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Cross posted by our friend, Richard Millett
Posing for daddy
Last night 50 Palestine Solidarity Campaign protesters marched through Brent Street in Hendon, an area of London where many British Jews and Israelis live, before congregating outside a hotel where Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman was due to speak.
The protesters spent the evening calling for Israel’s destruction, while being met with chants aimed back at them of “Fascist scum, off our streets” by the 100 or so pro-Israel supporters who had come out on a lovely summer’s evening to see what all the fuss was about.
Hendon rarely witnesses such excitement but had a fascist group wanted to march through an area of London while calling for the destruction of a country from where another minority group living in England originates there’s a good chance they wouldn’t have been allowed to.
Some PSC protesters couldn’t resist bringing their very young children along for an indoctrination session. One father tried to get his young son and daughter to pose in front of the “Jews are in exile” sign paraded by the Neturei Karta (see photo above). Such an evening’s entertainment is cheaper than taking them to the cinema, I guess.
Finally, the PSC protesters were given a police escort back to Hendon Central station as you can see in this clip where one protester, the kid in the black top, is articulating himself in the aggressive manner one has come to expect. If anyone can lip read please let me know what he is saying (richardblog@live.co.uk). I know it isn’t pretty.
Also, at about 2 minutes in another PSC protester gives a salute. Does anyone know its origins? Thanks.
Here are some more photos:
Who’s going to shoot first, me or him?
Not a pretty sight. At least tuck your shirt in!
Am Ysrael Chai
Yup, it’s all the Jews fault as usual, obviously.
Daddy lines up his children for that mantlepiece shot.
Oh dear, son looking pretty disinterested.
yeah man
More Am Y’srael
And more
I didn’t realise these were taking place in Israel in 2013, so thanks!
You mean free the Palestinians from their Hamas thugs.
What is it about Israel being a Jewish state that brings him here?
Saying evening prayers in front of those that despise you. Beautiful.
Related articles
- Richard Millett SOAS Update (cifwatch.com)
- Who’s afraid of Richard Millett? (cifwatch.com)
- Brainwashing children to hate Israel: The Palestine Solidarity Campaign way (cifwatch.com)
- Mavi Marmara’s Ken O’Keefe compares Jews to Nazis at Middlesex Univ. Event: The Footage. (cifwatch.com)
- Camera grabbed, rucksack snatched and racially abused at SOAS (cifwatch.com)
- Moral posturing as serious thought: Context-Free essay on migrants in Israel by Seth Freedman (cifwatch.com)
This is cross posted from at Snapshot, the blog of CAMERA
[Note: This CAMERA post is consistent with their current efforts to analyse NY Times' coverage of the Palestinian prisoner issue numerically, by quantifying their tendency to use certain words, phrases, and themes (and cite certain facts) over others. CiF Watch has also recently published a post similarly providing a textual analysis of Harriet Sherwood's report on the Palestinian prisoner issue. - A.L. ]
NYT Jerusalem correspondent, Jodi Rudoren
Even before Jodi Rudoren began her tenure as the New York Times‘ bureau chief in Jerusalem, serious concerns were raised about her objectivity.
Here at Snapshots we said, “Only time will tell whether [those] concerns will be borne out.”
Unfortunately, judging by Rudoren’s recent story about Palestinian prisoners on a hunger strike, published online on May 3 and in print the following day, those concerns are certainly being borne out.
You can read some criticism of the story here, here and here. Below we take a look at the piece by the numbers:
• Number of quoted words by Palestinian supporters of Palestinian prisoners: 269
• Number of quoted words by Israelis explaining the rationale behind administrative detention (or anything else): 0
• Number of words by Rudoren (or anyone else) discussing Israeli rationale behind administrative detention: 0
• Number of paragraphs before Rudoren gets around to letting readers know that the stars of her article are members of Islamic Jihad: 14
• Countries and groups that list Islamic Jihad as a terrorist organization include: The United States, Canada, The European Union, The United Kingdom and Australia.
• Rudoren’s description of Islamic Jihad: “a radical and militant Palestinian faction.”
• Number of other articles in May 4 edition of the New York Times that use the words “terrorist,” “terrorist organization,” terrorist network” or “terrorist attack” to describe non-Palestiniangroups, individuals and attacks: 6
• Number of people murdered by Islamic Jihad: Hundreds
• Number of rockets fired at Israeli cities and towns by Islamic Jihad: Hundreds
• Number of references in the article to those attacks: 0
• Number of days after extremist activist Ali Abunimah complained to Rudoren on Twitter about lack of coverage of the prisoners’ hunger striker before Rudoren authored what Abunimah endorsed as her “must read” report: 4
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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:
Cross posted by Raheem Kassam atThe Commentator
Noam Chomsky and Ross Caputi
The title of this piece is a summary of events that no doubt sensationally portrays what has happened between the Guardian, Tarek Mehanna and Ross Caputi. But this scenario is worthy of serious contemplation for the security services, justice system and for all the individuals involved.
To bring you up to speed, Tarek Mehanna was recently found guilty of conspiracy to kill Americans overseas and of giving material support for terrorism.
He was sentenced to 17 years in prison. While his lawyers tried to represent him as a modern day Martin Luther King or even more spuriously, Nelson Mandela – a jury of his peers returned the verdict of ‘guilty’, acknowledging his role in criminal conduct.
It is reported that Mehanna travelled to Yemen in December 2004 to seek training at a terrorist camp, after which he planned to go to Iraq and fight against U.S soldiers. The judge in the case stated that he was “concerned about the defendant’s apparent absence of remorse” and when Mehanna was sent down, his family and friends delivered him a standing ovation.
I have my own concern about lack of remorse based on a recent Guardian Comment is Free article written by an Iraq War veteran who, as free as he walks, insists that what he did in Fallujah was ‘terrorism’ and writes openly in the Guardian, “I, too, support the right of Muslims to defend themselves against US troops, even if that means they have to kill them.”
This shocking statement from Ross Caputi is the kind of dangerous nonsense from someone tied up with the Stop The War Coalition, who recently introduced Noam Chomsky at an event and who seems to have become a Guardian poster boy since his article entitled, ‘I am sorry for the role I played in Fallujah’.
Firstly, if Caputi is indeed adamant about his role in ‘terrorism’ then one wonders why he hasn’t marched himself down to the local police station, courtroom or military tribunal demanding the ‘justice’ he so vehemently campaigns for on behalf of convicted terrorists. It seems the Iraq vet thinks he can alleviate this double standard by writing a groveling letter of apology to The Guardian, where he apologises for attacking Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaeda operatives who he claims were ‘defending their city’. In reality, these groups were attacking as many Iraqi civilians and security forces as they were coalition forces in the city and just to be clear, The Guardian is not, despite what its editors may think, a part of the justice system or somewhere Caputi should be able to alleviate his guilt publicly.
Next, Caputi goes on to write about the murder of his friends in a romantic fashion – glorifying their killers, “How can I begrudge the resistance in Fallujah for killing my friends?” He classes himself as an ‘invader’ and ‘aggressor’ but makes no mention of the fact that it was al-Qaeda who fought in amongst civilians, oppressing them, using home and mosques and civilian areas as munitions stores. I’m inclined to agree with one of his opening statements where he claims he had no idea what was going on in Fallujah – it appears he still does not.
By no means am I excusing the killing of civilians and the use of depleted uranium or white phosphorus as weapons, by the way. But it is important to keep a level head on these issues and perhaps through no fault of his own and some would argue understandably, Caputi cannot. When reading his work, it is evident to anyone with even a vague sense of the importance of factual evidence and strategic realities that Caputi cannot reconcile the geopolitical and moral imperatives with the memory of the war in his own mind.
He links to the ‘Iraq Body Count’ website which in fact does little to back up his claims that U.S. troops were mainly to blame for civilian deaths. They played a major role for reasons given earlier, as well heavy-fire tactics used during the invasion years – but insurgents and post-invasion criminal violence caused the lions share of civilian deaths. The website, the very same that Tony Blair cites in his recent memoir, states, “Killings by anti-occupation forces, crime and unknown agents have shown a steady rise over the entire period”. Yet these are the forces that Caputi supports when he writes, “I’m not afraid to profess my support for Tarek Mehanna, or to advocate for his ideas”.
Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. sentenced Tarek Mehanna to 17 years in prison (less than the 25 called for by the prosecution) and while Ross Caputi’s confused and dangerous rants can be dismissed as the misguided, angry and stress-related consequences of war, it is less apparent why The Guardian should see fit to print such a piece which not only advocates terrorism and supports a convict, but is also factually flawed and fuels incitement to violence against foreign troops abroad.
Even one of the more sympathetic jurors who laments Mehanna’s long prison sentence acknowledges that he was a radical obsessed with violence, jihad and on the killing of U.S. troops. Perhaps Caputi’s defense of Mehanna would be less robust if it had been he that was targeted – or perhaps in such an extreme case, it would have driven him even further.
But ‘free speech’ is always the elephant in the room in cases like this. What is to stop The Guardian, Ross Caputi or even Tarek Mehanna from speaking their minds on such issues – even if it leaves the bitterest of tastes in our mouths?
The legal implications are complex, but in Britain, Caputi’s statements of support for Mehanna, including we assume from his words, his trip to Yemen and interest in fighting in ‘the resistance’ in Iraq is not just endorsement of terrorism but also proliferation, glorification and tantamount to incitement. His piece supports the killing of American soldiers abroad and could indeed be criminal under USC 2339A – ‘providing material support to terrorists’ and in Britain ‘inciting murder for terrorist purposes overseas’.
In Mehanna’s case under U.S. law, a 1969 Supreme Court case which the ‘Brandenburg test’ is derived from sets a precedent. For criminality of speech to be inferred, you have to be able to show that it would lead to ‘imminent lawless action’. Mehanna’s defence argued that he did not do this, but rather he was prosecuted for conspiring to kill American soldiers and supporting Al-Qaeda – far more heinous crimes.
The question now arises of what happens to Caputi, since it was he himself writing in the Guardian Comment Is Free (America) who originally wrote, “I have done everything that Tarek Mehanna has done, and there are only two possibilities as to why I am not sitting in a cell with him: first, the FBI is incompetent and hasn’t been able to smoke me out; second, the US judicial system would never dream of violating my freedom of speech because I am white and I am a veteran of the occupation of Iraq.”
Here, Caputi sets himself up as a hero – his status as a veteran of the war in Iraq he argues, precluding him from the arms of the law. Neither of the stated reasons is accurate, as Caputi did not travel to Yemen looking for terrorist training, nor did he conspire to assist al-Qaeda. To the best of our knowledge, he also never conspired to kill American soldiers overseas – unless he knows something we don’t know? However he does raise a valid point. Since he is in fact, openly inciting terrorist acts abroad, what do British and American courts intend to do about it?
Typically, going after someone like Caputi would not be worth the time and money it would the government to prosecute him, even if they could be sure of a conviction. What makes this incident even more telling for the rational amongst us is Caputi’s own admission of being somewhat of a less than perfect soldier – not the ‘hero’ the FBI would have to think he was in order to, as he asserts, violate his freedom of speech. In fact, reading his blog it is easy to see that Caputi is indeed not the prim and proper Iraq veteran he masquerades as, nor was he privy to the kind of primary source information one might think The Guardian editors would look into:
“My unit got called into Camp Fallujah a couple of weeks before the 2nd assault. I was a buck private at the time and had recently been demoted for a number of charges from underage drinking to theft to general conduct unbecoming of a Marine. I was even moved out of my old infantry platoon because I just was not listening to anyone in charge of me, and they made me the Company Commander’s radio operator instead.”
