Tag Archives: Observer

Apr 2 2013

William Sutcliffe’s Guardian-approved anti-Israel propaganda for teens

Alison Flood’s March 31 Guardian/Observer report on a new novel by William Sutcliffe about the Israeli ‘occupation’ includes a quote by the self-described Jewish atheist which encapsulates how the most facile understandings of both the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the broader political realities of our day often pass for serious commentary.

‘…the story of our era is the divide between the haves and the have-nots, and it seemed the wall in the West Bank was very specific to that situation, but also symbolic of other things happening elsewhere”.

As befits such platitudinous prose, Sutcliffe’s new work is targeted towards a less mature audience.

teens

Flood’s review and interview begins thusly:

Pitched as a fable, his crossover novel is set in a city split in two by a vast wall. On one side live the privileged, the occupiers – and our hero Joshua. On the other live the desperate, the occupied, and when Joshua, hunting for his lost football, discovers a tunnel that leads under the wall, he sets in action a series of dreadful consequences. Without making it explicit, it soon becomes clear that this is the West Bank, that Joshua, 13, is Jewish, and that Leila, the girl who saves his life on the other side of the wall, is Palestinian.

The cover art chosen to illustrate the story of “privileged” Jews and “desperate” Palestinians is thoroughly consistent such an obtuse paradigm: An olive tree encircled with barbed wire, juxtaposed with a title evoking the morality tale Sutcliffe is demanding the young reader to imagine.

wall

What finally pushed the writer to commence the project?  Flood explains:

“…he heard about PalFest, Palestine’s annual travelling festival of literature, and decided he needed to travel to the region. He’d been to Israel before, but after experiencing PalFest, “everything I thought I knew about Israel was shattered.”

As CiF Watch has noted (here and here), Palfest (the Palestine Festival of Literature) is the (partially UK-funded) anti-Israel advocacy vehicle which has included a significant proportion of participating writers (and ‘recommended authors) who have been featured in the Guardian or ‘Comment is Free’ – including Ali Abunimah, Ben White, and Ghada Karmi.

Sutcliffe’s commentary on the ‘revelatory’ benefits of his Palfest journey continues:  

 He’d been to Israel before, but after experiencing PalFest, “everything I thought I knew about Israel was shattered. Seeing a military occupation up close, seeing a small number of people with guns telling a large number without guns what to do… it was so much more brutal than I thought it could be.”

It’s unclear where precisely Sutcliffe ventured in the West Bank, but it’s curious that in his apparently serious overall examination and research of the region he somehow failed to learn of the ubiquity of Palestinians ‘with guns‘, explosives and other weaponry – ‘activists’ who are of course waiting for the opportunity to deploy such lethal instruments of terror against Israeli civilians without guns.

Archive: Weaponry Uncovered in Palestinian's Home

Weaponry Uncovered by the IDF in a Palestinian’s Home, 2012

To critics who may question Sutcliffe’s expertise on such a subject, his answer is as follows:

“it’s reportage – which is why I went out of my way with the two research trips”.

Yet, Sutcliffe’s reporting cum ‘activist tourism’ left him unable to grasp the most elementary story about the fence which divides Palestine and Israel, the muse which inspired his Middle East tale: That there once was a time when the borders dividing the two peoples were porous, when a genuine peace seemed, to some, to be within reach – an ideal which was shattered by an onslaught of snipers, bombings and suicide belts.  

The security fence about which he writes was born of shrapnel, savagely fired, coursing through organs and limbs, tearing apart bodies, and shattering lives.   

Flood then adds the following:

[Sutcliffe] is also playing on another familiar children’s literary motif – that of the portal from the mundane to a world of fantasy. “What’s happening in this book is a kid living in a complete fantasy, who discovers a portal to reality. I’m taking the cliché and turning it upside down,” he says. “I’ve been with the settlers… and I think they are living in a world of complete fantasy.”

However, as one ‘Comment is Free’ critic recently and quite keenly observed about such lazy depictions:   

‘Whilst Palestinians have names, faces and form – their injured children…blazoned across headlines – Israelis are faceless, without history or family. They are not cute or charming or tragic. They are not gifted musicians or parlour comedians.  Israelis are just, coldly and callously, ‘Israelis’, unnamed, numbered and otherwise ignored, unless they are ‘settlers’ or soldiers, when they are as if motherless, amorphous.

