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A couple of months ago Jenny Tonge caused a firestorm after she publicly stated during an anti-Israel diatribe “Israel is not going to be there forever in its present performance”. Rejecting an ultimatum from Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, to apologize for her remarks Tonge was forced to resign from the Liberal Democrats and give up the party whip.
Commenting on Tonge’s remarks, Robert Halfon, MP opined
“Baroness Tonge has an appalling record of strong anti-Israel rhetoric. Too often, these remarks carry an offensive anti-Semitic tone. The Liberal Democrat whip should be withdrawn immediately, and she should withdraw her remarks.”
Enter Salma Yaqoob, hailed by the Guardian as “the most prominent Muslim woman in British public life”.
Yaqoob, leader of the Respect Party and former Birmingham city councilor, is known for her Islamist leanings having called the 7/7 London bombings “reprisal attacks”. According to Harry’s Place:
[H]er connections with Islamist extremism go back far further than her association with RESPECT. She was part of the campaign team which supported the family of Abu Hamza, who were caught while taking part in jihadist training in Yemen. Most disgracefully, she wrote an article in Inayat Bunglawala’s “Trends” magazine, which imagined Britain becoming an Islamic Republic, from which Salman Rushdie was depicted fleeing for his life.
Salma Yaqoob (right) endorsing Ben "I can understand why some are antisemitic" White's book Israel Apartheid for Beginners
It should come as no surprise then that Yaqoob holds a special place in her heart for Israel. She attended a protest together with Richard Burden, MP, in which the Israeli flag was burnt. On her personal blog, she lovingly refers to the IHH terrorists on board the Mavi Marmara as martyrs, campaigned for the release of Sheikh Raed Salah, endorsed the closure of the Israeli embassy in London, and supported the pro-Hamas Viva Palestina convoy while on Twitter she participated in the campaign to release Palestinian Islamic Jihad spokesperson, Khader Adnan.
In the spirit of Norman Finkelstein, in an article published in the Guardian (but where else!) she accused “Zionists [of abusing] the memory of the Holocaust to bolster support for today’s Israeli state.” And as can be seen from this article she is a staunch supporter of the BDS movement and the antisemitic Israel apartheid trope.
Which is all by way of introduction to this video filmed in 2010 that places everything neatly in context.
Around the 1 minute mark you can hear Yaqoob saying the following:
“[J]ust as South Africa now is liberated. Just as the bankrupt apartheid regime was exposed, was exposed to a world of the solidarity of world citizens [sic] was dismantled, so too the days of this racist apartheid regime are numbered.” [emphasis added]
Calling into question the existence of and willing the end of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people is abhorrent, offensive and yes antisemitic.
So I ask the question: is there really any difference between what Jenny Tonge and Salma Yaqoob said?
Perhaps Yaqoob should ponder this next time she openly threatens CiF Watch on twitter for expressing our First Amendment rights of free speech.
Update 1
On Twitter, Yaqoob is claiming that she referred to the fact that 7/7 bomber claimed it as a reprisal attack and that she condemned the bombings unreservedly.
Update 2
On Twitter, Yaqoob claims that the Trends article was a satirical parody. She’s strangely silent about the substance of the post – namely the similarity of her statement to that of Jenny Tonge!
Update 3
More hate speech from Salma Yaqoob, this time on Twitter:
Salma Yaqoob Hate Speech Tweet
Update 4
Yaqoob is resolute about standing behind her comments a la Jenny Tonge as evidenced by this retweet:
Update 5
This retweet from Salma Yaqoob is priceless:
Update 6
Note how Salma Yaqoob accuses us of trolling and smearing in the following two tweets:
And then she retweets this:
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Mohammed Merah
As we reported, The Guardian’s two official editorials on the Islamist inspired murders of four innocent Jews in the French city of Toulouse by Mohammed Merah, in over 900 words of text, never once used the word “antisemitism”, nor mentioned the names or Jewish identity of the victims, yet employed the phrase “anti-immigrant rhetoric” three times.
