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Cross posted by Anne, who blogs at Anne’s Opinions
Float in Dusseldorf featuring Ahmadinejad
Guardian Associate Editor Seumas Milne, per George Galloway and other political fellow travelers, never met a dictator he couldn’t love and whose opposition to anything Western is visceral.
His latest column, Feb. 21, asserts that an attack on Iran would be an act of criminal stupidity.
A US-Israeli stealth war [against Iran] is already raging on the ground, including covert assassinations of scientists, cyber warfare and attacks on military and missile installations. And Britain and France have successfully dragooned the EU into ramping up sanctions on Iran’s economic life-blood of oil exports as a buildup of western military forces continues in the Gulf.
Any of this could easily be regarded as an act of war against Iran –
If an attack is launched by Israel or the US, it would not just be an act of criminal aggression, but of wanton destructive stupidity. As Michael Clarke, director of the British defence establishment’s Royal United Services Institute, points out, such an attack would be entirely illegal: “There is no basis in international law for preventative, rather than pre-emptive, war.”
However, Clarke does not make clear, as with Milne’s broader commentary, the difference between pre-emptive and preventative.
From Dictionary.com:
Preemptive: of or pertaining to preemption…taken as a measure against something possible, anticipated, or feared.
Preventive; deterrent: a preemptive tactic against a ruthless…rival.
And as I have pointed out before, preemptive attacks are indeed legal in the face of not only imminent attack but also expected and threatened attack:
The proliferation of WMDs by rogue nations gave rise to a certain argument by scholars concerning preemption. They argued that the threat need not be “imminent” in the classic sense and that the illicit acquisition of these weapons, with their capacity to unleash massive destruction, by rogue nations, created the requisite threat to peace and stability as to have justified the use of preemptive force. NATO’s Deputy Assistant Secretary General for WMD, Guy Roberts cited the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1998 US attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant, (identified by US intelligence to have been a chemical weapons facility) and the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s nuclear facility at Osirak as examples of the counter-proliferation self-help paradigm. Regarding the Osirak attack, Roberts noted that at the time, few legal scholars argued in support of the Israeli attack but notes further that, “subsequent events demonstrated the perspicacity of the Israelis, and some scholars have re-visited that attack arguing that it was justified under anticipatory self-defense.” Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, American forces captured a number of documents detailing conversations that Sadaam Hussein had with his inner sanctum. The archive of documents and recorded meetings confirm that Hussein was indeed aiming to strike at Israel. In a 1982 conversation Hussein stated that, “Once Iraq walks out victorious, there will not be any Israel.” Of Israel’s anti-Iraqi endeavors he noted, “Technically, they [the Israelis] are right in all of their attempts to harm Iraq.
Note what was said about Israel’s attack on Osirak, the international condemnations and the later reversal of opinion (not that Israel ever received an apology for the original condemnations).
The threats emanating from Iran, with its parades of missiles engraved “Marg bar Israel” (Death to Israel), the regime’s Holocaust denial, the determination of Ahmadinejad to wipe Israel off the map (yes, he indeed did say it many times) - not to mention its permanent proxy war against Israel conducted by Hezbollah and Hamas – all amount to viable motivations for a legal pre-emptive attack, whether by Israel, the Western allies, or a coalition of them all.
Again, Milne:
Such a capability wouldn’t be the “existential threat” Israeli politicians have claimed. It might, of course, blunt Israel’s strategic edge. Or as Matthew Kroenig, the US defence secretary’s special adviser until last summer,spelled it out recently, a nuclear Iran “would immediately limit US freedom of action in the Middle East”. Which gets to the heart of the matter: freedom of action in the Middle East is the prerogative of the US and its allies, not independent Middle Eastern states.
Milne’s dismissal of Israel’s concern about an existential threat is characteristically Guardian: Detached moral posturing far removed from the crisis being discussed. He is not the one sitting here in the Middle East waiting for bombs to fall on his family. And, of course he does not care that Israel’s strategic edge would be blunted.
Anything that would weaken Israel is good as far as he is concerned, and similarly supports the potential that a nuclear Iran would limit US freedom of action in the Middle East.
It is biased and ideologically driven “journalists” like Milne who suffer from the real failure of imagination – those who cannot imagine the dire straits the civilised world will find itself in if Iran develops nuclear weapons, and who refuse to see the disastrous implications, some of which are already being played out today in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He also seems egregiously detached from the moral lessons learned from the 20th century’s previous wars: That when despotic regimes threaten destruction they usually carry out their threats.
Related articles
- CiF readers blast Jonathan Freedland’s critique of Guardian Left orthodoxies on Syria, Iran & Israel (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s Seumas Milne runs interference for “anti-Imperialist” Islamic Republic of Iran (cifwatch.com)
- Fascinating Twitter exchange between Guardian’s Seumas Milne & Hamas member Azzam Tamimi (cifwatch.com)
- Tin-Pot Pravda: Guardian editorial scolds Israel for taking Iranian nuclear threat seriously (cifwatch.com)
- Seumas Milne shills for Syria & Iran: Sees hidden Zionist hand in calls for Assad’s overthrow (cifwatch.com)
Explicitly antisemitic commentators often complain that Jewish money distorts U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and warn of the broader danger posed by Jewish influence in politics.
Such narratives can be found on the extreme left, the Jewish far left, the extreme right, and Islamic /Arab sites.
And, the Guardian is certainly no slouch at employing rhetoric suggesting the nefarious influence of Jewish Americans on U.S. policy or the election process.
