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More proof that J Street is clearly outside even the broadest Zionist tent

February 11, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | by | 3 comments

The following essay, by Lori Lowenthal Marcus of the group Z Street, was published at American Thinker

Given the ideological bedlam often seen even within individual Jewish organizations, just imagine trying to get an entire community of Jewish organizations together to sign a several-paragraphs-long statement reflecting a single position — and to do that within a matter of weeks.

That miracle almost happened recently, when the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia gathered practically every Jewish organization in the Philadelphia community to send a message of strong disapproval to an anti-Israel coalition known as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which is holding a three-day conference at the University of Pennsylvania on February 3-5.  But the “almost” is necessary because one significant local group refused to join in.  Understanding who, and why, reveals important lessons that must be taken to heart.

Penn BDS was thrown together by a single undergraduate student with the goal of luring the BDS conference to the University of Pennsylvania campus.  BDS is a global, largely unsuccessful but widely publicized menace with the ultimate goal of demonizing, demoralizing, and destroying the state of Israel.  BDS proponents claim that their methods constitute a tool to achieve justice for those oppressed by Israel; they take their cue from the effort to overthrow the racist South African government during the 1980s.  But BDS is, in fact, merely a thin mask over enmity against any effective haven for the Jewish people.

Last month, when the Penn Hillel leadership learned that the BDS conference was to take place on their campus, the Philadelphia Jewish leadership was alerted, as was the Israeli Consulate.  A broad spectrum of at least nominally pro-Israel local organizations was quickly called together with the goal of creating a strong communal response. 

Mainstream local groups such as the Jewish Federation, the Anti-Defamation League, and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East — as well as those on the far left of the spectrum, such as the New Israel Fund and J Street, and those on the right end, such as Z STREET and the Zionist Organization of America — were included in this call to action.  Several decisions were reached: there would be a communal statement of solidarity condemning the BDS conference; there would be an event showcasing communal support for Israel just prior to the conference; and, to counter the campaign of boycotting Israeli goods, there would be a concerted effort to encourage people to purchase Israeli products.

The crafting of the communal statement took two rounds of drafts and delicate negotiations with each organization involved.  It fell to David Cohen, the senior associate for Israel and Middle East Affairs at the Philadelphia Federation, to ferret out each group’s rock-bottom red lines, then artfully craft changes to avoid crossing any of those lines, and finally to come up with a document that avoided all the pitfalls but still clearly condemned the strategy of BDS generally, and the holding of the BDS conference at Penn specifically.  

I was present at and participated in the meetings as the Z STREET representative.  In response to the first draft, I told Cohen that Z STREET objected to an emphasis on the ubiquitous “two state” mantra.  We think the one clear goal of the peace process should be peace for Israel.  Z STREET believes that the pro-Israel community disserves that goal by adding an additional goal which may not — and in our view, clearly does not — ensure that such peace will be attained.  While disappointed to see the “two states” language as part of the final version of the community statement, we decided that a show of community-wide solidarity is important.  More than two dozen other organizations felt the same, with each no doubt making its own ideological compromises so that the Jewish community could say something with one voice.

But there was a conspicuous absence from the Philadelphia Community Statement’s list of signatures.  Although its representative was present at the community-wide meeting and was included in the community phone calls, J Street refused to be a part of the community and would not sign the joint statement of condemnation.  Instead, J Street Philly issued a separate statement – one very different from the community’s in title, in tone, and in apportionment of blame.  As the local representative stated clearly, J Street wanted to “maintain the integrity of our values” and their “unique position on this issue.”

Whereas the Philadelphia Community Statement is officially one of solidarity with Israel and of condemnation of the BDS Conference, J Street’s is neither.

The Philadelphia Community Statement unequivocally condemns boycotting Israel, disinvesting from its companies, or sanctioning it.  J Street’s statement criticizes the BDS tactics but explicitly recognizes, validates, and agrees with the underlying sentiments expressed by those advocating BDS, which include “the ongoing occupation and diplomatic stagnation” and the “legitimate and warranted” and shared “concern about the present and future of the Palestinian people.” 

Of particular concern to J Street was a broad condemnation of BDS — one that lacked “nuance,” such as making exceptions for boycotting goods made in Judea and Samaria.  Also, J Street refused to criticize Penn, even subtly, for allowing the conference to be held there.  J Street was unwilling to include its voice in stating that “the outrageous claims of BDS campaigns do not stand up to the rigors of academic inquiry and as such, go against the sophisticated civil discourse that is a core element of the University of Pennsylvania.”

Worse, J Street seems to have issued even its own tepid statement with not even enough enthusiasm as to post it; the J Street statement does not appear on the J Street Philadelphia website or on J Street’s Facebook page.  J Street also refused to be one of the more than thirty co-sponsors of the “We Are One ” event with Alan Dershowitz.

Much has been about why and whether J Street is allowed in the “big tent” of Jewish communal organizations.  The argument in favor, of course, is the desire to expand the marketplace of ideas, to be as inclusive as possible, and simply to give a respectful hearing even to those with whom one disagrees.  But we now know what happened when J Street was unquestioningly welcomed into the Philadelphia community tent.  When given the first opportunity to stand as one with the community and speak with one voice from one tent,  J Street snuck out the back and pitched its own tent instead

(Editor’s note: Also, see following clip, from the PennBDS conference, at a breakout session on the “Academic Boycott of Israel”. During the Q&A session, a teacher asked Amy Kaplan, professor of English at Penn, how to incorporate BDS narratives delegitimizing Israel into college courses, even when the course has nothing to do with “Palestine.”)

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“Israel Firster”: Anatomy of an Antisemitic Smear

February 7, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | by | 22 comments

This is cross posted at The Sad Red Earth, by A. Jay Adler

There are many aspects to the current controversy over use of the “Israel Firster” term. There are people who use the term – continue to use it, resistantly defending its use – and there are those who criticize them for it. The critics claim that adopters of the term are continuing an ages-old anti-Semitic libel against Jews – of disloyalty to their home country because of greater, primary loyalty to their Jewish identity. The people who use the term have accused their critics of “smearing” them with the anti-Semitic label for political ends. Again, there are multiple issues buried in these counter charges – that of anti-Semitism itself, and of disloyalty, or divided loyalty or, as has mostly been expressed, “dual” loyalty – but first I consider the notion of the smear.

The first definition of a smear, in its literal, physical sense is to apply an oily, greasy substance that adheres. Extended metaphorically to its secondary meaning, a smear is an unsubstantiated accusation intended to label and “stick” to its object, sullying its reputation. Note the element of unsubstantiation. There is the additional, more uncertain element of intent.

To criticize, in contrast, is “to consider the merits and demerits of and judge accordingly.” In other words, criticism, in its analytical, intellectual sense, is empirical – evidence based. It is not simply a label applied with sticky fallaciousness, but an analytical discrimination that classifies according to identifying characteristics.

One may use the term smear at will, and many do, but it is not just another one of those misguided, relativistic “one person’s smear is another person’s criticism” cases. The two acts are not the same – they have distinct definitions – and they can be identified and themselves discriminated.

There have been several foci of attention in this current accusatory debate, including those initiated by a Ben Smith piece at Politico and James Kirchick in Haaretz. Another was Jeffrey Goldberg’s blog post responding to an email request from Glenn Greenwald. The email from Greenwald, beginning with a typical, causal and friendly “Hi Jeffrey” and ending with a “Much appreciated” explains that Greenwald is “working on (yet another) piece about the CAP anti-Semitism controversy.” Greenwald is seeking helpful information from Goldberg.

Goldberg himself, given the substance of the request, wryly noted the “much appreciated” sign off. I’ll add to that the “(yet another)” parenthetical. It’s all just one pro – writer, blogger, journalist – seeking assistance from a fellow slogger in the field (oh, you know, “yet another”) in getting some work done. What decent guy or gal would not provide collegial assistance?

However, the specific request was the following:

Hi Jeffrey – I’m working on (yet another) piece about the CAP-anti-Semitism controversy. Could you confirm whether, when you joined the IDF, you took this standard oath:

“I swear and commit to pledge allegiance to the State of Israel its laws, and authorities, to accept upon myself unconditionally the authority of the Israel Defense Force, obey all the orders and instructions given by authorized commanders, devote all my energies, and even sacrifice my life for the protection of the homeland and liberty of Israel.”