The second editorial, published after Merah’s identity, and Jihadist background, was known, warned not of Islamist inspired Jew hatred, but of the danger of French officials “alienating” the French Muslim community.
An analysis of the shootings by the Guardian’s Paris correspondent, Angelique Chrisafis, which attempted to locate root causes for Merah’s rampage, similarly never mentioned the word “antisemitism” yet included this possible explanation for his massacre:
Merah had self-radicalised in prison, where he spent nearly two years as a teenager after stealing a handbag. Merah’s lawyer said he been a polite and tolerant teenager, but resentful about that prison sentence and angry at being rejected by the army.
And, Chrisais added this:
Merah’s background of petty crime and poor schooling on a housing estate in a drab neighbourhood of Toulouse has catapulted the question of social inequalities and the integration of minorities in France back onto centre stage….Some said the social alienation and discrimination felt by second and third generation, ethnic minority French youths must be addressed...
Not to be outdone, the Guardian’s Associate Editor Seumas Milne, in an essay on April 3 praising the dictator-loving George Galloway (whose political infatuations have included Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh) wrote the following:
Since last month’s atrocities in Toulouse, President Nicolas Sarkozy has improved his poll ratings a bit, pandering to xenophobes and Islamophobes and posturing as a security champion
Yes, clearly: The lesson of the Toulouse massacre is the danger of Islamophobia and xenophobia, but certainly NOT Islamist antisemitism!
Three official editorials, and a prominent feature report by their France correspondent, and not even a cursory attempt to address the disturbing dynamics of a malign Islamist ideology which would prompt a 23-year-old man, raised in France, to murder three innocent Jewish children.
In a refreshing bit of political lucidity French Interior Minister Claude Gueant, commenting on the recent arrests of 30 radical Muslims by French police, who were tracked on Islamist forums preparing to travel to areas including Afghanistan, Pakistan and West Africa to wage Jihad, said the following:
“There will be no respite in France’s pursuit of militants…The pressure on radical Islam and the threats it represents will not stop.”
That such an intuitive understanding of the moral and political lessons of the Toulouse massacre – the need to face the threats posed by radical Islam in Europe, and not the problem of Islamophobia, second generation immigrant “alienation”, poverty or poor schooling – is even remotely controversial at the Guardian is another commentary on their editors’ supreme political pathos.
The Guardian group continues to be defined by this morally perverse and intellectually unintelligible understanding of what a modern liberal political sensibility demands.
Related articles
- Hate crime in Toulouse, & the Guardian Left’s callous disregard towards antisemitic ideology (cifwatch.com)
- Jew hatred? What Jew hatred? A tale of two Guardian editorials on the Toulouse murders (cifwatch.com)
- Toulouse Massacre, the Guardian’s Jessica Reed and the tyranny of liberal guilt (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian reader’s outrage with paper’s latest propaganda about antisemitic murders in Toulouse (cifwatch.com)
Jewish victims from Toulouse shooting: 30-year-old Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arieh, 5, and Gabriel, 4, and seven-year-old Miriam Monsonego
As French police continue to negotiate for the surrender of the man they suspect to be behind the killing of a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday (30-year-old Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his children Gabriel, 4, and Arieh, 5, and the daughter of the school’s principal, seven-year-old Miriam Monsonego), we now know a few things.
- The suspect is a French Muslim named Mohammed Merah, and is a Jihadist who French authorities believe is affiliated with Al Qaeda.
- Merah allegedly spoke to French journalist Ebba Kalondo last night, cooly admitting he was the shooter, and said he’d done it in revenge for the law banning the wearing of the headscarf and also for France’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan and to protest about the situation in Palestine. The journalist added:
He wasn’t in the least bit agitated or nervous or excited; just very, very calm and convinced about what he was saying, and very polite. He said this was only the beginning and that there would be more attacks, [adding] ‘I’ll either go to prison with me head held high or die with a smile on my face.’”
