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Stuart Jeffries’ profile of Jacqueline Rose, “Jacqueline Rose: a life in writing“, Guardian, Feb. 3, begins with a subtitle which manages to convey in less than 20 words much of what you need to know of Rose’s pseudo psychoanalysis of Zionism and the Jewish people.
‘Victimhood is something that happens but when you turn it into an identity you’re psychically and politically finished’
To understand why Rose is indeed talking about Zionist Jews being “psychically and politically finished” due to an “identity” of “victimhood”, you need to read a few of her choice musings on Israel and Jewry, but the answer is clear by the sixth passage of Jeffries’ essay.
After introducing Rose (recent author of, Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East) as a feminist, and “fearless” “psychoanalytic critic“…“ready to battle against those who hate her for daring to psychoanalyze Israel” [emphasis added], Jeffries quotes the author’s analysis of Israel:
[You] project on to the other the bits of yourself that you can’t stand, but the function is to utterly purify yourself of the feeling. So your innocence is a form of violence against others.”
Such a psychoanalysis of the Jewish state is nothing, however, compared to Rose’s previous diagnoses.
In her book, Question of Zion, Rose wrote, “We take Zionism to be a form of collective insanity” (p. 17), and suggests that those who embrace it are part of a group neurosis.
As Alvin Rosenfeld noted, in Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Antisemitism, Rose’s lexicon for Zionism and its errant ways in “Question of Zionism” include: “bloody,” “cataclysmic,” “cruel,” “deadly,” “apocalyptic,” “blind,” “crazy,” “delusional,” “defiled,” “demonic,” “fanatical,” “insane,” and “mad.”
Zionism appears, to Rose, to be nightmarish, ruthless and deranged, and specifically asks how “Israel [could] inscribe at its heart the very version of nationhood from which the Jewish people had to flee”?
To dispel any doubt that Rose is indeed evoking Nazism, she has written:
“The suffering of a woman on the edge of the pit with her child during the Nazi era…and a Palestinian woman refused access to a hospital through a checkpoint and whose unborn baby dies as a result, is the same”
Ukraine 1942: Holocaust photo of German soldier shooting a Jewish woman and her young child which Jacqueline Rose is referring to.
Continuing with Rose’s theme of the traumatized, crazed Zionist Jew, Jeffries writes:
Rose was born in London in 1949 into a Holocaust-traumatized family. Her grandmother’s family perished in Chelmno concentration camp. Hers was, as she puts, “one type of North London Jewish survivor family who, to survive, internally entrenched itself in Jewish ritual“. [emphasis added]
Jeffries then quotes Rose describing her family’s evidently distorted, obtuse and myopic post-Holocaust traditional Judaism:
“It was observant and desperate that we continue the faith. There was no mixing of meat and milk, there were two sinks in the kitchen and if anything got mixed up it had to buried in the mud outside. [emphasis added]
Adds Jeffries:
Non-Jewish boyfriends were intolerable. [emphasis added]
A kosher kitchen and the desire to marry within the faith!
Respect for religious tradition, and a passion for Jewish continuity (a few years after the horrors of the Shoah): Clearly evidence of an entrenched, defensive, and traumatized people.
Jeffries concludes:
After the interview Rose emails me, hoping I can stress that she isn’t done with the Middle East conflict. She’s written four books dealing with that conflict and…there will be more. “As Edward Said wrote about getting involved in the Palestine-Israel conflict – once you’re in you’re there for life…You don’t say goodbye to this.”
And, as a Jewish writer who can – in an academic’s literary erudition, and a psychoanalyst’s cool, dispassionate sophistication – deride Zionism as a mental disorder, while boldly likening elements of the Jewish state’s ethos to Nazism, the Guardian will not soon be saying goodbye to Jacqueline Rose.
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H/T Israelinurse
The official Twitter account of the UK Foreign Office, deciding to weigh in on hip hop, linked to a video by an anti-Zionist British political rapper named Shadia Mansour.
Here’s the Tweet:
Mansour is widely known for her role in the production of Lowkey’s ‘Long Live Palestine’ (and has collaborated with Lowkey on other projects).
