to have turned him into a Middle East expert, and writes for a variety of outlets including ‘Electronic Intifada’ and ‘Ceasefire’. Winstanley’s level of ‘expertise’ on Israel can be appreciated in the following passage.
“When I lived in Palestine, on the few times I had to travel to Tel Aviv from the West Bank (via Jerusalem,) walking around the public bus stations I was struck by the sheer number of armed, uniformed soldiers who used the public bus system. Anyone who has used buses in Israel for any length of time will tell you they often have more soldiers than civilians on them.
The phenomenon is so widespread that it can only be a deliberate policy. Does some $3 billion a year in military aid from the US government not provide it with enough funding for its own troop transportation? So Israel not only uses Palestinians as human shields, but it even “hides” its soldiers amongst its own civilian population – exactly what Israeli spokespeople accuses Hamas of. Talk about projection.”
Recently Winstanley has invested much in defending the case of Northern Islamic Movement leader Raed Salah who was arrested earlier this year in the UK. (The Tribunal decision is here.) Here he is being interviewed on the subject by Dr Hanan Chehata (also press officer for Daoud Abdullah’s MEMO) on the Muslim Brotherhood-linked ‘Al Hiwar’ TV channel which was established in 2006 by Azzam Tamimi.
With lies and distortions in practically every sentence, not to mention the liberal sprinklings of ‘Israel lobby’ conspiracy theory and false accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ against the CST and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, it is easy to appreciate why Winstanley is such a hit in anti-Israel circles. Particularly interesting is his declaration that the new book he co-edited is designed to be a ‘handbook’ for those engaging in BDS.
The book’s other editor is the currently UK domiciled French activist Frank Barat who is also the co-ordinator for the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. Barat is also a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and the UK branch of ICHAD.
In January 2010 Barat spoke as RToP representative at one of the Palestine Memorial Week events which the RToP now organizes annually together with the Palestinian Return Centre, the Palestinian Forum in the UK, the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza, the Islamic Forum of Europe, FOSIS, the Muslim Association of Britain and the Islamic Human Rights Commission, among others.
The majority of these organisations have direct links to Hamas – a proscribed terror organization in the UK – and the Muslim Brotherhood. The events are endorsed by the PSC, Friends of Al Aqsa, the ISM, the Free Palestine Movement (organizer of flotillas) and Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East.
Barat is also busy on the lecture circuit: here he is for example appearing alongside a Guardian reporter at a Tower Hamlets Jenin Friendship Association event, and here, alongside Ghada Karmi and Jody McIntyre, explaining why he is an ‘activist’.
Barat also appears to have links to the ISM and in addition writes for a number of outlets including Al Jazeera, ‘Electronic Intifada’, the Palestine Chronicle and others. Here is his report for Ma’an from the recent RToP session in South Africa, written together with Al Shabaka’s Victor Kattan who was reporting from the event on Twitter.
Barat also runs his own blog where he links to, among other extremists, Gilad Atzmon, whose antisemitic resume includes leveling the explicit charge, on his blog, that Jews are indeed trying to take over the world.
Barat is also the editor of a book by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe.
Here is Barat’s distinctly incomplete account of the death of Jawaher Abu Rahma.
“Jawaher probably chanted “la la el jidar” (no, no, to the wall) and walked, side by side with others, towards the Apartheid Wall and the line of soldiers, waiting on top of the hill. She then probably run away when the first tear gas were fired, regrouped, and walked back towards the wall again.
……Or maybe she did not. Not this time.
She inhaled a huge quantity of this most poisonous substance and was taken to a Ramallah hospital. She never recovered. She died. The Holy Land is not the land of miracles.”
Both Winstanley and Barat are obviously wedded more to the ‘narrative’ which promotes their careers as ‘activists’ than to the kind of objectivity and adherence to fact one would expect from the editors of books or serious publications. One must therefore ask why a publishing house would select them for that role and the answer to that question is probably best found in an understanding of the ideologies adhered to by founder and publisher of Pluto Press, Roger van Zwanberg.
Many of the authors on Pluto’s authors list are household names to those familiar with the anti-Israel scene: Alastair Crooke of Conflicts Forum, Sarah Irving, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Uri Gordon of ‘Anarchists Against the Wall’ and Ted Honderich - who published at letter at the Guardian morally justifying suicide bombing against Israeli civilians - to name but a few.
Pluto Press’ radical agenda is, however, not entirely limited to the subject of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In 2005, for example, it published a book (preface can be read here) entitled ‘Conjuring Hitler; How Britain and America made the Third Reich’ which, according to reviews, leans on the works of Holocaust Denier David Irving among others.
The publishing house also has its own Youtube channel, organizes events at universities and other venues and dedicates a page on its site to the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.
Roger van Zwanenberg
In addition to his activities at Pluto Press, Roger van Zwanenberg was also a trustee of the apparently now defunct ‘Gateway Trust’ (also known as the ‘Van Zwanenberg Charitable Trust’) which included Naomi Klein and former Guardian employee Victoria Brittain among its group of ‘international advisors’ and which was supported financially by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, UNESCO and Pluto Press.
He has also been a member of the advisory board of ‘Just Media’ (founded by the Palestine Chronicle’s Ramzy Baroud – also a Pluto Press author) along with Ilan Pappe, Noam Chomsky and John Pilger.
Here is Pluto Press described in its founder’s own words:
“Our niche, our rationale and our advantage in the marketing place of the world, is that we tackle the great issues of our day… the grandeur of Imperialism, war and peace locally and globally, the tyranny of oppression, and the domination of one people by another…. the great issues as seen through socialist writers (sic) eyes.”
Van Zwanenberg describes himself as a Marxist born into “a Christian family with deep Jewish roots; all my first cousins were and are deeply Jewish.” That fact is, apparently, sufficient grounds for pulling the ‘asaJew‘ card when deemed an advantage. Here van Zwanenberg has signed a 2008 ‘Jewish opposition statement to attack on Iran’ organized by ‘Jews against Zionism’. He is also a member of ‘Jews for Justice for Palestinians’.