This Chomsky-fanatic, who has only just surfaced in the mainstream, poses a serious threat to rational and evidence-based discourse about the war in Iraq, its consequences and the ongoing terrorist threat. Since he’s so adamant that he was a terrorist in Fallujah – I’m tempted to suggest that Caputi should be frog-marched to the nearest courtroom and forced to stand trial under his own admission of guilt. The reality is though, as he conveniently leaves out of his Guardian articles, he was scarcely ever around to witness what happened. “Most of the time” he admits, “I was perfectly safe with the officers, and there was no fighting within my immediate vicinity”.
Raheem Kassam is the Executive Editor of The Commentator. He tweets at @RaheemJKassam
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This is cross posted by Ben Cohen, and originally appeared at Jointmedia News Service.
If Hollywood ever makes a movie about the movement to boycott Israel, I can think of no one better suited to the starring role than Emma Thompson.
I imagine Thompson’s character as a schoolteacher or a librarian, dowdy looking with just a hint of prettiness. She lives alone in a cozy apartment filled with potted plants and books on personal growth, third-world politics and vegetarian cookery.
Her significant other is a fluffy cat that nestles in her lap every night as she sits in front of her computer reading the latest dispatches from occupied “Palestine,” her face etched with righteous disbelief.
She doesn’t have time for a boyfriend, but that won’t stop her would-be suitor, an equally self-righteous, mildly kooky Jewish writer—think Peter Beinart—from trying to win her heart.
By the time we’re halfway through the film, Emma will have decided that she simply must visit the West Bank, despite the enormous dangers posed by the Israeli occupation forces. She comes to this awareness while attending a Passover seder hosted by her aspiring boyfriend, during which he pulls out a fading photograph of his great-grandmother who was murdered during the Holocaust.
Fighting back the tears, he confides that, “If she could see what Israel has become, she’d die all over again from the shame.” The two fall into each other’s arms, waking the next morning to a breakfast of matzo brei— as Emma tries to pronounce the name of the dish she’s eating, we giggle through the obligatory moment of light relief—before she’s whisked away in a taxi to the airport, and thence to the beautiful-yet-tragic land of Palestine.
In the West Bank, she cavorts with cute little kids—“just like the ones I teach back home”—drinks mint tea with effusive women who bear the daily humiliation of occupation with a smile and a shrug, and admires the steely-eyed men who stand up to the nasty Israelis with all the conviction of a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King.
Emma embraces their anger but concludes that violence is not the answer. Just before she leaves the Palestinian village that now feels like home, she regales the enthusiastically nodding villagers with a speech—tearful, of course—expounding on the importance of non-violence. “Don’t use bombs,” she exhorts. “Use boycotts.” Their applause can be heard all the way to the adjacent Israeli army base, where the commander is suddenly struck by the realization that the Palestinian aspiration for freedom can never be crushed.
Roll the credits. And don’t call it a chick flick.
With a movie like this one, art would be imitating life—to be precise, Emma Thompson’s life. Recently, the Oscar-winning actress joined with other darlings of stage and screen to protest the participation of Tel Aviv’s venerable Habimah Theater in a London festival that is performing the plays of William Shakespeare in 37 different languages.
In a letter published by The Guardian—a liberal newspaper with a long track record of publishing anti-Semitic material—Thompson and her cohorts slammed “Habima” [sic] for its “shameful record of involvement with illegal Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territory.” They ended with a demand to exclude the theater from the festival. No such objections were voiced concerning the participation of a Palestinian theater troupe, nor the involvement of the National Theater of China, which is directly funded by one of the world’s most repressive regimes.
In fact, there are many good reasons to ditch political objections and keep the festival open to all—which its organizers, to their credit, have done, in spite of Thompson’s fulminations. To perform Shakespeare is in itself a celebration of artistic freedom. Habimah’s version of “The Merchant of Venice,” the play that gave us the figure of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who embodies anti-Semitic canards even as he challenges them, is sure to be enticing. And I would genuinely love to see how actors from communist China interpret the story of “Richard III.”
For those like Emma Thompson, though, boycotts are predicated on supposedly universal principles and then applied to only one target—Israel. To understand the strategy here, it’s worth recalling the campaign in the UK for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Ten years ago, an article in The Guardian noted that Israel’s universities are victims of their own success:
“The nature of Israel’s academic pre-eminence,” the article explained, “makes it vulnerable to a boycott.”
The same logic applies to the flourishing arts scene in Israel. The excellence of a theater like Habimah, along with its enthusiasm to perform outside Israel’s borders, renders it a sitting duck for boycott campaigners. In their warped view of the world, Palestinian freedom can only be achieved by quarantining Israelis on the basis of their nationality.
Thus do apparently free-spirited artists echo the racist policies of the Arab League, which began its boycott of the Jewish community in Eretz Israel in 1945, three years before the state of Israel was born.
What, then, is the appropriate response to Emma Thompson and those like her? Certainly not to make the movie I described earlier. Instead, they should be given a taste of their own medicine.
We are often told that Jews run Hollywood—the same Hollywood that carried on casting Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson’s fellow Brit, in leading roles after she denounced so-called “Zionist hoodlums” in an Oscar acceptance speech in 1978. Will the studio moguls continue to indulge Thompson as they indulged Redgrave? Or will they show some gumption, and tell her that, for as long as she seeks to discriminate against Israeli artists, she will be banished from our screens?
I think I know, sadly, what the answer is. But I’d love to be proved wrong.
Related articles
- Letter published in the Guardian: “We welcome Israel’s national theatre” (cifwatch.com)
- Comment is Free, Jane Eisner & a modest question for Peter Beinart & the American Jewish Left (cifwatch.com)
- Peter Beinart and the Crisis of American Jewish Liberalism (cifwatch.com)
- What Peter Beinart won’t report: PA TV thanks Palestinian children for fertilizing land with blood (cifwatch.com)
- As events refute their dogmatic doctrine ‘two-staters’ are looking more like ‘flat-earthers’ (cifwatch.com)
Cross posted by Dr. Martin Sherman, and originally published at the Jerusalem Post on April 6.
(Editor’s note: While CiF Watch doesn’t necessarily endorse the views expressed by Sherman, his commentary, fisking the premises behind most 2-state solution proposals, is thoughtful, politically and morally sober, and needs to be taken seriously.)
“If a Palestinian state is established, it will be armed to the teeth. Within it there will be bases of the most extreme terrorist forces, who will be equipped with anti-tank and anti-aircraft shoulder-launched rockets, which will endanger not only random passers-by, but also every airplane and helicopter taking off in the skies of Israel and every vehicle traveling along the major traffic routes in the coastal plain.
Even if the Palestinians agree that their state have no army or weapons, who can guarantee that a Palestinian army would not be mustered later to encamp at the gates of Jerusalem and the approaches to the [coastal] lowlands.”
– Shimon Peres
My column last week was largely a historical account of the monumental failure of the endeavor to implement a two-state approach following the 1993 Oslo Agreements. This column will focus more on some of the conceptual defects and inconsistencies that made past failure – and will make future failure –inevitable.
Two kinds of ‘two-staters’
In principle there are two categories of “two-staters:” (a) Those who insist that in their version of a two-state solution, “secure/defensible” borders for Israel are an indispensable imperative; and (b) Those for whom “secure/defensible” borders appear to be consideration of minor–if any–significance in their vision of the two-state arrangement.
Arguably one of the most eminent spokesmen for the first category is Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz; while the second category includes figures such as Peter Beinart, and groups such as J-Street and the Geneva initiative, endorsing the Obama-prescription that the frontiers of the Palestinian state be based on the indefensible 1967-lines with “agreed” (read “minor/cosmetic”) land swaps.
To assess the ramifications of these two schools of thought (or rather “wishful thinking”), it is necessary to comprehend clearly the geo-political significance of the territory ear-marked by them for the putative Palestinian state east of the 1967 frontier.
This is crucial for a responsible risk-assessment on the part of anyone professing pro- Israel credentials. For one would hope that– whatever their political proclivities – they would be mindful not only of the cost of error, but also of the probability of success, of any proposed policy option–particularly in the light of the failed optimism of the past.
‘An arrow aimed at Israel’s heart’
“An arrow-head aimed at Israel’s very heart with all the force of the Arab world behind.”
These words, conveying the danger entailed in the establishment of a Palestinian state, are not those of a radical right-wing rejectionist, but of 2006 Israel Prize (Law) laureate, Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, who served as an MK – and education minister–for the dovish Meretz party.
They are of course very apt, for as I have reiterated in previous columns, any territorial configuration even remotely acceptable to even the most moderate of Palestinians would allow them topographical command the all of the following: Most major airfields in the country (civilian and military) – including the only international airport;
• Major sea ports and naval bases;
• Vital infrastructure systems/installations;
• The sweet water system;
• Main land (road and rail) transportation axes –including the Trans-Israel Highway;
• Principal power plants;
• The nation’s parliament, crucial centers of government and military command; • Eighty percent of the civilian population and of the commercial activity in the country.
All of these would be in range of weapons being used today against Israel from territory transferred to Palestinian control–making the notion of “demilitarization” largely irrelevant (something on which I will elaborate in a future column).
Peril presaged
This ominous prospect can no longer be dismissed as “right-wing scaremongering,” for it reflects no more than proven past precedents.
Indeed it was clearly predicted in vivid detail by none other than Nobel laureate Shimon Peres who expressed his skepticism regarding the credibility of any prospective peace partner. In a more perceptive era, before of political correctness eclipsed political truth and facts succumbed to fads, he cautioned:
“The demilitarization of the West Bank seems a dubious remedy. The major issue is not [reaching] an agreement on demilitarization, but ensuring its actual implementation in practice. The number of agreements which the Arabs have violated is no less than number which they have kept.”
Presciently, he warned that if a Palestinian state were established:
“in a short space of time, an infrastructure for waging war will be set up in Judea, Samaria [note the non-compliance with the newly proposed “Beinartian” terminology] and the Gaza Strip. Israel will have problems in preserving day-to-day security….
In time of war, the frontiers of the Palestinian state will constitute an excellent staging point for mobile forces to mount attacks on infrastructure installations vital for Israel’s existence, to impede the freedom of action of the Israeli air-force in the skies over Israel, and to cause bloodshed among the population.”
In similar vein – and similarly prior to the advent of Oslo-mania, which relegated common sense to “rejectionism”– Amnon Rubinstein cautioned”
“Israel will neither be able to exist nor to prosper if its urban centers, its vulnerable airport and its roads, are shelled….
This is the terrible danger involved in the establishment of a third independent sovereign state between us and the Jordan River.
What are ‘secure borders’?
It is the combination of geographic proximity to, and topographical dominance over, Israel’s urban megatropolis in the coastal plain that makes a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria so potentially perilous. It is this fact – with all its politically incorrect ramifications– that has brought a host of security experts – Israeli and American – to the conclusion that for Israel to maintain secure borders it must retain control of wide swathes of territory between the 1967 Green Line and the Jordan River.
