Tag Archives: Rachel Shabi

Jan 24 2013

Guardian editorial on Israeli vote ignores their own erroneous political predictions

While we’re quite accustomed to Guardian reporters and commentators completely re-writing Israeli history, an editorial on the results of the Israeli election re-writes their own history by ignoring their entire body of work on the subject prior to the Jan. 22 vote.

The official Guardian editorial, ‘Israel: the new normal‘, is, to be sure, characteristically imperious and hubristic towards the “truculent“ Jewish state, but also concedes – based on the likelihood that Netanyahu will be forming a centrist coalition – that “the Israeli voter rejected “the far right”.

However, the editorial also briefly touches on those political observers who didn’t for a second believe that the Israeli center would hold:

“In the end, the crown prince of Israeli politics was not the dotcom millionaire who would annex 60% of the West Bank. He was neither of the far nor the national religious right, as many had confidently predicted.”

So, who precisely were these arrogant prognosticators who got it so terribly wrong?

Here’s a graphic look back at the headlines and passages published by the media group which they may be referring to.

1

‘Comment is Free contributor, Rachel Shabi

2

Guardian’s Middle East Editor, Ian Black

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Ian Black

4

Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent, Harriet Sherwood

black tweet

Ian Black is Gloomy and Inaccurate

5

Observer’s foreign affairs editor, Peter Beaumont

6

Again, Harriet Sherwood

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Harriet Sherwood cites a piece by the New Yorker’s David Remnick,  to confirm Israel’s rightward shfit

8

Guardian journalist, Jonathan Freedland

replacement

Jonathan Freedland asks why the Israeli move right – which didn’t in fact happen – was happening.

freedland

Freedland also cites wisdom of ‘New Yorker’ contributor on Israel’s “endless” move right 

new

Once again, Harriet Sherwood

mid east

Guardian’s Middle East ‘Live’ Blog post edited by John Henley 

letters

Guardian publishes two letters from readers affirming Guardian analysis of Israel’s move to the right

As Adam Garfinkle recently observed, in a thoughtful piece about coverage of the Algerian hostage crisis, much of the media often sees what they expect to see, and thus ignores all evidence that “does not fit with [their] framing of the situation”.

Whilst I’ve been following the Guardian far too long to be so foolish as to expect anything resembling a mea culpa from their editors in response to such an egregious misreading of the Israeli electorate, it would truly be a gift to their readers if they were to even briefly acknowledge the limits of their capacity to interpret Israeli political phenomena unfiltered by their preconceived, ideologically inspired, conclusions.

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Jan 22 2013

The Guardian gets it wrong: Exit polls indicate no rightward political shift in Israel

If exit polls (as reported by Times of Israel and other media outlets) turn out to be accurate, the Guardian mantra – parroted by nearly every commentator and reporter who’s been providing ‘analysis’ on the Israeli elections – warning of a hard and dangerous shift to the right will prove to have been entirely inaccurate.

In the final days before the vote, the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent Harriet Sherwood seemed certain that the elections would bring “a more hawkish and pro-settler government“, and Guardian Middle East Editor Ian Black warned that “Netanyahu [was] poised to…head a more right-wing and uncompromising government than Israel has ever seen before“.

Rachel Shabi predicted that Israel would elect “the most right-wing government in its history“, while Jonathan Freedland expressed gloom that diaspora Jews would have to watch “the centre of gravity…shift so far rightward [in Israel] that Netanyahu and even Lieberman will look moderate by comparison.”

However, based on preliminary reports, not only does it appear that there has been absolutely no rightward shift, but the makeup of the next Knesset may be slightly more left than the current one.

While in 2009 the right-wing bloc bested the center-left bloc by 65-55, the tallies released tonight after polls closed in Israel at 10 PM showed that the new Knesset will have a narrower (61-59) right-bloc advantage.    

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Screenshot from Israel’s Channel 2, showing 61-59 right-left split based on exit polling

According various exit polls, the top three parties will be Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu with 31 Knesset seats, the centrist Yesh Atid with 19, and the leftist Labor Party with between 16-18. The rightist party, Jewish Home, headed by Naftali Bennett, came in fourth and will have 13 or 14, while Shas, the ultra-orthodox party, came in fifth with 12.

Some Israeli commentators are already predicting that Binyamin Netanyahu will attempt to form a centrist or even a right-center-left coalition.

Though the final results aren’t expected to be announced until the early hours of Wednesday, a few things are certain:

The Guardian invested heavily in promoting their desired political narrative of a Jewish state lurching dangerously towards the right.  

They got it completely wrong.

They will learn absolutely nothing from their egregious miscalculation.

   

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Jan 16 2013

Guardian readers, and Holocausts real and imagined

A guest post by AKUS

The Guardian’s attempt to provide a thoughtful and appropriate article about a praiseworthy attempt by UK footballers to provide schools with a serious and sensitive Holocaust educational film documenting what they learned from a trip to Auschwitz (‘England’s football stars feature in Holocaust educational video film for schools, Jan. 14), was quickly hijacked, as we noted earlier, by Holocaust deniers.

The first comment on the thread was a plea that the footballers’ efforts (and, presumably, reader comments) not be hijacked to demand “equal time” for other atrocities:

1

Despite SantaMoniker’s plea anticipating what was to follow, in addition to the subsequent Holocaust denial comments CiF Watch captured which were eventually deleted, for one person simply denying the Holocaust wasn’t not enough. He demanded (comment now deleted) that the educational authorities invent a new one to provide some balance to the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis.

Yes – if English children are to learn about the Holocaust that actually happened, at least one reader, whose comment garnered recommendations, demanded that they learn about the non-existent Palestinian Holocaust.

2For this commenter, and those recommending his comment, as part of the campaign against Israel it is necessary to create a myth about a Palestinian history to reinforce the lethal narrative that the Jews, “who should know better”, have killed millions of Palestinians.

Visiting the thread now, about 12:40 pm UK time, the moderators have removed most of the presumably inappropriate comments. But the striking lack of empathy remains at least in this one, the last at the time this is written, which has been there for over an hour:

 3

Apparently for some people it will remain a mystery why “the jews will bang on forever about their persecution, because they are under the impression no one as suffered like they have”.  For some it is too difficult to comprehend that this mass murder was so horrific that the special term “Holocaust” had to be created to refer to it and in which modern technology was used to eliminate an entire people by killing as many as 6 million of them – and why the annoying survivors keep “banging on about it”.

It is also worth noting that while holocaust-denying comments remained on the thread for hours, beneath Rachel Shabi’s tendentious and morally pretentious commentary alleging Islamophobia by the “the power-brokers of Hollywood”, comments which didn’t abide by the Guardian Left script were quickly deleted.

The appearance of both articles on the same day, and the totally different level of comment moderation, demonstrates the bias of Guardian editors and those they employ to moderate the threads. 

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Dec 27 2012

What the Guardian won’t report: Israel wins at the UN. Israeli culture wins in the Middle East

On Dec. 21, 2012, a UN resolution on “Entrepreneurship for Development” was proposed by Israel, along with 97 co-sponsors.

The resolution encourages private and public sector entrepreneurship, “developing new technologies and innovative business models, and enabling high, sustained, inclusive and equitable economic growth while protecting the rights of workers as the best way to deal with the challenges of poverty and job creation.”

Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, said the following:

“The Israeli spirit of entrepreneurship and creativity prevailed at the UN today.  As a state that was founded in difficult circumstances, we have been able to create opportunities for talented people and have become an enterprising superpower. Creating a culture of entrepreneurship can work miracles and drive economies forward. Investing in human resources is a real message that Israel conveys to the developing world.”

