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Harriet Sherwood’s first heart-wrenching tale of the trials of a terrorist “Palestinian hunger striker” named Khader Adnan (Israel shackles Palestinian hunger striker), Feb. 12, held in administrative detention by Israel – who has become a martyr in the eyes of terror sympathizers everywhere – barely mentioned his ties to Islamic Jihad, and included no mention of the group’s deadly attacks which have claimed dozens of innocent Israeli lives.
Image from "Free Khader Adnan" Facebook Page
Further, Sherwood provided no legal context about the “administrative detention” being used by Israel to imprison Adnan since mid-December – a judicial method, I noted, similarly employed by other democratic and rights-respecting states around the world, including the the UK and the U.S. For example, the recently released al-Qaeda terror suspect, Abu Qatada, was held in administrative detention in the UK for over six years.
But, more broadly, the curious subtext of Sherwood’s piece, as with similar criticisms of Israel over Adnan’s hunger strike, seems to suggest that a terror suspect in custody should be released simply because he engages in a hunger strike to highlight his imprisonment to the Western media.
However, Sherwood’s latest piece on Adnan, Palestinian hunger striker Khader Adnan near death in Israeli detention, Feb. 16, was even more sympathetic to the PIJ operative, included passages about the toll Adnan’s hunger strike is taking on his family, and even characterized the Palestinian terrorist as an innocuous “baker from a village near Jenin”. [emphasis added]
Alternately, Sherwood’s 837 word tale of Israeli cruelty included one sentence (15 words) on Adnan’s ties to one of the most violent and hard-line terror groups in the Palestinian territories.
However, Adnan’s major role in the Islamist terror group is well-documented.
- In a June 8, 2005 Boston Globe article Adnan was identified as a PIJ spokesperson, and was quoted admonishing the Palestinian Authority for cooperating with Israeli officials to apprehend suspects in the wake of a Tel Aviv suicide bombing: “We have strong suspicions that the security coordination’ between Israeli and Palestinian authorities that has resumed in recent weeks ‘is responsible for this”, Adnan said. He further said there had been no response to Islamic Jihad demands that the PA say publicly that it was not involved in helping Israel identify jihadis who were planning fresh attacks.”
- Per information in the Arab media cited by Elder of Ziyon, Adnan has been a leader of PIJ for years, and was arrested by the PA as well, and even embarked on a hunger strike against the Abbas regime while in PA jail only a year previous to the current hunger strike.
- Al Arabiya identified Adnan as a “main leader” of PIJ.
The multi-talented “baker” named Khader Adan is evidently impressively skilled in both the culinary arts and the more sublime craft of providing rhetorical support for a “resistance” movement’s efforts to murder innocent Jewish civilians.
Harriet Sherwood’s cause celeb, Khader Adnan, is not only a “Hunger striker”, but a true renaissance man.
Related articles
- Harriet Sherwood feels Islamic Jihad terrorist’s pain (cifwatch.com)
A guest post by David Lewis, a committee member of UK Lawyers for Israel.
In 2003 the BBC appointed a senior news journalist, Malcolm Balen, to produce an internal report on the quality and impartiality of its Middle East news coverage. This report led to various changes in personnel and training.
In 2005 Steven Sugar, a pro-Israel lawyer, sent the BBC a Freedom of Information request to see the Balen Report. The BBC rejected his application, and the resultant dispute was pursued through the Information Commissioner, the Information Tribunal, the High Court, the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. After Mr Sugar sadly died, in 2011, his widow Fiona Paveley continued the fight.
The UK’s Freedom of Information Act broadly requires public authorities to disclose information to anyone requesting it. Is the BBC a public authority? The Act says it is, “in respect of information held for purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature”, and it’s clear that these exemptions are essentially to protect freedom of expression.
Leaving aside the bit about “art or literature”, what this literally means is that, if the BBC holds information for any significant non-journalistic purposes, even if the information is also held for journalistic purposes, then it is a public authority and must disclose the information. But the law doesn’t always give plain words their literal meaning, as we shall see.
Neither of the parties, nor any of the officials, courts and tribunals involved, suggested at any point that the Balen Report was exclusively journalistic or exclusively non-journalistic; clearly it included both purposes.
On 15 February 2012 the Supreme Court rejected Mrs Paveley’s appeal. It said that if information is held by the BBC to any significant degree for the purposes of journalism, it is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. This does now seem to be the end of the road for Fiona Paveley, and for all those hoping to discover what the Balen Report actually said.
Anyone reading this is bound to ask: what could have been in the Balen Report to make the BBC fight so long and so hard to prevent it seeing the light of day? But this is not, or not necessarily, the right question. The BBC’s fixation on concealing the report’s content is directly linked to its obsession with protecting its editorial discretion. Those who, rightly, criticise the BBC’s institutional anti-Israel bias need to understand that it is the sacred cow of editorial freedom which underpins that bias and the BBC’s power to perpetuate it indefinitely.
At the heart of that editorial freedom is the BBC’s right to decide what news items to report on and what subjects to make programmes about. (Strangely, that key function was omitted in the list of activities which the Information Tribunal identified as constituting “journalism”, and which Lord Neuberger in the Court of Appeal said he could not improve upon.)
Here it is necessary to mention the BBC’s system for dealing with complaints about inaccuracy and lack of impartiality. To say that this system is rigged to ensure the rejection of pro-Israel complaints would be an understatement. The Corporation imposes time limits on complainants but none on itself. When a complaint is rejected, there is no appeal beyond the BBC’s own officials and committees.
The BBC’s fundamental approach is to select news items and topics which involve complaints by Palestinians and others against the Israeli government, the Israel Defence Forces, and (naturally) Israeli “settlers”. The resultant reports and programmes will essentially comprise accusations against Israel. Certainly there will be some representation of the pro-Israel viewpoint, typically through fairly inarticulate and not terribly PR-savvy Israeli officials; and, of course, by a few wild-eyed “settlers”, preferably with an American accent. You are highly unlikely ever to see a BBC programme about suicide terrorists or about rockets launched from Gaza or Lebanon against Israeli civilians.
Naturally, if virtually every BBC programme about the Middle East involves an attack on Israel, even where an adequate defence is permitted, then the viewer will be nudged continually in an anti-Israel direction, as required by the bien pensants of the BBC. So it is selection of subject-matter which underpins the Corporation’s anti-Israel bias, even more than the content of the resultant programmes.
But whenever a complaint is made to the BBC about bias in its selection of subject-matter, the standard response is that this selection forms part of the Corporation’s legitimate editorial discretion, which is (according to the BBC) untouchable and not the proper subject of a complaint. If nothing else, it would be fascinating to know whether Balen even touched upon this crucial element of editorial discretion and, if he did, what his conclusions were. I’m sure you can now understand why the BBC must at all costs prevent the disclosure of any such discussion.
You might by now be wondering what democratic, legal or moral principle justifies the right of a publicly and generously funded corporation, staffed by an unelected elite, exercising a virtual UK monopoly in the field of non-commercial broadcasting, and possessing an enviable global reach, to select and disseminate programmes filled with the systematic and institutional bias which the BBC operates on Middle East affairs.
This question becomes all the more relevant in the light of the BBC’s persistent refusal to disclose the Balen Report, which is not itself a work of journalism but is simply an internal briefing document containing suggestions for improving the quality of the BBC’s coverage and its impartiality. But for the BBC, publishing even a document about its exercise of editorial freedom is seen as undermining that freedom, and must therefore be suppressed at all costs.
The publication of the Hutton Report in 2004, with its serial criticisms of the BBC, marked an apparent low point in the fortunes of the Corporation. But it proved to be no more than a temporary blip, as witnessed by the fact that in 2012 the Supreme Court has reinforced the extraordinary power of this venerated and apparently untouchable and indestructible institution.
Having won another victory in its war against those challenging its routine Middle East bias, the BBC is riding high and no doubt considers itself to be invulnerable. The government probably has little interest in correcting the BBC’s anti-Israel slant, but is likely at some point in the future to be concerned for other reasons about the unconstrained power of this state within a state.
If the BBC’s power is to be checked, if not reversed, then a good place to start would be its complaints system, which needs to cover selection of news items and topics for programmes and to be subject to proper external review and appeal.