In a 2006 article entitled “Jewish people of Israel re-enact the horrors of their German oppressors” (written as a response to the IDF’s attempt to locate and rescue the kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit), van Zwanenberg wrote the following:
“Israel and its people are now behaving with impunity, just like the State of Germany did in prosecuting the final solution. We are schooled in the belief that we must say “never again!” to such barbarity. But Israel knows that all the surrounding states are too weak to intervene. As we watch with horror the invasion of Gaza, we all feel our helplessness. All the fine words, how the horrors of the Holocaust must always be remembered, are quickly forgotten by the world’s governments as the Jewish people of Israel re-enact the horrors of their German oppressors—the horrors that their mothers and fathers underwent 60 or more years ago.
Just as Nazi Germany could not survive for long, so too, a brutal Israel, brutalizing her own and all the surrounding people, cannot survive for long. As things stand, I cannot see how that demise will come about. But the acts of evil we are now witnessing cannot last without having deep and lasting effects on all of us.” [emphasis mine]
In 2008 van Zwanenberg lent his name to a campaign for the reinstatement of a German academic, Ludwig Watzal, removed from his tenure at an official periodical after making a series of anti-Semitic remarks. Coincidentally or not, Watzal had produced a glowing review of one of Pluto Press’ publications the previous year.
Van Zwanenberg appears to consider himself proficient in understanding what he terms “so-called Terrorism”, supports BDS and is an ardent promoter of ‘anti-Imperialism’:
“Western and Eastern interests are everywhere, shipping into and out of the Suez Canal; the struggle to own or control mineral resources; but above all, the fear of “Political Islam”. The Western powers fear of political Islam is a dominant force driving the US to war throughout the region. Some will argue, as I would, that this is thoroughly misunderstood. But the hatred of all things Islamic is a mantra which is everywhere in Western media. The ruling and political classes use this fear to drive their own “War against Terrorism”.”
In 2007, following the controversy over an American publisher’s distribution of the Pluto Press book “Overcoming Zionism”, van Zwanenberg said that:
“Many presses in the United States are frightened of the pressures that the lobby can place on them,” van Zwanenberg said. “We get authors from the United States, precisely because they can’t obtain adequate representation elsewhere, and we have a good reputation for scholarly work on the subject of Israel and Palestine, and we probably have the best collections of any university press in that area.”
“Van Zwanenberg added that the attempts by “the Israel lobby” to cut off Pluto’s American distribution channel were an attack on free expression. “The lobby is very powerful and very well-financed, and small presses like us could be destroyed by these people,” van Zwanenberg said. “They are a threat to our existence and to free speech.” “
Of course in reality no-one is threatening van Zwanenberg’s free speech or the existence of his business, but free speech is a two-way street.
Members of the public have the right (and perhaps the obligation) to be aware of the extremist ideologies which motivate the publication of the type of quasi-academic work produced by publishers such as Pluto Press, particularly when it comes as a result of collaboration with a ‘tribunal’ which misleadingly affords itself quasi-legal status and faux ‘human rights’ activists such as Winstanley and Barat with links to terror-enabling organisations.
Related articles
- ‘War on Want’ at Russell Tribunal on Palestine: “More direct action coming.” (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian Travel publishes article by Sarah Irving, former ISM activist (cifwatch.com)
- Channel 4′s lying subtitles in Guardian-endorsed “Going for Gold in Gaza” documentary. (cifwatch.com)
- The Tweets +972′s Joseph Dana didn’t want you to see (cifwatch.com)
This is cross posted by Richard Millett
Rafeef Ziadeh, Asa Winstanley, John Hilary, Joseph Dana, Frank Barat at Amnesty.
War on Want’s John Hilary spoke of more direct action against firms complicit in Israel’s “breaches of international law”.
He was on a panel at Amnesty International on thursday night for the launch of a book about last year’s London session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.
In response to a question from Eva Jaciewicz, a member of the Polish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and who last year daubed “Free Gaza and Palestine” at the Warsaw Ghetto, about the possibility of occupying the workplaces of companies doing business with Israel Hilary endorsed the targeting of security company G4S, especially in light of its security role in next year’s London Olympics.
Here’s a short audio of the discussion. Frank Barat speaks first followed by Rafeef Ziadeh and Hilary:
Audio: Barat, Ziadeh, Hilary at Amnesty on G4S.
Hilary also spoke about anti-Israel activists going into shoe shops and trying on Caterpillar boots and then staging anti-Israel protests. Staff were unable to ask them to leave while they were wearing the boots.
Here’s the relevant clip which includes a short discussion on whether Hamas was invited to the Russell Tribunal:
Frank Barat, who coordinated the London RTOP, had initially started off the evening telling us how clearly international law is on the side of the Palestinians and how little Israel can do about this.
He said the word “Apartheid” scared Israel and its supporters, especially when people like Desmond Tutu are saying what is happening on the West Bank is far worse than what happened in apartheid South Africa.
This, Barat thought, was a good way to attack RTOP’s detractors and he reiterated RTOP’s call for:
1. Israel to dismantle its system of Apartheid.
2. All states to consider putting pressure on Israel to do this including severing diplomatic relations.
3. The prosecutor of the ICC to accept jurisdiction over Palestine.
4. Global civil society to replicate the spirit of solidarity that contributed to the end of apartheid South Africa and to support BDS.
There were only 43 people in the audience at Amnesty; not a good sign of global solidarity.
Asa Winstanley, who edited the book briefly ran us through its content and Rafeef Ziadeh, a Canadian Palestinian “refugee” now living in the UK, called the “Nakba” an “ongoing process” and reiterated the BDS movement’s call for Israel to:
1. End the occupation of all Arab lands.
2. Create equality for Palestinians everywhere, including in Israel.
3. Allow Palestinian “refugees” to return to their homes in Israel.
She said she couldn’t believe that Israel could consider someone like her to be such a threat.
Joseph Dana, an American Jewish blogger with +972 Magazine and living in Ramallah, referred to the Palestinians in Bil’in, where he covers the weekly protests, as offering “Ghandian-like unarmed resistance” and he encouraged the use of Twitter and Facebook to combat the Jerusalem Post, Associated Pressand Thomas Friedman, who is calling for the Palestinians to adopt non-violent resistance while, according to Dana, he is ignoring just that.
