Is Iran’s government sponsoring an Internet site that extols the German Nazis, their history and achievements, including the antisemitism that the current Iranian regime also supports? Or is it merely permitting one to operate in a highly censored communications’ system?Here are the facts. There is a discussion group site entitled IranNazi that has an Iranian internet URL. It is written in Persian and seems to have begun on August 24. All the material on the site is pro-Nazi and features pictures of Adolph Hitler, the swastika, and goose-stepping German soldiers. There is an English-language part as well.
This one has been doing the email rounds rather feverishly today, and now Jeff Goldberg has run with it:
Well, this is certainly disconcerting: The New Israel Fund, a left-leaning organization I admire (it funds all sorts of civil liberties groups in Israel), states that, on the one hand, the anti-Israel boycott movement (the BDS movement, for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) is pursuing a counterproductive and inflammatory strategy, but on the other, it will continue to fund groups that support BDS, so long as they don’t support BDS too much. Here are the weasel words, so you can judge NIF’s position for yourself:
Here is one resistance worthy of the name, in a country that can legitimately be called a concentration camp. You can learn more about the democracy struggle in Burma at The Irrawaddy.
I’m asking because, in his report to the scrupulously neutral and balanced UN Human Rights Council in September 2009, Judge Richard Goldstone and his fellow commissioners said: “Statements by Israeli political and military leaders prior to and during the military operations in Gaza indicate that the Israeli military conception of what was necessary in a war with Hamas viewed disproportionate destruction and creating the maximum disruption in the lives of many people as a legitimate means to achieve not only military but also political goals.”
As readers of this blog know, in the last couple of weeks I’ve written two pieces about the remarks of Andrew Whitley, an UNRWA official who was more candid than he should have been (here and here.) I want to point out this superb piece by Asaf Romirowsky, which provides some much needed historical perspective. Says Asaf:
Sometimes UNRWA will simply deny its internal critics even existed. In 1952 Lt.-Gen. Sir Alexander Galloway, a noted British soldier-diplomat who was then UNRWA director in Jordan, made what was to become a famous statement to a group of visiting American church leaders: “It is perfectly clear than the Arab nations do not want to solve the Arab refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront against the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die.”
Galloway’s solution was straightforward: “Give each of the Arab nations where the refugees are to be found an agreed-upon sum of money for their care and resettlement and then let them handle it. If… the United Nations had done this immediately after the conflict – explaining to the Arab states, ‘We are sorry it happened, but here is a sum of money for you to take care of the refugees’ – the problem might have been solved long ago.”
Do be sure to read all of Asaf’s piece, co-authored with Alexander H. Joffe, here.
This article by Winston Pickett was originally published in the UK Jewish Chronicle.
Now that the latest terror threat has been neutralized - with a little help from the Saudis - we’ve entered the predictable post mortem phase. This is the political scrum in which government, security, intelligence and law enforcement authorities scramble to apportion blame and devise strategies to keep air travel safe.
Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist and a longstanding contributor to Z Word, interviewed Esther Webman, research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, Tel Aviv University, about her new book on Arab responses to the Holocaust.
Karl Pfeifer: In your book From Empathy to Denial / Arab Responses to the Holocaust (Co-author Meir Litvak) you emphasize discussing “as Jews and Israelis” this subject matter, to have “tried to maintain, as much as possible, a dispassionate approach”. Why did you qualify your ethnic origin as “our shortcoming”?
Esther Webman: Unfortunately, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict there is a widespread belief that an Israeli is biased when he deals with Arab issues. And we do understand that as historians, we always have our own subjective position which might be reflected in our writing.
Recently, I wrote about the case of Andrew Whitley, who is the New York Director of UNWRA, the UN agency tasked with aiding Palestinian refugees. Whitley told a conference in Washington that the so-called “right of return” is unlikely to ever be exercised, and that efforts would be better expended on integrating Palestinian refugees into the countries where they have been living for decades. Continue reading ‘UNRWA Shames Andrew Whitley’
Jonathon Narvey of The Propagandist has written a compelling, if sadly nauseating, series on the effort by Adbusters - a Vancouver-based alternative media network - to associate the State of Israel with the crimes of Nazi Germany through a photo essay comparing Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto. Sounds like that would win some awards in Tehran, at least. Read Jonathon here, here and then here.