The video consists of hateful anti-Zionist propaganda, through both lyrics and images, and includes still frames of cartoons from the notorious Carlos Latuff suggesting that Israel is a Nazi like states which intentionally targets Palestinian children.
As Harry’s Place has commented, the video further asserts that the profits from various non-Israeli global companies (who were founded or believed to be currently run by Jews) goes directly to Israel, evoking conspiracy theories about international Jewish domination:
‘Every coin is a bullet, if you’re Marks and Spencer,
And when you’re sipping Coca-Cola,
That’s another pistol in the holster of them soulless soldiers,
You say you know about the Zionist lobby,
But you put money in their pocket when you’re buying their coffee,
Talking about revolution, sitting in Starbucks’
It claims that Israel is a genocidal state:
‘How many more children have to be annihilated
Israel is a terror state, they’re terrorists that terrorise,
I testify, my television televised them telling lies,
This is not a war, it is systematic genocide’
And it further states that:
‘We curse every Zionist since Theodore Herzl’
‘Nothing is more anti-Semitic than Zionism.’
Here’s the video:
Turning to Lowkey, here are some 9/11 conspiracies of his, published by the StWC:
One day I was running from the truth,
To speed me up they gave me these shoes,
So tie my feet with Nike’s,
Tell me lies about the 11th of September,
…
It was the planes.
Not controlled demolition,
The BBC didn’t report the explosion of Building 7,
20 minutes before hand, on my television,
They found passport’s and plane flying manuals belonging to terrorists in the rubble.
That all makes perfect sense
Naturally, a Guardian Music review of rap artists, in Nov. 2010, included this commentary by Kieran Yates:
For current UK sounds, I’d go for the political punch of Lowkey’s Long Live Palestine.
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- “See Britain through my eyes” (Hadar Sela at Harry’s Place)
- Fight or flight? CiF Watch, David Yehuda Stern & Ben White (cifwatch.com)
- The Tweets +972′s Joseph Dana didn’t want you to see (cifwatch.com)
- Lauren Booth on “Jewish supremacism”, why antisemitism is justified, & the wisdom of Gilad Atzmon (cifwatch.com)
- Yvonne Ridley, Palestinian terrorist attacks, and peanut allergies (cifwatch.com)
- Anti-Zionist blog attacks CiF Watch and defends racist depiction of Obama by Carlos Latuff (cifwatch.com)
- CiF piece critical of Gilad Atzmon elicits storm of antisemitic reader comments, including organ theft libels (cifwatch.com)
- Jews, Israel, & the Atavistic British Left: A response to Bob from Brockley (cifwatch.com)
The most infamous essay of CiF contributor Ben White was a 2002 CounterPunch piece titled, “Is it possible to understand antisemitism?”.
First, there was this passage:
I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, yet I can also understand why some are. There are, in fact, a number of reasons. One is the state of Israel, its ideology of racial supremacy and its subsequent crimes committed against the Palestinians. It is because Zionists have always sought to equate their colonial project with Judaism that some misguidedly respond to what they see on their televisions with attacks on Jews or Jewish property.
And he further linked the rise of antisemitism with “the widespread bias and subservience to the Israeli cause in the Western media”.
But, equally as pernicious was this:
[There was a] controversy in Germany over alleged anti-Semitic remarks made by Jürgen Möllemann, the deputy leader of the FDP party, when he compared the Israeli government’s actions to those of the Nazi regime. Since his remarks Jewish groups have taken to the streets to call for Mr Möllemann’s resignation.
Comparisons between the Israeli government and the Nazis is unwise and unsound, since the Israelis have not (at the time of going to press) exterminated in a systematic fashion an enormous percentage of the Palestinians. Cold-blooded killings, beatings, house demolitions, vandalism, occupation, military assaults, and two historical pushes at ethnic cleansing–yes. Full fledged genocide–no.
However, the comparison is not anti-Semitic. It does not make racist assumptions, nor does it smack of bigotism.
(Also of note, White has recommended an essay by Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, in his book on “Israeli Apartheid”.)
Regarding the Israel-Nazi analogy, White has also employed language which at least evokes this political parallel, such as in the following passage from an essay posted on his website:
“Palestinians, who, in the name of a ‘social-democratic experiment’, had to endure massacres, death-marches, and ethnic cleansing…”
In addition to such comparisons being intellectually unserious, such morally obscene comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are codified as antisemitic by the EU Working Definition.
