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A guest post by Hadar Sela (this report may also be viewed on scribd by clicking here)
Hot on the heels of the ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ will come yet another event designed to continue the assault on Israel’s legitimacy – the April 15th ‘Air Flotilla 2′ (also known as ‘Welcome to Palestine’) or ‘flytilla‘ as last year’s (Hamas approved) similar event was dubbed.
Once again, the aim is to have large numbers of international “activists“ flying in to Ben Gurion airport on one day – in the words of the organisers – as part of the “challenge to Israel’s illegal siege of Palestine”.
“There is no way into Palestine other than through Israeli control points. Israel has turned Palestine into a giant prison, but prisoners have a right to receive visitors.
Welcome to Palestine 2012 will again challenge Israel’s policy of isolating the West Bank while the settler paramilitaries and army commit brutal crimes against a virtually defenceless Palestinian civilian population.”
The similarity of the methodology and rhetoric of this project to that of the Global March to Jerusalem is no coincidence; several of the organisers and endorsers are mutual to both campaigns. In fact, Mazin Qumsiyeh recently put out calls for volunteers for both projects on his blog, claiming that over 1,500 Europeans have already purchased tickets for April 15th whilst the overall target number appears to be 2,500.
Endorsers of the Air Flotilla include occasional Guardian contributor and ‘Right to Enter‘ activist Sam Bahour, Tony Benn (controversial president of the ‘Stop the War Coalition’ which was involved in the GMJ) , Noam Chomsky (a GMJ endorser), Nazareth-based former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook, ‘Free Gaza’ and ISM activist Hedy Epstein and PA Ambassador Manuel Hassassian (whose mission promoted the Global March to Jerusalem).
Also on board are Ronnie Kasrils (a GMJ endorser), Nurit Peled, John Pilger, Jean Ziegler, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb ( a GMJ endorser), Susan Abulhawa (a GMJ endorser), Ali Abunimah (whose ‘electronic Intifada’ is promoting the Air Flotilla), Mustafa Barghouti (a GMJ organizer), Abdelfattah Abu Srour of the Al Rowwad Culltural Centre (which supported the 2011 flytilla and the GMJ) and Desmond Tutu (also a GMJ endorser).
Mustafa Barghouti’s ‘Palestinian National Initiative‘ was also an endorser of the Global March to Jerusalem, as was The Siraj Centre (where Mazin Qumsiyeh is a member of the board) and the Palestine Justice Network which is currently involved in the organization of the Air Flotilla. The Palestine Justice Network solicits donations through the International Solidarity Campaign-linked ‘Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement between People’, of which Qumsiyeh is head.
In April 2011 the Palestine Justice Network launched its ‘One State Initiative’ and as can be seen from the endorsements, many of the names also appear on the list of those supporting or organising the ‘Welcome to Palestine’ campaign, as well as on the list of signatories of the Stuttgart Declaration.
In short, as was the case with the organisers of the Global March to Jerusalem, the Air Flotilla initiators are united by their rejection of the internationally-accepted route of negotiations aimed at leading to a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Their aim is an imposed ‘one-state solution’ which would result in the end of self-determination for the Jewish people.
A list of foreign organisations endorsing the Air Flotilla – predominantly from the United Kingdom – can be seen here. Among the individual endorsers is Maha Rahwanji of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign executive committee. The PSC was of course heavily involved in the organization of the Global March to Jerusalem. Something of Rahwanji‘s mindset can be understood from her Twitter timeline.
Unsurprisingly, the Iranian regime-linked ‘Islamic Human Rights Commission’ based in the UK is also promoting the ‘Welcome to Palestine’ project, as is Iran’s ‘Press TV’ – according to which “[t]his year, the Welcome to Palestine movement aims to overwhelm Israeli officials by its sheer number of members”.
Purveyor of anti-Semitic cartoons Carlos Latuff presented a gift to the campaign:
The ‘Welcome to Palestine’ campaign has no qualms about using the false – and highly charged – canard of ‘apartheid’ on its official website in order to curry support.
“Plans are underway to challenge Israeli apartheid during 2012 by having a large number of international activists land in Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport.”
The campaign’s supporting Twitter account – described as an ‘awareness campaign’ – goes even further, propagating lies and descending into anti-Semitic Nazi analogies.
The end-game of the ‘Welcome to Palestine’ Air Flotilla is, however, revealed in this Tweet:
One of the people operating the ‘Airflotilla2′ Twitter account and its online campaign in general is Gaza Strip-born Ayman Qwaider who is currently resident in Spain.
Before leaving Gaza to study abroad, Qwaider worked for the ‘European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza’ – a Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood project which is headed by UK-based Hamas operative Mohammed Sawalha. Sawalha was instrumental in the organization of both the 2010 and 2011 flotillas and was also one of the organisers of the Global March to Jerusalem.
Ayman Qwaider has written for the Palestine Telegraph which is operated by Sameh Habeeb, who is also spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza’ and connected to the Hamas-linked ‘Palestinian Return Centre‘ based in London which is proscribed by Israel. Last year Qwaider was active in the flotilla campaign on behalf of the ‘Spanish Boat to Gaza’, including giving a talk at a Spanish university.
Part of the online support campaign for the ‘Airflotilla2′ initiative includes an e-mail campaign aimed at members of Parliament.
“Palestinians resist. The British Government, however, joins with Israel to isolate the Palestinians while they are being dispossessed. The UK Government, for example, refused to support the recent successful Palestinian bid to join UNESCO in the teeth of bitter US and Israeli opposition. The UK Government has also signalled it will oppose the Palestinian bid for full membership of the UN.
When our governments endorse illegal Israeli occupation, concerned citizens need to take action.”
The main difference between the Airflotilla2 and the Global March to Jerusalem is that the former is designed to appeal primarily – though not exclusively - to European audiences, as reflected in its campaigning and publicity which includes websites and advertising in various European languages.
FRANCE : contact@bienvenuepalestine.com
UK : uk@bienvenuepalestine.com
SPAIN : pazahora1@gmail.com
ITALY : benvenutinpalestina2012@gmail.com
BELGIUM : bienvenuepalestine.wallonie.be@gmail.com / et pour Bruxelles (Brussels) : welcomepalestinebelgium@yahoo.com
GREECE : greece@welcometopalestine.info
USA: palestine2012us@gmail.com
PALESTINE : jneno@ejepal.org (school project) and info@palestinejn.org
In the Netherlands, Electronic Intifada’s Adri Nieuwhof appears to be utilising her connections within the ‘human rights’/international aid community in order to publicize the project.
Several of the ‘Airflotilla2′ organisers took part in last year’s failed flytilla including Myriam de Ly and David Dupire from Belgium and Mick Napier of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Events were held in Paris , Brussels and other European cities earlier this year to promote the campaign.
The final speaker in the video – Jaques Neno of the EJE (Les Enfants, le Jeu et l’Education) is also one of the project’s organisers, along with George N Rishmawi – co-founder of International Solidarity Movement (ISM), head of the International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC), coordinator of the Siraj Centre and a former board member of the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement between Peoples. As stated above, Airflotilla2 and GMJ organizer Mazin Qumsiyeh is connected to both the latter organisations.
Neno tells potential participants that they should expect three possible scenarios. The first is that they will get arrested. In that case, according, to him “you have won because when Israel puts you in prison it shows how it becomes more and more fascist”.
The second scenario involves the activists being prevented from boarding their flights at the point of departure, as happened in many cases in 2011, but which Neno appears to consider unlikely this year. The third scenario is that they will reach their destination.
Obviously, provocation and bad public relations for Israel are yet again the real name of the game and several factors suggest that this latest publicity stunt aimed at undermining Israel’s legitimacy should not be taken lightly.
One of these factors is the date which, although originally planned to coincide with the anniversary of the death of ISM activist Vittorio Arrigoni, is also the day after the end of the Pessach holiday when Ben Gurion airport will be particularly busy with a large volume of travelers. For example, the UK airline Jet2 has added an additional flight to its usual schedule on that day which is probably aimed at returning Pessach visitors to Manchester, but is likely to be used by ‘Airflotilla2′ activists from Scotland and the north of England.
Another factor is the unverified claim by ‘Welcome to Palestine’ organisers (Palestine Justice Network) that following the 2011 flytilla during which the majority of activists were not permitted to board their flights, “[a]s a result of legal challenges, many European airlines not only fully refunded the tickets, but also agreed not to repeat the incident.” In the event that airlines will refuse to transport the activists, demonstrations are already being planned.
The International Solidarity Movement in France is already very indignant regarding a statement put out recently by the French Foreign Ministry advising its citizens not to take part in the ‘Airflotilla2′.
The British government has similarly advised against participation in the project, but such recommendations are unlikely to make much of an impression on these activists, as can be seen by the reaction of the French organisers.
“We have no illusions about our leaders and the fact they eat in the hand of the Israeli occupation. We know how they behaved in July, and more generally how they refuse to apply international law and the principle of reciprocity, then they leave to enter France all Israelis who wish, including criminals war. They do not even defend French diplomats when they are humiliated, beaten or injured by the police or the IDF.”
“The method of intimidation will not work. Participants in the mission “Welcome to Palestine” have the right, justice and morality on their side. And they are aware of the seriousness of the situation for the Palestinians, every day more persecuted and dispossessed. They are not ashamed to go visit them. And to do head high, without lying, without going into the game of the occupant, which would wipe out Palestine and the Palestinians.
Gentlemen of the Quai d’Orsay, gentlemen of the government, history will record that you do not have much dignity.”
On the publicity front, the involvement of Ali Abunimah in this campaign means that we are likely to see a far more intense level of activity, particularly on social networks, than was the case with the Global March to Jerusalem which Abunimah and others shunned.
UPDATE, April 11th:
The full ‘Welcome to Palestine’ programme of events can be seen here. The stated aims of the project – building a school and a museum and refurbishing a kindergarten – appear to be confined to one day of activity, with the rest of the week’s visit dedicated to trips to various destinations and a seminar on the subject of “How to End the Occupation?”.