Related articles
- Tale of Two Cities: Contrasting BBC headlines on Homs and Bet Shemesh (cifwatch.com)
- BBC Staff HEARTS the Guardian (cifwatch.com)
As Hadar Sela noted in her recent reports on the upcoming ‘Global March to Jerusalem’, scheduled for March 30, 2012:
The organisers are a conglomerate of people representing the ‘red-green alliance’ the world over. Radical Leftists, Muslim Brotherhood-connected Islamists, [antisemites] and representatives of and sympathisers with the Iranian regime have once more come together with the aim of engineering an event which will…advance their long-term assault on the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
So, it wasn’t surprising when I read, at Anti-Defamation Leagues’s site devoted towards exposing extremists, that an antisemite as prolific as Gilad Atzmon will be speaking in Oakland, California, on February 25, at a “benefit for the Global March to Jerusalem – North America.”
Here’s the flyer promoting the event.
As we’ve noted repeatedly, Atzmon’s musings on the threat to humanity posed by Jews is literally indistinguishable from what you’d find at websites of white supremacists, and so his common cause with Islamists and other extremists inspired by dreams of the Jewish state’s demise represents quite an intuitive ideological synergy.
Finally, note the blurb from the Guardian on the flyer, which refers to this 2009 interview of the “London saxophonist” by the paper’s literary critic, John Lewis, which included this photo of the urbane, sophisticated artist.
Lewis’ glowing profile included this passage:
It may come as a surprise to some that Atzmon is a saxophonist at all. His career as a musician has long been drowned out by the clatter of his extra-curricular activities: the furious attacks on Israel (he writes and edits for the website Palestine Think Tank); the philosophical texts on Jewish identity that get discussed by the likes of Noam Chomsky; the two comic novels that have been translated into 24 languages.
Just to be clear, Atzmon’s extreme antisemitic musings predated Lewis’ 2009 praise of Atzmon by many years. Here’s a quote from Atzmon’s website, posted in 2003.
American Jewry makes any debate on whether the ‘Protocols of the elder of Zion’ are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews (in fact Zionists) do control the world.. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least.
The problem with Atzmon, wrote Lewis, later in his piece, is ”that trenchant politics often sit uneasily alongside music, particularly when that music is instrumental.”
Yes, that’s truly the problem with Gilad Atzmon: His incisive politics on Jews’ evil sits “uneasily” with his sublime artistic expression.
Related articles
- You know you’re an antisemitic Guardian reader when…you defend Gilad Atzmon (cifwatch.com)
- Another pejorative reference to Jews as “Chosen People” by a Guardian contributor (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian, Khaled Diab and the Gilad Atzmon antisemitism test (cifwatch.com)
- Following our post & complaint, Guardian amends Khaled Diab’s CiF essay: Removes Atzmon passage (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian publishes letter by supporter of Gilad Atzmon, refuses to publish rebuttal (cifwatch.com)
- Gilad Atzmon takes aim at CiF Watch, accusing us of running “a Jewish supremacist site”! (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch Special Report: Extremists & terror supporters organizing ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ (cifwatch.com)
Rachel Shabi
Rachel Shabi is a journalist who writes for ‘Comment is Free’ and Al Jazeera whose contempt for the Jewish state, and seeming indifference to antisemitism, is consistently demonstrated.
Shabi has blamed Zionism for the ethnic cleansing of 900,000 Jews from Arab lands; characterizing their plight as being caused ”either by agitating Zionist emissaries, or by the shockwaves that Zionism sent through the Middle East.” [emphasis added]
She has accused those who raise the issue of the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands of engaging in cynical “political point-scoring”, and has even mocked the notion of historic Arab antisemitism.
She also dismissed Israeli concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) – writing that the MB was merely “perceived as…anti-Semitic - characterizing the Jewish state’s fear of the Islamist group’s rise (a movement whose spiritual leader literally called for Allah to murder every last Jew on earth) as evidence of Israeli racism!
In addition, while Shabi has carved out a successful journalistic niche as a Jewish critic of Israel I have found nothing Shabi has written on the subject of antisemitism, and absolutely no indication that she is at all burdened by the malign Jewish obsession which is normative in the Arab world – all of which provides relevant context to her latest essay at ‘Comment is Free’, “False accusations of antisemitism desensitize us to the real thing“, Feb. 17.
Shabi, in arguing that “rightwing pro-Israelis [have] sucked the oxygen out of any conversation about the country”, argues:
a broader rash of pouncing-upon from rightwing pro-Israelis that has sucked the oxygen out of any conversation about the country – especially in the US. Witness the recent storm over the phrase “Israel firsters”: used to accuse people of putting policy on Israel above US interests, it sparked a row among liberal commentators on whether it carries connotations of dual loyalty that feed into antisemitic tropes. This was just another attempt to smear liberal American critics of Israel,
Yet the real danger in all this is that the rush to throw charges of antisemitism…and silence…people who criticise Israel will desensitise vigilance over the real thing. Such tactics are meant to intimidate and paralyse, choke and divert the discussion over Israel’s occupation and policies in the Middle East.
Briefly, the controversy Shabi is referring to arose when it was discovered that Zaid Jilani, who blogged for a Center for American Progress (CAP) website, ThinkProgress, used Twitter to call US supporters of the Jewish state “Israel Firsters” – evoking the antisemitic narrative that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country.
As several progressive commentators observed following the row, “liberal” voices who defend this dual loyalty canard are evidently unaware of or unburdened by the fact that the idea that diaspora Jews are insufficiently loyal to the country where they reside has a decidedly reactionary pedigree.
The charge of dual loyalty was central in the Dreyfus Affair through the Nazi’s rise to power – and, indeed, this notion in large measure underlay the failure of European emancipation. In the 1920s American industrialist Henry Ford published The International Jew: The World’s Problem where it was asserted that disloyal American Jews were pushing the U.S. into WWII, though the war was not in the national interest.
While after WWII manifestations of this charge often remained on the fringes of American society, Paul Findley, a former Republican U.S. Congressman, wrote a book in 1985, They Dare to Speak Out, which became a best-seller. In it, Findley maintained that American Jews utilized “tactics which stifle dissent in their own communities and throughout America” to benefit not their own country but, rather, Israel.
Paleoconservative commentators, not surprisingly, have similarly championed this narrative. Pat Buchanan wrote in 2008 that “Israel and its Fifth Column in [Washington , DC] seek to stampede us into war with Iran”, and has previously written that Jews “harbor a ‘passionate attachment’ to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America.”
As liberal columnist Spencer Ackerman noted on the term “Israel-firster”:
It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and (former KKK Grand Wizard) David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network…It is a term that Charles Lindbergh would [have been] comfortable using.
As David Bernstein observed upon researching the term:
The “Israel-firster” slur was not used in “mainstream” discourse until the last few years.
Before that, you can find it occasionally in the early 1980s and 1990s in sources such as Wilmot Robertson’s anti-Semitic Instauration journal, a 1988 anti-Semitic book called “The F.O.J. [Fear of Jews] Syndrome, and a 1998 anti-Semitic book “Rise of AntiChrist.” I also found a couple of references to “Israel-firsters” in the extremist anti-Israel publication, The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs…
By the early 2000s, one can find “Israel-firster” being used by a variety of anti-Semitic “right-wing” sources like DavidDuke.com and the Vanguard News Network. As the decade wore on, the phrase occasionally pops up in far left anti-Israel sites that have ties to the anti-Semitic far-right or are known for playing footsie with anti-Semitism
Finally, over the last few years the term has become increasingly used on the anti-Israel far left
So the question is, does your average Progressive recoil at the use of terminology that migrated recent from the far-right racist kook fringe to refer to members of minority groups? They sure do. Should they recoil less if the terminology is aimed at Jews, as opposed to other minority groups? They sure shouldn’t–unless they are themselves prejudiced against Jews.
Rachel Shabi, a “progressive” commentator writing for a publication which fancies itself the “worlds leading liberal voice”, not only doesn’t recoil from such a malign narrative, questioning the loyalty of Jews but, rather, is outraged that those who engage in such Judeophobic tropes (popularized on the far-right) are being “smeared” as antisemites.
As A. Jay Adler concluded in a recent CiF Watch cross post about those, like Shabi, who would defend or excuse such a slur on Jewish Americans”.
They defend their use of the term because they believe that this time it is true. They believe that this time there really are divided loyalties, there really is a cadre of Jews exercising excessive, secretive power while aggressively attempting to suppress any exposure of it. And like all their reactionary forebears…they forget that the belief they cling to is the belief to which purveyors of anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish power always hold fast – it’s the essential marker of the tradition – that what they believe is true.
To this I’d add one more caveat.
Activists like Shabi, like so many others at ‘Comments is Free’, seem to believe that self-proclaimed “progressives” are ipso facto free of prejudice, and so should be granted a kind of impunity from accusations of racism even when trading in the most classic Judeophobic stereotypes.
