In an excellent post which we have already linked to here, Eve Garrard looks at the rise of the new, cool, politically-correct antisemitism and some possible ways of dealing with it.
Continue reading ‘The New Antisemitism: Sharpening the Debate’
Archive for May, 2009
Argentina’s Supreme Court yesterday upheld the verdict of a lower court that held that the initial investigation into the AMIA atrocity had been fatally flawed by the actions of the investigating judge, the state prosecutors and the government of Carlos Menem, all of whom had conspired together to pervert its course.
“The Zionists bareley (sic) showed up,” crowed one pro-boycott activist attending the University and College Union’s annual Congress in the British seaside town of Bournemouth. I won’t comment here - go instead to our friends at Engage who continue to expose the stench of antisemitism in this corner of British academia.
Arieh Kovler of the Fair Play Campaign Group is attending the 2009 UCU Congress. He takes up the story.
BRICUP, the British organisation behind the boycott of Israeli academics, held a fringe meeting at UCU Congress yesterday in Bournemouth.
This is a guest post by Phoebe Maltz.
There have been a number of solid take-downs of New York Times columnist Roger Cohen’s Israel series, by Eamonn McDonagh here and by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Commentary’s Jonathan S. Tobin and more. These critics provide sound evidence of just where Cohen gets Iran, Israel, and the Middle East wrong. This needs pointing out, but risks falling right into Cohen’s clever trap. He wants to get The Zionists all riled up, because the more goats he gets, the more readers will take the time to comment on his “courage.”
Adam Lebor’s hymn to a wonderful city, here.
Federal Judge Claudio Bonadío yesterday denied bail to the five detainees arrested as a result of their participation in an antisemitic attack in Buenos Aires on Sunday as he judged them to be a flight risk and capable of intimidating witnesses. The judge now has ten days to decide exactly what charges to bring against the five; newspaper reports suggest a number of possibilities, ranging from resistance to lawful authority to assault causing injury and attempting to impose their ideas by force or through fear.
Continue reading ‘Judge Refuses Bail to Buenos Aires Antisemites’
To my knowledge, no independent sightings have been confirmed, but according to his website, the pro-Hamas British MP George Galloway is currently on a speaking tour here in the US.
Here is a snippet:
The HRC’s promotion of what are, in effect, blasphemy taboos is a logical extension of its internal policy. The HRC is run like an oligarchy governed by Orwellian speech codes, with any criticism of the body’s behavior immediately stifled in session. In March 2008 testimony to the HRC, for instance, Roy Brown mentioned that the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam-passed and ratified by the OIC in 1990-took sharia as its legal premise and was inimical to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Brown was challenging a claim made by Masood Khan, Pakistan’s UN ambassador, who had told the council, on behalf of the OIC, that the Cairo Declaration was a “complement” rather than an alternative to the Universal Declaration. Immediately, Imran Ahmed Siddiqui, the HRC delegate from Pakistan, issued a point of order, silencing Brown, and announced: “It is insulting to our faith to discuss sharia here in this forum.” The president of the council at the time, Doru Costea of Romania, ceded the point to Siddiqui.
Read the rest, by Ibn Warraq and Michael Weiss, here.
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
On May 10th, survivors of the concentration camp Ebensee were shot at with pellets and abused as they gathered to remember their liberation. Masked neo-Nazi thugs screamed ‘Heil Hitler!’ and ‘This way to the gas!’ at ten elderly Italian men and women who returned to the site of the concentration camp in Austria.
A street event jointly organized by the government of the city of Buenos Aires and the Israeli embassy to celebrate the 61st anniversary of Israel’s foundation was yesterday disrupted by a gang of 15 or 20 people who emerged from a nearby subway station and laid into members of the public with clubs, chains and nunchakus.
Just a line to point readers towards two notable guest posts over at the mighty Norm’s blog. The first is by Eve Gerrard and in it she considers what is to be done about the new antisemitism. The second is by Shalom Lappin and it deals with recent and other attempts to psychologize Jews and the things they do.
1.
The enthusiasm of Buenos Aires cinefolk for Israeli director Avi Mograbi and his film Z32 shows no sign of abating. Página/12 - a national newspaper which enjoys the favor of the government and whose weekend culture and entertainment sections are obligatory reading for a good part of the capital’s progressively minded opinion - today devotes two whole pages to an interview with three local documentary film makers in which each tries to outdo his colleagues in expressions of admiration for Mograbi and his latest film. I said what I have to say about the film itself in a previous post and here will focus on a couple of the more general ideas expressed by the journalist and his interviewees.
Paul Rogers here speculates about the possibility of Iran testing a basic nuclear device before its presidential election in June.