Ewen MacAskill, writing in the Guardian on Jan. 25, commenting on Obama’s State of the Union address, wrote:
On foreign policy, a president who has been at loggerheads with the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, over a Middle East peace process promised unflinching support for the state. With an election looming and in need of votes and funds from American Jews, some of whom have been unhappy over his approach to Israel, Obama referred to “our iron-clad, and I mean iron-clad, commitment to Israel’s security”.
In nearly 3000 words in two separate Guardian reports (both published on Jan. 28,), Paul Harris and Arun Kundnani played to their Guardian base by evoking the injurious effects of (Zionist) Jewish money on the American body politic.
Harris’s “The Secrets of the billionaire bankrolling Gingrich’s shot at the White House“, warned darkly of Adelson’s billions attempting to purchase the outcome of the U.S. elections, but Arun‘s account of Adelson, in “Newt Gingrich’s agenda-setting big donor“, represented a far more egregious polemical assault on pro-Israel Jews. Concluded Arun:
we should not be discouraged from properly scrutinising the millions of dollars being spent to advance the career of a politician who…is running for the presidential nomination while espousing a Greater Israel agenda.
The mere fact the Guardian’s hitherto favorite wealthy Jewish bogeyman, Sheldon Adelson, failed to propel his preferred candidate, Newt Gingrich, to political supremacy within the Republic primary for President doesn’t mean that such narratives on the “disproportionate” influence of Jewish money on the campaign will cease.
The latest Guardian piece consistent with such narrative isn’t nearly as egregious as the above examples, but again demonstrates that such memes are increasingly accepted within the Guardian Left and mainstream media.
In “FACT CHECK: ‘Record-low’ ignores money for Israel“, Guardian/Associated Press, Feb. 18, Donna Cassata (Political Editor at AP) attempts to refute allegations by “two powerful House Republican chairmen accused President Barack Obama of jeopardizing Israel’s security with a ‘record-low’ budget request for a cooperative U.S.-Israeli missile defense program.”
While Cassata cites some budgetary facts to counter the argument made by Foreign Affairs Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., and Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif. that “the administration is requesting record-low support for”, she then attempts to contextualize the criticism:
Election-year politics and the increasing Iranian threat to Israel have ratcheted up the bitter rhetoric in Washington and on the presidential campaign trail. Republicans and Democrats are keeping a close watch on Jewish voters who not only are an important political base for Democrats but whose financial contributions are critical for either party.
Commanders in chief propose a specific amount for the missile defense program knowing full well that Israel will contact members of Congress and ask that they come up with more money. Congress routinely complies.
Cassata’s argument is clear: U.S. Congressional support for Israel, and criticisms that President Obama’s proposed funding for Israel’s security, are a product of the influence of both American Jewish money and the government of the Jewish state.
As is typical when journalists write about Jews’ allegedly disproportionate influence on U.S. policy towards Israel, Cassata fails to contextualize the story by citing evidence that strong support for Israel among the Jewish and non-Jewish U.S. electorate is undeniable – empirically demonstrated by annual polls conducted by Gallup going back to 1967.
The degree that Congress is pro-Israel merely reflects something of a political consensus across the American political spectrum.
Yet, the belief that Jewish money (and/or Israel) is purchasing pro-Israel congressional support reflects something of a consensus among the Guardian Left and those politically aligned with their brand of “progressive” politics.
Related articles
- Arun Kundnani, & a Guardian dog-whistle about the injurious effects of a wealthy American Zionist (cifwatch.com)
- Jews & the charge of ‘Dual Loyalty’: CiF’s Rachel Shabi excuses a classic antisemitic canard (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill sees Obama’s Israel support, in State of Union, reflecting need of Jews’ money (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s Simon Jenkins suggests Obama’s sanctions against Iran caused by Israel lobby (cifwatch.com)
- Jewish money: The Guardian leaps once more into the sewer of antisemitic conspiracies (cifwatch.com)
Harriet Sherwood’s first heart-wrenching tale of the trials of a terrorist “Palestinian hunger striker” named Khader Adnan (Israel shackles Palestinian hunger striker), Feb. 12, held in administrative detention by Israel – who has become a martyr in the eyes of terror sympathizers everywhere – barely mentioned his ties to Islamic Jihad, and included no mention of the group’s deadly attacks which have claimed dozens of innocent Israeli lives.
Image from "Free Khader Adnan" Facebook Page
Further, Sherwood provided no legal context about the “administrative detention” being used by Israel to imprison Adnan since mid-December – a judicial method, I noted, similarly employed by other democratic and rights-respecting states around the world, including the the UK and the U.S. For example, the recently released al-Qaeda terror suspect, Abu Qatada, was held in administrative detention in the UK for over six years.
But, more broadly, the curious subtext of Sherwood’s piece, as with similar criticisms of Israel over Adnan’s hunger strike, seems to suggest that a terror suspect in custody should be released simply because he engages in a hunger strike to highlight his imprisonment to the Western media.
However, Sherwood’s latest piece on Adnan, Palestinian hunger striker Khader Adnan near death in Israeli detention, Feb. 16, was even more sympathetic to the PIJ operative, included passages about the toll Adnan’s hunger strike is taking on his family, and even characterized the Palestinian terrorist as an innocuous “baker from a village near Jenin”. [emphasis added]
Alternately, Sherwood’s 837 word tale of Israeli cruelty included one sentence (15 words) on Adnan’s ties to one of the most violent and hard-line terror groups in the Palestinian territories.
However, Adnan’s major role in the Islamist terror group is well-documented.