- Merah spent time in Afghanistan participating in terrorist acts against U.S. and British forces, and escaped from an Afghan jail in 2008 after having been sentenced to three years for carrying bomb-making equipment. He was among several hundred prisoners who escaped in a Taliban assault on the jail.
- The suspect trained with Pakistani Taliban militants before going to Afghanistan to fight with the insurgents.
The Guardian’s Live Blog on the unfolding drama, as with so much of what passes for reporting on issues relating to the threat posed by radical Islam, are filtered through their egregiously skewed ideological blinders.
Who’s to blame? The murderer? Al-Qaeda? Racial Islam? No, Anti-immigrant rhetoric from Sarkozy.
Live Blog dispatch from7.57am:
As Reuters points out, immigration and Islam have been major themes of the election campaign as Sarkozy tries to woo supporters of the far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Analysts say the shootings could transform the election debate and possibly tone down the populist rhetoric. [emphasis added]
This is more than obscene. It’s also nonsensical.
We’re to believe that an al-Qaeda trained terrorist shot Jewish children in cold blood because of the alleged anti-immigrant, populist rhetoric of the French Presidential campaign?!
Further, it’s as if they’re bending over backwards to avoid the more intuitive conclusion: The brutal killing of innocent Jews by a French Islamist vindicates the concerns of Sarkozy and others about the dangers of radicalization, and the failure of such citizens to assimilate into society.
The funeral for the victims held this morning in Jerusalem for the French Jewish victims: Reporter Phoebe Greenwood emphasizes Jewish calls for vengeance:
Dispatch from 10.09am, from Greenwood:
There was a long list of very emotional speakers from both France and Israel and all have spoken with deep emotion about the shootings in Toulouse. The chief rabbi broke down in tears as he vowed that there would be vengeance for their deaths; that God will avenge their deaths… [emphasis added]
Dispatch from 9.25am:
One Israeli official has described the attack as the act of “wild animals made crazy by their hatred”
The Jewish people face wild and insatiable animals, wild animals made crazy by their hatred,” the speaker of parliament, Reuben Rivlin, said in a eulogy at the burial site.
So, even at the funeral, where the unimaginable grief of the victims’ family and friends must have been suffocating, the Guardian decided to focus on the theme of Jewish vengeance, and the remark by one Israeli official characterizing those responsible for the crime as “wild animals”.
More broadly, as Barry Rubin observed about the reaction to the Toulouse murders:
What a tragic, evil joke. An [Islamist] shooter in the beautiful, almost magical, city of Toulouse, France, murders three Jewish children and a teacher in front of their school. Various VIPs issue statements about how terrible is this deed, how unspeakable.
And yet at that very moment, the next round of murders, the next slanderous and inciting antisemitic lies are being perpetrated by respectable people and institutions. There is no real soul-searching, no true effort to do better, no serious examination about how the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hysteria is paving the way to murder… [emphasis added]
During the attack at the Jewish school, when the suspect’s 9mm weapon jammed he switched to a .45-calibre gun, entered the school gates and chased children as they fled for cover. He reportedly cornered eight-year old Miriam, the daughter of the school principal, Yaacov Monsonego (the blond haired girl in the photo above).
He then put the gun to her and fired a bullet through her head.
Though more Guardian reports on the shooting will be forthcoming, we can can be certain that the vital and unmistakable moral lessons of such incomprehensible evil – an extremist antisemitic ideology which views even Jewish children as legitimate targets – will not be included in their coverage.
Such painfully obvious truths about the danger posed by Islamic antisemitism are simply not part of the narrative.
The mother mourns during the joint funeral service in Jerusalem for victims of Monday's shooting in Toulouse
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This essay was written by Michael Ross, and originally published at National Post
Thai police officers escort Iranian bomb suspect Mohammad Kharzei (C) during an investigation at his rented house in Bangkok on February 20, 2012. Police in Thailand said on February 17 they were hunting for a fifth Iranian suspected in a failed bomb plot in Bangkok that has sent tensions between Israel and Iran soaring.