Such supreme moral hubris continues to inform so much of the the commentary about Israel and Jews by Guardian reporters, contributors and their “progressive” fellow travelers.
Related articles
- Rachel Shabi morally absolves the perpetrators who ethnically cleansed Jews from Arab lands (cifwatch.com)
- CiF’s Rachel Shabi, Israeli democracy and the rank dishonesty of the anti-Zionist Left (cifwatch.com)
- CAP report on Islamophobia co-authored by writer sympathetic to antisemites & Muslim Brotherhood (cifwatch.com)
- “Israel Firster”: Anatomy of an Antisemitic Smear (cifwatch.com)
Confirmation Bias: The habit of favoring information that confirms what you believe, whether it’s true or not, and ignoring the rest.
One of the most consistent habits of Guardian reporters is their ability to vilify Israel in response to almost any story about the country.
A case in point is the tragic accident yesterday, which killed ten and injured 40 others, when a bus carrying Palestinian children (from a kindergarten in the Palestinian territories) and a truck collided in Adam Square in northern Jerusalem. Israeli Magen David Adom and Palestinian Red Crescent teams were working together on the rescue operation, and Israeli and Palestinian police are similarly collaborating on the subsequent investigation.
An initial investigation indicated that the truck or the bus had veered from the oncoming lane, probably due to inclement weather, Army Radio reported.
Yet, Phoebe Greenwood, the Guardian stringer based in Israel for the past eight months (who has yeoman’s work delegitimizing the Jewish state while filling in for Harriet Sherwood) was able to frame even this tragic auto accident in a manner consistent with a broader anti-Israel narrative.
Her story on the accident for The Telegraph, Palestinians mourn death of ten children in bus crash, Feb. 16, included this passage in the penultimate paragraph:
Ahe gleeful reaction of several Israelis on Twitter has provoked disgust and outrage on social media sites.
One tweet posted by Ajali Cali read, “Great, less terrorists” while another tweeter named Itai Viltzig said: “Thank God [these are] Palestinians. I hope every day there is a bus like this [that crashes].” [emphasis added]
First, it turns out that the offensive comments weren’t Tweets, but rather a couple of comments within one Facebook thread beneath a link to a story about the accident from the site of Walla.
More broadly, there are 3.4 million Facebook users in Israel, and it seems relevant to ask how precisely a couple of stray hateful comments (in one FB thread) is news worthy, yet alone represents a dynamic that is in any way relevant to properly contextualizing the story?
But, the most outrageous facet of Greenwood’s gratuitous focus on a few Israeli FB comments is the deafening silence, by both Greenwood and Sherwood, in face of a Palestinian culture saturated with antisemitic incitement not only “beneath the line” at social media sites, but by the official state controlled media, as well as political and religious leaders.
The Palestinian culture of hate towards Jews – and not merely Israelis – is well-documented and impossible not to acknowledge except for those willfully blind to the phenomenon.
To cite just one of countless examples of the consequences of such incitement – a culture which routinely honors terrorists – nearly one-third of Palestinians polled expressed SUPPORT for the terror attack last year in Itamar, in which two Palestinians broke into a Jewish home and butchered five members of the Fogel family, including three children, ages 10, 4, and 3 months.
Interestingly, Greenwood not only doesn’t find such disturbing realities about Palestinian culture to be newsworthy (based on her reports), but evidently is skeptical that such incitement even occurs. Here’s a Tweet by Greenwood in December about statements by Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon that Palestinian textbooks promote terror.
As I posted at the time, all Greenwood would had to have done is go to the site of Palestinian Media Watch to read a comprehensive report on the incontrovertible evidence regarding the glorification of violence against Israelis in PA textbooks.
But, as with so many of her colleagues, Greenwood’s liberal racism, which compromises any claim to objective journalism, necessitates that Palestinians are never held accountable for such an endemic antisemitic culture – a vital political dynamic, in accurately understanding the politics of the region, that the Guardian will never report.
Related articles
- Jews to build new bridge. Guardian characterizes it as a provocation. (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian’s Phoebe Greenwood Tweets: “What Palestinian incitement?” (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian’s Phoebe Greenwood promotes the new kinder, gentler, peaceful Hamas (cifwatch.com)
- Phoebe Greenwood continues Guardian tradition of dishonest reporting about Palestinian incitement (cifwatch.com)
- How the Jews steal Christmas: Ugly Guardian story evokes Jesus as an “oppressed” Palestinian (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian’s Phoebe Greenwood gambles with Palestinian lives. (cifwatch.com)
- The miracle of Guardian writer Phoebe Greenwood (cifwatch.com)
H/T Margie
Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott, in his quasi mea culpa, “On Averting Accusations of antisemitism“, wrote:
Three times in the last nine months I have upheld complaints against language within articles that I agreed could be read as antisemitic...Two weeks ago a columnist used the term “the chosen” in an item on the release of Gilad Shalit, which brought more than 40 complaints to the Guardian, and an apology from the columnist the following week. “Chosenness”, in Jewish theology, tends to refer to the sense in which Jews are “burdened” by religious responsibilities; it has never meant that the Jews are better than anyone else. Historically it has been antisemites, not Jews, who have read “chosen” as code for Jewish supremacism.
The columnist Elliott was referring to is Deborah Orr, who contemptuously referred to Jews’ supposed racist belief in their own superiority, in a bizarre missive which imputed bigotry to Israel in the context of the prisoner release deal to free Gilad Shalit.
Wrote Orr:
“…there is something abject in [Hamas's] eagerness to accept a transfer that tacitly acknowledges what so many Zionists believe – that the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbors.”
Though Orr’s “apology” was far from adequate or honest, the incident at least set a precedent at the Guardian regarding the antisemitic pedigree, and unacceptability, of such tropes.
More recently, the Guardian removed a passage from Khaled Diab’s CiF essay after we alerted them about a similarly pejorative characterization of Jews as ‘chosen people’ – a quote, included by Diab, in support of his broader narrative of Israeli bigotry, by none other than Gilad Atzmon.
Yesterday, Feb 15, in a characteristically ugly anti-American, anti-Zionist polemic by Noam Chomsky, The Imperial Way: The American Decline in Perspective, Part 2, there was this passage:
Christian Zionism in Britain and the US long preceded Jewish Zionism, and has been a significant elite phenomenon with clear policy implications (including the Balfour Declaration, which drew from it). When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during the first world war, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.
The next step was for the Chosen People to return to the land promised to them by the Lord. Articulating a common elite view, President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, described Jewish colonization of Palestine as an achievement “without comparison in the history of the human race”. [emphasis added]
While it’s not surprising that Chomsky - an outspoken opponent of Israel’s existence who has likened Zionism to Nazism and expressed support for Hezbollah - would engage in such anti-Jewish vitriol, its instructive to note that the seemingly sincere call by Chris Elliott on how the Guardian can “avert accusations of antisemitism” evidently hasn’t been taken seriously by his paper’s contributors and editors.
Related articles
- Following our post & complaint, Guardian amends Khaled Diab’s CiF essay: Removes Atzmon passage (cifwatch.com)
- The apology to the Jewish people Deborah Orr should have written (cifwatch.com)
- Gilad Atzmon takes aim at CiF Watch, accusing us of running “a Jewish supremacist site”! (cifwatch.com)
- You know you’re an antisemitic Guardian reader when…you defend Gilad Atzmon (cifwatch.com)
- The continuing notoriety of Guardian journalist Deborah Orr’s perverse antisemitic logic (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian, Khaled Diab and the Gilad Atzmon antisemitism test (cifwatch.com)
- Deborah Orr Tweet of the day: Jews are “not allowed” to “not allow people to be critical” of Israel (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian vindicates CiF Watch (cifwatch.com)
A guest post by AKUS
Al-Durrah Stamp in Iran
If there was one event that made the Second Intifada more deadly than it might otherwise have been, it was the apparent shooting of Mohammed Al Durrah (Al Dura/al Durah) on September 30th, 2000 that was filmed by Arab cameraman Talal abu Rahmah on behalf of France 2 TV producer Charles Enderlin. This was the few seconds of video that showed the boy cowering with his father behind a barrel at the Nitzanim junction in Gaza in a video and an image that have become infamous.
The accusation to this day surfaces constantly on the internet and doubtless in Islamic media even though it has been conclusively shown to have been impossible for Israeli soldiers to have shot the boy or his father from their position.
See, for example, James Fallow’s report in the Atlantic Monthly in 2003 Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura? .
In fact, it has never been proven that al Durrah was actually killed (there was never a body produced).