- In a June 8, 2005 Boston Globe article Adnan was identified as a PIJ spokesperson, and was quoted admonishing the Palestinian Authority for cooperating with Israeli officials to apprehend suspects in the wake of a Tel Aviv suicide bombing: “We have strong suspicions that the security coordination’ between Israeli and Palestinian authorities that has resumed in recent weeks ‘is responsible for this”, Adnan said. He further said there had been no response to Islamic Jihad demands that the PA say publicly that it was not involved in helping Israel identify jihadis who were planning fresh attacks.”
- Per information in the Arab media cited by Elder of Ziyon, Adnan has been a leader of PIJ for years, and was arrested by the PA as well, and even embarked on a hunger strike against the Abbas regime while in PA jail only a year previous to the current hunger strike.
- Al Arabiya identified Adnan as a “main leader” of PIJ.
The multi-talented “baker” named Khader Adan is evidently impressively skilled in both the culinary arts and the more sublime craft of providing rhetorical support for a “resistance” movement’s efforts to murder innocent Jewish civilians.
Harriet Sherwood’s cause celeb, Khader Adnan, is not only a “Hunger striker”, but a true renaissance man.
Related articles
- Harriet Sherwood feels Islamic Jihad terrorist’s pain (cifwatch.com)
As Hadar Sela noted in her recent reports on the upcoming ‘Global March to Jerusalem’, scheduled for March 30, 2012:
The organisers are a conglomerate of people representing the ‘red-green alliance’ the world over. Radical Leftists, Muslim Brotherhood-connected Islamists, [antisemites] and representatives of and sympathisers with the Iranian regime have once more come together with the aim of engineering an event which will…advance their long-term assault on the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
So, it wasn’t surprising when I read, at Anti-Defamation Leagues’s site devoted towards exposing extremists, that an antisemite as prolific as Gilad Atzmon will be speaking in Oakland, California, on February 25, at a “benefit for the Global March to Jerusalem – North America.”
Here’s the flyer promoting the event.
As we’ve noted repeatedly, Atzmon’s musings on the threat to humanity posed by Jews is literally indistinguishable from what you’d find at websites of white supremacists, and so his common cause with Islamists and other extremists inspired by dreams of the Jewish state’s demise represents quite an intuitive ideological synergy.
Finally, note the blurb from the Guardian on the flyer, which refers to this 2009 interview of the “London saxophonist” by the paper’s literary critic, John Lewis, which included this photo of the urbane, sophisticated artist.
Lewis’ glowing profile included this passage:
It may come as a surprise to some that Atzmon is a saxophonist at all. His career as a musician has long been drowned out by the clatter of his extra-curricular activities: the furious attacks on Israel (he writes and edits for the website Palestine Think Tank); the philosophical texts on Jewish identity that get discussed by the likes of Noam Chomsky; the two comic novels that have been translated into 24 languages.
Just to be clear, Atzmon’s extreme antisemitic musings predated Lewis’ 2009 praise of Atzmon by many years. Here’s a quote from Atzmon’s website, posted in 2003.
American Jewry makes any debate on whether the ‘Protocols of the elder of Zion’ are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews (in fact Zionists) do control the world.. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least.
The problem with Atzmon, wrote Lewis, later in his piece, is ”that trenchant politics often sit uneasily alongside music, particularly when that music is instrumental.”
Yes, that’s truly the problem with Gilad Atzmon: His incisive politics on Jews’ evil sits “uneasily” with his sublime artistic expression.
Related articles
- You know you’re an antisemitic Guardian reader when…you defend Gilad Atzmon (cifwatch.com)
- Another pejorative reference to Jews as “Chosen People” by a Guardian contributor (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian, Khaled Diab and the Gilad Atzmon antisemitism test (cifwatch.com)
- Following our post & complaint, Guardian amends Khaled Diab’s CiF essay: Removes Atzmon passage (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian publishes letter by supporter of Gilad Atzmon, refuses to publish rebuttal (cifwatch.com)
- Gilad Atzmon takes aim at CiF Watch, accusing us of running “a Jewish supremacist site”! (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch Special Report: Extremists & terror supporters organizing ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ (cifwatch.com)
Rachel Shabi
Rachel Shabi is a journalist who writes for ‘Comment is Free’ and Al Jazeera whose contempt for the Jewish state, and seeming indifference to antisemitism, is consistently demonstrated.
Shabi has blamed Zionism for the ethnic cleansing of 900,000 Jews from Arab lands; characterizing their plight as being caused ”either by agitating Zionist emissaries, or by the shockwaves that Zionism sent through the Middle East.” [emphasis added]
She has accused those who raise the issue of the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands of engaging in cynical “political point-scoring”, and has even mocked the notion of historic Arab antisemitism.
She also dismissed Israeli concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) – writing that the MB was merely “perceived as…anti-Semitic - characterizing the Jewish state’s fear of the Islamist group’s rise (a movement whose spiritual leader literally called for Allah to murder every last Jew on earth) as evidence of Israeli racism!
In addition, while Shabi has carved out a successful journalistic niche as a Jewish critic of Israel I have found nothing Shabi has written on the subject of antisemitism, and absolutely no indication that she is at all burdened by the malign Jewish obsession which is normative in the Arab world – all of which provides relevant context to her latest essay at ‘Comment is Free’, “False accusations of antisemitism desensitize us to the real thing“, Feb. 17.
