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This is cross posted by Richard Landes, who blogs at Augean Stables. Landes is the author of: “Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience“.
One of the supreme ironies among the European moral stances has to do with their discourse on the “death penalty.” It’s a standard trope of European contempt for the USA that it still has a death penalty, a sign of its cowboy nature and its retardation in the moral progress of nations. At least when it comes to the death penalty, America is still in the 20th century. “Moral Europe,” on the other hand, stands at the vanguard of the global community of nations and its appreciation of the value of human life undergirds its horror at the execution of criminals, no matter what their deeds.
And yet when that same moral entity turns its gaze on the Middle East, the country they have the most contempt for is the only country in the entire region to reject capital punishment, and they have the most admiration for a country that among a widespread political culture that extensively uses torture and execution for the maintenance of public order, shows perhaps the most contempt for the lives of its own peoples and its enemies.
Normally, this would not be even worth mentioning. Most people would just roll their eyes while others complain about Zionist imperialists trying to divert attention from their oppression of the Palestinians. But if you want to understand the “hostage-for-prisoner-exchange” that just took place in Israel and the Western media’s coverage of the event, then you need to pay attention to the issue.
Israel first outlawed the death in 1954, thus reversing the Mandate Law, which, in most other instances, Israel took over from the British. They based themselves both on rabbinic precedent (concerns for both respecting the image of God in man and the unattainable burden of proof) and modern liberal sentiment (Robespierre initially opposed the death penalty). In doing so, they became the first modern Western democracy after Germany (1949) to ban the death penalty, followed a decade later by Britain (1965), Sweden (1972), Canada (1976) and France (1981).
Note that Israel passed this law five years after the creation of a polity dedicated to equality before the law for all its citizens, a move that earned them the ferocious hostility of their neighbors in the Arab Muslim world. Normally, when countries attempt these egalitarian revolutions and find themselves surrounded by hostile enemies, they have, by year five, descended into mass executions of their own citizens (French Revolution in their fourth year, Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, almost immediately). Israel, on the other hand, outlawed the death penalty even for Arab terrorists who were captured while killing Israeli civilians. Israel has only executed one person, Adolph Eichmann, held responsible for the extermination of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.
If the Israelis had hundreds of terrorists in their prisons, in some cases serving multiple life sentences, available to trade for Gilad Shalit, a soldier kidnapped from Israeli soil by Hamas combatants five years ago, it’s because of this attitude towards human life, both their own and those of the Palestinians. And that attitude was on full display throughout this exchange, with people agonizing over endangering future Israelis from releasing these men, and the profound commitment to getting Gilad Shalit back. Some Arabs recognized the unflattering light this shed on their own culture, while others reveled in it.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, represent almost the polar opposite. This is a culture in which killing daughters and wives and homosexuals for shaming the family with (even suspected and loosely interpreted) inappropriate sexual behavior is a regular feature of society, where “collaborators” are summarily executed, where official statistics for executions put the PA at a rate of formal, legal execution that cedes only to China, Iran, N. Korea, Yemen and Libya.
The trade of over a thousand Palestinians for one Israeli highlights the radical differences between the cultures, themselves outlined often in a triumphalist statement of superiority by the Palestinians (and others in the name of Islam):
“In as much as you love life, the Muslim loves death and martyrdom. There is a great difference between he who loves the hereafter and he who loves this world. The Muslim loves death and [strives for] martyrdom.”
As Hizbullah’s Nasrullah put it after a prison exchange in 2004:
“We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.”
These are not mere abstractions or rhetorical verbiage. Palestinian culture inculcates a culture of hatred, murder of enemies, contempt for life. In a chilling exchange at the height of the intifada, one sweet 12 year old girl told an approving TV interviewer:
“Shahada [martyrdom through suicide bombing] is a very, very, beautiful thing. Everyone yearns for Shahada. What can be more beautiful than going to heaven.”
As one Israeli observer noted in commenting on a op-ed by Palestinian Bassem Nasser complaining that it’s inappropriate to depict those released as convicted “terrorist murderers” because they are heroes in Gaza.
The picture Nasser so proudly paints of Palestinian society, glaringly clarifies to all that the leaders of Gaza and its citizenry as a whole comprise one of the most despicable and detestable societies in the history of Man. No Hollywood studio has ever created a villain as evil as the likes of Khaled Mashaal, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini or Hassan Nassrallah.
No Hollywood writer has ever written a script about an entire society of evil, millions of devout clones of a murderous, deviant ideology and eschatology.
The reality of Gaza today, and most of the Arab world, is too strange for fiction.
