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Barry Rubin: How I learned about courage from Arab Marxist & about cowardice from Western ‘Liberals’

January 13, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , | by | 16 comments

This was written by Barry Rubin

ALVY: Boy, those guys in the French Resistance were really brave….

ANNIE: I don’t know, sometimes I ask myself how I’d stand up under torture.

ALVY: You?  You kiddin’? If the Gestapo would take away your Bloomingdale’s charge card, you’d tell ‘em everything.

– Woody Allen, from Annie Hall

A little man stood on the stage in a British university hall, meticulously dressed, looking just like the scholar that he was. To look at him you would think he was the embodied stereotype of timidity. It was 1980. Iraq had just invaded Iran and I was in Exeter, England, at an academic conference. Though I hadn’t realized it before arriving, the meeting was sponsored by the Saddam Hussein government.

The speaker was Dr. Hanna Batatu, a Palestinian scholar who had spent much of his adulthood in the United States but at the time was living in Beirut. He was a Marxist who had written extensively about Iraq and Syria. His presentation was on Shia opposition groups in Iraq and he spoke about how and why they were opposing the Saddam Hussein dictatorship. Batatu didn’t exaggerate or politicize the subject. He just spoke factually.

This lecture did not meet with great approval in the audience which was, I came to realize, sprinkled with Iraqi security personnel. A few chairs away from me sat a very tall, very powerful looking man wearing bright yellow shoes and a suit the shade of blue that didn’t belong on one. He looked like a man who usually wore clothes designed so that the blood came off in the wash. He towered over Batatu. And in broken English this thug said:

You cannot say these things!

And Batatu responded without hesitation:

I am a free man and I can say whatever I want.

Wow. Batatu was living in Beirut at the time and if the Iraqis wanted to have him assassinated they could easily do so. I never met Batatu on any other occasion but I was truly inspired by that moment. How could I ever do less?

In contrast, most of the Western academics were complete sycophants, flattering Saddam and avoiding giving any offense to the repressive dictatorship. One of them later plagiarized Batatu’s paper word for word in aNew York Times op-ed piece a few weeks later.

I’m telling you this story in part because of a conversation with a colleague today in which he told me a story expressing very well the intellectual mess we are facing.

Someone had written an article in the left-wing British magazine New Statesman, which always bashes Israel sometimes in the nastiest terms, defending Israel’s  2008-2009 Gaza operation called “Cast Lead.” In the article, the writer had gone into great detail to set forth the facts of what happened and to rebut the wild allegations of war crimes and the many outright lies told about these events.

But here’s the relevant part for all of us: my colleague explained that there had been about 300 comments to that article, some positive and most negative. And, he recounted, not a single one of the negative responses cited a single fact. They did not say, for example: “Oh, you’ve gotten the numbers wrong,” or “Here’s a critical point you missed.”

No, the theme of every attack was that “only a fascist would say this” or “you cannot say such a thing.”

What these people were saying is that they don’t have to argue with you or pay attention to what you are saying. They can just close their eyes, put their hands over their ears, and scream: “Liar! Evil person! You have no right to disagree with us or else we will destroy you.”

You can see why this reminded me of the incident with Batatu. And George Orwell, too, for that matter.

My colleague continued by reciting various conversations he had with European officials and academics in which whole areas of discourse were out of bounds. For example, it was forbidden to argue that people in the Middle East might think or react differently from Westerners. But if you don’t do so how could you explain, for example, why almost 80 percent of Egyptian Muslims (and 70 percent of Egyptian voters overall) supported repressive radical Islamist parties? Or why the Palestinian leadership refused to make a compromise peace that would get them a state?

We’re not talking about races or biology here but rather about historical experiences, widely varied society, and prevalent ideas.

More broadly, we cannot live and seek the truth in a world where your facts make no difference.

Read the rest of the essay, here

The Insanity of the Middle East: A Handy Guide

November 24, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , | by | 7 comments

This was written by Barry Rubin

Every day in the Middle East, terrible things take place.

The worst are the material acts of violence and oppression. The second-worst are the lies and distortions of truth that help ensure things don’t get better.

Every day in the West, the lies are echoed, amplified, and invented. This also helps ensure things don’t get better in the Middle East and that they do get worse in the West.

