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Which anti-Israel blogs do the Guardian’s editors read? Whilst the comprehensive answer to that question remains a mystery, we may have been privy to a little insight on that subject this weekend.
On April 24th an article was published on CiF by one Mohammed Talat. All well and good, except that the very same article appeared four days previously on the virulently anti-Israel blog ‘Mondoweiss’. Different title, a few minor editorial changes, but essentially this is exactly the same piece.
Who is Mohammed Talat? According to his CiF bio, he is “an assistant professor of civil engineering at Cairo University and a UC Berkeley alumnus”. If he is the same Mohammed Talat as this one, (as appears to be the case) then he is also a member of the benign-sounding ‘March 9th Movement for Egyptian University Independence’. Hamdy Qandil, founder of the March 9th movement, is a supporter of Hamas and Hizbollah and an opponent of normalisation with Israel. Dr. Mohammed Abdul-Ghar, its leader, is also an official of the ‘National Association of Change‘ which advises Mohamed ElBaradei and the Muslim Brotherhood.
For the fortunate few who have yet to become acquainted with the ‘Mondoweiss’ blog, it describes itself thus:
Mondoweiss is a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective.
It has four principal aims:
- To publish important developments touching on Israel/Palestine, the American Jewish community and the shifting debate over US foreign policy in a timely fashion.
- To publish a diversity of voices to promote dialogue on these important issues.
- To foster the movement for greater fairness and justice for Palestinians in American foreign policy.
- To offer alternatives to pro-Zionist ideology as a basis for American Jewish identity.
Biography
This blog is maintained by Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz. Weiss is 55 and lives in New York state. Horowitz is 37 and lives in New York City.
We maintain this blog because of 9/11, Iraq, Gaza, the Nakba, the struggling people of Israel and Palestine, and our Jewish background.
So ‘progressive’ is the anti-Zionist fringe blog ‘Mondoweiss’ that it promotes BDS and its high priest Omar Barghouti, is a major advocate of the Goldstone Report and has defended Max Blumenthal, who recently threw in his lot with the Iranian government’s ‘Press TV’, and routinely advances anti-Semitic tropes about the injurious effects of Jewish power on American foreign policy.
In fact, it is precisely the sort of far Left anti-Zionist port of call that is a gift that keeps on giving to those who aspire to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel, particularly if some self-flagellating faux-kosher back-up is required.
So it would probably have been more surprising to discover that Guardian staff were not reading this blog, but the question that remains is why CiF gave no credit to ‘Mondoweiss’ for this article by Talat. Surely they can’t be worried that their reading habits would make them a laughing-stock among their own audience?
I wouldn’t recommend reading the Jewish anti-Zionist blog Mondoweiss unless you’re really prepared to roam the abyss of Jewish extreme left political pathologies – Jews who, as Anthony Julius has observed, appear to be “proud to be ashamed to be Jewish” (and here’s something I posted at Elder of Ziyon if you’re interested in a primer on the blog) – but I thought it at least worth noting the surreal “debate” going on on at the site. Here’s the conclusion of a recent post by a frequent contributor:
“We know from history that if you occupy, torture, and humiliate a people, kill their children, destroy their homes, ravage their mosques, burn their olive trees, and degrade their hopes to dust, some of them will snap. You want my condemnation? You will not have it. No one should respond to such demagogic moral blackmail. We killed those children. There are those who will warp my words. Good luck. I do not want children to die, no child deserves to die or deserves such parents or deserves to be born into such a society or such a state. However, I don’t think judgment of the Palestinians is the best way to prevent such murders. I have a better idea: war crimes trials for those most responsible. They will be easy to find – they are all over the television, and we vote for them regularly. If we are interested in stopping the killing of Jewish children and Palestinian children alike, then let’s point our fingers at those responsible for creating the conditions that make those murders almost inevitable: the endless chain of military commanders-turned-bourgeois ahusalim sitting in the suburbs of Tel-Aviv clucking at the latest barbarity spawned by the barbarities they’d rather forget. We know names, we know who to blame: Netanyahu, Livni, Peres, Bush, Obama, Clinton. How convenient, for us to blame the victims. How pathetic and cowardly. How shameful.”
