On September 4, Shiva Nazar Ahari, a young female human rights activist incarcerated in Evin since last December, will enter a Revolutionary Court to face fabricated charges that carry the death penalty. Ahari, a leading activist with the Committee of Human Rights Reporters (CHRR), stands accused of “anti-regime propaganda” and “acts contrary to national security.” She faces an additional charge in a category of criminality plausible only in societies run along totalitarian lines; what the ayatollahs deem mohareb, or “rebellion against God.” It would require the most blinkered apologist for the Iranian regime to suggest that someone charged in this way can expect a fair trial.
On September 30, 2000, The New York Times, Associated Press and other major media outlets published a photo of a young man — bloodied and battered — crouching beneath a club-wielding Israeli policeman. The caption identified him as a Palestinian victim of Israeli brutality – with the clear implication that the Israeli soldier was the one who beat him.
That young man was, in fact, Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish student from Chicago, who was beaten within inches of his life before being rescued by the Israeli border policeman in the photo.
The resulting outrage generated by the gross distortion of the photo “launched” Honest Reporting.
Now, ten years later, we caught up with Tuvia in an exclusive interview.
In the 1930s, the exiled Trotsky began to take an interest in both the Arab-Jewish conflict and Zionist colonization in Palestine. Unlike the orthodox Stalinists, he was distrustful of the “reactionary Muslim” and “anti-Semitic pogromist” elements in the Palestinian Arab national movement. Unlike the Trotskyists of today, he did not uncritically whitewash the Palestinian riots of 1929 as a revolutionary “liberation” struggle. Indeed, by 1937, though he never became a Zionist, Trotsky had come to radically revise his earlier standpoint on the “Jewish question.” He recognized, for example, that his earlier belief in the inevitability of assimilation was unfounded; that there was a Jewish nation, which required a territorial base; and that the Soviet regime was shamelessly encouraging anti-Semitism to deflect attention from its own failures.
The always insightful Robert Wistrich describes the evolution of Leon Trotsky’s thinking on that topic of discussion known as “The Jewish Question.” Read it all here.
Wistrich adds:
In the West, his legacy is kept alive by the amorphous Fourth International - a motley crew of Trotskyite groups whose sectarianism, internal dissension, sterile scholastic disputes and personal rivalries are legendary.
You know what’s coming now, don’t you…
And if you just can’t sit through that scene again, remember this jaunty little number?
One of the most vicious anti-Zionist propagandists subsidized by the late, unlamented Soviet Union was a man named Trofim Kichko. The author of an antisemitic tract called “Judaism Without Embellishments,” Kichko would doubtless have approved of this photograph which the irredeemably blockheaded Max Blumenthal has posted on his Facebook page:
They’re calling it the yarmulkeh goal - because when Hapoel Tel Aviv striker Itay Schechter scored his team’s third in a 3-2 victory over Salzburg in this week’s Champion’s League qualifier, he celebrated not by crossing himself or tearing off his shirt, but by donning a Hapoel TA skullcap. Schechter received a yellow card as a result. Hapoel manager Eli Guttman said: “I don’t have a problem with Christian players who cross themselves after they score so why shouldn’t Shechter pray the way he wants to.”
Here’s the goal itself: note the precision in avoiding the offside position and the truly exquisite finish.
My latest article on the Huffington Post examines the extraordinary and shocking case of Cliona Campbell, a young woman being victimized by anti-Zionist thugs.
First-class reporting from BBC Panorama’s Jane Corbin, in Death in the Med. Says one commenter on Panorama’s website, “Another demonstration of how the pro-Palestinian lobby has been foiled again, let’s all cry Israel’s disproportionate violence and then show the truth. Jenin sounds familiar.”
Exactly. Now watch both parts of the program below.
Sorry BDSers. Looks like your sordid little campaign has suffered yet again. Why do you keep making claims that aren’t true, I wonder? Wouldn’t be Ahmadinejad’s influence, would it?
Some of you will have seen this splendid effort to think outside the box on Israel’s delegitimization by Yoram Hazony of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. If you haven’t, I really urge you to read it. And once you’ve done so, please have a look at my essay on The Propagandist; as you’ll see, I have differences with Yoram, particularly over the use of Kant’s ideas on international politics, but these are expressed in a constructive spirit. We owe Yoram a huge debt of thanks for reframing a debate that was becoming extremely sterile.
Indeed, it is probable that Hamas’ future will be largely determined in the West Bank, rather than in Gaza. Its role as a spoiler cannot be underestimated, but Hamas’ long-term fortunes depend on an irrevocable failure of the national strategy of negotiations and of the PA state- and institution-building program. If either or both of these policies succeed, Hamas’ single-minded promotion of the strategy (though certainly not always the practice) of violent resistance and insistence on the non-recognition of Israel - even in the context of Palestinian independence - will become increasingly hollow and unappealing. If the PLO and PA strategies unequivocally fail, however, there is little to prevent Hamas from inheriting practically uncontested the leadership of the Palestinian movement and transforming it from a nationalist to an Islamist one.
Hussein Ibish’s reading of the stakes involved in the battle between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, here.
I think this is what psychoanalysts call “projection.” After being decisively rejected by voters in east London at the recent British General Election, George Galloway is now prostrating himself before a man for whom voters are an irritant, to be beaten, tortured and imprisoned until they realize that the right to vote should be understood as the right to vote for him alone.
For those readers who have forgotten how George behaves in the company of genocidal tyrants, here’s a reminder. Somehow, this footage never loses its nauseating quality no matter how many times you see it, but since a) it’s the weekend and b) Saddam’s regime is no more, you may choose to laugh rather than grit your teeth.
The Propagandist’s editors put it better than I can in describing themselves: “The Propagandist magazine is for political junkies, thinking conservatives and the anti-fascist left. We see the public space being taken over by an unholy alliance of unrepentant Marxists, 9/11 Truthers and thuggish religious fanatics…We’ve had enough. Our underground conservatives and counter-revolutionary propagandists are waging a war of words against the resurgent enemies of democracy and modernity.”
More power to ‘em. Especially as they are publishing our good friend Terry Glavin.
A deadly conflict in Lebanon could derail the prospect of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, thus boosting Hamas at just the time that the Obama Administration is urging the PA to drop its reticence. Iran also has a vested interest in opening up a western front. In the last fortnight, a host of countries from the United States to the European Union to Japan have added a new layer of sanctions to those already agreed by the UN Security Council in response to Tehran’s continued nuclear defiance. And Hezbollah - as Sheikh Naim Qassem confessed in a 2007 interview with Iranian broadcaster Al Qawathar - invariably does Iran’s bidding, to the point of securing clearance for its operations from Iran’s leaders.
The IDF has released a photograph of Lt. Col. Dov Harari, who was killed today in an unprovoked attack against the IDF by the Lebanese army.
Note that Colonel Harari is standing here in front of a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. You can make out the name of Mordechai Anielewicz, who led the Ghetto’s fight against the Nazi occupiers. For those who don’t read Hebrew, the cover on the Torah scroll he is carrying bears the name of Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who perished in the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003.