The UN adopted it by a vote of 141 in favor to 31 against, with 11 abstentions.

The Guardian – which continually informs their readers when the UN censures the Jewish state – hasn’t reported the Israeli sponsored resolution.

Why does it matter?

If you recall, there was a huge row over comments during the US Presidential campaign suggesting that Israeli culture is a major factor in the state’s economic and social prowess in the region.  

Many commentators on the far left (including ‘Comment is Free’ contributor Rachel Shabi) scolded those who would suggest a connection between culture and success – imputing racism to such arguments.

Shabi characterized the broader narrative that Israeli culture may be more conducive to success than Palestinian culture as “standard-issue superiority complex racism”.

To those so easily manipulated by au courant post-colonial causation, the stubborn reality of Israeli success (as with Western success more broadly) must be explained by Western hegemony or other global injustices.

To the far-left crowd which occupies the Guardian, the word “racism” – typically understood as a belief in the inherent, immutable, biological or genetic inferiority of a group, race, or ethnicity – has been defined so expansively as to even impute such bigotry to those observing intuitively that some cultural habits are necessarily inimical to economic achievement and social development.

Now, take a look at the countries who voted against the Israeli resolution advocating “entrepreneurship for development”.

Algeria, Bahrain, Bolivia, Comoros, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Nicaragua, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Yemen.

Do you see a pattern?

A strong majority of these states are plagued by poverty, under-development and despotism – and would greatly benefit from the ‘development through entrepreneurship’ growth strategy recommended by Israel.

Unfortunately, the majority of these states are opposed to Israel’s very existence, and some have a shameful history of having ethnically cleansed their Jewish citizens in the twenty years following 1948.

The resolution, based on the most intuitive reasoning, was opposed because it was the Jewish state which proposed it.

By obsessing over Israel, refusing to concentrate on the real problems plaguing their societies, and failing to instill the liberal cultural habits necessary to alleviate poverty and throw off the yoke of tyranny – as well as ignoring the lessons on how a small, innovative, Jewish country accomplished so much in just six and a half decades - they ensure that little progress will likely be achieved.

Those in the West who continue  to indulge such nations in the fantasy that their anti-Zionist delusions are justified, even righteous, are complicit in condemning millions to poverty, tyranny and hopelessness.

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Dec 9 2012

Guardian editorial takes the side of Morsi (or Mubarak?)

To get an idea of just how outrageous a recent Guardian editorial (on Dec. 7) defending President Morsi and criticizing the liberal opposition truly was, here are two tweets by commentators with otherwise unimpeachable Guardian Left credentials:

Here’s Guardian Cairo correspondent Jack Shenker.

Here’s ‘Comment is Free’ contributor Rachel Shabi:

Here are a few excerpts of the Guardian editorial in question:

[The crisis in Egypt] is not about the proposed constitution,

…

[The opposition is engaged in] a power battle in which the aim is to unseat a democratically elected president, and to prevent a referendum and fresh parliamentary elections being held, both of which Islamists stand a good chance of winning. Morsi, for his part, is determined that both polls be held as soon as possible to reaffirm the popular mandate which he still thinks he has.

…

The opposition on the other hand has never accepted the results of freely held elections, parliamentary or presidential, and is doing everything to stop new ones being held

So, the Guardian, when faced with a choice between a Muslim Brotherhood which is ideologically opposed to true democracy and individual freedoms – a political predisposition clearly on display in Morsi’s recent decision to assume dictatorial powers - and a political opposition which is at least marginally progressive, chose the reactionary Islamists.

The following post by a Lebanese writer, who blogs at Karl reMarks, is titled ‘The Guardian’s Editorial on Egypt Re-Imagined‘, and is based on the same Dec. 7 Guardian editorial re-imagined as if it were written in January 2011, with minor changes like replacing Morsi with Mubarak.

As the crisis in Egypt develops, it is becoming increasingly clear what it is not about. It is not about the elections, or the economic crisis, or Egypt’s relationship with Israel. Nor is it about the arrangements for a successor to the president. Nor even is it about the temporary but absolute powers that the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, assumed for himself – for a mere thirty years, and which will lapse the moment the Egyptian people stop making a fuss.

Urging the opposition to shun dialogue, Mohamed ElBaradei said that Mubarak had lost his legitimacy. So the target of the opposition is not the constitution, or the emergency law, but Mubarak himself. What follows is a power battle in which the aim is to unseat a democratically elected president, with 88.6% of the vote, and to prevent fresh parliamentary elections being held, both of which the ruling NDP stand a good chance of winning. Mubarak, for his part, is determined that both polls be held as soon as possible to reaffirm the popular mandate which he still thinks he has.

In weighing who occupies the moral high ground, let us start with what happened on Wednesday night. That is when the crisis, sparked by yet another Mubarak decree when he was at the height of his domestic popularity over the role he played in stopping the yet another Israeli assault on Gaza, turned violent. The NDP party sanctioned a violent assault on a peaceful encampment of opposition supporters in Tahrir Square. But lethal force came later, and the NDP was its principle victims. NDP offices were attacked up and down the country, while no other party offices were touched. This does not fit the opposition’s narrative to be the victims of state violence. Both sides are victims of violence and the real perpetrators are their common enemy.

Mubarak undoubtedly made grave mistakes. In pre-empting decisions by the courts to derail his reforms, his decrees were cast too wide. His laws have many faults, although none are set in stone. The opposition on the other hand has never accepted the results of freely held elections, parliamentary or presidential, and is doing everything to stop new ones being held.

The Guardian is not only supporting a racist, antisemitic, anti-Christian, anti-West Islamist movement, but are remaining loyal even when a more liberal alternative is possible. 

You don’t need to agree with our critique of the paper’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict to acknowledge that the ‘Guardian Left’ ideology in many ways resembles the reactionary right more than anything truly progressive?

Oct 31 2012

Rachel Shabi has “fresh hope” that the Jewish state may cease to exist

Perhaps someone needs to remind Rachel Shabi, and ‘Comment is Free’ editors, that the Peel Commission has adjourned, the Jewish nation is a wonderful reality, and the state’s radical bi-national reconstitution will never, ever be countenanced by its citizens.

Shabi’s Oct. 23 piece, ‘The death of the Israel-Palestine two-state solution brings fresh hope‘, pronounces the two-state principle dead, a victim, she claims, of the impossibility of removing “half a million Jewish settlers and infrastructure from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

However, this line of argument is absurd, as it implies that nothing other than the evacuation of 100% of Israelis from the territories would achieve a two-state solution.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s proposal in 2008 would have given the Palestinians an independent, contiguous state, with 94% of the West Bank (plus land swaps in pre-1967 Israel to make up for the 6% of the WB which would remain in Israel’s control), 100% of Gaza, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Tens of thousands of Jews would have been uprooted.

Yet, Olmert’s peace plan, the details of which have been confirmed by U.S. leaders active in the talks, were rejected by Mahmoud Abbas, who walked away from the deal - just as Yasser Arafat did in response to Ehud Barak’s offer of statehood in 2000.

Here’s a map representing the proposed deal.

As former U.S. Secretary of State Condi Rice wrote in her autobiography:

“Although Palestinian negotiators spoke publicly about compromise on refugees privately they spoke of the “right of return” as a matter of individual choice that would have to be extended to each of over seven million people and with Palestinians retaining the open-ended right to try to negotiate additional “returns” beyond any number initially agreed upon in a peace treaty.

