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On June 29th 2011, hours after Sheikh Raed Salah had been arrested in London, The Guardian published an article in his defence on its ‘Comment is Free’ website by Haneen Zoabi.
There are three elements to this story and despite the fact that they may appear to come from different worlds, they in fact have more in common than may first meet the eye. Their binding factor is one: Israel.
Haneen Zoabi is an Arab-Israeli (from Nazareth) member of Israel’s parliament on behalf of ‘Balad‘ – an acronym for ‘Brit Leumit Democratit’ or National Democratic Alliance. It is a secular far-Left Arab party formed in 1995 by Azmi Bishara and others as an expression of dissatisfaction with the Oslo Accords, which were supposed to bring about a two-state solution. Its members reject the concept of a Jewish State – and therefore Jewish self-determination – and seek to establish a bi-national secular one in its place to which Palestinian refugees would be given ‘the right of return’. Concurrently, it supports the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territories captured by Israel from Egypt and Jordan during the Six Day War, including part of Jerusalem.
Raed Salah is also an Arab-Israeli – head of the radical northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel (or, as they prefer to be known, the ‘Islamic Movement in ’48 Palestine’) – and a resident and former mayor of the city of Um El Fahm. The movement’s origins can be traced back to the days of the Arab revolt in Mandate Palestine in 1936, but it gathered momentum as a result of the co-operation between Haj Amin al Husseini and its parent organisation (also that of Hamas), the Muslim Brotherhood. The signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 was accepted by the movement’s more moderate southern branch –a move which created a permanent rift between it and the northern branch, which rejected the agreements. The underlying principles of the northern branch are similar to those of Hamas: the rejection of Israel’s right to exist, the establishment of an Islamic state (as part of the Caliphate) in its place and the implementation of Sharia law. It also supports the ‘right of return’ for Palestinian refugees.
In other words, despite the fact that, according to Salah’s ideology, Haneen Zoabi would no longer have the right to be a secular, uncovered, educated female Arab politician, the ‘red’ of the far Left finds common ground with the ‘green’ of the Islamist movement on one subject: the desire to eliminate the Jewish State from the map.
Salah and Zoabi have another thing in common: both were aboard the ‘Mavi Marmara’ last May when Muslim Brotherhood-linked IHH activists viciously attacked and wounded Israeli soldiers trying to prevent the ship from breaching the naval blockade on Gaza and nine of them were killed as a result. Photographs taken aboard the ship at the time yet only recently published apparently show Zoabi in the vicinity of Turkish activists armed with guns.
Here is Salah in action after the flotilla:
And where is the Guardian in all this? Well, it frequently gives a platform to anti-Zionists and in particular those of the far-Left variety, in accordance with the ideologies and activities of some of its own staff such as Seumas Milne. It also frequently acts as a voluntary platform for members of Hamas and sympathisers of that Islamist movement. It is, in other words, the place where red and green meet in order to promote their anti-Israel message and at no time was that more obvious than during the aftermath of the 2010 flotilla which was dutifully promoted by the Guardian according to red/green dictates.
Like Salah and Zoabi, the Guardian too appears to reject the option of negotiation as the preferred manner of solving the Arab-Israeli conflict; its active participation in the ‘Palestine Papers’ affair which effectively put the lid upon the Palestinian Authority’s ability to negotiate anything indicated that Farringdon Road is definitely in the Hamas camp.
So let us now examine Zoabi’s arguments in favour of Salah, as published by the Guardian. Immediately she tries to attribute the blame for Salah’s arrest to Israel and its supporters, whilst at the same time playing the ‘Islamophobia’ card. According to British statements on the subject, Salah was arrested under Section 3 of the Immigration Act of 1971 which, to the best of my knowledge,’ Israel and its supporters’ had no part in drafting. Obviously, Zoabi cannot credit the UK authorities with possessing minds of their own.
She refuses to recognise the unpleasant fact that, like many other countries, both Britain and Israel have seen a worrying rise in the popularity of various strains of the Islamist movement in recent years and that measures to limit incitement against non-Muslims, Muslim apostates, women, homosexuals and members of other ethnic groups are part and parcel of a democratic country’s responsibility towards its citizens of all stripes. Raed Salah is not the first (and will probably not be the last) Islamist (or other) hate preacher to be denied entry to or deported from the United Kingdom and that fact has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘Islamophobia’ or clandestine behind the scenes operations by a mythical ‘Zionist lobby’.
Is it surprising that the Guardian should permit Zoabi to promote such ridiculous claims on its virtual pages? Not in the least: it has frequently allowed Islamists and their supporters to sound warning bells of ‘Islamophobia’ (as opposed to the real phenomenon of anti-Muslim bigotry) on its pages as part and parcel of the campaign by British Islamists to silence debate. As for the all-powerful ‘Zionist lobby’; this, of course, is one of the favourite themes on CiF and is promoted by former Foreign Office types, Arabists and Islamists alike.
Zoabi’s falsehoods continue with the statement that:
“Because I took part in the first freedom flotilla to break the illegal and inhuman siege of Gaza, the Israeli establishment has waged a propaganda campaign against me, accusing me of “terrorism”, and demanding the withdrawal of my parliamentary immunity and citizenship. This will be difficult to implement, but it threatens my political legitimacy and defines me as a “risk”.”
Of course she conveniently forgets to mention that as a Knesset member she swore that “I pledge myself to bear allegiance to the State of Israel and faithfully to discharge my mandate in the Knesset.” Sadly for Haneen Zoabi, the right to collaborate with enemies of her country and to attempt to facilitate the increased influx of weapons from the Iranian regime she so admires into Gaza with the sole purpose of their being used to kill, injure and terrorize the civilians who pay her generous salary is not included in her job description. She also neglects to mention that the sanctions enacted against her following her flotilla escapade were at most symbolic; as she herself said in an interview with ‘electronic Intifada’ “ The three parliamentary sanctions are nothing — I mean nothing — because I can still use my civic passport”.
Zoabi then goes on to dismiss criticisms of Salah as ‘fabricated’:
“Unable to produce any legal evidence, the Israeli establishment and its supporters in Britain accuse him of antisemitism. Salah has rebutted the fabricated allegations behind these claims and instructed his lawyers to begin legal action against those repeating them.”
“It appears that the charge of antisemitism is being used as a way of suppressing criticism of Israeli policies. Since when has the struggle for equality become a form of racism? Since when have states that boast of their democratic credentials acquired the right to arrest people for their political views?”
A quick tour around Salah’s (Zoabi endorsed) ‘struggle for equality’ and ‘political views’ shows him to be a supporter of the notion that Jews were pre-warned about the 9/11 terror attacks, a condemner of America’s action against the “martyr” Osama Bin Laden and a radical homophobe. That alone would probably be enough to drastically reduce his Brownie points with the British Home Secretary but has nothing to do with Israel.