Yesterday, Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010, IDF Chief of the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, sent to every commander in the IDF a letter in which he expressed his personal thoughts on ethics with regards to several recent incidents that had occurred. This letter was to be read to each and every soldier by the commanders of the IDF, as ordered by Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi.
Below, please find a translation of the letter, whereas the letter itself is originally Hebrew form:
As America votes in the midterm elections, Iran’s medieval regime is doing what it does best. Sakineh reportedly faces execution tomorrow, November 3rd. This from the International Committee Against Stoning, via The Propagandist:
The Islamic regime of Iran plans to execute Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani immediately
According to news received by the International Committee against Stoning and International Committee against Execution on 1 November 2010, the authorities in Tehran have given the go ahead to Tabriz prison for the execution of Iran stoning case Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. It has been reported that she is to be executed this Wednesday 3 November.
We had previously reported that the casefile regarding the murder case of Ms Ashtiani’s husband had been seized from her lawyer’s office, Houtan Kian, and found missing from the prosecutor’s Oskoo branch office so as to stitch Ms Ashtiani up with trumped up murder charges. Ms Ashtiani’s son, Sajjad Ghaderzadeh, and her lawyer, Houtan Kian, have warned of the regime’s plan to do so on many occasions. With the arrest of Ms Ashtiani’s son and lawyer on 10 October and her not having had any visitation rights since 11 August and after fabricating a new case against her, the “Human Rights Commission” of the regime has announced that: ‘according to the existing evidence, her guilt has been confirmed.’ In fact, the regime has created a new scenario in order to expedite her execution.
The International Committees against Stoning and Execution call on international bodies and the people of the world to come out in full force against the state-sponsored murder of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. Ms Ashtiani, Sajjad Ghaderzadeh, Houtan Kian and the two German journalists must be immediately and unconditionally released.
International Committee against Execution
International Committee against Stoning
Email: minaahadi@aol.com
Tel: 0049 (0) 1775692413
This story is at least a week old, but it doesn’t seem to have had much of an airing, so here goes. At this month’s World Masters Weightlifting Championship in Poland, an Israeli competitor, Sergio Britva, took first place. Britva lifted an astonishing 300kg of weight, beating the second-placed competitor, the Iranian Hossein Khodadadi, by 4 kilos.
The two athletes mounted the podium to receive their medals, together with the third-placed competitor from Germany. Britva and the German shook hands. But when Britva offered his to Khodadadi, the Iranian refused it.
That unsporting gesture didn’t prevent Khodadadi from being rebuked by the Iranian authorities for standing alongside an Israeli. According to Radio Zamaneh, “the Head of Iran’s National Athletic Organization had earlier written a letter to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to receive instructions on how to handle situations where Iranian athletes have to confront Israeli athletes.” You don’t need a wild imagination to figure out what those would have been.
And so to the video embedded above. At 1′30″, you can see Britva mount the podium draped in an Israeli flag. He shakes hands with the German to his left. He turns to his right, but the Iranian declines. That doesn’t seem to bother Britva, who is deservedly delighted with his victory. Then, at 2′21″, with Khodadadi and Britva still together on the podium, a stirring rendition of Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, strikes up. Britva stands erect and solemn, choking back tears of pride and joy. His image then dissolves into another of the Israeli flag atop the Iranian and the German.
I don’t know whether the Polish producers of the broadcast understood the enormous historical resonance here, but it really has to be seen.
Andrew Whitley is an UNRWA official who, at a conference last week, dared to suggest that the notion of Palestinians exercising the “right of return” is a “cruel illusion.” More on this in my latest article for The Huffington Post.
Turkish-Israeli relations have fallen to their lowest point in the months following the flotilla dispatched to Gaza by the pro-Hamas Islamist charity IHH. Joint military exercises have been canceled, Israeli tourism to Turkey has dropped by 90 per cent and Turkish officials have threatened “irreparable consequences” to relations between the two countries. Into this breach has stepped Greece.
The Boycott-Israel conference that ended Sunday in Montreal was supposed to show the growing momentum for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. With barely 100 activists attending the closing plenary Sunday afternoon at UQAM, it is clear that the BDS movement has no noticeable traction or support in Quebec.
