As regular readers of this blog know, comments are approved before they are published and deleted if they are not. Given the issues we cover, we receive a disproportionate amount of trash, much of it abusive and antisemitic. Today, though, there was a little more than usual, including such gems as, “I hate jews who do nothing but protect the illegal country of Israel,” and “neocon jews wield almost unchallenged power in republican party foriegn (sic) policy and control many op-ed pages in major american newspapers.” I wondered why. Then the penny dropped. Glenn Greenwald linked to us. Charming company you keep, Glenn.
Archive for the 'anti-Zionism' Category
This is a crosspost by Mark Gardner of the CST blog
On 2 March I posted an article expressing concern about John Pilger: and, more importantly, about what would appear to be the repeated failure of his publishers at the New Statesman to moderate or edit his rhetoric concerning Zionism and Jews.
This article includes a guest contribution by habibi from Harry’s Place.
A group of friends in London alerted me to this grubby little piece by a British Labour Party Member of Parliament, Bob Marshall-Andrews, concerning his recent visit to Gaza. Upon reading it, I was struck by various thoughts, not least the degree to which Marshall-Andrews words will be welcomed by the Hamas cheerleaders who compose the Palestinian solidarity movement, in marked contrast to the fierce condemnation with which this blog, and others like it, will greet his compendium of antisemitism-laced falsehoods. Why bother to refute such lies, one might ask, when those of us who defend Israel are at irreconcilable odds with those who demonize her, when any charge of antisemitism we make is bound to be dismissed as another tired attempt to muzzle debate? The most satisfactory answer I can come up with is that some things - and Marshall-Andrews article is one of them - are so odious that they cannot pass without rebuke.
As the event known as “Israel Apartheid Week” (IAW) kicks off, here are some resources to combat the antisemitic, Soviet-inspired slander that Israel is an apartheid state.
Here are three good pieces which came out today. Robbie Sabel has written a detailed paper published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs debunking the apartheid analogy. Richard (don’t confuse him with Roger!) Cohen has an incisive column in today’s Washington Post. And, in a searing editorial, Canada’s National Post points out that a motion condemning IAW has been unanimously passed in the Ontario provincial parliament (H/T: Robin Shepherd.)
Going further back in the archives, Z Word published a path-breaking essay by South African writers Rhoda Kadalie, a South African Human Rights Commissioner, and Julia Bertelsmann, which challenged the analogy from the perspective of those who directly experienced apartheid in South Africa. I also wrote a monograph for AJC entitled “The Ideological Foundations of the Boycott Campaign Against Israel,” much of which is devoted to exposing the the blatant falsehood that Israel is an apartheid state.
Be sure to visit the “apartheid” tag on this blog, where you will find, among other pieces, Jonathan Hoffman’s guest post, “Lies, Damn Lies and the Apartheid Analogy.”
Finally, here’s another chance to see the film I produced last year, “Vilified: Telling Lies About Israel.” The falsehoods we uncovered here will doubtless be repeated at the various IAW events.
This is a guest post by Adam Levick
Even before the birth of the modern state of Israel, Jews have stood accused of not possessing sufficient loyalty to the nations where they reside. Its contemporary manifestation however almost always centers around the notion of dual loyalty - a charge that Jews are more loyal to Israel than their own nation. Often, such charges of dual loyalty are infused with a narrative imputing enormous power to Jewish communities which typically represent a tiny fraction of the overall population. Such a synthesis of disloyalty on one hand and exaggerated power on the other allows the accuser to charge the Jewish community of working to undermine their nation - often alleging that such Jews are dangerous aliens who represent nothing short of a Fifth Column.
Continue reading ‘Glenn Greenwald Keeps an Ugly Calumny Alive’
“Antisemitism cannot be regarded as just one more lazy, ill-thought-out bigotry. The anti-Semite hates and fears Jews because he interprets the world through them. Wistrich quotes the French monarchist Charles Maurras’s candid admission that anti-Semitism ‘enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over and simplified.’” From my Jerusalem Post review of Robert Wistrich’s epic new book, A Lethal Obsession.
This is a guest post by Christian Tau of NIJ.
Most Norwegian books are dearly priced and contribute to nothing except the prestige of their authors, yet still manage to capture the public eye. Meanwhile Eirik Eiglad’s recently published “The anti-Jewish riots in Oslo” is receiving no publicity whatsoever. For the sin of contrasting too sharply with Norway’s “goody two shoes” image of being a humanitarian superpower, Eiglad’s book is being quietly ignored to death.