Much appreciated -

That is, Greenwald was trying (so he thought) to get the goods on Goldberg, to establish, voila, that Goldberg was/is(?), like Sasquatch caught by flash lumbering through the Bayou – there he is, Ladies and Gentleman, you pays your buck, you steps right up, you get to see him, certified, we got the goods on him – a real live Israel Firster in the flesh.

Goldberg provided his answer in the blog post. He offered other comments in other posts, which prompted other responses from a variety of defenders of the Israel-Firster term, including, from Corey Robin, one exceedingly tedious attempt at clever academic exegesis, of an observation by Goldberg, intended to demonstratesee, we’re not anti-Semitic, you’re anti-Semitic, nyah, nyah.

Focus on Goldberg is significant. Goldberg is a liberal supporter of Israel. (The meaning of the word “support” when applied to Israel is yet another issue embedded in this debate. For my purpose today, I’ll call such supporters of Israel as Goldberg firm supporters.) Critics – indeed, very harsh critics of Israel – consistently identify firm support of Israel with the political right, which identification is an essential ground to this whole debate. Neocon is another popular label. Such as Greenwald will apply that term to any individual who has offered any measure of support at any time to exercises of military force by the United States. The right aids in this identification by the typically fundamentalist belligerence of its own support for Israel. If firm support for Israel can successfully be isolated as a hard right position –  and there has been great success in this effort – then the ongoing campaign against the Israeli position can gain greater strength. If a firm, liberal supporter of Israel can be exposed as an “Israel-Firster,” then the very idea of liberal support for the Israeli position can be dismissed as a phantasm. The Israeli-Palestinian war of historical cases can be drawn only in terms of Israel’s most extreme defenders, while the Palestinian extremes are ideologically white washed, and liberal sense is vanquished from the field.

First, then, I call your attention to Greenwald’s approach to Goldberg, on a personal level. In the past, Greenwald has been consistently vituperative in his treatment of Goldberg, with whom he has no personal relationship. Yet he sends this email dressed in the imposture of a friendly, collegial request for assistance – an email intended to gather the information that will help Greenwald, as he sees it, expose Goldberg as a disloyal American. Now it is true that in the political world – and in the journalistic world, where reporters are always seeking very, very importantinformation, justifying all sorts of behavior for the greater good of the human race and the future of the world – excuses are often made for what is normally considered bad behavior. But in that normal world, Greenwald’s phony smile of an email, with its hateful, destructive intent, is as slimy as a human being gets. That the act he committed with his email was not committed for money or to gain political power is a function only of the interests that motivate his life. The discredit it brings upon him should not be forgotten.

Second, consider that we know from the public record of Goldberg’s service in the IDF decades ago, oath taken or not. There are about  in some form, with the details complex and varied. Dual citizenship may easily be argued as prima facie (thought not actually certain) evidence of dual loyalty. The United States does not formally recognize dual citizenship; neither does it restrict or punish it in any way. While there are no records kept of dual citizenships, the 2010 census shows the percentage of foreign-born Americans – people with the potential of being dual citizens, and likely to feel degrees of dual loyalty – to be 12.7%, or about 39 million people. Americans, like people all over the world, feel multiple loyalties, to their religious faith, their families, to causes and ideals separate from the official policies of their national governments. Red meat GOP candidates will almost without fail name God first among their following loyalties to family and country. And if God led them to believe that some other nation or group was in his service rather than their own nation?

Beginning in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, approximately 2800 Americans fought in Spain on behalf of the Republican cause, in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and elsewhere. Most were members of the Communist Party or other leftist organizations. They served without the support of the U.S. government, were treated with suspicion after the war, and in some cases were even prosecuted by the Roosevelt Administration for recruiting volunteers into the Brigade. These volunteers into a foreign army are universally regarded with respect and even reverence by American liberals and the broader left.

Whether Goldberg himself swore the oath in question, it is a matter of the most common sense that any military force would require of its personnel that they pledge allegiance to the fighting force that was entrusting them with weapons and their cause.

Greenwald’s attempt to impugn Goldberg’s full loyalty to the United States is vile and reprehensible on two scores. First, in the convergence of some elements of the American left with reactionary movements and sentiments, Greenwald’s attempt to question Goldberg’s loyalty on the basis of an oath resounds with the questioning of Roy Cohn and others during the McCarthy hearings:

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?

Now, the question is from Greenwald, and from those who countenance these questions about the loyalty of American Jews whom they believe to support Israel a little too much,

Are you now or have you ever been too ardent a supporter of Israel?

Of what other ethnic or racial group would supposed progressives permit such questions to be asked without condemnation? And in the matter of the most regressive right political forces in the nation – resisting all identification of their own and others’ racist language and insinuation (see: the current GOP presidential primary race) – though the anti-Semitic history of “Israel Firster” has been well documented – these so-called progressives reach to rationalize use of an offensive term against Jews in a manner they would countenance in no other cultural context.

Just because white supremacists used a term doesn’t mean everyone who employs it is an anti-Semite.

Substitute “racist” for anti-Semite and search left literature world-wide for a similar expression.

“Israel-firster” is admittedly a deliberately crude response, but use of the term should be understood within the context of decades of American Jewish right-wing rhetoric that has largely silenced dissent on Israeli policies by discrediting those who dare to criticize Israel.

Try this substitute:

“Food stamp President” is admittedly a deliberately crude response, but use of the term should be understood within the context of decades of militant black rhetoric that has largely silenced dissent on Welfare policies by discrediting those who dare to criticize their perpetuation of an African-American underclass.

Once again:

He also fails to mention that many of those employing the term “Israel-firster” are deeply concerned about Israel’s future and about regional stability, and are no different from members of the Israeli peace camp – not to mention that some of them are Jewish themselves.

Or

He also fails to mention that many of those employing the term “Food stamp President” are deeply concerned about America’s future and about social and economic stability, and are no different from members of the Nation of Islam – not to mention that some of them are black themselves, e.g. Clarence Thomas, Michael Steele, Herman Cain, and Alan West.

That some people who consider themselves progressive do not cringe with embarrassment and shame at the incoherence of these ideas and arguments, or, in the case of those like Greenwald, at the depths to which they plunge in their animus toward Israel, would be startling if not for the twentieth century history that records these depths before.

It is always so, though, that misguided, even hateful political manifestations will be betrayed in their nature by the figures who most publically represent them. So when we consider Greenwald’s malign questioning of Goldberg’s loyalty on the basis of an oath he might have made over twenty years ago, we need to consider it in the following final light.

When Glenn Greenwald began blogging in 2005, he espoused opinions about illegal immigration that would not be admired or popular among his current fan base. He has been challenged about these views a sufficient number of times to have posted an explanatory update at his original blog, Unclaimed Territory, six years later. His explanation?

This post was written in 2005, one month after I began blogging. It was recently dug up by some Obama cultists trying to discredit my criticisms of the President ….

That was a 6 yrs ago: 3 weeks after I began blogging, when I had zero readers. I’ve discussed many times before how there were many uninformed things I believed back then, before I focused on politics full-time – due to uncritically ingesting conventional wisdom, propaganda, etc. 

Six years is not a very long time in the intellectual life of a 44 year old man. For Glenn Greenwald and Mitt Romney, however, it is sufficient time to reverse most of their previously, and apparently not very reliably, conceived political views, and to now scorn those who believe some of what they once did, including, for both men, ironically, Barack Obama. Six years is sufficient time for Greenwald to expect not to be held accountable for his views. In contrast, for Greenwald, the twenty-two years since Jeffrey Goldberg may have taken an oath that Greenwald thinks damning is no barrier to setting Goldberg up for a smear of disloyalty (IsraelFirster) based upon it.

To repeat and clarify: criticisms are based on evidence analyzed and subjected to judgment. A smear is unsubstantiated. The anti-Semitic history of the term “Israel Firster” has been clearly laid out by numerous sources. The disloyalty (IsraelFirster) of no one of significance or party to this debate has been substantiated, only malignly alleged in the hope that the accusation will stick.

