Here's the liberal Zionist editor of The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, pretending that Netanyahu's victory at the polls will be equally bad for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, and omitting the fact that it was the former who enabled it:
"So Palestinians will have to brace themselves for a Trump 'peace plan' that is likely to deny them the territory they need to build a state of their own. Meanwhile, Netanyahu's victory promises a further assault on democratic norms and the rule of law inside Israel. It surely spells gloom for the long-term prospects of both peoples, but they are used to that by now. It's been this way on and off for most of the last quarter century. For truly this is the age of Netanyahu." (Netanyahu's victory means life is about to get worse for Palestinians, theguardian.com, 10/4/19)
George Orwell would be turning in his grave if he knew Freedland had been awarded a special Orwell Prize in May 2014 for his 'journalism'. Certainly, at least on the subject of Palestine/Israel, he seems incapable of producing anything other than pro-Israel PR.
In a 2012 New Statesman essay, Yearning for the same land, Freedland reveals why.
In it, he argues unconvincingly that, alongside the Zionism we're all familiar with, "the expansionist desire to control the entire biblical land of Israel," there's another "true" Zionism, consisting of "the more modest claim that there should be a Jewish national home within historic Palestine," and that that is the Zionism he, Freedland, professes. IOW, it's two states for two peoples, with the Palestinians getting a mere 22% of their historic homeland at most, contingent on the unlikely event of every soldier and settler pulling up stakes and getting out.
Whatever their imagined difference, both Zionisms, of course, subscribe to the same dogma, namely that Jews constitute not a faith community, but a "people" who, "like every other people, have a right to self-determination in the historic land of their birth." Although the concept of Jewish peoplehood has no basis in fact (and has been exploded most recently by Israeli historian Shlomo Sand in his 2009 book The Invention of the Jewish People), Freedland accepts it uncritically. Nor does he acknowledge the absurdity of this fictional people's achieving its fictional right of self-determination at the expense of another.
Sensing he's on shaky ground here, he attempts to bolster his case by shamelessly playing the Holocaust card: "The Jewish people, scythed by the Holocaust and after centuries of persecution, were gasping for breath in 1948; their need for a home was as great as that of any people in history. They had the right to act, even though the cost for another people, the Palestinians, was immense." Overlooked, of course, is the bleeding obvious that it was Germany, not the Palestinians, who perpetrated the Holocaust, not to mention the fact that the majority of Jews displaced by the war would have preferred to migrate to the United States and elsewhere than to Palestine.
Freedland goes on to claim that there was no "logical" connection between the pre-1967 Zionist colonisation of Palestine and the post-1967 Zionist colonisation of its West Bank and Gaza remnants. The Israeli settlement of the occupied territories was not, he asserts, "the ineluctable consequence of Zionism - as the Israeli right argued then and now." Presumably, for Freedland, those responsible for settling pre-1967 Palestine, his "true," Labor, Zionists, were more than content with their "national home" in 78% of historic Palestine. How strange then that their behaviour after 1967 belies this:
"The authorized, 'legal' settlements began in the era of the Labor-led governments, from 1967 to 1977. They flourished in the days of the Likud governments that followed and during the subsequent period of the Labor, Likud, and unity governments. In the course of the negotiations that engendered the September 1993 Oslo agreement, and in the period following it, the settlements saw an unprecedented building boom. All the the subsequent governments have made a point of approving new construction, ostensibly only within the boundaries of the existing settlements, but they have always supported - by political and budgetary deed and by failing to enforce the law and deter violations - the establishment of new settlements in the guise of new neighborhoods and 'illegal' outposts." (Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007, Idith Zertal & Akiva Eldar, 2007, pp xvii - xviii)
Freedland, of course, overlooks entirely the colonial-settler roots of the Zionist project and the trampling of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs' right to national self-determination following World War I; the fact that political Zionism, from its inception, was focused exclusively, as one of its early slogans put it, on 'a land without a people'; and that Zionist colonisation, like every other form of colonisation, has only ever trampled underfoot the rights of those it has dispossessed.
Freedland may try to fool us with his airy talk of Zionist "dreamers" and "two peoples, fated to seek their dreams in the same land," but in truth he's only fooling himself.