In a recent article in The Guardian entitled, “Iran seems an unlikely culprit for the attacks on Israeli diplomats”, University of London scholar Arshin Adib-Moghaddam contends that Iran wouldn’t plan attacks in India, Thailand and Georgia because Tehran enjoys good relations with these countries. Mr. Adib- Moghaddam is either very naive or enjoys good relations with the Iranian regime but either way, his article flies in the face of very damning evidence. A long look at Iran’s state-sponsorship of terror would indicate to the most casual observer that the regime couldn’t give a damn about it’s multilateral relationships with those countries.
Mr. Adib-Moghaddam even floats the absurd theory that these were dissidents belonging to an anti-regime faction or part of the “Indian Mujahedeen” ostensibly bent on wrecking relations between India and Iran. I guess this theory works for some if confined to the Indian sub-continent, but it’s going to be very hard to convince the government in Azerbaijan that this is the case as details emerge today of the arrest of an IRGC-QF/Hezbollah cell that was gathering intelligence, purchasing firearms, ammunition, explosives and devices, and making other preparations in order to commit terrorist acts on Israeli targets in Baku.
As more details emerge about the Iranian cell’s activities in Bangkok, the first thing I examined were their flight records. At least four of the six Iranians flew to Bangkok on direct flights originating in Tehran – and in the case of Leila Rohani, the woman involved in the plot – on a flight directly back to Tehran. I don’t have much experience as a dissident, but it seems to me that I’d probably want to avoid any travel that would ultimately take me into the waiting arms of the regime’s security services. But it’s not just the direct flights; it’s the airline they used. As it happens, the members of this cell flew on Mahan Air, an Iranian commercial airline that was designated by the U.S. last year under Presidential Executive Order 13224 blacklisting it due to links to Iran’s support for terrorism.
Mahan Air is known in counter-terrorism circles as “IRGC Air” due to its busy schedule ferrying IRGC-QF/Hezbollah/MOIS operatives, weapons and money around the world. The U.S. is especially displeased with Mahan Air as it emerged that the airline was covertly flying IRGC-QF officers in and out of Iraq to engage in all manner of mayhem directed at coalition forces and in support of the Shia militias in the south of that country. Mahan Air has also been one of the air links facilitating weapons transfers between Iran, Syria and their enfant terrible, Hezbollah, based in Lebanon. The cargo manifests belonging to this airline have a long history of omitting certain shipments that are transferred between these three countries.
Also emerging from the plot in Bangkok is the use of stickers bearing the word “SEJEAL” to mark possible target zones at various points along a 1.5-km route on roads and public transit in Bangkok. These stickers were similar to ones located at the house where the first blast occurred and at another house rented by Leila Rohani. The stickers were also found under the seat of a seized motorcycle belonging to the Iranian cell. As it happens, Iran-sponsored Hamas refer to their rockets as “Sejeal Stones” after a passage in the Koran that tells of a miracle when birds dropped “Sejeal Stones” on an army attempting to kill Mohammed.
Iranians flying on Iranian documents from Tehran to Thailand on Mahan Air and caught en flagrante on one of the busiest streets in Bangkok with their stickers, explosive devices and motorcycle would seem to point in directions other than the “Indian Mujahedeen”.
I’m curious to know how far The Guardian’s writers and editors will bend themselves into contortions of Iran denial before they just end up looking silly.
The only “false flag” I can detect is flying from the roof of the British newspaper.
Related articles
- Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, an Unlikely Non-partisan Analyst (Harry’s Place)
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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)
H/T Bataween and Michele
Per the blog, Point of No Return:
Cries of ‘Out with the Jews!’, ‘Kill the Jews!’ greeted the arrival at Tunis airport of the Hamas chief in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh…
A few hundred people gathered on 5 January at the Tunis-Carthage airport to welcome Haniyeh. As they waited for him they sang antisemitic chants and slogans to the glory of Palestine and the liberation of Gaza. They carried Palestinian flags, the flags of the Ennahda movement, and the black flags of the Salafists.