These critics of Israel could easily back away from the expression and continue to make their case about Israel-Palestine on the basis of the merits they can gather. That they do not, that they aggressively reassert their claim to the term “Israel-Firster,” – rationalizing it in the face of all evidence – and attack those who object to it – casting themselves as victims (rather like Rick Perry’s and Newt Gingrich’s “war on Christianity) – clearly reflects their likeness to their mirrored opposites. These critics defend their use of the term because they believe that this time it is true. They believe that this time there really are divided loyalties, there really is a cadre of Jews exercising excessive, secretive power while aggressively attempting to suppress any exposure of it. And like all their reactionary forebears (like every GOP reactionary today who plays the card of nationalist loyalty) they forget that the belief they cling to is the belief to which purveyors of anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish power always hold fast – it’s the essential marker of the tradition – that what they believe is true.

And this is the belief, like a ball that is chained to the ankle, drawing one down to the depths, by which they will be known.

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As Islamic extremists take power in ME, New Statesman publishes vicious attack on Israel by Ben White

February 6, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | by | 12 comments

This was written by Robin Shepherd, the owner/publisher of @CommentatorIntl. You can follow him on Twitter @RobinShepherd1

Ben White has taken to the New Statesman to attack Israel yet again

Of all the bigotries in the world today, one stands out for special consideration. That is not simply because it is so odious, though it is certainly that. It is because it is the one bigotry that presents a clear and present danger of translating into a genocidal outcome. It is also the one form of bigotry that has been openly accepted and internalised by large sections of a British and West-European political intelligentsia that remains dominated by the liberal-Left.

I am talking, of course, about anti-Zionism – a uniquely discriminatory agenda aimed at deligitimising the State of Israel and ending that country’s existence as the national homeland of the Jewish people.

In the context of Iranian threats to destroy the country, the loss of Turkey as an ally and the new pre-eminence of extreme, anti-Israeli Islamists in Egypt, the rantings of Western anti-Zionists have now acquired a new and more dangerous significance.

Think of it this way: it’s one thing to spout abuse about black people to a group of equally bigoted but basically passive racists when nobody else is listening; it’s quite another to do exactly the same thing in front of a frenzied, knife-wielding mob of skinheads heading towards a black neighbourhood.

I make no direct analogy, but enter Ben White, author of, “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide”. On Sunday, he published an extensive piece in the leading weekly magazine of the British Left, The New Statesman. Essentially, it’s a trash job on Israeli democracy. It, perversely, charges a British pro-Israel grouping, BICOM, with having unwittingly revealed, in a series of recent essays, that Israel is not in fact a proper democracy at all: it’s a racist“ethnocracy“ run by and for Jews.

You’ve heard it all before, of course. And I will come to the “substance“ (if such a word is appropriate in the circumstances) in a moment.

But let me first re-emphaise the point made above, and make it relevant to the fate of Israel in the Middle East.

For there is nothing new about fanatical hostility to Israel in the British and European mainstream. The Guardian newspaper – the media-intellectual home of the British Left and, effectively, the house journal of the BBC – has been at it for years.

What is new is the context in the Middle East where Israel now looks set to be ensnared in a potentially deadly triangle of annihilationist regimes. On one point on that triangle is Turkey – a country that in little more than a blink of an eye has moved from being an ally to an enemy; a country whose leadership is increasingly using anti-Israeli rhetoric as a rallying cry and which has even gone so far as to threaten sending its warships to protect pro-Hamas “aid“ flotillas to Gaza.

Now draw a straight line from Ankara to Cairo for the second point on the triangle. Egypt’s parliamentary elections were resoundingly won by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists – both of which combine extreme forms of anti-Semitism with resolute opposition to the existence of the Jewish state. Together, they took over 70 percent of the seats.

Now go to Tehran, drawing the line necessary to complete the triangle from both Ankara and Cairo. (Iranian hostility to Israel surely needs no elaboration.)

Read the rest of the essay here.

Guardian’s David Hearst equates Israeli war against Hezbollah to Syria’s ongoing civilian massacre

February 6, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | 3 comments

This is cross posted by our friend Anne, who blogs at Anne’s Opinions.

Attacks by Syrian troops led by President Bashar al-Assad has resulted in up to 6000 dead

David Hearst, one of the Guardian’s “foreign leader writers” according to his bio, has never met an Israel-hater or delegitimizer he didn’t love.

In his article yesterday at “Comment is Free‘, in which he addressed the Russian and Chinese veto of a UN Security Council vote against Syrian President Bashar Assad, he correctly described the unpopularity of Putin’s decision to use his veto power and the strategic error in such a move.

But Hearst being Hearst, how could he leave Israel out of this issue? Even though Israel is not connected in any way to the uprising in Syria, the revolutions in the Arab world and the violence committed in these countries, Hearst managed to work Israel into his first sentence.

If anyone thinks the international opprobrium heaped on Russia and China for vetoing the UN resolution condemning Syria’s violent repression of its people is unusual, they should cast their minds back to 13 July 2006. George Bush and Tony Blair spent the best part of the following 33 days dismissing calls for an end to Israel’s bombardment of southern Lebanon in response to a cross-border raid by Hezbollah.

Note how Hearst compares Israel’s defensive war against Hezbollah’s terrorist bombardment of Israel’s northern cities with a dictator slaughtering his own civilians.

Hearst continues:

On 3 August Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former British ambassador to Moscow, wrote that Blair’s premiership had descended into “scandal and incoherence”. Nor were serving Foreign Office officials quick to leap to Blair’s defence. The government’s policy of resisting calls for a ceasefire [in Lebanon, in 2006] was “driven by the prime minister alone”, they said.

Such a position is today occupied by Vladimir Putin

Now he compares Putin’s cynical decision to play the role of Assad’s Guardian with Blair’s stand against calls to save the Iranian backed Islamist terror group in Lebanon.  Blair preferred to back a democratic ally acting in self-defense, and withstood enormous political pressure rather than cave in to the predictable chorus of “right-thinking” (or should we call it “left-thinking”) calls to condemn Israel whenever it has the temerity to defend its citizens.

One of the commenters on Hearst’s article, who calls him/herself “external”, remarked so acutely:

Wow ! You managed to mention Israel in the first paragraph. Good work, even by Guardian standards !

As I have said before, the man is execrable, but oh so suitable for the Guardian’s World View™.

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Is ‘Federation of Student Islamic Societies’ (FOSIS) Training the Violent Extremists of Tomorrow?

February 3, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , | by | 11 comments

This is cross posted by Hasan Afzal at Huffington Post

University Islamic Societies have been described as ‘conveyor belts‘ for extremism and terrorism. There may be some truth in this. After all, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, better known to you and I as the underwear bomber, who tried to make a martyr of himself by attempting to detonate a bomb in an airplane en route to the US was the president of UCL Islamic Society. Amazingly, Malcolm Grant, the vice-chancellor of the University, tried to later claim that campus extremism is ‘made up‘.

The ‘conveyor belt’ theory follows the line that young Muslims enrol into university as liberal-minded, impressionable students only to be indoctrinated by extremist Islam and turned into insular, backward-thinking, extremely conservative Muslims. In turn, the mindset of these students can then be used by terrorist recruiters to mould them into potential bombers. The rationale is convincing as this is precisely what is thought to have happened to Abdulmutallab.

All too often we see the end product of the conveyor belt. We see the Abdulmutallabs and extremists of this world when it’s too late. Ever seen what goes on in the middle? Have you ever wanted to know how well intentioned young Muslims turn into their community’s worst nightmare? I can give you a sneak peak.

The Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS), the umbrella organisation that represents most Islamic Societies, likes to make-believe that it has no part to play in turning young Muslims into extremists.

If that is the case, why is FOSIS hosting an event with a vicious hate preacher to an audience described as “exclusively for the leaders of London Islamic Societies”?

A concerned Muslim student provided us with a link (in case it is shut, have a look at this screenshot) inviting that person to a religious gathering. The concerned student had reason to be worried for Haitham al-Haddad would be speaking at that event.

Haitham al-Haddad is an extremist. Let’s have a look at what this man believes in:

The Arab-Israeli conflict is one of our generation’s biggest challenges. To solve the conflict, it will take time, nuance and a lot of patience. But, that’s not how al-Haddad it. Like other extremists, he takes the far-right view that the conflict is one against Muslims and Jews (ignoring the fact that Israel’s population is one-fifth Arab).

In a video on YouTube, al-Haddad’s advice to Muslims is to “be ready to pay the price for this victory from our blood”.  You read that correctly. Whilst NGOs and governments across the world try to bring both sides together in peace, Mr al-Haddad has told Muslims to be ready to die. Indeed, al-Haddad’s opinion on the Gaza conflict is to tell Muslims, “to prepare themselves for jihad, all over the world.”