Showing posts with label Jonathan Freedland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jonathan Freedland. Show all posts
Monday, April 15, 2019
Saturday, March 2, 2019
A Modern Witch Hunt
Over 100 years ago, political Zionism unobtrusively entered British politics with the deceptively worded, thoroughly deceitful, Balfour Declaration, which declared that "His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people..." Who at the time could possibly have imagined that, as a direct consequence of that disastrous foreign policy blunder, Britain today would be witnessing (in addition to the protracted agony of the Palestinians) the deplorable phenomenon so lucidly analysed below by British journalist Jonathan Cook?
"'McCarthyism' is a word thrown around a lot nowadays, and in the process its true meaning - and horror - has been increasingly obscured. McCarthyism is not just the hounding of someone because their views are unpopular. It is the creation by the powerful of a perfect, self-rationalising system of incrimination - denying the victim a voice, even in their own defence. It presents the accused as an enemy so dangerous, their ideas so corrupting, that they must be silenced from the outset. Their only chance of rehabilitation is prostration before their accusers and utter repentance. McCarthyism, in other words, is the modern political parallel of the witch hunt.
"In an earlier era, the guilt of women accused of witchcraft was tested through the ducking stool. If a woman drowned, she was innocent; if she survived, she was guilty and burnt at the stake. A foolproof system that created an endless supply of the wicked, justifying the status and salaries of the men charged with hunting down ever more of these diabolical women. And that is the Medieval equivalent of where the British Labour Party has arrived, with the suspension of MP Chris Williamson for anti-semitism.
"Williamson, it should be noted, is widely seen as a key ally of Jeremy Corbyn, a democratic socialist who was propelled unexpectedly into the Labour leadership nearly four years ago by its members. His elevation infuriated most of the party's MPs, who hanker for the return of the New Labour era under Tony Blair, when the party firmly occupied the political centre.
"Corbyn's success has also outraged vocal supporters of Israel both in the Labour Party - some 80 MPs are stalwart members of Labour Friends of Israel - and in the UK media. Corbyn is the first British party leader in sight of power to prefer the Palestinians' right to justice over Israel's continuing oppression of the Palestinians. For these reasons, the Blairite MPs have been trying to oust Corbyn any way they can. First through a failed re-run of the leadership contest and then by assisting the corporate media - which is equally opposed to Corbyn - in smearing him variously as a shambles, a misogynist, a sympathiser with terrorists, a Russian asset, and finally as an 'enabler' of anti-semitism.
"This last accusation has proved the most fruitful after the Israel lobby began to expand the definition of anti-semitism to include not just hatred of Jews but also criticism of Israel. Labour was eventually forced to accept a redefinition, formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that conflates anti-Zionism - opposition to Israel's violent creation on the Palestinians' homeland - with anti-semitism.
"Once the mud stuck through repetition, a vocal group of Labour MPs began denouncing the party for being 'institutionally anti-semitic', 'endemically anti-semitic' and a 'cesspit of anti-semitism'. The slurs continued relentlessly, even as statistics proved the accusation to be groundless. The figures show that anti-semitism exists only in the margins of the party, as racism does in all walks of life. Meanwhile, the smears overshadowed the very provable fact that anti-semitism and other forms of racism are rearing their head dangerously on the political right. But the witchfinders were never interested in the political reality. They wanted a never-ending war - a policy of 'zero tolerance' - to root out an evil in their midst, a supposed 'hard left' given succour by Corbyn and his acolytes.
"This is the context for understanding Williamson's 'crime'. Despite the best efforts of our modern witchfinder generals to prove otherwise, Williamson has not been shown to have expressed hatred towards Jews, or even to have made a comment that could be interpreted as anti-semitic. One of the most experienced of the witchfinders, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, indulged familiar McCarthyite tactics yesterday in trying to prove Williamson's anti-semitism by association. The MP was what Freedland termed a 'Jew baiter' because he has associated with people whom the witchfinders decree to be anti-semites.
"Shortly before he found himself formally shunned by media commentators and his own parliamentary party, Williamson twice confirmed his guilt to the inquisitors.
