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 'bad journalism' 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 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’
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Yesterday I reviewed Bridget Kevane’s ignorant and ill-intentioned attempt to besmirch the memory Jacobo of Timerman. Today I’m going to take a look at her hatchet job on Argentina in general and its current ambassador it Washington in particular, a text in which she gets in a few final swipes at Timmerman along the way.
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Many readers will be familiar with the name of the Argentine journalist and publisher Jacobo Timerman. Kidnapped and tortured by agents of the 1976-1983 dictatorship, he was eventually allowed to leave for Israel where he wrote a book, Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number that was to become a classic account of the horrors of military rule in Argentina.
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 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.
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Readers with good memories will recall the appointment of Jorge Palacios, a disgraced former Federal Police officer to head the city of Buenos Aires’s first autonomous police force. To put it mildly, it wasn’t an idea that prospered. Palacios was obliged to resign when indicted on charges of being involved in the cover up of the AMIA massacre and is now in prison while being investigated on charges of organizing illegal wiretaps. Among those who had their phone conversations illicitly listened in on was Sergio Burstein, a well known campaigner for justice for the families of the survivors of the AMIA attack.
Continue reading ‘Israeli Embassy Controls Buenos Aires City Hall’
Now here’s one item in The Guardian that’s really worth reading:
We should not have put the headline “Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs” on a story about an admission, by the former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv, that during the 1990s specialists at the institute harvested organs from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers without getting permission from the families of the deceased (21 December, page 15). That headline did not match the article, which made clear that the organs were not taken only from Palestinians. This was a serious editing error and the headline has been changed online to reflect the text of the story written by the reporter.
How, I wonder, could such an error have been made?
Jay Adler directs me to this correspondence of his with Andrew Sullivan. Inter alia, Adler writes: “The problem in this is that Max Blumenthal and those particular ‘young left-wing Jewish political writers who criticise right-wing Israeli policies’ are not, simply, ‘writers who criticise right-wing Israeli policies.’ Blumenthal and Mondoweiss are both anti-Zionist. They are opposed to the existence of the Jewish state and are expressly working to bring about its demise.”
Continue reading ‘Andrew Sullivan Forecasts Israel’s Demise’
The increasingly nauseating Max Blumenthal is ably taken apart by Dvar Dea here. Serendipitously, Dvar’s piece came into my in-box while I was reading Blumenthal’s whine on the Huffington Post (look it up, I ain’t linking) comparing Israel’s security forces with those of Iran.
Should it ever dawn upon Blumenthal that intrepid journalism involves more than filming a bunch of drunken kids in the safety of west Jerusalem, perhaps he might venture to Tehran. Or at least London, where Press TV may well be willing to take him on, given that so many other pundits are bailing out on the voice of the Iranian regime.
Also recommended: Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez in The Boston Review write about antisemitism in Chavez’s Venezuela.
Over at Harry’s Place, habibi congratulates UK pundit Iain Dale for announcing that he will no longer appear on Press TV, the Holocaust-denying mouthpiece of the Iranian regime which masquerades as a legitimate news outlet. And The Times has an excellent piece here. It’s clear that Press TV, which is based in west London, is violating UK broadcasting regulations. The UK government must act - and shut it down.
As Jonathan Hoffman of the UK Zionist Federation was leaving a book launch held at the British Parliament, someone informed him that the “Nazis should have finished the job.” Not as shocking as it seems when you know that the launch was for a new book penned by the squalid propagandist Ben White (if I really wanted to punish Z Word readers, I’d republish some of White’s godawful poetry, but I like to think of myself as a decent person.) Anyway, read Jonathan’s account of what happened.
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In case you had forgotten, I’ll remind you. Israel and Iran are at war. Any doubts about this should have been put to bed by the reports of a series of airstrikes by Israel on Iranian arms convoys bound for Hamas as they passed through Sudan.
I have never pictured AJC, the organization which sponsors Z Word, and where I proudly work, as being driven by a particularly American Jewish “psychopathology;” nor have I ever been aware that AJC actively colludes with those who seek to wipe Israel out of existence; nor did I know that my colleagues would sit happily in the same room as those who would deny the Holocaust in which six million Jews, including members of my own family, were exterminated.