 

Furthermore, Haitham al-Haddad runs such a Sharia court. Sharia law brings untold, and often unheard, misery to moderate Muslims in the United Kingdom (just have a look at the brilliant work of One Law for All). There are many stories of women being denied justice because they are forced by their families or communities to go through the unfair and unjust sharia court system in the UK.

Al-Haddad’s tribunal has issued a number of judgements (otherwise known as fatwas). In a question asked to him on why sharia law considers two women the equivalent of one man, he answers with the following, “The text (Surah Al-Baqara 2:282) which requires two female witnesses in place of one male witness, gives a clear reason for it i.e. “if one of them forgets, the other reminds her.” Is this derogatory to the status of the women or is it a revealed secret about the nature of the women?”. The misogyny and extremism is laid bare.

In another judgement, al-Haddad was asked if stoning and hand lopping should be discontinued as a barbaric practice. al-Haddad’s answer was, “As a Muslim we should know that our religion is perfect without any imperfection as Allah says, ‘this day, I have perfected your religion for you, and have chosen for you Islam as your religion’. Therefore, belittling them or calling them as out-of-date constitutes disbelief as Allah says.”

A final example of the sick mind of Haitham al-Haddad comes in a fatwa asked of him what to do if a woman refuses to sleep with her husband due to a history of childhood sexual abuse. His answer is that should that woman refuse to sleep with her husband, “angels will curse” her.

So, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies London is inviting someone whose views would render him a sociopath in a decent-thinking person’s judgement. This is what young Muslims in Islamic Societies across the country are taught, they are taught to hate the very society that has brought them up. Just don’t be surprised when the next Abdulmutallab decides come off the conveyor belt and into the news headlines.

I challenge Nabil Ahmed, the president of FOSIS, and FOSIS London to explain why they are inviting such a nightmarish individual to their ‘religious gathering’?

What good can this man do to the minds of young Muslims?

Follow Hasan Afzal on Twitter: www.twitter.com/hasanafzal

 

(Ben) White Wash at Amnesty

January 28, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | by | 12 comments

This is cross posted by Richard Millett

Ben White showing off his well-trolled quotes at Amnesty last night.

Ben White was last night handed the opportunity by Amnesty’s UK branch to call for the destruction of Israel. Not necessarily in the way Hamas would wish to achieve it, but White wants Israel changed from a Jewish state into another Muslim Arab state. This is what White thinks is “justice”.

Lest we forget that it was White who once wrote: “I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, yet I can also understand why some are”.

For that and other statements of his there was a small protest outside Amnesty last night. Once sign read “Amnesty is great, except on Israel”, which is probably about right. Amnesty will stand up against other human rights’ abuses except when they are against Israel. They raised their voice in anger when Gaddafi was cruelly tortured before being executed, but when Israeli soldiers are kidnapped or Israeli children are bombarded by Hamas rockets from Gaza Amnesty falls silent.

Amnesty’s opposition to Israel’s existence is now, sadly, almost policy. Virtually no month passes without there being an anti-Israel event and never will there be a pro-Israel voice on the platform. One of Amnesty’s roles is to try to bury Israel.

White was promoting his new book Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy and it will be instructive to jump straight to the end of last night’s talk.

After calling for “A future based on a genuine co-existence of equals, rather than ethno-religious supremacy and segregation”, with its obvious anti-Semitic connotation of Jewish supremacy, White said (see clip):

“Instead of asking ‘can we return?’ or ‘when will we return?’ Palestinian refugees can ask ‘what kind of return do we want to create for ourselves?’ I think that’s a kind of beautiful phrasing actually that speaks to the liberation of the imagination that has to take place as we move towards securing a peace with justice”:

I can’t see Israelis ever voting for their state being changed into a Muslim Arab state, so what White is basically promoting is more war and bloodshed.

White’s talk, probably like his book, was a long list of out-of-context and out-of-date quotes.

He started with an apparent quote by Balfour in 1919 – “in Palestine we do not propose to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country” – and ended with one by Moshe Dayan’s father, MK Shmuel Dayan, from 1950 – “Maybe (not allowing the refugees back) is not right and not moral, but if we become just and moral, I do not know where we will end up”.

White must spend many nights trolling through the internet and old books looking for quotes that support his pursuit of Israel, but it is obviously a money-making exercise judging by the queue of people waiting for him to sign their copy of his 90-page book.

In between quotes he criticised Israel for what he calls the “Judaisation” of the Galilee and the Negev and for Israel not allowing “Palestinian citizens of Israel”, as he calls them, to live in Israel with their spouses who come from the West Bank and Gaza. The serious security implications for Israel if it allowed the latter are obvious, but Israel’s security isn’t high up on the list of White’s priorities.

During the Q&A he praised the protests during the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra’s concert at the Royal Albert Hall saying that the protests:

“Were targetting a body, the IPO, that receives funding from the Israeli state and also does concerts and stuff for Israeli soldiers.”

He raised the accusation of anti-Semitism aimed at him and said:

“The irony of the accusation of anti-Semitism against me in this context is that it is precisely opposition to all racism that informs my personal opposition to Israeli apartheid”.

And when someone asked him about Hamas and its policies White simply said that the evening wasn’t about Hamas but he hoped that the questioner would “support efforts to end the discriminatory practices against the Palestinians”.

It seems that Hamas is not much of an issue for White or Amnesty, whereas the Jewish state’s existence is.

More clips and photos from last night:

Ben White on “Jewish and Democratic?”

Ben White on “Judaisation” -

I bought this last night as no one else was buying.

Related articles

Holocaust Memorial Day, 2012

January 27, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , | by | 7 comments

This was written by our friend Chas Newkey-Burden, and originally posted at his blog, OyVaGoy

It is Holocaust Memorial Day [today]. You can read more about this year’s theme here.

On days such as this I am reminded of the words of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who wrote the following:

‘What cannot help but astound us is that the Hasidim remained the Hasidim inside the ghetto walls, inside the death camps. In the shadow of the executioner, they celebrated life. Startled Germans whispered to each other of Jews dancing in the cattle cars rolling towards Birkenau; Hasidim ushering in Simchat Torah. And there were those who in Block 57 at Auschwitz tried to make me join in their fervent singing. Were these miracles?’

What a passage: it is haunting and inspiring, harrowing and uplifting all at once. Similar emotions are provoked by a recording made at Bergen-Belsen shortly after it was liberated in April 1945. It includes weary Jewish survivors singing Hativkah (The Hope), the song that became the national anthem of the state of Israel. You can find a link to the recording on the right-hand side of this page. (Or, see YouTube clip below)

‘Never despair! Never! It is forbidden to give up hope,’ wrote Rabbi Nachman, a century before any of these events took place. These are wise words, yet not always easy to live up to.

Yet consider the Hasidim who celebrated life in the death camps, and the survivors who sang of hope at Bergen-Belsen. Stories such as these remind me how even in the darkest moments it is possible, and essential, to maintain hope.

 

What the Guardian won’t report: Christians in Iran, Syria face rising persecution

January 25, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | by | 17 comments

This is cross posted by Benjamin Weinthal, and originally published at the Jerusalem Post

There has been a wave of violence targeting Iranian and Syrian Christians over the past month, say Christian news reports.

In addition, Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who has been on death row since 2010 for seeking to register his home-based church, refused to renounce his Christian beliefs in exchange for his release from prison.

He was also jailed for questioning the role of Islam as the dominant form of religious instruction in his children’s school.

According to a report on the website of the International Christian news agencyBosNewsLife, “Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani has rejected an offer to be released from prison if he publicly acknowledges Islam’s prophet Mohammed as ‘a messenger sent by God,’ well-informed Christians and rights activists said” earlier this month.

While Iran’s opaque judicial system coupled with the lack of access for most Western media makes it difficult to verify the new coercion against Nadarkhani, the reports are considered reasonable in light of the Iranian regime’s intense crackdown on its Christian population over the years.

In an e-mail to The Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio and author of the book A New Shoah, wrote “After the ethnic cleansing of Jews in 1948 from the Arab countries, Islamic fundamentalism is now trying to push away the Christians from the region. They want to establish a pure Islamic environment and the mass exodus already began under our noses.”