The organisation hoping to build a museum on the history of Palestinian refugees is the Al Rowwad Centre which was also involved in the organisation of the 2011 flytilla, is party to the BDS movement and was an endorser of the Global March to Jerusalem. Pictured below is one of its vehicles, bearing a logo which clearly rejects a negotiated two-state solution.
Related articles
- CiF Watch Special Report on extremists behind ‘Global March to Jerusalem’: Pt 2, Europe Chapter (cifwatch.com)
- CiF gives platform to Sarah Colborne to promote terrorist-organized ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch Special Report: Extremists & terror supporters organizing ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ (cifwatch.com)
- Global March to Jerusalem leader compares Israel to Nazis & declares their readiness for “martyrdom” (gm2j.co)
- Hizballah site promotes Holocaust-denying Global March to Jerusalem organizer (gm2j.co)
- Who’s fundraising for ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ in Canada? (gm2j.co)
- CiF Watch welcomes its first follower from Gaza! (cifwatch.com)
Written by Hadar Sela, lead researcher for the CiF Watch project, “Exposing the truth about the Global March to Jerusalem“.
Taking a post-event look at the Global March to Jerusalem, it is as important to identify what did not happen as it is to look at what did occur.
The most obvious conclusion is that the GMJ organisers failed to get the numbers of participants they declared having in advance, with only single percentage numbers of their vaunted one to two million marchers actually taking part. Despite GMJ organiser Ribhi Halloum’s feeble attempts at face-saving post-event spin, any objective observer can only conclude that the project’s organisers are clearly out of touch with majority concerns and opinion.
This was also reflected in the picture around the world with, for example, a mere 50 activists turning up for the GMJ event in Germany and 100 in Ottawa. Even in London – a major hub of anti-Israel activism and home to a significant proportion of GMJ organisers and their various organisations – the turnout to shout at an empty Israeli embassy was not particularly impressive.
Significantly too, in Deir Hanna – the site of the main Land Day march in Israel – and other locations in the Galilee, participation in the event was low, with organisers already expressing their disappointment on Israeli radio by early Friday afternoon.
With the majority of the world’s mainstream media giving the event very low profile handling, it is also clear that the organisers failed to achieve another of their main objectives: the creation of an embarrassing PR event for Israel which would result in condemnatory headlines around the globe and create an opportunity for another Goldstone-style attack on Israel’s legitimacy.
That objective was in part thwarted by the actions taken by the authorities in the countries bordering Israel to contain the event to demonstrations and avoid the potentially fatal clashes which would have resulted had they allowed the would-be infiltrators to have their way.
In Syria the only GMJ event took place in Damascus, with the Iranian regime’s Press TV reporting that “ the Syrian government prevented them from reaching the nearest point to the Palestinian land, as a result of the accident that happened last year on Nakba Day where Israeli soldiers killed around 26 demonstrators who tried to cross the borders in the action called “Yawm al Awda”.
One must also factor in to that decision the rifts which appeared early on among GMJ organisers of a pro-Iranian/Syrian regime persuasion and those loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood which is heavily represented among the Syrian opposition, as the proliferation of Hizballah flags and Assad portraits at the Damascus event reflects.
Participation in the GMJ event in Lebanon, which was confined to the Beaufort castle, was reportedly low due to the fact that the Lebanese army declined to allow participants to approach the border. Some foreign activists expressed a clear – but typical – lack of understanding of the regional dynamics at play.
Here’s a GMJ-North America supporter, #Occupy “human rights” activist, and Mondoweiss contributor, Deppen Webber.
(Note that in fact, GMJ organisers – including Webber’s patron Paul Larudee – had been cooperating with Hizbollah since the early stages of preparation.)
(Note that another – though no less unreliable – source would appear to contradict Webber’s claims.)
Here’s Kunal Majumder, senior correspondent covering GMJ as a “reporter” for the Indian political weekly, Tehelka:
The Global March to Jerusalem has undoubtedly helped shine the light of exposure on several important points, one of which is the unquestioning collaboration between so-called peace activists and human rights advocates from Western and other countries and extremist elements such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizbollah, the Iranian regime and even the Syrian Nazi Party – SSNP – which was represented at the GMJ event in Lebanon.
In addition, it is clear that the professed GMJ slogan of non-violence is merely a tactic employed by this handful of extremists in order to gain sympathy and legitimacy for their cause among Western audiences. Just as there is nothing non-violent about intending to illegally breach a sovereign state’s borders and over-run its capital, there was nothing non-violent about Friday’s riots in Bethlehem, Gaza and Kalandiya (lead, incidentally, by a professor from the Sorbonne and with approximately 8% of the rioters being foreign activists – probably members of the ISM).
Equally clear is the end-game agenda of the organisers of the Global March to Jerusalem and its supporters. Their common denominator is the rejection of a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict, the rejection of recognition of Israel’s existence and the aspiration of achieving an imposed settlement which would bring that about. The ample rhetoric we have heard over the past few weeks on such subjects as ’64 years of occupation’ and ‘liberating Jerusalem’ is clear indication of their aims.
The Global March to Jerusalem project has clarified just how little understanding this bunch of professional and semi-professional activists have of the dynamics of the Middle East as indicated by their indignant objections to the fact that various authorities and security forces acted to prevent the escalation of their provocation into a potentially serious cross-border event.
Fortunately, it has also exposed just how out of touch its mostly foreign organisers are with the aims and priorities of people who actually live in the region and how outlandish the ideas of their relatively small – if loud – cult movement are to the majority of the people they seem to have somehow persuaded themselves that they represent.
Related articles
- Guardian’s Phoebe Greenwood runs interference for Global March to Jerusalem organizers and rioters (cifwatch.com)
- CiF gives platform to Sarah Colborne to promote terrorist-organized ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ (cifwatch.com)
- Global March to Jerusalem journalist/activist Kunal Majumder’s selective reporting (gm2j.co)
- Leading Global March to Jerusalem organizers embrace Gilad Atzmon (gm2j.co)
- Fact Sheet: Global March to Jerusalem (GMJ), March 30, 2012 (cifwatch.com)
- Global March to Jerusalem organisation inside Israel (gm2j.co)
- The Global March to Jerusalem – another terrorist provocation on Israel’s borders (cifwatch.com)
- Regional organisation ahead of the Global March to Jerusalem. (gm2j.co)
- ‘Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe’ issues rallying call supporting Global March to Jerusalem (gm2j.co)
- Global March to Jerusalem violence update: & +972′s Lisa Goldman gets owned by IDF on Twitter (cifwatch.com)
A guest post by Hadar Sela, a freelance Anglo Israeli writer
Jenny Tonge (far left) with Hamas' Ismail Haniyeh (third from left)
The recent tirade by Baroness Jenny Tonge – which resulted in her removal from the Liberal Democrats Party – included one of her more recurrent themes; the so-called ‘Israel lobby’.
Tonge said that Americans would tell “the Israel lobby in the USA: enough is enough” and accounts by those present at the event report that:
“Tonge, who describes herself as an “ethnic Christian” started by telling the audience to beware of the Israel lobby because “once they have decided to go for you, they will go for you. I bear the scars”. She cited the notorious writings of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, which have been widely discredited for effectively alleging a Jewish conspiracy – a charge that the authors have strenuously denied.”
This, of course, is not a new theme for Jenny Tonge. In 2006 she opined:
“The pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the Western World, its financial grips. I think they’ve probably got a certain grip on our party”.
It is therefore interesting to note that on Baroness Tonge’s newly updated profile page on the House of Lords website she declares two overseas trips within the last few months, both paid for by the Council for European Palestinian Relations.
Visit to Cairo and Gaza, 20-25 November 2011; travel expenses and accommodation paid by Council for European Palestinian Relations (based in Brussels)
Visit to Qatar, 8-10 January 2012, for discussions with Crown Prince; cost of accommodation and travel met by Council for European/Palestine Relations (based in Brussels)
The Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR) declares itself to be an “independent non-profit and non-partisan” organization registered in Belgium (BE 0828.629.725) and with an office in London.
It appears on the Transparency Register of the Joint Secretariat of the European Parliament and European Commission (no. 60576433-83). According to that register we see that in the financial year 2010/2011 the CEPR had a total budget of 155,000 Euros, all of which came from donations, although no information is available as to the identity of the donors.
The CEPR declares on the register and on its website that:
“The CEPR is funded by individual donations from around the world in compliance with Belgian and UK legal requirements. It does not accept funds from any individuals or bodies whose objectives are inimical to the interests of peace and justice.”
So far, the CEPR perhaps sounds like any other lobbyist body, but the interesting aspects of this organization begin to come to light when one takes a look at the personalities behind it.
The Director of CEPR is Dr. Arafat Shoukri (aka Arafat Madi Mahmoud Shukri). Shoukri is also Operational Director with the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC) – a Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood affiliated organization based in London which is outlawed in Israel due to its clear links to Hamas.
Several of the PRC’s senior figures are Hamas activists who found refuge in the UK. Founded by Salman Abu Sitta in 1996, the PRC was born out of rejection of the Oslo Accords, denial of Israel’s right to exist and the agenda of ‘right of return’ for millions of Palestinian refugees to Israel, effectively annihilating the Jewish state. Its funding is not transparent.
Other PRC board members are connected to charities linked to the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Union of Good’ umbrella organization – illegal in Israel and the United States due to its fundraising activities for Hamas. Several prominent PRC activists took part in the infamous ‘Durban Conference’ in 2001.
Since 2003 the PRC has organized an annual ‘Conference of Palestinians in Europe’ which is attended by figures from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood along with representatives of their supporting organisations. Ismail Haniyeh – unable to travel to the conferences in person due to a European travel ban – has on several occasions addressed the conference by video link.