Dana predicted that there will be a “new unarmed Intifada” and he holds every Israeli responsible for Israel’s “transgressions” and spoke of the non-violent protests in Bil’in as being what “drives Israelis insane”. He said:
“Artists don’t come to Israel anymore. Israeli society wants to be considered a normal western country…The boycott pinpoints that issue of normality and says ‘no, you are not a normal society. You have to be held accountable for the transgressions that you are committing on a regular basis. Even if you are not directly committing them you are part of the society that’s doing that.’”
If that’s true then Dana, who lives in Ramallah, is indirectly accountable for the massacre of five members of the Fogel family by a Palestinian, including three month old Hadas who was decapitated while she slept.
Here’s the relevant clip:
Related articles
The Guardian Online has been confusing lately. More and more Guardian articles are closed to comments. Why is that? Are they having to lay off moderators or rely on school leavers/holiday job volunteers? Why are they departing so markedly from their format of printing guff about Israel and by not allowing even their own baying hounds to vent their hatred?
No comments are allowed either below the article in the World News section about Hamas hanging two Palestinians, allegedly for spying for Israel.
Hamas executing political opponents in Gaza.
Accusing their political enemies of spying for Israel is the strong suit of every Arab government in the Middle East, as Daniel Pipes says in his book “The Hidden Hand” , so that should not surprise us.
Nevertheless not allowing comments below the Guardian article is bizarre, given the readiness of the Guardian, and particularly Comment is Free, to leap to the defence of Hamas and give its apologists all the column inches they want to spout their particular brand of distortion.
Why, I wonder, is there no attempt to explain away Hamas’ behaviour or at least give the Guardianista anti-Israel knuckle draggers the opportunity to do so below the line? Also curious is that this article is stripped of the usual anti-Israel / pro-Hamas hype one expects from the Guardian.
We see from the article that the two men, aged 60 and 29, (who according to CNN were father and son) were hanged at dawn on 26 July. The Guardian article says that the Hamas spokesman would give no further details, so we do not know from that article whether they were tried or whether this was a summary execution in the manner preferred by Hamas of its enemies, real and/or imagined. CNN, however, tells us that they had been convicted in 2004 of assisting the enemy and providing information used to assassinate Palestinians. It is interesting to note the egregious double standard here, that Hamas executed two men for colluding with the very crimes (ie assassinating Palestinians) that it itself committed subsequently against Fatah:
“According to the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, the families of the men received a call at 1 a.m. Tuesday, asking them to visit their relatives. The meeting took place until 3 a.m., and at 6 a.m. the men’s bodies were received at Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital.
“It appears from the state of the bodies that the men were hanged,” a statement from Al Mezan says. The center noted the danger in collaborating with Israel, but said that “(while) it is important to bring them to justice, we strongly object to the use of the death penalty and see the move by Hamas as illegal.”
[Question 1: If CNN could find this out, why didn't the Guardian print the whole story? *
Anomaly 1: According to CNN, these men were arrested in 2004 and Israel left Gaza in September 2005. I am not sure – and the article does not make clear – exactly how they fell into the hands of Hamas, when Fatah was presumably in charge of maintaining what passed for civil law and order in Gaza at the time of their arrest. Perhaps it happened after the Hamas coup and the bloodletting and murder of Fatah operatives when Hamas took over the jail system. But why wait seven years to execute these men if the case against them is clear-cut? Is Hamas losing its grip and therefore it needs to make an example of them now? So many questions shopping for answers!]
Conjecture apart, Amnesty International’s Middle East programme director Malcolm Smart said in 2010 that legal proceedings that led to death sentences “failed to meet international fair trial standards” and made any resulting executions “especially abhorrent.”
*Now look a little closer at the article. This report of Hamas barbarism was not written by a Guardian hack filled with anti-Israel animus but by Associated Press, which might explain the unadorned, unemotional nature of it, and why it did not wander off into the ozone layer of hyperbole and supposition. Can we assume that it was chosen for publication because the sparse nature of the information in it might have fitted the Guardian World View far better than the more detailed reporting of an outlet like CNN, simply because AP skated over the circumstances of the executions and the fact that they arose from Hamas’ failure to meet the international standards for a fair trial?
These are not the first such executions and it is a racing certainty that they will not be the last.
Indeed Hamas seems morbidly proud of its record and intentions, as one might expect given its blatant disregard for the human rights of its own people (see also here ). The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said that Hamas has executed five people for spying since taking control of the coastal strip in 2007. It would not be surprising if the figure was in fact higher and that is definitely the case if one includes the summary executions of Fatah members and sympathisers after Cast Lead.
It is a similar racing certainty that no article condemning Hamas’ complete lack of awareness of what might constitute “just” behaviour towards its own people will ever find its way into the Guardian or Comment is Free.
Related articles
- Hamas executes father and son for Israeli collaboration (cnn.com)
- 15 seconds in Sderot: An open letter to Harriet Sherwood, the Guardian’s Jerusalem, Israel correspondent (cifwatch.com)
- Another in the series: Where in the world is Harriet Sherwood? (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian or Gaza TV News? Harriet Sherwood continues to run interference for Hamas apologists (cifwatch.com)
- If they’re Jews send them back! (cifwatch.com)
- Campaigning for truth about Hamas (cifwatch.com)
- Next Hamas-supporting stunt by Western ‘activists’: the ‘Flytilla’ (cifwatch.com)
- On the “Guardian Hamas support network” (cifwatch.com)
- Hamas calls for “end of Zionist project”: CiF’s Tareq Baconi promotes the group’s moderation (cifwatch.com)
H/T Harry’s Place
As Israelinurse noted previously, Amnesty International is hosting an event on May 23 entitled “Complicity in Oppression: Does the Media Aid Israel?” which is being co-organized by the openly Islamist group, MEMO.
Per Israelinurse:
Daoud Abdullah, who is the director of MEMO as well as deputy secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and a senior researcher for the Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Palestinian Return Centre, has two major claims to fame. The first is his lead of the MCB’s boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK. The second is his signing of the Istanbul Declaration which potentially endorsed terrorism against British service personnel.
Senior editor of MEMO is Ibrahim Hewitt, who also heads ‘Interpal’ – the charity which has been the subject of three investigations by the Charity Commission and named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial in the United States, as well as having been banned in Israel because of its Hamas connections.