The most recent study, updated in 2011, authored by five former IDF generals – including a former chief of staff and the current national security adviser–stipulated that “secure borders” necessitate Israeli control of the highlands in the West Bank, the Jordan Valley and the entire air space from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
This coincides in large measure with Yitzhak Rabin’s vision of the permanent solution with Palestinians, articulated in his last address to the Knesset, a month prior to his assassination. In the speech, significantly delivered after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and being feted around the world as a valiant warrior for peace, Rabin proclaimed that
“…the security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.”
He endorsed the retention of Israeli sovereignty over large tracts of land on the highlands including the settlements of “Gush Etzion, Efrat, Beitar and other communities… which are east of what was the “Green Line” and urged:
“…the establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria [again note the noncompliance with the newly proposed “Beinartian” terminology].”
242 and ‘secure borders’
This prescription for “secure borders” presented by an array of Israeli experts – with nary a radical right-wing religious rejectionist among them –closely reflects the findings of an earlier study of Israel’s security requirements, made by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The study was referred to in an article published in 1993 by Eugene Rostow, former US under-secretary of state and one of the principal authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242. According to Rostow:
“[The study] is useful in interpreting Resolution 242 because it reveals… what the US government had in mind in pushing the resolution through.”
He went on to observe:
“[t]he study advised …that the security of Israel required Israel to receive [substantial] parts of the territory of the West Bank as essential to its defense”
And, he pointed to the wide-ranging consensus on this, remarked:
“In fact, all the studies of the Israeli security problem reached the same conclusion – from the security point of view, Israel must hold the high points in the West Bank and areas along the Jordan River.”
He summed up stating:
“I do not know if the Joint Chiefs of Staff would draw a different map today, but I doubt is very much.”
Findings of subsequent studies provide strong support for his assessment.
Clueless, conniving, corrupt?
What does all this mean for the two previously delineated categories of “two-staters”? It perhaps simpler to begin with the second category–those who minimize (or disregard) the issue of “secure borders” for the Jewish state and are willing to accept withdrawal to the 1967 “Auschwitz” borders – with or without minimal adjustments.
Clearly in light of the potential perils these lines portend for Israel, this is a proposal comprises – at best – a gamble of epic proportions.
Its endorsement portrays its proponents as either clueless, conniving or corrupt: clueless because they are unaware of the mortal dangers their suggested policy entails; conniving because – although they may be aware of these dangers – they persist in collaborating with Israel’s adversaries to advance their pernicious agenda – equipped with nothing more than naiveté and alleged goodwill (read “wishful thinking”) to prevent the lethal consequences of their implausible political credo; corrupt because are advancing a policy that clearly menaces the security of Israel and safety Israelis in exchange for benefits – material or otherwise – from foreign sources with interests often divergent from those of Israel.
Of course, there is always an outside chance that the Hamas and Islamic Jihad will miraculously morph into a benign liberal social-democratic party, but are these “ two-staters” seriously suggesting that we “bet the farm” on that? Are the “enlightened” proponents of this version of the two-state paradigm suggesting that Israel base its policy on the wildly improbable? Surely prudence dictates heeding the accumulated lessons of past experience and the proven patterns of previous behavior?
Insincere or inconsistent
The other class of “ two-staters ”–t hose who claim they insist on “secure borders”– are if anything, more exasperating. Take, for example, the following excerpt from Dershowitz’s The Case for Peace, which shows that he is keenly aware not only of dangers that might arise from a Palestinian state but that the Palestinian signatory to any “two-state” agreement would be powerless to ensure his contractual commitments, even if he sincerely wished to:
A Palestinian state will not soon secure the monopoly on the use of arms. Terrorists organizations and militias – such as Hamas, Al-Aqasa Martyrs Brigades, Islamic Jihad and others – will continue to have access to weapons of all kinds. Even if the Palestinian state renounced all support for terrorism, other states, most particularly Syrian and Iran, will likely continue to arm terrorist groups dedicated to Israel’s destruction. Nor is it out of the question that someday Hamas might gain control over the Palestinian government, either by means of a coup, or an election, or some such combination of both. Israel cannot be asked to accept a fully militarized Hamas state on its vulnerable borders.
In many ways, this is a stunning admission for a “two-stater.”
Given the clear recognition of the potential dangers, several trenchant questions arise: In light of the plausible scenarios he himself raises, what are the geographical parameters that Dershowitz proposes to provide Israel with “secure borders”? What Palestinian could survive–politically or physically–the wrath of his rivals, were he to accede to frontiers that would provide Israel with “secure” borders that even remotely approach the parameters set out by military experts? And if such borders are politically unfeasible, why advocate entering into an arrangement with some Palestinian counterpart who – by Dershowitz’s own admission – may not be able to prevent the onset of situations which – by Dershowitz’s own admission – are intolerable…and far from improbable.
So is it just me or are “secure-border-two-staters” seriously advancing a policy that is either unattainable politically or unachievable geographically? And if so, why? Are they being mindfully insincere or mindless inconsistent?
To be continued…
Much of which needs to be said about the dangerous and detrimental delusion of the two-state paradigm, and the corrosive consequences it has had on Israel, its national security, its diplomatic standing, its international legitimacy and the level and vibrancy of its public discourse, has still been left unsaid.
Indeed, as time goes by and events consistently refute their dogmatic doctrine, “ two-staters ”– seemingly oblivious to the facts and dismissive of the dangers – are looking more and more like “flat-eathers.”
But as Pessah is almost upon us and as I do not wish to incur the wrath of my very patient editor, I will defer further discussion for a future opportunity.
Like this:
The following essay was written by Chas Newkey-Burden and published at The Jewish Chronicle
I never told you the one about how a Christian/Hindu cult helped me love Israel and Judaism, did I? As a non-Jew who proudly supports Zionism and is fascinated by Judaism, particularly the mystical and Hasidic traditions, I am often asked how I came to feel this way. To me, the real question is why someone would not support Israel and admire Judaism, but of course I understand the curiosity.
The short answer – which I’ve blogged about and mentioned during speeches – is that I became fascinated by the Middle East after the September 11 attacks. To my surprise, having previously had a lazy, hazy perception that Israel were the villains of the conflict, I became more and more pro-Israel the more I learned about the issue. So I started visiting Israel and quickly fell in love with the place.
However, I’ve never written or spoken publicly about a challenging childhood experience that had a part to play in this. When I was nine, I joined a new school in London. I was so excited to be leaving primary school and joining a new, ‘grown-up’ establishment. What I didn’t realise until I got there was that 99 percent of the pupils and their families were members of bizarre religious cult, as were all the staff.
The cult, which dominated the school, combined Victorian sternness with less savoury elements of Christianity and Hinduism to create a cruel concoction. I was a member of the one percent of pupils with no connection to the cult. This meant that twice a day, as my classmates meditated and chanted Sanskrit, I had to go to a dark room in the basement and sit kicking my heels with the other odd ones out of the school.
It also meant I was pressured to join the cult. The more I resisted this pressure, the more I was targeted by the staff. It was astounding how quickly the teachers could turn a maths, English or science class into a free-for-all discussion of how I came from an “impure” family.
The staff strongly discouraged pupils from befriending me and at times some of the teachers were violent with me. At one point I was even-handed a year-long detention, which meant I couldn’t leave the school until 6.30pm on weekdays and not before mid-afternoon on Saturdays.
For six years I resisted the pressure to join the cult and then at 16 I was finally able to leave the godforsaken place. Years later, in 2007, an inquiry found that “mistreatment” and “criminal assaults” had taken place when I was there. It is possible that one can never completely move on from such an experience – the question is how to create a positive legacy.
Which brings me to my love of Israel. I think that as result of what I faced at school I have developed a stronger empathy for anyone who is unfairly singled out. For instance, when Kofi Annan – then the Secretary General of the UN – was asked why the UN so disproportionately targets Israel, and replied: “Can the whole world be wrong?” he made my blood boil. As I knew from my schooling, sometimes yes, the whole world can be wrong.
Recently, while dining with a Jewish family I’m friendly with, I sensed a wider connection. I was telling them about my strange school, when the wise father of the household turned to me and said:
“You were like the Jew at school – that’s why you understand us.”
I had never thought of it that way, as I consider the story of the Jewish experience to be as much about the inspiration of your enormous achievements and inspiring example as it is the hatred you have faced.
But I can see his point – and within it is the positive legacy I sought. Perhaps if I had not been so tested as a child I would not have subsequently stood at the Kotel, nor watched the sunset in Tel Aviv, nor heard of the wondrous Baal Shem Tov and Rabbi Nachman, whose teachings now enrich my life.
Whatever took me here I am glad it did. After all, supporting Israel and admiring Judaism is the only sensible way to roll.
Related articles
- Holocaust Memorial Day, 2012 (cifwatch.com)
Like this:
This essay was written by Daniel Vahab
Did you know that, until recently, Jews lacked the same civil rights protections on college campuses that is afforded to Arab Americans, African-Americans, and Hispanic Americans, to name just a few?
That was until Kenneth L. Marcus, former head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), and others lobbied to revise the Title VI policy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 2004, as head of OCR, he revised—or “clarified”—the policy which he said always meant to apply to Jews, too, but technically didn’t because of a legal loophole.
The loophole stemmed from the fact that OCR classified Judaism as just a religion, and not a race or ethnicity. Religion is not protected under Title VI. And so, Jewish students who suffered discrimination and harassment on federally funded universities (even most private institutions receive at least some government funding, said Marcus) were not able to receive the standard protection of resources and support, and have their complaints investigated by the university.
Jewish students who reported such incidents were previously told by the campus that it basically couldn’t do anything, and that the student could either go through the process of getting an attorney and taking her complaint to the federal courts or take her complaint to the justice department, which Marcus said “wasn’t interested in pursuing these cases.”
Thus, Marcus was tasked with convincing OCR that Jews are indeed an ethnicity. But, he said, what was really relevant was for him to show that the manifestation of antisemitism often sees Jews as an ethnicity and that because of this reason the law needed to include Jews along with other protected groups.
Now, a school is legally obligated to take action upon being notified of antisemitism that falls under the jurisdiction of Title VI—lest it lose millions of dollars in federal funding that it relies on.
To combat the campus antisemitism, Marcus recently formed the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
Simply put, the Brandeis Center is “saying these are the laws that exist and these are the laws that protect our students. They protect Jews. They protect non-Jews,” said Rabbi Akiva Tendler, director of the Fellowship for Campus Safety and Integrity.
“Until now,” said Marcus, “there have been a lot of organizations that have been putting together complaints in a sort of scattershot way, but no single institution formed for this purpose. My hope is that the Brandeis center will bring centralized expertise to a very serious national and international problem.”
And it is indeed a problem. Consider this statistic: more than 40 percent of Jewish students experience antisemitism on college campuses, according to a recent study by the Institute for Jewish & Community Research. This means that for every five Jews, two report having experienced antisemitism on campus. The study “Alone on the Quad: Understanding Jewish Student Isolation on Campus,” polled more than 1,400 students nationwide.
And while “classic” antisemitism that focused on stereotyping, discriminating Jews, and attacking the Jewish religion still exists on campus, several experts I spoke with said the new antisemitism on campus mainly involves Israel, which is attacked as a vehicle for persecuting the Jew, en masse. Examples include a speaker, a professor, or a school-sponsored conference that likens Israelis or Zionists to Nazis and Israel to a genocidal state or Apartheid South Africa.