Flash to a Twitter exchange yesterday which involved Sunny Hundall, editor of Guardian partner blog, Liberal Conspiracy, Louise Mensch, British MP, and David Shariatmadari, deputy editor of ‘Comment is Free’.
The row began after White posted an essay at Liberal Conspiracy, titled “Mensch to speak at ‘extreme’ Israeli conference“, which criticized Mensch’s upcoming appearance at a Stand With Us conference, and leveled simply unserious accusations that StandWithUs “donors accused the group of having “a web of funders who support organisations that have been accused of anti-Muslim propaganda.”
There was, of course, quite a bit of vitriol below the line, which included defenses of the Israel=Nazi Germany comparison after one commenter brought attention to White’s defense of this view.
Here is a snippet from the Twitter exchange which followed.
Then when Ben White joined the exchange, taking issue with Mensch’s characterization of his views, Mensch responded thusly:
Then, Comment is Free editor, David Shariatmadari, chimes in:
So, the Guardian’s Shariatmadari evidently finds it morally relevant whether or not White was defending comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany broadly (not as bad), or whether there was a specific charge that Israel exterminates Palestinians in Auschwitz-like concentration camps.
Did Mensch really have to Tweet this morally intuitive argument to the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ deputy editor?
Further, Shariatmadari’s grave concern about Ben White’s “reputation” speaks volumes about a media group who continually licenses commentators who may possess a liberal veneer but are morally compromised by an undeniable antipathy towards Jews.
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- ‘Comment is Free’ Land: Here be Jews… (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian publishes letter by Tony Greenstein suggesting comparison between anti-Israel protests & those against Nazis (cifwatch.com)
- UK philosopher Ted Honderich repeats his Guardian refrain that Palestinians have the right to murder Israelis (cifwatch.com)
- CiF piece critical of Gilad Atzmon elicits storm of antisemitic reader comments, including organ theft libels (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian issues ‘progressive in good standing’ card to Carlos Latuff: racist and anti-Semite (cifwatch.com)
- #PropagandaWaves: The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade or the ‘Free Gaza’ Movement? (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian publishes letter stating “Israel forfeits right to be treated as member of the community of nations” (cifwatch.com)
- Why is an essay on alleged Israeli racism in the “Jewish Belief” section of ‘Comment is Free’? (cifwatch.com)
- MEMO and Carlos Latuff, “respectfully” criticizing Israel (cifwatch.com)
- CiF comment, justifying antisemitism as normal reaction to Zionism: 74 “recommends” & not deleted (cifwatch.com)
- +972 and a revealing Twitter exchange between CiF Watch and a radical left Israeli Jew (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian’s abusive Deborah Orr (cifwatch.com)
The Guardian published three letters on the protesters who disrupted the Prom by the Israel Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta in London recently (Report, 2 September), including one by leading anti-Zionist Jew, and previous CiF contributor, Tony Greenstein. (See Richard Millett’s post on the incident, here)
Greenstein is a founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a member of Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods and styles himself as a “Socialist, anti-Zionist”.
Here’s what Greenstein wrote in his Guardian letter.
“As someone who is Jewish, I was proud to take part in the protests at the Royal Albert Hall against the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra. Those who proclaim that politics and culture don’t mix, when they keep silent as the Freedom Theatre in Jenin is under constant attack by the Israeli military, its premises ransacked and two workers detained without trial, are a prime example of western hypocrisy. Culture, art and sport cannot be divorced from their social context. When I took part in demonstrations in 1970 against the Springbok rugby tour, this same argument was used. The BBC’s attitude to broadcasting the all-white South African cricket team then was exactly the same as it is today towards Israel’s cultural ambassadors. However, the Guardian and Daily Telegraph’s cricket correspondents, John Arlott and Jim Swanton, took a principled stance, refusing to commentate for the BBC. The reason why Israel funds and subsidises artists, musicians and writers to travel abroad is stated in the contract that they sign. The artist agrees they will “promote the policy interests of the State of Israel via culture and art”. Who would now say that it would have been wrong to mix politics and culture and disrupt the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the performances of their famous conductor, Wilhelm Furtwangler, when they toured in the 1930s?”