If a European, concerned about the nature of the aggressive Islam that has begun to crop up in and around his or her cities, claiming for example Sharia-zones, wanted to understand the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict, he might spend a moment visiting the sites of Palestinian anti-Zionists, where this profoundly perverse culture teems.
But of course, that would be politically incorrect. To spend any time pointing out the problems here constitutes the highest level of politically-incorrect Islamophobia. How dare one essentialize an entire culture as morally repugnant? How demeaning to Palestinians, how insulting to Islam. Little matter that they openly embrace these values. After all, “who are we to judge?”
So instead of helping Europeans understand what’s at stake here, most of the media and the NGO community (like Amnesty International) have done their best to spin this story as one of violations of human rights on “both sides” with a heavy focus on Israeli misdeeds. The prisoners were considered as “equal,” and Israeli primarily held accountable by the Geneva Convention for the treatment of enemy combatants when, in reality, the only one protected under these conditions was Shalit, a uniformed soldier kidnapped on his own soil in non-combat situation, and the thousand Palestinian prisoners where convicted in a court, primarily of crimes related to terror attacks on civilians (an, alas, necessary redundancy in these days of sophism).
Thus, the NYT’s Robert Mackee could speak glibly about the “joy of parents on both sides” at the return of prisoners, and the UN could voice its concern that the prisoners Israel released might be subject to illegal forced transfer.
“Returning people to places other than their habitual places of residence is in contradiction to international humanitarian law.”
The UN’s exquisite concern for the full exercise of free will by convicted mass murderers illustrates the problem. Humanitarian discourse has been turned on its head to protect the ugliest players in this particular game, threatened by ugly forces within their own society, all the while implying that Israel, in its haste to get its own soldier back, trampled their rights and violated humanitarian law. Not surprisingly this led Ban Ki Moon to a moment of moral vertigo where he denounced the violation of everyone’s rights.
Of course, in order to present the moral equivalence (if not inversion) of all the “prisoners” in the swap, one has to play down the heinous nature of the crimes and personalities of the Palestinian prisoners released. BBC Correspondent Jon Donnison showed the extent of ignorance and laziness among the supposedly professional news media by interviewing a man in prison for organizing and abetting several suicide bombings. (Because the attacks only injured but did not kill, he did not receive life sentences.)
“You are 31 years old, 10 years in prison, serving a life sentence for being a member of Hamas, I mean, how do you feel today?”
BBC viewers could be excused for sympathizing with a political prisoner, inhumanly incarcerated for belonging to an opposition party, free at last.
A still more disgusting example concerns the Sbarro Pizza bombing, one of the most revolting of all the suicide attacks because it explicitly sought to kill as many little children as possible (and succeeded). Palestinian students celebrated its anniversary with an astonishing exhibition, recreating in papier mache the moment of detonation so viewers could savor their Schadenfreude.
The parents of one of the girls killed in the attack, Malki Roth, objected to the release of Ahlam Tamimi, who not only planned the attack meticulously as an attack on religious children, but, in prison, showed not only no remorse, but real pleasure at the news that she had killed 8, not just 3 children. Many in the media preferred “driver of the suicide bomber,” thus making the Roths look petty for objecting to her freedom. Meantime, the “moderate” Jordanians celebrated her release with a ceremony at the Family Court in Amann.
So, if one might ask the question, “Will the world ask: ‘Why do Palestinians celebrate murder?’” the answer is, “no.” Even those who know that’s what they’re doing, will have had any moral indignation bleached out of their awareness long before they’ve had a chance to ponder the variables.
In acquiescing with a Palestinian narrative in which hatred and child mass murder are considered legitimate expressions of “resistance” to “occupation,” Western human rights activists – including too many journalists – have degraded humanitarian language at the same time as they have allowed into the public sphere a discourse of genocidal hatred, they have excluded any sympathy for Israelis who defend themselves from the onslaught they have shut out from their, and their audiences’ consciousness. As Leon Wieseltier put it in a different context, this all reflects “the new heartlessness toward Israel. A whole country and a whole people have been expelled from the realm of imaginative sympathy.”
It may seem cost-free to Westerners who, for one reason or another, don’t like pushy Jewish overachievers, but it’s not. In misreading the nature of the threat Israel faces, in adopting a degraded language of human rights to protect the greatest enemies of human rights on the planet, in adopting a that masquerades as empirically accurate, they embrace all the kinds of techniques that put them in danger when faced with the same enemy.