In his evocation of Israeli caricatures, unrecognizable as they are crude, it is  Sutcliffe who conjures the most risible and fantastical tale.

Related articles
Feb 14 2013

Peter Beaumont’s absurd political analogy regarding Israel and ‘Prisoner X’

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor at the Observer (sister publication of the Guardian), has already authored, or co-authored, six separate reports (totaling over 5000 words) in less than two days at the Guardian on the row over ‘Prisoner X’.

part 1

part 2

Prisoner X is believed to have been a Mossad agent (reportedly an Australian Israeli dual citizen named Ben Zygier) jailed by Israel because he was about to reveal Mossad secrets to Australian authorities or the media.  He reportedly committed suicide in his cell in 2010.

Due to the secrecy involved in any alleged spy case, there is a relative dearth of verifiable facts regarding Prisoner X’s background and incarceration.  However the absence of such information hasn’t prevented Beaumont from advancing the desired Guardian narrative regarding alleged Israeli violations of human rights and international legal norms.

Though the Observer is supposedly the more moderate of the two Guardian Group publications, Beaumont’s framing of the spy row has included one particularly hysterical political analogy, casually leveled without even an attempt to support its validity.

One of Beaumont’s reports from Feb. 14 includes the following passage:

“The latest revelations come amid a growing outcry over the case in Israel, with some comparing the treatment of Zygier to that meted out in the Soviet Union or Argentina and Chile under their military dictatorships.”

Naturally, Beaumont doesn’t inform us who specifically is making such a comparison, and even a cursory look at the judicial process, and the rights afforded Prisoner X, makes a mockery of the charge.

First, the prisoner’s incarceration was supervised by the Israeli judiciary, the original arrest warrant was issued by the authorized court, and the proceedings were overseen by the most senior Justice Ministry officials. We also now know that Prisoner X was legally represented by a top Israeli lawyer who reported, after meeting with his client, that he was in good health, was considering a plea bargain and didn’t appear to have been mistreated.

After the prisoner was found dead in his cell roughly two years ago, the President of the Rishon Lezion Magistrates Court held a coroner’s inquest into the cause of death and, though it was determined that suicide was the cause, “the Presiding Judge sent the file to the State Attorney’s Office for an evaluation regarding issues of [possible] negligence” by prison authorities.  

Further, the prisoner’s family was notified during the course of his incarceration, and Australian officials knew of the proceedings.

Though Prisoner X likely represented a serious security risk for Israel, he was afforded due process in a manner which certainly seems consistent with democratic norms.

To evoke a comparison with the USSR – where, for instance, several million Soviet “enemies of the state” died (due to overwork, starvation, torture or summary executions) after being sent, without trial, to Gulag camps spread out across the entire country – is beyond parody.

Indeed, it’s likely that the true identity of Beaumont’s unnamed commentators comparing Israel’s handling of the spy case to that of the most repressive totalitarian regimes of the 20th century will prove to be far more elusive and mysterious than the identity of Prisoner X himself.

Related articles
May 13 2012

Observer op-ed on ‘hunger strikers’ exposes double standards on administrative detention coverage

The Guardian’s coverage of Israel’s administrative detention of a Palestinian “baker” (who, in his spare time, found time to ‘volunteer’ for Palestinian Islamic Jihad) named Khader Adnan was as one-sided as it was obsessive.  They published  five separate pieces (over a ten-day period) sympathetic to a terrorist (who went on a hunger strike to protest his detention) held due to his involvement in a movement responsible for terror attacks claiming over 200 Israeli lives since the 1990s.

(The “baker” can be seen in this video imploring his fellow Palestinians to carry out more suicide attacks against Israelis.)

Yesterday, May 12, The Observer (The Guardian’s sister publication) published an official editorial titled “Hunger strikers expose an inhuman system“.

The editorial begins:

“The disclosure that six of almost 1,600 Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike to protest against the Israeli policy of “administrative detention” are close to death has profound implications for Israel and for the stalled Middle East peace process. The rule of law and fair and proper judicial processes, where those accused of a crime may be charged and are guaranteed an opportunity to speak in their own defence in open court, is a key human right that a properly functioning democracy should guarantee even in a troubled period of peacetime.”

Vital context ignored by the editorial includes the fact that administrative detention is a practice inspired by the recognition that the criminal law’s reliance on strict rules of evidence are not suited to handle the challenges presented by terrorism.  The reasoning behind administrative detention often is based upon fear that the suspect is likely to pose a threat in the near future. So, it is meant to be preventive in nature rather than punitive. 