Shabi, in arguing that “rightwing pro-Israelis [have] sucked the oxygen out of any conversation about the country”, argues:
a broader rash of pouncing-upon from rightwing pro-Israelis that has sucked the oxygen out of any conversation about the country – especially in the US. Witness the recent storm over the phrase “Israel firsters”: used to accuse people of putting policy on Israel above US interests, it sparked a row among liberal commentators on whether it carries connotations of dual loyalty that feed into antisemitic tropes. This was just another attempt to smear liberal American critics of Israel,
Yet the real danger in all this is that the rush to throw charges of antisemitism…and silence…people who criticise Israel will desensitise vigilance over the real thing. Such tactics are meant to intimidate and paralyse, choke and divert the discussion over Israel’s occupation and policies in the Middle East.
Briefly, the controversy Shabi is referring to arose when it was discovered that Zaid Jilani, who blogged for a Center for American Progress (CAP) website, ThinkProgress, used Twitter to call US supporters of the Jewish state “Israel Firsters” – evoking the antisemitic narrative that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country.
As several progressive commentators observed following the row, “liberal” voices who defend this dual loyalty canard are evidently unaware of or unburdened by the fact that the idea that diaspora Jews are insufficiently loyal to the country where they reside has a decidedly reactionary pedigree.
The charge of dual loyalty was central in the Dreyfus Affair through the Nazi’s rise to power – and, indeed, this notion in large measure underlay the failure of European emancipation. In the 1920s American industrialist Henry Ford published The International Jew: The World’s Problem where it was asserted that disloyal American Jews were pushing the U.S. into WWII, though the war was not in the national interest.
While after WWII manifestations of this charge often remained on the fringes of American society, Paul Findley, a former Republican U.S. Congressman, wrote a book in 1985, They Dare to Speak Out, which became a best-seller. In it, Findley maintained that American Jews utilized “tactics which stifle dissent in their own communities and throughout America” to benefit not their own country but, rather, Israel.
Paleoconservative commentators, not surprisingly, have similarly championed this narrative. Pat Buchanan wrote in 2008 that “Israel and its Fifth Column in [Washington , DC] seek to stampede us into war with Iran”, and has previously written that Jews “harbor a ‘passionate attachment’ to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America.”
As liberal columnist Spencer Ackerman noted on the term “Israel-firster”:
It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and (former KKK Grand Wizard) David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network…It is a term that Charles Lindbergh would [have been] comfortable using.
As David Bernstein observed upon researching the term:
The “Israel-firster” slur was not used in “mainstream” discourse until the last few years.
Before that, you can find it occasionally in the early 1980s and 1990s in sources such as Wilmot Robertson’s anti-Semitic Instauration journal, a 1988 anti-Semitic book called “The F.O.J. [Fear of Jews] Syndrome, and a 1998 anti-Semitic book “Rise of AntiChrist.” I also found a couple of references to “Israel-firsters” in the extremist anti-Israel publication, The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs…
By the early 2000s, one can find “Israel-firster” being used by a variety of anti-Semitic “right-wing” sources like DavidDuke.com and the Vanguard News Network. As the decade wore on, the phrase occasionally pops up in far left anti-Israel sites that have ties to the anti-Semitic far-right or are known for playing footsie with anti-Semitism
Finally, over the last few years the term has become increasingly used on the anti-Israel far left
So the question is, does your average Progressive recoil at the use of terminology that migrated recent from the far-right racist kook fringe to refer to members of minority groups? They sure do. Should they recoil less if the terminology is aimed at Jews, as opposed to other minority groups? They sure shouldn’t–unless they are themselves prejudiced against Jews.
Rachel Shabi, a “progressive” commentator writing for a publication which fancies itself the “worlds leading liberal voice”, not only doesn’t recoil from such a malign narrative, questioning the loyalty of Jews but, rather, is outraged that those who engage in such Judeophobic tropes (popularized on the far-right) are being “smeared” as antisemites.
As A. Jay Adler concluded in a recent CiF Watch cross post about those, like Shabi, who would defend or excuse such a slur on Jewish Americans”.
They 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…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.
To this I’d add one more caveat.
Activists like Shabi, like so many others at ‘Comments is Free’, seem to believe that self-proclaimed “progressives” are ipso facto free of prejudice, and so should be granted a kind of impunity from accusations of racism even when trading in the most classic Judeophobic stereotypes.
Such supreme moral hubris continues to inform so much of the the commentary about Israel and Jews by Guardian reporters, contributors and their “progressive” fellow travelers.
Related articles
- Rachel Shabi morally absolves the perpetrators who ethnically cleansed Jews from Arab lands (cifwatch.com)
- CiF’s Rachel Shabi, Israeli democracy and the rank dishonesty of the anti-Zionist Left (cifwatch.com)
- CAP report on Islamophobia co-authored by writer sympathetic to antisemites & Muslim Brotherhood (cifwatch.com)
- “Israel Firster”: Anatomy of an Antisemitic Smear (cifwatch.com)
Confirmation Bias: The habit of favoring information that confirms what you believe, whether it’s true or not, and ignoring the rest.
One of the most consistent habits of Guardian reporters is their ability to vilify Israel in response to almost any story about the country.
A case in point is the tragic accident yesterday, which killed ten and injured 40 others, when a bus carrying Palestinian children (from a kindergarten in the Palestinian territories) and a truck collided in Adam Square in northern Jerusalem. Israeli Magen David Adom and Palestinian Red Crescent teams were working together on the rescue operation, and Israeli and Palestinian police are similarly collaborating on the subsequent investigation.
An initial investigation indicated that the truck or the bus had veered from the oncoming lane, probably due to inclement weather, Army Radio reported.
Yet, Phoebe Greenwood, the Guardian stringer based in Israel for the past eight months (who has yeoman’s work delegitimizing the Jewish state while filling in for Harriet Sherwood) was able to frame even this tragic auto accident in a manner consistent with a broader anti-Israel narrative.