On his home turf, Salah is best known (apart from funding Hamas and having spent five months in prison for assaulting a policeman) for being a very successful inciter of violent riots. His favourite tactic is to whip up fervour by telling his listeners that Israel is attempting to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque.
“On Friday the leader of the Islamic Movement’s northern branch told followers that should Muslims have to choose between renouncing the al-Aqsa Mosque and becoming martyrs they will choose the latter.
“Should the State of Israel make us choose…we will clearly choose to be martyrs,” said Sheikh Raed Salah in the annual al-Aqsa convention in Umm al-Fahm. “We are a nation that does not give up, we will die and win; the al-Aqsa Mosque is not a matter that can be given up on, and we shall win, God willing.”
Thousands of Muslims heeded Salah’s call and made their way to Jerusalem’s Old City early Sunday. Police initially restricted access to the compound – both to tourists and visitors – as a precautionary measure, after learning that residents of east Jerusalem were urged to “come to protect the Mount.” Large police forces were deployed in the Old City as well.”
At a lecture at Haifa University in 2009 he said:
“We love life, our families, our homes and our children, but if they suggest that we give up our principles and holy sites, we would rather die and we will welcome death.”
Salah claimed that the government continued constantly to dig tunnels under the Temple Mount and the al-Aqsa Mosque, and that Netanyahu was planning to complete during his current term what he did not complete during his first one – “to dig additional tunnels under al-Aqsa and rebuild the Temple on the Temple Mount.”
The Muslim students responded by chanting, “Allahu Akbar” (God is great).”
It is, of course, the prerogative of the British Home Secretary to decide that it is not in the public interest to allow such an obvious master in the incitement of violence to have free access to the already problematic sections of radicalised youth in her society.
No amount of crying wolf by Haneen Zoabi can transform that into ‘Islamophobia’, just as Israeli opposition to the actions of those who seek to deny Jews the right to self-determination should not be categorised as racism. The Israeli public and government have nothing against Salah and Zoabi because they are Arabs or Muslims; any objections are to their (often violence-related) actions taken as part of their red/green campaign to destroy the Jewish State.
Salah, Zoabi and the Guardian obviously cannot understand the difference. That could well be because none of them have pristine reputations themselves when it comes to anti-racism, and their repeated references to a ‘pro-Israel (ie Jewish/Zionist) lobby’ influencing policy in foreign countries, both in this article and others, are just the tip of that particular iceberg.
Of course the rich irony of it is that of all the countries in the world, Israel and the United Kingdom are members of quite a small but select club of those which would allow people such as Zoabi and Salah such a free rein to disseminate their lies and propaganda, and that especially excludes the types of country which members of the red/green alliance revere and would emulate if their wishes concerning the end of the Jewish State ever came true.
Related articles
- Conal Urquhart quotes Ben White as a source in Guardian’s second whitewash of anti-Semitic preacher (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian’s bias in covering Sheikh Raed Salah (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian and Independent coverage of second flotilla omits key facts (cifwatch.com)
- Azzam Tamimi’s big ‘Arab Spring’ lie. (cifwatch.com)
- The tangled web they weave – the eminence noir behind the “Freedom Flotilla 2″ (cifwatch.com)
- ‘Freedom Flotilla 2′ – Update 4 – ‘Brothers’ in Arms (cifwatch.com)
Since yesterday, when the IDF announced that it has information regarding the intent of some of the flotilla passengers to cause physical harm to Israeli soldiers trying to board their boats, the flotilla organisers, their in-house journalists and their groupies around the world have been frantically giving interviews, writing articles and Tweeting themselves dizzy trying to dismiss the announcement.
One of those is Dror Feiler, who gave an interview to Ynet in his capacity as flotilla organiser. Of course Feiler is far more than just that; he is head of the Swedish branch of ‘Free Gaza’, chair of the Swedish ‘Jews for Israeli-Palestinian Peace’ and chair of ‘European Jews for a Just Peace’ which organised a mini-flotilla of its own last year. Not only did he take part in the May 2010 flotilla, but he was also a guest of honour at the rally organised by the IHH in December 2010 to mark the ‘homecoming of the ‘Mavi Marmara’. Others present included the IHH president Bülent Yildirim, fugitive Hamas commander and member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ECESG Muhammed Sawalha and the ECESG’s co-ordinator Mazen Kahil (sometimes spelt Kahel).
Here is Feiler making his speech at that rally, in which he compared Israeli leaders to Slobodan Milosevic.
For some reason, Feiler the ‘peace activist’ failed to do anything about the cries of ‘death to Israel’ or the giving out of buttons with the words ‘ Damn Israel’ by the organizers of the rally at which he agreed to speak. Neither is there any record of his objecting when the IHH president Bulent Yildirim stated in his speech that his organization would struggle against “the filth that is Israel”, called for “release from the burden that Israel puts on the back of the Middle East” or criticized the leaders of the Arab countries who, he said, “if they wanted to, could wipe Zionism off the face of the earth”.
It is, therefore, painfully obvious that Feiler’s definitions of violence and terrorism are not the standard ones adopted by most ordinary people, but that was evident back in 2004 when he set up an ‘art installation’ in Stockholm glorifying the female suicide bomber who murdered 21 people at a restaurant in Haifa.
So obviously we need to have bucket-loads of salt at the ready when Dror Feiler assures us via the Israeli press that:
“The activists are undergoing training for passive resistance. They all signed a non-violence paper and pledged not to kick, hit, curse, throw objects or jump overboard. We know our weapon is a non-violent struggle. If we use actual weapons, we’ll lose.”
We particularly need to take note of the cunning escape clause in his next sentence:
“We won’t respond with violence if there is no violence”
That, of course, is precisely how Feiler and his fellow Hamas-sympathizers tried to explain away the violent attacks on Israeli soldiers on the previous ‘Freedom Flotilla’ jaunt they organized – by making false claims that they were attacked first.
If one needed any further evidence as to Dror Feiler’s warped concepts of truth, he provides it further on in the interview.
“Obviously I care about the Palestinians, but not just them. They house the greatest concentration camp in the world, but I’m also worried about Israeli residents – a wall is being put around them and that also is a form of prison.”
“As long as there are no equal rights for all the residents there will be war and hate and both peoples will suffer. My mother lives in a kibbutz near Tulkarem and there’s a wall in front of her. Is that a way to live?”
Feiler’s mother,, lives on Kibbutz Yad Hanna – the only communist kibbutz in Israel and one which has the reputation of being the most extreme hard Left community in the country.
Dror Feiler’s family moved to Yad Hanna from Tel Aviv in 1967 and he lived there until he left Israel just days before the Yom Kippur war. Yad Hanna is indeed very close to the anti-terrorist fence built as a result of the infiltration of hundreds of terrorists and suicide bombers into Israel during the years of the second Intifada. Whilst Feiler enjoyed Scandinavian tranquility during those years, Israeli citizens begged their government to do something to protect them from the endless waves of suicide bombers. The result was the fence which Feiler has the luxury of never having needed in order to be able to send his children to school in the mornings with peace of mind.