Abbas was simply unprepared to accept any offer that did not allow for the “right of return.” [emphasis added]

The Palestinians’ trickery on what they were actually willing to accept concerning the “refugees” completely fooled the Guardian in their contextualization of the ‘Palestine Papers’ in 2011.

Further, their maximalist, unlimited demand for a so-called “right of return” (for Palestinians refugees from 1948 and millions of their descendants) by Palestinian leaders  is perhaps the greatest indication that their “two-state” support is merely a chimera – that Palestinian leadership have never reconciled themselves to the continued existence of a Jewish state.  

A “right of return” for “7 million Palestinians”, back to places in Israel where the overwhelming majority have actually never lived, necessarily negates Israel’s continued existence as a state for the Jewish people.  

In her CiF piece, Shabi writes:

“…a new generation of Palestinian activists, in part inspired by the Arab uprisings in the region, are bypassing territorial demands to focus on civil rights and freedoms.

Shared-space [binational] alternatives have grassroots momentum, but no leadership support. “

Of course, the term “grassroots momentum” is one of those intentionally blurry words meant, in this case, to avoid having to acknowledge that, the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis would fiercely reject a bi-national solution. (Per a recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, 86% of Israeli Jews reject such a plan.)

Those who advocate for a one-state solution are either parroting the narrative of Palestinian rejectionists, or are indifferent to the fact that any attempt to impose a one-state “solution” would be met by fierce Jewish resistance, inspired by the historical lessons Jews have painfully learned on the political necessity and ethical imperative of Jewish sovereignty.

Such Utopian dreams represent a recipe for endless war – and certainly nothing resembling peace. 

The Jewish state has been re-established in our historic homeland, and those wishing to undo 1948 should get over it.  

Their malign fantasies are not going to be realized.

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Oct 28 2012

You don’t need to know Hebrew to write Israeli history backwards at the Guardian

A guest post by AKUS

As you know, Hebrew is written from right to left, not left to right. But the mere fact that the letters are arranged in the opposite direction should not imply that the logic is.

Apparently, however, when writing to the Guardian, it helps to transcribe the letters from left to right, but have the logic go backwards.

In a recent letter to the Guardian, arguing for a two-state Israeli-Palestinian solution against the one-state solution proposed in an article by   Rachel Shabi declaring the “Two-State Solution  Dead”, Dr. John Jennings wrote (my emphasis added):

“The opening sentence in Rachel Shabi’s article (The death of the two-state solution gives fresh hope, 24 October) underlines its central weakness. We are told: “We could argue who killed it but what’s the point.” But exaggeration aside, this is precisely what we should do, since it immediately highlights the principal cause: A COMPLETE ABSENCE of a sustainable high-powered PALESTINIAN resistance movement on the ground for over TWO DECADES and counting.

The literature on resistance in asymmetric conflicts over the last 100 years shows that, for the weaker protagonist, up to 50% of such conflicts are successful, not so much in the classical Castro sense, but more with respect to a meaningful and substantive reconfiguration of the power between the parties. Then and only then can negotiations become “realistic”, as the stronger party, succumbing to the cost factor, inevitably becomes attuned to the reality of a robust protagonist.

A classical paradigm is the Vietnam war, but PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE, especially in the late 1980s, is even more pertinent, since it effectively drove RABIN to the negotiating table, AS HE HIMSELF ADMITTED. The great pity was that Arafat threw away all the advantages of this initial success by disbanding the very resistance that prompted the Palestinian breakthrough in the first place.

In my view, a comprehensive, robust, nonviolent core resistance on the ground in Palestine, coupled with an international campaign akin to the boycott movement, in conjunction with an equally robust negotiating strategy will lead to an independent Palestinian state.”

Now, how about this version?

“We could argue who killed it but what’s the point.” But exaggeration aside, this is precisely what we should do, since it immediately highlights the principal cause: THE EMERGENCE OF A high-powered JEWISH/ZIONIST/ISRAELI resistance movement on the ground for over SIX DECADES and counting that led to an Independent Israeli state that could not be coerced into accepting an Arab fiat creating a Palestinian state under conditions unacceptable to Israel.

The literature on resistance in asymmetric conflicts over the last 100 years shows that, THE VASTLY OUTNUMBERED JEWISH STATE, was the best example of how to create a meaningful and substantive reconfiguration of the power between the parties.

A classical paradigm is NOT the Vietnam war, waged by the Vietnamese against foreign powers. ISRAELI FORTITUDE, especially in the late 1980s, is even more pertinent, since it effectively drove EGYPT AND JORDAN to the negotiating table, as THEY THEMSELVES admitted.

Any impartial reading of the last 64 years, since the State of Israel was founded, and also the 30 -40 years before that, must show that Israelis pulled off a textbook example of using self-reliance, economic development, willingness to sacrifice and flexibility in negotiations to achieve goals the Palestinians have never been able  to achieve. If one seeks a classic example of “asymmetric resistance” in the face of a vastly superior enemy, it is Israel’s ability to resist conquest by its Arab enemies.

Jennings’ call for the Palestinians to emulate the Vietnamese in order to create a Palestinian state is ludicrous and a complete misreading of the two conflicts. There is not the slightest resemblance to the Vietnam situation. In Vietnam, an existing nation beat off the armies of foreign powers led by the USA that came from thousands of miles away for ideological reasons (anti-Communism) to support a corrupt regime that had taken over half the country.  Obviously, Israel in this scenario is not in any sense a remote country under no threat from its opponent  like the USA and its allies in Vietnam, and certainly is not trying to support the corrupt and divided Palestinian regime. Moreover, Israel is not going to go away when the going gets tough.

Rather than having a “robust negotiating strategy” the Palestinians have either walked away from negotiations or refused to negotiate with a stronger power, Israel.  When Jennings proposes “a comprehensive, robust, nonviolent core resistance on the ground” he is dreaming. The only person to seriously attempt to implement this has been Salam Fayyad. He is regarded almost if not in fact as a traitor to “the cause”, which is really the destruction of Israel, not the creation of Palestinian State on the West Bank (and possibly in Gaza). The concept of “resistance”, in the Palestinian context, means the use of terror tactics against Israeli civilians, not non-violence.

Furthermore, Jennings’ proposal for a sort of “asymmetric” jiu-jitsu, i.e. an “international campaign akin to the boycott movement,” has been tried and like the BDS cult, has failed. The Palestinians can go to the UN as often as they like, but it is not the UN they must negotiate with, and the UN will not force Israel to withdraw from the West Bank in its entirety which is the only thing that might satisfy the Palestinians.

The Palestinians are not the Vietnamese or Cubans. They have not been a “robust opponent” able to “drive”  Israel to the negotiating table. On the contrary, Israel has begged the obdurate Palestinians to negotiate – which means accepting some compromises for both sides – and they have refused. One could argue, I suppose, that Israel has not been able to “drive” the Palestinians to the negotiating table – is this a measure of Palestinian power and success? It certainly does not seem to be.

The problem the Palestinians have is not how to “drive” Israel to the negotiating table. The most “unrealistic” aspect of the Palestinians’ aspirations for a Palestinian state (other than their desire to take over Israel) is that they have not learned how to say “yes” when offered 95% of the West Bank. But perhaps the problem is that what lies behind the “one-state” concept is that it is not even 100% of the West Bank that would satisfy them – it is 100% of Israel that they dream of taking.

 Israel is not America, the Palestinians are not a good example of a resistance or national liberation movement but Israel is, and they have no need of a “robust resistance”. If it is an “independent state” they want, as Jennings seems to believe, they can have 95% of what they want tomorrow if they can only bring themselves to take it.