Her story on the accident for The Telegraph, Palestinians mourn death of ten children in bus crash, Feb. 16, included this passage in the penultimate paragraph:
Ahe gleeful reaction of several Israelis on Twitter has provoked disgust and outrage on social media sites.
One tweet posted by Ajali Cali read, “Great, less terrorists” while another tweeter named Itai Viltzig said: “Thank God [these are] Palestinians. I hope every day there is a bus like this [that crashes].” [emphasis added]
First, it turns out that the offensive comments weren’t Tweets, but rather a couple of comments within one Facebook thread beneath a link to a story about the accident from the site of Walla.
More broadly, there are 3.4 million Facebook users in Israel, and it seems relevant to ask how precisely a couple of stray hateful comments (in one FB thread) is news worthy, yet alone represents a dynamic that is in any way relevant to properly contextualizing the story?
But, the most outrageous facet of Greenwood’s gratuitous focus on a few Israeli FB comments is the deafening silence, by both Greenwood and Sherwood, in face of a Palestinian culture saturated with antisemitic incitement not only “beneath the line” at social media sites, but by the official state controlled media, as well as political and religious leaders.
The Palestinian culture of hate towards Jews – and not merely Israelis – is well-documented and impossible not to acknowledge except for those willfully blind to the phenomenon.
To cite just one of countless examples of the consequences of such incitement – a culture which routinely honors terrorists – nearly one-third of Palestinians polled expressed SUPPORT for the terror attack last year in Itamar, in which two Palestinians broke into a Jewish home and butchered five members of the Fogel family, including three children, ages 10, 4, and 3 months.
Interestingly, Greenwood not only doesn’t find such disturbing realities about Palestinian culture to be newsworthy (based on her reports), but evidently is skeptical that such incitement even occurs. Here’s a Tweet by Greenwood in December about statements by Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon that Palestinian textbooks promote terror.
As I posted at the time, all Greenwood would had to have done is go to the site of Palestinian Media Watch to read a comprehensive report on the incontrovertible evidence regarding the glorification of violence against Israelis in PA textbooks.
But, as with so many of her colleagues, Greenwood’s liberal racism, which compromises any claim to objective journalism, necessitates that Palestinians are never held accountable for such an endemic antisemitic culture – a vital political dynamic, in accurately understanding the politics of the region, that the Guardian will never report.
Related articles
- Jews to build new bridge. Guardian characterizes it as a provocation. (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian’s Phoebe Greenwood Tweets: “What Palestinian incitement?” (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian’s Phoebe Greenwood promotes the new kinder, gentler, peaceful Hamas (cifwatch.com)
- Phoebe Greenwood continues Guardian tradition of dishonest reporting about Palestinian incitement (cifwatch.com)
- How the Jews steal Christmas: Ugly Guardian story evokes Jesus as an “oppressed” Palestinian (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian’s Phoebe Greenwood gambles with Palestinian lives. (cifwatch.com)
- The miracle of Guardian writer Phoebe Greenwood (cifwatch.com)
H/T Margie
Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott, in his quasi mea culpa, “On Averting Accusations of antisemitism“, wrote:
Three times in the last nine months I have upheld complaints against language within articles that I agreed could be read as antisemitic...Two weeks ago a columnist used the term “the chosen” in an item on the release of Gilad Shalit, which brought more than 40 complaints to the Guardian, and an apology from the columnist the following week. “Chosenness”, in Jewish theology, tends to refer to the sense in which Jews are “burdened” by religious responsibilities; it has never meant that the Jews are better than anyone else. Historically it has been antisemites, not Jews, who have read “chosen” as code for Jewish supremacism.
The columnist Elliott was referring to is Deborah Orr, who contemptuously referred to Jews’ supposed racist belief in their own superiority, in a bizarre missive which imputed bigotry to Israel in the context of the prisoner release deal to free Gilad Shalit.
Wrote Orr:
“…there is something abject in [Hamas's] eagerness to accept a transfer that tacitly acknowledges what so many Zionists believe – that the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbors.”
Though Orr’s “apology” was far from adequate or honest, the incident at least set a precedent at the Guardian regarding the antisemitic pedigree, and unacceptability, of such tropes.
More recently, the Guardian removed a passage from Khaled Diab’s CiF essay after we alerted them about a similarly pejorative characterization of Jews as ‘chosen people’ – a quote, included by Diab, in support of his broader narrative of Israeli bigotry, by none other than Gilad Atzmon.
Yesterday, Feb 15, in a characteristically ugly anti-American, anti-Zionist polemic by Noam Chomsky, The Imperial Way: The American Decline in Perspective, Part 2, there was this passage:
Christian Zionism in Britain and the US long preceded Jewish Zionism, and has been a significant elite phenomenon with clear policy implications (including the Balfour Declaration, which drew from it). When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during the first world war, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.
The next step was for the Chosen People to return to the land promised to them by the Lord. Articulating a common elite view, President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, described Jewish colonization of Palestine as an achievement “without comparison in the history of the human race”. [emphasis added]
While it’s not surprising that Chomsky - an outspoken opponent of Israel’s existence who has likened Zionism to Nazism and expressed support for Hezbollah - would engage in such anti-Jewish vitriol, its instructive to note that the seemingly sincere call by Chris Elliott on how the Guardian can “avert accusations of antisemitism” evidently hasn’t been taken seriously by his paper’s contributors and editors.