“The university,” said Richard Cravatts, president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, “would not allow members of the Ku Klux Klan to have a rally on their campus. And you can be sure that black kids would be screaming bloody murder, that this would be intimidating for them, as well they should. If the university did nothing there would be Title VI lawsuits because they are creating what we would call a hostile environment for those black students. The same thing could be said for Jewish students, who at the University of California at Irvine … have to hear Imam Amir Abdul Malik Ali come to campus and talk about the new Nazis being the Jews. And how the Jews control the press and the Zionists are murderers. And the Zionists do this and that. And they are controlling American politics and all of those lies.”
For Jewish students who “identify with the state of Israel, it’s very difficult for them to speak out against [the new antisemitism] because these are the same professors that give them their grades, give them their recommendations, that determine in many ways their future and they would rather either drop the class or keep their mouth shut than to complain or to make trouble,”said Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, cofounder of the Investigative Task Force on Campus Anti-Semitism. “And so it becomes a very discriminatory experience because no other student has to compromise their educational experience because of what happens in the classroom.”
“The administration,” added Tammi, who lectures at the University of California Santa Cruz, “either turns a blind eye to what’s happening on the campus square or in the classroom, or the administrators themselves are actually perpetrating this, which we have in California campuses.” She offered the example of how Harold Hellenbrand, the interim president of California State University at Northridge, who as provost and vice president had signed an open letter to CSU Chancellor Charles Reed that likened Israel to an apartheid racist nation and asked that the Israel study abroad program at his university not be reinstated.
What about the notion of academic freedom? To this question, Tammi said, “If you’re talking about academic freedom then really you’re talking about faculty. Are faculty allowed to use academic freedom to say racist and antisemitic things? I say not. And it’s not even a legal issue. It’s a professional issue … It’s allowing you to teach your subject without interference from the government, from religion, from the outside. But the line is crossed when you use the university as a pulpit for your own political, partisan agendas. Then you’re not pursuing scholarship. You’re not pursuing truth and knowledge.”
Marcus, who has been combating the hate on campus for more than a decade now, says he only recently started to file complaints. He said the center’s research-funding component deals mainly with “legal and public policy research” and that it also plans to host a forthcoming conference on campus antisemitism and that he will serve as guest editor to an issue of The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism dedicated to campus issues. Other examples in which the center educates people on campus antisemitism include through op-eds, lectures, and social media, said Marcus.
Besides funding, one of the biggest stumbling blocks facing the center, said Marcus, is the 180-day deadline by which OCR requires a case to be filed from when the incident occurred. The center is tasked with finding cases, and helping in the process of investigating and then filing them, which takes a lot of time.
Asked why, given his distinguished law background, he chose to take the non-profit advocacy route over lots more money at a high-profile law firm, Marcus admitted that he was a partner in such a firm before, but said that he “feels that the Louis D. Brandeis Center is doing critically important work which I really feel called to do.” He added that he is “really concerned that if we don’t act forcefully now that the situation could deteriorate on college campuses.”
Related articles
- Anti-Zionism is Racism (An essay by Judea Pearl) (cifwatch.com)
- Berchmans or Ben White? Deep thoughts at ‘Comment is Free’ on why Jews are hated (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s false accusation of “false accusations of antisemitism” (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian publishes letter by supporter of Gilad Atzmon, refuses to publish rebuttal (cifwatch.com)
- Arthur Nelsen’s Occupied Mind: Why the Guardian Left can’t take Arab antisemitism seriously (cifwatch.com)
- Antisemitism below the line at CiF: Jewish control of US policy, & Jews’ insidious practice of usury (cifwatch.com)
- Perpetrators as victims: Seumas Milne ignores Islamist-inspired antisemitism of Toulouse massacre (cifwatch.com)
- The Big Lie Returns (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian reader on those uppity British Jews exercizing their political rights (cifwatch.com)
- Muslim Anti-Semitism, Israel, and the Dynamics of Self-Destructive Scapegoating (cifwatch.com)
Cross posted by our friend Richard Millett
A Global March to Jerusalem activist yesterday.
At the PSC’s “Global March to Jerusalem” outside the Israeli Embassy yesterday from 5pm to 7pm a three-year-old girl listened to two hours of hate-filled chanting and sermons before being called to the platform by her mother.
The microphone was thrust under her nose so she could do her own version of “Free Free Palestine”. Who needs preachers of hate when children are so indoctrinated with hate from birth in some British homes (see clip):
The little girl had heard repeated calls for Israel’s destruction and some things said about Jews in Arabic, which I didn’t understand.
She heard (‘Comment is Free’ contributor) Ghada Karmi, who teaches Arab and Islamic Studies at Exeter University, declare “Israel is finished”, “it does not to deserve to continue as a state”, “Jerusalem does not belong to Jews”, “we respect all religions but we do not allow one group to take over this wonderful city” and “we muct act against Israel’s interests” (see clip):
It was Karmi, of course, who recently sat silently by as Ken O’Keefe compared Jews to Nazis. Karmi doesn’t seem to trust Jews to look after Jerusalem, but when the Jordanians controlled Jerusalem from 1949 to 1967 Jews were forbidden to visit it and its Jewish cemeteries were desecrated. Now people of all faiths can freely worship there, as long as your intentions are benign.
The “Global March to Jerusalem” turned out to be nothing more than a couple of hundred indoctrinated Israel haters taunting an empty Israeli Embassy building.
On its news feed Iran’s Press TV mocked the paltry turnout of pro-Israel activists and PSC head-honcho Sarah Colborne announced, to cheers, that those activists had left early.
Note to Press TV and Sarah Colborne: Friday night is Shabbat, the holiest and most precious time for Jews. They are with their families. That is why only 20 came and why those that came left early.
Here are Colborne et al aiming their chants towards an empty Israeli embassy building as Shabbat is about to come in. Even Colborne looks embarrassed:
As I walked back to the tube I chatted to some of the protesters.
I asked two teenage girls what they were doing to stand up for their oppressed sisters in Saudi Arabia who are not allowed to show their faces like these girls were doing. They answered that the Saudis treated women with more respect than women over here get. I asked a teenage boy whether he supported suicide bombings inside Israel. He said it was a response to having your land stolen.
With such sentiments you can start to understand where Toulouse Jew murderer Mohamed Merah came from.
More photos from yesterday:
The 2 middle maps are correct but the other 2 are laughable.
A cross post by Anne, who blogs at Anne’s Opinons
Tens of thousands of Islamists, anti-Israel activists and assorted ill-wishers are planning to take part in a “Global March to Jerusalem” tomorrow, March 30th, also known to Palestinians as Land Day.
Turbulent weekend in cards? International supporters and hundreds of thousands of participants are expected to take part in the Global March on Jerusalem Friday, as Israel braces for potential attempts to breach the Jewish state’s borders..
The event, which is expected to include marches and protests across the region, is entering its final preparations, as IDF forces are also deploying in a bid to prevent any disruptions on Israel’s borders.
The IDF is preparing for the possibility that attempts will be made to breach Israel’s borders. The forces have been directed to prevent any beaches of Israeli sovereignty with minimal injuries to the protestors, if they do approach the border.
Sources within the defense establishment have conducted talks with Palestinian security officials to coordinate the events and make sure they remain within the jurisdiction of Palestinian towns.
Sa’id Yakin, one of the protest organizers in the Palestinian Authority, told Ynet that rallies will be held at three West Bank focal points.
“We expect thousands of participants,” Yakin said. “We have no interest in confrontation, and this march will not give rise to a third Intifada. We hope this move will affect Israel and its government’s policy.”
Palestinian security officials are also preparing for the weekend’s events and are estimating that most marchers won’t be able to get through local roadblocks and approach Israeli territory.
In Lebanon, participants will convene for a prayer session on the Beaufort, which overlooks the border with Israel. Public figures are expected to deliver a speech at the site, with organizers looking forward to welcoming tens of thousands of participants.
According to Lebanese reports, security forces held a Turkish vessel carrying activists from Iran, Turkey and other Asian states for long hours. Hezbollah representatives reportedly mediated in efforts to resolve the crisis.
Jordan has set the gathering point at the site where it is believed that Jesus was baptized, a location overlooking Jerusalem. According to plans, this rally will also include speeches and masses of protestors.
Jordanian coordinator of the march, Ribhi Halloum, said: “We feel the immense interest in the event expressed through donations from private individuals and the Islamic Movement.”
The Al-Dustour newspaper reported that Jordanian Prime Minister Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh expressed his readiness to provide the Jordanian government’s sponsorship to the march which he said would be non-violent.
In Morocco, recent mass marches in Rabat have been seen as the first signs heralding the Jerusalem march events. Plans for the event include a joint forum with students from Jordan and a declaration of a fast day in efforts to show solidarity with Jerusalem.
On Friday, a number of marches will be held simultaneously, leaving from Casablanca, Fes and Meknes. Two days later pro-Palestinian organizations will launch a mass rally in Casablanca expected to attract hundreds of thousands of people.
Syria did not allow the recent riots to interfere with rigorous planning of the events, while in Egypt the activity is set to be low-key with just a central rally and a few small protests in the cards.
I highlighted certain sentences above in order to note that the IDF is right to be concerned about a possible breach of Israel’s borders. It happened before, last May, in the “Naqsa Day” disturbances, and all the signs are that despite the protestations of non-violence, the march has a huge potential to similarly turn very violent indeed.
The Times of Israel also reports on the diplomatic and military preparations being taken to prevent violence and a border breach:
The march’s organizers have predicted that two million participantswill join the protests. Israeli officials say they are braced for tens of thousands, and military sources said the army and policy have been instructed to act with maximal restraint while doing what is necessary to protect the country’s borders and citizens.
The security forces have been ordered to protect themselves and bystanders, to prevent any cross-border incursions, however brief, and to deny activists “a media victory,” Israel’s Channel 2 news reported Thursday night. In protests at the Syrian border last year, more than 100 activists broke through the border fence and entered Druze villages in the Golan Heights; one man even made his way to Tel Aviv.
Diplomatic officials sounded relatively unworried by the planned protests, although one source acknowledged that there was no way of knowing what might unfold on the Syrian and Lebanese borders, because Israel has no dialogue with anyone in authority on the other side of either of those lines.
Several hundred anti-Israel demonstrators are also planning protests in front of Israeli institutions worldwide.
In Jerusalem, access to the Temple Mount for Friday prayers will be limited to adult worshipers, and police have called in extra forces. Police deployments in hotspots nationwide are also being reinforced. Sources expressed concern at the prospect of violence in and around the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem as well as on the outskirts of Jerusalem, at known flashpoints such as the Kalandiya checkpoint.
[...]
“Messages have been sent through a third country to the Lebanese authorities, messages to the effect that border incidents are of no interest to anyone and that we expect them to enforce law and order,” a diplomatic source said. “But we all know who really controls the South of Lebanon, so we don’t know really know what to expect,” he added, referring to Hezbollah fighters who might seek violent confrontation with Israeli troops.
Israelis and Jordanians routinely cooperate on military issues and thus it was not necessary to send any warning messages to Amman, the diplomatic official said. “The Jordanians know it’s against their interests to have any cross-border incidents.”
“The big question is what will happen near our borders with Syria and Lebanon. Nobody can forecast what’s going to happen. There is no one in Syria we can send any messages to, not even indirectly.”
