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Deborah Orr will go down in the Guardian hall of shame as the journalist whose antisemitic smear in a column was so explicit she was evidently pressured to issue an apology (albeit a mealy-mouthed one), and whose commentary was so hateful that Israel’s ambassador to the UK cited it as an egregious example of British antisemitism. She also featured prominently in HonestReporting’s 2011 Dishonest Reporting award, which the Guardian won by a landslide.
Here’s the most important passage in Orr’s essay, Is an Israel life really more important than a Palestinian’s?, which was dripping with contempt for Jewish citizens of Israel.
“It’s quite something, the prisoner swap between Hamas and the Israeli government that returns Gilad Shalit to his family, and more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to theirs…[which is] an indication of how inured the world has become to the obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives.”
“At the same time, however, 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. “[emphasis added]
The capacity to impute racism to Israel because it freed over a thousand Palestinian prisoners (many serving sentences for lethal attacks against Israeli civilians) to gain the release of one Israeli demonstrates the seemingly unlimited capacity of anti-Zionists to vilify the Jewish state in response to any political phenomenon.
Regarding her swipe at “the chosen”, Guardian readers’ editor Chris Elliott, in a piece in November curiously titled “on averting accusations of antisemitism“, included this clear reference to Orr:
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.
While Orr has avoided commenting on the Middle East since then, she hasn’t been quiet on Twitter (see here and here ); a forum which often serves as journalists’ Id, allowing them to enter political territory they otherwise wouldn’t dare go, thus the ubiquitous disclaimer: “My Tweets are my own“.
Indeed, only a couple of weeks after the “chosen people” row, Orr, in an exchange with a critic, Tweeted this:
Her Tweet couldn’t be more clear: Jews/Zionists wield power so immense that they can silence Israel’s critics – a suggestion that’s laughable in light of the obsessive criticism the Jewish state receives in the media, from self-described “activists” and at international bodies such as the UNHRC. I’ve often joked that if Zionists are indeed engaged in a concerted effort to silence their critics, they’re doing an awfully bad job.
Orr’s latest foray into the debate over Israel was her reply to a CiF Watch Tweet, which noted Orr’s history of Jew baiting in the context of a thread inspired by a recent Commentator piece about Guardian diary editor Hugh Muir. (Also see this piece on Muir).
Here’s another CiF Watch Tweet, citing a relevant example of such Guardian behavior:
Orr then Tweeted the following responses:
Here’s the first one, clearly suggesting that she still defends her reprehensible November Guardian essay on the Shalit prisoner deal.
Admittedly, the rhetorical limits of Twitter makes it impossible to adequately express complex ideas, but I’ll quickly try to unpack this.
By “your”, she could be referring to CiF Watch the organization, myself, or our cadre of contributors and volunteers, or perhaps Zionists and/or Jews. But, either way, we stand accused of engaging in a (“paradoxical”) “aggressive” defense of our “victimhood”, rendering us unserious.
I don’t think it’s unfair to connect these words with her Tweet noted above from November.
Zionists, believes Orr, (who she already established are burdened with racist notions of their own superiority) attempt to silence their critics.
How do we achieve such a herculean task?
Per her most recent Tweet, Orr may think we cynically exploit our past victimhood in an attempt to gain impunity from current sins.
If this is her proposition it certainly isn’t the first time Jews/Zionists have stood accused of engaging in such moral blackmail. Indeed, a quite familiar trope used by antisemites against Zionists and their Jewish supporters is that they exploit the Holocaust and past antisemitism to blunt criticism about Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.
While I can’t of course get into Orr’s mind, her columns and Tweets certainly erode any hope that she used the response to her November Guardian essay as an opportunity to engage in serious self-reflection about the dangers of engaging in Judeophobic narratives.
I’m very curious to hear readers’ thoughts on Orr’s Tweet, and whether folks think I’m reading too much into her 121 character missive.
Related articles
- Clip of Israeli Amb to UK, Daniel Taub, blasting Deborah Orr at ‘Big Tent for Zionism’ conference (cifwatch.com)
- Another pejorative reference to Jews as “Chosen People” by a Guardian contributor (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s duty to Jews on Yom HaShoah? Don’t publish accusations that we’re “supremacists”! (cifwatch.com)
- Lost in anti-Zionist translation? Guardian misquotes Noam Shalit on Palestinian hostage taking (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian “journalist” Style Guide related dilemmas: Palestinian “Terrorism” edition (cifwatch.com)
- My speech on countering delegitimization @ ‘Big Tent for Zionism’ conference: Manchester, Nov. 27 (cifwatch.com)
- Ghetto Jews: Most unintelligible & offensive Israel related Guardian letter ever? (cifwatch.com)
The Guardian’s sports section is currently running a series entitled ’50 stunning Olympic moments’.
The placing of an article about the murders of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 games under that heading may well be considered a failure of judgment and good taste, but the article itself is very competent – especially in highlighting the gross failures of the both the German and Olympic authorities throughout and after the terror attack.
More, then, is the pity that the author – Simon Burnton – chose to end a lengthy, informative and well-written piece with the following unfortunate sentence, for which he was duly taken to task by commenters below the line.
“Away from the Olympic gaze, meanwhile, Palestinians continue to die for their cause, and Israelis for theirs.”
But still, we are in the realms of taste and decency here, just as we were in July 2010 when the Guardian chose to run an obituary for the mastermind of the Munich attack – Abu Daoud – in which the terrorist was described as:
“Mohammed Daoud Oudeh (Abu Daoud), guerrilla leader, teacher and lawyer, born 1937; died 3 July 2010″.