"First, he dared to challenge the authority of the witchfinders. He suggested that some of those being hounded out of Labour may not in fact be witches. Or more specifically, in the context of constant claims of a Labour 'anti-semitism crisis', he argued that the party had been 'too apologetic' in dealing with the bad-faith efforts of those seeking to damage a Corbyn-led party. In other words, Williamson suggested that Labour ought to be more proactively promoting the abundant evidence that it was indeed dealing with what he called the 'scourge of anti-semitism', and thereby demonstrate to the British public that Labour wasn't 'institutionally anti-semitic'. Labour members, he was pointing out, ought not to have to keep quiet as they were being endlessly slandered as anti-semites.
"As Jewish Voice for Labour, a Jewish group supportive of Corbyn, noted: 'The flood of exaggerated claims of anti-semitism make it harder to deal with any real instances of antisemitism. The credibility of well-founded allegations is undermined by the less credible ones and real perpetrators are more likely not to be held to account. Crying wolf is dangerous when there are real wolves around the corner. This was the reality that Chris Williamson was drawing attention to.'
"As with all inquisitions, however, the witchfinders were not interested in what Williamson actually said, but in the threat he posed to the narrative they have created to destroy their enemy, Corbynism, and reassert their own power. So his words were ripped from their context and presented as proof that he did indeed support witches. He was denounced for saying what he had not: that Labour should not apologise for its anti-semitism. In this dishonest reformulation of Williamson's statement, the witchfinders claimed to show that he had supported anti-semitism, that he consorted with witches.
"Second, Williamson compounded his crime by publicly helping just such a readymade witch: a black Jewish woman named Jackie Walker. He had booked a room in the British parliament building - the seat of our supposed democracy - so that audiences could see a new documentary on an earlier Labour witch hunt. More than two years ago the party suspended Walker over anti-semitism claims. The screening was to inform Labour party members of the facts of her case in the run-up to a hearing in which, given the current atmosphere, it is likely she will be expelled. The screening was sponsored by Jewish Voice for Labour, which has also warned repeatedly that anti-semitism is being used malevolently to silence criticism of Israel and weaken Corbyn. Walker was seen as a pivotal figure by those opposed to Corbyn. She was a co-founder of Momentum, the grassroots organisation established to support Corbyn after his election to the leadership and deal with the inevitable fallout from the Blairite wing of MPs. Momentum expected a rough ride from this dominant faction, and they were not disappointed. The Blairites still held on to the party machinery and they had an ally in Tom Watson, who became Corbyn's deputy. Walker was one of the early victims of the confected claims of a Labour 'anti-semitism crisis'. But she was not ready to roll over and accept her status as witch. She fought back.
"First, she produced a one-woman show about her treatment at the hands of the Labour Party bureaucracy - framed in the context of decades of racist treatment of black people in the west - called The Lynching. And then her story was turned into a documentary film, fittingly called Witch Hunt. It sets out very clearly the machinations of the Blairite wing of MPs, and Labour's closely allied Israel lobby, in defaming Walker as part of their efforts to regain power over the party. For people so ostensibly concerned about racism towards Jews, these witchfinders show little self-awareness about how obvious their own racism is in relation to some of the 'witches' they have hunted down. But that racism can only be understood if people have the chance to hear from Walker and other victims of the anti-semitism smears. Which is precisely why Williamson, who was trying to organise the screening of Witch Hunt, had to be dealt with too.
"Walker is not the only prominent black anti-racism activist targeted. Marc Wadsworth, another longtime ally of Corbyn's, and founder of the Anti-Racist Alliance, was 'outed' last year in another confected anti-semitism scandal. The allegations of anti-semitism were impossible to stand up publicly, so finally he was booted out on a catch-all claim that he had brought the party 'into disrepute'.
"Jews who criticise Israel and support Corbyn's solidarity with Palestinians have been picked off by the witchfinders too, cheered on by media commentators who claim this is being done in the service of a 'zero tolerance' policy towards racism. As well as Walker, the targets have included Tony Greenstein, Moshe Machover, Martin Odoni, Glyn Secker and Cyril Chilson.