Arafat Shoukri is also chair of the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza (ECESG) which was established by the Muslim Brotherhood’s European arm – the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe (FIOE) in 2007 and shares the same London offices as the PRC. The ECESG is one of the coalition of groups which organizes the various flotillas aimed at breaking Israel’s maritime embargo on Gaza which was established in order to prevent the smuggling of weapons to Hamas. Jenny Tonge is a “supporting VIP” of the ECESG.
Here is Shoukri being interviewed in his ECESG capacity prior to the tragic 2010 flotilla:
The CEPR website is registered to ‘Save Gaza’, which was the address of the apparently now defunct ECESG website still promoted on the ECESG Facebook account.
Arafat Shoukri attended the recent ‘Conference for the Defence of Al Quds’ in Qatar, (also attended by Yusuf Qaradawi of the Muslim Brotherhood) which came to the conclusion that “the Israelis have no heritage in Al-Quds”.
Assistant to the Director at CEPR is Ramy Abdu (aka Rami Salah Ismail Abdo) who at least until 2011 was (and may still be) also the ECESG spokesman. In 2009 Abdu left his native Gaza (where he acted as spokesman for the pro-Hamas ‘Popular Committee Against the Siege’) and moved to Manchester to study at MMU. He also became an ECESG co-ordinator. Here is Abdu being interviewed in his previous role with the PCAS.
James Tuite is the Parliamentary Officer of the CEPR and as such is active at the European Parliament in Brussels and presumably in initiatives such as this.
Dimitris Bouris is the CEPR Research Assistant. Examples of his writing and research can be seen here and here.
Stuart Reigeluth is Communications Officer for the CEPR. He holds a Master’s degree in Palestinian poetry from the American University in Beirut and also writes for several outlets including the Gulf News, the Daily Star, the Palestine-Israel Journal and Electronic Intifada.
Unsurprisingly, Reigeluth has also contributed articles to the antisemitic ‘Palestine Telegraph‘ which is run by Sameh Habeeb (aka Sameh Akram Subhi Habib – also originally from Gaza) who is also connected to both the Palestinian Return Centre and the ECESG, having acted as the latter’s spokesman during its 2009 aid convoy. Jenny Tonge was patron of the Palestine Telegraph until she resigned after it posted a David Duke video.
Julian Memetaj is listed as Communications Assistant on the CEPR website. In this recent article (written together with Reigeluth) he states that “Jewish Israelis are xenophobic towards Arabs”.
Ayman Abuawwad (also Abu Awad) is not listed on the website, but is sometimes described as Information Officer in press releases and articles put out on behalf of the CEPR. He is also apparently connected to the ECESG.
Further indication of the close level of co-operation between the CEPR and the other organisations with which so many of its staff are involved can be seen in their joint projects.
In 2011 the CEPR and the PRC together took a group of Parliamentarians from Britain and Europe – lead by Sir Gerald Kaufman – to Lebanon where they met representatives of the PFLP-GC and Osama Hamdan of Hamas. (Both these organisations are proscribed terror groups in the EU). Majid al Zeer of the PRC (a known Hamas operative) and Arafat Shoukri of the CEPR were also present in the delegation.
Also in 2011 a joint CEPR/ECESG project took a group of 50 Parliamentarians to Gaza, where they met with Ismail Haniyeh among others.
Whilst it is unsurprising to say the least that Jenny Tonge would collaborate with such a thinly veiled Hamas lobby as the Council for European Palestinian Relations, some of the many other members of both Houses of Parliament who have taken part in CEPR trips might care to ask themselves exactly where the money for their travel expenses originated and whether or not their allowing themselves to be lobbied by an organisation with such clear links to a terrorist organisation their own government has proscribed is appropriate.
The European and British Parliaments – which allow the CEPR to lobby on their premises – would also be wise to verify that organisation’s claim that it “does not accept funds from any individuals or bodies whose objectives are inimical to the interests of peace and justice”.
Related articles
- Guardian’s Michael White defends Jenny Tonge’s anti-Israel fantasy, ignores O’Keefe’s Nazi analogy (cifwatch.com)
- Jenny Tonge rants about the Holocaust and idolises Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh. (cifwatch.com)
- ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ Update: Quarrels within anti-Zionist ‘Sunni-Shia/Red-Green’ Alliance? (cifwatch.com)
Like this:
A guest post by Hadar Sela
Since the publication of the two-part report on the Global March on Jerusalem scheduled for March 30th, further information and several new developments have come to light thanks to the work of some wonderful people.
Aaron took a look at the subject of the registration and hosting of the various GMJ websites and found that they share an IP address with the website of the AhlulBayt Islamic Mission – the Islamic Republic of Iran aligned Shia missionary organisation in the United Kingdom. The server hosting both the AhlulBayt site and the GMJ sites is registered to a Leicester resident named Shabbir Hassanally. Read all the details here.
Mr Hassanally appears to be quite a fan of Hizbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah. In fact he puts considerable effort into making English language sub-titles for Nasrallah’s frequent speeches which he then posts on his own blog – apparently unconcerned by the fact that Hizbollah’s military wing is proscribed by his own government and that the glorification of terrorism is a criminal offence in the UK.
Hassanally has also acted as roving reporter in Lebanon for the Palestine Telegraph – founded and edited by Sameh Habib (aka Sameh Akram Subhi Habeeb) who is also spokesman for the flotilla-organising ‘European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza’ which was set up by the Muslim Brotherhood’s European arm – the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe (FIOE) – in 2007. The Palestine Telegraph proved to be too extreme even for its former patron Jenny Tonge and it and its editor have been involved in multiple scandals.
Here is Shabbir Hassanally celebrating the 32nd anniversary of the Iranian regime last year. Note his apparent subscription to the messianic Mahdi concept and his description of Israel as “the cancer occupying our beloved Palestine“.
If UK readers are now pondering the efficacy of their government’s ‘Prevent‘ counter-terrorism policy upon which so much of their taxes have been spent, they will certainly not be reassured by the fact that Hassanally has also been given a platform at the Muslim Shia Welfare Foundation in Leicester, which is – of course – a registered charity.
A variety of interested parties are making intense efforts to bring Jerusalem to the top of the publicity agenda ahead of the planned march next month, including a conference in Qatar earlier this week (for some reason apparently attended by UN representative Robert Serry), an incendiary press release by the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual mentor Yusuf al Qaradawi and publicity on the websites of Hamas and ‘Unified Umma’.
However, it would appear that all is not rosy in the world of joint Sunni-Shia/Red-Green alliance project management.
From the Facebook account of ‘Viva Palestina Australia‘ (h/t to F.) we learn that initial enthusiasm for the GMJ project has been somewhat dampened due to apparent differences of opinion with co-ordinator Zaher al Birawi.
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Meanwhile, over at ISM California, Paul Larudee is chastising his fellow activists for not getting behind the GMJ in sufficient numbers.
Well well; it seems as though some people even within the ‘pro-Palestinian’ movements are waking up to the extremist nature of the GMJ venture and its leaders and organisers and the fact that such publicity stunts do nothing to help the Palestinian people.
About time.
Related articles
- ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ endorsed by Guardian approved ‘saxophonist’ Gilad Atzmon (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch Special Report on extremists behind ‘Global March to Jerusalem’: Pt 2, Europe Chapter (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch Special Report: Extremists & terror supporters organizing ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ (cifwatch.com)
A guest post by Hadar Sela, an Anglo-Israeli freelance writer
Introduction:
As spring approaches, so the annual season for publicity stunts aimed at undermining Israel’s legitimacy begins once more. This year several high-profile events are planned and, building on the success of last year’s thwarting of the ‘Freedom Flotilla 2′ by means of pre-emptive dissemination of information, this report (and those which will follow) aims to provide essential background about the aims and allegiances of the organisers which will be useful to those engaged in combatting the assault on Israel’s legitimacy, particularly in the media and social networks.
‘Global March to Jerusalem’:
The first large-scale event planned this year is a ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ scheduled for March 30th 2012 – Land Day. The concept behind it is to have a million people marching on Israel’s borders from all the surrounding countries – Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. The aims, according to the project’s official website, are as follows:
“The march will demand freedom for Jerusalem and its people and to put an end to the Apartheid, ethnic cleansing and Judaisation policies affecting the people, land and sanctity of Jerusalem.”
“The march will confirm that the policies and practices of the racist Zionist state of Israel against Jerusalem and its people are a crime not only against Palestinians but against all humanity.”
“The march will unite the efforts of Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and all citizens of conscience in the world to put an end to Israel’s disregard for international law through the continuing occupation of Jerusalem and the rest of Palestinian land.
We aim to make this march a turning point in the nature of the confrontation, with the occupation having to face millions of protesters and demonstrators demanding Freedom for Palestine and its capitol (sic) Jerusalem.”
Obviously Israel, like any other sovereign country, cannot permit mass infiltration of its borders, especially by people who identify with terrorist organisations and enemy nations dedicated to its destruction. The results are therefore likely to be grave and perhaps similar to the consequences of attempted infiltrations of Israel’s northern borders in June 2011. The march’s organisers are undoubtedly very much aware of those facts.
They will also be aware that the current turmoil and uncertainty throughout the Middle East means that the ability of the Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian or Lebanese governments to intervene in order to prevent such a dangerous scenario is now considerably reduced. Some idea of the mindset of the event’s organisers can be gleaned from statements made in the following e-mail exchange between two of them regarding a previous identical project. (All errors in the original text)
As I have written out in the report, the liberation of Jerusalem, of Palestine are at the core of all that we have done & will do. The point is that how do we build a movement that compells the governments of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon & Syria to let us in (which is easy) & then let us march across the borders into Palestine, challenging the Israeli army (which is difficult). Thus the idea is to keep the idea simple – We are going to pray at the Wailing Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre & the Masjid-i-Aqsa & the Qubattus Sakhra. We will not apply for visas or permissions from the Israeli’s obviously not, for reasons known to us all. But imagine a situation where we have more than a million people streaming in from four borders & israel fails to stop the human tide. Once we have broken this mental barrier, then its all over. next time we will have 5 million who will be marching in & it will ony grow from there. This is exactly the nightmare situation for Israel. How do you handle a million ordinary non-violent people who want to go back Home? – how do you handle a million non-violent people who just wish to pray in their Masjid in Jerusalem, which is under our Occupation? Thius will undermine the Israeli state, like no other strategy & then it will all begin to unravel & the Zionist edifice which is unraveeling as we speak, will soon fall. It’s a matter of time now, as we well know.