However, even the Guardian’s sports section is not immune to the malaise of racist stereotyping as so often seen at ‘Comment is Free’.
Related articles
- ‘Comment is Free’ places obituary for Israeli PM’s father on ‘Palestinian Territories’ page. (cifwatch.com)
- Mehdi Hasan croons the Iran chorus on ‘Comment is Free’. (cifwatch.com)
- Faces of the IDF & faces of stereotypes: Countering the Guardian’s crude caricature of Israelis (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian, Raed Salah and Yom HaShoah. (cifwatch.com)
- Anti-Zionist propaganda as literary criticism: How the Guardian demonizes Israel without really trying (cifwatch.com)
- ‘Elder of Ziyon’ responds to the Guardian’s Ben White on BDS. (cifwatch.com)
- CST secures amendments on the ‘Comment is Free’ website. (cifwatch.com)
- New Think Tank Formed to Combat Campus Antisemitism (cifwatch.com)
- You may need to read this twice – the Guardian Denies that Jerusalem is Israel’s Capital. (cifwatch.com)
In the Guardian Diary, on their Op Ed Page, on April 19th, with the grossly misleading headline, “A BNP bigwig writing for the Jewish Chronicle. Some mistake surely?, Hugh Muir, writes:
With their party in laughable disarray, most members of Nick Griffin’s far-right BNP seem content to keep their heads down. But others have careers to build and division to sow. Thus, even in this period of hibernation, they seek a profile. One such is Carlos Cortiglia, who needs to put himself about, not least because he is standing as the party’s mayoral candidate for London. But platforms are hard to find. What to do? His solution has been nothing if not canny; he has been blogging on the Jewish Chronicle. It was easy, for until recently the paper had a system where any reader could set up their own blog and publish their thoughts. He penned at least three blog posts there, all moderate by the standards of JC bloggers, in fact “completely innocuous” as described by editor Stephen Pollard. Unacceptable nevertheless. For although it boasts a Jewish councillor in Essex, the BNP never seems far from the whiff of antisemitism. Griffin, we know, received a conviction in 1998 for distributing material likely to incite racial hatred, and in the course of the prosecution made statements denying the Holocaust. Recently antisemitism appeared to fuel a row between activists on the south coast. “Hitler had a purpose with the Jews,” tweeted one local organiser approvingly. That’s the least offensive quote I could find. The BNP and the Chronicle were never a good fit.
Cortiglia’s blog project endured until Wednesday when the Muslim Public Affairs Committee [MPACUK] put out a story claiming that the BNP man had been hired as a columnist. He never was. But a screenshot taken that morning shows his name at the top of the list of JC bloggers. Google’s cache records that his words were still available then. One blog was dated 23 November. That conflicts with Pollard’s account that he became aware of Cortiglia’s blog and deleted all trace of it “last September”. Still, by Wednesday afternoon the purge was indeed complete and the site amended to explain that only approved people can blog for the Chronicle. [emphasis added]
Of course, the suggestion that the Jewish Chronicle would knowingly associate with a BNP member is beyond ludicrous, and the innuendo that Pollard knowingly employed the services of an open BNP blogger is a smear, and grossly defamatory.
Here was Pollard’s Tweet in response to the Guardian post:
Further, I spoke to Pollard on the phone on Friday, and here’s what else the Guardian blogger got wrong.
- Pollard, who was interviewed about the story by the Guardian’s ‘Belief’ editor, Andrew Brown, never claimed he became aware of Cortiglia’s blog and deleted all trace of it “last September”, only that he learned of it sometime in autumn. He made clear that the JC blocked the BNP member as soon as it was alerted to his presence on the site.
- Muir’s suggestion that Pollard misrepresented himself in the timeline of events is an outright falsehood.
- Even more insidious is the suggestion that Cortiglia’s BNP’s affiliation was known ahead of time by the Jewish Chronicle. As Pollard clearly and unambiguously informed the Guardian, they absolutely did not. As soon as they were alerted to the man’s BNP membership they immediately barred his access to the Jewish Chronicle site. They didn’t remove his post then. They blocked him from posting again, but his three existing posts did remain in the archive. They said Pollard lied about this because his posts were still searchable, but Pollard NEVER claimed he removed them.
- And, Muir’s most gratuitous, tendentious, and misleading line was this: “The BNP and the Chronicle were never a good fit.” It never was a good fit because Cortiglia’s BNP affiliation was never to known to the Chronicle when he was blogging. The JC had a system of open access blogging, through which anyone could register and immediately set up their own blog. Their was no provision for checking the political affiliations of any blogger, any more than the Guardian checks out the affiliations of people who leave comments on CiF. Once the JC realized that their system had been abused by the BNP, they changed the entire system and removed the open access. Blogs are now only hosted from those invited to blog by the paper. [emphasis added]
- The BNP and the Jewish Chronicle are as far removed ideologically as possible and to suggest otherwise, by innuendo and rhetorical obfuscation, is the height of irresponsible journalism, and represents yet another smear by the Guardian of the UK Jewish community.
By comparison to U.S. blogger Richard Silverstein’s coverage of the The JC, however, the Guardian’s journalistic indiscretions are less egregious.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Silverstein, taking the lead of Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK (MPACUK), outright lied about Pollard and the Chronicle. While anyone even remotely familiar with Silverstein shouldn’t be surprised by anything published at the blog of the former Comment is Free contributor, the following truly should win an award for outright dishonesty.