"But as the battle in Labour has intensified to redefine anti-Zionism as anti-semitism, the deeper issues at stake have come to the fore. John Lansman, another founder of Momentum, recently stated: 'I don't want any Jewish member of the party to be leaving. We are absolutely committed to making Labour a safe space'. But there are a set of very obvious problems with that position, and they have gone entirely unexamined by those promoting the 'institutional anti-semitism' and 'zero tolerance' narratives.
"First, it is impossible to be a home to all Jews in Labour, when the party's Jewish members are themselves deeply split over key issues like whether Corbyn is a force for good and whether meaningful criticism of Israel should be allowed. A fanatically pro-Israel organisation like the Jewish Labour Movement will never tolerate a Corbyn-led Labour Party reaching power and supporting the Palestinian cause. To pretend otherwise is simple naivety or deception.
"That fact was demonstrably proven two years ago in the Al Jazeera undercover documentary The Lobby into covert efforts by Israel and its UK lobbyists to undermine Corbyn from within his own party through groups like the JLM and MPs in Labour Friends of Israel. It was telling that the party machine, along with the corporate media, did its best to keep the documentary out of public view.
"The MPs loudest about 'institutional anti-semitism' in Labour were among those abandoning the party to join the Independent Group this month, preferring to ally with renegade conservative MPs in an apparent attempt to frustrate a Corbyn-led party winning power.
"Further, if a proportion of Jewish Labour Party members have such a heavy personal investment in Israel that they refuse to countenance any meaningful curbs on Israel's abuses of Palestinians - and that has been underscored repeatedly by public comments from the JLM and LFI - then keeping them inside the party will require cracking down on all but the flimsiest criticism of Israel. It will tie the party's hands on supporting Palestinian rights. In the name of protecting the Israel 'right or wrong' crowd from what they consider to be anti-semitic abuse, Labour will have to provide institutional support for Israel's racism towards Palestinians.
"In doing so, it will in fact simply revert to the party before Corbyn, when Labour turned a blind eye over many decades to the Palestinians' dispossession by European Zionists who created an ugly anachronistic state where rights accrue based on one's ethnicity and religion rather than citizenship. Those in Labour who reject Britain's continuing complicity in such crimes - ones the UK set in motion with the Balfour Declaration - will find as a result, that it is they who have no home in Labour. That includes significant numbers of anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinians, Muslims and Palestinian solidarity activists.
"If the creation of a 'safe space' for Jews in the Labour Party is code, as it appears to be, for a safe space for hardline Zionist Jews, it will inevitably require that the party become a hostile environment for those engaged in other anti-racism battles. Stripped bare, what Lansman and the witchfinders are saying is that Zionist Jewish sensitivities in the party are the only ones that count, that everything and anything must be done to indulge them, even if it means abusing non-Zionist Jewish members, black members, Palestinian and Muslim members, and those expressing solidarity with Palestinians.
"This is precisely the political black hole into which simplistic, kneejerk identity politics inevitably gets sucked.
"Right now, the establishment - represented by Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6 - is maliciously trying to frame Corbyn's main adviser, Seumas Milne, as a Kremlin asset.
"While the witchfinders claim to have unearthed a 'pattern of behaviour' in Williamson's efforts to expose their smears, in fact the real pattern of behaviour is there for all to see: a concerted McCarthyite campaign to destroy Corbyn before he can reach No 10. Corbyn's allies are being picked off one by one, from grassroots activists like Walker and Wadsworth to higher-placed supporters like Williamson and Milne. Soon Corbyn will stand alone, exposed before the inquisition that has been prepared for him. Then Labour can be restored to the Blairites, the members silenced until they leave and any hope of offering a political alternative to the establishment safely shelved. Ordinary people will again be made passive spectators as the rich carry on playing with their lives and their futures as though Britain was simply a rigged game of Monopoly. If parliamentary politics returns to business as usual for the wealthy, taking to the streets looks increasingly like the only option. Maybe it's time to dust off a Yellow Vest." (The witchfinders are now ready to burn Corbyn, jonathan-cook.net/blog)
"'McCarthyism' is a word thrown around a lot nowadays, and in the process its true meaning - and horror - has been increasingly obscured. McCarthyism is not just the hounding of someone because their views are unpopular. It is the creation by the powerful of a perfect, self-rationalising system of incrimination - denying the victim a voice, even in their own defence. It presents the accused as an enemy so dangerous, their ideas so corrupting, that they must be silenced from the outset. Their only chance of rehabilitation is prostration before their accusers and utter repentance. McCarthyism, in other words, is the modern political parallel of the witch hunt.