Related articles
- Following our post & complaint, Guardian amends Khaled Diab’s CiF essay: Removes Atzmon passage (cifwatch.com)
- The apology to the Jewish people Deborah Orr should have written (cifwatch.com)
- Gilad Atzmon takes aim at CiF Watch, accusing us of running “a Jewish supremacist site”! (cifwatch.com)
- You know you’re an antisemitic Guardian reader when…you defend Gilad Atzmon (cifwatch.com)
- The continuing notoriety of Guardian journalist Deborah Orr’s perverse antisemitic logic (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian, Khaled Diab and the Gilad Atzmon antisemitism test (cifwatch.com)
- Deborah Orr Tweet of the day: Jews are “not allowed” to “not allow people to be critical” of Israel (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian vindicates CiF Watch (cifwatch.com)
H/T Steve
Geneive Abdo is a former Iran correspondent for the Guardian and current contributor to major American newspapers, as well as Al-Jazeera.
She is a fellow at the Century Foundation which, according to Commentary Magazine‘s Michael Rubin, has close ties to the White House.
Abdo recently suggested to Australian public radio that Israel had bombed its own diplomats in India in order to have an excuse to blame Iran:
(Journalist) ELEANOR HALL: Iran’s leadership says it’s sheer lies that it’s behind the attacks and that the Israelis have planted the bombs themselves to discredit Iran?
GENEIVE ABDO: Well I think that’s entirely possible. I mean, if you consider what the Israelis did for many years in Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East, that theory is not so farfetched.
And, as Rubin observed, “What progressive analysis would be complete without obsessing about the dark shadow of a “Jewish lobby?”
ELEANOR HALL: So how dangerous do you think the situation is right now?
GENEIVE ABDO: Well, I think it’s very dangerous. It’s far more dangerous than probably any escalation tension that we’ve seen in 30 years. So, you know, you have the Israelis not willing to live with a nuclear Iran. You have the Iranians going forward with their nuclear program. And you have an American president trying to be re-elected with a Jewish lobby in the United States that’s extremely powerful.
So, we have a “specialist” on Iran, working for an influential progressive think tank, who legitimizes bizarre conspiracy theories and advances tropes about the injurious effects of organized Jewry.
But that’s not all.
Abdo is a speaker at the upcoming conference, in Washington, DC, of the left-wing Israel lobbying group, J Street - an event which also features Peter Beinart.
Perhaps one of the biggest conceits of Israel’s critics are their frequent suggestions that there’s something brave about their stance, positing that anti-Israel views are stifled, and that activism can cost you professionally.
As Noah Pollock observed of Peter Beinart’s claims to this effect:
Beinart imputes that critics of Israel within the Jewish community and elsewhere have been rendered mute and ineffective by the power of politically conservative Jews and the Washington lobby they supposedly control.
The presence of Geneive Abdo, an anti-Israel conspiracy theorist who advances antisemitic canards, at a conference of a well-funded American Jewish lobbying group, would suggest, however, that such politically powerful conservative Jews are doing a horrible job of muting such “alternative” voices.
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Ian Black
The latest report by the Guardian’s Middle East editor, Ian Black, Feb. 13, is titled “Israeli embassy attacks in Delhi and Tblisi could set off conflagration“.
Black’s analysis attempts to contextualize the recent attack on the Israeli embassy in India, and the thwarted attack in Georgia, (likely committed by Iran or Hezbollah) with the “ongoing campaign of sabotage and assassination against [Iranian] scientists” working on a nuclear programme”.
Black characterizes such covert acts as representing a “highly volatile element in an extremely unstable landscape.”
Adds Black:
Against a background of extraordinary turbulence across the Middle East, the Israeli-Iranian confrontation is by far the most dangerous element.
Black’s analysis of the Iranian-Israeli conflict includes the following:
- A requisite obfuscation over Iran’s nuclear intentions. Black non-judgmentally contrasts Iran’s insistence that its program is peaceful with “Israel and western countries adamant [that it] is not”, failing to cite the latest IAEA report, available on the Guardian website, which states: “the information indicates that Iran has carried out…a structured program…to develop an explosive nuclear device.”
- The suggestion that Iranian attacks on Israeli targets are justified: Black quotes a former British diplomat accusing Israel of “international state terrorism [which] invit[es] a response. It looks like a further twist that will lead to a tit-for-tat.”
However, the most egregious distortion in Black’s report is the historical analogy he attempts to draw in the penultimate paragraph, suggesting that Israel is looking for a “pretext” to war.
Nor could the stakes be higher [for the Middle East]. In June 1982 an assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador to London by the renegade Palestinian faction led by the Iraqi-backed Abu Nidal provided the pretext for war against Yasser Arafat’s PLO in Lebanon, despite a ceasefire that had held for nearly a year. Ariel Sharon, then defence minister, was pressing to attack and persuaded the prime minister, Menachem Begin, to go ahead
Full scale invasion, thousands of dead and years of war and occupation were the result.
Black’s characterization of the cause of the 1982 war, about which he attempts to draw an analogy to the current crisis, is grossly ahistorical.
The roots of the Lebanon war lay in the bloody expulsion of the PLO from Jordan, the terror group’s relocation to Lebanon in 1971 and subsequent staging of hundreds of terrorist acts across Israel’s northern border.
In March 1978, PLO terrorists infiltrated Israel, hijacked a bus and ended up murdering 34 Israeli civilians on board.
In response, Israeli forces crossed into Lebanon and overran terrorist bases, pushing the PLO away from the southern border.