Here’s the revised version of Silverstein’s original story about the row over Cortiglia, which originally contained a headline similar to the MPACUK lie, which suggested that the BNP candidate had been hired as a columnist by The JC. (subsequently removed, but confirmed by Pollard)
Notice, Silverstein is still shamelessly writing (in the caption under the photo of Cortiglia) that The JC “offered” the white supremacist a blogging platform, which is a complete and total lie.
Plus, notice the similarity between Silverstein’s headline and that of MPACUK.
Briefly, MPACUK‘s extremism and antisemitism is well documented. They have promoted the idea of a worldwide Zionist conspiracy and used material taken from neo-Nazi, white nationalist, and Holocaust denial websites. A report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Anti-Semitism also notes the CST’s assertion that “[t]he use of ‘Zionist’ as a replacement for ‘Jewish’ is common on the MPACUK website” and that MPACUK has articulated antisemitic conspiracy theories through the language of anti-Zionism.
In a later post, Silverstein weighed in on the contrasting versions of events between Pollard and the Guardian’s Muir, thusly:
[All of this] leaves one wondering who to believe: an Islamophobic pro-Israel ultranationalist or a reporter for one of England’s most distinguished newspapers.
Silverstein calling Pollard “Islamophobic” and “ultra-nationalist” just means, of course, that he, and his paper, supports Israel’s right to exist, and isn’t afraid to condemn Islamist antisemitism when they see it.
As far as Silverstein’s characterization of the Guardian as “one of England’s most distinguished newspapers”? Well, if by “distinguished” he means, unique in conflating reactionary, violent, antisemitic Islamism with progressive thought, he’s correct. In this category, the UK broadsheet is truly in a class by itself.
As recently as April 19, Yom HaShoah, they provided a platform to radical Islamist preacher Raed Salah, promoter of medieval blood libels, who proceeded to accuse the UK Jewish community of being “supremacists”.
Inayat Bunglawala, an Islamist who believes that the the BBC and the rest of the media are “Zionist controlled” was a contributor to ‘Comment is Free’.
A six month study by Just Journalism published in August 2011 demonstrated that ’three of the Palestinians who contributed op-eds to ‘Comment is Free’ during a six month period [during the 'Palestine Papers' series] were either members of Hamas or strongly affiliated with it, and have endorsed terrorist attacks.” The report concluded:
“The decision, by ‘Comment is Free’ [editors] to repeatedly offer a platform to signed-up Hamas members is the logical, if distasteful, outcome of its preference for those who fundamentally disagree with Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”
Again, bear in mind, these hateful extremists were not blogging in an open blogging platform, but were approved and published by Guardian editors.
Here are excerpts from an email Pollard sent to Silverstein in response to his baldface lies.
Mr Silverstein,
I did not bother to respond to your earlier post in which you simply made up a story, that the JC had announced a new columnist – the BNP candidate for mayor. Quite why you would choose to post a lie, which you must have known was a lie – since you made it up – is your problem, not mine
I suggest that you preface any posts about me and the JC with the words: “This post is made up and has no basis in fact”.
Stephen Pollard
Some final thoughts.
Silverstein is one of the more shrill, dishonest, and hateful extreme left commentators in a very crowded anti-Zionist blogosphere, and, as the title of his blog, Tikkun Olam, (To heal the world), continues to make a mockery of such self-styled progressives bloggers.
Several months ago, for instance, he thought nothing of exposing the identity of a Zionist blogger, including his address, potentially placing his entire family at risk.
Also, for those unfamiliar with his brand of “liberalism”, and self-styled promoter of “social justice”, it includes expressions of support for a one-state solution, repeated defenses of terror groups like Hamas, and characterizations of IDF soldiers as “bestial” and “subhuman.
And, he has even likened Israel to Nazi Germany.
Finally, the very notion that the UK Jewish community could even conceivably find common cause with the BNP would be dismissed out of hand by all but the supremely dishonest or those ideologically conditioned to find such implausible alliances politically convenient enough to advance.
The behavior of both Silverstein and the Guardian in this episode (demonizing a mainstream UK Jewish publication, while finding ways to legitimize the most reactionary political forces in the world today, under the absurd veneer of “progressive” thought) demonstrate what this blog has argued continually.
Much of the the modern Left is in a deep ideological crisis, one which they don’t seem prepared to acknowledge, yet alone overcome.
Related articles
- I’m a Pro-Israel Muslim: So Why did UJS Ban Me? (cifwatch.com)
- Bigotry & justifications for terror as ‘progressive’ politics: Air Flotilla 2′s York PSC contingent (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch Gossip of the Day: Harriet Sherwood “Head Spinning” Edition (cifwatch.com)
- Chas Newkey-Burden reflects on his love of Israel & Judaism: “The missing part of the jigsaw” (cifwatch.com)
Cross posted by Alan A at Harry’s Place
In the Guardian’s op ed by Raed Salah, the following footnote has been added:
In the thread below, there has been some discussion about statements that Raed Salah allegedly made. The Comment editor Becky Gardiner has commented, setting out the judgement here and here. Raed Salah has also replied here.