A couple of reminders:
The Guardian characterized Rached Ghannouchi (after his Ennahda Party won the Tunisian elections) as ushering in to Tunisia a “moderate” brand of Islamism.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele, in Oct., complained that secular (anti-Islamist) Muslim parties which competed in the Tunisian elections were playing on Islamophobia by warning of the threats posed by Islamist parties such as Ennahda.
CiF’s Rachel Shabi, in her shameful apologia, on Dec. 27, for the ethnic cleansing of Jews by Arab leaders, wrote the following:
Tunisian Jews, a deeply rooted but diminished community of fewer than 2,000 people (once numbering more than 100,000), are integrated and involved…Tunisia’s President Marzouki has said that Jews who left the country are welcome to return – powerful words that carry trailblazing possibilities.
Interestingly, a professional Arabic translator has informed us that the following can also be heard in the above clip:
“Killing the Jews is a must!” (0:16)
Crowd:”Duty” [wajib] (It is a duty)
“Chasing away the Jews is a must!” (0:20)
Crowd:”Duty”
Yes, the “new”, trailblazing, down-right philosemitic brand of Tunisian Islamism, which inspires its Muslims to “moderately” call for the murder of the country’s Jews.
Related articles
- Guardian “Moderate Islamist” Update: Tunisian constitution bans non-Muslims from Presidency (cifwatch.com)
- Update on the Guardian’s “moderate” Tunisian Islamist, Rashid Ghannouchi (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s Jonathan Steele accuses Tunisian Muslims who oppose radical Islam of Islamophobia (cifwatch.com)
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One of CiF Watch’s signature posts is “Why was this deleted” and, alternately, “Why wasn’t this deleted”?
We spend quite a bit of time monitoring comments beneath the line at ‘Comment is Free’ observing what precisely runs afoul of their “community standards”, and have documented scores of examples of pro-Israel comments being deleted, while some of the most hateful anti-Zionist vitriol remains.
Beyond the narrow issue of deleted comments, however, there are some commenters whose apostasy has rendered them in a state of pre-moderation – where CiF Moderators review, and then release, on a case by case basis, only those comments deemed acceptable.
The last strike for unruly CiF commenters is to have their user privileges permanently suspended due to an especially egregious violation, or pattern of violations, of their norms.
We recently documented two cases in which such a ban was employed – one commenter for merely questioning whether an essay by Sunny Hundal was consistent with Guardian editorial guidelines, and another for simply asking CiF Moderators why his/her comments, noting the Islamist (pro-Muslim Brotherhood) sympathies of CiF contributor, Wajahat Ali, were being deleted.
While the latter example seemingly demonstrates that the Guardian is not about to have their consistent licensing of pro-Islamist voices – who espouse views they evidently deem consistent with “liberal” thought – questioned, the former suggests an institution which is, at the very least, remarkably thin-skinned.
In light of this propensity by CiF Moderators to ban users for content they deem offensive, the following comment, beneath the line of Ranj Alaaldin‘s CiF essay on Dec. 22, “Iraq must divide to survive“, which has not been deleted, nor resulted in the commenter being banned, is especially curious.
Is there any question this commenter is referring to Tony Blair? And, further, is there any doubt that the commenter using the moniker “ChanceyGardener” is suggesting that Blair be killed?
Here are a few CiF standards, from their ‘Community standards and guidelines‘ page, which would seem relevant when assessing comments calling for murder:
We understand that people often feel strongly about issues debated on the site, but we will consider removing any content that others might find extremely offensive or threatening.
We welcome debate and dissent, but personal attacks (on authors, other users or any individual), persistent trolling and mindless abuse will not be tolerated.
…we do ask users to find ways of sharing their views that do not feel divisive, threatening or toxic to others.
So, the suggestion that a former British Prime Minister should be executed: “divisive”, “threatening”, or “toxic”?
You think?!