What is becoming increasing apparent, hence the futile calls for the impossible “one-state solution”, is that the Palestinians are incapable of creating the conditions under which they will achieve a Palestinian state on the West Bank.  The conclusion seems to be that this is not what they want even if Jennings  and others think it is what they should want.

On the other hand, despite Shabi, since the “one state solution” requires Israelis to agree to it, they are unlikely to get that either. If one accepts that their leaders understand that, and are unwilling to negotiate with Israel, one can only assume that they do not, in fact, want an independent state. The true “one-state” for the West Bankers is federation with Jordan – a logical idea which is becoming more openly discussed by West Bank intellectuals and Jordanian leaders. The West Bank leadership should say so, and open negotiations with Jordan, with Israel entering the final status negotiations under the terms of the existing peace agreement with Jordan once those two parties have formulated their proposals.

As long as you can write the logic backwards, reinvent history, draw false analogies and make improbable claims about how to create a Palestinian state other than simply saying “yes” it appears that, like Dr. Jennings, you too can have a letter published in the Guardian.

Oct 11 2012

Millett: Holocaust analogies and calls for Israel’s destruction at SOAS’ Centre for Palestine Studies

Cross posted by Richard Millett

Naomi Foyle, Rachel Shabi, Bidisha, Miranda Pennell, Selma Dabbagh last night.

The London Middle East Institute (LMEI), which is based at the School of Oriental and African Studies, used to give serious lectures. Not any more. The recently established Centre for Palestine Studies (CPS) now sits like a cuckoo in the nest of the LMEI.

Last night the first LMEI lecture of the new academic year was presented under the auspices of CPS. Palestine Now: Writers Respond was all about attacking Israel; nothing about studying the Palestinians.

Bidisha (The Guardian), Rachel Shabi (The Guardian), Selma Dabbagh (author), Miranda Pennell (film-maker) and Naomi Foyle (British Writers in Support of Palestine) had simply come to talk about how to fight for “the Palestinian cause” and against “Hasbarah”.

New students heard calls for the destruction of Israel dressed up as justice for the Palestinians, racist calls to boycott Israel and a totally gratuitous Holocaust analogy. Shame on LMEI for allowing this.

Dabbagh, Pennell and Foyle said they supported BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) against Israel.

Dabbagh explained that she writes in order to get more people involved in the Palestinian cause and told of how she refused to speak at Jewish Book Week (JBW), when asked to, because of its Israeli government funding.

Bidisha suggested it might have been better for Dabbagh to go to JBW and get her message across to the audience, but Dabbagh said she felt she couldn’t break the call to boycott Israel.

Dabbagh, who is also a lawyer, has been living in Bahrain from where she said she has been helping to sue, not the Bahrain police, but the British police!

Bemusingly, Shabi said that she agreed with the ‘D’ of BDS (divestment) but not the ‘B’ (cultural boycott) which she viewed as a “witch-hunt”. Bidisha said she was equally “ambivalent” about the boycott.

During the Q&A I asked whether any of the panelists had accepted funding from a government whose actions they disagreed with and what the panelists were doing about the oppression of gays, women and dissidents under Hamas rule. I said BDS was racist and that it calls for the destruction of Israel by demanding “the return of Palestinian refugees”.

Naomi Foyle refused to accept that Israel would be destroyed by BDS. Using a crude Holocaust analogy she explained:

“After the Holocaust Jews, who suffered in the Holocaust, were allowed reparations. They had their property returned to them. They were allowed to sue. Of course they were allowed to do it. That was their right. The Palestinian refugees, whose population has mushroomed, are living in squalid conditions, horrendous conditions with no passports, no freedom of movement, no sanitation, no hospital care. These people have keys to their family homes and their right to these family homes must be recognised. Once that right is recognised then the negotiations can begin on what this means for Israel as a state; whether it will become one state, whether it will become a secular state. No one is calling for the destruction of Israel. Is South Africa destroyed now because the blacks in South Africa have human rights? Israel is being asked to evolve.”

Obviously Israel would be destroyed as a Jewish state, but it would have been decent for another panelist to have pointed out to Foyle that it was slightly impossible for 6,000,000 Jews to have had their property returned because they were actually dead, having been murdered by the Nazis. However, no one uttered a word; not even Shabi.

And ignoring that more than 50 rockets had landed in Israel on Monday alone without condemnation from any quarter Foyle stated:

“Palestine is shrinking by the day. We have to say no, we have to put moral pressure on. Palestinians haven’t been allowed, in international opinion, to fight back with armed resistance. That’s been a complete disaster for them.”

Foyle continued that BDS doesn’t call for Israelis to go unfunded by the Israeli government, as “that’s their right as taxpayers”. She said it merely calls for Israelis not to leave Israel to perform and for performers not to go to Israel.

She said she had taken funding from the Canadian and British governments to support her writing and education, and then added:

“If there was a boycott of Great Britain that had any hope of helping the people of Afghanistan or Iraq and all I was being asked to do was not travel abroad to a foreign festival; it’s a no brainer.”

This all goes to show that boycotting Israel has nothing to do with objecting to settlements. It is a racist boycott of Israel per se.

Anti-Israel activists neatly try to evade accusations of racism by claiming that “Palestinian society” has called for BDS. In reality, such a call has merely come from a large group of tiny anti-Israel NGOs posing as “Palestinian society”.

Shabi, who described herself as a British/Israeli/Iraqi, then told of her research for her book which involved her seeing how easy it is to buy a house in a settlement and how she had to perfect a “back story” to do this. She said she knew her back story was perfect when her neighbour asked why she was disguised as a “British Jewish religious tourist”.

Meanwhile, Dabbagh admitted that she was “uncomfortable with the way women and gays are treated by Hamas”, but blamed Israel’s “siege” for keeping Hamas in power.

And Bidusha, addressing me directly, said that Palestinian children are brutalised by “the siege of Gaza”. I replied that Egypt is also conducting “the siege”. She had no answer.

As for the future, Shabi concluded that there was already “one-state on the ground” and the discussion in Israel was now just centred around whether it will be a left-wing or right-wing state. This is, of course, pure fantasy from Shabi.

While this brainwashing of new students was taking place a brave girl, Malala Yousufzai, who is 14, was still recovering in hospital after being shot in the neck and head by the Taliban for standing up for women’s education in Pakistan.

SOAS’ students should look to the likes of Yousufzai, not to phony human rights activists, for inspiration in fighting against real injustice.

Related articles
Aug 3 2012

Despite Rachel Shabi’s claims, political culture does affect social and economic outcomes

A guest post by Gidon Ben-Zvi, who blogs at Jerusalem State of Mind

As it turns out, Mitt Romney – and, of course, the rich Jewish donors who support him – are racist.

The presumptive Republican presidential candidate has invoked the wrath of Palestinian officials for suggesting that Israel’s culture is superior to the Palestinians’.

By claiming that Israel’s economic prosperity is due in part to culture and “the hand of providence”, Romney is apparently buying into a “… standard-issue, superiority-complex racism,” according to  CiF contributor Rachel Shabi’s latest piece, ‘Mitt Romney’s insult-the-world tour excels on picking on the Palestinians‘, July 31.

Shabi sums things up by writing that “…Romney thinks that Palestinians are screwed because Israelis have a better culture and a better god.”

The sad fact is that much of the Muslim and Arab world is in a state of economic malaise—fueled by high unemployment, massive illiteracy and anemic GDPs. These societies are in the vice-like grip of a cultural hostility toward religious freedom and pluralism . As a result, the potential of  such nations is shackled.

 It can’t be denied that many of the countries with the worst records on religious freedom – Burma, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, the Maldives, North Korea, Sudan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, etc. – also have terrible economies.