Now I’ve found, from the most unexpected place, a single sentence, an ancient proverb, that explains it all. It comes from the Navahos and it goes like this:

You cannot awaken someone who pretends to be sleeping.

In other words, you cannot convince someone who is not merely mistaken but is deliberately lying. They have abandoned professional ethics, democratic and intellectual norms. They have embraced being propagandists and supporters of authoritarian and bloody regimes.

Obviously, this doesn’t apply to everyone, and in those others are the hope for something better. It is those people, who honestly don’t realize that their leaders follow foolish policy, their newspapers all too often lie, and their universities (or at least significant sections of them) have abandoned the pursuit of truth in favor of the manufacture of lies.

If that seems extreme, perhaps that means you fall into that last category of the decent but deceived. Let’s look at some specific cases.

The newspaper.

If there would ever be a last straw for me regarding what was once the English-speaking world’s greatest newspaper, it is this one, the New York Times editorial of October 19, 2011:

“One has to ask: If Mr. Netanyahu can negotiate with Hamas—which shoots rockets at Israel, refuses to recognize Israel’s existence and, on Tuesday, vowed to take even more hostages— why won’t he negotiate seriously with the Palestinian Authority, which Israel relies on to help keep the peace in the West Bank.”

What has one thing have to do with the other? Israel isn’t negotiating with Hamas on a political level but to save the life of a young Israeli who has been in horrible captivity for five years. And this is one with no illusion that Hamas will continue to wage terrorism.

But what’s really disturbing here is the idea that it is Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who have been refusing to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority rather than the other way around. It is frequently repeated in the mass media and it is so obviously absurd that it must now be considered a deliberate lie by propagandists rather than an honest or ignorant or ideologically driven error.

Funnily enough, within hours of this editorial claim we have…

The “Moderates”

The ultimate Palestinian “moderate,” Prime Minister Salam Fayyad,explained:

“We want to see an end to the Israeli occupation that began in 1967. We want the Palestinian people to live with dignity. Fayyad said the Palestinians are committed to resolving the conflict, but that “the conditions are not right to resume talks.”

In other words, even when the Palestinian prime minister openly rejects talks and even after dozens of previous rejections by him and Palestinian “President” Mahmoud Abbas, and dozens of documented acceptances of negotiations by Netanyahu and Israel, the lie that Israel doesn’t want to negotiate and the PA does is repeated.

Obviously, this is not a misunderstanding but a lie. One reason for this lie is that if the truth were to be told it would have to be explained why the “poor,” “desperate,” “victimized” Palestinians don’t want to negotiate. And the answer would have to be an uncomfortable truth:

Their leaders don’t’ want peace, compromise, or a two-state solution but total victory.

And that truth would require a change in the Western policy and understanding of the issue.

Finally, note the reaction of the leaders of the two Palestinian regimes:

Abbas told the released prisoners:

“You are freedom fighters and holy warriors for the sake of God and the homeland.”

And Hamas deputy leader Abu Marzouk insisted:

“The rest of the prisoners must be released because if they are not released in a normal way they will be released in other ways.”

By murdering Israeli civilians, both the “moderate” and the “radical” explain, these people have done nothing wrong and are free—even encouraged—to do so again in future. You cannot build a democratic state on the basis of calling terrorists “freedom fighters” (and note the “secular” Abbas’s reference to jihad).

And you cannot compromise with another side when you continue to urge and justify the deliberate murder of its civilians.

Related articles

The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins is tired of our “obsession” with Nazism and the Holocaust

October 15, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | 33 comments

The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins is just bored to death with the continuing pedestrian “Nazification of evil”.

In “Britain’s Nazi obsession betrays our insecurity“, Jenkins complains that the topic of Nazi genocide, in one form or another, continues to pervade the British national curriculum, the arts, history, and our politics – what he refers to as a national “obsession”.

Jenkins writes:

“We might have hoped that the new century would see this phase of Germany’s past set in some historical context. It was not to be.

[Yet] The British book-writing, book-selling and book-buying public seems obsessed with recounting its forefathers’ triumphs over the Germans… In 2000 there were 380 English-language titles on the Third Reich, adding to some 30,000 with the word Hitler in the title. [emphasis mine]“

Jenkins adds, wearily:

“Nazis are still a favourite [representation of evil within] the cultural wild west, the video games industry, with little sign of their being replaced by Russians or mujahideen.”