Related articles
- CiF comment, justifying antisemitism as normal reaction to Zionism: 74 “recommends” & not deleted (cifwatch.com)
- CiF commenter banned for noting that Sunny Hundal essay is inconsistent with CiF “standards” (cifwatch.com)
- Unintentionally comical CiF reader comment of the day: CiF moderators are biased IN FAVOR of CiF Watch (cifwatch.com)
- Why weren’t these deleted? CiF essay about Rosh Hashana elicits antisemitic comments (cifwatch.com)
- CiF reader comment of the day: Bashing bankers, bashing Jews (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian readers claim leading Zionists during WWII rooted for Hitler. Comments not deleted by CiF Moderators (cifwatch.com)
- Comment is Free moderators delete my comment pointing out the moral hypocrisy of Medhi Hasan (cifwatch.com)
- Anti-Zionist CiF commenter accuses CiF Watch of the insidious tactic of trying to “sway” opinion (cifwatch.com)
“You’ve come a long way, baby” was an album by British musician Fatboy Slim, released in 1998.
The title was taken was from a slogan for the cigarette brand Virginia Slims, introduced in 1968 and marketed to young professional women and meant to appeal to the themes of feminism and women’s liberation in the 60s and 70s. The ads often featured anecdotes about women in the early 20th century who were punished for being caught smoking, as compared to the time of the ads when more women had more rights.
The Virginia Slims ad came to mind when I came across a brief story from the Malta Times, titled “Fresh Graduates”, which featured this photo from Gaza.
The photo included the following text:
Palestinian women and members of Hamas security forces marching in formation during a graduation ceremony for new recruits in Gaza City, yesterday.
So, I then began imagining a new Virginia Slims ad to appeal to the unique brand of Palestinian Islamist feminism:
I mean, really, who needs such bourgeoisie women’s rights as the freedom to dress as they please, or legal protection from forced underage marriages, wife-beating and honor killings, when you can enjoy the more sublime freedom of marching in a military drill with automatic weapons, while receiving the most up to date training on how best to defeat the Zionist entity?
(Editor’s Note: In 2010 Hamas banned women from smoking water pipes, so the Virginia Slims campaign may have to be tweaked a bit before going into production so as not to run afoul of of Gaza’s “community standards”.)
Related articles
Back on Oct. 3, a Guardian report about an arson at a mosque in Israel included this headline.
In the first passage, we learn who the culprits of the arson most likely were, despite no definitive claim of responsibility:
“Arsonists torched a mosque in an Arab village in northern Israel Monday, setting off protests by residents who clashed with police. Graffiti sprayed at the site suggested Jewish radicals, suspected in other recent mosque fires, were involved.”
On Dec. 25, however, a Guardian’s story about a series of deadly terror attacks against Christians, targeting Nigerian churches on Christmas day, which resulted in dozens killed, avoided any mention of the perpetrators in both the headline and sub heading.
The above headline is even more interesting in light of the fact that the first passage in the story notes immediately that the “Christmas Day bombs” didn’t target the churches without assistance:
“A militant Islamist group [Boko Haram] has claimed responsibility for a series of co-ordinated attacks on Christmas Day services at churches in Nigeria, one of which killed at least 35 people.”
Further, a proper contextualizing of the attack would necessarily include the fact that Boko Haram is a Sunni Islamist movement, and that Sunni extremists, per the U.S. National Counter Terrorism Center’s (NCTC) website, were responsible for approximately 70% of all terrorism related deaths worldwide (9,092 out of 13,186) in 2010. (A good summary of the official U.S. report can be found here)
In contrast, Christian extremist groups were responsible for 321 terror related deaths in 2010 worldwide.
The remaining attacks were committed by secular, political, or anarchist groups.
Here’s a graph (from the NCTC) you’ll never find among the Guardian’s ubiquitous charts, graphs and “interactive” maps.