This is what Becky Gardiner says:
Raed Salah’s amanuensis adds in his name:
After a 10-month legal battle, I have now been cleared on “all grounds” by a senior immigration tribunal judge, who ruled that May’s decision to deport me was “entirely unnecessary” and that she had been “misled”. The evidence she relied on (which had been given to her by the Community Security Trust, a British charity, and included a poem of mine about oppression which been doctored to make it appear anti-Jewish) was not, he concluded, a fair portrayal of my views. The judge said the one short passage in a speech that May used as evidence that I had repeated the so-called “blood libel” [the medieval accusation that Jews use the blood of Christian children to make bread] “was not a sample [of my views], or ‘the tip of the iceberg’: it is simply all the evidence there is.” In reality, I wasn’t referring to any such thing. I reject any and every form of racism, including anti-Semitism. I don’t believe in the “blood libel” against Jews and I reject it in its entirety. What I was really referring to in my sermon was the killing of innocents in the name of religion, including children, from the time of the Inquisition to as recently as Bosnia and elsewhere in Europe whose governments support Israel’s action. In fact, what May has neglected to consider in respect of the speech is that I also said in the speech ‘we are not malicious and we will not be malicious, thus we will also protect the honour of the Jewish synagogues.’ I have no doubt that, despite this, Israel’s cheerleaders in Britain will continue to smear my character. This is the price every Palestinian leader and campaigner is forced to pay.
So, that’s the Guardian’s position.
On Holocaust Memorial Day.
There is a whole bunch of evidence, unused in the trial and unquestioned, that shows the nature of Raed Salah. Becky Gardiner is very much aware of it herself, because I know that “a senior Guardian figure” took it to her, in an attempt to get her to publish just ONE piece explaining why liberals and progressives ought not to back Raed Salah.
Articles were written. They were submitted by a number of people to the Guardian. They weren’t even acknowledged.
Becky Gardiner’s view, I’m afraid to say, was that Comment is Free should not offer a platform to those who wanted to oppose Raed Salah’s incitement and racism. She saw opposition to Zionism as a sort of Manichean struggle, in which she was on the side of the angels.
The “senior Guardian figure” was quite surprised. But obviously, he did nothing about it because, you know, we mustn’t make a fuss.
This is the year in which antisemitism became a mainstream “progressive” cause. Fancy joining the fightback?
Related articles
- The Guardian, Raed Salah and Yom HaShoah. (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian again defends Islamist antisemite Raed Salah, attacks Community Security Trust (cifwatch.com)
- Why is the ‘liberal’ Guardian still rooting for a reactionary antisemitic Islamist named Raed Salah? (cifwatch.com)
Like this:
A whole nation is at this moment remembering the slaughter of two-thirds of its members’ population in Europe.
That genocide was fuelled and enabled by the spreading of a racist supremacist ideology which sought to rid its subscribers’ country from ‘contamination’ by Jews.
That ideology was propagated in the minds of another nation by the spreading of false tales about Jewish evil-doing and coordinated scheming and by the dehumanisation of Jews to such a degree that even if they did not directly take part, millions stood by and watched as one of the most shocking events in human history took place.
Barely had the strains of the memorial siren which was sounded this morning all over Israel as a mark of respect for the six million victims of racist hatred faded away, when the Guardian chose to publish an article on its ‘Comment is Free’ website penned by Raed Salah – a man who holds beliefs and ideologies virtually indistinguishable from those which caused the events that siren commemorates.
The editors of the Guardian have fought in Raed Salah’s corner ever since the affair began.
Now, once again, their immature “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” stance has caused them to tarnish the battered reputation of a once respected newspaper (and prove themselves to be eminently lacking in taste) by publishing Salah’s bizarre claims of being the victim of a “smear campaign” by “Israel’s cheerleaders in Britain” and that his anti-Semitic ‘poem’ “had been doctored” in order to frame him.
Those editors also permit Salah to launch a tirade of lies and distortions on everything from marriage laws, municipal and government budgets and equal pay laws to the well-worn subject on Guardian pages of Al Arakib and deliberate misrepresentation of the Balfour Declaration.
More gravely still, they allow Salah an unfettered platform from which to make the ridiculous – and dangerous – claims that official Israeli policy includes transfer and ethnic cleansing and that Israel is destroying the al Aqsa mosque.
There can be little doubt that some at the Guardian actually subscribe to at least parts of the genre of lies propagated by Raed Salah. There can be even less doubt that those who do not must be so intimidated by the prevailing organisational culture that they cannot curb the publication of such a blatantly outrageous article by a religious supremacist and separatist who subscribes to Hamas ideologies and aspirations alarmingly similar to the one the victims of which are being commemorated today.
Raed Salah has made a career out of extremism and incitement. That is who he is and what he does. However uncomfortable it may be, it is necessary to admit that – as his planned speaking tour proves – there is an audience for that kind of extremism in the United Kingdom as well as the Middle East.
But extremists do not get very far without the middle-men who re-package and re-brand their ideas and move them into the mainstream.
There are too many of these middle-men in Britain today.
Some of them sit in the House of Lords and in Parliament whilst others hold office in churches or so-called human rights organisations and charities.
Still more are members of Trade Unions, the academia or the media.
These people take the lies and dehumanisation of extremists such as Raed Salah and wrap them in a veneer made possible by their own standing which allows pernicious ideas to be spread to a general public which would otherwise not come into contact with them.
This is not to suggest that the editors of the Guardian and others are plotting a new genocide against the Jews. Indeed they would doubtless be horrified by the very suggestion. But what they are doing by uncritically publishing and promoting the lies and libels of extremists such as Salah and various Hamas functionaries and supporters is shifting hate-speech against Jews and Israelis alike into the realm of mainstream opinion.
As we should all (Guardian editors included) know by now and as we are reminded today, Yom HaShoah, such hate-speech does not exist in a vacuum.
“The power of the media to create and destroy fundamental human values comes with great responsibility. Those who control the media are accountable for its consequences.”