If al Durrah was shot it has been conclusively shown to have been done by Palestinians firing at the two from virtually point-blank range behind the cameraman abu Rahmah.
The two were completely shielded from Israeli bullets by the barrel behind which they were cowering and exposed to bullets from the Palestinian position. However, even the boy’s death is disputed since he is shown moving after he is supposedly killed and there is a strong suspicion that the whole thing was a Pallywood production in which the father had agreed to act due to a previous encounter with Hamas (and this is where the latest news surfaces – see below).
Abu Rahmah was brought in to do the filming, and Enderlin was only too happy to get the results and edit them for maximum effect. There is an excellent video reconstruction of the events on YouTube, if you can ignore the disgusting comments below the video by those who either will not accept the truth or want to continue to use the event to libel Israel, at Birth of an Icon.
France 2, Abu Rahma and Enderlin consistently denied faking the scene by selectively filming then editing the few seconds of the action that they showed. Their version is widely available on the Internet to this day.
As more doubts about the events that day surfaced (even the IDF accepted the initial reports), the father, Jamal al Durrah, paraded scars he claimed were the results of the Israeli bullets that hit him in an effort to persuade the public of his and the France2’s version of events. In fact, he became something of a cause célèbre, trotted out routinely at anti-Israeli events and in anti-Israeli media.
As it happened, an Israel orthopedic surgeon, Dr. David Yehuda of Tel Hashomer Hospital became aware of these claims, and the case rang a bell with him. When he checked his records, he found that he had treated Jamal Al Durrah for wounds inflicted upon him by Hamas in 1994 when they suspected him of collaborating with Israel! The scars al Durrah paraded were from the wounds inflicted by Hamas and the subsequent surgery. (There is some confusion in the press as to the doctor’s correct name as both names – “Yehuda” and “David” – could be first or last names. In Israel people are sometimes addressed by last name first, rather than the usual way. He appears in the media as both Yehuda David and David Yehuda).
In fact, the suspicion has been raised that Jamal al Durrah agreed to act in the Pallywood production to “repay his debt”, so to speak, to Hamas, for his previous actions.
Jamal al Durrah then sued Dr. Yehuda and a French magazine that published his story for libel in France in 2008. Of course, it is rather unclear how a semi-illiterate Gazan could have done this. It appears he was funded by an unknown source. Like Enderlin in the Karsenty libel case (see additional material below), on April 29th, 2011 al Durrah won his suit despite the evidence of Dr. Yehuda’s medical records! Dr. Yehuda was ordered to pay thousands of Euros in damages.
Dr. Yehuda vowed to fight back, and on Wednesday, February 15th 2012 the French Supreme Court acquitted him of slandering al Durrah. Another of the lies has been exposed, and it is now even less clear that either al-Durrah – son or father – was actually wounded or killed that day.
Another brick has been torn down from the wall of lies, falsehoods, edited film, and propaganda that has been erected around this patently falsified event in order to demonize Israel. Nevertheless, until a French court forces Enderlin to release the entire film clip, and rules on the actual complaint that the footage was doctored to create a false impression, this affair will continue to damage Israel’s image.
——-
Additional background:
Richard Landes is probably the most important voice tracking the whole affair (see this page on his blog, Al Durah Affair: The Dossier). There also is a chronology of events at Landes’ site.
Here’s an interview with Landes at The Muhammad Al-Dura Blood Libel: A Case Analysis where he recounts what made him take such an interest in the case:
“On 31 October 2003, I sat down in the France 2 studios in Jerusalem and watched the rushes with Charles Enderlin and his Israeli cameraman, who happened to have been in Ramallah with him on 30 September 2000. That was when the shingles fell from my eyes.
“Much of the footage had a familiar quality: it resembled the footage I had seen in Shahaf’s studio, either boring or staged. At one point a Palestinian adult grabbed his leg as if he’d been shot and limped badly. Here, for the ‘scene’ to work, a half-dozen others should have picked him up and run him past cameras to an ambulance. But only kids gathered around him who were too small to pick him up. The man shooed them away, looked around, realized no one’s coming, and walked away without a limp.
“Enderlin’s Israeli cameraman laughed. When I asked why, he said, ‘It seems staged.’ I replied, ‘Everything seems staged.’ And then the other shoe dropped. ‘Oh, they do that all the time,’ Enderlin offered helpfully, ‘it’s a cultural thing; they exaggerate.’ ‘But if they do it all the time, why couldn’t they have done it with al-Dura?’ ‘Oh, they’re not good enough for that.’
“At that moment I realized the full-double-extent of the problem: Palestinians stage all the time, and Western journalists have no trouble with that. Any serious journalist who had a cameraman who filmed extensive staged scenes for him should either have told him that was unacceptable or fired him. Enderlin, the dean of Middle East journalism, had been working with Abu Rahma for more than a decade at this point, and he clearly had done neither. On the contrary, he told everyone that Abu Rahma was a superb journalist who met all the Western professional standards.”
Philippe Karsenty took up the issue in France and was fined 1 Euro and costs in 2006 when he was sued by France 2 for disputing their presentation and the judge awarded the libel case to France 2.
On appeal, Karsenty had the judgment reversed in 2008.
In 2002, Landes notes that:
“German filmmaker Esther Schapira releases her film, “Three Bullets and a Dead Child: Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?” in which she concludes that Israeli bullets could not have killed the boy. France 2, sister station of the German ARD which produced the film, refuses to air it.”
Not to be outdone by France 2, as Landes notes, Suzanne Goldenberg, of the Guardian (UK) and the primary source of another outrageous libel, the so-called “Jenin Massacre”, “ published a lengthy article titled ‘The Making of a Martyr,’ in which Mohammed is eulogized and Israelis demonized”.
Being a useful Jewish reporter no doubt increased the impact of both her reports. Other networks, notably CNN, did much the same. Given the Guardian’s wide circulation among the left and Islamists who wish to delegitimize Israel, Goldenberg’s article was one that had great impact among the many reports on this affair and is still frequently referenced and has never been corrected or retracted by the Guardian.
Ha’aretz no longer claims that Israeli soldiers shot Mohammed Al Durrah, (See their report from Jan. 2011: Mohammed al-Dura’s father wins slander case against Israeli in French court), while their earlier coverage implied that Israeli soldiers had indeed shot the boy.
Nidra Poller examines the al Durrah hoax here: The Muhammad al-Dura Hoax and Other Myths Revived.
One of the most powerful descriptions of the miscarriage of justice in France in the Karsenty trial and the way the French media establishment tried to protect Enderlin as one of their own even when they knew the facts is “L’affaire Enderlin” written by Anne-Elizabeth Moutet at The Weekly Standard:
You could see Palestinians being carried on stretchers into ambulances, then coming out again unharmed, all in a kind of carnival atmosphere, with kids throwing stones and making faces at the camera, despite what was supposed to be a tense situation. The tape showed occasional gunshots, not continuous firing. From the general horsing around captured on film by Abu Rahmeh, Mena concluded that the whole scene must have been staged.
CiF Watch has commented on the issue several times, and cross-posted a very compelling essay by David Solway about Karsenty.
Finally, here’s a great video about L’Affair Al-Durrah by Richard Landes.
Related articles
- The Guardian links Abu Rahma to Al-Durra Affair (cifwatch.com)
BDS activists posted, then removed, this YouTube video of Norman Finkelstein blasting the BDS movement - Yes, Norman Finkelstein! - during an interview with a pro-BDS activist at Imperial College, with an interlocutor who, no doubt, thought Finkelstein was on board.
Here’s what you saw when trying to access the video following its removal.
However, thanks to our friends Zach and Matt at Huffington Post Monitor (HPM), who downloaded the video (and trimmed the original 30 minute video to include only the sections calling out the BDSers) the clip anti-Israel activists didn’t want you to see is now available.
Here’s a transcript of the shortened clip, courtesy of HPM, as well:
I’ve earned my right to speak my mind, and I’m not going to tolerate what I think is silliness, childishness, and a lot of leftist posturing.
I mean we have to be honest, and I loathe the disingenuous. They don’t want Israel. They think they are being very clever; they call it their three-tier. We want the end of the occupation, the right of return, and we want equal rights for Arabs in Israel. And they think they are very clever because they know the result of implementing all three is what, what is the result?
You know and I know what the result is. There’s no Israel! And if you don’t want the same framework then stop talking about the law and stop trying to be so clever. Because you’re only so clever in your cult. The moment you step out you have to deal with Israeli propaganda. And here they have a case.
