A brief coda to this post. Enric González is the correspondent of El País in Jerusalem and he has just posted some rather dull (Islamophobia exists too you know!) reflections on antisemitism on his blog. What interests me here is how the post begins:
Archive for the 'antisemitism in the Spanish press' Category
El País is a leading liberal and progressive newspaper in the Spanish, Roman Catholic and Democratic Kingdom of Spain. It has long campaigned to put an end to Jewish self-determination and today’s contribution to that campaign comes in the form of an op-ed from M. Á. Bastenier, one of its most senior journalists.
Continue reading ‘The Latest From The Spanish, Roman Catholic And Democratic Kingdom Of Spain’
El País today runs yet another of its habitual anti-Israel opinion pieces. Today’s example of the genre is by Javier Valenzuela, who says that:
In the 1948 Israel was founded in more than three quarters of what had been that [British] mandate…
Every so often and apropos of nothing in particular El País feels obliged to vomit up a gut full of hatred for Israel. Today’s edition runs an editorial titled “The Israeli Quasi-theocracy”.
7. Conclusion
There are far more similarities than differences in the two papers coverage of the crisis. Both see Israel as entirely at fault, whether through malevolence or incompetence, and both would probably like the crisis to get worse and for the Israelis to get their comeuppance from Washington, but neither can quite bring itself to believe this might be possible. Both share a view of the Palestinians as generally passive, with Israel bearing practically the whole responsibility for the absence of a Palestinian state, almost as if it was something it possessed and perversely refused to hand over, as if the only obstacle to the creation of a state was Israel’s refusal to allow it. Their view of the conflict is an Israel-obsessed one and it sees the Palestinians as having, at best, a partial political subjectivity, waiting for others, principally Israel but also the Americans, to do the right thing and vindicate their rights for them. They both see Israel, in both its existence and its actions as the sole motor of history in the conflict and have a very thin view of the history of the conflict. Despite their evident sympathy for the Palestinians neither paper treats them with the seriousness it treats the Israelis.
Continue reading ‘Biden’s Visit in The Guardian and El País V’
5. El País (i)
The March 14th editorial in El Páis dealing with fallout from Biden’s visit is titled “Dark Horizon”, and starts like this,
The U.S. Vice President, Joseph Biden, arrived in Tel Aviv last week with the intention of promoting a rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians, but he was received by the Netanyahu Government with the announcement of new settlement projects: 112 housing units in the West Bank and 1,600 in East Jerusalem.
Continue reading ‘Biden’s Visit in The Guardian and El País III’
3. The Facts
The controversy arose from the fact that during a visit in early March from Vice President Biden, Israel announced its intention to build 1600 new housing units in a part of the city of Jerusalem captured from the Kingdom of Jordan during the Six Day War. Given that Biden was in the country to make encouraging noises to both sides in the then approaching proximity peace talks, the timing of the announcement was unfortunate to say the very least. Biden himself immediately condemned the move while Secretary of State Hilary Clinton described it as “deeply negative” and David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Obama, described it both as an “affront” and an “insult”. Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Sates, is alleged to have said that the row amounted to the worst crisis in US-Israeli relations in 35 years, though he later claimed to have been misquoted. Prime Minister Netanyahu claimed that he was unaware that the announcement was to be made during Biden’s visit, expressed regret about its timing and set up a committee to ensure that such a decision would not be made public without his approval in the future. The Palestinian side reacted by threatening not to participate in the proximity talks.
Continue reading ‘Biden’s Visit in The Guardian and El País II’
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.
1.
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.
Readers are no doubt aware that President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was overthrown by a coup d’etat on the 28th of June and that he currently languishes in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa. They may also know that the coup leaders organized a national election on Sunday and that - in a paroxysm of stupidity - the government of the United States seems set to recognize it as valid.