The administrative detention practice used to imprison Adnan is a judicial method similarly employed by other democratic states around the world, including the the EU, UK – and the U.S.

In fact, Israeli detainees are allowed judicial review, generally within eight days, while in the UK the length of time (which was 28 days until 2011) is now two weeks. The U.S. can hold terror suspects indefinitely.

A U.S. Homeland Security Affairs report concluded that (for these and other reasons) Israel’s use of administrative detention is more respectful of prisoners’ rights than in the U.S. and Britain.

Further, while Israel uses administrative detention purely to prevent acts of terror against its citizens, many countries in the EU use this type of detention for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.

The Observer editorial continues:

“Indeed, according to the UN’s special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, over the past year the number of administrative detentions has almost doubled despite the period of relative peace in Israel.”

Much like Harriet Sherwood’s false claims that rockets have only “sporadically” been fired into Israel (when, actually, 627 deadly projectiles were fired at Israeli towns in 2011 alone), the notion that Israel has “relative peace” is profoundly misleading. 

In addition to rockets from Gaza, each month there are typically dozens of terror attacks in Israel proper as well as in the West Bank. Here’s a breakdown of terror attacks in Israel for the month of April, 2012, most of which never get reported by the MSM.

West Bank and Jerusalem – 60 attacks: 2 explosive devices; 2 small arm shootings; 2 stabbing (in Jerusalem); 54 firebombs (22 in Jerusalem).

Green Line – 1 stabbing attack (in Kfar Saba).

The Observer editorial further warns:

“There is an evident risk of violence for both Israelis and Palestinians should any of the hunger strikers die.”

And, there is a much greater risk that Israeli civilians will die if the Palestinian terrorists are released, a humanitarian concern the author of this polemic clearly did not consider.

The Observer editorial continues by issuing a further warning to Israel on why they must give in to the terrorists’ demands.

“At a time when more and more observers are increasingly convinced that the two-state solution is failing, the nonviolence of this hunger strike is already deeply suggestive of what a Palestinian civil rights movement might look like – should Palestinians abandon the demand for their own self-determination and, instead, insist on full equality within a binational state.”

I guess it was lost on the author that the only reason such prisoners affiliated with violent terrorist movements are behaving ‘non-violently’ is the fact that they’re incarcerated and unarmed.  Further, ignored in the passage is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the terror suspects subscribe to an ideology intrinsically opposed to mere “self-determination” and hostile to the existence of a Jewish state within any borders. 

The “non-violent” Palestinian prisoners currently engaged in a hunger strike include the following suspects, who were re-arrested by Israeli authorities for continued terrorist activity after being released in the Shalit deal:

Abbas al-Sayyid – Senior activist in Hamas.  He was sentenced to 35 life sentences for his role in the terrorist attack in the Park Hotel terror attack in Netanya on Passover evening 2002 which killed 30.  After he was arrested, he confessed during questioning by the GSS (General Security Service) that he organized and led the terrorist attack, and even afterwards he sought two more explosive belts to commit additional attacks.  His arrest prevented a number of planned attacks on Israeli citizens.

Muhannad Shrim – Senior activist in Hamas and al-Sayyis’ assistant.  He was sentenced to 29 life sentences for his involvement in the deadly“Park Hotel” terrorist attack in 2002, which killed 30 and injured 160.  During questioning after he was arrested, he told police how he transported the terrorist bomber from his apartment before the attack.

Jamal al-Hor – Hamas activist who was sentenced to five life sentences forterrorist attacks and involvement in murder.  Among other things, he was involved in the planning of the attack at “Café Apropo” in Tel Aviv with other members of a terrorist cell he founded which came to be known as the “Tzurif squad”.  Three young women in their early 30’s were killed, one of whom was in her third month of pregnancy, and 48 others injured.

Wajdi Joda – Head of the ‘Democratic Front’ in the Nablus region.  Joda personally recruited the terrorist who committed the suicide attack at Geha interchange on December 25, 2003.  In the attack, four Israeli civilians were killed, among them three women and 21 injured, when the bomber blew himself up at a bus stop in the evening.

Finally, the editorial claims that they oppose the use of administrative detention by all countries. Yet, a quick search of the Guardian’s website demonstrates a disproportionate focus on Israel.  Out of 13 total references to “administrative detention” on their site in 2012, in some critical or pejorative manner, only one didn’t focus on Israel. 