Related articles
- Yom HaShoah: ‘Unto every person there is a name’. (cifwatch.com)
- Why is the ‘liberal’ Guardian still rooting for a reactionary antisemitic Islamist named Raed Salah? (cifwatch.com)
- Harriet Sherwood cynically exploits a Holocaust survivor on Yom HaShoah to criticize Israel (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian again defends Islamist antisemite Raed Salah, attacks Community Security Trust (cifwatch.com)
H/T Al
I’d really love to know the identity of the Guardian editor who decided to publish the following letter (Guardian Weekly Letters, 20 April 2012), that we commented on yesterday. The letter, by Niels Engelsted, was evidently an allusion to the security fence Israel is building along the Sinai border in response to an increase in Jihadist activity after Mubarak’s fall:
While this blog is constantly revealing that the intellectual ghetto inhabited by Israel haters allows for the most “enlightened” souls to frame even the most innocuous Israeli act in a way which imputes maximum malice, this pseudo psychological analysis of Israeli Jews is in a class of its own. And, I truly wonder at the cognitive process by which the decision, by Israel, to erect a security fence along an internationally recognized border to prevent terrorism can be construed as an indication of Jews’ subconscious need to relive the glory days of forced exclusion from non-Jewish society.
Well, sometime following our post, and a few sharply worded emails from concerned readers later, the letter was removed from the Guardian’s site, and this now appears on the page.
I’m sure it was an honest mistake by one lone editor and in no way should be construed as part of a larger pattern of institutional hostility to Israel. Indeed, banish the very thought!
Related articles
- Ghetto Jews: Most unintelligible & offensive Israel related Guardian letter ever? (cifwatch.com)
- Why is the ‘liberal’ Guardian still rooting for a reactionary antisemitic Islamist named Raed Salah? (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian contributor David Wearing’s Twitter pic: The Israeli Grinch who steals Christmas (cifwatch.com)
- Hebron’s Hardline Jewish Settlers! A Harriet Sherwood production (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian, Khaled Diab and the Gilad Atzmon antisemitism test (cifwatch.com)
- Being an Israeli & a Jew in 2012: Let’s face reality without illusion, shrug & move forward (cifwatch.com)
- Former Nazi Gunter Grass & ‘liberal’ broadsheet called the Guardian (Analysis of coverage) (cifwatch.com)
- Following our post & complaint, Guardian amends Khaled Diab’s CiF essay: Removes Atzmon passage (cifwatch.com)
Guardian Weekly Letters, 20 April 2012 included this:
So, what seems to be an attempt by Israel to protect its citizens from thousands of terrorist infiltrations from the Palestinian territories, Gaza, Sinai and Lebanon is really only a sign that Jews are stuck in an atavistic ghetto mentality.
On some psychological level, Jews evidently internalized the mores of European ghetto life, antisemitic legal requirements dictating where they could live, and are, subconsciously, attempting to recreate the glory days of 15th century Venice and 20th century Lodz and Warsaw. Hamas and Hezbollah just provide a convenient pretext!
If this letter was chosen by Guardian editors as especially meritorious, out of all which were submitted, I can only imagine what they rejected.
Related articles
- Snapshot of bias: Guardian’s Israel page is seeing double…no, triple (cifwatch.com)
- Jenin. Ten Years Since Something That Never Happened: A Learning Moment for the Guardian (cifwatch.com)
- Letter published in the Guardian: “We welcome Israel’s national theatre” (cifwatch.com)
- Suzanne Goldenberg avoids mentioning her Jenin lies at the Guardian Open Weekend (cifwatch.com)
- Seth Freedman’s attack on Israel’s Jewish nature: Classically Guardian egregious absence of context (cifwatch.com)
- Former Nazi Gunter Grass & ‘liberal’ broadsheet called the Guardian (Analysis of coverage) (cifwatch.com)
- Israel to revoke citizenship of 1.6 million Palestinian Arabs! By ‘Israel’ I mean Jordan, so Guardian yawns (cifwatch.com)
- Perpetrators as victims: Seumas Milne ignores Islamist-inspired antisemitism of Toulouse massacre (cifwatch.com)
- Faces of the IDF & faces of stereotypes: Countering the Guardian’s crude caricature of Israelis (cifwatch.com)
As I was Tweeting last night at Ben Gurion Airport while covering the extremist organized Anti-Zionist provocation known as ‘Air Flotilla 2‘, I came across these Tweets on the Fly2Palestine hash tag. They were so over the top they could have almost been sent by a Zionist troll, or one of those intentionally fake Twitter accounts which parody well-known Twitterers.
This Twitterer is?
Yes, Ali Abunimah: co-founder of Electronic Intifada, bold one-state solution proponent, and CiF contributor through 2009.
Abunimah is the man who The Jewish Forward characterized as a “rock star” in the title of a complimentary profile. Interestingly, The Forward subsequently changed the title to “Lightening Rod of the BDS Movement” but evidently forgot to wipe clean the original title from its Facebook page.
It looks like the Forward’s social media manager isn’t quite on top of things!
Oh, and one last thing. The most risible line from the progressive Jewish paper’s piece on the advocate of the Jewish state’s demise, was this:
[Abunimah] speaks out frequently against anti-Semitism, partly, he says, because he’s often accused of it. Zionism, he claims, is itself form of anti-Semitism — the idea that all Jews should live, and can only be safe, in Israel.
Well, that’s not quite fair. Here’s exactly how he’s framed it.
“supporting Zionism is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.”
I simply can’t imagine why he’d be accused of antisemitism.