That Amnesty would even consider hosting an event organized by such extremists is highly disturbing and, as with their alliance with Moazzam Begg, a supporter of the Taliban, demonstrates how far the once respected international human rights group has fallen.
We ask that you consider signing the following petition asking Amnesty to cancel the event.
http://www.petitiononline.co.uk/petition/tell-amnesty-no-to-the-memo-event/2829
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What is it about Amnesty International UK which makes it repeatedly engage in self-destructive behavior? After the very public and widespread criticism which the organisation brought upon itself by partnering with ‘Cageprisoners’, one would have hoped that lessons would have been learned. Apparently that is not the case for, as shown above, Amnesty International UK is permitting some of Britain’s more off-the-wall Israel haters to congregate on its premises next month for an otiose exercise in self-gratifying rhetoric.
We do not need to dust off our crystal balls in order to predict what will be the answer to the’ question’ “Does the Media aid Israel?”. The very nature of the organising bodies and invited speakers guarantees only one possible outcome to the so-called debate.
Chairing the event is the Guardian’s former associate foreign editor, Victoria Brittain; she of “I didn’t notice that thousands of pounds had been deposited in my bank account” fame. Ms Brittain does a nice line in Israel defamation herself, of course, when not advocating BDS in her role as patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) or ghost-writing the biography of the head of ‘Cageprisoners’, of which she is also a patron (what a coincidence!).
Next on the panel we have Tim Llewellyn, the former BBC Middle East correspondent who has sat on the executive board of the lobbying group CAABU – Council for Arab-British Understanding – which is financed by assorted Arab governments and is involved with the Arab British Centre. For many years now Llewellyn has been attempting to advance the idea, not least in the Guardian, that the BBC is tainted by pro-Israel bias. He is also a keen advocate for Hamas and Hizbollah, believing that Zionism is a “calamity”, and occasional writer of Guardian obituaries for terrorists.
How does Llewellyn account for this supposed BBC bias? Well it appears to have something to do with Tony Blair’s choice of (affluent, of course) friends:
“The Blair vision of the Middle East – that the Americans have all the answers, but need a little gentle coaxing from Whitehall, that the Israelis are victims of terror, and “terror” is our main universal enemy, that the Palestinians are their own worst enemies and must do what they are told – will have been sensed at the BBC and passed on down the line.
It is no secret that Blair is very close to Israel. His old crony and party financier, Lord Levy, has been rewarded with the post of special adviser on Middle East matters. Lord Levy is a peer who has close contacts with Israel and a multi-million pound villa near Tel Aviv – his son Daniel Levy worked in the office of Israel’s former Justice Minister, Yossi Beilin. The first stress in any New Labour comment on the Palestine-Israel crisis is always on Israeli security or on “terror”, that easy bête noir of the modern politician (the BBC has uncritically accepted “The War on Terror” as a phrase with meaning).”
Llewellyn has worked closely with another panel member, Greg Philo – a Professor at the University of Glasgow who has co-written two books on the subject of supposed pro-Israel media bias as well in the Guardian.
The fourth panel member is editor in chief of the Al Quds al Arabi newspaper – set up by Palestinian ex-pats – Abdel Bari Atwan, who also writes an occasional column for CiF. Atwan is well-known for his egregious remarks on various Israel-related subjects, not least his statement that he would “dance in Trafalgar Square” if Israel were ever hit by Iranian nuclear weapons.
If Amnesty International officials think that they will be advancing human rights by hosting Atwan on their premises, they may care to consider his behaviour at a public meeting at the London School of Economics a few months ago, after which the police began an investigation following complaints of antisemitism.
“Raheem Kassam, the Muslim director of Student Rights, said: “These are truly cowardly, bullying tactics which have no place in an academic environment. He (Atwan) must be held to account for creating the conditions on campus whereby audience members see fit to call Jewish students ‘Nazis’.”
None of this should come as a surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with MEMO – aka Middle East Monitor – the co-organiser of this event along with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Ten minutes on Google should have been enough to persuade Amnesty International that these are not human rights activists, but seasoned political campaigners, some of whom have associations with terror organisations and political and religious fanatics.
Daoud Abdullah, who is the director of MEMO as well as deputy secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and a senior researcher for the Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Palestinian Return Centre, has two major claims to fame. The first is his lead of the MCB’s boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK. The second is his signing of the Istanbul Declaration which potentially endorsed terrorism against British service personnel.
Senior editor of MEMO is Ibrahim Hewitt, who also heads ‘Interpal’ – the charity which has been the subject of three investigations by the Charity Commission and named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial in the United States, as well as having been banned in Israel because of its Hamas connections.
MEMO’s press officer, Hanan Chehata, took part in a ‘Viva Palestina’ convoy to Gaza, its staff writer Renee Boyer was spokesperson for ‘Free Gaza’ – organiser of pointless flotillas to Gaza- in 2008/9 and its analyst Samira Quraishy is also a researcher for the Khomenist pretend human rights organisation known as the Islamic Human Rights Commission.
MEMO’s honorary advisors include Dr. Salman Abu Sitta – a leading figure in the ‘Al Awda‘ movement which advocates ‘return’ to Israel for millions of descendents of Palestinian refugees with the aim of eradicating the Jewish state.
Two of MEMO’s advisors sit in the House of Lords: Lord Nazir Ahmed , who opposed the presentation of a knighthood to the author Salman Rushdie and hosted a book-launch for the renowned antisemite ‘Israel Shamir’, and Baroness Jenny Tonge, who is also a patron of the PSC and the Muslim Brotherhood-linked ‘ European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza’, as well as someone who ‘understands’ suicide bombers and promoted libels regarding fictional Israeli organ-stealing operations in Haiti.
Other honorary advisors are Dr. Maria Holt of Westminster University – who has no qualms about appearing on Hizbollah’s Al Manar television channel, former Catholic priest Oliver McTernan, founder of Forward Thinking which seems to advocate engagement with terrorists, and last but not least, Muslim Brotherhood linked Oxford academic Tariq Ramadan.
For now, Amnesty International appears to have been intent upon squandering its good reputation for the sake of political designs and its self-harm only seems to get worse as time goes on. With its credibility already in tatters, the time is long overdue for Amnesty to decide whether it aspires to be part of the solution on the subject of human rights crises and abuses around the world or not.