Meanwhile, the Pakistan Christian Post wrote last week on its website, “The Christian community in Syria has been hit by a series of kidnappings and brutal murders; 100 Christians have now been killed since the anti-government unrest began. A reliable source in the country, who cannot be identified for their own safety, told Barnabas Aid that children were being especially targeted by the kidnappers, who, if they do not receive the ransom demanded, kill the victim.”

The Pakistan Christian Post website noted “Two Christians were killed on January 15 as they waited for bread at a bakery. Another Christian, aged 40 with two young children, was shot dead by three armed attackers while he was driving a vehicle.”

The Post could not independently verify these allegations.

Meotti, the Italian Journalist who has written extensively on Christians in the Mideast region, told the Post “In Syria Christians will be persecuted after Assad’s eventual fall, since they were the most loyal allies of the Baathist regime. Christians will be slaughtered or squeezed. From Cairo to Damascus, Arab Christian era is near to its end everywhere.”

Many critics of Assad’s regime, however, view Assad as exploiting sectarian conflicts in Syria to solidify his repressive security apparatus, which has resulted in the killings of over 5,000 pro-democracy supporters in Syria.

“Of course Assad is using the power of fear to manipulate the Christians. He is directing these bishops and patriarchs to say what suits him,” Pascal Gollnisch, a Catholic priest and director of l’Oeuvre d’Orient, told the French news organization F24 in December.

The Paris-based organization seeks to shield Christians from persecution mainly in the Middle East region and is part of the Archdiocese of Paris.

Christians make up 10 percent of Syria’s 22 million population.

Clifford D. May, the president of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former New York Times reporter, has long argued the persecution of Christians in numerous Muslim-majority countries is the most pressing news story ignored by the mainstream media.

He told the Post “If the situation were reversed, if such a war were being waged against Muslims, it would be the top story in every newspaper, the most urgent item at the UN, the highest priority of all the big-league human-rights groups.”

The US-based media watchdog organization the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) held on Saturday a conference titled “The Persecuted Church: Christian Believers in Peril in the Middle East.”

Dr. Richard Landes, an associate professor of history and director and cofounder of the Center of Millennial Studies at Boston University, who spoke at the CAMERA event, wrote the Post on Sunday: “there’s a bizarre, eery, indeed terrible (a-)symmetry between the nearly hysterical concern of the media and the ‘progressive’ NGOs etc. about Israeli violations of the Palestinian ‘human rights’ and the nearly total silence about the horrendous things happening to Christians in Muslim majority countries, not necessarily at the hands of their neighbors but of Salafists, Jihadis, etc.”

Landes added that “it all illustrates Charles Jacobs’ notion of human rights complex – the thing that gets western ‘human rights’ folk indignant has nothing to do with the victims of their sufferings, but the [perpetrators]. If white, hysteria; if of color, embarrassed silence.

“There’s a racism inherent in this – we don’t expect anything from people of color, we hold whites to a much higher standard – and the result is that truly horrendous stuff gets ignored.”

There has been a wave of violence targeting Iranian and Syrian Christians over the past month, say Christian news reports.

In addition, Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who has been on death row since 2010 for seeking to register his home-based church, refused to renounce his Christian beliefs in exchange for his release from prison. He was also jailed for questioning the role of Islam as the dominant form of religious instruction in his children’s school.

According to a report on the website of the International Christian news agencyBosNewsLife, “Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani has rejected an offer to be released from prison if he publicly acknowledges Islam’s prophet Mohammed as ‘a messenger sent by God,’ well-informed Christians and rights activists said” earlier this month.

While Iran’s opaque judicial system coupled with the lack of access for most Western media makes it difficult to verify the new coercion against Nadarkhani, the reports are considered reasonable in light of the Iranian regime’s intense crackdown on its Christian population over the years.

In an e-mail to The Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio and author of the book A New Shoah, wrote “After the ethnic cleansing of Jews in 1948 from the Arab countries, Islamic fundamentalism is now trying to push away the Christians from the region. They want to establish a pure Islamic environment and the mass exodus already began under our noses.”

Meanwhile, the Pakistan Christian Post wrote last week on its website, “The Christian community in Syria has been hit by a series of kidnappings and brutal murders; 100 Christians have now been killed since the anti-government unrest began. A reliable source in the country, who cannot be identified for their own safety, told Barnabas Aid that children were being especially targeted by the kidnappers, who, if they do not receive the ransom demanded, kill the victim.”

The Pakistan Christian Post website noted “Two Christians were killed on January 15 as they waited for bread at a bakery. Another Christian, aged 40 with two young children, was shot dead by three armed attackers while he was driving a vehicle.”

The Post could not independently verify these allegations.

Meotti, the Italian Journalist who has written extensively on Christians in the Mideast region, told the Post “In Syria Christians will be persecuted after Assad’s eventual fall, since they were the most loyal allies of the Baathist regime. Christians will be slaughtered or squeezed. From Cairo to Damascus, Arab Christian era is near to its end everywhere.”

Many critics of Assad’s regime, however, view Assad as exploiting sectarian conflicts in Syria to solidify his repressive security apparatus, which has resulted in the killings of over 5,000 pro-democracy supporters in Syria.

“Of course Assad is using the power of fear to manipulate the Christians. He is directing these bishops and patriarchs to say what suits him,” Pascal Gollnisch, a Catholic priest and director of l’Oeuvre d’Orient, told the French news organization F24 in December.

The Paris-based organization seeks to shield Christians from persecution mainly in the Middle East region and is part of the Archdiocese of Paris.

Christians make up 10 percent of Syria’s 22 million population.

Clifford D. May, the president of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former New York Times reporter, has long argued the persecution of Christians in numerous Muslim-majority countries is the most pressing news story ignored by the mainstream media.

He told the Post “If the situation were reversed, if such a war were being waged against Muslims, it would be the top story in every newspaper, the most urgent item at the UN, the highest priority of all the big-league human-rights groups.”

The US-based media watchdog organization the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) held on Saturday a conference titled “The Persecuted Church: Christian Believers in Peril in the Middle East.”

Dr. Richard Landes, an associate professor of history and director and cofounder of the Center of Millennial Studies at Boston University, who spoke at the CAMERA event, wrote the Post on Sunday: “there’s a bizarre, eery, indeed terrible (a-)symmetry between the nearly hysterical concern of the media and the ‘progressive’ NGOs etc. about Israeli violations of the Palestinian ‘human rights’ and the nearly total silence about the horrendous things happening to Christians in Muslim majority countries, not necessarily at the hands of their neighbors but of Salafists, Jihadis, etc.”

Landes added that “it all illustrates Charles Jacobs’ notion of human rights complex – the thing that gets western ‘human rights’ folk indignant has nothing to do with the victims of their sufferings, but the [perpetrators]. If white, hysteria; if of color, embarrassed silence.

“There’s a racism inherent in this – we don’t expect anything from people of color, we hold whites to a much higher standard – and the result is that truly horrendous stuff gets ignored.”

Guardian Report Misses the Real Child Abuse

January 24, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , | by | 74 comments

This is cross posted by Simon Plosker at HonestReporting

NBC News reports:

The images grow no less shocking with time — a gaping wound on a tiny skull, the hair matted with blood; a gunshot that pierced the skin of a small torso and went straight toward the kidney; and finally, the broken neck and severed penis of a 13-year-old boy, his mangled body contorted on a plastic sheet.

This isn’t, however, a story from Israel but the shocking example of what is happening to Syrian children being tortured and murdered by the Assad regime.

Meanwhile, in Israel, The Guardian runs a special report on the alleged mistreatment of Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military. With the report is an 11 minute video which includes footage of an interrogation. A Palestinian child cries, not as a result of torture but because he is going to miss some school exams.

By opening this critique with the emotive and disturbing description of a dead child, we could be accused of being deliberately manipulative. Just like The Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood who also set the scene in a similar fashion:

The room is barely wider than the thin, dirty mattress that covers the floor. Behind a low concrete wall is a squat toilet, the stench from which has no escape in the windowless room. The rough concrete walls deter idle leaning; the constant overhead light inhibits sleep. The delivery of food through a low slit in the door is the only way of marking time, dividing day from night.

This is Cell 36, deep within Al Jalame prison in northern Israel. It is one of a handful of cells where Palestinian children are locked in solitary confinement for days or even weeks. One 16-year-old claimed that he had been kept in Cell 36 for 65 days.