Related articles
- ‘Air Flotilla 2′ Participants – the trailer (Anti-Zionist ‘activists’ consumed by hate) (cifwatch.com)
- Israeli Jews characterized as Nazis on the ‘Air Flotilla 2′ Facebook account (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch Special Report: Latest Assault on Israel’s legitimacy, ‘Air Flotilla 2′, April 15th, 2012 (cifwatch.com)
- ‘Airflotilla 2′ & “normal,average Europeans” (cifwatch.com)
- Bigotry & justifications for terror as ‘progressive’ politics: Air Flotilla 2′s York PSC contingent (cifwatch.com)
- Classic anti-Zionist PR strategy employed by ‘Flytilla 2′ activists: Fail Miserably, Claim Victory (cifwatch.com)
- Ali Abunimah Tweets for a third violent Intifada (cifwatch.com)
- Live Blogging from Ben Gurion Airport for ‘Flytilla 2′: latest extremist inspired Anti-Zionism PR stunt (cifwatch.com)
A guest post by AKUS
Goldenberg with Guardian's Middle East editor Ian Black at 'Open Weekend' 2012
While looking once again at the disgusting role the Guardian, and, in particular, Suzanne Goldenberg, played in disseminating the lies about the so-called “Jenin massacre” I came across a videoclip of a workshop held by the Guardian for the paying faithful (Weekend pass: £60) called the frontline debate at Guardian Open Weekend. The Guardian lined up Suzanne Goldenberg, Emma Graham-Harrison (just recruited from Reuters), Martin Chulov, and Ian Black, in what they referred to as a “debate” moderated by Lindsay Hilsum (International Editor for Channel 4 News and frequent contributor to the Guardian and Observer – 2002 TV story of the year runner up for Jenin reporting) for this event.
Actually, it was not a debate – it was a panel discussion and exercise in group-think amongst an incestuous group of mainly Israel-bashing reporters who have known each other for decades, with the exception of Graham-Harrison who seemed a little uncertain about her role in the event. There was no debate, there were no opposing views about anything, and it was attended by,I would estimate from the videocam pictures, as perhaps 20 Guardianista groupies.
If you do not think “groupies” is a fair term to describe the attendees, and have the energy to watch it all the way through, you will see one middle-aged person, worried about the digital age, expressing her undying love for the print version of the Guardian (“I’m an avid consumer of the print version. God, I love the print version. It gives me an enormous amount of pleasure every day”). I was left wondering what strange views of the world this woman must have, since reading every word, every day, in a paper like the Guardian, must surely create an alternative world view that most of us outside the Guardian bubble can hardly begin to comprehend.
Well, feeding straight into the carefully-crafted GWV of people like this we had the Goldenberg view of the ME. She managed to refer to the Middle East (Israel and Iraq were once her beats) without once mentioning her despicable role in creating the Jenin massacre libel (along with, of course, Brian Whitaker and the entire stable of anti-Israeli Guardian journalists, including weekend panelist Ian Black).
Goldenberg, like Judge Goldstein for his Gaza report, should never be forgiven for the damage she did to Israel with her reporting about Jenin. While she and the Guardian were not the only sources of the libels, and the BBC and CNN have much to answer for, her articles set the tone. In 2002, after leaving Israel for the US (see below), she won Journalist of the Year award with the BBC’s John Kampfner for her reporting from Israel and his from Gaza– awards, surely, in a minor way, as little deserved and cynical as Yasser Arafat’s Nobel Peace prize.
On the Guardian’s website, Goldenberg is shown as the Guardian’s “US Environment Correspondent”. Links to her other reporting activities avoid a link to her reports from Israel.
She left Israel after then head of the Israeli government press office , Daniel Seaman, denied her access to Israeli briefings after accusing her (and several other reporters) of acquiescing to control of her reporting by Yasser Arafat in order for her to get access to West Bank and Gazan sources (“fixers”). The manipulation of journalists and media in this way by the PA has been extensively documented by Stephanie Gutmann in her important book, “The Other War”. Although Rusbridger denied this was the reason for Goldenberg’s withdrawal, clearly she was no longer useful in her position in Jerusalem. The Guardian has never retracted her reports and has never apologized in print for its coverage of the battle in Jenin. Rusbridger has only made a verbal retraction in a barely noticed comment on March 3rd, 2008 (six years later!) at the Jewish Book Week’s closing session in London.
There are two clips recording her comments that the Guardian extracted from the panel discussion. The first is:
In which she recounts how sad she was when, as a result of the first intifada, barriers went up between Jerusalem and Ramallah, due to the mistrust between Israelis and West Bank Arabs. She ignores the horror, deaths, and brutality of the suicide bombings. Her theme for the weekend was “How the contacts (between Israelis and Palestinians) withered and how that fed the conflict” – never mentioning how her virulent reporting contributed to the bitterness.
The second refers to her shameless attitude to misreporting and creating the news:
‘Your job is to make people connect to the story’ – video
“I can’t predict accurately what will make a big impact and what will not”.
Fair enough, if what she reported is really what happened. But in fact the hallmark of her reporting from Israel, culminating in her lies about what happened in Jenin as a result of the second intifada, was the creation of a story with “big impact” by grabbing onto and reporting every rumor and lie spread by the likes of Saeeb Erekat and other Palestinians such as Nabil Shaath without any serious attempt at corroboration from the IDF.
Israel’s Defensive Shield operation in Jenin ran from April 1 – April 11, 2002. In an article from April 9, Toll of the bloody battle of Jenin, she recounted the fierce opposition met by Israeli forces. The article carries the almost certainly incorrect sub-header
“Suzanne Goldenberg in the West Bank town that has seen a ‘victory’ for militiamen bought at the terrible price of 13 Israelis and 100 Palestinians dead”
Since reporters were not allowed in by Israel, she herself wrote
What little independent information has trickled out of the camp has arrived through the accounts of Palestinian men, who were detained and released by the invading Israeli forces, or through sporadic telephone phone calls with residents of Jenin camp and town.