If it does, it must begin by immediately cancelling its hosting of this MEMO/PSC event which is engineered by people with obvious practical connections to – and ideological sympathies with – some of the world’s worst human-rights abusing regimes and some particularly prominent racists.
Otherwise, Amnesty International will rapidly confirm the growing suspicions of many that it is in fact part of the problem.
Conal Urquhart
With Harriet Sherwood apparently having abandoned Jerusalem in favour of Libya, (was it something we said?) CiF reports from this part of the world are mostly being written by Conal Urquhart. On April 14th, CiF published Urquhart’s version of ‘everything a Guardian reader needs to know about the Goldstone Report’.
In his opening sentence Urquhart quotes unverified casualty figures in Gaza, opting for the number promoted by Palestinian NGOs which contributed to the Goldstone report. However, in November 2010, Hamas admitted that some 700 of the dead were actually terrorist combatants, and the total number of casualties is set at 1,166 following IDF investigations, of which some 60% were combatants.
Whilst making a passing mention of Mary Robinson’s refusal to head the UNHRC commissioned investigation, Urquhart fails to expand on the subject of the biased mandate of the investigation or the fact that the UNHRC’s anti-Israel stance is both well-known and has been much criticized, even by UN officials themselves.
Urquhart also fails to mention the conflicts of interest affecting Goldstone himself as well as the other members of the mission and its staff. As NGO Monitor reports:
- Several members of the Goldstone Mission have had significant links to NGOs, including HRW, Amnesty International, and PCHR. These same NGOs were among the most cited in the Goldstone report. These connections, which were not disclosed by the Mission, call into question the ability of panel members and staff to objectively evaluate information submitted by these organizations. These conflicts are in clear violation of the International Bar Association’s London-Lund Guidelines for Fact Finding Missions.[1]
- Three members of the Mission – Goldstone, Hina Jilani, and Desmond Travers – signed a March 2009 letter initiated by Amnesty International and widely publicized, stating that “events in Gaza have shocked us to the core.”
- The fourth member, Christine Chinkin, who declared Israel’s actions to be a “war crime” and delegitimized Israel’s right to self-defense while the fighting in Gaza was still underway, was also previously a consultant to Amnesty International.
- Goldstone mission staff researcher, Sareta Ashraph, is a UK lawyer and a member of Amnesty International who has a history of anti-Israel political activity. For instance, in 2003, she was an organizer for a Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights “lawfare” lecture given by Raji Sourani, head of PCHR, and chaired by Daniel Machover, the attorney responsible for filing PCHR’s 2005 case against Doron Almog and a leading proponent of lawfare. Ashraph also worked in the West Bank on “investigations of allegations of violations of international humanitarian law following ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ in 2002.”
- Francesca Marotta, Head of the Secretariat UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, is a long-time employee of the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights as Coordinator of the Methodology, Education and Training Unit, Research and Right to Development Branch and the “UNHCHR officer responsible for the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” In1997 and 1999, she held meetings with PCHR.
As previously reported by NGO Monitor, Goldstone was an HRW board member at the time of his appointment. Although he stepped down after NGO Monitor pointed to this conflict of interest, his mission has been vigorously promoted by both HRW and Ken Roth. Goldstone’s September 17, 2009 oped in the New York Times closely echoed language from a September 16, 2009 HRW press release. (In this time frame, HRW was forced to suspend and open an investigation of “senior military expert” Marc Garlasco, who co-authored a number of reports targeting Israel.)
Urquhart goes on to imply that Israeli objections to the obviously biased mandate of the mission were the fruit of no more than base subjective emotions:
“If the appointment of a Jewish Zionist judge with impeccable international credentials was meant to appease Israel, it failed. The Israeli government and its supporters in the Israeli media went for Goldstone with a vengeance.” (my emphasis)
The next claim presented by Urquhart is that Israel refused to co-operate with the mission, ignoring the fact that to expect Israel to afford credence to such a one-sided project is tantamount to demanding that a soon to be executed prisoner load the firing squad’s rifles himself. He completely ignores the fact that several Israeli bodies did present – or at least try to – evidence to the Goldstone mission. 108 Israeli citizens from the regions targeted by Hamas rockets did give evidence to the commission. One of them later reported that:
“When I stood up and started to testify before the judges, Justice Goldstone fell asleep in front of me. It was an embarrassing moment but I continued talking, realizing that I should not have high hopes”
Urquhart’s claims that “[a]t the same time the Israeli army embarked on an unprecedented investigation into its own “war crimes” (my emphasis) also fail to take into account that the IDF’s legal division, which is completely independent from the chain of command, investigates any and every accusation of wrongdoing by Israeli soldiers, even if no official complaint has been made or if the accusation merely appears in a media report or comes from a hostile NGO. Urquhart’s claim that it was only the existence of the Goldstone mission which “galvanised Israel to start investigations” is also untrue: by July 2009 an initial report had already been released although investigations were still ongoing.
Given that so much has been written about the circumstances surrounding the Goldstone ‘fact-finding’ mission and the resulting report itself, not to mention Goldstone’s recent backtracking, readers may be rather perplexed by Conal Urquhart’s pious adherence to the official UNHRC mantra. His orthodoxy becomes a little more transparent when one appreciates that Urquhart was, at least until two months ago (and may still be) a UN employee, in addition to his writing for the Guardian.
Urquhart has been in this region since about 2002, spending considerable time in Gaza in the framework of his role as External Relations Advisor for the UN Development Programme. His wife, Kirstie Campbell, is also a UN employee; spokesperson for the UN World Food Programme.
The underlying problem with the UN Human Rights Council is that is dominated by the 57 member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. This is what enables it to place human rights abusing countries such as Libya and Iran on its council and sub-committees and this is what was behind the conception of the Goldstone report with its biased mandate and the continued and relentless obsession with Israel, often at the exclusion of urgent human rights issues in some of its own member states.