The IDF shortly withdrew and allowed UN forces to enter, but UN troops were unable, or unwilling, to prevent PLO terrorists from re-infiltrating the region and introducing new, and more dangerous arms – a striking similarity to the complete failure of UNIFIL troops to keep southern Lebanon free of Hezbollah weaponry, per their mandate under UN Resolution 1701, following the 2nd Lebanon War in 2006.
Violence escalated with a series of PLO attacks and Israeli reprisals, which culminated n a U.S. brokered ceasefire agreement in July 1981.
However, the PLO repeatedly violated the cease-fire over the ensuing 11 months, carrying out terror assaults from Jordanian territory. (Between July 1981 and June 1982 26 Israelis were killed and 264 injured.)
Meanwhile, a force of over 15,000 PLO members was encamped in of locations throughout Lebanon, including thousands of foreign mercenaries. Israel later discovered an extensive cache of weaponry – which included mortars, Katyusha rockets and an antiaircraft network. The PLO also brought hundreds of T34 tanks into the area, and even surface-to-air missiles.
Israeli commando raids were unable to stem the growth of the PLO army, the of frequency of attacks forced thousands of Israeli residents in the Galilee to flee their homes and spend large amounts of time in bomb shelters.
So, while the final provocation occurred in June 1982 when a Palestinian terrorist group led by Abu Nidal attempted to assassinate Israel’s Ambassador to the UK, Black’s suggestion that Israel cynically used the assassination as a pretext break a peaceful “truce”, in order to launch an unnecessary war, is patently untrue.
What country on earth would permit a terrorist group (with an increasingly deadly arsenal of weaponry) on its border to launch frequent terror attacks against its citizens without a robust military response?
In fact, the important historical analogy with Iran today and the PLO in the early 1980s, which the Guardian’s Middle East editor fails to observe, is that Israel is again faced with increasingly well-equipped terrorist militias on their borders (Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad) – with funds, training and increasingly sophisticated weaponry provided directly by the regime in Tehran.
Every cross border raid, every missile attack, and every attempt to abduct Israeli soldiers by Iranian proxy armies in Lebanon and Gaza over the years have represented acts of war – military aggression by an Islamist state which is attempting to develop nuclear devices, producing rockets capable of delivering such a lethal payload, and whose leadership has provided explicit religious justifications for the use of weapons of mass destruction on Jewish civilians.
Black’s last paragraph included the following, which he no doubt views as an incriminating quote by Menachem Begin, to buttress the overriding narrative of an Israeli state determined to use any pretext to ignite a dangerous regional conflagration.
“Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal,” [Menachem] Begin reportedly replied as his security chiefs explained the crucial detail and significance of the London attack.
However, those of us who understand the circumstances of Israel’s wars against hostile state and non-state actors since its founding (be it Nasser, the PLO, Hezbollah, Hamas or Iran) are not swayed by Black’s crude caricature of an Israeli antagonist. We read the attributed quote and see an Israeli leader who understood that his first role was to protect his nation from harm, and that the threat posed by a well-equipped military force reigning terror down on Israeli civilians more than justified an assertive military response.
The casus belli for Operation Peace for the Galilee was self-evident, building for years, and needed no “pretext”.
The antagonists have changed, but Israeli leaders today similarly face a very real threat by an even more powerful foe.
Today, as in 1982, the Jewish state will not shy away from confronting clear and present dangers it faces, and need not morally justify – to Ian Black or others who fancy themselves sophisticated, dispassionate political sages – its fierce and unapologetic defense of its national interests, and its citizen’s lives.
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When reading the headline of Harriet Sherwood’s report on a Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror suspect being held by Israel, you’d almost think the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent was covering a political prisoner being held by a totalitarian regime.
The title of Sherwood’s piece, “Israel shackles Palestinian hunger striker“, would be easy to pass over or dismiss, but yet says so much about how the Guardian frames such Palestinian “prisoners”, even those clearly affiliated with the most violent and malevolent Islamist movements.
Sherwood’s story begins:
A Palestinian prisoner who has been on hunger strike for more than eight weeks is being kept shackled to a hospital bed by the Israeli authorities, despite warnings that he may be close to death.
Khader Adnan, 33, has been held without charge under “administrative detention” since mid-December. The Israeli military authorities have refused to tell his lawyer what he is accused of or disclose any evidence against him.
His wife, Randa, who is expecting the couple’s third child, said no reason was given for his arrest.
First, “administrative detention”, used to imprison Adnan, is a judicial method similarly employed by other democratic and rights-respecting states around the world, including the the UK – and the U.S.
In fact, unlike the U.S., Israeli detainees are allowed judicial review, generally within eight days, and are subject to renewals every six months – which would seem to undermine claims by Adnan’s wife, uncritically cited by Sherwood, that no reason was given for his arrest.
But, more importantly, it’s only by the sixth paragraph where we learn that Adnan has been previously convicted for being a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Evidently considered of little significance to Sherwood in properly contextualizing the story is the fact that Adnan is a member of a group recognized as a terrorist organization by the EU, U.S., and the UK,.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) was formed in 1979 by Fathi Shaqaqi and other radical Islamists in Egypt who had split from the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza whom they deemed too moderate.
The mission of PIJ is the creation of an Islamic Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel through terrorist attacks on military and civilian targets.
PIJ receives financial assistance from Iran and logistic assistance from Syria.
The group’s paramilitary wing— the al-Quds Brigades—has conducted numerous deadly attacks, including large-scale suicide bombings.
PIJ terrorist attacks have claimed the lives of dozens of Israelis and wounded hundreds.