Related articles
- Are UK Archbishops leading their Christians into the Coliseum? (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian buries story of Israelis murdered by Palestinian terrorists, highlights revenge attack on mosque (cifwatch.com)
- Tunisian Islamist Cognitive Dissonance Watch: Jewish freedom edition (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s Jonathan Steele accuses Tunisian Muslims who oppose radical Islam of Islamophobia (cifwatch.com)
- CiF piece by Brian Whitaker on “why media believes worst about Iran” draws on conspiracy blog (cifwatch.com)
- What the Guardian won’t report: FBI Hate Crime Stats again disprove claims of rising Islamophobia (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian’s “democratic” Islamist leader: Kill every last Jew on earth (cifwatch.com)
On the same day the Tunisian assembly (led by a party the Guardian characterized as representing a moderate brand of Islamism) approved a new constitution explicitly banning Jews (indeed, all non-Muslims) from seeking the Tunisian Presidency, Al-Arabiya reported the following:
The story begins as follows:
“Tunisia’s moderate Islamist Ennahda party said in a statement Saturday that Jews living in the North African country were citizens with “all their rights and duties.”
Evidently, by “all rights” he meant to add: Except, of course, for the insignificant right of Jews to equally participate in the nation’s political system.
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Why is the ‘liberal’ Guardian still rooting for a reactionary antisemitic Islamist named Raed Salah?
April 10, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: Al-Aqsa Mosque, anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Comment is Free, Delegitimization, Guardian, Hadar Sela, Islamism, Jewish Conspiracy, Or Commission, Raed Salah, Terrorism | by Hadar Sela | 4 comments
The Guardian’s infatuation with Raed Salah is not new. When the story of his arrest in the UK broke last year, the paper produced a plethora of articles, all eerily similar in their support for Salah and his British patrons and in the whitewashing of who Salah is (the various articles uniformly described him as a ‘Palestinian activist’) and what he stands for.
The Guardian’s Ian Black went so far as to describe the organisation its cause celebre heads in the following anodyne terms:
Notably, the Guardian failed to report the fact that Raed Salah lost an appeal against the deportation order in October 2011.
Now however, in the wake of the recent decision by the UK immigration tribunal judge, the Guardian is back on the case, with two articles (so far) on the subject in one day. Along the way, the Guardian did not miss the opportunity to lash out once again at the CST, quoting David Miller and apparently having learned little from the last time it relied upon information provided by that known purveyor of outlandish conspiracy theories .
There are many reasons why a newspaper which likes to describe itself as both ‘Left’ and ‘liberal’ should not be trumpeting the cause of the leader of a religious ultra-nationalist movement which practices ethnic separatism, sex segregation and suppression of the rights of homosexuals, women and religious and ethnic minorities.
One of those reasons is that Raed Salah and his Northern Islamic Movement stand for everything which the liberal Left supposedly abhors. But the Guardian’s puerile ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ stance means that it is dazzled by the fact that Salah is feted in anti-Israel circles as a leading ‘activist’, and so it is prepared to sell out its once firmly held Leftist and liberal principles and avoid exposure of Salah’s real background and agenda at all costs.
In 2003 the Or Commission – appointed by the State of Israel to investigate the riots of October 2000 in which 12 Arab Israelis, one Jewish Israeli and one Palestinian were killed – published its report.
The report noted the incitement within the Arab sector which preceded the deadly riots:
The Or Commission did not recommend legal action against Raed Salah – a move which was severely criticized across the Israeli political spectrum.
Far from being the type of ‘human rights’ or ‘civil liberties’ movement as Ian Black suggested in his article quoted above, the Northern Islamic Movement is in fact the Muslim Brotherhood’s branch in Israel.
In 1997 it created controversy by attempting to build an unauthorized mosque on church-owned land outside the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth. A year later it gained control of the local council and Christian residents of the city and visitors to it are still confronted by Islamist propaganda as they approach their holy sites.
Like its sister organization Hamas – also a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood – the Northern Islamic Movement rejects the existence of Israel completely and advocates the establishment of an Islamic state run on Sharia principles in its place.