They say no they’re not really talking about rights. They’re talking about they want to destroy Israel. And in act I think they’re right I think that’s true. I’m not going to lie. But this kind of duplicity and disingenuous, “oh we’re agnostic about Israel.” No you’re not agnostic! You don’t want it! Then just say it! But they know full well: If you say it you don’t have a prayer reaching a broad public. Because that’s where the public is right now.
I support the BDS. But I said it will never reach a broad public until and unless they’re explicit in their goal. And their goal has to include the recognition of Israel or it’s a nonstarter. It won’t reach the public because the moment you go out there Israel will start to say what about we and they won’t recognize our right and in fact that’s correct. You can’t answer the Israelis on that because they’re making a statement that’s factually correct. It’s not an accidental and unwitting omission that BDS does not mention Israel. You know that and I know that
It’s not like they’re “oh we forgot to mention it.” They won’t mention it because they know it will split the movement. Cause there’s a large segment of the movement that wants to eliminate Israel.
You talk about BDS they make all these claims about their victories. All their claims. You know what? You use these ten fingers? These more than suffice to count all their victories. There are superfluous fingers here to count all their victories. It’s a cult! Where the guru says we have all these victories and everyone nods their head and no one sits down to do the arithmetic on their own.
Yes it’s had some victories no question about it. But the way people promote it as if it’s proven itself and we’re on the verge of a victory of some sort. It’s just sheer nonsense. It’s a cult. And I personally am tired of it.
There’s no Israel. That’s what it’s really about. And you think you’re fooling anybody. You think you’re so clever that people can’t figure that out for themselves? No they understand the arithmetic perfectly well. Are you going to reach a broad public which is going to hear the Israeli side ‘they want to destroy us?’ No you’re not. And frankly you know what you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t read a broad public because you’re dishonest. And I wouldn’t trust those people if I had to live in this state. I wouldn’t. It’s dishonesty.
Related articles
H/T Steve
Geneive Abdo is a former Iran correspondent for the Guardian and current contributor to major American newspapers, as well as Al-Jazeera.
She is a fellow at the Century Foundation which, according to Commentary Magazine‘s Michael Rubin, has close ties to the White House.
Abdo recently suggested to Australian public radio that Israel had bombed its own diplomats in India in order to have an excuse to blame Iran:
(Journalist) ELEANOR HALL: Iran’s leadership says it’s sheer lies that it’s behind the attacks and that the Israelis have planted the bombs themselves to discredit Iran?
GENEIVE ABDO: Well I think that’s entirely possible. I mean, if you consider what the Israelis did for many years in Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East, that theory is not so farfetched.
And, as Rubin observed, “What progressive analysis would be complete without obsessing about the dark shadow of a “Jewish lobby?”
ELEANOR HALL: So how dangerous do you think the situation is right now?
GENEIVE ABDO: Well, I think it’s very dangerous. It’s far more dangerous than probably any escalation tension that we’ve seen in 30 years. So, you know, you have the Israelis not willing to live with a nuclear Iran. You have the Iranians going forward with their nuclear program. And you have an American president trying to be re-elected with a Jewish lobby in the United States that’s extremely powerful.
So, we have a “specialist” on Iran, working for an influential progressive think tank, who legitimizes bizarre conspiracy theories and advances tropes about the injurious effects of organized Jewry.
But that’s not all.
Abdo is a speaker at the upcoming conference, in Washington, DC, of the left-wing Israel lobbying group, J Street - an event which also features Peter Beinart.
Perhaps one of the biggest conceits of Israel’s critics are their frequent suggestions that there’s something brave about their stance, positing that anti-Israel views are stifled, and that activism can cost you professionally.
As Noah Pollock observed of Peter Beinart’s claims to this effect:
Beinart imputes that critics of Israel within the Jewish community and elsewhere have been rendered mute and ineffective by the power of politically conservative Jews and the Washington lobby they supposedly control.
The presence of Geneive Abdo, an anti-Israel conspiracy theorist who advances antisemitic canards, at a conference of a well-funded American Jewish lobbying group, would suggest, however, that such politically powerful conservative Jews are doing a horrible job of muting such “alternative” voices.
Related articles
- CiF readers blast Jonathan Freedland’s critique of Guardian Left orthodoxies on Syria, Iran & Israel (cifwatch.com)
- CiF piece by Brian Whitaker on “why media believes worst about Iran” draws on conspiracy blog (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill sees Obama’s Israel support, in State of Union, reflecting need of Jews’ money (cifwatch.com)
- What Peter Beinart won’t report: PA TV thanks Palestinian children for fertilizing land with blood (cifwatch.com)
A guest post by Hadar Sela
Introduction:
As we saw in part one of this report on the ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ (GMJ) scheduled for March 30th 2012, the organisers are a conglomerate of people representing the ‘red-green alliance’ the world over. Radical Leftists, Muslim Brotherhood-connected Islamists and representatives of and sympathisers with the Iranian regime have once more come together with the aim of engineering an event which will result in PR disaster for Israel and advance their long-term assault on the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
The European chapter of the GMJ also represents a text-book example of what the Reut Institute termed the ‘red-green alliance’ in 2010 and in particular indicates that the naming of London as a hub of systematic assault on Israel’s right to exist in the Reut Institute’s report is still – two years on – very relevant indeed.
GMJ – the European chapter:
The radical Leftist ‘Anti-Imperialist Camp’ is promoting support for and participation in the Global March to Jerusalem by means of the following rhetoric:
Jerusalem has been a centre of the three monotheistic world religions for more than 1,000 years. This plurality has been threatened since the creation of the state of Israel and more so with the occupation of east Jerusalem and its annexation, in violation of international law. Jerusalem’s Palestinian inhabitants are subjected to a continuous process of expulsion from the city.
85% of its territory has been robbed by foreign settlers, while the Israeli state systematically destroys the livelihood of Palestinians. Every day, the Apartheid state of Israel demolishes Palestinian homes. Armed Israeli gangs, supported by the state, terrorise the old city’s inhabitants demanding, “Arabs out, Jerusalem is Jewish!” Jewish religious fanatics even attack Jewish women if they don’t abide by the rules emanating from their extremist interpretation of religion. All this is happening while the people of the Arab world are clamouring for democracy and self-determination
……..
After decades of submission to a world order dominated by NATO and Israel, the Arab masses have begun to rid themselves of their dependent and dictatorial regimes.
………..
The sole reaction of the last settler colony in the world to the growing protest is increased brutality. The Apartheid state of Israel is hastening to create more facts on the ground, particularly in Jerusalem, before the balance of forces in the region turns completely against them. Once again, Israel’s claim to be the only democracy in the Middle East is exposed to be a racist fallacy – as only Jewish citizens are entitled to it.
As may be concluded from the type of language used above, many (though not all) of the endorsers of the European branch of the GMJ come from the radical Left
Individual endorsers:
Fatima Radjaie, Peace Movement, Karlsruhe, Germany
Thomas Zmrzly, Initiativ e.V. Duisburg, Germany
Ron Ridenour, author, Denmark
Benjamin Monnet, World Assembly Member, USA/Korea
Raymond Deane, composer and political activist, Ireland
Dekmak Haidar, coordinator Quds association in Lebanon
John Beeching, Hon. Chair Canadians for Peace and Socialism
Yvonne Ridley, Vice President of the European Muslims League, England
Dr S Sivasegaram, retired professor, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
Nadine Rosa-Rosso, senior anti-imperialist activist, Bruxelles, Belgium
Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, publicist, Germany
Franz Fischer, Palestine activist and CC of the Labour Party, SwitzerlandOrganisations:
Canada Palestine Association, Vancouver, and the Voice of Palestine, Canada
Campaign against the Occupation and for the Sovereignty of Iraq, Spanish state
Among the organisers, we find an interesting mix of radical Leftists and Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas-linked veteran activists.
European preparatory committee for the Global March to Jerusalem
Rome, January 14, 2012Zaher Birawi, leading Palestine activist, Britain
Gretta Duisenberg, Chair Foundation “Stop the Occupation”, Board member Free Gaza Movement, Netherlands
Leo Gabriel, Journalist and Anthropologist, Member of the IC of the World Social Forum, Austria
Dr. Hafiz al Karmi, Chairman Palestinian Forum in Britain
Mohammad Kozber, British Muslim Initiative
Wilhelm Langthaler, Anti-imperialist Camp, Gaza must live coalition, Austria
Mikalis Lukianos, Ship to Gaza, Greece
Daniela di Marco, Chair of Sumud – Anti-imperialist Voluntary Association, Italy
Moreno Pasquinelli, Anti-imperialist Camp, Italy
Ismael Patel, Chairman Friends of Al Qqsa, Britain
Attia and Verena Rajab, Palestine Committee Stuttgart, Germany
Elsa Rassbach, Film maker, journalist and peace activist, Berlin, Germany
Massimo de Santi, President of the International Committee for Education for Peace, Italy
Mikalis Lukianos is, as stated, connected to ‘Ship to Gaza, Greece’ which is part of the coalition of groups behind the organisation of the flotillas and which includes the ‘European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza’ which was established by the Muslim Brotherhood’s European arm, the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe, (FIOE) in 2007 and includes Hamas operatives among its senior figures.