But the UNHRC is far from the only UN body influenced by the OIC agenda. The UN Development Programme functions under the auspices of the UN Economic and Social Council, where, of the current 54 member states, 11 are members of the OIC. Currently active members of the UN Development Programme’s board include Iran, Pakistan, Qatar, Yemen, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Djibouti, Cameroon and Bangladesh – all of which are members of the OIC, with the latter two also holding vice-presidency of the body.
Thus, considering that the UNDP tells us that it “operates according to the principles and values of the United Nations”, we might reasonably ask ourselves whether someone such as Conal Urquhart who has imbibed that organizational culture for considerable time is capable of offering an impartial and objective view of a report commissioned by the UNHRC and compiled with the aid of the equally partisan UN OCHA.
This CiF article by Urquhart would not only suggest that his objectivity is severely compromised, but it also prompts wider questions as to Urquhart’s suitability in general as a reporter on Israeli affairs due to the obvious conflict of interests brought about by a journalist also having financial and employment ties to the United Nations.
Back in November 2010, I wrote a post about the disproportionate number of anti-Israel letters published in the Guardian. Nothing much has changed on that front, of course, but a belated comment recently appeared on the defunct thread from a signatory of one of the letters mentioned in the article – a Ms. Rosalind Levy.
Rosalind Levy:
I am disappointed to see that you neither got my full name nor any of my affiliations : (Labour Party, Amnesty, Co-op, JFJFP, JBig).
I am furious to be described as anti Israeli, I am not. I am anti the current government in the same way that I am anti the current government of Zimbabwe. I am anti the shitty things that the administration does, particularly because as a jew it is assumed they are done in my name and I support them. David Beauvais has said it for me.
Had the (self-Googling?) Ms. Levy bothered to click upon the supplied link to the original letter as published in the Guardian she would have seen that her name appears there exactly in the format in which it was reproduced in the post: Ros Levy. Complaints should therefore be addressed either to the Guardian or to herself for signing it in that way.
As for Ms. Levy’s ‘affiliations’, they too were not mentioned in the original letter and to be frank, it really is just too tedious to waste time investigating the background of every one of the handful of members of such insignificant fringe groups as JfJfP, JBig and such like, particularly as the same names tend to crop up like mushrooms after the rain whenever a new one of these groups is launched. However, seeing as Ms. Levy herself has brought the subject into the public arena, let’s take a closer look at some of her objections.
The core argument she presents is the following:
“I am anti the current government in the same way that I am anti the current government of Zimbabwe.”
Leaving aside the repugnant and unserious comparison of Israel to Zimbabwe, that argument can of course only begin to hold water on the day that we see Ms. Levy’s signature on the launch of JfJfZ (Jews for Justice for Zimbabweans) or JBzg (Jews for boycotting Zimbabwean goods). Naturally, one doubts that the prefix ‘Jews for’ would make any impression whatsoever in campaigns relating to any subject other than Israel – maybe Ms. Levy should ask herself exactly why that should be the case.
In addition, Ms. Levy has been busy signing a plethora of anti-Israeli letters and petitions for several years – long before the current Israeli government came to office – and so her claim to be ‘anti the current government’ is obviously dishonest.
One also wonders whether Ms. Levy has used her affiliation to the discredited Amnesty International to try to get the subject of Zimbabwe discussed at least once at the UN Human Rights Council (I appreciate that it must be very difficult to find a time-slot in among all the relentless discussion of Israel, but even so…) or to get some much-needed balance in their reporting so that the number of reports and press releases might actually reflect the regions of the world with the greatest abuses of personal liberties and worst loss of life.
Likewise, Ms. Levy’s declared ‘affiliation’ to the Co-op could maybe prompt her to demand from that company that its bank cease to provide services to ‘Viva Palestina’ which, contrary to British law, has provided material and cash aid to a proscribed terrorist organization which targets Israel’s civilian population – a clear and evident war crime.
But Rosalind Levy’s most revealing statement in her comment is this one:
“I am anti the shitty things that the administration does, particularly because as a jew it is assumed they are done in my name and I support them.”
Two main points are obvious here. Firstly, apparently Ms. Levy would rather the Israeli government place her well-being at the top of its priority list rather than the actual citizens who have a vote in Israel, even though she is unlikely to come under attack from Hamas Grad rockets or Hizbollah Katyushas in North London or wherever she resides. Tragically, it would seem that Ms. Levy has some very basic misunderstandings on the subject of a democratically elected government’s legal obligations regarding the protection of its citizens.
Secondly, if she does find herself being held responsible by other parties for the actions of the Israeli government, rather than recognizing this for what it is – antisemitism according to the EUMC Working Definition: “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” - and fighting it accordingly, Ms. Levy apparently prefers to take a coward’s approach to the problem by siding with and whitewashing the perpetrators of that racism. Should this concept be too difficult for Ms. Levy to get her head around, maybe she could ask herself why Zimbabwean ex-pats in the UK are not held personally responsible for the actions of the current regime or automatically assumed to be supportive of it in any way.
If there is one outstanding factor to be taken note of as a result of the currently ongoing unrest in the Arab world, it is the inability of most Western commentators to see the Middle East in anything but one-dimensional terms. Unfortunately, this disability afflicts politicians, journalists and many an analyst, as well as the general public such as Ms. Levy.
If Mubarak, Ben Ali and Ghaddafi are bad, then the automatic assumption is that those who oppose them must be good. If Israel does things of which they disapprove (and no matter the reasons behind it – understanding those is far too taxing), then Israel’s enemies must be whiter than white and deserving of their unquestioning support.
Of course most of the world does not work like that, and certainly not the Middle East, but the simplistic Western view provides comfort and reassurance in the face of a very complex picture. It allows its holder to categorize players and their actions into neat and tidy compartments and it cannot be denied that such stereotypes make the life of their holder infinitely more easily manageable.
Unfortunately, this one-dimensional and facile view has also become the socially acceptable narrative in many circles and so people like Rosalind Levy can both absolve themselves from anything approaching strenuous thought about the Middle East and, at the same time, earn Brownie points in their social circle by wearing their radical-chic fashion accessory credentials on their sleeves.
The fact that their incessant letter-writing campaigns and attempts to secure a place in the public limelight for their earnest trendy little grouplets might raise objections from those people who actually live in the region they campaign about apparently fills them with indignation, as revealed by the above comment.