And the importance of freedom of conscience to the stability and economic well-being of the state is based on historical precedent. Rising prosperity across Europe during the 17th century had a significant impact on religious mentalities. The flourishing of trade and rising living standards occurred alongside the rapid growth of religious sects, undercutting the fear that spiritual disunity invited divine judgment. Whereas prosperity and toleration had once been seen as mortal enemies, the economic dynamism of religiously tolerant states provided a new paradigm: prosperity and religious freedom were now seen as twins.

Yet, despite this strong, documented correlation, Ms Shabi insists on blaming the economic plight of the Palestinian people on “… Israeli restrictions on access to markets and to natural resources [that] continue to be a prerequisite for the expansion of the Palestinian private sector.”

To back up her assertion, Ms Shabi rolls out the big guns: World Bank and IMF. Yet citing these organizations is quite problematic.

The World Bank has had a tendency over the years to base its reports on the state of the Palestinian economy on the claims and allegations of organizations with a long history of one-sided and inaccurate reporting, reflecting political and ideological bias in relation to Israel. Some World Bank reports about the Palestinian economy contain no original research by this august body.

Regarding the IMF, Ms Shabi must have forgotten that it was Israel that in early 2012 sought a $1 billion IMF bridging loan for the Palestinian Authority, but  was turned down because the organization feared setting a precedent of making IMF money available to non-state entities.

As it turns out, it is in Israel’s own national interest to avoid the security deterioration that could accompany a financial collapse of the government in the West Bank.

Now, Ms Shabi is correct in her assumption that the Palestinian economy could get a boost if restrictions on the movements of Palestinians were removed.

However, Ms Shabi’s depiction of a victimized Palestinian populace is grossly lacking in historical context. Like any other country, Israel must balance humanitarian and economic needs with the very real security concerns of its citizens. Barriers, checkpoints and other limitations on mobility are an unfortunate yet vital necessity. 

Until the security dynamics significantly change, however, the best that can be hoped for is the easing of restrictions on movement – dependent, of course, on the diminution of security threats. And Israel has made concerted efforts to oblige.

In 2010, for example, Israel issued more than 651,000 entry permits to West Bank residents wishing to travel to Israel, an increase of 42 percent over 2009. In 2009-10, Israel removed more than 200 roadblocks and reduced the number of manned checkpoints from 41 to 14.

Ms Shabi’s commentary is one part ‘blame Israel’ rhetoric and one part ‘culture of victimization’ doublespeak.

For decades, it’s been an article of faith around Western halls of academe to view the local populations of the Middle East Arabs as the hapless victims of alien encroachment, and to blame the region’s endemic malaise on Western political and cultural imperialism.

Such a warped worldview does a terrible injustice to Palestinians and other oppressed peoples, who must live under the yoke of tin pan dictators and autocrats who dismiss political and religious freedoms as ethnocentric luxuries.

Until a culture of prosperity grounded in freedom takes root across the Arab and Muslim world, hundreds of millions of people will continue to wallow in poverty and intellectual stagnation. The human need to blame someone for this horrific fate will perpetuate the culture of outrage towards the ‘other’ that has been molded and used by corrupt leaders to channel their citizens’ justifiable rage outward.

Related articles
Aug 1 2012

Rachel Shabi reveals the hidden truth about “superiority-complex” racist Jews

Though I’ll likely never personally be rich enough to be characterized as a ‘wealthy Jewish donor’, according to Rachel Shabi I evidently have what it takes to be a “superiority-complex” racist Jew.

Shabi’s latest piece, Mitt Romney’s ‘insult the world’ tour excels on picking on the Palestinians, included this strap line:

Shabi suggests that Mitt Romney was inspired by the desire to please rich, racist Jews in suggesting that culture partly explains Israeli success and that underdevelopment in the PA may have something to do with cultural and political mores.

Indeed, per Shabi, Jews are responsible both for Palestinian failures and Mitt Romney’s racism. 

Here are the choice quotes from Shabi’s piece:

On Jewish donors/Jewish racism

“Over a £16,000-a-plate campaign fundraiser breakfast with Jewish donors in Jerusalem, Romney aired his deep thoughts on “the dramatic, stark difference in economic vitality” between the Palestinian and Israeli economies. These thoughts were obtained by reading books, he prefixed, before surmising that Israeli accomplishments were down to “at least culture and a few other things” – oh, and also, “the hand of providence”. So Romney thinks that Palestinians are screwed because Israelis have a better culture…

The presidential hopeful doubtless believes this standard-issue, superiority-complex racism – and that it’s what his donors want to hear.” [emphasis added]

Palestinians not to blame for social/economic failures

“Perhaps, when the Republican visitor noted that Palestinians were stumped by “a few other things” he was just using internationally recognised shorthand?

Maybe he’s parsing for “things” like the checkpoints, barriers and roadblocks that thwart movement of Palestinians and products – and thereby railroad any attempts to revive an economy.”

…

“In addition to those books, Romney could read any number of reports about Gaza, including from the IMF and the World Bank, which state that its crippled economy is down to Israel’s five-year blockade.”

Israeli success is not based on merit

“And he couldn’t possibly have referenced “things” without it also alluding to America’s generous aid package to Israel, the largest annual recipient of US financial assistance and whose military aid was upped just prior to Romney’s visit.”

Yes, of course, the ‘root cause’ of Israel’s security measures are clearly not related to the violent intifada which claimed over 1100 Israeli lives and maimed thousands more, but rather the hideous spite of a chosen people’s might.

The clearly ‘supremacist’ idea that Jewish culture may imbue the state with certain advantages must be defeated.

Israel’s international advantages in biotech start-ups, the percentage of its citizens with university education, the number of patents per person and scientific papers per capita - as with its democratic institutions which have weathered every political and military storm for over 64 years – are clearly connected to the largess of the indulgent West.  

Israel didn’t build it. 

We simply must not hold the terrorist group which Palestinians voted into office even minimally responsible for the situation in Gaza. The ‘H Word’ must never be uttered.  Such a simple-minded causation – between Hamas’ firing of Iranian imported rockets into Israel and the blockade – must be denied at all costs.

The deluded few which suggest that culture matters – those of us so intellectually impoverished – must invariably possess a distorted understanding of what the word “racism” means.

Those of us not endowed with a piercing intellect have misguidedly assumed that the term denotes the belief that some people are inherently or biologically inferior. Consequently, nothing they do can alter their inevitable backwardness – culture being malleable, while biology is not.

Shabi demonstrates that only the Semitic 1% haughtily insist on the role culture has played in Jewish survival (and success) throughout history, and the deleterious effects on Palestinians by theirs. 

Similarly, our false consciousness prevents us from granting Palestinians – the recipient of more than $2 billion per year from the international community - a moral pass, a furlough from critical scrutiny.

The extreme ‘right’ thoughts which haunt our political imagination must be what give rise to our outrage over the PA’s incitement and crude antisemitic hate advanced in their mosques, state-controlled media and schools.

And, it certainly has to be our reactionary values which inform a stubborn insistence that those who advocate for ‘Palestine’ should also demand that the PA create genuinely democratic institutions, a free press and independent judiciary; that Palestinians take steps to improve their human rights record towards women, gays and religious minorities. 

Overall, our supreme political pathos quite chillingly expects the same moral performance from Palestinians as they do of Israeli Jews.

Isn’t it clear that we ‘superiority-complex’, racist Jews truly possess crazy and dangerous ideas?!