Revealingly, the following statement appears in the FAQ section of the website of the American chapter of the Global March to Jerusalem (GMJ-NA):
Q: Why is there a separate GMJ-NA organization?
A: Because of the laws governing citizens of the U.S. and Canada, legal advisers in these countries have determined that it is better for them to operate separately and not to participate in the decision-making of the international movement, but rather as an autonomous coalition. This is because some of the groups in the international coalition are subject to legal reprisals in these countries, and there is some risk that any joint decision-making might place citizens of those countries in legal jeopardy. The risk may be small, but this is an extra measure of safety for those concerned.
In other words, the leaders of GMJ-NA are very much aware of the march’s links to proscribed terrorist groups, and yet its endorsers include a rather predictable list of organisations and US and other nationals, including a UN employee and a former British MP.
Ann Wright, former United States Army colonel
Clayborne Carson, Professor & Director, Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University
David Hartsough, Co-founder of Nonviolent Peaceforce
Edward Peck, Retired US Ambassador and career US Diplomat
George Galloway, British Member of Parliament
Dr. Ghada Karmi, Co-Director, Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter
Dr. Hatem Bazian, Senior Lecturer in Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Izzet Sahin, International Affairs Secretary, IHH
Joe Meadors, Veteran and Survivor of the 1967 Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty
Lauren Booth, English broadcaster, journalist and pro-Palestinian activist
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, American rabbi in the Jewish Renewal movement
Mairead Maguire, , Nobel Peace Laureate
Marcy Winograd, Los Angeles teacher, peace activist and former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives
Medea Benjiman, Anti-war organizer and activist
Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian democracy activist and former presidential candidate
Richard Falk, Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University
Roger Leisner, Radio Free Maine
Ronnie Kasrils, South African ANC leader and cabinet minister
Samuel F. Hart, U.S. Ambassador, ret.
Susan Abulhawa, Palestinian-American author and Founder of Playgrounds for Palestine
Tariq Ali, British Pakistani military historian, novelist, journalist, filmmaker, public intellectual, political campaigner, activist, and commentator
GMJ International Advisory Committee:
Some of the GMJ endorsers also sit on its ‘International Advisory Committee’.
INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE FOR THE GMJ
Maan Bashour (Lebanon), Dr. Ribhi Halloum (Jordan), Prof Paul Larudee (USA), George Galloway (UK), Khaled Soufiyani (Morocco), M K Sawalha (UK), Saud Abu Mahfouz (Jordan), Prof. Mohsen Saleh (Lebanon), Mazin Qumsiyeh (Palestine), Dr. Ghada Karmi (UK), Sheikhul Islam (Iran), Huseiyn Oruc (Turkey), Huwaida Arraf (Palestine-USA), Abdul Ghaffar Aziz (Pakistan), Sandeep Pandey (India),
Maan Bashour is the General Co-ordinator for the Muslim Brotherhood centre in Beirut, head of the preparatory committee for the ‘right of return forum’ and General Coordinator of the National Initiative Committee to Break the Blockade of Gaza (NICBBG).
Maan Bashour
Dr Ribhi Halloum joined the PLO in 1966 and was its regional underground organizer in the UAE until 1971. He was a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council and the PNC until resigning in 1993 over opposition to the Oslo Accords. He heads the Jordanian preparatory committee for the march and according to an interview he gave in December 2011 prior to the recent GMJ conference in that country, “[t]he protest aims to move the right of return possessed by Palestinian refugees from theory to practice”
Paul Larudee is one of the founders of the ‘Free Gaza’ and ‘Free Palestine’ movements as well as the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) with which he was active during the second Intifada. He took part in the 2008 and 2010 flotillas, was deported from Israel in 2006 for trying to enter the country under a false identity and allegedly volunteered as a ‘human shield’ for Hizballah during the second Lebanon war. He was also one of the organisers of last year’s ‘flytilla’. Here he is meeting Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza in 2008 (from whom he also received an award the following year) – second from the left on the front row.
George Galloway is of course a well-known figure on the anti-Israel activism scene, his activities ranging from ‘Viva Palestina’ in its various incarnations, to working with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War Coalition and being employed by the Iranian regime’s Press TV. Galloway believes that “Hizbollah is not and has never been a terrorist organization” and that Israel is responsible for the assassination of Rafik Hariri. Here he is handing over cash to the Hamas Economy Minister at the culmination of one of his ‘Viva Palestina’ convoys.
Galloway also promoted the Global March to Jerusalem on Press TV prior to the latter being closed down by the UK authorities.
Khaled Soufiyani is a former chair of the Arab National Congress and co-ordinator of the Moroccan organization the ‘National Action Group (sometimes ‘Task Force’) for Solidarity with Palestine and Iraq’. In 2010 he called on a Moroccan Jewish advisor to the king to leave the country as a result of the former’s suggestion that the Holocaust should be part of the curriculum in Moroccan universities. He is strongly opposed to any normalization of relations between Israel and Morocco, and in particular to the establishment of the Amazigh-Israel Friendship Association, and has made several attempts to use ‘lawfare’ against Israelis visiting the country.
Khaled Soufiyani
Mohammed Kassem Sawalha is also a well-known figure on the British anti-Israel circuit and a former Hamas commander who, since his arrival in the UK in the 1990s, has been instrumental in the founding of a series of organisations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood including the Muslim Association of Britain and the British Muslim Initiative. Sawalha is involved in the organization of the various flotillas and convoys to Gaza through a variety of roles in organisations and charities linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and in collaboration with the Turkish IHH. Here he is at an IHH press conference last year (front row, far right):
Saud Abu Mahfouz is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party in Jordan, the Islamic Action Front. He was a participant in the 2010 flotilla, along with several other Muslim Brotherhood members from Jordan, the former leader of which is on record as having stated:
“We in the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan see Palestine as part of the Islamic and Arab land that must not be relinquished – on the contrary, defending it is a national and jurisprudential obligation… We see Hamas movement in Palestine as standing at the head of the project of the Arab and Islamic liberation for which the Muslim Brotherhood calls… The Muslim Brotherhood supports Hamas and every Arab resistance movement in the region that works for liberation.” (memri.org report 4265)
Mohsen Saleh is a professor at the Lebanese University in Beirut who takes a consistently pro-Iranian line, opposes the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (accusing it of being a US-engineered attempt to destabilize Lebanon and weaken the ‘resistance’ against Israel) and defends Bashar Assad’s actions against the uprising in Syria.
Mazin Qumsiyeh is a well-known Palestinian political activist. He heads the ISM-linked ‘Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement between People’ (which was involved in the organization of the 2011 ‘flytilla’), is a co-ordinator for the ‘Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements’ in Beit Sahour and was a co-founder of Al Awda (the Palestinian Right to Return Coalition) in the US. Qumseiyeh spoke at the 2010 Stuttgart conference which produced the Stuttgart Declaration – a call for opposition to a negotiated two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Ghada Karmi of Exeter University in the UK is also a signatory of the Stuttgart Declaration. A member of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) and a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Karmi has called for “the end of a Jewish state in our region”.
Sheikhul Islam is an ambiguous title in that it can be given to any high-ranking Shiite religious leader, but obviously the man concerned holds some prominence within the Iranian regime. The listing may possibly refer to Hossein Sheikh-ul-Islam; Senior Advisor to the Parliament Speaker for International Affairs of Iran.
Huseyin Oruc is a member of the board of trustees of the ‘Union of Good’ linked Turkish organization Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), its deputy chairman and heads its public relations department. He was a participant in the 2010 Mavi Marmara flotilla and was involved in the planning of the failed 2011 flotilla.
Huseyin Oruc
Huweida Arraf is of course the American-born co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) who also chairs the ‘Free Gaza’ movement which is behind the organization of the flotillas. She has taken part in several flotillas herself, including that of 2010.
Arraf is perhaps best remembered for her provision of support to Yasser Arafat in Ramallah during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 when the Israeli army sought to put an end to the campaign of suicide bombings in Israel orchestrated by Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, and for her part in the ISM’s collaboration with the terrorists who took over the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem the same year. One of the more recent publicity stunts in which Arraf took part was the so-called ‘Freedom Ride‘ in November 2011 when she, together with Mazin Qumsiyeh and four others, attempted to enter Jerusalem without permits.
Abdul Ghaffar Aziz is a member of – and spokesman for – Jamaat e Islami – the Pakistani Islamist movement which has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and was founded by Abul Ala Maududi.
Sandeep Pandey heads the National Alliance (sometimes ‘Association’) of People’s Movements in India. He was one of the organisers of the Asia to Gaza Caravan, in which he took part and reported on extensively. The convoy included a variety of Islamist and human rights organisations and received considerable en-route support from Iran, including an official reception with Ahmedinijad. Pandey is currently involved in promotion and organisation of the Asian chapter of the GMJ, describing it as an attempt to “counter the Judaisation of Jerusalem”.
GMJ International Executive Committee:
The ‘International Executive Committee’ for the Global March on Jerusalem also includes both familiar and lesser-known figures.