But as time went by, to get the “impact” she needed and make “make people connect to the story”, the description of events became more and more reliant on the wild exaggerations of the PA spokesmen.
For example, in the article Disaster zone hides final death toll, even when it was apparent that the death toll in Jenin was dozens and not hundreds, and even she referred to only 16 confirmed Arab deaths (later to rise to 52) she continued beating the drum of anti-Israeli lies.
She continued the attempt to give the impression of hundreds of innocents had been massacred. To help “people connect to the story” and give it “impact”, she added unsubstantiated “accounts” of “scores of bodies beneath the ruins”:
There are also accounts of scores of bodies beneath the ruins – especially at the centre of the camp where some 200 homes were crushed by Israeli army bulldozers – reputedly with people inside – in a frenzied demolition campaign on the last two days of fighting.
As her stories developed, references to Israeli casualties disappeared, and from the start there was no context provided by mentioning the reason for the Defensive Shield action, of which Jenin was one battle, (increasing terrorist attacks culminating in the real massacre of innocents at the Park Hotel Seder). In fact, Goldenberg is credited with only one article about the Park Hotel massacre, Suicide bomb kills 16 Israelis in hotel, co-written with Graham Usher while she was in Beirut. She was reporting there on a now long-forgotten meeting where the Saudis laid out their peace plan while preventing Arafat from participating by satellite link. She reported, ironically in light of the events we are witnessing in Syria a decade later, contemporaneously (March 27, 2002) with the Park Hotel massacre:
“Syria’s Bashar Assad called on Arab leaders to support the Palestinian uprising, and condemned the Jewish state as a “living example” of terrorism.”
The Guardian reader was left with the utterly false impression that what happened in Jenin was an event at least on the scale of a Bosnia visited for no reason at all on defenseless, peaceful people. In fact, the claim was immediately uncritically repeated by the Guardian’s own Jonathan Freedland, writing from London – Parallel universes– who compared the Jenin battle to the Christian massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila:
The streets are strewn with corpses, and there are more underneath the wreckage. Palestinians say bodies were piled up and taken away in trucks; that men were lined up, thinking they were under arrest, and shot; that homes were hit by helicopter gunships even as civilians cowered inside. Among the dead are the elderly and the very young, left to die, it is said, because no ambulance was allowed to get near. For Palestinians, Jenin 2002 is a tragedy on a par with Beirut 1982, when Christian Phalangists massacred hundreds in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, unhindered by the Israeli army which then ruled the city.
An account of the battle on Wikipedia, adds information which provides context for the limited number of civilian casualties. This background was not mentioned by Goldenberg, who, like other journalists, was not allowed access until after the fighting had ended:
According to Efraim Karsh, before the fighting started, the IDF used loudspeakers broadcasting in Arabic to urge the locals to evacuate the camp, and he estimates that some 11,000 left. Stephanie Gutmann also noted that the IDF used bullhorns and announcements in Arabic to inform the residents of the invasion, and that the troops massed outside the camp for a day because of rain. She estimated that 1,200 remained in the camp, but that it was impossible to tell how many of them were fighters. After the battle, Israeli intelligence estimated that half the population of noncombatants had left before the invasion, and 90% had done so by the third day, leaving around 1,300 people. Others estimated that 4,000 people had remained in the camp. Some camp residents reported hearing the Israeli calls to evacuate, while others said they did not. Many thousands did leave the camp, with women and children usually permitted to move into the villages in the surrounding hills or the neighbouring city. However, the men who left were almost all temporarily detained. Instructed by Israeli soldiers to strip before they were taken away, journalists who entered Jenin following the invasion remarked that heaps of discarded clothing in the ruined streets showed where they were taken into custody.
Not a word of this was ever reported by Goldenberg, nor, as far as I have been able to discover, by the Guardian.
Ian Black, also on the panel, co-authored which indicates how quickly the media disinformation had infected the political ranks in Europe, and repeated the exaggerations of the Palestinian Authority:
A senior Palestinian, Nabil Shaath, accused Israel of carrying out summary executions and removing corpses in refrigerated trucks. He said close to 500 people had been killed. Israel says 70 Palestinian fighters died in the fighting. “The Israeli army took six days to complete its massacre in Jenin and six days to clean it up,” Mr Shaath said.
In a speech published by then editor of Ha’aretz, Hanoch Marmori about a Jenin-inspired libel, the Abu Ali affair, Digging beneath the surface in the Middle East conflict , Marmori said:
While preparing this address, I made some inquiries about Abu Ali’s case. First, final numbers indicate that three children and four women were killed during the fighting in the Jenin refugee camp. Second, Abu Ali’s children were not among them. And third, the [influential European] magazine did not bother to tell its readers of this relatively happy end to its story. Perhaps because they are tired of writing editor’s notes on Middle East stories.
The past 20 months of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have created a real crisis of values for journalism. I believe I can compress the enormous volume of coverage and comment into four fundamental sins: obsessiveness, prejudice, condescension and ignorance. The story of Abu Ali conveniently exemplifies all four.
…
One day, historians examining this period of crisis will have to consider the circular process by which the media were transformed from observers to participants. From covering the story to playing a major part in it, to stimulating and sometimes agitating the environment for their own media purposes. The media in this cruel Israeli-Palestinian conflict are like a very rich junkie, who parks his Mercedes on the high street of a slum. You can be sure that in no time at all, everyone will be out there, pushing a whole variety of merchandise.