No, “shameful” doesn’t begin to describe the depravity of Jews whose hatred of Israel is so intense that they’re not prepared to fiercely, and without qualification, express moral outrage towards Palestinian terrorists who would slit the throat of an infant.
H/T Just Journalism
Today’s Guardian “Palestine Papers” update included the following illustration by one of the most prolific anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic cartoonists, Carlos Latuff – depicting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as a sinister looking (gun wielding) Orthodox Jew. (The Guardian casually referred to Latuff as “a Brazilian based cartoonist.”)
As I noted previously (in a piece for the JCPA, as well as a guest post for Elder of Ziyon), Latuff is a Brazilian political “activist” and cartoonist with an impressively large portfolio of work – much of which openly express anti-Semitic themes. Some of his caricatures seem to suggest that Israel is a unique and immutable evil in the world. His work includes imagery frequently suggesting a moral equivalence between Israel and Nazi Germany – and he has explicitly acknowledged that this is indeed his political view.
Latuff’s work has been posted on various radical left websites and blogs, as well as several terrorist affiliated websites such as ‘The Islamic Front for the Iraqi Resistance’ (JAMI) magazine. Norman Finkelstein’s official website has also featured Latuff cartoons. As I noted in my Elder of Ziyon post, a blogger at the site, Mondoweiss, made use of one of Latuff’s cartoons during the flotilla incident. (Scroll down to bottom to see link to Latuff‘s cartoon)
Latuff’s notoriety includes his participation in the 2006 Iranian International Holocaust Cartoon Competition – for his cartoon comparing the Israeli West Bank security barrier with the Nazi concentration camps. Latuff placed second in the contest.
In their 2003 Annual Report, the Stephen Roth Institute compared Latuff’s cartoons of Ariel Sharon to the antisemitic caricatures of Philipp Rupprecht in Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer.
Even the Guardian’s Ian Black noted that Latuff was among those cartoonists “drawing, without inhibition, on judeophobic stereotypes in the service of the anti-globalisation movement.”
Latuff also has employed racist themes in service of his critiques of President Barack Obama.
Here is some of Latuff’s work:
The Latuff cartoon above, showing Sharon kissing Hitler, appeared on the (Washington) DC Indymedia site.
This is a revised version of an essay which I had published by Elder of Ziyon. The post was specifically about the anti-Zionist Jewish blog, Mondoweiss – and anti-Semitic tropes the site often engages in, such as the Israel = Nazi Germany narrative. But as such accusations are leveled by Jewish writers and bloggers other than Phillip Weiss’s site, I wanted to expand on my original discourse. I’m speaking of CiF contributors Tony Greenstein and Slavoj Zizek, as well as Richard Silverstein (of the Orwellian named blog, Tikkun Olam), Norman Finkelstein, UK Jewish MK Gerald Kaufman, and others. It is worth noting that such grotesque analogies – between the Jewish state (the only free and democratic state in the Middle East), and the fascist Nazi regime which murdered one out of every three Jews in the Holocaust – are leveled by non-Jewish writers at the Guardian, and expressed in CiF’s reader comment section.
Nazi anti-Semitic caricatures during and preceding the Holocaust often portrayed Jews as an octopus-like creature, or some other beast – a category of anti-Semitism known as Zoomorphism. Such depictions would appear in official Nazi publications such as Der Sturmer. These cartoons would sometimes include images of a Jewish beast wrapping its tentacles around the world, representing the malicious control they were purported to exert on international affairs – consistent with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories codified in, among other sources, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Here is one such Nazi cartoon, circa 1938–An octopus with a Star of David over its head has its tentacles encompass the world.