INTERNATIONAL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE FOR THE GMJ
Feroze Mithiborwala (India), Nabil Hallak (Lebanon), Bashir Zmaili (Jordan), Izzet Sahin (Turkey), Zaher Birawi, Kevin Ovenden (UK), Ali Mallah (Canada), George Rishmawi (Palestine), Salim Ghafouri (Iran), Shaheen Kattiparambil (India), Ramy Zurayk (Lebanon), Mustapa Mansour (Malaysia), Roohulla Rezvi (Iran), Gauhar Iqbal (India), Irman Abdurahman (Indonesia)
Feroze Mithiborwala was a co-organiser of the 2010 Asia to Gaza Convoy and is a member of Awami Bharat – an Indian political group which describes itself as being involved in an “international struggle against imperialism, Zionism, and Brahmanism”. He is also a member of the Muslim Intellectual Forum of India and the South Asian Solidarity Initiative and is the ‘Free Gaza’ national coordinator in India. Unsurprisingly for someone who relies upon ‘Israel Shamir‘ for information, Mithiborwala seems to be rather fond of conspiracy theories: the Moscow subway terror attacks were, according to him, deliberately timed to deflect attention from the BDS movement and Osama Bin Laden died in 2001. He is also of the opinion that:
..the Arab Revolution presents new possibilities & the epic 94-year-old struggle of the Palestinian people, a proud & ancient nation, which has inspired the world for generations, will finally see a new awakening & with it, a new hope, a new Intifada, the Third Intifada!!
It is only the resistance on the ground, within Palestine, across the Palestine diaspora, across the Arab nations & then across the entire world, will we finally witness the rebirth of a nation.
Feroze Mithiborwala presenting Khalid Masha'al with a gift in Damascus whilst en route with the Asian convoy in 2010
Mithiborwala meeting Mahmoud al Zahar in Gaza, 2010
Mithiborwala and other GMJ organisers at a conference of the Asian People’s Solidarity for Palestine in Karachi, 2-3 February 2012. Representatives from Palestinian organisations were also present.
Nabil Hallak is an Irish-Lebanese citizen who took part in the 2010 flotilla and acted or acts as co-ordinator for the National Committee to Break the Siege on Gaza. Here he is being welcomed upon his return to Lebanon after his deportation from Israel in the wake of the flotilla.
Nabil Hallak (top left, being carried)
Izzet Sahin is an employee of the IHH. He was deported from Israel in May 2010 after having been found working for that organization which has been banned in Israel since 2008 due to its ties to the Union of Good which channels funding to Hamas.
Izzet Sahin
Zaher Birawi is a well-known Hamas operative resident in the UK. He is connected to the Palestinian Return Centre which is banned by Israel, ‘Viva Palestina’, the Palestinian Forum of Britain and the ‘Union of Good’-linked charity ‘Education Aid for Palestinians’. Birawi’s connections will be further expanded upon in part two of this report. Here he is (far left) in Gaza along with Kevin Ovenden and Mohammed Sawalha receiving an award from Ahmad Bahar of Hamas.
Kevin Ovenden (pictured above, second from the left) was Parliamentary aide to the former British MP George Galloway. He is a former trustee of Galloway’s ‘Viva Palestina’ and very active in the organization and leadership of its various projects. He was aboard the Mavi Marmara in 2010 and has received repeated recognition for his services to Hamas. Here he is in Syria, addressing a welcoming party for one of the Viva Palestina convoys whilst standing under the flags of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party.
Ali Mallah is Vice-President of the Canadian Arab Federation which supports the removal of Hamas and Hizballah from the list of proscribed terrorist organisations and an academic boycott of Israel. He is also a leader of the Canadian Union of Public Employees and a member of the ‘Gaza Freedom March Liaison Committee’.
George Rishmawi could be either of two well-known Palestinian activists – cousins – both of whom have connections to the ISM and – like Mazin Qumseiyeh above – the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement (PCR).
Salim Ghafouri from Iran acted as spokesman for the Asia to Gaza convoy. According to him, the “war with the Zionists” is not only an “Islamic-Zionist war,” but the showdown between the “truth,” represented by “the freedom-loving people of the world,” and the “lie,” represented by Israel and its supporters. Ghafouri also appears to be involved in advancing Iranian interests in Kashmir and has represented the ‘Iranian House of Latin America’ on visits to Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Shaheen Kattiparambil was another Indian participant in the Asia to Gaza Convoy, and together with Pandey and Mithiborwala, issued this statement on behalf of of the Indian chapter of GMJ following its meeting on January 23rd 2012. All three, along with the Student Islamic Organisation of India of which Kattiparambil is a member, are endorsers of the statement by the ‘India Lifeline to Gaza’ according to which:
The Palestinian people must have the freedom to exercise their right to self-determination including their right to establish on all the territories that Israel has occupied, an independent sovereign state with Jerusalem as its capital. The structure of Zionist apartheid, based on ethno-religious discrimination that Israel has established, must be dismantled and it must grant equal rights to all its citizens, including the “Right of Return” to the Palestinians refugees.
Rami Zurayk is a Lebanese agronomist at the American University of Beirut who has taken part in ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ and is currently promoting this year’s events on Twitter, where his profile picture is of terrorist Leila Khaled, and on his blog.
Roohulla Rezvi from Iran is cited by Feroze Mithiborwala as having been instrumental (along with Salim Ghafouri) in securing Iranian support for the 2010 Asia to Gaza convoy.
Gauhar Iqbal is a functionary of the ‘Human Welfare Trust’ which is included in the social service wing of the Indian Jamat al Islami. He also took part in the Asai to Gaza Convoy and is pictured here first from the left.
Irman Abdurahman is also a graduate of the Asia to Gaza Convoy and is a member of the board of executives of the Indonesian Society for Palestine Freedom (aka the Voice of Palestine) which states on its website that “[n]ative inhabitants of historical Palestine are people that are expelled and dispossessed from their lands and houses by force. Since 100 years to date the ultra-nationalist Zionist movement with support of some colonial powers has been doing this brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” The Indonesian chapter of GMJ has a Facebook group featuring a book by Gilad Atzmon, a speech by Khamenei at the ‘Islamic Awakening and Youth’ conference and this graphic:
Part two of this report will focus on the European chapter of the Global March to Jerusalem.
Brian Whitaker has had many assignments during his nearly twenty-five year career at the Guardian, including a long stint as the paper’s Middle East editor.
So, the Guardian veteran’s image and moniker caught my eye in the comment section below CiF’s latest edition of Divine Dispatches by David Shariatmadari.
Whitaker was responding to Shariatmadari’s final bullet point about “speculation as to whether Mormons would have undue influence over the White House” (in the event of a Mitt Romney Presidency).
Here’s Whitaker’s reply:
Whitaker linked to an essay he wrote in 2005, while Middle East editor, titled “Fundamental Union“, which began thusly:
Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi is a controversial Islamic scholar who approves of wife-beating and believes in traditional family values. The Mormon church, having abandoned polygamy more than a century ago, believes in traditional families too.
With that much in common, they have joined forces to “defend the family” and fight progressive social policies at the United Nations.
Intrigued by a comparison between the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader and the Utah based Church of Latter Day Saints, to which Romney is a member, I read on.
“The Doha conference”, Whitaker informs us, “provides a striking example of growing cooperation between the Christian right (especially in the United States) and conservative Muslims.” [emphasis mine]
Further intrigued by a Guardian editor evoking the specter of a burgeoning Evangelical-Islamism Alliance – which, after all, represents something approaching apostasy at an institution which continually claims that the Christian right (and America more broadly) is immutably Islamophobic – I read further.
The debate about family values, opined Whitaker, does not “follow the usual dividing lines of international politics. The battle is between liberal secularists and conservatives…who think religion has a role in government.”
On this issue, Whitaker’s flourish concludes, “the United States now sits in the religious camp alongside the Islamic regimes: not so much a clash of civilisations, more an alliance of fundamentalisms.” [emphasis mine]
While there is, to be sure, much to criticize about the Christian right in the U.S. – such as their views on gay rights and other social issues – it takes a truly breathtaking leap to posit anything approaching a moral overlap with Islamism, particularly the brand of Islamist thought championed by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Al-Qaradawi’s Islamism (which, along with the even more extreme Salafists, garnered a strong majority of the vote in Egypt’s recent elections) doesn’t merely condemn gays, but calls for their execution.
Al-Qaradawi’s Islamism approves of female genital mutilation, and believes that women who are the victims of rape arguably should be punished for their apparent sin of tempting their innocent male attacker!
Al-Qaradawi Qaradawi also supports acts of terrorism innocent American and Israeli civilians – and issued a fatwa in 2003 specifically authorizing the use of women in suicide attacks.
Finally – and strangely absent, even in passing, anywhere in Whitaker’s nearly 2,000 word essay – there’s the issue of Al-Qaradawi’s extreme, explicit and unapologetic antisemitism.
Such Jew-hatred, which Whitaker ever so curiously omitted, includes the MB spiritual leader’s citation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in “religious deliberations”, and his incitement of violence specifically against Jews.
More recently, Al-Qaradawi’s (Mormon-style?) Islamism explicitly endorsed Hitler’s genocide against the Jews, and was quoted in a Wikileaks cable literally calling on Allah to kill every last Jew on earth.
Whatever legitimate criticisms their may be regarding Mormon religious doctrine, even a cursory view of the Church (and its leadership) would disabuse those sincerely interested in such an inquiry of any suggestion that the faith is compromised by even a hint of such extremism.
Whitaker’s bizarre, tall tale of twin, morally overlapping, fundamentalisms represents a classic Guardian polemicism: preconceived, politically convenient, and ideologically driven conclusions in desperate search of anything even resembling supporting evidence.
Related articles
- The Guardian’s “democratic” Islamist leader: Kill every last Jew on earth (cifwatch.com)
- The Perils of Self-Deception on the Root Cause of Antisemitism (cifwatch.com)
- CiF’s Rachel Shabi, Israeli democracy and the rank dishonesty of the anti-Zionist Left (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian provides free PR to Interpal, a “charity” widely known as terrorist front group (cifwatch.com)
- Wadah Kanfar promotes the progressive virtues of radical Islam at ‘Comment is Free’ (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian “Moderate Islamist” Update: Tunisian constitution bans non-Muslims from Presidency (cifwatch.com)
The following Guardian headline, in a story written by Phoebe Greenwood, truly could have been written by the Hamas minister of propaganda.
Evidently, Greenwood – the Guardian Israel correspondent who makes us long for the days of Harriet Sherwood – wasn’t being in the least facetious.