The subtext of the Observer editorial, suggesting that releasing dangerous terrorists from prison will help the ‘peace process’, is only exceeded in absurdity and cynicism by the Guardian Group’s evidently serious suggestion that they aren’t obsessively critical of the Jewish state.

Related articles
Dec 12 2011

Observer 2011 classical music review notes “trouble” brought by Israel Philharmonic Orchestra

Fiona Maddocks’ report, “The Best classical music of 2011“, Observer, Dec. 11, began her take on the best classical performances as follows:

This year’s riots and protests to some degree penetrated the usually self-contained world of music. When word spread that the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra would play at the BBC Proms, everyone anticipated trouble.  It proved the case. Hecklers shouted in the Royal Albert Hall, bringing the Radio 3 live broadcast to a halt. Players from the London Philharmonic Orchestra, among several signatories of a letter to a national newspaper protesting at the Israel concert, were suspended, generating a second level of heated debate which is still, if behind the scenes, working itself out.

Other visiting orchestras brought purely musical pleasures…

Yes, those Israelis. Bringing trouble wherever they go.

In fact the only ones causing trouble were the Palestine Solidarity Campaign anti-Israel activists, and their few fellow political travelers, who somehow found it progressive to boycott a performance by Israeli musicians.

A handful of London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) musicians joined in calls for a cultural boycott of the Jewish state, expressing their view that the performance by the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) should have been cancelled.

Specifically, the musicians signed a letter as members of the LPO denouncing the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra as “an instrument of the country’s propaganda,” echoing Sarah Colborne, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) who characterized the Israel’s Orchestra as an organization which lends ”strategic support to Israel’s occupation.”

Yes, classical musicians performing for the national orchestra of the Jewish state are truly just  another insidious element of Zionist oppression.

PSC, for those unaware, is an organisation which continually has demonstrated itself compromised by the explicit expressions of antisemitism of its “activists” and leaders; a group so “progressive” that it invited the extremist Islamist preacher, Sheikh Raed Salah, to speak – a man who was convicted for funding Hamas, who repeatedly incited his followers to violence, and who called homosexuality “a crime” that starts “the collapse of every society”.

However, as Richard Millet noted about the shameful disruptions at the Proms in contrast with the musical pleasure appreciated by the overwhelming majority of the London audience:

The band played on, the audience inside the Royal Albert Hall loved it and screamed “More!”,

#BDSFAIL

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Sep 23 2011

The Palestinian Guardian (A photographic look at political advocacy parading as journalism)

H/T Margie

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot. – George Orwell

No, that’s certainly not true of all left-wing thought, but certainly the Guardian variety.

Robin Shepherd recently observed  the following in response to an Observer editorial (which argued that the only possible moral position is to support Palestinian UDI) and commenting more broadly on the Guardian group’s pro-Palestinian advocacy:

Anyone but a fool can see that this is a blatant attempt to avoid direct negotiations with Israel so as to obviate the need for the kind of concessions that meaningful negotiations always entail….And anyone but…an implacable anti-Zionist can see that the whole enterprise is fraught with extreme dangers both for Israel itself and for the peace and stability of the entire region. [emphasis mine]

Indeed, whether providing moral sanction to the UK riots or glorifying Palestinian violence, the Guardian has repeatedly demonstrated that they can’t be bothered with such quotidian concerns as the real world consequences of their positions.

Here are a few images from the Guardian’s glorious Palestinian campaign for statehood, as seen on their Israel page.

 

The last photo, accompanying a pro-Palestinian statehood commentary at CiF, likely is just a reminder, for the really dense, of who precisely are the people standing in the way of the Palestinians’ quest for freedom and justice. 

Finally, this is where I would have placed Guardian photos illustrating Israeli aspirations to live in peace – in a region free of terrorism, rejectionism, and antisemitism – except that there aren’t any such images to post.  I simply can’t imagine why that would be. 

Related articles
Jun 7 2010

Ignoring Aunt Isabel

My late Great Aunt Isabel used to say that if one has nothing intelligent to contribute to a discussion, it is better to remain silent and keep everyone guessing rather than open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.

Whichever editor of the Guardian’s sister paper, The Observer, wrote the June 6th editorial, he or she seems to have been deprived of an Aunt Isabel. Whilst there was nothing remotely surprising in the editorial’s content, its approach serves as a graphic illustration of the rather impressive ability of so many journalists within the Guardian stable to pontificate in a pseudo-authoritative manner about that of which they have dangerously limited understanding and in addition provides us with yet another insight into the tacky simplicity of the Guardian World View.