Just nineteen kilometers north of Yad Hanna lies another kibbutz called Metzer which was always at the more doveish end of the political spectrum. Metzer lies inside the ‘green line’ and is very close to several Arab villages with which its residents always enjoyed excellent relations, including a joint football team with one of them. When the people of Metzer discovered that the anti-terrorist fence was set to be built on land belonging to one of the nearby Arab villages, they petitioned the Israeli government with a request to give up some of their own land instead.
On November 10th 2002, Metzer resident and single mother Revital Ohiyun had just put her two sons Matan, aged 5, and Noam, aged 4, to bed when a Palestinian gunman fired two shots at her front door, entered the house and burst into the boys’ bedroom. Revital tried to shield her sons with her body. The terrorist shot all three of them dead and then proceeded to kill two other people
Noam and Matan Ohiyoun z”l
The Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade – a Fatah branch – claimed responsibility for the operation. Hamas praised the murders, calling them “a legitimate resistance operation” and described Metzer as a “settlement that was built on Arab land usurped by the Zionist enemy in 1948″.
That is the same Hamas which Dror Feiler and his fellow flotilla passengers are now aiding and enabling. It is the same Hamas which has operatives and sympathizers within the ranks of the flotilla’s organizers and posing as ‘human rights activists’ on its ships. Its self-stated aim, then and now, is to annihilate Jewish ‘usurpers’ living on so-called ‘Arab land’. If Feiler and his ‘progressive’ friends have their way and manage to breach the naval blockade, that task will become much easier with the aid of unlimited amounts of lethal weapons provided by Iran.
Dror Feiler, his Islamist colleagues and the flotilla’s sympathizers have lied repeatedly about the circumstances surrounding the violent events aboard the Mavi Marmara in the flotilla they organized a year ago. They lie about their connections to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, about the situation in Gaza, the legality of the naval blockade and the purpose of their mission. In fact there is very little they do not lie about, and so there is no particular reason we should believe that they have had a sudden attack of conscience and truthfulness when they tell us that they pledge non-violence this time around.
Related articles
- ‘Freedom Flotilla 2′ – Update 4 – ‘Brothers’ in Arms (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian and Independent coverage of second flotilla omits key facts (cifwatch.com)
- Defending Israel from next delegitimization assault: Background on “Freedom Flotilla 2″ (cifwatch.com)
Like this:
The IDF is well-versed in maritime and other law. Israel knows that it must apply its blockade unequivocally across the board, to all maritime traffic regardless of where it is from, if it is not to have an Iranian-armed next-door neighbour in Hamas. Hamas’ Charter sets out what it wants to be able to do to Israel and Israel cannot let that happen. This means that no matter how many boats attempt to run the blockade, however misplaced their righteous indignation when they are collared and arrested and sent home or banned for ten years from Israel; however violently they resist being boarded, Israel cannot afford to let them through, and not only because the first part of the Turkel Commission’s report of the enquiry by the UN into the last flotilla has ruled that the blockade of Gaza is legal.
Nevertheless in spite of warnings from the Israeli and US governments that participation in the “Freedom Flotilla 2″ would constitute an illegal act, boatloads of useful idiots for Islamism and more than a few from the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) will try to descend upon Gaza in the coming days from various countries.
Many have at least one thing in common – ignorance, wilful or genuine, of the true motives behind the over-publicised attempt to break the blockade of Gaza. Others hate Jews but would have us believe that their animus is directed against the “Zionist entity.”
Some, however, are not so easily fooled, or blind to the obvious even though they may support the flotilla. This from the Radio Nederlands webpage shows us how the scales fell from the eyes of this reporter and several others as they all jumped ship. Note in particular:
“.. Things started going wrong from the very beginning. During our first meeting on the Greek island of Corfu, we received the usual latest updates, and then one of the organisers informed us that one of the Dutch journalists had leaked secret information to the most popular Dutch daily about the mission. She was furious: No one is as open as the Free Gaza Foundation, she proclaimed indignantly.
“But I have worked as a journalist for the past 25 years, and never have I experienced such a closed organisation…”
And
“… After this welcoming message, she explained the ground rules to us. There were many, many non-negotiables. “If you don’t accept this, you can’t come along.” I wanted to make a video report, filming the two days of obligatory training sessions to convey a sense of how the activists were preparing for the mission. But the organisation declared numerous sessions off-limits. I and the other Dutch journalists present explained that we needed this footage to do our work. But she wouldn’t have it. “I have worked with CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC, and no one has been as demanding as you Dutch reporters.”
“Eventually there was a hand count and the activists voted us out of those sessions. We journalists all felt that a schism had been created for no reason. We also began to lose faith and trust in the organisation, both essential ingredients when undertaking such a risky trip….
And also:
Motivation.
“I expressed an interest in joining the mission earlier this year when I heard that the Dutch were going to send their own vessel to Gaza for the first time. There would be over 30 participants, including prominent members of Dutch society. An Italian delegation with 20 people would also take part.
“I then attended meeting after meeting in various cities in Holland. I had to be screened because – I was told – there were so many people wanting to travel to Gaza. When the organisers called to say I had passed the screening and been chosen as one of the select group of people who would set sail, I felt obliged to express my joy.”
Deception.
“Now, back in the Netherlands, over three months later, I feel deceived. There never was a “select group”. There were no prominent Dutch figures interested in joining Freedom Flotilla2. Instead of 32 people from the Netherlands, the organisation managed to assemble just eight activists and four journalists. Yesterday [Monday], two more journalists decided to jump ship before the boat even left the port of Corfu.
“Since day one, journalists, including myself, asked questions about the Dutch organisation and the boat, for example about the funding. Even simple questions about the ship’s power supply for me to hook up my satellite transmitter. The answer was consistently: “I’ll get back to you about that” or “we don’t know”. I’m still waiting for answers…..”
Note also the persistence of the flotilla members’ delusions in spite of this journalist’s sensible advice. If his account is at all representative of the members’ experiences, it seems that this flotilla is the archetypal camel which started out as a horse but was designed by a committee.
Delve a little deeper than he did, however, and you come to the real motives behind this fun-loving, “peaceful” jaunt. The flotilla is organised by none other than Muhammad Sawalha, from the safety of the UK (the government of which allows him a free hand to do so whilst decrying the Islamist terrorism his organisation supports). Sawalha is the excessively litigious representative of the Ikhwan there.