Jenkins’ diagnosis of the UK’s Nazi obsession:

“Only insecure nations should rely on creating or memorialising “necessary enemies”, as Britain appears to do with Nazism. Only frightened people seek sustenance from ancient rivalries and past victories. [emphasis mine]

Evidently, for Jenkins, Nazism should not be seen as history’s most dangerous and murderous political movement, but, rather, just one political actor in a tired national rivalry which needs to be put to rest.

Of course, Jenkins’ waning patience for the West’s continuing historical reckoning with the moral lessons learned from a Europe which allowed a totalitarian movement to arise which attempted to enslave a continent, and annihilate every Jew on the face of the earth, is a broader commentary on the post-modern relativism which informs the political zeitgeist of our day.

History since the Holocaust has demonstrated that the antisemitic evil which was presumed to be buried in Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka may have changed form but is still, most certainly, alive and well.

But, those intent on denying this tragic fact are typically the ones who also arduously attempt to frame the West’s war with militant Islam as merely a political rivalry to be negotiated or appeased rather than an existential threat and a moral challenge to the values of tolerance, pluralism and liberalism to be ardently resisted.

The Guardian’s endemic hostility to Israel is partially informed by this moral failure – an incapacity to see the annihilationist antisemitism which informs the Jewish state’s Islamist enemies (as with evil more broadly) clearly and without illusions.

As Barry Rubin observed recently:

“Part of the problem here is that all too many Western intellectuals no longer believe in fighting—or even sacrificing–for your country; patriotic pride or nationalism or religion; or even the nation-state itself.”

Israel’s fierce willingness to use force in defense of its existence, and the Jewish state’s unique national purpose, may lie at the root of Europe’s hostility towards Zionism.

Again, Rubin:

“Yet all of this also shows why Israel is the key to understanding today’s world. Israel’s survival shows that democratic societies can fight and defeat dictators and totalitarian ideologies.” 

The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins isn’t merely tired of hearing about Hitler, Nazism, and the Holocaust. 

He’s tried of the moral burden of waking up each day with the sober realization that there are real threats to our existence, and that there are some things in life worth sacrificing,  fighting, and even dying for. 

Related articles

For Israel: Better a bad press than a good epitaph.

May 18, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , | by | 14 comments

Barry Rubin’s latest post is an exceptionally cogent and lucid reply to a column recently in the New York Times written by Tom Friedman, and serves as an important response to those, like Friedman, who continue to demand – from the safety afforded to them by life in places like New York City and London, far from the conflict they opine about – that Israel make territorial concessions without ever acknowledging the very dire consequences which may result from such withdrawals.   Of course, for those following the upheavals in Egypt, its important to note that Rubin’s analysis and predictions have been spot-on, and his blog has become required reading for those who seek to gain insights about the Middle East which the mainstream media rarely, if ever, provides.

Recently, it was revealed that President Barack Obama had consulted Tom Friedman in formulating his Middle East policy. Here’s an example of where disastrous policy comes from. 

Friedman writes:

“Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel is always wondering why his nation is losing support and what the world expects of a tiny country surrounded by implacable foes. I can’t speak for the world, but I can speak for myself. I have no idea whether Israel has a Palestinian or Syrian partner for a secure peace that Israel can live with. But I know this: With a more democratic and populist Arab world in Israel’s future, and with Israel facing the prospect of having a minority of Jews permanently ruling over a majority of Arabs — between Israel and the West Bank, which could lead to Israel being equated with apartheid South Africa all over the world — Israel needs to use every ounce of its creativity to explore ways to securely cede the West Bank to a Palestinian state.”

By the way, the picture of “a minority of Jews permanently ruling over a majority of Arabs” has not been accurate since 1994, that’s 17 years ago. The Palestinian Authority rules over the West Bank Arabs. Hamas, which has now merged with the Palestinian Authority, rules in the Gaza Strip. The only non-citizen Arabs that “Jews” are ruling over are those in east Jerusalem, according to an agreement that Israel made with the PLO.

So a big part of Israel’s difficulty is that people like Friedman are perpetuating anti-Israel lies instead of attacking them.