Tony Greenstein
Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods
Indeed, Greenstein’s previous anti-Zionist writings have similarly espoused views which equate Nazism to Zionism.
In a CiF essay in 2007, he wrote:
“It is argued that “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is in itself anti-semitic. Now, it might arguably be offensive, but why anti-semitic? In her book The War Against the Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz reports that it was the position of the SS that “the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position, and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state”. Is it anti-semitic to point out that “ethnic cleansing” and the transfer or forced migration of civilian populations was also Nazi policy; or that only in Israel and Nazi Germany were Jews barred from marrying non-Jews?”
Further, according to Greenstein, a comment he posted in the CiF comments section in response to Anthony Lerman’s article “Antisemitic, or just offensive” argued that Israelis possess a “Nazi mentality”.
As with the Guardian’s recent sympathetic profile of far left extremist Carlos Latuff – who, as we noted, repeatedly publishes political cartoons with the explicit narrative that Israeli Jews are the new Nazis – their decision to publish Greenstein’s invective suggests that, for Guardian editors, this odious moral comparison is, at the very least, debatable.
Such an argument is morally and intellectually unserious, hateful, antisemitic, extraordinarily cruel, and (it would certainly seem) represents the complete antithesis of anything even resembling genuine liberal thought.
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Though I’ve seen quite a large volume of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hate expressed by Guardian readers, I’m still continually amazed by the creative malice of those sensitive souls who tune in daily to catch the latest defamation of Israel by the world’s leading liberal voice.
This comment, beneath Sherwood’s latest assault on Israel, from a reader called “deepcut”, was deleted, but, amazingly, as of this writing, deepcut’s account and user privileges are still active.
Click to enlarge
The Guardian’s Mya Guarnieri has reached a new low. In a recent piece for Al-Jazeera, titled, “The death of Israeli democracy“, Guarnieri outdid, by several degrees, her previous anti-Zionist opus in the Guardian in the levels of hyperbole and pure malice.
In her Dec. 8 piece in CiF, “Israel Rabbi’s racist decrees strikes at the soul of Judaism”, Guarnieri contextualized the bigoted remarks of a small number of rabbis as signifying Israel’s “rising tide of religious fascism,” by claiming that such views were state-sanctioned, which, as we noted in an official complaint to the Guardian’s Readers’ Editor, was categorically untrue.
But, undeterred, and clearly not one to let facts get in the way of preconceived prejudices about Israel, Guarnieri decides to double-down, and raises the moral stakes even higher by advancing an even more inflammatory narrative about Israel’s supposed descent into political darkness – in Al-Jazeera, a media organization, it should be noted, that’s not exactly known for sharing her secular liberal outlook.
Guarnieri’s case, in her Al Jazeera piece, against Israel – helpfully illustrated with a photo of a sinister looking Orthodox Jew – is, of course, paper-thin, and includes, as exhibit A, a bill passed by the Knesset which merely denies government funding to groups who view the state’s very creation as a horrible tragedy.
But her polemical invective against the Jewish state then picks up steam when she – mirroring a narrative recently advanced by the Guardian’s Simon Tisdall who claimed that Israel merely “poses” as a democracy – informs us that its arguable that, “Israel was never a democracy in the true sense of the word.”
Guarnieri then quotes Knesset member Dov Khenin, of the Jewish-Arab party Hadash, who had just given a talk under the banner of “The Danger of Fascism”, about which she adds, “There [were] about 20 people present – a sad number considering what is at stake.”
Khenin – who later showed himself a fan of the father of Marxist thought, Fredrich Engels – said:
“Arab Knesset members have always been regarded with suspicion – the vicious verbal assault Haneen Zoabi faced in the Knesset after she participated in the flotilla comes to my mind”
Of course, the fact that Zoabi (an Arab member of Knesset) participated in a flotilla sponsored by known terrorists (IHH) who seek Israel’s destruction, and whose members, while on board the vessel, brutally attacked the citizens serving in her own country’s military, and then merely suffered a verbal assault, may at least partially explain why only 20 Israelis saw fit to turn out at Khenin’s event.