Sawalha’s influence is great and stretches far. He has been allowed to get away with most of his activities because the strong suit of the Ikhwan and of other Islamist bodies in the UK is to despise western democracy on the one hand whilst using its laws to try to stifle debate about or criticism of their behaviour on the other (see AKUS’ article and also here, and here). As AKUS has said Muhammad Sawalha’s spiteful yet successful machinations behind the Spectator’s ignominious appeasement of his particularly repulsive form of Ikhwan bullying, would not be tolerated in the USA. However, the Ikhwan has the measure of the spinelessness of successive UK governments whose over-eager attempts to engage with Islamist extremists has blinded them to Islamist’s real agenda and has set a woeful precedent for more such goings on. The most polite explanation of the UK’s behaviour is that it cannot realise that it is sending mixed messages to Islamists, but this monumental oversight (if allowing an avowedly antisemitic Islamist into the UK after having issued an exclusion order against him only the previous week can be called a mere oversight) almost beggars belief!
Given that the “Freedom Flotilla 2″ is organised by Sawalha from the safe haven of the UK (the same Ikhwan who, remember, are brothers of Hamas) and is probably carrying Ikhwan members, can we really expect them to behave peacefully and respond peacefully to Israel’s demands to be allowed to board and to be towed into Ashdod? Hardly. Even the Guardian’s soul mate in Israel, Ha’aretz, ran a story which cast doubt on that. It matters little whether they are carrying letters, balloons, hearing aids, or tons of bubble gum – it is important to the Ikhwan that they break the blockade for the reasons I have set out above, and particularly in view of the following:
In January 3 2002, the Israeli Navy and Air Force seized the Karine-A, purchased by the Palestinian Authority and loaded with 50 tons of weaponry supplied by Iran and Hizb’allah, which it planned to transfer to the Palestinian Naval Police force on Gaza beach near El Arish. According to the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
“…The shipment included both 122 mm and 107 mm Katyusha rockets, which have ranges of 20 and 8 kilometers respectively. It also contained 80 mm. and 120 mm. mortar shells, various types of anti-tank missiles, anti-tank mines, sniper rifles, Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition. From Gaza, the 122 mm. Katyushas could have threatened Ashkelon and other coastal cities; while from the West Bank, Ben-Gurion International Airport and several major Israeli cities would have been within their range….”
Also on board was equipment which could have facilitated seaborne attacks from Gaza against coastal cities in Israel.
On March 15 2011, Israeli Navy commandos seized a cargo ship, the German-owned “Victoria”, in the Mediterranean, while it was en route to Alexandria, from whence the Iranian arms and ammunition it was carrying would be smuggled into Gaza via tunnels from Egypt. Iran, of course, denied it had supplied the arms.
Arms and ammunition, almost certainly from Iran, continue to be smuggled into Gaza via tunnels from Egypt where the ships that transport them dock.
It should be evident that this apparently benign bunch of useful idiots is mere window dressing for the Ikhwan’s attempt to undermine the legality of the blockade. If they are allowed to break the blockade then Israel will not be able to apply it legally against the boatloads of arms and ammunition which will inevitably be sent by sea to Gaza from Iran in future.
Recommended Links:
- ‘Freedom Flotilla 2′ Publicity Stunt, Update 3: abusing the concept of ‘non-violence’ (cifwatch.com)
- Journalists on board Gaza-bound flotilla will be active participants in illegal act (cifwatch.com)
- ‘Freedom Flotilla 2′ – Staying Pointless. (cifwatch.com)
- Flotilla ‘Publicity Stunt’ Update, 2 (cifwatch.com)
- Flotilla Publicity Stunt Update (cifwatch.com)
- ‘Freedom Flotilla 2′ – Update 4 – ‘Brothers’ in Arms (cifwatch.com)
- Should the British Spectator Bow to Lawfare? (cifwatch.com)
- Hamas Leader in the UK Identified as Gaza Flotilla Coordinator (The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report)
H/T Harry’s Place
As Israelinurse noted previously, Amnesty International is hosting an event on May 23 entitled “Complicity in Oppression: Does the Media Aid Israel?” which is being co-organized by the openly Islamist group, MEMO.
Per Israelinurse:
Daoud Abdullah, who is the director of MEMO as well as deputy secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and a senior researcher for the Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Palestinian Return Centre, has two major claims to fame. The first is his lead of the MCB’s boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK. The second is his signing of the Istanbul Declaration which potentially endorsed terrorism against British service personnel.
Senior editor of MEMO is Ibrahim Hewitt, who also heads ‘Interpal’ – the charity which has been the subject of three investigations by the Charity Commission and named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial in the United States, as well as having been banned in Israel because of its Hamas connections.
That Amnesty would even consider hosting an event organized by such extremists is highly disturbing and, as with their alliance with Moazzam Begg, a supporter of the Taliban, demonstrates how far the once respected international human rights group has fallen.
We ask that you consider signing the following petition asking Amnesty to cancel the event.
http://www.petitiononline.co.uk/petition/tell-amnesty-no-to-the-memo-event/2829
Related articles
In less than a week we have seen two Guardian editorials published hailing the recent Hamas-Fatah reconciliation as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Clearly, this represents the monochrome Guardian view of this development; a view which has no room for anything other than an almost religious acceptance of the merger and does not even attempt to discuss alternative views or potential pitfalls.
On April 29th as initial news of the Hamas-Fatah pact emerged, a nameless editor insisted that “tectonic plates start to shift“. The really interesting aspect of this editorial was the extent to which it aimed to justify the Guardian’s own positions on the subject of the Middle East. We were told that the Hamas-Fatah agreement is a result of the ‘Arab Spring’ which the Guardian has been extremely busy promoting over these last few months.
Firstly, it was claimed that the publication of the ‘Palestine Papers’ – of course courtesy of the Guardian itself along with its leak-buddy Al Jazeera – had been instrumental in weakening the Palestinian Authority to such an extent that it had no choice but to do a deal with Hamas. The second factor cited was the fall of Mubarak in Egypt and the third, Abbas’ disappointment with the US over its recent veto of a proposed UN motion.
Some of this may be true; certainly the deliberate misrepresentation of the ‘Palestine Papers’ by the Guardian and Al Jazeera as a ‘sell out’ of the ‘Palestinian cause’ on the part of the PA did plenty of damage (almost certainly pre-planned, deliberate and co-ordinated) to the ability of Mahmoud Abbas to negotiate and compromise, and even called the continued existence of the PA into question.
That, of course, suited Hamas and the other factions which reject negotiations very well indeed and a further clue to just how close the Guardian sails to Muslim Brotherhood ideology can be seen in the statement that “a future environment composed of free Egyptians, Jordanians and even possibly Syrians could well fashion Israel’s borders”.
As any informed observer of the regional events is aware, the Muslim Brotherhood appears to be set to make considerable headway in the elections to be held in Egypt in September. If that turns out to be the case, Egyptians will regrettably still be far from free. In Jordan the main opposition to the government is also instigated by the Muslim Brotherhood and that movement is also active in the uprisings in Syria.
In other words, when the Guardian editor says ‘free’, he does not use that word in the context in which the majority of readers would understand it. For him, ‘free’ means ruled according to sexist, homophobic and racist Islamist principles which just happen to align with the political ideologies to which he subscribes.