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- Jewish supremacism revisited: And, Deborah Orr’s faulty memory (cifwatch.com)
- On the explicit antisemitism of the Guardian’s Deborah Orr (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian readers view release of Shalit for 1027 terrorists as evidence of Israeli racism! (cifwatch.com)
- When white faces at the Guardian refuse to treat non-white faces as moral equals (cifwatch.com)
From the BBC Radio 4 news today and today’s Daily Telegraph comes word of the latest Guardian hypocrisy, that a senior Guardian journalist, Amelia Hill, has been questioned under caution* by the Metropolitan Police in London in connection with the telephone hacking scandal. According to the Daily Telegraph, she is thought to have published information based on leaks from an officer assigned to the inquiry into the News of the World’s voice mail hacking.
I cannot deny that Schadenfreude rules for me. It appears that the Guardian, so eager and quick to point the finger at the News of the World, may itself be implicated in the very sleaze it condemns. The biter seems to have been bitten.
But although the Guardian’s Teflon coating seems to be getting worn, note the following attempt to deflect from Dan Roberts, the paper’s national news editor, who tweeted that the developments were a “bleak day for journalism when (a) reporter behind vital hacking revelations is criminalised for doing her job”. What on earth could he have meant – that the “bleak day for journalism” was because another Guardian reporter has been implicated in underhanded, possibly illegal and certainly unethical behaviour?
*Interviews under caution are conducted when the police would like to speak to a person about an arrestable offence. Amelia Hill is likely to have received documentation along the following lines:
CLICK TO ENLARGE
A Guardian Reporter’s Prayer:
Our Editor, which art in King’s Place
Rusbridger be thy name
Thy time has come
To be undone
For thy sins against the truth;
But give us this day thy latest excuse
That the readership may forgive our lies
As we forgive thy spin to us;
And lead us not into the arms of the Met
But deliver us from government enquiry;
For thine is the (ever-shrinking) kingdom,
The power and misplaced glory
But not for long
Amen
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A guest post by Michael G.
I was not present at Saturday’s student rally in Manchester against the British Government’s plans to sharply raise university tuition fees, but here are the facts that the British media seem to agree on:
National Union of Students (NUS) president Aaron Porter was prevented by an abusive mob from speaking at the rally and had to be escorted to safety by police officers. About 150 fellow protesters, many pictured carrying Socialist Workers’ Party placards, broke away from the main, peaceful demonstration and barracked Porter over his leadership of the student movement. At least 16 demonstrators were arrested on the day.
The British media differed slightly in their reports of the type of abuse hurled at Porter.
The Daily Mail reported that Porter faced chants of “Tory Jew scum” in an article headlined, “Student union leader pulls out of speaking at fees rally after protesters hurl anti-Jewish abuse at him.”
The Daily Telegraph said that Porter was called a “f*cking Tory Jew” under the headline, “Student leader Aaron Porter barracked with anti-Semitic insults,” while Sky News reported that demonstrators surrounded Porter, “chanting anti-Semitic insults and calling for him to resign.”
The Guardian, though, saw it much differently.
Their story admits that student protesters targeted Porter before he was led to safety by police, but claims that he was merely called a “Tory too.” The word “Jew” doesn’t appear anywhere in their story, and there’s no mention whatsoever of the anti-Jewish abuse that other British media outlets detected. Why?
Porter himself, who apparently is NOT Jewish, said:
“Before I was able to speak to the rally of thousands a small group of people started to chant abuse to try to intimidate me, and there were audible antisemitic comments.
“Racism is something that student activists have been fighting to eliminate for decades and this was a sobering reminder that there is still work to do.”
Does The Guardian think Porter is lying? Or, rather, could it simply be that a story about racism by British Far Left “activists” simply isn’t a narrative that is particularly helpful to their cause?
I’ll put my money on the latter.
Just Journalism has an interesting post up evaluating the official views of the British broadsheets in reaction to Miliband’s announcement that an Israeli diplomat has been expelled in connection with the purported assassination of Hamas leader, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Unsurprisingly, the Guardian’s coverage featured heavily in Just Journalism’s commentary.
“The Guardian, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph all published leading articles today, analysing this latest development. The Guardian took a palpably hostile stance towards Israel. Its editorial accused Israel of being ‘an arrogant nation’ and claimed that Miliband ‘all but accused the Israeli government of participation in a criminal, terrorist conspiracy’. The publication also took the opportunity to berate Israel for its policies in Jerusalem, going as far as to imply that Israel will relinquish the whole city to the Palestinians in final status talks:
‘Jerusalem was not a settlement, he said, it was the capital of Israel. These are not the words of a government prepared to negotiate what all Israelis know is a central demand of final status negotiations – Jerusalem becomes the capital of a Palestinian state.’