Greta Duisenberg is a long-time anti-Israeli activist from the Netherlands. She sits on the board of the ISM-linked ‘Free Gaza‘ movement chaired by Huweida Arraf and is the founder of ‘Stop the Occupation’ . In 2003, during the second Intifada, her use of a Dutch diplomatic passport in order to visit Yasser Arafat in Ramallah provoked scandal , as have many more of her actions and statements.
Leo Gabriel is a member of the Austrian Social Forum who took part in the failed 2011 flotilla. A long time anti-Israel activist, Gabriel has participated in demanding that the partial embargo on the Gaza Strip (aimed at preventing the flow of weapons into that area) be lifted. He also campaigns for the removal of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups from the European list of proscribed terror organisations. Here he is speaking in 2009 at a protest against the ‘Tel Aviv Beach’ project in Vienna.
Wilhelm (Willi) Langthaler is the other GMJ organiser in Austria and spokesman for the far Leftist Anti-Imperialist Coordination (AIK) – mainly active in Austria and Italy – which courted controversy with its 2003 ’10 Euros for the Iraqi resistance’ campaign. According to the Stephen Roth Institute:
The AIK (Anti-Imperialist Coordination), in particular, is involved in anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda activities and collaborates with Muslim extremists. During a “solidarity trip” to the Palestinian refugee camp Baka near Amman, leading AIK activist Wilhelm Langthaler asserted that the destruction of Zionism and the so-called state of Israel was “the only way to achieve justice” in the Middle East. He branded Israel “an apartheid regime worse than the one that existed in South Africa.” Before and during the US-led campaign in Iraq, the AIK together with other extremist left-wing and Muslim organizations organized pro-Ba`ath demonstrations against the US. In AIK publications, the murder of Israeli citizens (“occupants”) is supported.
Moreno Pasquinelli from Italy is also part of the Anti-Imperialist Coordination and a GMJ organiser. This former chef and long-time communist has, as mentioned above, been involved in supporting the Iraqi ‘resistance’ as well as Turkish extremists. In November 2011 he attended an ‘Anti-Imperialist’ conference in Bangladesh (together with Maan Bashour; see part one of this report) and the previous month was to be found in Tehran at the regime organised ‘Fifth International Conference for Defending the Palestinian Intifada’, also attended by Khaled Masha’al and the General Secretary of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Daniela di Marco is secretary of ‘Sumud Volunteering and Resistance’ which appears to have interests in Lebanon. Sumud is also involved with the Italian branch of the ‘Freedom Flotilla‘ movement which is also planning another ‘flytilla’ on April 15th 2012 together with ‘Welcome to Palestine’.
Massimo de Santi is a professor of nuclear physics at the University of Pisa who last year attended the Iranian regime organised ‘International Conference on Global Alliance Against Terrorism for A Just Peace’ at which Ahmadinejad stated that “The Zionist regime is the main base for exerting cruelty and terror acts of the main terrorisms around the world including South America, Africa and the Far East; and this regime is the main pillar of terrorism and the unjust system of arrogant world“. De Santi is director of the ‘International Committee of Education for Peace’ and apparently thinks that France is a “danger to world peace” and promotes the idea that Israel is the ‘real threat‘ in the Middle East.
Elsa Rassbach is an American film-maker living in Berlin. She is the founder of ‘American Voices Abroad Military Project’; an “initiative to support GIs who resist in Europe” and is involved with several other ‘anti-war’ groups. Her particular bête noire appears to be American military bases in Germany. Rassbach is also a member of ‘Codepink‘ and took part in the organization of the ‘Welcome to Palestine’ ‘flytilla‘ in 2011 together with Mazin Qumsiyeh (see part one of this report).
Attia & Verena Rajab are prominent members of the Palestine Committee of Stuttgart and were involved in the organization of the 2010 Stuttgart Conference that produced the ‘Stuttgart Declaration’ which rejects a negotiated two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Ismail Patel is a well-known anti-Israel activist in the United Kingdom. An optician from Leicester, he founded ‘Friends of Al Aqsa‘ in 1997, which he also chairs, and which is described as being “concerned with defending the human rights of Palestinians and protecting the sacred al-Aqsa Sanctuary in Jerusalem”. ‘Friends of Al Aqsa’ is one of the organisations which collaborate with the Khomenist ‘Islamic Human Rights Commission’ in organizing the annual ‘Al Quds Day‘ events in London. It is also part of the ‘Britain 2 Gaza‘ campaign.
Patel is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked British Muslim Initiative (BMI) and also sits on the board of ‘Conflicts Forum‘. He has been involved with Islam Expo and the Stop the War Coalition and collaborates with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. He took part in the 2010 flotilla aboard the Mavi Marmara and has also participated in the ‘Union of Good’-linked ‘Miles of Smiles‘ convoy to Gaza organized by Interpal – a banned organization in Israel due to its Hamas links. Here he is in Gaza, meeting Ismail Haniyeh (far right, second row).
(Note: second from the left at the back is Mohammed Kozbar; see below.)
An occasional contributor to the Guardian, Patel has tried to draw equivalence between British citizens serving in the IDF and those seeking to join terror organisations banned by his own country.
‘Friends of Al Aqsa’ was one of the groups involved with the UK speaking tour by Raed Salah of the Northern Islamic Movement last year and Patel was one of the public figures who rushed to Salah’s defence after his arrest.
Patel has made much of his self-described status as a “survivor” of the Mavi Marmara incident, using it as a platform to spread his anti-Israel rhetoric. Here he is at a ‘Rage against Israel’ rally in London in 2010 stating that Israel’s “days are numbered”.
Hafiz al Karmi is Chairman of the ‘Palestinian Forum in Britain’ (PFB) – another one of the organisations involved in the sponsoring of a speaking tour in the UK by Raed Salah, whom he also in prison.
(More on Ahmad Nofal here)
Al Karmi is also director of the Qatari funded Mayfair Islamic Centre in London (a registered charity), a member of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). In addition, he belongs to ‘The Coalition of British Muslim Organisations Concerned with the Rights of the Palestinian People‘ which produced this letter in 2009.
In 2010 al Karmi took part in a conference on the subject of European foreign policy towards the Palestinian issue alongside Osama Hamdan of Hamas, Istanbul Declaration signatory Daoud Abdullah, Alistair Crooke of ‘Conflicts Forum‘, Tariq Ramadan and a member of the Lebanese Al-Jama’a Al- Islamiyah.
Members of the Palestinian Forum of Britain are old hands at organizing anti-Israel demonstrations in collaboration with other Hamas/ Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups and the Iranian-linked ‘Islamic Human Rights Commission’.
MAB: PALESTINE RALLY, London, UK
13 April 2002
Transport will be arranged from:
Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, BirminghamMUSLIM BROTHERHOOD LAUNCH BIGGEST PALESTINE RALLY IN THE UK, INSHA ALLAH
Supported by Muslim Council of Britain, UK Islamic Mission, Islamic Human Rights Commission, Stop the War Coalition, Palestinian Return Centre, Mayfair Islamic Centre, Palestinian Forum, Dawat-ul-Islam.
_________________________________________________________________________
Date: 13th April 2002
Venue: from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square: CONFIRMED…………..
Contact Person:
Email: intifada101@hotmail.com
Mobile: 07958329879
Join the Children’s Demo to show solidarity for the children in Gaza and all over Palestine. Bring your children along; let us not be silent any more.
Date: Sunday 8th February 2009
Time: 1.30pm – 3.00pm
Place: Outside 10 Downing Street
Nearest Tube Stations: Charing Cross (Northern Line), Westminster (Jubilee Line) and Embankment (District and Circle Lines)Organised by: Islamic Human Rights Commission and Palestinian Forum of Britain.
Supported by: Islamic Forum of Europe, Friends of Al-Aqsa, British Muslim Initiative, Muslim Association of Britain, Young Muslim Organisation UK, Palestine Internationalist, Muslimaat UK, Friends of Lebanon, FOSIS, CAMPACC, Islamic Centre of England, Innovative Minds and Palestinian Return Centre.