In the second editorial of May 5th, we see the (same?) editor trying to persuade us that the Hamas-Fatah agreement has the “capacity to change the scenery” in the Middle East. Predictably, the editorial blames Israel alone for the failure of peace negotiations, totally ignoring the Palestinian refusal to come to the negotiating table despite a plethora of confidence-building measures, concessions and a 10 month building freeze. Equally predictably, the editorial tries to raise the false flag of “territory” and “settlements” as the “core” issues of the conflict, blithely dismissing the subject of Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
Continuing down the standard Guardian route whereby Palestinians can do no wrong (unless they try to negotiate with Israel), this editorial then goes on to invert the facts completely by pretending that Abbas was never offered a realistic treaty.
“Had Mahmoud Abbas been given a serious and imminent possibility of signing an agreement that established a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in Jerusalem, and one in which the Palestinian right of return had not been erased unilaterally from the reckoning, Mr Netanyahu might have had a case when he accused his counterpart of walking away from peace.”
Apart from the fact that Mahmoud Abbas was offered precisely such an agreement in 2008 by Ehud Olmert, as the whole world – despite the Guardian’s efforts – knows, what is really hilarious about this statement is that not only was it just a few weeks ago that the Guardian was chiding Abbas and his team for negotiating that very agreement, but the Hamas-Fatah merger which the Guardian is now so earnestly promoting will, by Hamas’ own declaration, put the lid on any chance of further negotiations taking place.
Both of these editorials are so off the wall in that they basically parrot Hamas propaganda (just without the signature medieval-style rhetoric) that one cannot but suspect that they were penned by Seumas Milne, or at least by someone who has spent far too much time with him in an Islington wine-bar over a bottle of organic Chardonnay.
And if one wonders how a once respected liberal newspaper reached such bizarre depths, it may be worth taking into account that in addition to the Guardian’s long history of providing a platform for various Hamas members and sympathisers, members of its staff have also met with them annually at the Al Jazeera Forum in Doha for at least the past three consecutive years.
At this year’s conference in mid-March a session was held entitled “Palestinian National Strategy in the New Middle East” with the speakers CiF contributors Karma Nablusi and Osama Hamdan of Hamas, Mustafa Barghouti, Mahdi Abdul Hadi and Robert Malley who, interestingly, takes up many of the same themes as employed in these two Guardian editorials in his recent commentary on Palestinian unity.
Live blogging of the discussion gives an idea of the prevailing mood within the rejectionist camp which preceded and possibly contributed to the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation.
(All typos in the original)
Karma Nablusi: In every palestinian gathering, under occupation, in the homeland the same question is being asked… “Is this not our moment too?” but how do we get over teh internal divisions and the repression which has kept us divided and unable to unify?
Karma Nablusi: Make no mistake, the one thing we need is all our sectors at this moment. No one can lead but the people themselves.
Osamah Hamdan: The PLO regime has failed, the revolutions which have taken place in the region, we need to be positively careful since they have not succeeded yet but are on the right track. We have to wait for these people to reach their demands.
Osamah Hamdan: We have to go directly to our project which is the ending of the occupation , the liberation of the Palestinian land and then the Palestinian people can decide how to govern themselves.
Osamah Hamdan: The Palestine Papers are over now, we should move over to a new sqaure and talk about National Unity for the Palestinian people, wherever they are.
Osamah Hamdan: We want an initiative coming from Palestinian Will… we have started a discussion with the various Palestinian factions to bring a national consensus of leadership which will be accountable to the Palestinian people., it’s called the Palestinian National Project and is about Liberation and Return.
Osamah Hamdan: The Palestinian people who launched the intifadah in 2000 is capable now to develop its tool and political identity to achieve the goals of this project.
Mahdi Abdulhadi: We were at the centre of it with the Intifadah, and now we are at the centre of this movement. We need ot move up to the level of revolution or regress and move back. The Palestinian issue is nothing new, there are too many divisions internally.
Mustafa Barghouti: The Youth of Palestine want Freedom.We need 4 things 1) Resistance – we need all forms of resistance, particularly the popular palestinian resistance. We need to stop buying Israeli products. Third Intifada is what we need. The Arab revolutions have highlighted the strength of popular revolution
Mustafa Barghouti: 2) we need to awaken Popular Arab Revolution and co-operation to work with the Palestinian people to stop buying Israeli Products and boycotting Israeli products.
Mustafa Barghouti: 3) We need to heed the call to end Palestinian Division and Arab Division. This means regaining the role of the people. We have more than 5 million people in the diaspora, we have to bring them back to the womb of the country. We need a unified national strategy through an election. Al the parties have to review their positions, some political leaders must now open the doors to change for the Palestinian people. We don’t need patchwork, we need real change.
Rob Malley: Culture, – A movement that is divided, cannot prevail. Fatah is based on negotiation, Hamas is based on Fighting and right now Fatah is not negotiating and Hamas is not fighting!
Rob Malley: Those who have risen up in the revolutions were united. This is something that needs to be taken into account by the Palestinians.
Azam Tamimi: WE have to have a revolution against the Palestinian Authority as we have seen in Tunisia and Egypt. The PA was imposed on the Palestinians and they didn’t want one!
Participant: I believe the door is open and we don’t need any more discussion, we need to topple PA and really push the liberation. We also need to fight the settlers. They need to withdraw from the South of Gaza and of Lebanon.
Mustafa Barghouti: Nobody is negotiating at the moment so consequently there is nothing left except we built a national struggle which is organised and destroy the occupation
Ehab Bessaiso: We cannot when talking about the problem of resistance, we need one unifying base for resistance but we need to define what resistance is… We have apolitical demands. If we all agree that resistance is the right way with the option of dismantling the PA then we should not have an elitist conversation and get on with it.
It is more than apparent that the Hamas-Fatah merger needs to be looked at not only from the point of view of the Fatah weaknesses which undoubtedly contributed to its creation, as these two editorials do, but also from the aspect of the Hamas (and other rejectionist groups) strategy behind it. On that subject the Guardian is less keen to elaborate, but what is chillingly clear is that the way the Guardian is championing is directly opposed to negotiation, compromise and peace.
How do you characterize a revolutionary Islamist, antisemitic and genocide-oriented, anti-Western, and anti-Christian organization?
What political orientation do you assign to a movement who calls for the Jews to be wiped out; endorses a jihad against America; and works to bring to power a totalitarian, theocratic state that would torture or murder infidels?
Well, of course, it depends on which publication you’re writing for.
If you’re writing for the Guardian, you refer to such a dangerous, intolerant, anti-democratic movement benignly as “an influential conservative” group.