But, Guarnieri, undeterred by the fact that the overwhelming majority of actual Israelis don’t take the hysterical warnings about their country’s supposed descent into fascism seriously, pivots into even more odious territory, by asking, “Will Israel become out-right fascist?”, before adding:
At an October protest against legislation commonly referred to as the loyalty oath – a bill that would require non-Jews seeking Israeli citizenship to pledge allegiance to a “Jewish and democratic” state - Gavriel Solomon, a prominent academic and peace activist, likened Israel to Nazi Germany, circa 1935...That was the year that the Nuremberg Laws – racist legislation that led to the systematic and deadly persecution of Jews – were created….There were no [concentration] camps yet but there were racist laws,” he said. “And we are heading towards these kinds of laws.” [emphasis mine]
Guarnieri follows this insidious analogy by concluding:
“While meaningful change is probably a long way off for Israel – it may take something huge, like fascism, to wake Jewish Israelis from their apathy and dreams of maintaining both a Zionist and democratic state – change is in the air.”
For Guarnieri, it seems, the imminent regression into Nazi-style fascism would of course be tragic and abhorrent for Israel, but (on a more positive note) could also serve a quite progressive cause – the end of the Jewish state.
You have to burn the village in order to save it.
This is a revised version of an essay which I had published by Elder of Ziyon. The post was specifically about the anti-Zionist Jewish blog, Mondoweiss – and anti-Semitic tropes the site often engages in, such as the Israel = Nazi Germany narrative. But as such accusations are leveled by Jewish writers and bloggers other than Phillip Weiss’s site, I wanted to expand on my original discourse. I’m speaking of CiF contributors Tony Greenstein and Slavoj Zizek, as well as Richard Silverstein (of the Orwellian named blog, Tikkun Olam), Norman Finkelstein, UK Jewish MK Gerald Kaufman, and others. It is worth noting that such grotesque analogies – between the Jewish state (the only free and democratic state in the Middle East), and the fascist Nazi regime which murdered one out of every three Jews in the Holocaust – are leveled by non-Jewish writers at the Guardian, and expressed in CiF’s reader comment section.
Nazi anti-Semitic caricatures during and preceding the Holocaust often portrayed Jews as an octopus-like creature, or some other beast – a category of anti-Semitism known as Zoomorphism. Such depictions would appear in official Nazi publications such as Der Sturmer. These cartoons would sometimes include images of a Jewish beast wrapping its tentacles around the world, representing the malicious control they were purported to exert on international affairs – consistent with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories codified in, among other sources, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Here is one such Nazi cartoon, circa 1938–An octopus with a Star of David over its head has its tentacles encompass the world.
Nazi, Soviet, and, more recently, Arab anti-Semitic caricatures often portray Jews as spiders, cockroaches, and Octopuses – dehumanizing Jews by turning them into animals that are destructive, inhuman and evil. The cartoon below, by the notorious anti-Zionist cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, was posted on the “progressive” Jewish anti-Zionist blog, Mondoweiss recently – by a frequent Mondoweiss blogger named Seham – in reference to the Gaza flotilla incident. (Here’s the link. Scroll to bottom to see cartoon link)
This ugly caricature of the Jewish state manages to both employ Nazi-like anti-Semitic imagery of a beastly and monstrous Jewish collective while simultaneously asserting that the Jewish state has become the new Nazi Germany. (Note the Jewish Magen David on the Israeli flag is morphed into a swastika) Such insidious depictions of Israel and Israelis are mostly seen on extremist websites, and is a phenomenon known as Holocaust inversion, or Abuse of Holocaust Memory.
H/T Yochanan Visser, of the organization, Missing Peace, for the Dutch translation.
Phyllis Chesler tells us of the typically outrageous lies and doublespeak of the antisemitic Israel-hater, Gretta Duisenberg. Duisenberg is the widow of Wim Duisenberg, the former President of the European Bank, the darling of Yasser Arafat and of the Free Gaza Movement, and chairwoman of a pro-Palestine committee “Stop the Occupation”. Prof Chesler tells us that Duisenberg, in an act which almost beggars belief, has proceeded to sue the Iranian-Dutch professor of philosophy and jurisprudence, Afshin Ellian, for calling her an “anti-Semite.” Duisenberg seems to have forgotten that she proudly defines herself as an “anti-Semite.”