She begins, reporting from Gaza City:
Hamas has confirmed that it will shift tactics away from violent attacks on Israel as part of a rapprochement with the Palestinian Authority.
A spokesman for the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniya, told the Guardian that the Islamic party, which has controlled Gaza for the past five years, was shifting its emphasis from armed struggle to non-violent resistance.
Greenwood admits, however, there is one caveat to the new Gandhi-style peaceful resistance of the group whose founding charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to “prove” that Jews are indeed trying to take over the world.
Violence is no longer the primary option but if Israel pushes us, we reserve the right to defend ourselves with force,”
Oh, I see.
Please, Ms. Greenwood, help contextualize this for us. What contemporary Islamic resistance movement is the Hamas leadership emulating?
The announcement on Sunday does not qualify as a full repudiation of violence, but marks a step away from violent extremism by the Hamas leadership towards the more progressive Islamism espoused by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.
The “progressive Islamism” of the Muslim Brotherhood? She must be referring to the group whose spiritual advisor praised Adolf Hitler’s genocide and literally called for the murder of every last Jew on earth.
But, wait. It gets better.
Greenwood:
In a further concession to international legitimacy, the Hamas leadership confirmed on Sunday that it could entertain discussions regarding a peace agreement with Israel if the Quartet of peace broking powers agree to modify its preconditions. Hamas will accept the foundation of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders but stands firm in its refusal to acknowledge the state of Israel.
The new Hamas: Peace, yes. Israel’s existence, no.
Then, Greenwood, in one last unintentionally comical rhetorical flourish, writes:
This softened tone on the international stage is not yet evident in Haniya’s domestic rhetoric. Speaking at a rally in Kateeba Square, Gaza City, to mark the 24th anniversary of the foundation of the movement last week, the prime minister vowed to continue the “resistance”.
“The resistance and the armed struggle are the way and the strategic choice for liberating Palestinian land from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea,” he said.
Alas, it seems that Hamas’s website similarly doesn’t reflect the new, gentler more sensitive Islamist group.
And, then there’s this communique:
Martyrs:
I’m being unfair to the Guardian, you say?
Well, let’s go back in time to a Guardian report from October 9, 2010:
Fast forward to the website of the New Hamas:
Hamas propaganda photo courtesy of the Guardian.
Hamas peace offensive propaganda communique courtesy of the Guardian’s Phoebe Greenwood.
Any questions?
As I observed the last time I commented on a CiF piece by Wajahat Ali, the commentator plays the Islamophobia card so liberally that he even characterized the U.S. Government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) as an example of anti-Muslim racism.
Far from a racist witch hunt, the FBI prosecution of HLF for the “charity” group’s ties to terrorism resulted in five convictions - including “conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization (Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood), providing material support to a foreign terrorist, and conspiracy to commit money laundering”.
The case was dubbed the “largest terrorism financing prosecution in American history”.
Ali can be seen here contributing essays to the English website of the Muslim Brotherhood. One such essay included, in the “related article” section beneath an Ali piece, an essay titled “Israel is Effecting Holocaust in Gaza“.
For those unaware of the MB, you can see the group’s spiritual leader, Sheik Yousuf al-Qaradawi, in a released WikiLeaks cable, asking Allah to kill every last Jew on earth.
Undaunted, CiF again commissioned Ali to opine on American Islamophobia, in “Lowe’s pulls TV ads – and gives a Christmas gift to Target et all“, Dec. 14, on the decision by the American retail chain to pull its advertising from TLC’s reality TV show “All-American Muslim”.
While Lowe’s decision certainly seems, on the face of it, entirely unjustifiable, it’s reasonable to question why CiF would choose someone affiliated with the MB to opine on bigotry in the U.S. – especially while not revealing the author’s Islamist sympathies.
Here’s one comment left by a reader beneath the line of Ali’s commentary.
14 December 2011 1:31PM
Wajahat
I absolutely agree that it is absurd and obnoxious to withdraw advertising from All-American Muslim: a show which follows very integrated and largely non practicing Muslims in America.
A stupider or nastier decision it would be hard to find.
HOWEVER, I’m very concerned by your own politics. Here is an article you wrote in the Guardian a couple of years ago, slamming the successful prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation
The HLF trial uncovered a significant network of funding, propagandising and political fronts for Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood in the USA. Those fronts were explicitly set up for two purposes:
1. To demolish the Oslo peace initiatives; and
2. The secure Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood leadership of US Muslim community politics.
One of the most remarkable pieces of evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial was this document, entitled “On the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” :
The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers, so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
These Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood fronts included some organisations which I understand you’ve been involved with yourself.
Now look. Most people here will stand up against rabble rousing and bigotry towards Muslims. However, it really does not help to have the case against Muslim-bating made by somebody with your politics.
CiF moderator Isabella Mackie (who, for those unaware, is Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger’s daughter) was none too pleased, writing to the heterodox commenter:
A lot of off topic comments here. The article is about an American TV programme, an American TV channel, and an American family organisation. All the comments about the Muslim brotherhood etc will be removed.
Our commenter responded to Mackie’s warning:
14 December 2011 4:45PM
Response to IsabellaMackie, 14 December 2011 4:22PM
Bella
I really wouldn’t recommend deleting the comment in which I discuss the wisdom of commissioning an article, attacking anti-Muslim bigotry, written by a writer who appears to have been a Muslim Brotherhood activist, and who previously wrote an article attacking the US Government for prosecuting the Holy Land Foundation for terrorist fundraising.
Do you not remember the Dilpazier Aslam/Hizb ut Tahrir affair?
The Guardian commissioned a writer who was linked to Hizb ut Tahrir, but didn’t disclose his extreme politics. Eventually, the Guardian dismissed Mr Aslam, paid him compensation, and put up a correction.
Now look. It plainly is relevant to this article, that the person who has written it has a background in a Muslim Brotherhood group, and has previously attacked the prosecution of Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas linked terrorist fundraising.
In fact, it is highly relevant to a very important point: namely, “are people with a background in Islamist politics best placed to campaign against anti-Muslim hatred?”
My view, and that of a lot of other opponents of bigotry and discrimination, is that they hinder the fight against anti-Muslim hatred.
Shortly after this exchange, these comments were deleted, and the commenter banned.
What this commenter was pointing out, which evidently runs afoul of ‘community standards’ at CiF, is that proponents or defenders of militant Islam (a movement whose ideology is based on hate and intolerance towards Jews and all non-believers) have absolutely no moral authority when taking a stand against racism.
A genuinely liberal newspaper would understand this painfully obvious and intuitive truth.
Related articles
November 27th saw the publication on CiF of yet another promotion of ‘moderate, democratic Islamism’, this time written by Wadah Kanfar who resigned from his eight year post as director general of Al Jazeera in September – but not before collaborating with the Guardian on the Palestine Papers affair last January.
Kanfar’s Muslim Brotherhood sympathies and affiliations are well known and indeed were the cause of the resignations of numerous journalists from Al Jazeera under his directorship.
It was also Kanfar who brought the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘spiritual leader’ Sheikh Qaradawi to Al Jazeera and gave him a regular slot where he promotes his anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynistic ideologies.
The Guardian’s provision of a platform for Kanfar to extol the virtues and advantages of the work-in-progress rise of Islamists to power throughout the Middle East and North Africa is therefore akin to inviting the Master of the Hunt to write an article on how absolutely spiffing fox-hunting really is.
I’m not going to deconstruct Kanfar’s arguments here myself because as it happens, the Azure magazine recently published an excellent must-read article by Dr. Uriya Shavit – a lecturer in Islamic history and theology at Tel Aviv University – which explains at length precisely why Islamist rule is inherently incompatible with democracy.
“According to the Islamist worldview, Allah has given mankind a complete and perfect doctrine of life: Islam. Democracy and individual rights follow from and are mandated by this doctrine—and are consequently subordinate to its divine injunctions.
Since Islamists believe that the legitimacy of the political order is founded on a divine decree, they utterly reject any possibility of rebellion, whether in the name of democracy or individual rights, against other religious precepts. Hence, they would not allow a parliament to pass laws that contradicted the explicit commands of Allah, as conveyed to humanity through the Koran and the example set by the prophet. As al-Qaradawi and others have explained repeatedly, human beings cannot permit what Allah has forbidden, nor can they ban what Allah permits. For example, the Koran denounces abortion and the consumption of alcohol; consequently, a human parliament has no authority to grant them legislative sanction. Similarly, for particular offenses the Koran stipulates harsh penalties—capital punishment or amputation of a hand, for example—that no human legislator may repeal, nor may the prohibition of idol worship be overturned in the name of freedom of religion.”
…….
“Western observers therefore miss the point when they wonder whether the Muslim Brotherhood supports free elections and civil liberties. To predict the character of the regime that the Islamists will establish, if and when they are given the opportunity, only one question is relevant: Will Islamic democracy take the Koran as its highest authority, with religious scholars as its sole authorized interpreters? An answer in the affirmative—whether clear or implicit—carries within it the unmistakable seeds of theological despotism.”
……..
“The challenge facing the Arab Spring can thus be summarized as follows: Democracy without the Muslim Brotherhood is impossible, but so is democracy under its leadership. There is no doubt that the Brotherhood enjoys broad support in every Arab country that has undergone democratic revolutions or uprisings in the last year. Elections in which the movement is not allowed to participate will therefore lack popular legitimacy. Moreover, the Brotherhood’s liberal and democratic rhetoric will make it difficult for the legal establishment to disqualify the movement. The inevitable result of its electoral victory, however, will be the formation of a theocracy. It will not permit the scientific and technological revolution of which Arab societies are in such dire need. Simply put, the future of Arab democracy hangs by a thread: The Muslim Brotherhood must be permitted to run in elections, but not gain power.”
However, as we are already seeing across North Africa, the Islamists are gaining power and any hope of the emergence of true democracies from the upheaval of the ‘Arab Spring’ is fast waning.