"In an earlier era, the guilt of women accused of witchcraft was tested through the ducking stool. If a woman drowned, she was innocent; if she survived, she was guilty and burnt at the stake. A foolproof system that created an endless supply of the wicked, justifying the status and salaries of the men charged with hunting down ever more of these diabolical women. And that is the Medieval equivalent of where the British Labour Party has arrived, with the suspension of MP Chris Williamson for anti-semitism.
"Williamson, it should be noted, is widely seen as a key ally of Jeremy Corbyn, a democratic socialist who was propelled unexpectedly into the Labour leadership nearly four years ago by its members. His elevation infuriated most of the party's MPs, who hanker for the return of the New Labour era under Tony Blair, when the party firmly occupied the political centre.
"Corbyn's success has also outraged vocal supporters of Israel both in the Labour Party - some 80 MPs are stalwart members of Labour Friends of Israel - and in the UK media. Corbyn is the first British party leader in sight of power to prefer the Palestinians' right to justice over Israel's continuing oppression of the Palestinians. For these reasons, the Blairite MPs have been trying to oust Corbyn any way they can. First through a failed re-run of the leadership contest and then by assisting the corporate media - which is equally opposed to Corbyn - in smearing him variously as a shambles, a misogynist, a sympathiser with terrorists, a Russian asset, and finally as an 'enabler' of anti-semitism.
"This last accusation has proved the most fruitful after the Israel lobby began to expand the definition of anti-semitism to include not just hatred of Jews but also criticism of Israel. Labour was eventually forced to accept a redefinition, formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that conflates anti-Zionism - opposition to Israel's violent creation on the Palestinians' homeland - with anti-semitism.
"Once the mud stuck through repetition, a vocal group of Labour MPs began denouncing the party for being 'institutionally anti-semitic', 'endemically anti-semitic' and a 'cesspit of anti-semitism'. The slurs continued relentlessly, even as statistics proved the accusation to be groundless. The figures show that anti-semitism exists only in the margins of the party, as racism does in all walks of life. Meanwhile, the smears overshadowed the very provable fact that anti-semitism and other forms of racism are rearing their head dangerously on the political right. But the witchfinders were never interested in the political reality. They wanted a never-ending war - a policy of 'zero tolerance' - to root out an evil in their midst, a supposed 'hard left' given succour by Corbyn and his acolytes.
"This is the context for understanding Williamson's 'crime'. Despite the best efforts of our modern witchfinder generals to prove otherwise, Williamson has not been shown to have expressed hatred towards Jews, or even to have made a comment that could be interpreted as anti-semitic. One of the most experienced of the witchfinders, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, indulged familiar McCarthyite tactics yesterday in trying to prove Williamson's anti-semitism by association. The MP was what Freedland termed a 'Jew baiter' because he has associated with people whom the witchfinders decree to be anti-semites.
"Shortly before he found himself formally shunned by media commentators and his own parliamentary party, Williamson twice confirmed his guilt to the inquisitors.
"First, he dared to challenge the authority of the witchfinders. He suggested that some of those being hounded out of Labour may not in fact be witches. Or more specifically, in the context of constant claims of a Labour 'anti-semitism crisis', he argued that the party had been 'too apologetic' in dealing with the bad-faith efforts of those seeking to damage a Corbyn-led party. In other words, Williamson suggested that Labour ought to be more proactively promoting the abundant evidence that it was indeed dealing with what he called the 'scourge of anti-semitism', and thereby demonstrate to the British public that Labour wasn't 'institutionally anti-semitic'. Labour members, he was pointing out, ought not to have to keep quiet as they were being endlessly slandered as anti-semites.