“Messages have been sent through a third country to the Lebanese authorities, messages to the effect that border incidents are of no interest to anyone and that we expect them to enforce law and order,” a diplomatic source said. “But we all know who really controls the South of Lebanon, so we don’t know really know what to expect,” he added, referring to Hezbollah fighters who might seek violent confrontation with Israeli troops.
Israelis and Jordanians routinely cooperate on military issues and thus it was not necessary to send any warning messages to Amman, the diplomatic official said. “The Jordanians know it’s against their interests to have any cross-border incidents.”
“The big question is what will happen near our borders with Syria and Lebanon. Nobody can forecast what’s going to happen. There is no one in Syria we can send any messages to, not even indirectly.”
The Jerusalem Post has a good article detailing the press and propaganda war surrounding this “Global March to Jerusalem” (GM2J). Meanwhile, Jeremy Havardi, writing in The Commentator, has written an excellent piece which rips to shreds the lies and distortions surrounding the Arabs’ pseudo-claim to Jerusalem. Here is just a small excerpt but do go and read the whole thing:
The Palestinians and their backers have long resorted to diplomatic war in order to undermine Israel’s legitimacy. The Global March to Jerusalem, scheduled for March 30, is a classic example of this tactic. The organisers claim they are seeking “freedom for Jerusalem” and an “end to the Apartheid, ethnic cleansing and Judaisation” affecting the city.
In reality, they are distorting the historical record for political purposes. They seek to depict Israel as a malevolent custodian of the Holy places and a usurper of Muslim rights, so as to buttress an Arab and Islamic claim to the city. But as it happens, their claim does not stand up to serious scrutiny.
But by far the most thorough and far-reaching counter-attack on the GM2J is the website set up by Adam Levick, [lead researcher Hadar Sela], and the team at CiFWatch.
The site is very cleverly designed to be an almost exact replica of the official Global March to Jerusalem site (I won’t provide a link to that to avoid sending them traffic), including their logo. The only difference is that the logo has a red diagonal line through it. And of course the title of the site is “Exposing the Truth about the Global March to Jerusalem“.
The site has links to the organizers, the sponsors, the endorsers etc. of the GM2J and makes rather horrifying reading.
They have now produced a very useful factsheet which I urge you to read, and use the information contained within it to counter lies, distortions and plain old anti-Israel propaganda wherever you may encounter it. Here are some highlights:
The organizers of GMJ are made up of members of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, far-left extremist groups and are backed by the Iranian government.
[...]
Official statements of the organizers of GMJ attempt to portray the movement as a peaceful protest aimed at highlighting the so-called “Judaization of Jerusalem”.
In 2011, GMJ general coordinator, Ribhi Halloum stated “[t]he protest aims to move the right of return possessed by Palestinian refugees from theory to practice”.
In practice, the right of return is a rejection of the two state solution and subterfuge for the destruction of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. Coupled with that, employment of the term “Judaization of Jerusalem” is hateful rhetoric designed to negate thousands of years of Jewish history and incite the Muslim world.
Should we be concerned about GMJ?
Absolutely. With a bloody uprising in Syria, a Muslim Brotherhood dominated Egypt, the looming Iranian nuclear threat, a failed peace process and recent renewed violence from Hamas-controlled Gaza, the situation is highly volatile. Combined with the extreme terror groups behind GMJ and the rallying cry of “saving Al Aqsa (Jersualem) from the Jews”, it is our assessment that with sufficient numbers the organizers will seek violent confrontation with Israeli forces with the aim of sparking a Third Intifada.
Unfortunately the march (or attempted invasion) will be taking place on Friday, and if there are any repercussions, violent or otherwise, they will spill over into Shabbat, when I will be offline. I will make this post a “sticky” post, so that it will stay at the top of my blog until after Shabbat so that readers not on my Shabbat time can leave updates in the comments section if they wish.
May the wishes of those who hate us be thwarted and may we all have a quiet and peaceful Shabbat and may the desires of those who hate us be thwarted.
Related articles
- CiF gives platform to Sarah Colborne to promote terrorist-organized ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ (cifwatch.com)
- Regional organisation ahead of the Global March to Jerusalem. (gm2j.co)
- ‘Global March to Jerusalem’: An Attempt to “unravel the Zionist edifice” (gm2j.co)
- Global March to Jerusalem: Change of plans for Lebanon? (gm2j.co)
- Global March to Jerusalem organisation inside Israel (gm2j.co)
This essay was written by Judea Pearl, president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, named after his son, who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan while investigating the case of a convicted shoe bomber. (It is being published here with the permission of Judea Pearl, via the site: Zionism on the Web)
In the past three months, I have visited four “troubled” campuses — Duke, York (Canada), Columbia and UC Irvine — where tensions between Jewish and anti-Zionist students and professors have attracted national attention.
In these visits, I have spoken to students, faculty and administrators, and I have obtained a fairly gloomy picture of the situation on those and other campuses.
Jewish students are currently subjected to an unprecedented assault on their identity as Jews.
And we, the Jewish faculty on campus, have let those students down.
We have failed to equip them with effective tools to fight back this assault.
We can reverse this trend.
Many condemn anti-Zionism for being a flimsy cover for anti-Semitism. I disagree. The order is wrong. I condemn anti-Semitism for being an instrument for a worse form of racism: anti-Zionism.
In other words, I submit that anti-Zionism is a form of racism more dangerous than classical anti-Semitism. Framing anti-Zionism as racism is precisely the weapon that our students need for survival on campus.
Anti-Zionism earns its racist character from denying the Jewish people what it grants to other collectives (e.g. Spanish, Palestinians), namely, the right to nationhood and self-determination.
Are Jews a nation? A collective is entitled to nationhood when its members identify with a common history and wish to share a common destiny. Palestinians have earned nationhood status by virtue of thinking like a nation, not by residing where their ancestors did (many of them are only three or four generations in Palestine). Jews, likewise, are bonded by nationhood (i.e., common history and destiny) more than they are bonded by religion.
The appeal to Jewish nationhood is necessary when we consider Israel’s insistence on remaining a “Jewish state.” By “Jewish state” Israelis mean, of course, “national Jewish state,” not “religious Jewish state” — theocratic states (like Pakistan and Iran) are incompatible with modern standards of democracy and pluralism. Anti-Zionist racists use this anti-theocracy argument repeatedly to delegitimize Israel, and I have found our students unable to defend their position with conventional ideology that views Jewishness as a religion.
Jewishness is more than just a religion. It is an intricate and intertwined mixture of ancestry, religion, history, country, culture, tradition, attitude, nationhood and ethnicity, and we need not apologize for not fitting neatly into the standard molds of textbook taxonomies — we did not choose our turbulent history.
As a form of racism, anti-Zionism is worse than anti-Semitism. It targets the most vulnerable part of the Jewish people, namely, the people of Israel, who rely on the sovereignty of their state for physical safety, national identity and personal dignity. To put it more bluntly, anti-Zionism condemns 5 million human beings, mostly refugees or children of refugees, to eternal statelessness, traumatized by historical images of persecution and genocide.
Anti-Zionism also attacks the pivotal component of our identity, the glue that bonds us together — our nationhood, our history. And while people of conscience reject anti-Semitism, anti-Zionist rhetoric has become a mark of academic sophistication and social acceptance in Europe and in some U.S. campuses.
Moreover, anti-Zionism disguises itself in the cloak of political debate, exempt from sensitivities and rules of civility that govern interreligious discourse. Religion is ferociously protected in our society — political views are not.
Just last month, a student organization on a UC campus hosted a meeting on “A World Without Israel.” Imagine the international furor that a meeting called, “A World Without Mecca,” would provoke.
So, in the name of “open political debate,” administrators would not think twice about inviting MIT linguist Noam Chomsky to speak on campus, though his anti-Zionist utterances offend the fabric of my Jewish identity deeper than any of the ugly religious insults currently shocking the media. He should be labeled for what he is: a racist.
Strategically, while accusations of anti-Semitism are worn out and have lost their punch, charging someone with racism makes people ask why anyone would deny people the right of self-determination in a sliver of land in the birthplace of their history. It shifts the frame of discourse from debating Israel’s policies to the root cause of the conflict — denying Israelis their basic rights as a nation.
Charges of “racism” highlight the inherent asymmetry between the Zionist and anti-Zionist positions. The former grants both Israelis and Palestinians the right for statehood, the latter denies that right to one, and only one side. This asymmetry is the most effective weapon our students should use in campus debates, for it puts them back on the high moral grounds of “fair and balanced” and forces their opponents to defend an ideology of one-sidedness.
For example, I have found it effective, when confronting an anti-Zionist speaker, to ask: “Are you willing to go on record and state that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a conflict between two legitimate national movements?” Western audiences adore even-handedness and abhor bias. The question above forces the racist to unveil and defend his uneven treatment of the two sides.
America prides itself on academic freedom, and academic freedom entails freedom to teach hatred and racism — we graciously accept this fact of life. However, academic freedom also entails the freedom of students to expose racism, be it white-supremacy, women-inferiority, Islamophobia or Zionophobia wherever it is spotted. Not to censor, but to expose — racists stew in their own words.
In summary, I believe the formula “Anti-Zionism = Racism” should give Jewish students the courage to both defend their identity and expose those who abuse it.
Related articles
- Muslim Anti-Semitism, Israel, and the Dynamics of Self-Destructive Scapegoating (cifwatch.com)
- Democracy deficits & moral deficits: The mindless anti-Zionism of CiF contributor Marc Weisbrot (cifwatch.com)
- The anti-Zionist malice of ‘Comment is Free’ contributor Mya Guarnieri (cifwatch.com)
- Glowing Guardian profile of Jacqueline Rose, bold analyst of Zionism’s psychosis (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian publishes letter by supporter of Gilad Atzmon, refuses to publish rebuttal (cifwatch.com)
- Jews & the charge of ‘Dual Loyalty’: CiF’s Rachel Shabi excuses a classic antisemitic canard (cifwatch.com)
- Anti-Zionist propaganda as literary criticism: How the Guardian demonizes Israel without really trying (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian welcomes back Ben White, tireless campaigner for the end of the Jewish State (cifwatch.com)
- Why do they hate the Jews? The Guardian and the toxicity of liberal racism. (cifwatch.com)
Cross posted by Richard Landes, who blogs at Augean Stables
One of my daughters recently wrote me:
“I was speaking to a friend of mine who had been dating a very, very, anti Israel activist for about a year. We don’t usually breech the topic but she asked me if most of the Muslim antisemitism in Europe wasn’t based on their dislike of what is going on in Israel and not so much on religion.”
This is a widely held belief among not only anti-Zionists, but among liberals in general. It takes a number of forms, all of which serve to explain the explosive and virulent hatreds of the Muslim world for Israel and the Jews (who support it), as a function of the evil that Israel has done to the Palestinians. It includes the widely held assumption that suicide bombings were a response to the despair that Palestinians felt because Israel denied them independence and dignity. It is also directly related to the problem of “Islamophobia is the new Anti-Semitism,” in which speaking of Muslim anti-Semitism becomes a new form of anti-Semitism.
I won’t so much argue against this approach – it has some data points to deploy – as I will argue an alternative approach to the problem, then discuss the consequences of (mis)reading the situation by either approach, and let readers decide for themselves which makes more sense.