It is an ugly scene for an equally ugly story that paints Israel as a serial abuser of Palestinian children. The real child abuse in reality, however, is that caused by Palestinian society and media that glorifies terrorists, suicide bombers and “martyrs”, encouraging Palestinian youth to follow the same path.

A vulnerable child is easy pickings for recruitment by terrorist organizations. In recent years the most predominant activities characterizing involvement of minors were involvement in suicide bomb attacks, Molotov cocktail throwing, stone throwing and stabbing. Minors have also been involved in grenade throwing, use of explosives, shooting, car bombs, transfer of weapons, kidnapping, rocket launching, as well as assault and murder.

See here for more on Children Dying to Kill.

And while it suits Palestinian propaganda to promote the image of children armed with stones facing Israeli armor, the reality is that stones can kill. As recently as September 2011, Asher Palmer and his infant son Yonatan were killed after the vehicle he was driving overturned as a result of Palestinian rock throwing.

The Israeli response: Unpublished by The Guardian

There are often complaints that Israel does not react in a timely manner to address allegations such as those made by The Guardian. While Israeli Government spokesman Mark Regev does appear in The Guardian’s video along with a token paragraph in the main article, most of the Israeli Security Agency’s (ISA) response went unpublished as Harriet Sherwood picked out only a few quotes.

Here, for the record, we are including the response from the ISA that was sent to The Guardian before its article was published. In it, the ISA states:

  • The claims that Palestinian minors were subject to interrogation techniques that include beatings, prolonged periods in handcuffs, threats, kicks, verbal abuse, humiliation, isolation and prevention of sleep are utterly baseless.
  • Those detained for ISA questioning receive the full rights for which they are eligible, in accordance with international treaties of which the State of Israel is a signatory and according to Israeli law, including the right to legal counsel and visits by the Red Cross.

Click here for the full ISA response.

DCI-PS: A Politicized, Anti-Israel NGO

We already know only too well from bitter experience, The Guardian’s anti-Israel agenda. But what of Defence for Children International – Palestine Section, the non-governmental organization (NGO) that collected Palestinian testimonies and collaborated with The Guardian?

According to NGO Monitor:

  • DCI-PS supports BDS campaigns, and is an active participant in boycott efforts in the framework of the UN and other venues. Also lobbies the UN and the EU to promote these campaigns.
  • Calls for Israel to “accept historical and legal responsibility for the Nakba, and recognise the principle of the right to return that was endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in its Resolution No. 194 in 1948.”
  • Published an ‘urgent appeal,’ calling the UN Human Rights Council members to “endorse all the recommendations contained in the Goldstone report…and submit the report to the General Assembly and the Prosecutor of the ICC for appropriate action.”

This is only a small selection of examples of DCI-PS’s politicized and anti-Israel agenda that puts its credibility in doubt. After all, if this NGO is actively seeking evidence with which to attack Israel, then coaxing questionable testimony from minors of questionable character who may have already been involved in criminal or terrorist activity may be easier than it should.

The Guardian’s Agenda Journalism

If any further proof were needed of The Guardian’s brand of agenda-driven journalism, it appeared the day after the original article. This follow-up focused on the UK government’s response to the allegations raised by The Guardian.

This is a prime example of how a biased and one-sided article in the media can have damaging consequences way beyond simple public relations damage.

Commenting to The Guardian is Sandra Osborne MP, who has been leading the campaign in Parliament. The photo below of Osborne with Hamas PM Ismail Haniyeh taken in July 2011 is an indication of where her sympathies lie.

Harry’s Place blog documents Osborne’s thought’s on the “moderate” Hamas leader:

We were also able to meet with Ismail Haniyeh who is recognised as PM in Gaza (while Fayyad is still seen as PM in the West Bank), who heads up the successful Hamas Parliamentary Group. He is a popular figure, living modestly locally in Gaza. He has been pivotal in taking Hamas down a more moderate road leading to a renunciation of violence and keeping the more militant factions within Hamas under control while promoting engagement with rival Fatah. We discussed a wide range of issues but he made it clear that some of the most important could not be seriously addressed until Israel recognised the Palestinian State and real progress was made.

Advocacy journalism is not, by itself, unacceptable. After all, it is the job of a free media to shine the spotlight on untoward behavior wherever it might be found. Indeed, the Israeli press is usually the first to expose issues that need to be investigated in a functioning liberal democracy.

What is unacceptable, however, is The Guardian’s relentless campaign to portray Israel in as negative a light as possible. If only the children of Syria or any number of other places in the Middle East had Guardian reporters advocating on their behalf instead of on the one place where the mechanisms of accountability and rule of law actually exist.

It would be naive to believe that there have never been any Israeli violations of those laws specifically meant to protect the rights of minors in detention. If these cases exist, there are authorities tasked with investigating and dealing with such deviations. This is not, however, the norm.

The Guardian, in collaboration with DCI-PS, has deliberately and falsely portrayed Israel as a country that tolerates the torture and abuse of Palestinian children, which is definitively not the case. Having to arrest, prosecute and imprison minors is by its very nature a difficult issue. Unfortunately, Israel has been forced out of necessity to address a problem arising from Palestinian society.

So where then is the real child abuse?

Send your considered comments to The Guardian – letters@guardian.co.uk

Related articles

Labour Shadow Justice Minister praises Hamas concessions @ Palestine Solidarity Campaign event

January 19, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | by | 20 comments

This is cross posted by Richard Millett

This map, without Israel, took pride of place behind all the speakers.

 

Last night the Palestine Solidarity Campaign revealed the horrors of what life would be like for British Jews under Labour. The Jew killing Hamas machine would become regulars to Downing Street.

But, first, a love letter.

At the PSC event about Gaza, held at Conway Hall (which is owned by the South Place Ethical Society), actorvist Leigh Outram read the following from Love Letters to Gaza (see clip 1 below). The boat mentioned is the Audacity of Hope:

What can a poem do?
Create awareness?
Light a fire?
A fire to fire the boat to sea.

There was no fire at Auschwitz
To stop the poison gas until
The fire part of the western world destroyed the evil of the Nazi state,
And Israel came into being because the will was there.

It is not now the Nazi state but Israel that blocks the seas.
It is not Auschwitz that stops the ship that carries hope and messages,
But those that might have died there.

So let this poem drive the Hope that heads for Gaza.
The victims are now the torturers.
Freedom must be for all not just the victors

Whose victory brings forgetfulness of what they suffered once now brought to others.

Maybe Ms Outram hasn’t visited Auschwitz and seen the gas chambers and the ovens or the pictures of naked Jewish women huddling together in front of a pit before being shot. Maybe she doesn’t know that one million Jewish children died in The Holocaust.

This is the true Holocaust industry, a term coined by Norman Finklestein, where the likes of Ms Outram get paid for minimalising the horrors of Auschwitz by comparing it to Gaza. But Outram set the theme for the evening.

The Love Letter read out by Tracy-Ann Woods (clip 2) described the Palestinians as “hated simply for being who they are” and that read out by Clare Quinn (clip 3) described Israel as “dying”. Ahmed Masoud, who has written for the BBC, compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. Another activist (clip 4) said “no oppression or injustice has ever gone without falling. The apartheid regime ended, the collapse of Nazism…”

Meanwhile, Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Andy Slaughter, the Shadow Justice Minister, sat on stage applauding and when it came to speak everyone stood in front of map of Palestine, where there was no Israel.

Of Hamas Slaughter said (clip 5):

“They recognise a Palestinian state on ’67 borders, which is to effectively recognise the state of Israel. Now I think if that is not enough for the Americans or Israelis then I think we are playing games because those concessions are considerable concessions and they are the right concessions to make.”

This from a potential Justice Minister. Except recognition of a Palestinian state is not recognition of Israel. A small swing from the Conservatives to Labour in 2015 and the Liberal Democrats could ditch the Tories. A Lib/Lab coalition would be the perfect storm for Israel and British Jews with Hamas becoming regular visitors to Number 10.

Slaughter has already met Hamas and the Labour Party offered no comment.

Corbyn (clip 6) finished off the evening calling for some potentially five million Palestinians to be allowed into Israel, effectively turning it into yet another Arab state while taking the benefits of the Israelis’ hard work builing up a successful country.

