Archive for the '"progressive" antimsemitism' Category

Argentine Jews: Someone’s Keeping An Eye On You

Regular readers will need no introduction to Luis D’Elía. The renowned social activist and prominent supporter of the government of Cristina  Fernández de Kirchner  shares his thoughts with the world on Twitter and a few minutes ago he posted this:

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Biden’s Visit in The Guardian and El País III

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.

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Biden’s Visit in The Guardian and El País II

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.

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Biden’s Visit in The Guardian and El País I

1.         Introduction

The purpose of this piece is to compare some aspects of the coverage of the recent diplomatic tension between the United States and Israel arising from Israel’s announcement of its intention to build new homes in a disputed part of Jerusalem during the recent visit to Israel of United States Vice President Joe Biden.  The Guardian, of London and El País, of Madrid were the newspapers chosen for examination because they are usually regarded as leaders in the advocacy of liberal and progressive politics in their respective countries and progressive and liberal opinion in some democratic nations has in recent years taken a sharp turn against Israel. Putting it very roughly, when Israel was  frequently involved in large-scale conventional warfare and expanding the territory under its control it was generally seen in sympathetic terms. Now that it has withdrawn from huge extensions of territory conquered in war, made comprehensive peace deals with two of countries that border it and abandoned fantasies of remaking the map of the Middle East to suit its proposes, it is increasingly seen as a uniquely evil state, illegitimate from birth, perverse in its policies, cruel in its behavior and ruled by a nefarious ideology, Zionism.

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The Swedish Scandal: Freedman Blames Bad Jews

Seth Freedman is a regular in the role of Acceptable Jew at The Guardian’s CiF website. In this piece he looks at the controversy surrounding the allegations of organ harvesting fom dead Palestinians leveled at the IDF in a Swedish newspaper. He concludes that it’s all Israel’s fault, naturally.

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Kick out the Jews and Foreigners!

We have before had cause to mention antisemitic activity in Argentina’s sun baked, dengue ridden province of Chaco and today we have cause to do so again.

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