In response to an article by Leon de Winter writing in Dutch in Elsevier, Abigail Esman writes:
“I invite all readers to support journalistic freedom and freedom of expression by writing ‘I, too, think Gretta Duisenberg is an anti-Semite.’”
I would not expect any reader to accept that statement purely on my say so. I propose, therefore, to define Duisenberg’s behaviour in terms of the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism formulated by EUMC, [although the EUMC has since been succeeded by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA)]. I believe that it is fair to say that Duisenberg’s behaviour falls into almost every category of antisemitism in the working definition, but to list all the evidence here would be time and space-consuming. I shall concentrate therefore on the more florid and blatant examples, and an internet search about Duisenberg will almost certainly provide the reader with even more information. Among the Working Definition’s specific examples of antisemitism are:
Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
Duisenberg is a supporter of extremist Islam, and formerly of the PLO and Hamas whose nihilistic antisemitism is evident in its Charter and has been proven by its murderous behaviour again and again. In 2003 Duisenberg organised and spoke at pro Palestinian rally at which donations were collected for the Al Aqsa funds which supports the families of suicide bombers. She also did not protest against the chanting of Hamas supporters around her of “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!”
Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
After the 2003 rally, Duisenberg draped a PLO flag from the balcony of her home in Amsterdam. When requested by her Jewish neighbours to take it down, they were told; “It’s the rich American Jews who make it possible for Israel to do what they are doing to the Palestinians”. More recently, in January 2010, Duisenberg added to this calumny by engaging in the too-ready conflation of Zionism with Judaism, invariably the hallmark of the antisemite who is trying to pass. See also Duisenberg’s answer in an interview in the Dutch magazine Keuzevrijheid :
“… These are the tactics of the Jewish lobby. By calling me an antisemite I will not be able to criticise the Zionist regime…”
In response to yesterday’s CiF column by Seumas Milne, “The Palestinians of Israel are poised to take center stage,” was this, by a frequent CiF commenter named “oldonmk2“. Though the comment was deleted, its worth noting the pure unadulterated hatred spewed by many CiF readers towards Israel and Jews. The word “disgusting” doesn’t begin to describe this bile.
CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE
This is cross-posted from Richard Millett’s Blog
Ewa Jasiewicz, Dr Ghada Karmi, Frank Barat, Paul Troop, Ken Loach
Last night at Amnesty International in London, against a backdrop of a quote by Bertrand Russell (“May this tribunal prevent the crime of silence”), sat four anti-Israel activists and Paul Troop, a solicitor, presenting the raison d’etre of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.
The first Russell Tribunal was convened in 1967 in Sweden and Denmark to harness public opinion against the Vietnam War, but it was largely ignored as being merely a show trial.
And so to the second Russell Tribunal, this time on Palestine. It is due to convene over three days at the Law Society in London on the 20,21 and 22 November.
Over that weekend some 20 or so companies are due to be put on trial for complicity with “Israeli war crimes”.
Israel is not on trial, the companies are.
It will already be presumed that Israel is in breach of international law and has committed crimes against humanity.
When I asked Paul Troop where such breaches of international law are judicially laid down the best he could do was direct me to the “opinion” of the International Court of Justice on the wall dividing Israel from the Palestinians.
None of the companies on trial will be represented. Letters have been sent but none have yet responded to say they will be present.
Dr. Ghada Karmi spoke of the Palestinian issue being the moral issue of our time. This polemic is freely bandied around by anti-Israel activists and makes people whince since we know that 3,000 children die every day in Africa from AIDS, malnutrition, malaria and other diseases when they shouldn’t be in this age.
Dr. Karmi cited Cast Lead and the siege of Gaza and was outraged that Israel had not even apologised over something as clearcut as the deaths on the Mavi Marmara.
She said that Israel was now too woven into the fabric of the international system and because of this was never being called to account. There is no major organisation or state that backs the Palestinians.