In other words, if your enemies lie about you does that mean that you must take huge risks? There’s a clever bumper sticker that says: Never apologize. Your enemies don’t care and your friends don’t need it.

Read the rest of Rubin’s essay, here.

Reductio ad Jew: CiF contributor engages in thinly veiled anti-Semitic attack

March 28, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | 7 comments

Cengiz Çandar’s defense of Turkey’s increasingly illiberal prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (CiF, March 28), included – for anyone possessing even a modicum of understanding regarding the popular tropes and lexicon employed by modern anti-Semites - a thinly veiled, but unmistakable, attack on Jews.

The Guardian approved polemic by Candar condemned those “pro-Israel” “hawkish” “neocons” engaged in a “dangerous alliance” attempting to smear the Turkish government – such as Commentary Magazine’s Michael Rubin.

Naturally, the piece elicited the following reader comment, which stated a bit more explicitly who the culprits truly are – a comment which still has not been deleted.

For those who want to know what’s really going on in Turkey, and why criticisms of the regime in Ankara aren’t merely a neocon conspiracy,  I’d suggest reading the blog of one of the most informed writers on the Middle East, Barry Rubin.

The “non-sectarian” Yusuf al-Qaradawi

February 18, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | by | 13 comments

The best-known Muslim Brotherhood cleric in the world and one of the most famous Islamist thinkers, addressed a massive crowd today in Cairo’s Tahir Square.  As Middle East scholar Barry Rubin noted,

“Qaradawi, though some in the West view him as a moderate, supports the straight Islamist line: anti-American, anti-Western, wipe Israel off the map, foment Jihad, stone homosexuals, in short the works.”

In other words, we can expect the Guardian to whitewash Qaradawi’s extremism in future columns and, indeed, in a brief summary of the day’s rally in Cairo, the Guardian described him as merely “controversial” and characterized his speech as “non-sectarian.”

Here’s a video of an interview Qaradawi recently gave that is decidedly, let’s say, “sectarian.”

The Guardian’s Ian Katz Lies and Cries

February 11, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | 5 comments

This is cross posted by Zach at Huffington Post Monitor

We didn’t comment on it at the time, but recently Israeli ambassador to the UK Ron Prosor published a scathing critique of the Guardian’s coverage of the Palestine Papers. If you haven’t read it already you should do so right away and then come back here, because the Guardian has fired back in the form of an editorial by Ian Katz, Deputy Editor. The main thing we learn from the article is that though the Guardian is quite happy to attack anything they can get their hands on (and fact check later) they cannot handle being the target of criticism themselves. I’m not going to go through the whole post by I did want to hit some highlights.

Mr. Katz’s tactics on this post are somewhat short of fisking. Instead it is more in the style of “Can you believe he said that?!” repeated over and over, with the assumption that the audience would simply accept Mr. Katz’s view as true and Mr. Prosor’s view as false.  But with the Huffington Post, that’s not a bad assumption. Where this was less pronounced is in Mr. Prosor’s attacks on the Guardian itself, but we will get to that in a minute.

First we’ll talk about the Palestine Papers, where Mr. Katz continues to cling to the myths that his paper peddled:

“In a series of reports over four days, we revealed how Palestinian negotiators had made dramatic, previously unknown concessions during 2008 negotiations including an offer of ‘the biggest Yerushalayim in history‘ that would allow Israel to annex all but one of the settlements in East Jerusalem…Other documents showed that Palestinian leaders had been prepared to accept the return of as few as 10,000 of the more than 5m Palestinian refugees, a dramatic shift from the PLO’s public demand that any family displaced during the 1948 conflict should be allowed to return.”

As we mentioned before, Barry Rubin has explained why the Palestine Papers smell so bad. But even if they are real, the Guardian continues to spin: When these ideas were revealed to the people, the leaders who supposedly made these “dramatic concessions” denied it, and the people reacted in fury! So how can you really call it a concession? You can’t! Unless you work for the Guardian.