Rather than confront that fact, the Guardian elects to sell out the real liberals in the MENA regions who risked their lives in the attempt to achieve genuine democracy and to bury its editorial head in the sands of the Islamist double-speak.
As Dr. Shavit points out:
“For democracy to strike real and lasting roots in the Arab world, the United States and its allies must free themselves of the influence of multi-cultural and post-colonial theories and determine—first for themselves, and then for others—the distinction between truly enlightened regimes and their imitators.”
The Guardian remains mired in its own long tradition of failing to do precisely that, and therefore aids and abets existing and future religious tyrannies rather than being the beacon of liberalism it claims to aspire to be.
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There are few people who even try anymore to claim that the Council on American-Islamic Relations is a legitimate Muslim “civil rights” organization. In fact, a recent poll showed that only 11% of American Muslims believe that CAIR represents their interests.
CAIR Director Nihad Awad (lower right) delivers speech under Hezbollah flag during speech in Washington, DC in 2002 (Photo from site of ADL)
The facts about the extremism, and terrorist affiliations, of the U.S. group are simply beyond dispute, and include the following:
- U.S. Federal law enforcement believes that the CAIR is the product of a Hamas-support network in the United States.
- CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror-finance trial against the Holy Land Foundation and its former officials.
- CAIR operates a Web site that makes anti-Semitic material, which includes Holocaust Denial, available for visitors interested in learning about Islam.
- In 2007, U.S. federal prosecutors described CAIR as “having conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists.”
- In 2003, CAIR’s Florida chapter invited William Baker to its annual banquet. Baker, a known right-wing extremist, warned in his book, Theft of a Nation, that Jews throughout the world “can easily become agents for specific world powers in order to create unrest and disharmony.”
Yet, Alison Flood’s “9/11 children’s colouring book angers U.S. Muslims“, Aug. 31, (in the Guardian’s Children and Teen Books section) extensively quotes CAIR officials who condemned a book written to teach children the lessons of 9/11, as “disgusting”. And, even more audaciously, given CAIR’s proven ties to Islamist terrorists, Flood quotes a CAIR official as complaining that the book “characterizes all Muslims as linked to extremism, terrorism and radicalism.”
Further, Guardian moderators also deleted comments beneath the line critical of CAIR – including those which merely pointed to reputable reports on the group’s extremist agenda.
Here, for instance, was my comment from last night:
“Just so we’re all clear, CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) has been designated as an unindicted co-conspirator by the U.S. Justice Dep’t in the terror-finance trial against the Holy Land Foundation and its former officials, and are well-understood to be affiliated with Hamas. Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/1854/doj-cairs-unindicted-co-conspirator-status-legit“
And, then:
There were also, for instance, seven consecutive deleted comments between 9:40 and 10:02.
But, beyond their biased moderation process, the larger question is why the Guardian would legitimize, and frame as progressive, a group so unquestionably compromised by proven links to terrorist movements?
There is a word generally used which aptly describes those who sanction and approve of groups who are intolerant, misogynistic, antisemitic, and support violence: At least in political terms it’s known as being Reactionary.
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Wajahat Ali
There is not , as CiF columnist Wajahat Ali contends in “Fighting the defamation of Muslim Americans“, Aug. 27, an Islamophobia network in America.
Yes, of course there exists anti-Muslim bigotry, just as there is bigotry in every nation in the world, but there is simply, despite the frequent hyperbolic insistence of CiF commentators, no actual evidence that there’s anything resembling an organized wave of Islamophobia in the U.S.
Ali begins:
“Center for American Progress Action Fund released a 138-page report, “Fear Inc: Exposing the Islamophobia Network in America“,”which for the first time reveals that more than $42m from seven foundations over the past decade have helped empower a relatively small, but interconnected group of individuals and organisations to spread anti-Muslim fear and hate in America.”
This report, which characteristically conflates criticism of radical Islam with Islamophobic bigotry, includes in this network, as those who stoke the flames of anti-Muslim bigotry, Sean Hannity, U.S., Congressman Allen West, former U.S. Congressman Newt Gingrich, Middle East Scholar Daniel Pipes, Terrorism expert Steve Emerson, and Walid Shoebat.
The report also indicts Fox News, The National Review, and the Washington Times as purveyors of anti-Muslim bigotry.
Ali continues:
”Islamophobia as the following: an exaggerated fear, hatred and hostility towards Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination and the marginalisation and exclusion of Muslims from America’s social, political and civic life.”
Of course, absent from Ali’s report is any empirical evidence indicating that bias, discrimination, or exclusion of Muslims is growing or represents a big problem in the lives of Muslims in America.
In fact, a new 40 page report by the Center For Security Policy not only debunks the claim that Muslim Americans are disproportionately victimized by religiously inspired bias crimes, but clearly demonstrates Jewish victims are, in fact, far more likely to be the target of such crimes – a report based partly on the FBI’s yearly Hate Crime Data from 2000-2010.
Further, a 2007 Pew Study about Muslims in America found the following:
“Muslim Americans generally mirror the U.S. public in education and income levels, with immigrant Muslims slightly more affluent and better educated than native-born Muslims. Twenty-four percent of all Muslims and 29 percent of immigrant Muslims have college degrees, compared to 25 percent for the U.S. general population. Forty-one percent of all Muslim Americans and 45 percent of immigrant Muslims report annual household income levels of $50,000 or higher. This compares to the national average of 44 percent. Immigrant Muslims are well represented among higher-income earners, with 19 percent claiming annual household incomes of $100,000 or higher (compared to 16 percent for the Muslim population as a whole and 17 percent for the U.S. average). This is likely due to the strong concentration of Muslims in professional, managerial, and technical fields, especially in information technology, education, medicine, law, and the corporate world.
So, in addition to the relatively low incidents of hate crimes against American Muslims, it also seems clear that such Muslims, by most objective measures, are doing quite well in the U.S. socially and economically, and enjoy religious and other democratic freedoms that many Muslims in the rest of the world are denied.
Ali, in past CiF essays, has demonstrated a similar tendency to engage in accusations of “Islamophobia” quite liberally.
Indeed, he leveled the charge of Islamophobia against the U.S. government in the context of the FBI prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for the “charity” group’s ties to terrorism – a prosecution which resulted in five convictions, which included “conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, providing material support to a foreign terrorist, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.”
Further, a little more research into the background of Wajahat Ali (who CiF benignly described as “a Muslim American of Pakistani descent, a writer and attorney, and Associate Editor of Altmuslim.com) revealed that the author holds some decidedly illiberal views about another historically oppressed minority – a record of bigotry which should put the author’s report on Islamophobia in some perspective.
Ali is a contributor to the radical anti-Zionist site, Counterpunch, where, in an essay largely commenting on Israel’s war in Gaza, he likened Israel to Apartheid in S. African, and characterized the war as an “Israeli blitzkrieg that repeatedly bombards a beleaguered Palestinian refugee population.” Ali also published, in Counterpunch, an extremely sympathetic interview with Norman Finkelstein, about “The Holocaust Industry” – a book which characterizes Israelis as “basically Nazis with beards and black hats”.
Indeed, a few searches on Ali’s own blog, Goatmilk: An intellectual playground, which is often cross posted at the English Website of the Muslim Brotherhood, demonstrates a propensity to use his “playground” for voices hostile to Jews and opposed to Israel’ existence.
On June 10, he included on his blog, as the “Essay of the week”, a cross-post of a piece by Ilan Pappe, the universally discredited radical Israeli “historian” who advocates the end of the Jewish state. Pappe, in the essay, commenting broadly about Israel in the aftermath of the May 31 Mavi Marmara incident, accused the state of practicing ethnic cleansing, and opined that “only sustained pressure by Western governments [similar to the pressure placed on S. Africa and Serbia] will drive the message home that the strategy of force and the policy of oppression are not accepted morally or politically by the world to which Israel wants to belong.”
In April of 2009, Ali posted a piece by Sasha Rabkin titled, “A Jewish American man’s defense of self-hatred” – simply exquisite example of the AsAJew recently dissected so skillfully by Geary – which characterized Zionism as an “identity centered on racism, military might, ["fascism"] and occupation,” and later characterized Jewish Zionist identity as a “Judaism devoid of soul and love and oppressing the most occupied people in the world”.
He also characterized Israel’s War of Independence as an act of “genocide” against Arabs.
Rabkin’s defense of Jewish self-hatred, which Ali endorsed, concludes with this appalling passage:
“the two main forces of the 20th century who sought to separate Jews were the Nazis and the Zionists. This is not to fully equate the two. There are obvious differences. But, both sought to single out the Jews, to show them as special and in need of segregation. They both contributed to the death of Jews. Most importantly, they both have sequestered Jewish identity in a militarized, confrontational and racist corner.
Our anti-Islamophobia crusader seems to be on a bit of a Judeophobic crusade of his own.
Who needs to demonize the Jewish state as a fascist, genocidal force – which is a moral blight on the world (and Judaism itself) – when you can get a Jew to do it for you?
More broadly, Ali’s exquisite moral hypocrisy in condemning bigotry against Muslims while promoting anti-Semitism represents another perfect illustration of the Guardian Left ideology – sensitive souls who renounce racism, real and imagined, against “the oppressed” at every opportunity, and who possess an eye for bigotry endowed with a wide and powerful lens, yet have a glaring and dangerous blind spot when it comes to Jews.
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A Guest Post by AKUS
There must have been many watching the insanity in Britain last week who were suddenly reminded of William Golding’s 1954 novel, “Lord of the Flies”, later turned into an equally disturbing film. Forget 7/7 – this was Britain’s 9/11, and nothing will ever be the same again in Britain.
The premise of “Lord of the Flies” is that a group of boys marooned on a desert island during a nuclear war become brutal savages. Comfortably middle class, they rapidly lose their civilized state and become a mob that turns on one their own, Piggy. In a world long before Facebook, Twitter, or Blackberries, the boys find a conch shell which serves the same purpose of gathering the boys together.