"As Jewish Voice for Labour, a Jewish group supportive of Corbyn, noted: 'The flood of exaggerated claims of anti-semitism make it harder to deal with any real instances of antisemitism. The credibility of well-founded allegations is undermined by the less credible ones and real perpetrators are more likely not to be held to account. Crying wolf is dangerous when there are real wolves around the corner. This was the reality that Chris Williamson was drawing attention to.'
"As with all inquisitions, however, the witchfinders were not interested in what Williamson actually said, but in the threat he posed to the narrative they have created to destroy their enemy, Corbynism, and reassert their own power. So his words were ripped from their context and presented as proof that he did indeed support witches. He was denounced for saying what he had not: that Labour should not apologise for its anti-semitism. In this dishonest reformulation of Williamson's statement, the witchfinders claimed to show that he had supported anti-semitism, that he consorted with witches.
"Second, Williamson compounded his crime by publicly helping just such a readymade witch: a black Jewish woman named Jackie Walker. He had booked a room in the British parliament building - the seat of our supposed democracy - so that audiences could see a new documentary on an earlier Labour witch hunt. More than two years ago the party suspended Walker over anti-semitism claims. The screening was to inform Labour party members of the facts of her case in the run-up to a hearing in which, given the current atmosphere, it is likely she will be expelled. The screening was sponsored by Jewish Voice for Labour, which has also warned repeatedly that anti-semitism is being used malevolently to silence criticism of Israel and weaken Corbyn. Walker was seen as a pivotal figure by those opposed to Corbyn. She was a co-founder of Momentum, the grassroots organisation established to support Corbyn after his election to the leadership and deal with the inevitable fallout from the Blairite wing of MPs. Momentum expected a rough ride from this dominant faction, and they were not disappointed. The Blairites still held on to the party machinery and they had an ally in Tom Watson, who became Corbyn's deputy. Walker was one of the early victims of the confected claims of a Labour 'anti-semitism crisis'. But she was not ready to roll over and accept her status as witch. She fought back.
"First, she produced a one-woman show about her treatment at the hands of the Labour Party bureaucracy - framed in the context of decades of racist treatment of black people in the west - called The Lynching. And then her story was turned into a documentary film, fittingly called Witch Hunt. It sets out very clearly the machinations of the Blairite wing of MPs, and Labour's closely allied Israel lobby, in defaming Walker as part of their efforts to regain power over the party. For people so ostensibly concerned about racism towards Jews, these witchfinders show little self-awareness about how obvious their own racism is in relation to some of the 'witches' they have hunted down. But that racism can only be understood if people have the chance to hear from Walker and other victims of the anti-semitism smears. Which is precisely why Williamson, who was trying to organise the screening of Witch Hunt, had to be dealt with too.
"Walker is not the only prominent black anti-racism activist targeted. Marc Wadsworth, another longtime ally of Corbyn's, and founder of the Anti-Racist Alliance, was 'outed' last year in another confected anti-semitism scandal. The allegations of anti-semitism were impossible to stand up publicly, so finally he was booted out on a catch-all claim that he had brought the party 'into disrepute'.
"Jews who criticise Israel and support Corbyn's solidarity with Palestinians have been picked off by the witchfinders too, cheered on by media commentators who claim this is being done in the service of a 'zero tolerance' policy towards racism. As well as Walker, the targets have included Tony Greenstein, Moshe Machover, Martin Odoni, Glyn Secker and Cyril Chilson.
"But as the battle in Labour has intensified to redefine anti-Zionism as anti-semitism, the deeper issues at stake have come to the fore. John Lansman, another founder of Momentum, recently stated: 'I don't want any Jewish member of the party to be leaving. We are absolutely committed to making Labour a safe space'. But there are a set of very obvious problems with that position, and they have gone entirely unexamined by those promoting the 'institutional anti-semitism' and 'zero tolerance' narratives.
"First, it is impossible to be a home to all Jews in Labour, when the party's Jewish members are themselves deeply split over key issues like whether Corbyn is a force for good and whether meaningful criticism of Israel should be allowed. A fanatically pro-Israel organisation like the Jewish Labour Movement will never tolerate a Corbyn-led Labour Party reaching power and supporting the Palestinian cause. To pretend otherwise is simple naivety or deception.