The truth of the matter is that the Guardian and Al-Jazeera aren’t stupid. They knew very goddamn well what the reaction to the Palestine Papers would be. They knew that it would make the PA look like a puppet of Israel and America, that was why they published so selectively! Mr. Prosor points us to  “David Landau, a commentator way on the left of the Israeli spectrum put it, the Guardian and Al-Jazeera ‘intended to poison the Palestinians against their leaders.’” He is far from the only one, CifWatch explains in further detail just how much spinning the Guardian was doing when they published the Palestine Papers. Here is another informative fib:

“[Many people wrote for the Guardian including] the PLO’s Saeb Erekat andGuardian columnist Jonathan Freedland all of whom defended the concessions offered by the Palestinian Authority”

Really? Did Erekat defend those concessions? I find that very difficult to believe. Let’s go to the editorial itself, shall we?

“We have been accused of making great concessions to Israel behind the back of the Palestinian people. Such allegations are groundless…A careful and complete reading of the documents at hand – which goes beyond the sensationalised headlines and spin – will reveal this to be true. First and foremost, it is essential to understand that no agreement has ever been reached between the parties on any of the permanent status issues. This reality, by its very definition, renders it impossible that either party has conceded anything.”

This is what Mr. Katz calls “defending?” I couldn’t believe my eyes! Is he for real? How ironic that a Deputy Editor of a newspaper doesn’t even know what’s in his own op-ed sections!

The rest of the article is basically Mr. Katz defending the Guardian on its own merits, which I feel the folks at CifWatch are more qualified to discuss than we are. What I do know is that when Mr. Katz says that there are “a broad range of comment articles,” he is referring only to the author and subjects of the articles, not to the general tone. I once asked a Huffington Post talkbacker to find me one, just one, pro-Israel article published in the Guardian. The offer still stands. One last quotation from Mr. Katz:

“It’s a curious claim to make about a newspaper which has long been and continues to be a consistent advocate for a two-state solution — not quite the Hamas take on things.”

From my perspective, though the Guardian has been an advocate of the two-state solution, they are hardly impartial. They are also of the view that Israel is always wrong and the Palestinians are always right, which is pretty darn similar to the Hamas take on things. And as I said before, I refuse to believe that the Guardian didn’t know exactly what it was doing not only when it decided to publish the documents but when it chose which papers to publish and how to editorialize them.

I am finding it interesting that the Huffington Post appears to be becoming a home for Internet catfights such as Katz vs Prosor, Suissa vs Cohen, Narwani vs S. Cohen, and Henri-Levy vs whats-her-name. Hardly a step in the right direction, if you ask me.

 

Now we know. Hamas has a partner at the Guardian

February 2, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , | by | 6 comments

I meant to post this piece by our friends at Simply Jews a few days ago, but, given the amount of material we had over the initial days of the “Palestine Papers”, I wasn’t able to do so.  Though it was written a week ago, their observations on the Guardian are quite interesting – especially given the blog’s eclectic politics – and, as with most of what they write, definitely worth the read.

It certainly pays off to sit for a while on the fence (I wonder why that activity is called this way in English – after all, normally fence is the last place you would choose to plop your backside upon). The media is raging for the last three days with a new PaperGate, this time with a scandal called “Palestinian papers”, carefully brewed by Al Jazeera and The Guardian.

Both Al Jazeera and The Guardian are under full steam, feeding the histrionics caused by the initial publication, publishing more new “material” daily. It is not for nothing that I put that word between quotation marks. The eggs are already in the air and no matter whether PaperGate is a deliberate hoax or just a self-delusion, the eggs are going to cover quite a few faces. Read the article SCOOP: Explaining How The “Palestine Papers” Story Is A Fabrication That Teaches Us The Truth. So far it’s the best guide for the perplexed. Only one quote:

Abbas suggests that the documents or the translation reverses the Israeli and Palestinian positions. In other words, it is Israel offering compromise and the Palestinians rejecting it. In general, it is Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, not the PA that is proposing to divide east Jerusalem and so on.

This single possible explanation of the whole affair will be hardly accepted by the main publishers, at least not immediately. It will mean too much egg too soon. Better to let the story fizzle slowly and then, in some distant future, fess up using a corner of the mouth only…

But this is not why this post. Folks like prof. Barry Rubin will get eventually to the roots of this sham. What was of a special interest to me is rather on the sidelines of the whole story.