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Jun 7 2012

Stunning moral failure of anti-Zionist left: Rachel Shabi compares Zionism to European fascism

Rachel Shabi

The comment (attributed to August Bebel) that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools can be extended to many other kinds of cheap and superficial errors which people make.

“The baffled, frustrated and the bewildered”, wrote Walter Russell Mead, “seeks a grand, simplifying hypothesis that can bring some kind of ordered explanation to a confusing world.”

Since 2002 Rachel Shabi has published over 100 essays at ‘Comment is Free’ on the topic of Israel, and the themes and memes have been as predictable as they have been facile.

Not only are Israelis almost never the objects of Shabi’s  sympathetic imagination; it is as if she, born to Iraqi Jewish parents, has gone out of her way to express sympathy for the Palestinian other. She even, in a ‘Comment is Free’ essay, mocked Israel’s efforts to “label” Hamas a terrorist organization.

When covering the painful withdrawal of 8,000 Israelis from Gaza in 2005 she asked:

“As Jewish settlers were evacuated from the Gaza Strip in August, the media caught every tearful, defiant move on camera. But how much was real and how much stage-managed?” [emphasis added]

Even a story about Jewish refugees from Arab lands was remarkably callous towards the 870,000 or so Jews who were ethnically cleansed by Arab governments, employing the following maddening moral obfuscation:

“There are significant points to make about the Jewish experience in Arab lands, caught in the crossfire of both Zionism and Arab nationalism”

Shabi’s desired narrative was clear: Jews were expelled from lands they lived for often thousands of years not by systemic expulsion by antisemitic Muslim rulers, but twin abstractions.

Typically, not only does Shabi question Israeli policies but – adopting the tropes of an increasingly hysterical Israeli far left – she often frames such political phenomena as inconsistent with democracy itself.

So a story about gender injustice on Haredi buses is not, for Shabi, an issue of women’s rights which needs to be addressed, but rather a societal fissure so serious as to be fundamentally at odds with Israel’s “claim” to be a “democracy”: Israel’s treatment of women is hardly that of a democracy (December 23rd, 2011).

Similarly, in her work at ‘Comment is Free’, the word antisemitism is almost never used – which is truly remarkable when you consider that she’s reporting in a region awash in the most crude and endemic Jew hatred.  In fact the only time I could find an allusion to the term antisemitism was in the context of an attack on an unfair use of it.

In a piece defending those accused of antisemitism, Shabi wrote:

“The real danger in all this is that the rush to throw charges of antisemitism at people who criticise Israel will desensitize vigilance over the real thing.”

Strangely, Shabi never got around to telling us what “the real thing” is.  Nor was I able to find any essay she had written at ‘CiF’ (or in any other publication for that matter) where she elucidated on the dangers of “real” antisemtism in the Arab world – or anywhere else.

Shabi’s themes at ‘Comment is Free’ include:

  • Israelis oppressing Palestinians
  • Israelis oppressing its Arab citizens
  • Israelis oppressing its minorities
  • Narratives attempting to undermine Israel’s democratic advantages
  • Israelis oppressing foreign workers
  • Israel moving to the extreme right politically

Shabi’s latest post at ‘Comment is Free’ adheres to these last two bullet points and is titled “Far-right Europeans and Israel: this toxic alliance spells trouble“, June 6th.

Here are some of Shabi’s themes:

  • Israeli TV reported that Haifa’s council had warned local businesses that they risked losing their licences if they employed African refugees

In the U.S. it is quite common for companies to be fined for hiring illegal immigrants.

  • So far, Israel’s approach has been to build a steel fence on the Egyptian border and a giant detention centre in the south and to pass a law which allows the detention of migrants for up to three years. 

By point of comparison, in the U.S. (even under Obama) over 400,000 illegal immigrants still face likely deportation in the near future and more than 1.1 million people have been deported in the last three years.  Reasonable people can agree or disagree with immigration policy, but such border controls have nothing to do with fascism. (Also, the U.S. will eventually have 700 miles of security fences along its border with Mexico to deter illegal immigration.)

  • There have been racist remarks about the African migrants by a couple of politicians.

Obviously, even one racist remark is one too many. But what democratic country in the world can claim that no such bigoted comments have at times been expressed by its political leaders?

  • Far-right Israeli ministers are basically repeating the anti-immigration, anti-Muslim sentiments of rising far-right parties in Europe. 

Here, Shabi’s moral inversion is simply stunning. Israel is, by nature, a state with a Jewish character: one which fosters Jewish immigration. That is and will always be its raison d’être.

Evidently Shabi hasn’t noticed that the Muslim Middle East has not been too hospitable to the Jews in the region – a hatred which continues to this very day and often manifests as an antisemitism without Jews even in nations such as Jordan and Egypt where there exists a cold peace.  

The most ominous cognitive dynamic of our times is – as scholar Robert Wistrich has written in his book ‘A Lethal Obsession‘ – that antisemitism in the Muslim world today is equal to that which existed in Nazi Germany at its worst. It is a sad fact that so many lack the courage to confront the modern manifestation of  such lethal Judeophobia.  

But, here is where Shabi’s most hideous moral pivot begins:

“The sight of Jewish Israelis – sons and daughters of refugees – echoing, pretty much window-smashing act by act and racist line by line, scenes from historic anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe, isn’t an easy one”

Not an easy sight, perhaps, because it is an utterly preposterous proposition.  

The analogy between anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe and a recent spate of anti immigrant hostility is as ahistorical as Nazi analogies.  The word “pogrom” refers to massive (typically government organized) violent attacks against Jews which date back at least to the Crusades such as the Pogrom of 1096 in France and Germany, as well as the massacres of Jews at London and York in 1189–1190. Pogroms against Jewish communities in Europe and N. Africa killed tens of thousands in the 19th and 20th centuries. [Elon, Amos (2002). The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933. Metropolitan Books. pp. 102–105.]

To say that nothing even remotely on this scale occurred in Tel Aviv recently is an understatement of immense proportions.

But Shabi is merely following the playbook of committed anti-Zionists. It is never enough to criticize Israel or to propose solutions to social problems or inequities. She must completely delegitimize, demonize and characterize the modern Jewish state as morally beyond the pale – even on par with the 20th century’s other odious ‘ism’s’.  Israel’s sins are too immense to be merely atoned for; the state itself is irredeemable. Zionism itself must be overcome.  

The suggestion that the Jewish state is lurching towards fascism is, according to Shabi, a dovetailing agenda between European fascists and far-right Israeli nationalists. This toxic arrangement represents a near perfect example of the cognitive warfare in which we are currently engaged: dupes such as Shabi demonizing and delegitmizing Zionism as an organic obstacle to progress whilst ignoring the true danger of fascism, in its Islamist guise – a movement by definition hostile to liberal values on women, gays, democracy and religious tolerance.  

Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi – the spiritual leader of perhaps the most popular Islamist movement in the Middle East – per a recently released WikiLeaks cable, called on Allah to literally kill every last Jew on earth.

The silence of Shabi and her political fellow travelers in the face of such chilling, fascist, extreme right, annihilationist antisemitism gives lie to the cliche of ‘never again’, as well as the anti-racism mantle they claim.  

CiF Watch is not merely a blog which aims to combat antisemitism and the assault on Israel’s legitimacy at the Guardian.  

Our broader mission is to elucidate on the intellectual battles which rage below the surface of the debate. We’re engaged in a fight for intellectual clarity against enemies of the Jewish state which often veer wildly from even the broadest rules of decency.

Shabi’s latest broadside on the Jewish state is more than an attack on one nation. It represents an assault on political and moral sobriety.