In an utterly surreal story (Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Says Bin-Laden should have been tried, Guardian, May 3) – in which Martin Chulov reports the Muslim Brotherhood’s concern that the civil liberties of Osama Bin Laden weren’t respected, without observing the almost comical hypocrisy of the radical Islamist group’s sudden fondness for progressive notions of due process – the Muslim Brotherhood is referred to twice as “conservative” and as “the inspiration for mainstream political Islamists.”
The evidence pertaining to the the Muslim Brotherhood’s extremism is bountiful, and it is simply incomprehensible how the Guardian, and others in the mainstream media, can continue to characterize the movement as anything approaching “moderate”.
Clips of MB leaders espousing views that are not quite “mainstream” or “conservative” are all over YouTube, but I’ll leave you with this one, in which the group’s spiritual leader, Yusuf al Qaradawi, characterizes Hitler’s slaughter of millions of Jews as divine punishment for their sins.
I don’t know about you, but I’m becoming a little weary of reading about the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ on CiF.
Theoretically, there should be a limit to the extent to which such an empty cliché can accumulate volume before it bursts, but that doesn’t look like happening anytime soon at Guardian HQ.
On May 2nd the well-known Hamas supporter and condoner of suicide bombing Azzam Tamimi proffered his air-brushed version of the myth of his commitment to budding democracy in the Middle East.
One has to wade past the sycophantic reference to the leader of a murderous terror organisation (“my old friend Khalid Mish’al”), the half-truths and distortions, and get right down to paragraph nine of Tamimi’s article to arrive at the nitty-gritty:
“Democracies representing the will of the Arab peoples can only be anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.”
Aha! So that’s what Tamimi and his Guardian enablers mean when they say ‘democracy’; everybody in the Middle East has to think like them, otherwise it won’t be democratic. And of course – as clearly implied in Tamimi’s oeuvre – only nasty dictators or PA sell-outs could ever possibly make peace with their neighbours.
Like many a Hamas apologist living in the West, Tamimi has studied the system well and is more than aware of the potent effects of the D-word on the gullible Left. Dressing up jihad in pseudo-democratic garb doesn’t make terror any less wrong, but how often does one come across some bright spark on CiF insisting that ‘Hamas was democratically elected’ as though that makes firing Iranian rockets at a kindergarten morally acceptable?
The trouble is that people with ideologies such as those subscribed to by Tamimi and his ‘old friends’ in Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood cannot, by the very nature of their beliefs, be truly committed to democracy, which entails a lot more than just voting. They cannot see women, gay people or non-Muslim religious minorities within their own territory as being equal to them and deserving of the same rights, let alone the citizens of the neighbouring country. Neither are they remotely capable of separating Mosque from state. One only has to look at the severe deterioration of human rights in the Gaza Strip since the Hamas takeover there four years ago to understand what kind of ‘democracy’ Tamimi has in mind.
Contrary to Azzam Tamimi, I’m not convinced that an Arab democracy – if we ever get to see it – has to be by definition anti-Israeli. The point is though that at the moment such a thing is still a long way from becoming reality. So far this ‘Arab Spring’ has shown only new shoots of the same old repressions, repackaged in different hues.
Opinion polls conducted in advance of the upcoming July elections in Tunisia show Rachid Ghannouchi’s Ennhadha party leading the race on a platform of what is termed ‘Islamist democracy’ under which it proposes to combine Sharia law with a system it terms ‘democratic’. In the meantime, Tunisians continue to leave the country in their thousands.
In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood is predicted to win some 30% of the seats in the September 2011 election and of course what will transpire in the rest of the Arab world is still anyone’s guess. In Libya and Syria the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ could yet turn into a winter of discontent, but there too Islamist forces are undoubtedly playing their part in the uprisings, as can be seen in the very under-reported Libyan opposition street propaganda which has clear antisemitic and racist motifs and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood’s encouragement for continued protests.
Maybe eventually we will see a true primavera of democracies in the Middle East and North Africa, but that will only happen when the religious fundamentalists are kicked into touch and people there begin to vote according to political opinion rather than tribal affiliation. Tamimi and others of his ilk are actually delaying that necessary process rather than advancing the cause of democracy and shamefully the Guardian – with its all-pervading racism of low expectations – is collaborating with that.
In Tamimi’s warped mind, hope for the Palestinians equates only with annihilation of Israel. He is of the same ‘old school’ as Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh who lauded Osama bin Ladan as a ‘Arab holy warrior’ and the Northern Islamic Movement’s Raed Salah who, like Tamimi, also thinks that “the government changes in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries came from the will of the people must be channeled against Israel”.
Were the Guardian a true liberal voice for progressive democracy, it would not be providing a platform for those such as Tamimi who aim to sell out the people of the Arab world by exploiting the current upheaval to impose fundamentalist theocracies rather than nurturing the beginnings of true democracy in the region.
H/T Judy
“From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” – 1984, by George Orwell
George Orwell, prolific writer and a staunch opponent of totalitarianism (including communism), writing in the spring of 1945, in a long essay titled “Antisemitism in Britain“, for the Contemporary Jewish Record, stated that anti-Semitism was on the increase in Britain, and that it was “irrational and will not yield to arguments.”
He argued that it would be useful to discover why anti-Semites could “swallow such absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others.”
Anti-Zionists today, those who are opposed to the Jewish state’s very existence and engage in demonization beyond any limits of reason, as those active in the fight for the state’s survival are acutely aware, is often equally irrational and unable to yield to even the most lucid arguments.
Indeed, the quote I cited above from 1984 reflects one of the common understandings the word “Orwellian” – the capacity to hold inherently irreconcilable, hypocritical, and/or irrational political views without the slightest cognitive dissonance.
The Orwell Prize for Journalism is characterized, on their website, as:
“Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing. Every year, we award prizes for the work – the book, the blog which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’.”
The 2011 list includes prolific Israel haters such as Robert Fisk (See here, here, and here), the man with the proud distinction of engaging in journalistic bias so egregious as to inspire the word “Fisking“) and Guardian contributor, Rachel Shabi.
In discussing a review of “Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands”, the New Centrist succinctly sums up Shabi as follows:
“Shabi is part of small group of post-Zionist Mizrahi intellectuals who want to reclaim the non-European aspect their identity. I think this is a positive thing. But some of these post-Zionists have a tendency to borrow analytical frameworks from Marxists and others who view Ashkenazim and Zionists as imperialists and colonialists. In this narrative, the Mizrahim are indigenous people who have been victimized by Zionism, just like the Palestinians. In other words, Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians are people of color and Ashkenazis are whitey. Shabi and her political allies, in turn, are part pf the global resistance against the forces of global empire.