Consider the murdered Piggy as an allegorical figure representing today’s British society, and the book is a prophetic vision of what happened in Britain last week. Given the setting of the novel, the one aspect Golding could not foresee was the way in which British adults joined what have been labeled “feral youths” in the looting and mayhem. The mask hiding the failed policies of the last decade or two has been ripped aside, revealing the some nasty truths about British society.
Those of us who have lived with terror in Israel could feel deep sympathy for the victims – the average citizens – of nights of terror in Britain. But as the riots played out in horrific comparison with the contemporaneous peaceful demonstrations for social equality in Israel there was also grim Schadenfreude directed at Britain as a society which has become the global center of organized anti-Israeli, and all too often, anti-Semitic, activity.
The looters were quickly labeled “scum”, “criminals”, “feral youths”, and so on. We saw street interviews with shocked Britains surveying the results of years of policies that, as Melanie Phillips so brilliantly summarized in her article Goodbye to the Enlightenment, were systematically put in place to destroy (“remake”, the perpetrators would claim) British society. The result she pointed to could be the premise for Golding’s book, with the societal collapse due, not to nuclear war, but deliberate removal of every norm that over millennia was found to make societies work:
… a society that embraces mass fatherlessness is a society that is going off the edge of a cliff. There are whole areas of Britain (white as well as black) where committed fathers are a wholly unknown phenomenon; ….
And the unutterably wicked thing is that this catastrophe has been deliberately willed upon Britain by left-wing politicians, well-heeled media feminists and other middle-class ideologues who wrap their utter contempt for the poor in the mantle of ‘progressive’ non-judgmentalism, witlessly prattling about poverty and social justice and hurling execrations at anyone who suggests that lone parenthood is in general a catastrophe for children (and a disaster for women) and that the state should stop subsidising family and social breakdown and start encouraging married parenthood instead.
(By the way, when it comes to fatherless families, the USA is trending in the same direction and for many of the same reasons).
Like Lords of the Flies on Golding’s Island, feral Guardianistas went on a verbal rampage to justify the destructive philosophies they espouse. The commentary ranged from the absurd to the ridiculous. The pickings are too rich to list them all here, but three columnists stood out more than most.
Following Phillips article, Jane Clare Jones, (“a doctoral student in philosophy, specialising in feminist ethics “– who knew that ethics had genders?) dodged the real issues and instead attacked Melanie Phillips and a conservative columnist, Peter Hitchens , for good measure, for “laying the responsibility for violence perpetrated mostly by young men at the door of women”. We are to believe that Phillips was blaming the issue of fatherlessness (more of a solution, apparently, in Clare Jones’ view, than a problem) on the mothers rather than the often unknown fathers, which is simply not true.
Phillips, according to Clare Jones, is a threat to the very concept of feminism, at the heart of which, we are apparently to understand, lies the single mother. Clare Jones, indeed a “well-healed media feminist”, typifies the very destructive lunacy that Phillips protests, and the people responsible for the destruction of a society that once gave the world so much.
There was the Egyptian Mona Eltahaway, one of the Guardian’s most vicious critics of Israel, who fatuously compared Cameron to Mubarak. Yes indeed – what is next for Britain? Will Cameron’s secret police reopen the torture chambers in the Tower and imprison the Moslem Brotherhood? Verbal hysteria has rarely reached this level.
So we might truly understand the dialectical underpinnings of the riots, the Guardian’s resident Bolshevik, Seamus Milne, was called in to interpret the riots as a grand “Failure of Capitalism in Britain”.
Of course, the riots represent the failures of multiculturalism and the welfare state – the antithesis, one might justifiably claim, of “Capitalism Run Wild”. CiFWatch already noted readers’ unprecedented opposition to Seamus Milne’s lunatic article. His article drew the most vehement response we have seen on CiF – currently 2,548 readers believe that Milne simply does not “get it”.
The Guardian’s responses to the riots reveal once more, if proof were needed, that there is something seriously wrong with the way Guardianistas, and not a few Britains, view the world and their society. With respect to the Guardian, this is most evident in its constant attacks on Israel. The Guardian even makes a point of running articles written for it by spokesmen of the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah whose ethos is one of murder, misogyny, intolerant religious fanaticism and terrorism aimed at the destruction of Israel. They have clearly stated their desire to bring about a second Holocaust. I imagine the Guardian would indignantly claim that it does not support that ethos and the actions it leads to. But, in fact, by its editorial policies and actions, it does.
The Guardian supports anyone and any group dedicated to the destruction of Israel, the only country in the Middle East that comes close to actually living the values, in many cases, of a liberal society that supposedly the Guardianistas hope to achieve in Britain. If the argument is one of opposition to Israel’s use of military force to protect itself, or the occupation of the disputed territories, how hypocritical does that sound when Britain is involved, for example, bombing civilians in Tripoli day and night when it has done nothing since the Lockerbie bombing to attack Britain? If Israel responded to every terrorist attack the way Britain has operated in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, Gaza and the Palestinian areas of the West Bank would be empty wastelands.
Many noted that the riots drew attention to a previously acceptable event that illustrates the sickness at the heart of the attacks on Israel. One of the cheerleaders at a recent Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC) conference was Jody McIntyre, now dropped like a hot potato by several newspapers that previously thought it rather fun to run his nasty anti-establishment blog. When he shrieked: “we [must] set the streets of London alight” at the PSC conference he was loudly applauded. A little later the mob actually set London alight. Hopefully McIntyre will now recede into the obscurity from whence he came
It was fun when it was politically correct to aim the taunts, protests and violence and calls at Israel. However, when the call to destroy London was aimed not as a backhanded protest at Israel, or Britain’s imagined support for Israel, but at Britain itself, this did not sit well with the great British public.
The questions I would have for the papers that have dropped McIntyre’s blog, for those supporting the PSC’s 300 member groups, and especially for the Guardian, are:
“Is the obsession with every problem Israel faces not a symptom of the rot in your own society? Which society breeds the Lords of the Flies, and which creates a vibrant, society, sustaining itself in the face of real threats that supports al l that liberals and the Left should stand for? Will you realize in time that the invective, harassment, and violence aimed at the democratic, liberal, ethnically diverse yet strongly cohesive state of Israel (and at British Jews) will, inevitably, rebound onto your own society?”
The riots gave a clear answer, in my opinion, and after the riots, nothing will ever be the same in Britain. Which way it goes remains to be seen.
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Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
European conference organised by ‘Palestinian Return Centre’ launches new initiative.
May 4, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: Clare Short, Flotilla, Gaza, Guardian, Hamas, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian prisoners, Palestinian Return Centre, Palestinians in Europe conference, Terrorism | by Hadar Sela | 3 comments
Last weekend the tenth ‘Palestinians in Europe’ conference – this year sponsored by Tunisian interim president Monsef Marzouki – was held in Copenhagen. The event was co-organised by the Palestinian Forum in Denmark and the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC) of London which is a permanent organiser of the annual event.
The conference’s president was Majed al Zeer of the PRC and also of the Hamas-linked European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza (ECESG) which was set up by the Muslim Brotherhood’s European arm in 2007 and takes part in organizing the various flotillas, including the fatal one of 2010.
The Palestinian Return Centre is a Hamas-supporting organization which promotes the ‘right of return’ for Palestinian refugees and is banned in Israel due to its links with a terrorist organisation. Besides its General Director al Zeer, others of its staff are well-known for their anti-Israel activities.
PRC spokesman and chair of trustees Zaher al Birawi recently acted as spokesman for the ‘Global March to Jerusalem’. He has also functioned as spokesman for George Galloway’s ‘Viva Palestina’ convoys, is an official of the Palestinian Forum in Britain and trustee of a UK charity named ‘Education Aid for Palestinians’ which is a member of the Hamas-supporting ‘Union of Good‘.
The PRC’s operational director, Arafat Madi Shoukri, is also connected to the ECESG as well as director of the Brussels-based European parliament lobbying group called the ‘Council for European Palestinian Relations‘. Ghassan Faour – a trustee of the PRC – is also linked to the UK charity ‘Interpal’ which is a member of the ‘Union of Good’. Another PRC trustee Majdi Akeel – a known Hamas activist and also connected to ‘Interpal’– was mentioned in the Holy Land Foundation trial in the US. The PRC’s senior researcher and editor, Daoud Abdallah, is also the director of MEMO and well-known as a signatory of the Istanbul Declaration.
Speakers at the recent conference included former British MP and Minister Clare Short (also a patron of ICHAD UK and an activist with the ECESG, as well as a member of the advisory board of Res Publica) and leader of the Palestinian party ‘al Mubadara’ (aka Palestinian National Initiative) Mustafa Barghouti who was recently involved in the organization of both the ‘Global March to Jerusalem‘ and the ‘Welcome to Palestine’ flytilla.
According to a ‘Union of Good’-linked website:
“The Conference called on the Arab countries and the countries sponsoring Palestinian refugees to improve these refugees’ conditions reminding the Europeans of their historical responsibility for the Palestinian problem, and stressing on the steadfastness and great sacrifices of the Palestinians people to defend their land.
The conference’s organizers also launched an initiative in which many European Communities will take part entitled “the wall and settlements’ removal” and aiming at pressuring “Israel”.
Meanwhile, a number of participants in the conference agreed unanimously on the key issues that must be supported, most importantly opposing the Judaization of AlQuds, the Palestinian prisoners’ issue and the internal situation stating that these issues can be solved only after a Palestinian reconciliation.”
The conference launched a new PR initiative on the subject of Palestinian prisoners, claiming that:
“Thousands of Palestinian and Arab prisoners are deprived of their basic freedom and incarcerated in Israeli prisons, lacking the basic standards required in any jail. They have endured many unjust practises (sic) inflicted by the Israeli government which is violating its own commitment to International law and Charters of Human Rights. These violations are committed with total impunity and International accountability.”
Given some of the recent media coverage on the subject of the Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike, we may well assume that the campaign is already in full swing.
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