Michael Deas (clip 7), Palestinian BDS National Committee, attempted to paint Israel as being undemocratic, but he was soon followed by Kika Markham (clip 8), the widow of Corin Redgrave, who read an extract from a role she performed as Haaretz journalist Amira Hass in which Hass talks of Israel in the most despicable terms.

A country that allows Hass and Haaretz to attack it so regularly cannot be anything but democratic. There isn’t something even near the equivalent of Haaretz for the Palestinians and that speaks volumes.

Photos:

Jon McKenna, Tracy-Ann Wood, Leigh Outram, Laura Freeman watching Clare Quinn spew poison about the Jewish state.

Clip 1 – Leigh Outram (compares Auschwitz to Gaza)

 

Clip 2 – Tracy-Ann Woods (“Palestinians hated for who they are”)

 

Clip 3 – Clare Quinn (“Israel is dying”)

 

Clip 4 – Activist (likens Israel to the Nazis)

 

Clip 5 – Andy Slaughter MP (“Hamas recognises Israel”)

 

Clip 6 – Jeremy Corbyn MP (“Palestinian refugees” will go to Israel)

 

Clip 7 – Michael Deas (“Israel is not democratic”)

 

Clip 8 – Kika Markham (acts as Haaretz’s Amira Hass)

 

Jenny Tonge rants about the Holocaust and idolises Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh.

January 17, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | by | 31 comments

This is cross posted by Richard Millett

Mads Gilbert and Jenny Tonge last night in Parliament.

Last night yet another hate-meeting took place in Parliament with the Palestine Return Centre holding an event “to commemorate the memory of Palestinian victims over the past six decades especially the last war in Gaza”. (Here is what the PRC is all about. It makes unpleasant reading for Jews).

Jenny Tonge was there ranting about how the Palestinians weren’t responsible for the Holocaust and asking “how can the Israelis treat the Palestinians the way they do after what happened in the Holocaust”.

She criticised the power of the “Israel lobby” and held up a magazine with Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh on the front cover and proceeded to idolise him.

She told us about a Palestinian fishing-boat which was boarded by the Israeli navy off Gaza. She said the Palestinian fishermen had their hands bound behind their backs and were forced to swim to the Israeli boat.

And she spoke about why she thinks she comes in for such heavy criticism and put this down to the fact that she stands up for the Palestinians and criticises Israel. The latter, she thinks, is viewed as being anti-Semitic.

When challenged by Jonathan Hoffman to give an example of when criticism of Israel has been called anti-Semitic she said she could give “many examples”, but failed to come through with even one. Here’s the action:

We also heard from Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian anesthesiologist, who gave us the names of Palestinian children who had been killed or who had horrendous injuries. He spent most of last night trying to flog his book about it all called Eyes on Gaza. Available from all good retailers.

We heard from Manal Timraz. Manal lost 15 members of her family during Operation Cast Lead, 11 of which were aged between twelve and two, and has lost another four since. After asking us to stand for a minute’s silence she emotionally outlined how the only way forward is a one-state-solution.

She lives in England next to a Jewish woman who “didn’t steal my land and I didn’t steal her’s”.

Gilbert had called for an academic boycott of Israel and during the Q&A I asked him how he could propose such an obviously racist policy and whether he used any Israeli products himself.

He said that the accusation that he was “a racist” was “absolutely preposterous” (I didn’t call him “a racist”) and said that he used computers without Intel chips. He then accused me of “smiling and laughing arrogantly” while Manal was speaking. I was smiling, but only at Manal’s suggestion that Jonathan go to the West Bank with her to drink tea “like a Palestinian”.

Gilbert further rejected accusations of anti-Semitism, eventhough none were made, with:

“If you want to look for anti-Semitism don’t look among us because we are profoundly anti-racist”.

He’s even friends with a Canadian Jew!

But how can anyone seriously claim to be “profoundly anti-racist” while hero-worshipping a self-confessed Jew hater (see Hamas Charter) like Ismail Haniyeh?

Here is the Q&A footage. First you hear PRC’s Sameh Habeeb, then Manal Timraz, then Mads Gilbert (from 4 mins. 15 secs.) and, finally, Jenny Tonge again, who, sadly, wasn’t impressed with me or Jonathan:

Additional photo:

British Palestinian Manal Timraz speaking last night.

War Horse writer (& CiF contributor) Michael Morpurgo: Israel shoots Palestinian children ‘like a video game’

January 16, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | by | 21 comments

This is cross posted by Richard Millett

War Horse writer Michael Morpurgo:

The film of War Horse, adapted from the novel by Michael Morpurgo (Contributor to ‘Comment is Free’), has just been released in the UK.  

But as well as horses being killed on screen there is something else for filmgoers to cry into their popcorn over. Morpurgo is happy to repeat vicious lies about Israel without seeming to bother checking facts.

Last February Morpurgo was given the honour of reciting the Richard Dimbleby lecture, which has been delivered by an influential figure every year since 1972, and he chose to speak on the lack of childrens’ rights around the world. He pointed out that 8 million children a year die before the age of 5. As he said, “that’s a holocaust of children every year”. He also mentioned that “69 million children never go to school” and that “3.5 million children in our own country are still mired in poverty”.

Most of those 8 million children die from AIDS, war, malaria, malnutrition and other diseases in Africa. But Morpurgo failed to say anything about that instead choosing to spend a large portion of this high profile speech on the darlings of the left, the Palestinians, and invoking the modern day version of the anti-Semitic blood libel. He relied on statements of those with an anti-Israel agenda.

He said he went to Jordan 10 years ago and met Jordanian children “about eighty per cent of whom are Palestinian refugees”. They are not refugees by any normal definition, but are simply born and bred Jordanians.

He mentioned a teenage girl who said:

“I want to tell you something real and true. My family lives here in Jordan, but I do not belong here. I belong in Palestine. It is my home but I can’t live there because it is occupied.”

Obviously, her “Palestine” means Israel and this was a call for the destruction of the Jewish state with its hidden aspiration for all Palestinians to head for Israel and turn it into another Arab state.

Morpurgo soon mentioned Gaza and repeated Israel-hating Amnesty International’s figure that 300 children were killed during Operation Cast Lead. But Amnesty and the United Nations class a child as being “under 18″. So a 17-year-old Hamas fighter pointing a gun at an Israeli soldier being shot dead in self-defence is classed as “a child”.

Morpurgo also gave the impression that from the moment he entered Gaza to the moment he exited it two days later that the Israelis were hell-bent on killing Palestinian children.

No sooner did he enter Gaza when:

“Halfway down I heard the sound of a shot being fired – it sounded to a country boy like me as if someone was shooting rabbits. All around young Palestinian boys were racing around on their donkeys and carts whooping and shrieking. I had no idea what they were doing at the time. I was in another world. I didn’t know who was doing the shooting. In this other world I went the next day to visit a hospital for malnourished babies and then on to a project for blind children.”

On his way out of Gaza he described how “earlier that morning, before I got there it seems, some of the scavengers had ventured too close to the wall and had been fired at and wounded”, and while he was waiting to leave:

“It was then I heard shots, then screaming, saw the kids running to help their wounded friends. Now I really was outside the comfort zone of fiction. A doctor from Medicins sans Frontieres, waiting there with me, told me that the shots were probably not fired by marksmen from the watchtowers on the wall, but that these scavengers were sometimes targeted, remotely, electronically from Tel Aviv, which was miles away – ‘Spot and Strike,’ they call it. Like a video game – a virtual shooting. I don’t know if these claims are true but I do know the shots were real, there was blood, the boy’s trousers were soaked in it, the bullets were real. I saw him close to, saw his agony as the cart rushed by me.”

So there you have it, the modern day reincarnation of the anti-Semitic blood libel. In the old days this involved the accusation that Jews abducted and slaughtered non-Jewish children and used their blood in religious rituals. Nowadays it is Israelis, or Jewish Israelis to be more precise, who, allegedly, just kill them “like a video game”.

Morpurgo admitted that he didn’t know if the claims by a doctor from Medicins sans Frontieres that the shots came remotely from Tel Aviv were true, but he made them anyway. For Morpurgo it doesn’t matter because it sounds like a wonderfully sad story, which he is in the business of telling.