Change “Mercedes” to “Rolls Royce” and you have an excellent summary of the way Goldenberg covered, and the Guardian with Harriet Sherwood and Phoebe Greenwood continues to cover, the Israel beat. There are no apologies, no retractions, just an on-going effort to shovel the suspect merchandise to their loving groupies.
—
Apropos the panel discussion, Robin Shepherd’s “Commentator” had this interesting article:
4. GUARDIAN TO CHARGE 9K FOR JOURNALISM COURSE
The Kraken isn’t going away without a fight.
Having made losses before tax of £33million last year, Guardian News and Media had already announced plans for a possible Hotel Guardianista ventureNow, it seems, education is their next port of call with the group looking at plans to start a digital journalism course.
Seeing as its current crop of hacks is incapable of presenting well-reasoned journalism, one has to wonder what’ll be on the syllabus – presumably tips on how to obfuscate a lost back-and-forth in order to evade embarrassment in a manner that would leave even Harry Houdini scratching his head.
And what’ll the damage be? £9000 per year.
Perhaps now its readers will be weaned off their current force-fed diet of attacks on rising tuition fees…
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The stylish appeal of BDS movement’s tireless campaign to erode the Jewish state’s legitimacy
May 6, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, BDS, Boycott, Co-operative Group, Comment is Free, Delegitimization, Omar Barghouti, Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel | by Guest/Cross Post | 60 comments
A guest post by Gidon Ben-Zvi
A major battle was won in the just war to free the Palestinian people, or so goes the self-congratulatory bloviating of a small but vociferous clan of activists.
Better still, this hard-fought victory of right over might was achieved without a single shot being fired. Non-violent protest at its most effective, no?
Let’s put to rest the canard that the BDS Israel campaign is in any way non-violent. Prominent British lawyer Anthony Julius, in his ‘Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England’, describes the inherently violent nature of boycott campaigns:
Long before Jordan’s West Bank became Israeli-occupied Palestine, there was the Arab economic boycott of Israel, one component of a decades-long effort to eviscerate the Jewish state. And today, the song remains the same, with the BDS Israel movement not merely advocating policy change, but actively campaigning to purge Israel, both within and without the ‘Green Line’, of every last vestige of Jewish character and sovereignty.
BDS Israel is a soft war that perverts the sincere, commendable desire of students, artists and others for social justice into a movement that espouses a simplistic, distorted view of the Middle East in general and Israel in particular. By equating democratic Israel with Apartheid South Africa, BDS Israel proponents seek to fill a yawning chasm of ignorance with their own corrosive biases regarding Israel.
Once a foundation of fiction is laid, it becomes easy to build the case for isolating Israel by conjuring up the specters of discrimination, oppression and colonialism from the dark annals of human history. The ‘Never Again’ battle cry is thus hurled like a boomerang back at the most persecuted people in history. And voila, the dismantling of the Jewish State becomes as noble an aim as was that of dismantling Apartheid South Africa.
These people of good conscience who seek to do nothing more than end Israeli repression and Israeli war crimes are worthy of further examination. According to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, many of the non government organizations that are spearheading the effort to end Israel’s colonization of Palestinian land are ‘either fictional, non-existent, and even, in some cases, front-organizations for Hamas and other terror groups.’
Had The Co-operative Group been better informed, it may have sought to dole out its misguided brand of social justice at such perennial human rights violators as Sudan, Syria, Iran, or Zimbabwe.
If The Co-operative Group had the support of Palestinian rights in mind, it may have thought twice before targeting the Middle East’s only true democracy, undergirded by a robust freedom of the press and an active, independent judiciary that helps ensure the equality of all Israel’s citizens – Jew, Muslim and Christian.
If the Co-operative Group wants to fix the Middle East, it can start with the tyrannical regime in Hamas-ruled Gaza. And yet the Co-operative Group chose to single out Israel. What drives the normally rational to such distraction when Israelis introduced into the conversation?
BDS Israel was conceived at the 2001 Durban Conference on Racism, where Israel was singled as the only nation earth that warranted the imposition of boycotts, divestment and sanctions.
Next, such Palestinian luminaries as Omar Barghouti, who studies at Tel Aviv University, stepped in to act as midwives, bringing BDS Israel into existence. Barghouti has openly and repeatedly called for a one state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In other words, this founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) supports the destruction of Israel.
Finally, BDS Israel was nurtured and grew loud and fat thanks to the round-the-clock care of a cabal of guilt-stricken Western academics. Pacifist and post-modernist in their view of the world, these leading intellectual lights look back in shame at the behavior of the colonists towards the colonized. Decades later, this guilt manifests itself by way of sympathy for oppressed nations demanding self-determination.
Yet, for all of BDS Israel’s sound and fury, the movement’s leaders have precious little to point to by way of concrete accomplishments, which in itself points to a fetishizing of style over substance, of political grandstanding over principled protest.
To date, Israeli foreign exports are soaring and the Tel Aviv Stock exchange has more than doubled in the last two years. As such, the BDS movement has had no discernible impact on the Israeli economy.
Still, the guerilla chic appeal of BDS Israel all but ensures that a persistent, overblown coverage of this rather inane movement will continue well into the future.
Apparently, movements for social justice only become fashionable if they are loudly anti-Western, superficially pro-democratic yet remarkably mute when it comes to the vast majority of crimes against humanity inflicted by the once colonized against their own people.
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