The repellent George Galloway turned up in Boston this week, raising money for Hamas. Via Solomonia, a video of the crowd greeting him.
This is a guest post by Modernity.
Stanley Kubrick’s marvellous film Spartacus was the inspiration behind the “I am Seismic Shock” campaign
This web Web phenomena, courtesy of the Streisand effect, was started to highlight how inappropriate it was for the British Police to visit a blogger and intimidate him into deleting one of his blogs.
Please take a copy and embed it in your blogs, as a reminder that the Police should not be involved in legitimate political criticism and discourse on the Internet.
Ben Cohen writes: Stephen Sizer, the Iranian regime’s dutiful mouthpiece inside the Anglican Church, has been intimidating the author of the excellent blog, Seismic Shock, as you will read below. Both cowardly and odious, Sizer’s action underlines the fanatical determination of the pro-Palestine lobby in the UK to shut down open debate. So it’s time to declare that “We Are All Seismic Shock” - and communicate that same message to Sizer by emailing him here.
This is a guest post by Seismic Shock.
As some people have noticed, I’ve been rather quiet in blogging about the Reverend Stephen Sizer’s activities of late.
After all, what more can be said of a man forwards emails from Holocaust deniers, shares platforms with Holocaust deniers, and shamelessly flaunts his anti-Zionist theology before Iran’s apocalyptic Holocaust-denying regime? As Iranian pastors are arrested and house churches closed down, why is the Khomeinist regime translating Sizer’s book on Christian Zionism into Farsi? How many more times can I point all this out?
Some readers of this blog must have experience of trying to get a work permit in a foreign country. I’ve had to do this myself on a number of occasions and it usually involved a dreadful amount of bureaucracy and no small number of arbitrary and incomprehensible decisions. Like most people in this situation it never occurred to me that because I’m a decent bloke and had the best of intentions towards my host country that I had some sort of right to a work permit. I knew that it was up to the country concerned to decide on what basis it wanted to let me enter its territory, if it wanted to let me in at all.
There’s a long article here about the British historian Tony Judt and from it I’d like to focus on the following paragraph:
Judt was born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family of Marxist anti-Communists. They lived in London’s East End, a historically Jewish section of the city. “Anti-Semitism at a low, polite, cultural level was still perfectly acceptable,” Judt recalls. Fearing that their teenage son was too socially withdrawn, his parents, in 1963, sent him to a summer camp on a kibbutz in Israel. Judt became a committed Zionist. “I was the ideal convert,” he says. A leader in left-wing Zionist youth movements, he even delivered a keynote address at a large Zionist conference in Paris when he was only 16 years old. [… ]In 1967, a few weeks after the Six-Day War, Judt volunteered as a translator for the Israel Defense Forces on the Golan Heights. He was surprised to find that many of the young Israeli officers he worked with were “right-wing thugs with anti-Arab views”; others, he says, “were just dumb idiots with guns.” Israel, he came to believe, “had turned from a sort of narrow-minded pioneer society into a rather smug, superior, conquering society.”
Continue reading ‘Tony Judt: Anti-Zionist as Disillusioned Convert’
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As readers of this blog will be well aware, Juan Miguel Muñoz, is a man of constant sorrow. He’s the Jerusalem correspondent of El País and over the last couple of years it has fallen to him to report on the daily outrages against the conscience of humanity committed by Israel.
However, in this piece in today’s edition of Spain’s most popular serious newspaper he seems a bit more cheerful. The world, as he sees it, is finally waking up to the reality of the many evils that allowing the Jews to govern themselves has brought upon the world. His analysis, however, doesn’t resist serious consideration.
There’s an editorial in today’s El País about Gaza and Israel’s policy towards it that offers a nice mix of rank prejudice and preconceptions masquerading as analysis.
John Pilger and the Enabling of Antisemitism
This is a guest post by David Adler.
To find journalist-ideologue John Pilger ranting about “the criminality of the Israeli state” and “the murderous, racist toll of Zionism” is all too routine. (Hat tip Oliver Kamm.) What’s new is this: Pilger trots out “the expatriate Israeli musician Gilad Atzmon” as a representative good Jew, emblematic of “the heroes of Israel” and “the moral courage of Israeli dissidents.” Either Pilger is fool enough to be unaware of Atzmon’s vicious anti-Jewish bigotry, or he has consciously praised an apologist for the Third Reich, who has declared:
Continue reading ‘John Pilger and the Enabling of Antisemitism’