The nation I love is engaged in a multi-front war: one physical and one cognitive. My hope is that my counter attack on Shabi’s latest assault (representing the latter) inspires you to continue doing the same in battles yet to come. 

Related articles
Apr 24 2012

CST secures amendments on the ‘Comment is Free’ website.

Readers may remember that back in February of this year, CiF Watch ran a cross post from the blog of the Community Security Trust regarding an article by Rachel Shabi posted on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ website, the title of which suggested that “Israel’s rightwing defenders” make “false accusations of antisemitism”. 

The Guardian has now amended that headline but, as the CST blog observes:

“So, after contact from CST, this particular false accusation has been removed. It is very little and it is very late.

The damage is done: to Guardian readers’ perceptions of antisemitism and to many Jews’ perceptions of the Guardian (yet again).”

The full CST blog post on the subject can be read here.

More recently, also on the ‘Comment is Free’ website, the Guardian ran an article by Raed Salah in which he claimed to be the victim of a “smear campaign” run by “Israel’s cheerleaders in Britain” and that a poem written by him “had been doctored”. 

No reference was made in the article itself to the CST, but in a comment posted under the article in Raed Salah’s name, it was falsely suggested that the “doctored” version of the poem had been provided to the British Home Secretary by the Community Security Trust. 

That comment has now been removed from the website. Details can be read on the CST blog here. 

Feb 25 2012

Guardian’s false accusation of “false accusations of antisemitism”

This essay is cross posted by Mark Gardner at the blog of the CST

The Jewish community has probably had more run-ins with the Guardian than every other British newspaper combined. This matters on two levels: emotionally, because the Guardian exemplifies the kind of liberalism that many Jews instinctively feel; and, politically, because of the moral tone that the Guardian sets within British life.

In recent years, Jewish upset has been exacerbated by the Guardian’s Comment is Free (CiF) website, which carries many more articles than the print edition; and is fundamental to the paper’s future.

CiF’s initial growth was tarnished by failures to adequately moderate readers’ comments underneath the actual articles. After much effort, this was largely remedied. Nevertheless, from a Jewish perspective at least, problems persist with the actual CiF articles themselves.

It was refreshing to see CiF recently feature a particularly spiky anti-antisemitism piece by Tanya Gold, but last week it reverted to type with a particularly poor and offensive article by Rachel Shabi. Its title claimed to reveal how “Israel’s rightwing defenders” make “false accusations of antisemitism”.

Shabi is welcome to her opinion, but after all the grief between the Jewish community and the Guardian, you might hope that they would hesitate before publishing such a shabby piece of work. Its extremely ugly headline and sub-headline (see below) are plain insensible; it has utterly inadequate levels of proof; it has utterly partial summaries of the sources that it links to; and it refuses to acknowledge that opposition to the phrase “Israel firsters” might be something other than an evil deception to defend Israel.

Shabi’s article can be read here. The title and subtitle:

False accusations of antisemitism desensitise us to the real thing.

Attacks on the New York Times’s new Jerusalem correspondent undermine the credibility of Israel’s rightwing defenders.

So, surely the article is about how the NY Time’s new Jerusalem correspondent has been falsely accused of “antisemitism” by “Israel’s rightwing defenders”?

Well, no actually. The article’s first three paragraphs deal with the new correspondent, Jodi Rudoren. Shabi claims Rudoren has been called an “anti-Zionist”, but there is no mention here by Shabi of antisemitism, none whatsoever. The word doesn’t feature, nor in any of the three articles linked to by Shabi’s article (here and here and here). It isn’t even hinted at in any of them. The headline and sub-headline are simply wrong and insensible. This, despite their being so provocative and insulting.

Less importantly, the word “anti-Zionist” appears in quotation marks, as if this is what Rudoren has been called. No source is given for this claim. Click on the links provided by Shabi’s article, and you still won’t find it: you’ll find criticism of Rudoren, strong criticism of whom she has tweeted with, people saying she gives the impression of being partial, but you won’t find the simple “anti-Zionist” accusation –  and, I repeat, far less anything mentioning antisemitism.

The closest you’ll find to a plain “anti-Zionist” accusation is this quote taken from Tablet online magazine: but Tablet is a centre-left US Jewish publication, so what does it have to do with the “rightwing defenders” of Shabi’s article? (And, again, nothing here remotely connected with ”false accusations of antisemitism“.)

Next, Shabi moves from Rudoren to an argument in America over the use of the phrase “Israel firsters”. This is a phrase that denotes those who put Israel’s interests above those of their own country. (Former American Ku Klux Klan leader, David Duke, is an especially notorious user of the term.)

Given the centrality of the ‘dual loyalty’ motif and attendant Jewish conspiracy and treason charges to antisemitism through the centuries, the antisemitic resonance and potential of “Israel firsters” is starkly obvious: as is the right of Jews (and others) to complain about its use. Not here, according to Shabi. Her take on it, as published by Guardian CiF:

“Witness the recent storm over the phrase “Israel firsters”: used to accuse people of putting policy on Israel above US interests, it sparked a row among liberal commentators on whether it carries connotations of dual loyalty that feed into antisemitic tropes. This was just another attempt to smear liberal American critics of Israel, and fed into the frustration over such blockading – best expressed in the title of one recent post: “Dear Israel lobby, we give up – please give us an acceptable way of insulting you.”

Yet the real danger in all this is that the rush to throw charges of antisemitism at people who criticise Israel will desensitise vigilance over the real thing. Such tactics are meant to intimidate and paralyse, choke and divert the discussion over Israel’s occupation and policies in the Middle East.”

And there you have it, CiF is happy to publish that concerns raised about the expression “Israel firsters” were “just another attempt to smear…intimidate and paralyse, choke and divert” liberal criticism and discussion of Israel. No question about it and seemingly no requirement from CiF that Shabi should explicitly explain the rationale behind her “smear” claims, which derive from this at Salon.com, linked to via Shabi’s above link at “liberal commentators“. Incredibly, the former AIPAC spokesman quoted in it didn’t even directly call anyone an antisemite, he merely says of US Democrats using the expression “Israel firsters”: “these are the words of anti-Semites, not Democratic political players.”

And that is the “false accusations of antisemitism” as stated in the title.

All of this, brought to you by Guardian Comment is Free: which is why it matters.

Postscript

When the AIPAC spokesman was asked to explain himself by Salon.com, he gave the following answer – and it is as strikingly appropriate for the Guardian, as it is for the Democratic Party (especially the final sentence):

Those who accuse pro-Israel advocates and American Jews of having “dual loyalties” and being “Israel Firsters” are engaged in anti-Semetic hate speech. Period. These are age-old canards and anti-Semetic smears that go back centuries, suggesting that Jews are disloyal, alien and cannot be trusted. This kind of rhetoric has no place in civil dialogue and anyone’s politics, but especially among progressives.

The organizations who pay the salaries of those using such hate speech, (see below for specific examples), and who have clearly had it brought to their attention, must either confront it and end it, or take full responsibility for it. In this case, that choice belongs to both CAP and Media Matters. This is a free country and people can say what they want, but the question for those organizations is whether they are an appropriate home for such discourse.

Related articles
Feb 18 2012

Jews & the charge of ‘Dual Loyalty’: CiF’s Rachel Shabi excuses a classic antisemitic canard

Rachel Shabi

Rachel Shabi is a journalist who writes for ‘Comment is Free’ and Al Jazeera whose contempt for the Jewish state, and seeming indifference to antisemitism, is consistently demonstrated.

