Here is a new film which I’ve made for AJC. Since I posted it 3 weeks ago, it’s had over 17,000 views on youtube - we’ve also done Russian and Spanish versions. So it feels appropriate to urge you all to watch it and - if you like it - pass on the link.
Archive for the 'Middle East' Category
This is a guest post by Petra Marquardt-Bigman.
The Quilliam Foundation in London prides itself for being “the world’s first counter-extremism think tank.” The organization’s expertise in this field is clearly unique given that it was founded by “former leading ideologues of UK-based extremist Islamist organizations.” When it comes to Zionism, however, Quilliam’s former Islamists find it hard to really leave behind the ideology they now oppose.
Continue reading ‘Zionism and Islamism: A New False Equivalence’
“It is quite preposterous that Abbas can go to Washington, tell everybody that Olmert’s offer wasn’t good enough and that he wants to ‘wait’ until somebody delivers something better on a silver platter, while theSaudi foreign minister all but acknowledges that the Arabs don’t really want to negotiate with Israel, because for decades they have whipped up popular hostility against the ‘Zionist entity’ and it would now be rather inconvenient to explain negotiations with the despised and hated Jewish state.”
Petra Marquardt-Bigman, always indispensable, here.
“But as for those sections of the Cairo speech which turned a gimlet eye on the American past, Obama did no more than speak the truth, or tread where others have to lesser fanfare. Condoleeza Rice first compared the situation in Palestine to the American civil rights movement, and Gershom Gorenberg’s recent cover story in The Weekly Standard implicitly did as well by asking why it was that there was no Palestinian Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Had Obama really wanted to placate Iran, he would not have repudiated Holocaust denial or quoted from the Torah.”
Michael Weiss casts a critical eye upon conservative readings of Obama’s Cairo speech, in the new - and rather splendid-looking - online magazine Tablet.
Here’s André Aciman in the New York Times:
“The president never said a word about me. Or, for that matter, about any of the other 800,000 or so Jews born in the Middle East who fled the Arab and Muslim world or who were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century. With all his references to the history of Islam and to its (questionable) “proud tradition of tolerance” of other faiths, Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.”
At 6:38 AM Eastern Standard Time, President Obama’s speech hit what the Wall Street Journal’s live bloggers called a “sensitive passage.” This one:
Here is the Palestinian writer and literary critic Hassan Khader on the “Nakba Narrative.”
Despite the fact that the signed agreements shook the foundations of accepted Palestinian norms and expectations, the PLO did not fail to develop rhetoric that emphasized the extent of its continued commitment to, and perhaps even conformity with, the traditional Narrative, despite obvious contradictions.
“If only Israel froze settlements. If only Israel removed checkpoints. If only Israel recognized the Hamas government in Gaza. If only Israel stopped assuming the worst about Iran’s ‘pragmatic’ leadership, which just wants a nuclear weapon for defensive purposes. If only Israel got beyond its Holocaust trauma.”
David Harris examines a well-established and persistent syndrome.
A quick reminder about another AJC video, Point of No Return.
Antisemitism was a prominent focus of the American Jewish Committee’s Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Among the speakers were John Mann, the British MP who has spearheaded the global parliamentary fight against antisemitism, and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French author and philosopher who has never lost sight of the centrality of antisemitism in his dissection of Islamism and its related ills.
Mindful of his audience, Mann declared: “Let me quote from Rosa Parks: ‘As I got up on the bus I saw that there was only one vacancy, so this was the seat that I took.’ This world and past generations are full of Rosa Parks. People going about their everyday business quietly and with dignity. But people not prepared to be bullied and cowered and intimidated. No doubt a little scared, but those who do their bit by doing what is right.”
You can read the entire speech here and watch highlights of it on YouTube here.
And here are some highlights of what BHL had to say, again on YouTube.
Oliver Kamm makes an attempt to defend Jeremy Bowen in this post. After giving the background to the story he says that,
On all that I have seen, Bowen’s reporting from the Middle East has been informed and scrupulous.
This is a guest post by Jonathan Hoffman, co-Vice Chair of the UK Zionist Federation
The BBC is a unique institution. It is the largest broadcasting organisation on the planet (with an annual operating expenditure over £4 billion) and it is a public service broadcaster. The former gives it tremendous power. Even in the internet age, more people almost certainly relied on the BBC than on anyone else for their information about the recent Gaza conflict.
In his latest interview with Der Spiegel, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is by turns ingratiating (”By the way, thank you once again for coming. You are Germans, and we think very highly of the Germans,”) haughty (”You are journalists, not representatives of NATO, which is why I will not explain my position to you in this regard,”) petulant (”Besides, I didn’t even want to meet the Italian politicians,”) and conspiratorial (”Mr. Obama’s biggest problem has to do with domestic policy…the new US president is under pressure from these groups.”) And yet, for all those swings of mood and tone as well as those dark hints - no, he doesn’t specify which groups, but you can guess - an unmistakable clarity emerges.
