“If only Israel froze settlements. If only Israel removed checkpoints. If only Israel recognized the Hamas government in Gaza. If only Israel stopped assuming the worst about Iran’s ‘pragmatic’ leadership, which just wants a nuclear weapon for defensive purposes. If only Israel got beyond its Holocaust trauma.”
David Harris examines a well-established and persistent syndrome.
No sign yet of a major campaign in the UCU, the British academic union, to highlight the current plight of Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. We’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, the UCU leadership is now denying earlier reports that some of the union’s trustees have gone to court this week to obtain an injunction to stop the union from going ahead with another debate about boycotting Israelis - while, as usual, not telling anyone what is going on. Update: read the new UCU motion and David Hirsh’s take on it here. Here we go yet again.
We’ve occasionally had reason on this blog to comment on the antics of the Saddam Hussein acolyte and, latterly, Hamas groupie, George Galloway. Galloway, who serves in his spare time in the British parliament, has his own show on Iran’s Press TV, a Holocaust denial outfit that masquerades as a legitimate news organization. Anyhow, Galloway was reduced by a recent guest into a sputtering, stuttering wreck. It is - how else can I put this? - delightful to watch.
A quick reminder about another AJC video, Point of No Return.
Antisemitism was a prominent focus of the American Jewish Committee’s Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Among the speakers were John Mann, the British MP who has spearheaded the global parliamentary fight against antisemitism, and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French author and philosopher who has never lost sight of the centrality of antisemitism in his dissection of Islamism and its related ills.
Mindful of his audience, Mann declared: “Let me quote from Rosa Parks: ‘As I got up on the bus I saw that there was only one vacancy, so this was the seat that I took.’ This world and past generations are full of Rosa Parks. People going about their everyday business quietly and with dignity. But people not prepared to be bullied and cowered and intimidated. No doubt a little scared, but those who do their bit by doing what is right.”
You can read the entire speech here and watch highlights of it on YouTube here.
And here are some highlights of what BHL had to say, again on YouTube.
There’s a retrospective of Avi Mograbi’s films on at a leading Buenos Aires art house and Z32, his most recent effort, has a regular slot at a state-sponsored cinema that normally only puts on Argentine films that wouldn’t survive on the commercial circuit.
Max Hastings doesn’t love Israel or Israelis anymore. That’s the general drift of this article in which starts by describing his coverage of the Yom Kippur War as a war correspondent.
Judge Fernando Andreu of Spain’s Audiencia Nacional court is investigating the assassination by Israel of Salah Shehadeh, a leader of Hamas, in 2002. The investigation has been described as “lacking the slightest degree of systematic rigor”, resting on an “opportunist interpretation” of the law and being based on a “conceptual error”.
Continue reading ‘Spanish Shehadeh Investigation “Opportunist”’
“But for the ‘facts-don’t-matter’ camp, there simply can’t be any threat to Israeli security: Ahmadinejad is just talking and anyway gets translated wrongly; anti-Semitism in the Arab and Muslim world doesn’t really exist and whenever it gets too obvious to deny it, it is only an entirely understandable reaction to Israel; Hamas doesn’t really mean what they say in their charter and if they do, their nostalgia for the good old days without Israel is only human; thousands of rockets and mortars targeting Israeli civilians are just homemade fire-crackers meant to signal understandable frustration, and there is no such thing as Palestinian terrorism because whatever the Palestinians do is legitimate resistance against a cruel and inhuman occupation. ”
Read Petra Marquardt-Bigman’s critique of those who regard facts in much the same way as my kids regard broccoli. Although on the latter front, I am more confident.
Back in December, I reported on the story of the Norwegian comedian with a line in slapstick jokes about the Holocaust. One result of Otto Jespersen’s stab at comedy was the condemnation of the PFU, Norway’s press authority.
The Israeli scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld, who has written widely and authoritatively on antisemitism in Nordic countries, has now brought his own complaint to the PFU concerning TV2 - the same station which broadcast Jespersen.
“The case of ‘Hezbollah’s man in New York’ offers a compelling glimpse into the expansive world of 21st-century terrorism, where democratic free speech rights are exploited by terror groups as part of their war against the West,” writes my colleague Kenneth Bandler in the New York Post. Read it all.
The prosecution of two former AIPAC staffers on espionage charges has been dropped. Expect the usual chorus of Israel Lobby theorists to start venting. With that in mind, it bears remembering that the 1917 Espionage Act, which was the basis for the case, had never before been used against private citizens - and that the US government knew that obtaining a guilty verdict would have been nearly impossible.
Reports AP:
This is a guest post by Terry Glavin.
Today is May Day, the holiday most of the world marks as international workers’ day. North Americans call it Labour Day and celebrate it on the first Monday in September, usually without much of a thought about its meaning, but it’s the same holiday.
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