Here is a partial list of the group’s attacks:
- An August 1987 shooting killed one Israeli in the Gaza Strip;
- A December 1993 shooting killed one Israeli aboard a bus;
- An April 1994 car bomb killed nine people and injured fifty aboard a public bus;
- A January 1995 a suicide bomb killed nineteen Israelis near Netanya;
- A March 1996 suicide bomb at a Tel Aviv shopping mall killed thirteen and injured seventy five more;
- A June 2001 suicide bomb killed twenty-one people in a Tel Aviv nightclub;
- A June 2002 suicide attack at the Meggido Junction killed eighteen and injured fifty;
- An October 2003 suicide bomb at a Haifa restaurant killed twenty-two and injured sixty;
- An October 2005 bomb at a Hadera market killed five people;
- An April 2006 suicide attack in Tel Aviv killed eleven;
- A January 2007 suicide attack at an Eliat bakery killed three.
In reading the Guardian’s coverage of such terror groups, I’m often reminded of the Talmudic warning that “Those Who Are Kind To The Cruel, In The End Will Be Cruel To The Kind.”
In 482 words, Harriet Sherwood didn’t even suggest that ”prisoners” such as Adnan are willing participants in a supremely cruel, violent, antisemitic movement which intentionally kills innocent civilians without remorse.
This is the story the Guardian rarely if ever tells.
It’s a sad commentary on the hard left that more aren’t outraged by a media group which fancies itself a liberal voice, yet continually finds the most reactionary political movements worthy of sympathy.
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Propaganda by wife of Islamic Jihad terrorist, Khadr Adnan: Courtesy of the Guardian
February 22, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Comment is Free, Guardian, Islamic Jihad, Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, Terrorism | by Israelinurse | 1 comment
Islamic Jihad terrorist Khadr Adnan, imploring Palestinians to launch suicide attacks
Articles penned by high-ranking members of terrorist organisations proscribed by the British government – and also by UK-based supporters of those organisations – are, as we all too well know, nothing new to Comment is Free. Now we have the WAGs version of puff pieces whitewashing terror groups and their actions in the form of an article written by Randa Musa. (My husband, Khadar Adnan has shed a light on Israel’s disregard for human rights, Feb. 22).
Mrs Khadr Adnan, as she is also known, seeks to inform readers about her husband’s supposed exposure of “Israel’s disregard for human rights”. With considerable drama she tells us that as a result of Adnan’s arrest last December she “would not be surprised if even our unborn baby which I now bear will also be affected”.
Randa Musa’s concern for human rights apparently does not extend to the trauma her husband’s terror group, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, has caused to the thousands of family members of those murdered or maimed in its car bombings, suicide bombings and other terror attacks.
In fact, she tries to pass Khadr Adnan off as a “student activist” which, to British readers probably conjures images of someone whose activities stretch to handing out flyers or drawing placards.
The truth is of course very different.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s own website describes Adnan as a “leader” of the organisation on more than one occasion. Reuters described him as a “senior figure in the Islamic Jihad” in 2010 and AP as “a top Islamic Jihad leader” in 2005. The Gulf Daily News has him down as “West Bank spokesman of the militant Islamic Jihad group” whilst Middle East Online and IMEMC both describe him as an “Islamic Jihad spokesperson”.
And if there were any further doubts about Adnan’s terrorist ideologies and affiliations, they are quickly dispelled in this video from 2007 in which he solicits suicide bombers.
Apparently banking on her readers’ lack of geographic knowledge, Musa tells us that “life under Israel’s military occupation has turned our dream into a nightmare”. However, their village – Arraba – has in fact been under Palestinian Authority control since the Oslo Accords in the earlier part of the 1990s.
Randa Musa makes the ridiculous claim that Administrative Detention is “part of an immoral policy used to keep Palestinians in a state of perpetual poverty and under-development”. In fact it is a means used by many democratic human rights-respecting countries around the world including the United States and the United Kingdom.
Despite having a degree in Islamic Law, Musa displays her ignorance of other forms of law when she states that:
In fact, the laws of Administrative Detention require that the detainee be brought before a judge within a short period of time. Detentions must be based upon evidence and all detainees – including members of terrorist organisations – have Habeas Corpus rights before the High Court of Justice.
Musa states that “the occupation has decided under pressure to free my husband in April” (emphasis added) whereas in fact Adnan’s detention was due to come to an end on April 17th in any case.
This self-described “devoted wife” is of course no less a propagandist for Islamist terror than her husband. Her concern for human rights, “freedom and dignity” is not universal and certainly does not apply to the ultimate right – the right to life – which her husband and his fellow PIJ members seek to deny Israelis.
She is also apparently prepared even to use her own children in furthering the Islamist cause. The picture illustrating Musa’s article is captioned as showing her daughter holding “a picture of her father, Khader Adnan, who is on hunger strike”.
The caption omits the fact that the child is also holding the flag of Islamic Jihad – a movement well-known for its indoctrination of children with hatred and glorification of terrorism.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad scouting boys wear uniforms and painted faces during a protest demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails, at the Palestinian Legislative council in Gaza city, Monday, Aug. 16, 2004. (http://tiny.cc/w0b62)
A Palestinian woman supporting Islamic Jihad attended a Gaza Strip rally Friday marking the 13th anniversary of the death of the group’s leader, Fathi Shekaki (http://tiny.cc/6s2su)
In indulging its now infamous addiction to terrorist chic, the Guardian long since ditched its liberal credentials to such an extent that it is not ashamed to publish unchallenged fact-free articles by terrorists and their collaborators.
One would, however, have hoped that a terrorist organisation’s exploitation of a child for propaganda purposes would have been a step too far even for the Guardian. Apparently not.
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