From my point of view (medievalist familiar with Christian anti-Semitic words and deeds, and a student of the current scene), the argument works exactly in the opposite direction: Palestinian anti-Semites have produced the images – icons of hatred – that, through modern media, have spread the virus throughout the Muslim world. The violence that Israel does against the Palestinians – a fraction of the violence that Arab leaders do towards their own people with far less provocation – responds to Palestinian attacks inspired by anti-Semitc propaganda.
Because the Western mainstream news media (MSNM) has mainstreamed some of this propaganda (inexcusably but pervasively), many people, including my daughter’s friend – whose only data points are the TV images of terrible violence Israelis do to Palestinians, and TV images of Palestinian hatred – assume that the hatreds are at least in part justified. The number is legion of French Jews in the early “aughts,” under assault from a wave of hostility, who heard some variant of “no wonder French Muslims hate you, look at what your brethren in Israel do to their cousins in Palestine.”
Of course, let’s grant the news media everything they claim – that Israelis “massacred” hundreds of Palestinians in Jenin (2002), that they devastated Lebanon in 2006, that they killed over 1400 Gazans mostly civilians in Operation Cast Lead. This is nothing in comparison with what toxic Arab dictators do to their own people, the over million Muslims that Saddam Hussein killed in his career, the tens of thousands that Hafez al Assad killed a matter of weeks in the city of Hama (1982), even the brutal behavior that marks the current authorities in the Arab world, despite the watchful gaze of the world. And yet we have nothing resembling the thorough “critique” of Zionism in the Arab world that tackles the far older and more widespread problem of authoritarianism in Arab political culture. In a sense, anyone who “grants” the Palestinians and other Muslims “permission” to hate the Jews “given what Israel does to them,” just reveals their unthinking racism: “I don’t really expect anything remotely rational or balanced from these folks. If you piss them off, you deserve their rage.”
But to return to the main issue, the silence of the MSNM about the pervasiveness of a grotesque hatred: it is guilty in two senses here. In addition to reporting Palestinian lethal narratives bordering on blood libels as news, they did not report the hatreds that lay behind such narratives. In the summer of 2000, before the collapse of the Oslo Peace talks at Camp David, months before the intifada, the PA was blasting hatred of Israel and calls to war on its media. Perhaps the MSNM, like Clinton and Barak, were surprised by Arafat’s “no” at Camp David because they did not listen to – or heed – what he and his friends were saying in Arabic. On the contrary, driven by a (soft millennial) belief that peace was around the corner, they felt that dwelling on such bad news would queer the peace process. I still remember someone in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem telling me they would not allow Itamar Markus to present his material (what Palestinians say in Arabic), to the foreign media, “because Israel is officially in favor of the peace process.” As if denying the problem were somehow going to bring peace.
Nor did this change once war broke out. On October 12, 2000, Palestinians shouting “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah!” tore two Israeli reservists apart with their bare hands and paraded them through the streets. The next day, Sheikh Halabiya gave a sermon calling on Muslims to slaughter the Jews (NB Jews, not Israelis) wherever they see them. Two weeks later, NYT veteran reporter William Orme wrote a piece assessing the Israeli claim that the horrendous violence of the intifada – the attacks on Israelis on both sides of the Green Line – came from the incitement of the Palestinian media. In it he never discussed the al Durah case (which he had specifically covered, and which was the most explosive component in the campaign of incitement, and which his Palestinian informant alluded to when he claimed (dishonestly) claimed that “we have no fabricated pictures, and no fabricated stories”); and when it came time to quote a passage to illustrate incitement, he quoted the genocidal Halabiya as saying, “Labor, Likud, they’re all Jews.” How could a consumer of the MSNM – much less the anti-Zionist media – know any of this?
As a result, the ferocious strain of anti-Semitism in Palestinian irredentism, from the Mufti – who visited Hitler in Berlin 70 years ago today, discussed his contribution to the “final solution,” and pumped the Arab world with Nazi propaganda – to the escaped Nazis who fled to Egypt and Syria to continue their work, to Arafat and his pseudo-secular patter of “national liberation,” to Hamas’ apocalyptic paranoia, has gone largely undocumented and unknown to the average observer of what’s quaintly known as the “Middle East conflict.” Nor is this merely a quirk of journalism, but a widespread practice of the “post-colonial” field of Middle East studies in the wake of Edward Said’s masterpiece of cognitive warfare forbidding Westerners from “othering” Muslims.
Why the Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism? In a book published in the 1986, Bernard Lewis noted that by and large, even though Arabs adopted anti-Semitic material from the worst European sources as part of an anti-Zionist campaign, they remained friendly to Jews personally: 9-5 anti-semitism of the workplace.
No longer. Jews have been driven from places like Egypt, and now “democracy” crowds rallied by the Obama-administration-designated “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood chant, “One day we will kill all Jews.” (As Barry Rubin noted, does that make them “moderate” because they don’t want to do it this week?) Since 2000, Arab and Muslim news media have been awash with gory video depictions of the Elders of Zion carrying out their blood sacrifices of innocent Muslim youth. Specialists disagree over whether this is primarily an import from the worst of European hate-mongering, especially the Nazis, or an indigenous growth with roots in the Qur’an.
From a the point of view of a medievalist who studies millennialism, both these sources share a single genealogy, that of supersessionist, invidious identity formation activated by honor-shame insecurity. Both Islam and Christianity arise as apocalyptic offshoots of Judaism – Jesus and Muhammad were both “roosters” announcing in the former case, the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, in the latter, the imminent Last Judgment. In both cases, early on, the founding prophets included Jews in their scope of those to whom they preached in the hopes of winning them over into apocalyptic time. In both cases their effort to win over the Jews and their prophecies failed: still today, neither kingdom of heaven, nor the Last Judgment have occurred. In both cases, one strain of belief blamed the Jews for the apocalyptic failure.
In both cases, the newer religions developed a replacement theology whereby they did not just become a new and additional chosen people, but had to replace the previous claimant(s). I make myself look bigger by making others (in this case, people I have been directly inspired by) look smaller. I can only be chosen of God if He has rejected you.
In the honor-shame, zero-sum variant of monotheism, one proves the superiority of one’s beliefs by subjecting those who do not share it to humiliations. Christianity took this attitude towards the Jewish minority in their midst (centuries before shariah law of dhimmis, Theodosius forbade Jews to build new synagogues or to have any synagogue higher than the Christian churches); and Muslims took the same honor-shame attitude towards both Christians and Jews under their power. And, not surprisingly, Christians and Muslims fought it out as only imperialist monotheists can do for well over a millennium.
As Gavin Langmuir pointed out decades ago, virulent anti-Semitism (which he distinguished from garden-variety anti-Judaism or dislike of Jews, but rather a demonization of the supernaturally evil Jews) arises when the supersessionist religion has a crisis of faith and becomes radically insecure. This can be provoked by a variety of circumstances – in the case Langmuir studied, it was a theological crises around the high medieval doctrine of transubstantiation (i.e., the wine and the wafer actually become the blood and body of Christ in the course of the mass). In any case, insecurity denied and weaponized can lead to apocalyptic paranoia and its genocidal hatreds.
In the current case of Islam, the realization that the West has far outstripped the Muslim world in technology and power, that Islam stands humiliated in the world scene, that modernity threatens to castrate Islam, and the belief that the Jews stand at the heart of modernity, has led to a virulent strain of not just anti-Zionism – itself the ultimate insult of modernity, a tiny bunch of should-be dhimmi who defeat Arab armies ten times their size – but of anti-Semitism.
Thus the Jewish slap on the faces of the Christians continues, who apparently enjoy and allow this sort of humiliation and attack, and give them their other cheek so that the Jew can continue to slap the Christians—just as we see—ruling them in Europe through the Masons who dig the grave of Western civilization through corruption and promiscuity. The Crusader West continues like a whore who is screwed sadistically, and does not derive any pleasure from the act until after she is struck and humiliated, even by her pimps—the Jews in Christian Europe. Soon they will be under the rubble as a result of the Jewish conspiracy. (Arif, Nihayat al-Yahud , 85, cited in Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic, 220; discussed in Landes, Heaven on Earth, pp. 455-57).
European anti-Zionist may like their fantasy that their attitude is not anti-Semitic, but in the case of the Arab and Muslim world, the slide from opposing Israel to ranting about “al Yahud” everywhere is effortless.
Given the power of genocidal anti-Semitic sentiments in the Arab and Muslim world – press and TV, mosques, public officials – one might wonder why the Western silence on the subject. Indeed it is so deafening, so understudied and underreported, that a less-well informed person might think that it doesn’t exist and my complaint is really just paranoia. It’s not enough to point to the degree of intimidation that pervades journalism in the Palestinian territories (and other places where state terrorists dominate the scene), an intimidation that came through loud and clear in the aftermath of the Ramallah lynch affair. Although that explains much of the behavior of journalists on the scene, like NYT reporter Steven Erlanger who waited until he left the region before – at long last – mentioning the problem in an article.
It’s also related to a particularly dangerous form of political correctness, in which speaking badly of Muslims is the new form of Anti-Semitism. As a colleague said to me in Paris, “The experience of the Muslims in Europe today is exactly the same as the Jews a century ago.” Of course, that’s not the case at all: both in terms of the wildly different behavior of the two minorities, and in terms of how the European elites behaved and behave towards them. By that (completely erroneous historical) logic, however, any attack on Islam is immediately comparable to a 19th century attack on Jews. To claim that Muslims want to take over Europe is the same as believeing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; to accuse them of planning terror attacks, is the same as believing in the blood libel. Little matter that Islamists themselves say they want to take over Europe, and they want to bring a holocaust on the European infidel, that they actually do carry out terror attacks. The triumph of the will over reality.
This problem is everywhere. Even Jewish organizations designed to protect Jews from anti-Semitism spend much more of their time sponsoring inter-religious dialogues, opposing Islamism, and applauding human rights initiatives, than even discussing, much less mobilizing against Muslim Anti-Semitism. In the USA, the once legendary ADL has become a 20th century relic in the 21st century, still pursuing the nice, liberal policy of protecting everyone’s rights in the (dashed) hopes that others will come to their defense when they need it. A recent study shows that only 1.3% of the ADL’s 4269 press releases (1995-present) focused on Islamic extremism and another 1.3% on Arab anti-Semitism. Of the 57 press releases devoted to Islamic extremism, only 13, about .005 were issued in the ten years since September 11, 2001, precisely when the threat to Jews from Islamic extremism dramatically increased. (That’s almost as small as the percentage of Jews in the world, or the percentage of the Arab world “occupied” by Israel – .002.)
In Germany, the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung in Berlin actually held a conference whose main theme was the close identity of Islamophobia and Judeophobia. Challenged, they replied indignantly that the mafioso tactics of their opponents (public criticism) were intolerable. A German colleague was surprised when I told him that Hamas is much closer to the Nazi attitude towards Jews than the neo-Nazis. These latter are closer to violent but garden variety xenophobes, and Jews barely register on their list of concerns, while Hamas shares the same fevered (apocalyptic) paranoia and genocidal loathing of Jews that the Nazis did.
Which brings us to the dilemma that faces the Western observer, especially the one who believes that moral behavior matters, and wants to support those who behave well and oppose those who behave badly. We are faced with two opposing narratives: one in which the Muslims (especially the Palestinians) are victims who might be forgiven their hatred of the imperialist Israelis, one in which the Israelis are victims, who might be forgiven their violent resistance to Palestinian and Muslim anti-Semitic assaults.