Here’s a sampling of Shabi’s offerings on the evils of Zionism and the moral sins of Israeli Jews:
“Most Israelis, in other words, seem to have convinced themselves that their own moral superiority somehow sanctions and justifies their own acts of moral repugnance. As a line of defence, it’s hard to see how this will stand up in court.” The self-defence defence January 23, 2009
But Palestinian analyst Ghassan Khatib says there is another factor at play in the overall media skew. “Even if the Palestinian side came up with proper messages, Hamas has been successfully labelled by Israel as a terrorist group and is portrayed in the western media in a manner similar to al-Qaida,” he says. As a result, western audiences are more prepared to sympathise with Israel – because it fits the “us or them” binary to which post 9/11 ears are attuned.” Winning the media warJanuary 10, 2009
“Kfir Brigade’s own former members describe its role in enforcing the Israeli occupation as having turned them into “monsters”. This brigade is the nightmare of bed-wetting Palestinian children and its deeds should be the nightmare of any Israeli who seeks peace, rather than perpetual loathing, between the Jewish and Palestinian peoples of the region.” Bruiting about brutes November 29, 2008
In the mind of Shabi, every Israeli act, her every fear and concern, can be contorted in a way to suggest the state’s inherent and immutable bigotry.
Indeed, her capacity to twist and turn prose in a way which assigns maximum malice to the Jewish state seems to have no limits as, more recently, she penned a piece for the Guardian which managed to spin Israeli concerns over the potential rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as evidence of Israeli racism.
The Muslim Brotherhood, as we noted previously, is a viciously anti-Semitic movement, which openly calls the destruction of Israel and whose spiritual leader, Yusef al-Qaradawi has endorsed the Holocaust as divinely inspired just punishment of the Jews.
The capacity to engage in such a profound moral inversion – accusing Jews of racism for expressing their concern over a movement inspired by a man who endorsed the Holocaust – represents the dangerous doublethink so eloquently illustrated in the totalitarian dystopia of Orwell’s novel and seems, at the very least, inconsistent with the moral parameters of the prize which bears his name.
Here at CiF Watch we, like many others, have for some time been following the very worrying events taking place with alarming regularity in too many British universities.
From the cancellation of lectures by some pro-Israeli speakers, through the heckling and intimidation of others, to the despicable attacks upon Talya Lador-Fresher (Israel Deputy Ambassador to the UK) last year in Manchester and a protester outside SOAS just recently, these events indicate beyond all doubt that something is seriously amiss in the higher education system of Great Britain. Ambassador Ron Prosor apparently thinks so too.
“Speaking at a conference on British-Israeli diplomatic relations at the think-tank Chatham House, he said there had “never been so much hatred and hypocrisy towards the state of Israel in British universities.”
Just as there seems to be very little enthusiasm in those same establishments to face up to the issue of Islamist radicalization within the confines of their protected walls, or the long-since known (but recently further publicized) subject of the funding of some of those institutions by human-rights abusing regimes and dictatorships, nothing very effective appears to be being done to counter the virulently anti-Israel (and sometimes anti-Semitic) atmosphere in what are supposed to be bastions of free debate and liberal enlightenment.
A post (which recently generated some renewed interest) on the Daphne Anson blog regarding the Leicester University lecturer Dr. Claudia Prestel raises some questions as to just how committed the management of British universities are in combating extremism in their institutions. As pointed out in the post, Dr. Prestel has links with the Leicester branch of ‘Friends of Al Aqsa’. She has written for their magazine and spoken together with the chair of that organization, Ismail Patel, at an event organized by the Leicester University Palestine Support Group. She is also a supporter of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel.
Some might say that what Dr. Prestel or any other university lecturer chooses to do with his or her free time is nobody’s business. Others might raise reasonable concerns that perhaps the political opinions of such lecturers do not always remain outside the lecture hall. What I found particularly interesting about this specific case is that Leicester University runs a centre for the study of the Holocaust, of which Dr. Prestel is also a member. And yet nobody in that institution seems to think it inappropriate that she should maintain connections with an organization which has quoted Holocaust deniers on its website, headed by a man who supports a terrorist organization with genocidal aspirations of its own.
‘Friends of Al Aqsa’ is one of the more extremist Islamist organizations at work in Britain today. It supports the Muslim Brotherhood-linked charity ‘Interpal’ (proscribed by the US Treasury) and advertises it on its website. It collaborates with the Khomenist Iranian-funded faux human rights organization known as the Islamic Human Rights Commission in organizing events such as Al Quds day at which public support is expressed for the Iranian proxy militia Hizbollah.
Advert for Friends of Al Aqsa sponsored event
Ismail Patel himself is a member of the red-green ‘Stop the War coalition’ and has represented that body at a Hizbollah conference. He is a spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated ‘British Muslim Initiative’, has been involved in the organization of the annual ‘Islam Expo’ hate-fest, is a member of ‘Conflicts Forum’ which advocates engaging with terrorists and was a passenger aboard the ‘Mavi Marmara’ which tried to break the Israeli naval blockade on Gaza last May. The voyage was co-sponsored by the Turkish organization the IHH which is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Union of Good’. Patel’s recommended reading list includes the work of Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy who does not believe that there was a Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe or that there were gas chambers.
One wonders if those attending last year’s conference on the subject of Holocaust Denial at Leicester University’s Centre for Holocaust Studies were aware that one of the associate members of that centre rubs shoulders with Islamist extremists who are not averse to a little denial of the Nazi Holocaust themselves and support both Hamas – with its genocidal charter – and the Iranian regime infamous for the Holocaust denial of its president.
One especially wonders whether the management of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust Studies and Leicester University as a whole consider Dr Prestel’s extra-curricular associations appropriate under the circumstances and whether or not they have given any thought whatsoever to the fact that allowing people such as Ismail Patel to speak on their campus is precisely the sort of supine approach which is contributing to the spread of increasingly violent extremism in universities throughout the British Isles.
As people who study racial hatred as a profession, one would hope that they would be able to make that rather obvious connection.
This is cross posted by Ciarán, who blogs at Impartial Eclipse
Destruction in aftermath of 27 day siege on Hama by Syrian government
Syria is a country in the Middle East of some 22 million people. It’s bordered by Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, Israel and Lebanon to the south-west and Turkey to the north. It’s western coast on the Mediterranean Sea is just under 200km long.
Syria was ruled by the Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 20th centuries after which it was occupied by French forces in 1920. The French used brutal methods to maintain a pre-eminent role in the country until after World War II when the Syrians finally attained independence.
The first two decades of independence were marked by instability despite rapid economic growth. The Sunni Islamic community that had been the elite since the time of the Ottoman Empire continued to dominate economically at the expense of other minorities. In 1963, a military coup brought the Ba’ath Party to power. The Ba’ath Party advocated Arab socialism and was dominated by the minority Alawite community. Alawites claim to be Muslims but are regarded as heretics and apostates by the more orthodox Sunnis.
The ideology espoused by the Ba’ath Party included amongst other things land reform and by the late 1960s, the estates of the Sunni elite were being broken up and expropriated. This added to the sense of resentment amongst Sunnis towards the Ba’ath regime and the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in Syria in the 1930s) became the focal point for Sunni resistance.