Just Journalism’s blog, The Wire, brought our attention to an article by the Guardian’s Kieran Yates where she recommended a hip hop artist who has written rap songs with explicitly anti-Semitic lyrics.
In the article, Yates said:
‘For current UK sounds, I’d go for the political punch of Lowkey’s Long Live Palestine.’
Lowkey’s ‘Long Live Palestine’ asserts that the profits from various global companies go directly to Israel, echoing conspiracy theories about international Jewish domination:
‘Every coin is a bullet, if you’re Marks and Spencer,
And when your sipping Coca-Cola,
That’s another pistol in the holster of them soulless soldiers,
You say you know about the Zionist lobby,
But you put money in their pocket when you’re buying their coffee,
Talking about revolution, sitting in Starbucks’
It claims that Israel is terrorist, genocidal state:
‘How many more children have to be annihilated
Israel is a terror state, they’re terrorists that terrorise,
I testify, my television televised them telling lies,
This is not a war, it is systematic genocide’
And it states that:
‘Nothing is more anti-Semitic than Zionism.’
Lowkey’s follow-up, Long Live Palestine Part 2, contains the following lyrics.
It claims that Israel is not compatible with Judaism, and Zionism equals ethnic cleansing:
“Zionism is not compatible with Judaism – the hijacked faith,
the state is misrepresenting,
Israel equals misplacement and ethnic cleansing.
I know I’m on a list, for being more verbal, curse every Zionist since Theodor Herzl,
Balfour was not a wise man,
shame on Rothschild,
between them the monster they created has gone wild.
It claims Israel is a terrorist state which kills innocent babies:
“Israel is a terrorist state,
the evidence is quite obvious,
war criminals using lethal weapons like white phosphorus,
burns your flesh to the bone,
and if you happen to live,
you’ll be left infected with cancer,
you’ll curse the fact that you did,
forgive me if I wish to say fate on those Israelis,
responsible for killing all those innocent little babies,
I studied the Torah and learnt by their own admission,
Israel’s actions are not kosher in their own religion.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
CiF reader sees Zionist fingerprints in international condemnation of Syria
February 7, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Biased Moderation, China, Comment is Free, Guardian, Nazi Analogies, Russia, Syria | by Adam Levick | 8 comments
Though the Guardian’s editorial (Syria: Russia on the wrong side, Feb. 7), critical of Russia (and China) for preventing the adoption of a watered down UN Security Council Resolution condemning Syria for its continuing civilian massacres, didn’t - unlike David Hearst – weave Israel into the narrative, that didn’t stop committed CiF readers from unleashing their righteous anger in a Zionist direction.
Here’s a comment by “PeteLoud” on Israeli control of U.S. and (therefore) UK foreign policy:
Yeah, I know, another day, another obsessive anti-Zionist conspiracy theory. Why sweat it? Well, occasionally such Israel Obsessive Compulsive Disorder-ridden CiFers can elicit quite pithy rejoinders, such as the following:
Further, PeteLoud’s original comment hasn’t been deleted and more than a few other commenters managed to weave Israel into the conversation. So, considering that ‘Comment is Free’ has a staff of moderators whose job it is to delete hateful and off-topic comments, it doesn’t seem, based on my review of the 178 comments so far, that they’ve done a very good job.
I’ll resist my urge to use the site Wordle again, but here are the results of my quick search on the number of times the following words have been used beneath the line:
Syria: 168
Russia: 179
China: 58
Israel: 56
As China was one of the antagonists in the Guardian editorial, and Israel has nothing whatsoever to do with the broader issue, it’s fair to say the Guardian’s professional moderators haven’t done a very good job of keeping the conversation on topic.
But, the story doesn’t end here.
I clicked on the link provided in PeteLoud’s ‘Comments is Free’ user profile, which took me to his personal website. And, it looks like Peter Loud (evidently his real name) is a lover of maps, photographs, and edgy political imagery.
Here’s a snapshot of the bottom of his home page:
As if we needed further evidence that our friend Pete sees Israel as a Nazi state, here’s a passage from his site’s “Palestine page“:
The fact that three out of four of Pete’s recommended links to prove Israel’s Nazi nature are from the Guardian are, OF COURSE, of no particular significance.
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