Why not toss a coin?
Because (aside from the fact that in so doing one would greatly increase support for the imperialist Zionists to 50%), there are serious consequences to misreading this situation. If I am wrong, and Palestinian hatred is merely a result of the “occupation”, then concessions from the Israelis should lead to a lessening of Palestinian hatred, and the road to peace. As Stephen Bronner, prominent scholar of Anti-Semitism noted in an article on the Protocols,
Nevertheless, it makes sense to believe that an anti-Semitism that has only grown with the success of Israeli imperialist policy will diminish with a change in that policy.
This is the prevailing paradigm that currently dominates thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It projects a kind of positive-sum rationality on Arab political culture, and assumes that if something’s wrong, it is the fault of the stronger party unwilling to compromise (Israel). It’s the same mentality that gives us the universal and universally wrong excitement of the MSNM about the “Arab Spring” – get rid of a dictator… get democracy. No?No.
Of course, if the Palestinians really are rational, really want their own state (rather than to destroy Israel), then they should, in principle, be amenable to making some important moves towards reconciliation, like, say, cutting off the hate incitement on TV, and building settlements in the land they control (Area A of the West Bank and all of Gaza) to resettle their refugees. No? No.
But if I’m right, if it’s a profoundly rooted anti-Semitism among Arabs today, one that has been “cooking” for over a century, got jacked up on steroids during the Nazi period, and hit a rolling boil in 2000 with the al Durah blood libel, then it’s another story entirely. If I’m right, then “solving the refugee problem” by allowing these poor victims of war to have a real home is not on the Palestinian agenda – even if they got their state. On the contrary, these “refugees” are designated victim-weapons in a war of annihilation.
If I’m right, then every time Israel makes concessions, it encourages further aggressions. Thus, despite what the politically correct paradigm, based on projecting our own liberal mentality on others, anticipated, every time Israel engaged in anti-imperialist activities – like withdrawing from most of the West Bank (1994-2000), all of southern Lebanon (2000) and all of Gaza (including uprooting 8000 settlers) – the result was more and more vicious aggression.
Nor is this merely a problem faced by Israel. (I know there are many anti-Zionists out there who treasure the thought that if only they throw Israel into the maw of the beast, that they’ll be spared, but that too is a piece of cognitive egocentrism in which their imagined distinction between the West (us) and despised Israel (them) is shared by the Jihadis.) Israel is to Europe dealing with Jihadi Islam what the Sudetenland was to the French and English in dealing with the Nazis. The difference is that, thankfully for the West, Israel is armed and refuses to commit suicide – even though that infuriates those who would prefer they do so quietly.
For ultimately, the problem of anti-Semitism is not a Jewish but a gentile problem. Granted the Jews suffer from anti-Semitism, indeed they’re often the first to suffer. But the ultimate price is paid by those foolish enough to either get sucked into the world of hatred and paranoia that anti-Semites peddle, or ignore its presence as a sad but inevitable part of life. As any historian of World War II can tell you, if six million Jews were murdered, more than ten (!) times as many non-Jews died in that madness.
The Arab world in the latter half of the 20th century offers a striking parallel to Spain in the 16th century. Both worlds had expelled their Jews (Spain in 1492, Arabs in 1948); both experienced a flood of wealth (Spain got New World gold and the Arabs got Petrodollars); and both were failed societies unable to parlay that wealth into a thriving culture that made life better for all its people. As Ruth Wisse put it recently: “Arab leaders do not yet acknowledge that they sealed the doom of their societies in 1948 when they organized their politics against the Jewish state rather than toward the improvement of their countries.” And they’re doing it again, this time not from the top down, but from the bottom up.
In a recent article, Jeffrey Goldberg tried to acknowledge the problem of anti-Semitic sentiments pervading the “Arab Spring” all the while preserving the belief that “The people of the Middle East are finally awakening to the promise of liberty.” But the two are intimately related. The Judeophobia of these alleged “liberty-seekers” isn’t some deplorable but ultimately separate issue. The Judeophobia is not the problem, but the symptom. It’s the conspiracy thinking that blames every problem on the “other”: Muslims attack Copts? It’s the Jews. Police turn violently on the crowds? It’s the Jews. Arab Spring turning into Islamist Winter? It’s the Jews (or, if you’re on the BBC, “”). How can one possibly inaugurate, foster, and sustain a democratic culture of freedom, one that, the in words of Isaiah Berlin, considers it “shameful not to grant to others the freedom one wants to exercise oneself,” without an ?
Anti-Semitism is everyone’s problem, especially the Muslims. And the sooner the “progressives” who want to help them, stop feeding their anti-Semitic vulnerabilities by joining them in demonizing Israel, and help them deal with the problem of self-criticism (a virtue to which the “left” could well afford to renew its commitments), the sooner we are likely to see a real Arab Spring, one that benevolent people the world over can sincerely cheer. Of course that would mean that anti-Zionists would have to overcome their own scapegoating fantasies.
Related articles
- Arthur Nelsen’s Occupied Mind: Why the Guardian Left can’t take Arab antisemitism seriously (cifwatch.com)
- (Ben) White Wash at Amnesty (cifwatch.com)
- Jews & the charge of ‘Dual Loyalty’: CiF’s Rachel Shabi excuses a classic antisemitic canard (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch exclusive interview with Smadar Bakovic, who fought anti-Zionist bias in UK Academia & won! (cifwatch.com)
- Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 2011 Top 10 anti-Israel and antisemitic slurs (cifwatch.com)
Cross posted by Mark Gardner at the blog of the CST
According to an article by “M.S.” on the Economist blog, Israel and its Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu fear Iran because they suffer from “Auschwitz complex”. Furthermore, this “Auschwitz complex” supposedly links with the Jewish festivals of Purim and Passover. At its end, we are told that Netanyahu’s fears over Iran, reveal his “ghetto mentality”.
The Holocaust, Jewish history and religion are crucial to the Israeli national psyche and the decisions of its leaders: but this is not a serious article on that multifaceted subject. Instead, this article’s lack of accuracy and sensitivity make it little more than an abuse of the Holocaust and Jewish religion in order to stick two fingers up at Netanyahu. (The Economist is perfectly entitled to criticise Netanyahu: but to do so on the premise of supposed Jewish psychological, religious and historical traits takes us into altogether different territory.)
To begin, the article’s title, “Auschwitz complex”, belongs more on the websites of Gilad Atzmon (eg “Swindler’s List”) and David Irving (eg “Auschwitz: the End of the Line”) than it does on that of the Economist. It is a cold joke, poking fun at the Holocaust to evoke a wry grin and not a little coldness in the heart of the reader.
The article opens with an attack upon Netanyahu for telling President Obama (in the context of Iran’s nuclear ambitions) that Israel seeks to remain “master of its fate”. The author ridicules the notion that any individual country, especially one in conflict with its neighbours, can be master of its own fate in an inter-dependent world. This is a facile straw man argument that sets the tone for what follows.
Next, Israel and Netanyahu are blamed for every failure of the Oslo Peace Accords and for the ongoing conflict situation. There is nothing unusual about such condemnation, but in this context it is required by the author to justify the notion of an “Auschwitz complex”, whereby Israel’s and Netanyahu’s actions are presented as a mix of premeditated ideological malice and unwarranted paranoia. (It is possible that the title, “Auschwitz complex” was written by the Economist, not the author. Nevertheless, the article is woeful; and if the Economist chose the headline, then that is, in a sense, even more depressing.)
Having built the platform, we get the crux of the article:
Having trapped themselves in a death struggle with Palestinians that they cannot acknowledge or untangle, Israelis have psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran…the notion that it represents a new Holocaust is overstated…But Iran makes an appealing enemy for Israelis because, unlike the Palestinians, it can be fitted into a familiar ideological trope from the Jewish national playbook: the eliminationist anti-Semite.
Where to begin with this? For the sake of brevity, two points:
Firstly, it is plain wrong to say that Palestinians cannot be “fitted into a familiar ideological trope from the Jewish playbook: the eliminationist anti-Semite”. Palestinian and Arab threats to destroy Israel have consistently formed an “ideological trope” in the Israeli psyche, just like today’s Iranian threat. Prior to the state’s creation, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was (and still is) reviled in this manner, just as Egypt’s President Nasser was in the 1950 and 60s. Then, Menachem Begin’s leadership of Israel (1977-1983) was marked by his characterisation of Yasser Arafat and the PLO as Nazi inheritors. Similarly, the Hamas charter bears comparison with any“eliminationist” text.
Secondly, as the ever-excellent Professor Alan Johnson points out, “let us note that far from the concept of eliminationist antisemitism – being part of some ‘Jewish national playbook,’ it was the absence of such an orientating concept among the Jews of Europe that made the nature of the Nazi assault so difficult to understand and respond to.”
The author, “M.S.”, then draws upon Netanyahu’s presentation to Obama of the Book of Esther, which tells how a Persian king was persuaded by (the Jewish) Queen Esther to prevent the massacre of his country’s Jews. The story is read at the festival of Purim, which coincided with the Netanyahu-Obama meeting. We are then told how Passover includes the “Ve-hi she-amdah” prayer, “Because in every generation they rise up to destroy us, but the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands”.
The article says that Netanyahu “seems to be wooing Mr Obama and the American public just as effectively” and that this “resembles” a “doomed marriage” in which
the more stubborn and unstable partner drags the other into increasingly delusional and dangerous projects whose disastrous results seem only to legitimate their paranoid outlook.
No consideration is given to Iran’s past and present actions. No mention is made of its nuclear programme, its goal of regional domination, its leader’s apocalyptic outbursts, its denial of the Holocaust, its terrorism against Jews and Israelis. It is simply all down to Israeli delusions, which rest upon paranoid Jewish religious and Holocaust foundations. This is superior to Gilad Atzmon’s work, such as “Trauma Queen [Esther]…Pre-Traumatic Gas Syndrome…From Purim to AIPAC”, but it is still reminiscent of it. Surely the Economist ought to have far higher standards than the dross psychology and selective facts that comprise and compromise this article.
Finally, the author signs off with a couple more digs at Netanyahu, claiming his concerns over Iran (and Palestinians), and his Book of Esther gift to Obama reveal the failure to fulfil “the Zionist mission…to give the Jewish people control over its destiny”, and his being “still in” “the ‘Ghetto mentality’”.
By comparison, the Jerusalem Post (traditionally a somewhat more pro-Israel publication than the Economist), noted that against American advice, Israel had very successfuly declared independence (1948), launched the Six Day War (1967) and destroyed the Iraqi nuclear programme (1981). The editorial also had this to say about Netanyahu, the Book of Esther, Zionism and Iran:
That message from the Megila [Book of Esther] that encourages Jews to proactively take their fate into their own hands is also the story of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel. Refusing any longer to reconcile themselves to traditional passivity vis-à-vis the creation of a sovereign state, Jews who adhered to Zionism called to take hold of their own destiny.
…Unfortunately, they failed to achieve their goal before the Holocaust, which proved beyond a doubt Zionism’s premise that the Jewish people could not rely on the compassion of others.
…The message of the Megila is not one of militarism.