Raed Salah’s ‘activism’ must be examined by any objective observer in that context, rather than in the cherry-picking manner adopted by those who choose to present him merely as a pro-Palestinian activist. Their support of Salah and, by extension, his movement’s aims is in fact support for an aspiring non-democratic theocratic regime with in-built persecution of minorities and discrimination against numerous sectors, not least moderate Muslims.
As cited in the Or Commission report, Raed Salah is well known for his ability to incite violence, conflict and unrest either through his signature rabble-rousing speeches or by other – sometimes imaginative – methods. Here he is speaking at a rally after his participation in the Mavi Marmara flotilla, glorifying ‘martyrdom’.
Salah’s support for Hamas and its genocidal aims is not, however, confined merely to inflammatory rhetoric and boat trips. Its practical side includes the Northern Islamic Movement’s links to terror attacks.
Whilst the Northern Islamic Movement may not have provided the logistic support for these terror attacks (that apparently came from Hamas) it certainly did provide the background atmosphere to them.
As is well known, Raed Salah has spent time in prison in Israel due to his role in the transferal of funds to Hamas. That, of course, is no coincidence: Salah has been named as sitting on the board of trustees of Yusuf Qaradawi’s ‘Union of Good’, the raison d’etre of which is to provide financial support for Hamas. On the basis of that support to a terrorist organisation, the ‘Union of Good’ was outlawed by the United States and by Israel – along with its various supporting charities.
Several of those supporting charities are based in Britain and, despite repeated public pressure, continue to function openly; rubber stamped by the Charity Commission of England and Wales.
Raed Salah’s 2011 speaking tour of the UK (cut short by his arrest) was promoted by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Palestinian Forum in Britain. The advertisements show that it was also a fundraiser for ‘Human Appeal International’ which is one of the members of the ‘Union of Good’.
‘Human Appeal International’ was named in the trial of Ahmed Salatna of the Jenin Zakat Committee as one of the organisations via which funds were transferred for Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist activities.
Raed Salah’s supporters (the Guardian included) in the UK have tried very hard throughout the entire affair to confine discussion of the case to semantic wrangling over his anti-Semitic statements and A-level English Literature-style dissections of his ‘poetry’. In that, they appear to have largely succeeded.
That ‘victory’ should, however, send chills down the spines of any genuine members of the liberal Left remaining in the UK. By focusing the public and legal discussions on the various interpretations of Raed Salah’s sermons and writings, interested parties have managed to create a smoke-screen of ‘Jewish over-reaction’, with an added measure of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory-style ‘untoward Jewish influence’, adding fuel to the fire of an already intimidating atmosphere as perceived by many British Jews and non-Jews alike.
But the ins and outs of British immigration law and Salah’s so-called poetry should – in theory at least – be of far less interest to Left liberal commentators than the fact that there are groups within their own society (some with members in very high places) who laud and support a man whose beliefs and ideas are the antithesis of the values of liberty, equality and human rights which Western liberals claim to embrace.
It is possible to agree or disagree with the principle behind Salah’s banning from the UK, but there is certainly no reason for any genuine liberal to invest as much energy as the Guardian has done into trying to disguise the fact that the aim of his visit was to spout his incitement, promote his ideas of theocratic-based separatism and do a bit of round-about fundraising for a terror organisation on the side.
The Guardian’s treatment of the whole protracted Salah affair shows how meaningless a term ‘Left liberal’ has become in the ‘progressive’ circles it inhabits. But that writing was on the wall right from the beginning of the saga when a Guardian editorial on the subject informed us that “[i]f the home secretary is unwise enough to start applying her “prevent” policy to all Palestinian activists Israel has a problem with, Britain will face a backlash in the Arab world.”
And that is precisely the trouble with the Guardian’s Israel obsession: it blinds it from seeing the world – and its own little corner of it – in focus and causes it to sell out the principles to which it – and too much of the liberal Left – used to once adhere.
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