The editorial calls for an end to the Israeli blockade on Gaza, using several arguments as supposed justification for this course of action. The so-called ‘moral’ arguments include claims of collective punishment, 10% malnutrition among Gazans, inflated prices and ‘crushing unemployment’. As we are well aware, the distribution of aid and resources within Gaza is neither egalitarian nor straightforward. A recent article in Der Spiegel offered interesting insight into how things are actually managed on the ground there.

“People who are not in with Hamas don’t see any of the relief goods or the gifts of money,” Khadar says. On the sand dune where his house once perched, there is now an emergency shelter. The shelter is made of concrete blocks that Khadar dug from the rubble, and the roof is the canvas of a tent that provided the family with shelter for the first summer after the war. “Hamas supporters get prefabricated housing, furnishings and paid work. We get nothing,” Khadar complains.

Continue reading →

Feb 28 2010

Calm down dear

We can probably safely assume that the Observer editorial of February 21st was not actually intended to be a comedy piece, but the nameless armchair general/diplomat who wrote it certainly achieved that effect. Its anachronistic patronising tone coupled with the irony that a writer from the Guardian group – undoubtedly the main stream media’s foremost de-legitimiser of the world’s one and only Jewish state – should instruct Israel to basically calm down and listen to her elders and betters was quite hilarious, but at the same time a sad indication of just how far removed from reality the writer (and his/her newspaper) is.

The editorial opened with yet another attempt to attribute the apparent execution of Mahmoud al Mabhouh to Israel, despite the fact that with every press release from the Dubai police this is looking further from being the case. Then, some pseudo-psychology supposedly explaining the ‘fears’ and ‘paranoia’ behind Israeli policy; obviously it has not occurred to the writer that after 62 years of an Israeli state in the Middle East we might have a rather better understanding of our neighbours than the average Fleet Street journalist.

“The diplomatic challenge is to help Israel grasp how its failure even to engage with international opinion risks an isolation which will make the country much less secure.”

How are we to define ‘international opinion’? Is the writer’s intention the Muslim bloc dominated UNHRC? The sometimes frankly ridiculous EU? The USA? Or (heaven help us!) the opinions of Guardian readers and journalists? Leaving aside the fact that there cannot be said to exist a homogenous opinion held by all, our armchair general seems to think that whatever it is, ‘international opinion’ must be just and correct. Unfortunately, history has proved time and time again that the Jews cannot rely upon international appraisal of right and wrong for their safety. From Evian to Bermuda, through the 1948 American embargo on arms and Heath’s Yom Kippur embargo to name but a few, the international community’s record is sadly lacking.

Even at this very moment, the international community is allowing Hizbollah to stockpile vast amounts of Iranian weaponry under its collective nose and in direct contravention of its own UN resolution 1701. Right now the international community is failing to come up with any viable solutions to the problem of Iranian nuclear armament. For the past 44 months the International Red Cross has failed to oblige Hamas to comply with international conventions regarding prisoners of war in the case of Gilad Shalit. For eight years prior to Operation Cast Lead the international community ignored Israel’s repeated appeals regarding Hamas rocket fire on Sderot and its environs. Just this week UN envoy Serry made statements regarding the preservation of heritage sites in Hebron and Bethlehem which can only encourage those for whom ridding Judea & Samaria of Jews is merely the first step in their aspirations. If these are examples of the effects ‘international opinion’, then it is obviously both a fickle and dangerous thing.

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Dec 29 2009

Shabby Shabi

Earlier this week, AKUS wrote a humorous piece mocking how Theobald Jew, Rachel Shabi, failed to get even the most basic facts right in her atrocious coverage of the murder of Meir Chai and the Israeli response.

HonestReportingUK has also picked up on the shabby reporting of Rachel Shabi including her mischaraterization of Modi’in as a settlement.

The Observer (which is owned by the Grauniad) has to date failed to issue a correction. As HonestReportingUK recommends its readers:

Rachel Shabi’s article fails to meet journalistic standards and basic requirements for accuracy. At a very minimum The Observer should publish a correction concerning the location and status of Modi’in.

Please demand that The Observer takes the appropriate action by sending your comments to its readers’ editor – reader@observer.co.uk

We ask that you do the same.