The inflated sense of self-importance nurtured by so many members of such insignificant fringe groups such as JfJfP and JBig apparently encourages them to believe that their self-initiated walk-on part on a stage so big and complex – with an ever-changing plot they do not even try to understand – makes the whole issue revolve around them. They are, of course, sadly – if often amusingly – mistaken.
A guest post from Geary
OxFam’s Israel Boycott Poster: “The Fruits of Israel Taste Bitter. Refuse the Occupation of Palestine: Don’t Buy Israeli Fruits or Vegetables”
It is an open secret that several of even the mainstream “high street” charities and NGOs long ago morphed into political associations.
One area where this is most obvious is environmentalism. According to War on Want, the only way to fight climate change (and presumably everything else they don’t like) is to smash capitalism.
Dr Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, has often expressed his utter dismay at this process of politicisation:
“The environmental movement I helped found has lost its objectivity, morality and humanity.”
His words are echoed by other experts in the field of human development:
Activists who’ve never had to worry about starvation, malaria and simple survival have no right to impose their fears, prejudices and ideologies on the world’s poor.
(CS Prakash, Professor of plant genetics)
Stewart Brand, one-time Green guru, describes in his book Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto the infiltration of his field in the 90s by far-left ideologues, refugees from the lost Cold War who saw environmentalism as a new way of attacking the west and its economic system.
Outside the Green ideological industry, we also have no trouble finding NGOs with blatant political agendas. Human Right Watch’s anti-Israeli stance is a glaring case. The main story on its Middle East page is very generally a criticism of Israel – quite absurd in a region where many countries and organisations, including and especially Israel’s enemies, are guilty of particularly egregious human rights abuse.
However, even when a charity / NGO has not necessarily been infiltrated by far-left ideologues, aid charities find themselves in a kind of fundamental “existential bind”, described with great clarity by Nick Cohen:
The aid charities are hybrids with incompatible aims. On the one hand, they provide relief regardless of the political consequences – like the Red Cross – and, on the other, they lobby for political change – like Human Rights Watch.
Of interest here, he takes the particular case of Oxfam:
… if Oxfam were to speak out against the obscenity of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe being elected to head the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, there’s a fair chance Mugabe would stop Oxfam workers from relieving the suffering inflicted by his economically unsustainable regime. Its hybrid status means Oxfam has to direct disapproval at governments that won’t respond to criticism by closing down Oxfam operations, but, rather, will invite Stocking in for a chat and a cup of tea. The aid charities are therefore treacherous guides to global politics. They are dependent on dictators and must overlook their crimes. They are respected by democrats and can therefore safely blame the democracies for the crimes of others.
(Nick Cohen, New Statesman, May 2007)
As a follow-up on our earlier post regarding the recent “martyrdom”(via a NATO airstrike in Afghanistan) of British al Qaeda leader Mahmoud Abu Rideh, note the astonishingly sympathetic piece the Guardian did on him in June 2009 entitled “A Day in the life of a terror suspect.”
Here’s some background:
- Abu Rideh had been detained by the British government in December 2001 for having links to al Qaeda. In 2005, after a British high court ruling, Rideh was released from prison but was subject to a “control order” – a house arrest which restricted his movements.
- In July 2009, Abu Rideh, with the help of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, succeeded in having the control order lifted.
- Rideh was said to have had close ties to the senior leadership of al Qaeda, including its deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and former leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, along with Abu Hamza, the radical preacher.
The portrayal of Rideh (who was then under house arrest) as a victim of government oppression by the Guardian – and NGOs like Amnesty and Human Rights watch – once again demonstrates that much of the British intelligentsia possess a seemingly unlimited capacity to cast reactionary jihadists as victims, as well as what can only be described as a willful blindness to the threat posed to Western society by radical Islam.
We may never know how many Americans and Brits lost their lives as a result of Mahmoud Abu Rideh’s involvement with al Qaeda, and his wish to become a “martyr.” But, what we certainly do know is that those who continue to make excuses and even advocate for such jihadists are not innocent in the crimes committed by those whose freedom they assisted in securing.
This is cross posted from the blog, Sad Red Earth, by our friend A. Jay Adler.
Back in May I wrote about Gita Saghal and her eventual resignation from Amnesty International because of its unseemly association with Moazzam Begg and his Cage Prisoners organization. You can catch up on that story here, too. Now, Harry’s Place reports on one of the AI and Cage Prisoners poster boys, Abu Rideh, a UK resident who was under a restrictive “control order” from 2005-09, until AI’s “action file” campaign was successful in winning Rideh’s release.
Mahmoud Abu Rideh
According to HP:
CagePrisoners, whose Director Moazzam Begg believes that “securing the release of Muslim prisoners” captured during jihad is “obligatory” on all Muslims, devoted significant campaigning resources towards this case.
A few days ago, The Daily Telegraph reported:
Mahmoud Abu Rideh, 39, was said to have been closely associated with the senior leadership of al-Qaeda, including its deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and former leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, along with Abu Hamza, the radical preacher.
He was allowed to travel to Syria in September last year after promising that he would not return to Britain.
But an Arabic jihadi web forum associated with al-Qaeda reports that he has become a “martyr in Afghanistan” and was with a group of fighters when he died, the Daily Telegraph has learned.
HP gives a full account of what AI had every reason to know about who Rideh was. My May post was entitled “The Future of the Human Rights Movement.” For a movement as resistant to self-examination and altered behavior as any nation its organizations report on, that future continues to look a sorry one.
Take a look at this headline from an article in the CiF UK news section on December 1st, and at the accompanying picture used to illustrate the article.
The (barely) subliminal message here is perfectly clear; war criminals are Israeli and Israelis are war criminals. C’est tout.
There is no mention, either in the headline or the body of the article itself of suspected war criminals from other nations: as far as the reader is concerned, this issue applies solely to Israelis.
There is no proper analysis of the manner in which the Law of Universal Jurisdiction has been abused in the UK as part of the lawfare campaign employed by politically motivated extremists to undermine Israel’s legitimacy.
The quoted official from Amnesty International UK, Kate Allen, apparently has no need for the niceties of ‘alleged’, ‘suspected’ or ‘innocent until proven guilty’, let alone some kind of legal basis for her accusations beyond the ‘if I say it, it must be true’ mode of thinking.