To start with, two (purportedly) different authors submit two articles. One is Jonathan Freedland, a Jewish lefty, with his Palestine papers: Now we know. Israel had a peace partner and the other Karma Nabulsi, an Oxford academic (I already had a dubious honor to reflect on her peculiar academic achievements) and a former PLO representative (in fact, today she is more of a Hamas mouthpiece than anything else). Karma Nabulsi calls her opus This seemingly endless and ugly game of the peace process is now finally over. Read both, there hardly is a need to quote anything. Of course, Ms Nabulsi is more incendiary of the two. Of course, her call for cessation of any negotiations and return to killing is not restrained much. But if you try to filter out the chaff, the gist is striking: both anti-Israeli extreme and “pro-Israeli” lefty are fully ready to accept the version fed to them by the Al Jazeera / The Guardian pair. Both don’t question for a moment the truth of the matter (well, Freedland left himself just a bit of wiggling out room, but far from being enough) – obviously the story told fits their point of view too well.

Now the more important issue: the role of The Guardian in this PaperGate. While general anti-Israeli trend of Al Jazeera is open for all to see, The Guardian is, on the face of it (OK, I know), interested in peace and tranquility in the Middle East. May the lions lie down with the lambs and all that jazz…

So, wouldn’t it be kind of natural to ask a simple question: even assuming that the story touted by Al Jazeera and The Guardian is correct in all its details (which assumption is bullshit), why would The Guardian participate in an act that blows away the current PA leadership, only to install a new regime that will be much less inclined to talk and much more inclined to shoot? Why would The Guardian give a willing hand, in fact, to a new intifada? Why is The Guardian so bloodthirsty?

You tell me…

Barry Rubin’s recent quote about the Guardian

January 29, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | 1 comment

Professor Barry Rubin, who blogs at Rubin Reports, has done a spectacular job covering the Guardian’s “Palestine Papers.”

Indeed, Rubin is truly in a class by himself in the blogosphere: An eminent scholar on the Middle East who also consistently writes posts which are well-informed, concise, pithy and, often, quite witty.

So, while you should read his recent post, criticizing the New York Times’ coverage of the Middle East, in its entirety, I just couldn’t resist posting his conclusion, in a piece titled, “Today in the New York Times: A new low and a new role model.”

Rubin:

And now for the surprise conclusion. Ladies and gentlemen, while there are honorable exceptions, the New York Times has now reached the level of…the Guardian.

Rubin’s last sentence is a (completely warranted) attack on the Grey Lady, but also represents, perhaps, the only good thing to come out of PaliLeaks: The increasing recognition, by commentators across the political spectrum, that when it comes to the vicious assault on Israel’s legitimacy in the mainstream media, the Guardian is truly in a class by itself.

If One Extremist Gunman Can Do So Much Damage in America, How About Ten Million Such People In The Middle East?

January 11, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 3 comments

This essay was published by Professor Barry Rubin, who blogs at Rubin Reports

When one crazed or ideologically obsessed gunman starts shooting in Arizona, people condemn him and start bemoaning their society. How about a place with ten million people like that who are treated as heroes?

America this week is awash in a huge and passionate debate over whether angry political disagreements and harsh criticisms of certain views or groups inspired the attack on an American congresswoman (Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel, by the way). I’m not going to enter into that argument right now but I want to point out the Middle Eastern ramifications of what’s going on here.

Every day for more than a half century, Arabs and Muslims have been inundated every day with hatred for Israel, America, the West, Jews, and often Christians. You can read transcripts of Syrian broadcasts or Palestinian speeches from 50 years ago that sound just like what was said in the same places yesterday by powerful and/or respectable figures and institutions.

Let’s say that the proportion of lies, slanders, and incitement in the American discourse is one-tenth of one percent of all the words spoken on controversial issues. The equivalent figure for the Middle East is well over 95 percent.

In addition to that tone, there is not only a total lack of balance but an absence of the other side altogether.

And in addition to those two points, the level of factual accuracy has a huge gap separating it from reality. (Though, admittedly, that gap has been narrowing in recent years as Western standards decline).

And in addition to those three points, while extremists tend to be marginal in the United States, they are in control–either politically or at least rhetorically–throughout most of the Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority worlds.

Thus, the level of incitement, imbalance, lies, and the hegemony of hatred in that part of the world towers above that in the West like the World Trade Center towers over an anthill.

Please read rest of the essay here.