The lesson that Netanyahu wanted to impart to Obama was not that Israel must launch an attack against Iran to stop its mullahs from developing nuclear weapons.
However, the Megila does value Jewish action over Jewish passivity and recognizes that whether through ingenuity, good luck, divine intervention or a combination of them all the Jewish people, when given the chance, have managed to foil the plans of their many enemies. Let’s hope we have the same success in facing the Iranian challenge.
Related articles
- AKUS @ AIPAC Conf: House leader vows Congress will declare red lines for action on Iran (cifwatch.com)
- Oh, That’s It – Just That Pesky Ol’ Auschwitz Complex (Victor Davis Hanson)
Like this:
Roger Lloyd Pack - "intellect has rapidly diminished over the years until it reached its current level of hilarious stupidity"
Cross posted by Richard Millett
It’s a shame when one of Britain’s best-loved comedy actors joins with the forces of darkness to come to the defence of one of the world’s most reviled regimes, but such is the fate of Roger Lloyd Pack who played Trigger in BBC’s Only Fools and Horses.
Lloyd Pack is a seasoned anti-Israel activist and so it is no surprise to find his signature among the usual suspects in a letter to yesterday’s Guardian supporting Stop The War Coalition’s Don’t Attack Iran Campaign.
Ironically, the BBC website even gives the following description of Trigger:
“Although initially a (relatively speaking) sharp-minded villain Trigger’s intellect has rapidly diminished over the years until it reached its current level of hilarious stupidity.”
Who said art doesn’t sometimes mirror life?
The Guardian website even generously links the letter to the Don’t Attack Iran Campaign website. Why take out an expensive ad in a national newspaper, hire an expensive London venue or print millions of leaflets when all you need do nowadays is write a letter to The Guardian who will give you free advertising space if you’re anti-Israel.
The familiarity of these hardcore anti-Israel signatories is positive in as much as it shows how so alone they are in their support for such an oppressive ideology:
Tony Benn,
Jeremy Corbyn MP
Brian Eno
Lindsey German
George Galloway
Kate Hudson,
Jemima Khan
Ken Loach
Roger Lloyd Pack
Lowkey
Len McCluskey
John McDonnell MP
John Pilger
Michael Rosen
Jenny Tonge
You’d have thought that after her forced resignation from her party after wishing away Israel’s existence they might have left Jenny Tonge off for once but, then again, her recent statements that “Israel is not going to be there forever” and “then they will reap what they have sown” ties in nicely with Ahmadinejad’s genocidal desire to wipe Israel off the map.
Some say Ahmadinejad was mistranslated and that he merely wanted to eradicate Zionism. It’s the same weak defence that commentators like The Guardian’s Michael White and The New Statesman’s Mehdi Hasan put up for Tonge.
Let’s forget that Israel and Zionism are not mutually exclusive and gloss over Ahmadinejad’s “mistranslation” and listen to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei who, as reported by Press TV, “described Israel as a cancerous tumor that must be removed”. It doesn’t get more unambiguous than that and straight from the fool’s and horse’s mouth.
And calling it an attack on Iran is like calling Operation Cast Lead an attack on Gaza or on the Palestinians when, in actual fact, it was a legitimate attack on the terrorist group Hamas in self-defence. Attacking Iran’s nuclear sites will also be a legitimate act of self-defence unless Iran opens itself up to a full nuclear inspection in accordance with its non-proliferation treaty obligations, something that it has so far proved suspiciously unwilling to do.
And calling itself Stop The War Coalition is as equally disingenuous. Let Them Die Coalition would be far more accurate judging by their calls for non-intervention in Libya and, now, Syria.
The Guardian letter compares the build up to a possible war with Iran to that with Iraq. But Stop The War Coalition’s approach is itself reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of another evil regime.
Galloway and German say they aren’t pacifists and Galloway has said that World War Two was a just war, but how can he, and we, be so sure he would have called it that at the time.
Stop The War Coalition is, basically, an organisation that supports non-intervention against regimes that are anti-American and/or anti-Israel. They were ecstatic when pro-American/pro-Israel Mubarak fell in Egypt but have criticised NATO’s ousting of anti-American/anti-Israel Gaddafi and will no way want Assad to fall with the negative impact that would have on Iran and, ultimately, Hezbollah and Hamas.
The hypocrisy of the signatories to The Guardian letter is fully exposed when Stop The War Coalition feels comfortable standing back watching Libyans and Syrians slaughtered in their droves while defending the vile Iranian regime and staying silent about the continued oppression of Iran’s women, gays, Jews (the 25,000 strong community is limited to one MP), Bahais, Kurds and anyone wanting to live a life in Iran as free as those signatories themselves can do in the west.
Related articles
- Chris McGreal Tweets away any possible claim to “liberalism” or journalistic integrity (cifwatch.com)
- How to become an anti-Zionist martyr on the pages of the Guardian: Jenny Tonge edition (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s former Iran correspondent legitimizes bizarre anti-Israel conspiracy theory (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian readers skew conversation about UK, U.S. & Iran in a decidedly Semitic direction (cifwatch.com)
- Mavi Marmara’s Ken O’Keefe compares Jews to Nazis at Middlesex Univ. Event: The Footage. (cifwatch.com)
- More Pro-Iranian “Hasbara” at ‘Comment is Free’ (cifwatch.com)
- Jenny Tonge & the Hamas Lobby (cifwatch.com)
- Seumas Milne or Ahmadinejad? Guardian warns attacking Iran would be ‘criminal aggression’ (cifwatch.com)
Hawkeye
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Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
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Guest/Cross Post
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With stroke of a pen, new bill in Congress could slash number of Palestinian refugees
May 25, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: Cross Post, Delegitimization, Foreign Policy magazine, Jonathan Schanzer, Mark Kirk, UNRWA | by Guest/Cross Post | 21 comments
This is cross posted by Jonathan Schanzer at Foreign Policy magazine. Schanzer is vice president of research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies
A war is brewing on Capitol Hill. And while wars tend to create refugees, this one may result in fewer of them.
Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) is trying to get a handle on the real number of Palestinian refugees in the Middle East — a move that could result in a change of status for millions of Palestinians. His proposed language for the 2013 foreign appropriations bill would require the U.S. government to confirm just how many Palestinians currently served by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) — the body taskedwith providing assistance, protection, and advocacy for Palestinian refugees — are actually refugees. The bill, slated for markup on May 22, would challenge the status of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Palestinian refugees — a great many of whom claim to be refugees despite the fact that they were never personally displaced in the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars.
The aim of this proposed legislation, Kirk’s office explains, is not to deprive Palestinians who live in poverty of essential services, but to tackle one of the thorniest issues of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: the “right of return.” The dominant Palestinian narrative is that all of the refugees of the Israeli-Palestinian wars have a right to go back, and that this right is not negotiable. But here’s the rub: By UNRWA’s own count, the number of Palestinians who describe themselves as refugees has skyrocketed from 750,000 in 1950 to 5 million today. As a result, the refugee issue has been an immovable obstacle in round after round of negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.
How have these numbers swelled, particularly as the Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes in 1948 and 1967 grew old and died? This question lies at the crux of the Kirk amendment. And the answer is UNRWA.
The knock on UNRWA is that it exists to perpetuate the refugee problem, not solve it. It was UNRWA that bestowed refugee status upon “descendants of refugees,” regardless of how much time had elapsed. As a result, the Palestinian refugee population has grown seven-fold since the start of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As one study projects, if descendants maintain their current status, the number of “refugees” in 2020 will be 6.4 million — despite the fact that few of the actual, displaced Palestinians will still be alive. In 2050, that number will reach 14.7 million.
UNRWA, which calls for a “just and durable“ solution to the refugee problem, has unquestionably been a silent partner to the Palestinian leadership. The agency’s administration fully understands that if Israel accepted the PLO’s demand, it would be demographic suicide. As Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas himself has admitted, asking the Jewish state to repatriate 5 million Palestinians “would mean the end of Israel.”
UNRWA’s warts notwithstanding, American taxpayers have rewarded it year after year. In the 2011 fiscal year, U.S. assistance to UNRWA stood at $249.4 million. Total contributions since its founding in 1949 amount to a staggering $4.4 billion.
In recent years, politicians and policy wonks, including one former UNRWA administrator, have called for UNRWA reform. The agency hasn’t merely demurred; it has girded for battle. UNRWA set up shop in Washington with two Hill-savvy professionals, despite the fact that its operations are entirely based in the Middle East, anticipating the need for what looks a full-scale lobby effort to defend its mission. The agency even toyed with changing its name last year in an attempt to burnish its image in the West.
UNRWA’s time to defend itself has unquestionably arrived. The Kirk amendment would require the secretary of state to report to Congress on how many Palestinians serviced by UNRWA are true refugees from wars past — those who could prove that they were personally displaced. That number is believed to be closer to 30,000 people. This new tally would then become the focus of America’s assistance to UNRWA for refugee issues.
Despite congressional Republicans’ current fervor to rein in America’s out-of-control debt, the bill’s proponents do not call for a full cutoff to the descendants. Rather, they seek to ensure that UNRWA services keep flowing to those who are needy. The United States would simply not view them as refugees — just people living in the West Bank or Gaza and below the poverty line.
But funding for the future would not be guaranteed. As Kirk’s office explains, Congress will soon need to consider tough questions, like whether U.S. taxpayers should be footing the bill for welfare programs in the West Bank and Gaza, or whether such services should be provided by the Palestinian Authority.
The fact that this language has made it to mark-up is nothing short of remarkable. The Israelis have historically avoided locking horns with UNRWA at all costs. In fact, they have quietly lobbied against UNRWA reform in the past. As one Israeli official confided, the Israel Defense Forces don’t want to risk being saddled with providing services to the refugees in the West Bank and Gaza should UNRWA unravel. Indeed, one of the Israelis’ primary purposes in signing the Oslo Accords and supporting the creation of the Palestinian Authority was to ensure that they were no longer saddled with the responsibility of providing services to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
But today, with the peace process moribund, if not dead, the Israelis believe that UNRWA reform could serve as a defibrillator of sorts. By tackling one of the toughest challenges of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict without the bedlam that typically accompanies bilateral negotiations, there would theoretically be one less sticking point when the stars align again for diplomacy. Under the leadership of Knesset member Einat Wilf, this idea now has the backing of the prime minister’s office, the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In Washington, a coalition is still forming. Rep. Howard Berman (D- CA), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, broadly backs this idea but has yet to introduce language on the House side. However, bipartisanship may not be enough: The State Department, which pledged an additional $10 million in UNRWA in March, is expected to put up a fight. The legislation would undoubtedly anger some of Washington’s Arab allies, and Foggy Bottom tries to avoid that at all costs.
But such grumblings will likely pale in comparison to the expected outcry in the West Bank, Gaza, and the Palestinian refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries. The refugee narrative is a sacred one in Palestinian political culture. Palestinian leaders will not simply table it because Congress passes new legislation. Rather, it’s a fair bet they will mobilize. When UNRWA merely mulled a name change in July 2011, Palestinians organized protests and sit-ins. Proposing real changes to UNRWA could even prompt violence.
In short, the Kirk legislation would strip Palestinian the descendants of their political symbolism. It would be a landmark for this generations-old conflict, but whether it paves the way for peace or conflict remains to be seen. There are few more potent symbols of the Palestinian cause. Don’t expect Palestinians to give it up easily.
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