Shabi has blamed Zionism for the ethnic cleansing of 900,000 Jews from Arab lands; characterizing their plight as being caused ”either by agitating Zionist emissaries, or by the shockwaves that Zionism sent through the Middle East.” [emphasis added]

She has accused those who raise the issue of the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands of engaging in cynical “political point-scoring”, and has even mocked the notion of historic Arab antisemitism.

She also dismissed Israeli concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) – writing that the MB was merely “perceived as…anti-Semitic - characterizing the Jewish state’s fear of the Islamist group’s rise (a movement whose spiritual leader literally called for Allah to murder every last Jew on earth) as evidence of Israeli racism!

In addition, while Shabi has carved out a successful journalistic niche as a Jewish critic of Israel I have found nothing Shabi has written on the subject of antisemitism, and absolutely no indication that she is at all burdened by the malign Jewish obsession which is normative in the Arab world – all of which provides relevant context to her latest essay at ‘Comment is Free’, “False accusations of antisemitism desensitize us to the real thing“, Feb. 17.

Shabi, in arguing that “rightwing pro-Israelis [have] sucked the oxygen out of any conversation about the country”, argues: 

a broader rash of pouncing-upon from rightwing pro-Israelis that has sucked the oxygen out of any conversation about the country – especially in the US. Witness the recent storm over the phrase “Israel firsters”: used to accuse people of putting policy on Israel above US interests, it sparked a row among liberal commentators on whether it carries connotations of dual loyalty that feed into antisemitic tropes. This was just another attempt to smear liberal American critics of Israel,

Yet the real danger in all this is that the rush to throw charges of antisemitism…and silence…people who criticise Israel will desensitise vigilance over the real thing. Such tactics are meant to intimidate and paralyse, choke and divert the discussion over Israel’s occupation and policies in the Middle East.

Briefly, the controversy Shabi is referring to arose when it was discovered that Zaid Jilani, who blogged for a Center for American Progress (CAP) website, ThinkProgress, used Twitter to call US supporters of the Jewish state “Israel Firsters” –  evoking the antisemitic narrative that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country.

As several progressive commentators observed following the row, “liberal” voices who defend this dual loyalty canard are evidently unaware of or unburdened by the fact that the idea that diaspora Jews are insufficiently loyal to the country where they reside has a decidedly reactionary pedigree.

The charge of dual loyalty was central in the Dreyfus Affair through the Nazi’s rise to power – and, indeed, this notion in large measure underlay the failure of European emancipation.  In the 1920s American industrialist Henry Ford published The International Jew: The World’s Problem where it was asserted that disloyal American Jews were pushing the U.S. into WWII, though the war was not in the national interest.

While after WWII manifestations of this charge often remained on the fringes of American society, Paul Findley, a former Republican U.S. Congressman, wrote a book in 1985, They Dare to Speak Out, which became a best-seller. In it, Findley maintained that American Jews utilized “tactics which stifle dissent in their own communities and throughout America” to benefit not their own country but, rather, Israel.

Paleoconservative commentators, not surprisingly, have similarly championed this narrative. Pat Buchanan wrote in 2008 that “Israel and its Fifth Column in [Washington , DC] seek to stampede us into war with Iran”, and has previously written that Jews “harbor a ‘passionate attachment’ to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America.”

As liberal columnist Spencer Ackerman noted on the term “Israel-firster”:

It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and (former KKK Grand Wizard) David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network…It is a term that Charles Lindbergh would [have been] comfortable using.

As David Bernstein observed upon researching the term:

The “Israel-firster” slur was not used in “mainstream” discourse until the last few years.

Before that, you can find it occasionally in the early 1980s and 1990s in sources such as Wilmot Robertson’s anti-Semitic Instauration journal, a 1988 anti-Semitic book called “The F.O.J. [Fear of Jews] Syndrome, and a 1998 anti-Semitic book “Rise of AntiChrist.” I also found a couple of references to “Israel-firsters” in the extremist anti-Israel publication, The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs…

By the early 2000s, one can find “Israel-firster” being used by a variety of anti-Semitic “right-wing” sources like DavidDuke.com and the Vanguard News Network. As the decade wore on, the phrase occasionally pops up in far left anti-Israel sites that have ties to the anti-Semitic far-right or are known for playing footsie with anti-Semitism

Finally, over the last few years the term has become increasingly used on the anti-Israel far left

So the question is, does your average Progressive recoil at the use of terminology that migrated recent from the far-right racist kook fringe to refer to members of minority groups? They sure do. Should they recoil less if the terminology is aimed at Jews, as opposed to other minority groups? They sure shouldn’t–unless they are themselves prejudiced against Jews.

Rachel Shabi, a “progressive” commentator writing for a publication which fancies itself the “worlds leading liberal voice”, not only doesn’t recoil from such a malign narrative, questioning the loyalty of Jews but, rather, is outraged that those who engage in such Judeophobic tropes (popularized on the far-right) are being “smeared” as antisemites.

As A. Jay Adler concluded in a recent CiF Watch cross post about those, like Shabi, who would defend or excuse such a slur on Jewish Americans”.

They defend their use of the term because they believe that this time it is true. They believe that this time there really are divided loyalties, there really is a cadre of Jews exercising excessive, secretive power while aggressively attempting to suppress any exposure of it. And like all their reactionary forebears…they forget that the belief they cling to is the belief to which purveyors of anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish power always hold fast – it’s the essential marker of the tradition – that what they believe is true.

To this I’d add one more caveat.

Activists like Shabi, like so many others at ‘Comments is Free’, seem to believe that self-proclaimed “progressives” are ipso facto free of prejudice, and so should be granted a kind of impunity from accusations of racism even when trading in the most classic Judeophobic stereotypes.

Such supreme moral hubris continues to inform so much of the the commentary about Israel and Jews by Guardian reporters, contributors and their “progressive” fellow travelers.

Related articles
Jan 6 2012

Guardian “Moderate” Islamism Update: Tunisians greet Hamas leader with chants of “Kill the Jews!”

H/T Bataween and Michele

Per the blog, Point of No Return:

Cries of ‘Out with the Jews!’, ‘Kill the Jews!’ greeted the arrival at Tunis airport of the Hamas chief in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh…

A few hundred people gathered on 5 January at the Tunis-Carthage airport to welcome Haniyeh. As they waited for him they sang antisemitic chants and slogans to the glory of Palestine and the liberation of Gaza. They carried Palestinian flags, the flags of the Ennahda movement, and the black flags of the Salafists.

A couple of reminders:

The Guardian characterized Rached Ghannouchi (after his Ennahda Party won the Tunisian elections) as ushering in to Tunisia a “moderate” brand of Islamism.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele, in Oct., complained that secular (anti-Islamist) Muslim parties which competed in the Tunisian elections were playing on Islamophobia by warning of the threats posed by Islamist parties such as Ennahda. 

CiF’s Rachel Shabi, in her shameful apologia, on Dec. 27, for the ethnic cleansing of Jews by Arab leaders, wrote the following:

Tunisian Jews, a deeply rooted but diminished community of fewer than 2,000 people (once numbering more than 100,000), are integrated and involved…Tunisia’s President Marzouki has said that Jews who left the country are welcome to return – powerful words that carry trailblazing possibilities. 

Interestingly, a professional Arabic translator has informed us that the following can also be heard in the above clip:

“Killing the Jews is a must!” (0:16)

Crowd:”Duty”  [wajib] (It is a duty)

“Chasing away the Jews is a must!” (0:20)

Crowd:”Duty”  

Yes, the “new”, trailblazing, down-right philosemitic brand of Tunisian Islamism, which inspires its Muslims to “moderately” call for the murder of the country’s Jews. 

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