The city of Hama in west-central Syria is some 200km north of the capital, Damascus. It had for decades been known to be a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood. As early as 1964, there had been anti-Ba’ath riots in Hama which were brutally crushed. Resistance continued however and in the late 1970s, anti-Baath violence and resistance to the Alawite president, Hafez al-Assad, became ever more deadly. An attack on a military school in Aleppo resulted in the deaths of scores of mainly Alawi cadets and in the autumn of 1980, car bombs in Damascus caused the deaths of hundreds.
On the morning of February 3rd, 1982 a Syrian army unit carrying out a search in Hama came across the hideout of a rebel commander. The rebels attacked and alerted other insurgents in the city. Word was spread by radio and by mosque loudspeaker. By morning, the city was in open revolt and the homes of Ba’ath leaders and government officials were being attacked.
The government in Damascus responded quickly calling on the city to surrender and warning that anyone found within the city would be considered an insurgent. The attack started with the airforce bombing the city from the air to allow the entry of infantry and tanks through the narrow streets. Heavy artillery caused much devastation too. The city was then cleared of insurgents street by streets. Some reports say that poison gas was also used to exterminate anyone left alive in the rubble. All in all, the violence lasted for three weeks and estimates of those killed run as high as 40,000 and there is no doubt that huge numbers of civilians were indiscriminately slaughtered in the bloodletting.
Eyewitness reports speak of horrific atrocities that were committed against defenceless men, women and children. Some speak of people being lined up to be shot along trenches already half-filled with bodies. When that line of people was riddled with bullets and fell into the trench, a new line of victims was brought forward.
The end result was that the power of the Muslim Brotherhood was shattered in Syria. Most of its leadership fled abroad and acrimonious splits occurred amongst those who stayed in Syria. Others reached an accommodation with the Ba’athist regime. Open discussion is strictly suppressed in Syria. Everyone knows it happened but 29 years later, no-one dares mention the Massacre of Hama
H/T Armaros and Atlas
I think the following video, of NPR Foundation’s senior VP for development Ron Schiller and Senior Director of Institutional Giving Betsy Liley, should at the very least, cement the view of National Public Radio as a member in good standing of the Guardian Left.
While there is much in the video that is simply astonishing – such as the NPR Executives’ extreme intolerance and bigotry towards Christians in the U.S. on one hand, and their tolerance towards guests who they understood to be members of a Muslim Brotherhood affiliated group wishing to fund NPR on the other – one thing in particular stands out.
When confronted with the ugly and unmistakable anti-Semitic narrative of Jewish control of the media, these NPR Executives – not long after expressing righteous outrage at the intolerance of “gun-toting”, “anti-intellectual” American Christians – didn’t storm out of the room, and didn’t even angrily denounce such flagrant racism. Indeed, Schiller continued the conversation with these potential funders almost as if nothing had happened.
In addition to the bigotry and hypocrisy, the imperious and condescending attitude of these NPR officials surpasses even the wildest caricatures of the organization.
I simply can’t wait for Michael Tomasky – The Guardian’s blogger on American politics – to try spinning this.
(Update: NPR issued a statement on the video)
The comments contained in the video released today are contrary to everything we stand for, and we completely disavow the views expressed. NPR is fair and open minded about the people we cover. Our reporting reflects those values every single day — in the civility of our programming, the range of opinions we reflect and the diversity of stories we tell.
The assertion that NPR and public radio stations would be better off without federal funding does not reflect reality. The elimination of federal funding would significantly damage public broadcasting as a whole.
Prior to the lunch meeting presented in the edited video, Ron Schiller had informed NPR that he was resigning from his position to take a new job. His resignation was announced publicly last week, and he was expected to depart in May. While we review this situation, he has been placed on administrative leave.
Hawkeye
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The Guardian finds fresh new talent to whitewash terror connections of flotilla movement, and demonize Israel
July 7, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: Adam Shapiro, Comment is Free, Flotilla, Free Gaza Movement, Hamas, IHH, International Solidarity Movement, Muslim Brotherhood, Ruqaya Izzidien, The Guardian | by Adam Levick | 8 comments
When Ruqaya Izzidien is not minimizing the threats posed by radical Islam, or decrying European Islamophobia, for the English website of the Muslim Brotherhood, blogging for the extreme anti-Israel site Mondoweiss, or contributing to Al Jazeera, she serves as the UK correspondent for Bikyamasr, an online magazine which focuses on “Egypt and the region” – a site which has, on the sidebar of their home page , a “resistance to occupation” video which contains scenes like these:
Among her more notable contributions, in the course of covering the UK for Bikyamasr, was an op-ed about the terrorist attacks on 7/7 and British Muslim terrorism more broadly, where, despite describing herself as a “justice-seeking”, “anti-violent” “hippy”, says, employing the Ben White formula of not explicitly endorsing hateful ideologies and actions, but expressing, nonetheless, an “understanding” or “empathy” towards it:
She is also, naturally, given such an impressive resume of anti-Zionism and “contextualizing” Islamist terror, a contributor to the Guardian, and penned a piece, Gaza flotilla: ‘Solidarity more important than aid’, July 6 (on the Guardian’s ‘Global Development Page, a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).
The piece is notable in its frank admission that the flotilla movement was never about providing Palestinians with humanitarian aid (which, we’ve noted, is not in short supply) – and represents the reason why, according to Izzidien, ”Gazans are quick to dismiss the Israeli-Greek offer to offload and transport to Gaza the humanitarian aid aboard the flotilla.”
She further explains that the desires of those involved in the flotilla campaign are to seek “peace” and “justice”, yet, characteristically, never once , in a 800 word essay, mentions the word Hamas in the context of Palestinians desire for rights, and further cites an “activist” as alleging Israel’s blockade is “illegal” – despite the paucity of any such designation by any official institution, and a body of international law and historical precedents attesting to the legal legitimacy of Israel’s blockade of arms flowing to the hostile Hamas regime.
Izzidien’s exercise in polemical obfuscation is perhaps most evident when she quotes a member of the International Solidarity Movement - whose unambiguous malicious intent, regarding the flotilla movement, was revealed in a video by member Adam Shapiro - saying the following:
Indeed, such a narrative, imputing in Israel’s efforts to defend themselves from an increasingly well-armed terrorist group committed to its destruction – conjuring a “dirty campaign” of “subversion” and “coercion”, by the Zionist entity – could have been written by the sponsors and organizers of the latest flotilla campaign who, it was revealed, just so happen to be Hamas operatives.
I now understand Izzidien’s curious omission of the word Hamas anywhere in her diatribe. I mean, after all, who needs the painful cognitive dissonance which would naturally arise from the understanding that no matter how much she hates the Zionist regime, the flotilla movement’s “grass roots” effort by “peaceful activists” to show solidarity with Gaza is actually an orchestrated propaganda event by a reactionary terrorist movement.
Vilifying Israel is just so much more satisfying – and much more likely to give you a platform at the Guardian.
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