The piece also asserted that PM Netanyahu’s policies in east Jerusalem was proof that ‘Israel is pre-empting the shape of the final agreement by creating facts on the ground’ and that ‘No deal with the Palestinians can be made in these conditions.’”
Read the rest here.
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Hadar Sela
The miracle of Guardian writer Phoebe Greenwood
December 26, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: Amnesty International, anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Christian Aid, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Delegitimization, Guardian, Phoebe Greenwood | by Israelinurse | 6 comments
From the Hannuka miracle of the oil to the virgin birth (to mention but those currently being celebrated), Israel has a reputation for marvels of mystical intervention stretching back thousands of years.
But miracles are not a thing of the past in the Holy Land; even in contemporary times we frequently witness the wonder of a journalist becoming an expert authority on the Middle East faster than you can say “half a portion of falafel with amba and don’t forget the chips”.
The Guardian’s Phoebe Greenwood is a classic case in point.
Having graduated in 2003 with a degree in English Literature, Greenwood began her career in journalism with an Australian celebrity gossip magazine before moving on to Grazia fashion magazine where, according to her own description, she was engaged in “writing and commissioning news and showbiz features, editing party pages”. A brief stint at the Daily Mail was followed by a post with a community advertising magazine before moving on to work as in-house journalist for Christian Aid. Eleven months later, Greenwood moved to another post within the NGO sector as she took on the role of media manager in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East on behalf of Save the Children UK. She has also worked with Amnesty International.
During her time with Save the Children (March 2009 – December 2010) Greenwood’s concurrent activity as a freelance writer saw a shift from articles mostly about the popular music scene to world politics (with a heavy accent on the Arab-Israeli conflict) which have appeared in numerous outlets including Al-Jazeera, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Sunday Times and the UN OCHA online magazine IRIN.
Since July 2011 she has been employed as a stringer – based in Jerusalem – for the Guardian/Observer and the Daily Telegraph newspapers.
As anyone who has ever worked in the charity sector is aware, one does not attract the donations necessary for financing either the organization’s activities or its employees’ salaries by telling the public that the situation in that particular field of operation is not too bad. A freelance journalist doubling up as a charity worker therefore clearly has a conflict of interests when reporting – supposedly objectively – about the situation in a foreign country in which he or she is also employed by a charity working in the field.
Several of Greenwood’s articles have relied heavily upon information and quotes from Save the Children UK’s country director in what it terms the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories) – Ms. Salam Kanaan – who clearly has a very politicized agenda easily discernible in her quoted statements, reports and interviews.
Greenwood’s rapidly acquired ‘understanding’ of the Middle East (a subject which she herself now defines as one of her ‘specialties’) is obviously influenced considerably by the organizational culture she absorbed whilst working for Save the Children UK. According to her self-composed LinkedIn profile, she continues to act as a consultant to that organization, as well as for Amnesty International and ACT Alliance.
Greenwood is a clear example of what we at CiF Watch have termed in the past a ‘journavist’: someone promoting a political agenda by means of what the public assumes to be objective reporting.
Her increasingly frequent articles on the pages of the Guardian’s Middle East section (cost-cutting in progress?) may initially appear to be little different from the often ideologically-motivated reports filed by Harriet Sherwood until one remembers that Greenwood’s lightning apprenticeship for her new trade as ‘Middle East Specialist’ was learned not at a foreign editor’s news desk, but at the knees of several of the more offensive anti-Israel charities at work in the region. That she claims to still work as a consultant with some of them indicates a continuing conflict of interests.
The fact that the Guardian is publishing supposedly serious reporting on the Middle East from a comparatively recently re-vamped former writer of pop music reviews and celebrity gossip with apparently no formal training in Middle East history or current affairs and whose ‘expertise’ on the subject was gained in a grand total of 22 months spent working on two rather large and far apart continents for a fairly notoriously biased charity is hardly likely to cause regular CiF Watch readers to set aside their Christmas pudding or Hannuka donut in shock.
The ‘miracle’ of Phoebe Greenwood’s meteoric transformation into a regular Guardian contributor with a self-described ‘specialty’ in the Middle East clearly has more to do with the fact that her ‘progressive’ one-sided approach dovetails very conveniently with the Guardian World View of the region rather than any boring, earthly factor such as knowledge, expertise or understanding.
Actually, it might well be a miracle if she wasn’t writing for the Guardian.
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