Join us to protest for the rights of the oppressed and innocents in Gaza. Join the Struggle for Justice.
In 2010 the Palestinian Forum in Britain organized an ‘Al Aqsa in Danger’ gala which featured among others Ennhada‘s Rachid Ghanouchi and Kamal Helbawy who joined the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood at the age of 12 and functioned as its official spokesman in the West between 1995-7, establishing both the MCB and MAB. At the gala, Helbawy reportedly stated that:
“the resistance is the active heart of the Islamic nation, that resistance is the only language that the occupation understands, which Khaled Mashaal, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, grasps well.” Helbawy called for action by everyone according to his capacity, “to liberate Palestine — all Palestine “.
Mohammed Kozbar (aka Kozber) is a senior member of the British Muslim Initiative (BMI) and a former director and member of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), both of which are connected to the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe (FIOE) – the Muslim Brotherhood’s European arm. He is also a trustee of the Finsbury Park Mosque (also known as North London Central Mosque) and a project director for IslamExpo.
In his BMI capacity, Kozbar is involved with ‘anti-war’ groups such as the Stop the War Coalition and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In the same role, he also collaborates with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and in December 2011 was to be found calling for the “end of Israel” at a London rally.
Here he is in 2010 at one of a series of anti-Israel rallies following the flotilla incident:
Kozbar is also a member and former director of the Lebanese Association (or League) of Britain and represented that organization (alongside Hafiz al Karmi, see above) at a memorial to Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood leader and Union of Good trustee Faisal Mawlawi. In this announcement from last year, Kozbar is also described as a member of the Lebanese Islamic Association.
Kozbar is a trustee of a registered charity named ‘Lebanese Relief’ with an offshoot – also a registered charity – named ‘UK Care for Children’, of which he is also a trustee. Also on the board of trustees of the latter charity is Jihad Qundil – a senior Interpal employee. Interpal is proscribed by Israel and the United States due to its links to the Hamas-supporting and financing ‘Union of Good’.
Here is Kozbar (second from the right) posing for a photograph at the Gaza Legislature with members of an Interpal mission.
Zaher Birawi (also al Birawi) is official spokesman for the ‘Global March on Jerusalem’. He is also spokesman /media officer for the Palestinian Forum in Britain (PFB) headed by Hafiz al Karmi (see above). The PFB states that it maintains the principle that “Palestine with its historic borders is an Arab Islamic land”.
As can be seen in the above announcement for the Raed Salah speaking tour, the PFB is involved in fundraising for the Manchester-based ‘Human Appeal International’ (HAI) – another registered charity in England & Wales proscribed by Israel due to its links to the ‘Union of Good’ headed by Yusuf Qaradawi. Human Appeal International was also directly named (along with Interpal) in the case of a Hamas activist tried for having been involved in fundraising for suicide bombings inside Israel. HAI is linked to the Muslim Association of Britain and partners for fundraising purposes with another registered charity entitled ‘Syria Relief’.
The Palestinian Forum in Britain is also part of the coalition of organisations including Ismail Patel’s ‘Friends of Al Aqsa’, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Stop the War Coalition and the BMI which came together to form the flotilla supporting and enabling ‘Britain 2 Gaza’ forum. The PFB also collaborates with many of the same organisations and additional ones on other anti-Israel projects.
In addition, Birawi is a trustee of the registered charity ‘Education Aid for Palestinians’ – also part of the ‘Union of Good’ – and acted as head of programming for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Al Hiwar TV established by Azam Tamimi. He has also acted as spokesman for George Galloway’s ‘Viva Palestina’ convoys.
Birawi is most well-known, however, for his activities as a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked ‘Palestinian Return Centre’ (PRC) in London – an organization also banned in Israel due to its Hamas affiliations. Prominent PRC figures are connected to Hamas and to the Muslim Brotherhood established ‘European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza’ (ECESG -which shares PRC office space), Interpal, MEMO and the MCB.
Here is Birawi sitting on Ismail Haniyeh’s right at a function in Gaza. Readers will also recognize Kevin Ovenden (to Birawi’s right; see part one of this report), Hamas Shura council member Mahmoud al Zahar and – on the far right – one of the Mavi Marmara participants.
Below we see Birawi (second from the left) at a classic red-green alliance event in Downing Street last September together with Sarah Colborne of the PSC, Mohammed Sawalha (see part one of this report), Lindsey German of the StWC, trade unionist Hugh Lanning, MP Andy Slaughter, former MP Martin Linton and member of the House of Lords and PSC & ECESG patron Jenny Tonge.
Conclusion:
The Global March on Jerusalem should be seen not only in the context of the broad alliance of anti-Israel activists of differing stripes brought together in order to get the project off the ground. It must also be assessed in terms of the interests of those providing considerable financial resources for its promotion and execution.
As pointed out on the ALAH blogspot , the campaign is obviously well-funded, allowing for publicity in several languages and frequent meetings of the organisers worldwide, including one for the European chapter scheduled for February 21st in London.
CLICK TO ENLARGE
The financial and ideological backers of the GMJ are –each for their own reasons – currently in need of a high-profile event with substantial media coverage in order to compensate for their failures on other fronts.
With Hizbollah having been unable to produce anything of major significance in the past four or five years and its ally in Damascus under ever-increasing pressure, and with Hamas feeling the financial pinch as a result of sanctions on Iran and ideological differences with the Tehran regime over Syria, a major and well-publicised distraction is at this time of vital importance to all.
Unfortunately, as we saw in the case of the 2010 flotilla, such a need for a high-profile event is likely to result in tragedy.
The deliberate exploitation of the subject of the Al Aqsa Mosque – unparalleled in its sensitivity in the Muslim world – by the organisers of the GMJ makes this unnecessary provocation even more potentially volatile.
Cartoon on 'Global March to Jerusalem' site
It is to be hoped that governments worldwide will recognize this counter-productive assault on a fellow UN member state for what it is. Hopefully they will also realize that the ability or will of surrounding countries to prevent their being used as a launching pad for the GMJ provocation is severely diminished and that they must therefore step up to the line and take action to prevent their citizens becoming involved in this foolhardy and potentially dangerous publicity stunt engineered by hardline terrorist sympathisers, the terrorist organisations themselves and their financial backers.
Related articles
- CiF Watch Special Report: Extremists & terror supporters organizing ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ (cifwatch.com)
- Following CiF Watch post & reader complaints, Guardian’s Travel page adds “Israel” to the Map (cifwatch.com)
- CiF readers blast Jonathan Freedland’s critique of Guardian Left orthodoxies on Syria, Iran & Israel (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch @ ‘Big Tent for Israel’ conference in Manchester, Nov. 27th (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch Gossip of the Day: Harriet Sherwood “Head Spinning” Edition (cifwatch.com)
- More proof that J Street is clearly outside even the broadest Zionist tent (cifwatch.com)
- Racist Alliance: Behind the scenes of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine and Pluto Press (cifwatch.com)
Ian Black
The latest report by the Guardian’s Middle East editor, Ian Black, Feb. 13, is titled “Israeli embassy attacks in Delhi and Tblisi could set off conflagration“.
Black’s analysis attempts to contextualize the recent attack on the Israeli embassy in India, and the thwarted attack in Georgia, (likely committed by Iran or Hezbollah) with the “ongoing campaign of sabotage and assassination against [Iranian] scientists” working on a nuclear programme”.
Black characterizes such covert acts as representing a “highly volatile element in an extremely unstable landscape.”
Adds Black:
Against a background of extraordinary turbulence across the Middle East, the Israeli-Iranian confrontation is by far the most dangerous element.
Black’s analysis of the Iranian-Israeli conflict includes the following:
- A requisite obfuscation over Iran’s nuclear intentions. Black non-judgmentally contrasts Iran’s insistence that its program is peaceful with “Israel and western countries adamant [that it] is not”, failing to cite the latest IAEA report, available on the Guardian website, which states: “the information indicates that Iran has carried out…a structured program…to develop an explosive nuclear device.”
- The suggestion that Iranian attacks on Israeli targets are justified: Black quotes a former British diplomat accusing Israel of “international state terrorism [which] invit[es] a response. It looks like a further twist that will lead to a tit-for-tat.”
However, the most egregious distortion in Black’s report is the historical analogy he attempts to draw in the penultimate paragraph, suggesting that Israel is looking for a “pretext” to war.