Barry Rubin on: A New Palestinian Lie about Israel and The Need to Discount Such Stories Systematically

January 4, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | by | 8 comments

This was published by the indispensable Barry Rubin, who blogs at Rubin Reports

What happens when the New York Times publishes, with no investigation, an atrocity story about Israel that is not only false but ridiculously so, based on the most obvious starting point: death by tear-gas doesn’t happen?

There’s a long history of Palestinians (including the Palestinian Authority) making up atrocity stories that blame Israel and then having these widely disseminated by the mass media. This is one of the main factors leading to increased hatred or criticism of Israel. These tales are disproven but the facts never catch up with the lies. Here’s a history of the phenomenon with a number of examples.

Now we have the first phony slander of 2011. You can check out the cartoon version also. The Palestinian Authority claims that Jawaher Abu Rahma, 36 years old, died during a demonstration, killed by “poison” in tear gas fired there by Israeli soldiers.

This was put out by Saeb Erakat, one of the main PA leaders, and the story was published as true by the French press agency (AFP), the Guardian and Associated Press (note the picture of the huge funeral given her as a “martyr” to an Israeli “war crime),” The Independent, UPI, Voice of America, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, China’s news agency and main newspaper, major sites in the Netherlands here and here, and others, especially in the Middle East. Even the U.S. State Department apparently gets its information from reading such stories in newspapers. Here’s a round-up of the online reporting and an analysis of the incident appropriately entitled, “Repeating Palestinian Allegations without Evidence.”

Read the rest of the essay, here.

The Fate of Western Civilization and Grade School Soccer

November 7, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 6 comments

This was published by Professor Barry Rubin at his blog, The Rubin Report

Before some reading this ask what this has to do with anti-Semitism at the Guardian, let me preempt the question by stating the following.  CiF Watch isn’t merely attempting to refute anti-Semitic commentary and egregious anti-Israel bias.  Our broader mission is to diagnose and comment on the intellectual currents which give rise to such bigotry.  As such, it is my view that certain intellectual trends (which are much more difficult to diagnose and deconstruct than explicitly anti-Semitic tropes) do as much harm to Jews and Israel as outright hatred against Jews.  Barry Rubin is among the very best at – as he says – “seeing big issues in small things.”  This post is about more than just his son’s soccer team.  It’s a commentary on the way children in Western society are socialized to believe in ideas which are detrimental to the long-term survival of freedom and democracy.  In short, ideas move the world, and bad ideas can be as dangerous as all the bullets, missiles and armies in the world combined.

“May your work be a fight, may your peace be a victory. War and courage have accomplished more great things than love of one’s neighbour. It was not your pity but your courage that so far has saved the downtrodden.” –F. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

It‘s something of a stretch to compare a soccer game among eleven-year-olds with the fate of the democratic world but I’ve always managed to see big issues in small things.

The basic background is this: My son is playing on a local soccer team on the East Coast which has lost every game, often by humiliating scores. The coach is a nice guy but seems an archetype of contemporary thinking. He tells the kids not to care about whether they win, puts players at any positions they want, and doesn’t listen to their suggestions.

He never criticized a player or suggested how he could do better. My son, bless him, had once remarked to me, “How are you going to play better If nobody tells you what you’re doing wrong?“ The coach just told them how well they were playing. Even after an 8-0 defeat he told them they’d played a great game. And, of course, the league gave trophies to everyone whether their team is in first or last place.

So were they really happier to be “relieved” of the strain of trying to win, “liberated” from feeling bad at the inequality of athletic talent? I’d even seen an American television documentary about boys and sports which justified this approach, explaining that coaches were doing something terrible by deriding failure, urging competitiveness, and demanding victory.

No doubt, of course, there are coaches who make unreasonable demands, scream at the kids, and humiliate them. This may be a big problem that should be righted when things go to the other extreme. But it isn’t a blue state problem!

Or am I right in thinking that sports should prepare children for life, competition, the desire to win, and an understanding that not every individual has the same level of skills? And a central element in that world is rewarding those who do better, which also offers an incentive for them and others to strive rather than thinking they merely need choose between becoming a government bureaucrat or dependent.

Read rest of the article here.

The Big British Left-Liberal Blind Spot

October 22, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | 3 comments

This was published at The Propagandist by Hadar Sela

Professor Barry Rubin draws our attention to an important shift in the policy of the Muslim Brotherhood: explicit endorsement of the extremist jihadist program of Al Queda and its affiliates.