Morpurgo did make a weak attempt at partiality with the following:

“I know Hamas rockets had been landing in Israel for a very long time and that Israeli children have been dying there too. And I know it is absolutely the right of every nation to defend itself.So most certainly the Israelis have had their reasons. But I’m sure that most of them believe as we all do that a child’s life in particular is precious, any child’s life. Yet Palestinian children died. Collateral damage, some might call it.”

He mentioned his visit to a village where “Arab and Jewish children play together and learn together”, but this mention of “Jewish children” should raise alarm bells. Why were the Israeli children described by him in terms of their religion and not their nationality, unlike the Arab children?

But if Morpurgo was really concerned about the rights of Palestinian children he would have highlighted the child abuse prevalent in Palestinian society where children are used as human shields by Hamas, where Hamas destroys childrens’ summer camps in Gaza and where television programmes are regularly aired by the Palestinian Authority on which children claim a desire to grow up to become martyrs.

Instead he chose to believe the propaganda of those who have their own financial interests in spreading lies about Israel and his words should have been prefaced with the following announcement:

“No facts were checked in the making of this speech”.

What a waste of an important speech last February. Instead of bravely speaking up for Palestinian children like he could have, Michael Morpurgo probably only succeeded in adding a little more hatred of Jews into the world.

What the Guardian won’t report: Planned terrorist attack in Israel blocked by quick thinking at checkpoint

January 8, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , | by | 6 comments

This is cross posted by Arnold and Frimet Roth at their blog, This Ongoing War

Israeli Border Policeman

There’s a report coming from Jenin in the past [couple] hours that illustrates one of two possible narratives depending on how flexible you are on the subject of terrorism.

Four Palestinian Arabs were required to stop and be checked by yet another of those hideous and humiliating IDF security barriers earlier today (Sunday) where they were told to remove some of their clothing.

The insult to their autonomy and manhood must have been unbearable and will very likely turn them hostile and unco-operative in their future interactions with Israelis.

That’s one version. Here’s another.

Some hours ago, four Palestinian Arabs were stopped at the Salem Crossing near Jenin in the northern West Bank and required to undergo a security check.

Here, according to Yaakov Katz from the Jerusalem Post is what happened next. The four were in line to walk into the Samaria Military Court.

A member of the Israel Border Police (Mishmar Hagvul in Hebrew) watching them noticed there were wires protruding from under the jacket of one of the four. The soldiers promptly shut down the crossing, ordered the Palestinian to remove his clothing and found that he had three pipe bombs on his body. A further eight pipe bombs were found in his bag.

So too was a pistol, several bullets and a commando knife. He and his three companions are now being interrogated. The suspicion is they were there to carry out an attack on the Samaria Military Court. 

Israel National News says the four are from Balata, a village near Shechem (Nablus) in central Samaria.

A week ago, the IDF captured a number of weapons including an M-16 and an Uzi submachine gun in a residence in Kfar Salem, near Nablus, not very far from Jenin. The Shin Bet reported a significant increase in the number of terrorist attacks in the West Bank during December (we reported on this last week: “1-Jan-12: Terror attack statistics climbed sharply in December“).

Border Police at a security checkpoint

For single-minded, religiously-impassioned individuals who are willing to die so long as they inflict pain on a despised enemy, there’s an enormous amount of harm you can do to people’s bodies with 11 pipe bombs, a pistol and a commando knife. 

This time, an alert serviceman was quick enough and – with his security crossing colleagues – determined enough to prevent it.

But the thing about terrorism is you don’t ever eliminate it by watchfulness.

Yes, you can do your best to ensure that this attack or that plan is thwarted – put up barriers, install cameras, be vigilant etc.

But so long as the jihadist process that creates this kind of hatred continues, and so long as it infects more and more young people growing to adulthood in Palestinian Arab society, the danger is constant and ends only when the terrorists themselves are completely neutralized.

How well is this understood outside Israel? Here’s one way to tell. Watch to see how much interest the news media outside Israel take in this story. As of 3:30 pm, Israel time, no one other than Israeli channels is reporting it.

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The Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood Gets 2012 Off to a Shoddy Start

January 2, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | by | 9 comments

This is cross posted by Simon Ploskerat HonestReporting

The newsprint has barely dried on the back of 2011 that saw The Guardian deservedly pick up the annual Dishonest Reporter Award. This hasn’t, however, stopped the paper’s Harriet Sherwood from carrying on where The Guardian left off with her first dispatch of the new year.

According to Sherwood, a supposedly reformed Palestinian terrorist has had his amnesty revoked by Israeli authorities:

Zakaria Zubeidi, a former of leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in the northern West Bank city of Jenin, is being held by Palestinian security forces after being told he would be arrested by Israeli authorities if he did not hand himself in.

“I am in a Palestinian Authority jail in Jenin,” he told the Guardian by phone. His account could not be confirmed by either Israeli or Palestinian sources.

If Zubeidi’s account cannot be confirmed, why bother digging any deeper if it already fits The Guardian’s agenda? Sherwood has previously demonstrated an inability to do elementary research extending even to a simple Google search. In this case, the story is presented in typically black and white terms appreciated by Israel-hating Guardian readers as ‘peaceful reformed Palestinian held in Palestinian jail and it’s Israel’s fault.’

If the story fits that predetermined frame then why bother to do the same research or mention some salient points that other media outlets actually bothered with?

For example, here are some details in a report from Global Post that Sherwood failed to mention, all constructed from widely available existing news sources including Israeli media that Sherwood either didn’t bother to read or preferred to ignore:

The reason for the decision [to revoke the amnesty] has not yet been given. According to Arutz Sheva, Zubeidi was recently involved in an incident in Jenin in which “gunmen under his command pointed their guns at PA security officers.”

Ynet News also suggested that his detention had more to do with Palestinian authorities than Israeli ones:

Zubeidi [...] is also on the Palestinian security forces’ radar – they accuse him of weapon offenses, which place him in violation of his clemency deal.

 Indeed YNet also reported:

Zubiedi stressed that the deal was, in fact, signed with the Palestinian security forces and “not between me and Israel.”

All this extra context and information that Harriet Sherwood failed to include. After all, why ruin a story if Israel might not actually be the only alleged bad guy in the piece?

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Medical Misdirection in The Guardian

December 30, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | by | 6 comments

This was published at HonestReporting by Simon Plosker

As NGO Monitor has extensively detailed, Physicians For Human Rights (Israel) has a radical political agenda far removed from simple medical matters. It’s therefore no surprise that the organization provides the main body of an article in The Guardian that claims:

“Palestinian patients and business people hoping to leave the Gaza Strip are being asked to collaborate with Israel in exchange for an exit permit”.

According to PHR:

172 people, mostly men aged 18 to 40, were called for interrogation by the Shabak, Israel’s internal intelligence agency, last month. Some who attended interviews were granted exit permits.

Putting this figure into perspective, in August 2011 alone, 1522 permits were granted for medical treatment to residents of Gaza (762 patients and 760 for accompanying individuals). In one week in December 2011, 330 patients and accompanying individuals crossed into Israel and the West Bank via the Erez Crossing.

Not to mention that there is nothing to stop Gazans from crossing into Egypt for medical treatment. After all, Israel is under no obligation other than humanitarian concerns, to treat Gazans in Israeli hospitals where Jews and Arabs are treated equally by both Jewish and Arab medical staff based solely on medical and not political concerns.

Israel’s security services would not be doing their jobs properly if extreme caution was not exercised in giving out permits to Gazan patients. While The Guardian is happy to publish a story accusing Israel of abusing the right to healthcare, it would do well to remember the real abuse of medical permits.

For example, Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss (recently released as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner deal) was caught attempting to smuggle a suicide bomb belt through Erez taking advantage of her medical permit for hospital treatment at Soroka Hospital in Israel. Indeed, Wafa actually intended to blow herself up in the very hospital that had given her treatment.

Al-Biss caught at the Erez Crossing

The MFA details other examples of Palestinians abusing the medical permit system.

Nobody said that the task of accumulating human intelligence from Gaza is a pleasant business. It is, however, necessary. That this story appears in The Guardian courtesy of PHR-I is merely the result of the unholy and symbiotic relationship between anti-Israel journalists and anti-Israel NGOs.

Thankfully, for every story such as this one, there are many more such as that of Israeli doctors saving the life of a Palestinian baby thanks to open-heart surgery – just the sort of news that you won’t ever see in The Guardian.

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