Nor could the stakes be higher [for the Middle East]. In June 1982 an assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador to London by the renegade Palestinian faction led by the Iraqi-backed Abu Nidal provided the pretext for war against Yasser Arafat’s PLO in Lebanon, despite a ceasefire that had held for nearly a year. Ariel Sharon, then defence minister, was pressing to attack and persuaded the prime minister, Menachem Begin, to go ahead
Full scale invasion, thousands of dead and years of war and occupation were the result.
Black’s characterization of the cause of the 1982 war, about which he attempts to draw an analogy to the current crisis, is grossly ahistorical.
The roots of the Lebanon war lay in the bloody expulsion of the PLO from Jordan, the terror group’s relocation to Lebanon in 1971 and subsequent staging of hundreds of terrorist acts across Israel’s northern border.
In March 1978, PLO terrorists infiltrated Israel, hijacked a bus and ended up murdering 34 Israeli civilians on board.
In response, Israeli forces crossed into Lebanon and overran terrorist bases, pushing the PLO away from the southern border.
The IDF shortly withdrew and allowed UN forces to enter, but UN troops were unable, or unwilling, to prevent PLO terrorists from re-infiltrating the region and introducing new, and more dangerous arms – a striking similarity to the complete failure of UNIFIL troops to keep southern Lebanon free of Hezbollah weaponry, per their mandate under UN Resolution 1701, following the 2nd Lebanon War in 2006.
Violence escalated with a series of PLO attacks and Israeli reprisals, which culminated n a U.S. brokered ceasefire agreement in July 1981.
However, the PLO repeatedly violated the cease-fire over the ensuing 11 months, carrying out terror assaults from Jordanian territory. (Between July 1981 and June 1982 26 Israelis were killed and 264 injured.)
Meanwhile, a force of over 15,000 PLO members was encamped in of locations throughout Lebanon, including thousands of foreign mercenaries. Israel later discovered an extensive cache of weaponry – which included mortars, Katyusha rockets and an antiaircraft network. The PLO also brought hundreds of T34 tanks into the area, and even surface-to-air missiles.
Israeli commando raids were unable to stem the growth of the PLO army, the of frequency of attacks forced thousands of Israeli residents in the Galilee to flee their homes and spend large amounts of time in bomb shelters.
So, while the final provocation occurred in June 1982 when a Palestinian terrorist group led by Abu Nidal attempted to assassinate Israel’s Ambassador to the UK, Black’s suggestion that Israel cynically used the assassination as a pretext break a peaceful “truce”, in order to launch an unnecessary war, is patently untrue.
What country on earth would permit a terrorist group (with an increasingly deadly arsenal of weaponry) on its border to launch frequent terror attacks against its citizens without a robust military response?
In fact, the important historical analogy with Iran today and the PLO in the early 1980s, which the Guardian’s Middle East editor fails to observe, is that Israel is again faced with increasingly well-equipped terrorist militias on their borders (Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad) – with funds, training and increasingly sophisticated weaponry provided directly by the regime in Tehran.
Every cross border raid, every missile attack, and every attempt to abduct Israeli soldiers by Iranian proxy armies in Lebanon and Gaza over the years have represented acts of war – military aggression by an Islamist state which is attempting to develop nuclear devices, producing rockets capable of delivering such a lethal payload, and whose leadership has provided explicit religious justifications for the use of weapons of mass destruction on Jewish civilians.
Black’s last paragraph included the following, which he no doubt views as an incriminating quote by Menachem Begin, to buttress the overriding narrative of an Israeli state determined to use any pretext to ignite a dangerous regional conflagration.
“Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal,” [Menachem] Begin reportedly replied as his security chiefs explained the crucial detail and significance of the London attack.
However, those of us who understand the circumstances of Israel’s wars against hostile state and non-state actors since its founding (be it Nasser, the PLO, Hezbollah, Hamas or Iran) are not swayed by Black’s crude caricature of an Israeli antagonist. We read the attributed quote and see an Israeli leader who understood that his first role was to protect his nation from harm, and that the threat posed by a well-equipped military force reigning terror down on Israeli civilians more than justified an assertive military response.
The casus belli for Operation Peace for the Galilee was self-evident, building for years, and needed no “pretext”.
The antagonists have changed, but Israeli leaders today similarly face a very real threat by an even more powerful foe.
Today, as in 1982, the Jewish state will not shy away from confronting clear and present dangers it faces, and need not morally justify – to Ian Black or others who fancy themselves sophisticated, dispassionate political sages – its fierce and unapologetic defense of its national interests, and its citizen’s lives.
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Propaganda by wife of Islamic Jihad terrorist, Khadr Adnan: Courtesy of the Guardian
February 22, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Comment is Free, Guardian, Islamic Jihad, Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, Terrorism | by Israelinurse | 1 comment
Islamic Jihad terrorist Khadr Adnan, imploring Palestinians to launch suicide attacks
Articles penned by high-ranking members of terrorist organisations proscribed by the British government – and also by UK-based supporters of those organisations – are, as we all too well know, nothing new to Comment is Free. Now we have the WAGs version of puff pieces whitewashing terror groups and their actions in the form of an article written by Randa Musa. (My husband, Khadar Adnan has shed a light on Israel’s disregard for human rights, Feb. 22).
Mrs Khadr Adnan, as she is also known, seeks to inform readers about her husband’s supposed exposure of “Israel’s disregard for human rights”. With considerable drama she tells us that as a result of Adnan’s arrest last December she “would not be surprised if even our unborn baby which I now bear will also be affected”.
Randa Musa’s concern for human rights apparently does not extend to the trauma her husband’s terror group, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, has caused to the thousands of family members of those murdered or maimed in its car bombings, suicide bombings and other terror attacks.
In fact, she tries to pass Khadr Adnan off as a “student activist” which, to British readers probably conjures images of someone whose activities stretch to handing out flyers or drawing placards.
The truth is of course very different.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s own website describes Adnan as a “leader” of the organisation on more than one occasion. Reuters described him as a “senior figure in the Islamic Jihad” in 2010 and AP as “a top Islamic Jihad leader” in 2005. The Gulf Daily News has him down as “West Bank spokesman of the militant Islamic Jihad group” whilst Middle East Online and IMEMC both describe him as an “Islamic Jihad spokesperson”.
And if there were any further doubts about Adnan’s terrorist ideologies and affiliations, they are quickly dispelled in this video from 2007 in which he solicits suicide bombers.
Apparently banking on her readers’ lack of geographic knowledge, Musa tells us that “life under Israel’s military occupation has turned our dream into a nightmare”. However, their village – Arraba – has in fact been under Palestinian Authority control since the Oslo Accords in the earlier part of the 1990s.
Randa Musa makes the ridiculous claim that Administrative Detention is “part of an immoral policy used to keep Palestinians in a state of perpetual poverty and under-development”. In fact it is a means used by many democratic human rights-respecting countries around the world including the United States and the United Kingdom.
Despite having a degree in Islamic Law, Musa displays her ignorance of other forms of law when she states that:
In fact, the laws of Administrative Detention require that the detainee be brought before a judge within a short period of time. Detentions must be based upon evidence and all detainees – including members of terrorist organisations – have Habeas Corpus rights before the High Court of Justice.
Musa states that “the occupation has decided under pressure to free my husband in April” (emphasis added) whereas in fact Adnan’s detention was due to come to an end on April 17th in any case.
This self-described “devoted wife” is of course no less a propagandist for Islamist terror than her husband. Her concern for human rights, “freedom and dignity” is not universal and certainly does not apply to the ultimate right – the right to life – which her husband and his fellow PIJ members seek to deny Israelis.
She is also apparently prepared even to use her own children in furthering the Islamist cause. The picture illustrating Musa’s article is captioned as showing her daughter holding “a picture of her father, Khader Adnan, who is on hunger strike”.
The caption omits the fact that the child is also holding the flag of Islamic Jihad – a movement well-known for its indoctrination of children with hatred and glorification of terrorism.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad scouting boys wear uniforms and painted faces during a protest demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails, at the Palestinian Legislative council in Gaza city, Monday, Aug. 16, 2004. (http://tiny.cc/w0b62)
A Palestinian woman supporting Islamic Jihad attended a Gaza Strip rally Friday marking the 13th anniversary of the death of the group’s leader, Fathi Shekaki (http://tiny.cc/6s2su)
In indulging its now infamous addiction to terrorist chic, the Guardian long since ditched its liberal credentials to such an extent that it is not ashamed to publish unchallenged fact-free articles by terrorists and their collaborators.
One would, however, have hoped that a terrorist organisation’s exploitation of a child for propaganda purposes would have been a step too far even for the Guardian. Apparently not.
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