Nazi, Soviet, and, more recently, Arab anti-Semitic caricatures often portray Jews as spiders, cockroaches, and Octopuses – dehumanizing Jews by turning them into animals that are destructive, inhuman and evil. The cartoon below, by the notorious anti-Zionist cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, was posted on the “progressive” Jewish anti-Zionist blog, Mondoweiss recently – by a frequent Mondoweiss blogger named Seham – in reference to the Gaza flotilla incident. (Here’s the link. Scroll to bottom to see cartoon link)
This ugly caricature of the Jewish state manages to both employ Nazi-like anti-Semitic imagery of a beastly and monstrous Jewish collective while simultaneously asserting that the Jewish state has become the new Nazi Germany. (Note the Jewish Magen David on the Israeli flag is morphed into a swastika) Such insidious depictions of Israel and Israelis are mostly seen on extremist websites, and is a phenomenon known as Holocaust inversion, or Abuse of Holocaust Memory.
This is a cross-post by Lee Smith at Tablet Magazine
When the comments on the blogs of Stephen Walt, Andrew Sullivan, Philip Weiss, and Glenn Greenwald turn ugly, who should be held accountable? Plus: A Jew-baiter’s lexicon.
Last week this column [1] argued that major media organizations were mainstreaming the opinions of anti-Semitic commenters in the hopes of boosting traffic on their websites. Some of my critics mistakenly believed that I was accusing specific journalists and academics—Stephen Walt, Andrew Sullivan, Philip Weiss, and Glenn Greenwald—of being anti-Semites. Some also charged that I had smeared these writers by incorrectly holding them accountable for the hate that appears in the comments section of their blogs.
These detractors missed the point of my article, which had nothing to do with the indiscernible beliefs of individuals; rather, I was instead illustrating that these pundits, their audiences, and the major media companies hosting their blogs, are complicit in the common work of mainstreaming the kind of anti-Semitic language, ideas, and discourse that were once confined to extremist hate sites on the far right.
Let’s start with a very recent example: After I contacted Foreign Policy’s Editor-in-Chief Susan Glasser for comment before publication of last week’s column, FP.com quickly excised dozens of the most egregiously anti-Semitic comments that stuck to Walt’s posts. Perhaps they should have also vetted some of the links that Walt himself embeds for the edification of his readers. Consider this recent post [2] where Walt has inserted a link under the name Ariel Sharon, which leads to a 2002 article [3] on the Media Monitors Network website:
The name Safire, as in William Safire of the New York Times, is a name they recognize well at the State Department. He is one of the high priests of Sulzberger’s New York Times empire which has a franchise to dictate terms to the State Department. Of course, it is Safire himself who appears to be taking in dictation work these days from his old pal, Ariel Sharon. Before you read on, note that the Boston Globe is also a publication owned by Sulzberger. Is there a civil war breaking out among the Yiddish Supremacists? Or is Sulzberger trying to deflect some of the damage that is bound to come his way as a result of transforming his media empire into just another corner of the Israeli Lobby? Who cares? Let Sulzberger explain his shadow government’s antics.
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Hadar Sela
Propaganda as Reporting: Guardian’s coverage of today’s riots and border infiltrations
May 15, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: anti-Zionism, Comment is Free, Delegitimization, Mondoweiss, Nakba Day | by Adam Levick | 11 comments
Guardian reports on today’s Nakba Day inspired violence could have been written by Syrian or Gaza state TV.
By reading the headlines, viewing the photos, and reading the accompanying text (in the three stories, here, here, and here) you’d never know that Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese initiated the attacks, riots, and infiltrations along Israel’s borders and in and around Jerusalem, nor that Iran was likely the state actor who instigated the incidents.
Of course, the only difference between the Guardian and Arab state propaganda is that the former operates under the guise of respectable journalism, yet consistently reads as anti-Zionist agitprop, Mondoweiss with a more polished veneer – headlines and prose assigning maximum malice to the Jewish state, photos depicting immutable Palestinian and Arab suffering.
Yes, the Guardian’s coverage of today’s events was entirely predictable, but the repetition of such journalistic malice doesn’t make it any less odious.
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