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 'blogging' Category
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?
After a two year break, Judeosphere is back. Already, there’s a range of engaging posts, from a quick dissection of Slavoj Žižek’s recent essay on Iran (and the obsequious introduction given it by the New Age messianists at Tikkun) to a reminder of why, when it comes to successful boycotts, it’s the economy, stupid.
Here’s another excuse to hear the line that will doubtless become Judeosphere’s motto:
Here’s our good friend and occasional Z Word contributor David Adler with a charming version of a mellow Christmas tune that sounds just perfect in the twilight of New Year’s Day. In addition to writing about politics, David is a respected jazz critic. He is also, as I know from having met with him, the sort of person with whom debate and even disagreement is instructive and animating, not painful and irritating. And watching his performance below is a pleasing reminder of why a range of interests makes for a happy life. Happy New Year.
Adam Holland’s guest post earlier this week examined the growing connections between the far right and Muslim anti-Zionists. One of the photos we published in that piece showed a conference in Kuala Lumpur featuring former Malaysian leader and antisemitic conspiracy theorist Mahathir Mohamed, Holocaust denier Michael Collins Piper and a certain Yvonne Ridley, who will be well-known to Z Word readers in the UK as a loyal sidekick of insidious parliamentarian George Galloway - when she’s not acting as a mouthpiece for Iran’s murderous theocrats on their Press TV propaganda channel. Anyway, Adam has an updated post here which covers all this and is well worth reading.
A couple of weeks ago, MJ Rosenberg wrote a rather pompous piece chiding AJC for our new film on Iran.
As the creator of the film, I can categorically state that I wasn’t joking about anything contained within - not the bombing of the AMIA center, not the appalling repression which Iran metes out to its citizens, not the vile public executions which the regime revels in, and certainly not the spectacle of a nuclear attack launched by the mullahs. By contrast, Hugo Chavez finds this latter prospect deeply amusing. I trust that MJ Rosenberg, political commentator and now, apparently, film maven, will be preparing an equally stern lecture for the tyrant of Caracas.
This is a guest post by Hawkeye.
For those of you that are familiar with the Guardian’s ˜Comment is Free, you’ll know that it has become the meeting place ˜above the line“ of Jewish anti-Zionists of the likes of Anthony Lerman and Richard Silverstein, supporters of the one-state solution such as Ali Abunimah and Khaled Diab, leaders and spokespeople for Hamas such as Khalid Mishaal and Azzam Tamimi and proponents of the ˜Israel is an apartheid state” lie such as Ben White. Only yesterday CiF readers were exposed to the toxic views of CiF regular, Seth Freedman, who incredulously denied the deeply antisemitic nature of the Aftonbladet blood libel article.
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.
“But for the ‘facts-don’t-matter’ camp, there simply can’t be any threat to Israeli security: Ahmadinejad is just talking and anyway gets translated wrongly; anti-Semitism in the Arab and Muslim world doesn’t really exist and whenever it gets too obvious to deny it, it is only an entirely understandable reaction to Israel; Hamas doesn’t really mean what they say in their charter and if they do, their nostalgia for the good old days without Israel is only human; thousands of rockets and mortars targeting Israeli civilians are just homemade fire-crackers meant to signal understandable frustration, and there is no such thing as Palestinian terrorism because whatever the Palestinians do is legitimate resistance against a cruel and inhuman occupation. ”
Read Petra Marquardt-Bigman’s critique of those who regard facts in much the same way as my kids regard broccoli. Although on the latter front, I am more confident.
I was struck recently by that fact that myself, Eamonn and the other contributors to this blog rarely comment upon or examine the medium that we use. Perhaps this has something to do with why (from the truly brilliant xkcd):
“Omidreza Mirsayafi was Iran’s first known casualty in the skirmishes between bloggers challenging the Islamic regime and authorities striking back with the tools they know best — imprisonment and intimidation.”
More on the trials facing Iranian bloggers here.
You have to read this. Utterly brilliant.
(Via Terry Glavin.)