“Unless a way of guaranteeing a means of preventing suspects fleeing can be built into the proposals, then the UK will have undermined the fight for international justice and handed war criminals a free ticket to escape the law.”
Of course Amnesty International are old hands in the industry of demonising Israel, as report after report of theirs indicates and off the cuff comments made by some of their officials and partners point to a disturbing institutional culture of anti-Israel bigotry.
Strangely, (or not) Kate Allen’s rigorous standards of proof of guilt when it comes to suspected supporters of terror organisations – those which allow her to partner with Cageprisoners and Moazzam Begg with a clear conscience – appear to screech to a halt where anyone bearing an Israeli passport is concerned.
In the eyes of many, Amnesty International has compromised itself by abandoning principles of universal human rights in favour of radical politics.
This is cross-posted from Richard Millett’s Blog
Ewa Jasiewicz, Dr Ghada Karmi, Frank Barat, Paul Troop, Ken Loach
Last night at Amnesty International in London, against a backdrop of a quote by Bertrand Russell (“May this tribunal prevent the crime of silence”), sat four anti-Israel activists and Paul Troop, a solicitor, presenting the raison d’etre of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.
The first Russell Tribunal was convened in 1967 in Sweden and Denmark to harness public opinion against the Vietnam War, but it was largely ignored as being merely a show trial.
And so to the second Russell Tribunal, this time on Palestine. It is due to convene over three days at the Law Society in London on the 20,21 and 22 November.
Over that weekend some 20 or so companies are due to be put on trial for complicity with “Israeli war crimes”.
Israel is not on trial, the companies are.
It will already be presumed that Israel is in breach of international law and has committed crimes against humanity.
When I asked Paul Troop where such breaches of international law are judicially laid down the best he could do was direct me to the “opinion” of the International Court of Justice on the wall dividing Israel from the Palestinians.
None of the companies on trial will be represented. Letters have been sent but none have yet responded to say they will be present.
Dr. Ghada Karmi spoke of the Palestinian issue being the moral issue of our time. This polemic is freely bandied around by anti-Israel activists and makes people whince since we know that 3,000 children die every day in Africa from AIDS, malnutrition, malaria and other diseases when they shouldn’t be in this age.
Dr. Karmi cited Cast Lead and the siege of Gaza and was outraged that Israel had not even apologised over something as clearcut as the deaths on the Mavi Marmara.
She said that Israel was now too woven into the fabric of the international system and because of this was never being called to account. There is no major organisation or state that backs the Palestinians.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
(Ben) White Wash at Amnesty
January 28, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: Amnesty International, anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, BDS, Ben White, Comment is Free, Cross Post, Delegitimization, Hamas, Richard Millett | by Guest/Cross Post | 12 comments
This is cross posted by Richard Millett
Ben White showing off his well-trolled quotes at Amnesty last night.
Ben White was last night handed the opportunity by Amnesty’s UK branch to call for the destruction of Israel. Not necessarily in the way Hamas would wish to achieve it, but White wants Israel changed from a Jewish state into another Muslim Arab state. This is what White thinks is “justice”.
Lest we forget that it was White who once wrote: “I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, yet I can also understand why some are”.
For that and other statements of his there was a small protest outside Amnesty last night. Once sign read “Amnesty is great, except on Israel”, which is probably about right. Amnesty will stand up against other human rights’ abuses except when they are against Israel. They raised their voice in anger when Gaddafi was cruelly tortured before being executed, but when Israeli soldiers are kidnapped or Israeli children are bombarded by Hamas rockets from Gaza Amnesty falls silent.
Amnesty’s opposition to Israel’s existence is now, sadly, almost policy. Virtually no month passes without there being an anti-Israel event and never will there be a pro-Israel voice on the platform. One of Amnesty’s roles is to try to bury Israel.
White was promoting his new book Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy and it will be instructive to jump straight to the end of last night’s talk.
After calling for “A future based on a genuine co-existence of equals, rather than ethno-religious supremacy and segregation”, with its obvious anti-Semitic connotation of Jewish supremacy, White said (see clip):
“Instead of asking ‘can we return?’ or ‘when will we return?’ Palestinian refugees can ask ‘what kind of return do we want to create for ourselves?’ I think that’s a kind of beautiful phrasing actually that speaks to the liberation of the imagination that has to take place as we move towards securing a peace with justice”:
I can’t see Israelis ever voting for their state being changed into a Muslim Arab state, so what White is basically promoting is more war and bloodshed.
White’s talk, probably like his book, was a long list of out-of-context and out-of-date quotes.
He started with an apparent quote by Balfour in 1919 – “in Palestine we do not propose to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country” – and ended with one by Moshe Dayan’s father, MK Shmuel Dayan, from 1950 – “Maybe (not allowing the refugees back) is not right and not moral, but if we become just and moral, I do not know where we will end up”.
White must spend many nights trolling through the internet and old books looking for quotes that support his pursuit of Israel, but it is obviously a money-making exercise judging by the queue of people waiting for him to sign their copy of his 90-page book.
In between quotes he criticised Israel for what he calls the “Judaisation” of the Galilee and the Negev and for Israel not allowing “Palestinian citizens of Israel”, as he calls them, to live in Israel with their spouses who come from the West Bank and Gaza. The serious security implications for Israel if it allowed the latter are obvious, but Israel’s security isn’t high up on the list of White’s priorities.
During the Q&A he praised the protests during the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra’s concert at the Royal Albert Hall saying that the protests:
“Were targetting a body, the IPO, that receives funding from the Israeli state and also does concerts and stuff for Israeli soldiers.”
He raised the accusation of anti-Semitism aimed at him and said:
“The irony of the accusation of anti-Semitism against me in this context is that it is precisely opposition to all racism that informs my personal opposition to Israeli apartheid”.
And when someone asked him about Hamas and its policies White simply said that the evening wasn’t about Hamas but he hoped that the questioner would “support efforts to end the discriminatory practices against the Palestinians”.
It seems that Hamas is not much of an issue for White or Amnesty, whereas the Jewish state’s existence is.
More clips and photos from last night:
Ben White on “Jewish and Democratic?”
Ben White on “Judaisation” -
I bought this last night as no one else was buying.
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