Unfortunately, as Prof. Rubin points out, they’ve made their intentions known in Arabic. Will the West notice?

“This is one of those obscure Middle East events of the utmost significance that is ignored by the Western mass media, especially because they happen in Arabic, not English; by Western governments, because they don’t fit their policies; and by experts, because they don’t mesh with their preconceptions.”

However, the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood happens to be “the most powerful group, both politically and religiously, in the Muslim communities of Europe and North America” makes it imperative that Western leaders, policy-makers and commentators rid themselves of the current debilitating blind spot which causes them to largely regard events in the Middle East as having no bearing upon their own environment.  Generally speaking, much of the West’s media, academia and politicians seem determined to avoid seeing at all costs the connections between the anti-Israel rhetoric on their streets and the creeping influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in their own countries, with all its implications.

For considerable time now, the anti-Israel campaigns in Europe and America have been largely orchestrated by members of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates. Moshe Dann has provided a comprehensive and useful overview of the Muslim Brotherhood and its partner organizations in North America. The situation in Europe is, if anything, even worse.In the UK Hamas activists operate openly and in some cases have achieved a remarkable level of entryism into British institutions.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s foothold in Britain became significant with the arrival there of its official spokesman for Europe, Egyptian-born member Kamal El Helbawy in the mid 1990s. In 1997 Helbawy founded the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), together with fugitive Hamas commander Mohammed Sawalha, Azam Tammimi (who between 1989 and 1992 worked for the Muslim Brotherhood’s in Jordan) and the son of the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq, Anas Al Tikriti. Since then, numerous Muslim Brotherhood associated organizations have sprung up in the UK, often connected to at least one of the four above names. They include the Palestinian Return Centre, Interpal, the Institute of Islamic Political Thought, the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and media outlets such as the monthly Hamas magazine ‘Filastin Al Muslima’ and the ‘Palestine Times’.

Also operating in the UK are several organizations set up by the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe (FIOE) which is the Muslim Brotherhood umbrella organization in Europe, established in 1989. The Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations (FEMYSO) for example enjoys links with the European Union, the Council of Europe and the United Nations as well as close links with the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) in British universities.

Read the rest of the essay, here.

What happens when UN Officials meet the Aliens

September 27, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 8 comments

This was posted by Barry Rubin at Rubin Reports

Actual News story: The UN has created a special envoy for alien life forms so if humans come into contact with extraterrestrials (ETs to Hollywood) the entire planet Earth will speak with a single voice. And who is this official? A Malaysian astrophysicist, Mazlan Othman who currently heads the UN’s Vienna-based Office for Outer Space Affairs, where one of the leading members is an Iranian government official named Ahmad Talebzadeh.  Othman worked a number of years for the Malaysian Islamist government.

What happens when there are Jihad Knights instead of Jeddi Knights? Take me to your Imam?

Does this demand satire, or what?

Greetings, beings from Betelgeuse-5! I am the official Earth spokesperson, representing the entire Human Race, who will give you a briefing on life on our planet.

Earth people have different religions, that is, a set of beliefs about the Supreme Being, who we call Allah, and nations, of which there are almost 200. Let me start with religion.

Although there are many religions on Earth, there is only one true religion which is called Islam. The other religions are either deficient in worshipping many false gods or they have deviated for the true word of Allah (Peace be Upon Him) as revealed in the Holy Quran, which should govern the Earth.

There are also a number of countries, though there is one, named Israel, which is evil and criminal and should be wiped off the map.

Read rest of the essay, here.

A short post by Barry Rubin gets to the heart of the matter

September 24, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 2 comments

“Mark Twain’s neighbors and why I’m writing this blog”

by Barry Rubin (at Rubin Reports.)

In 1870, Mark Twain, the great American writer and journalist, had just moved to Buffalo, New York, where he was part-owner and an editor of the newspaper. One Sunday morning Twain saw smoke pouring from the upper window of the house across the street, whose residents he had not yet met. The couple was sitting on their porch, unaware of the danger.

Twain calmly strolled across the street, bowed politely, and introduced himself:

“We ought to have called on you before, and I beg your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your house is on fire.”

Read rest of the post, here

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