"That fact was demonstrably proven two years ago in the Al Jazeera undercover documentary The Lobby into covert efforts by Israel and its UK lobbyists to undermine Corbyn from within his own party through groups like the JLM and MPs in Labour Friends of Israel. It was telling that the party machine, along with the corporate media, did its best to keep the documentary out of public view.
"The MPs loudest about 'institutional anti-semitism' in Labour were among those abandoning the party to join the Independent Group this month, preferring to ally with renegade conservative MPs in an apparent attempt to frustrate a Corbyn-led party winning power.
"Further, if a proportion of Jewish Labour Party members have such a heavy personal investment in Israel that they refuse to countenance any meaningful curbs on Israel's abuses of Palestinians - and that has been underscored repeatedly by public comments from the JLM and LFI - then keeping them inside the party will require cracking down on all but the flimsiest criticism of Israel. It will tie the party's hands on supporting Palestinian rights. In the name of protecting the Israel 'right or wrong' crowd from what they consider to be anti-semitic abuse, Labour will have to provide institutional support for Israel's racism towards Palestinians.
"In doing so, it will in fact simply revert to the party before Corbyn, when Labour turned a blind eye over many decades to the Palestinians' dispossession by European Zionists who created an ugly anachronistic state where rights accrue based on one's ethnicity and religion rather than citizenship. Those in Labour who reject Britain's continuing complicity in such crimes - ones the UK set in motion with the Balfour Declaration - will find as a result, that it is they who have no home in Labour. That includes significant numbers of anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinians, Muslims and Palestinian solidarity activists.
"If the creation of a 'safe space' for Jews in the Labour Party is code, as it appears to be, for a safe space for hardline Zionist Jews, it will inevitably require that the party become a hostile environment for those engaged in other anti-racism battles. Stripped bare, what Lansman and the witchfinders are saying is that Zionist Jewish sensitivities in the party are the only ones that count, that everything and anything must be done to indulge them, even if it means abusing non-Zionist Jewish members, black members, Palestinian and Muslim members, and those expressing solidarity with Palestinians.
"This is precisely the political black hole into which simplistic, kneejerk identity politics inevitably gets sucked.
"Right now, the establishment - represented by Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6 - is maliciously trying to frame Corbyn's main adviser, Seumas Milne, as a Kremlin asset.
"While the witchfinders claim to have unearthed a 'pattern of behaviour' in Williamson's efforts to expose their smears, in fact the real pattern of behaviour is there for all to see: a concerted McCarthyite campaign to destroy Corbyn before he can reach No 10. Corbyn's allies are being picked off one by one, from grassroots activists like Walker and Wadsworth to higher-placed supporters like Williamson and Milne. Soon Corbyn will stand alone, exposed before the inquisition that has been prepared for him. Then Labour can be restored to the Blairites, the members silenced until they leave and any hope of offering a political alternative to the establishment safely shelved. Ordinary people will again be made passive spectators as the rich carry on playing with their lives and their futures as though Britain was simply a rigged game of Monopoly. If parliamentary politics returns to business as usual for the wealthy, taking to the streets looks increasingly like the only option. Maybe it's time to dust off a Yellow Vest." (The witchfinders are now ready to burn Corbyn, jonathan-cook.net/blog)
Tuesday, April 24, 2018
Give Us a Break, Guardian!
Another Israeli bloodletting in Gaza. Another lame Guardian editorial:
"The soldiers use of live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators is an affront; but it is in line with the brutal attitudes towards Palestinians that have been normalised by Israeli politicians." (The Guardian view on the Gaza protests: a new challenge to Israel's blockade, 23/4/18)
It's not an "affront," it's a fucking war crime!
That aside, if the Guardian's editor, Jonathan Freedland, is so bloody ignorant that he seriously thinks that Israeli brutality towards Palestinians is something new, then he doesn't deserve editorial space on a news website, let alone the job of boss cocky.
I mean, how far back do we have to go to understand that anti-Palestinian brutality is in the Zionist DNA?
1967?
"[Israeli Prime Minister Levi] Eshkol had already had reason to be worried about the Gaza refugees roughly two years before the Six-Day War [of 1967]. The refugees were multiplying, and when their numbers reached half a million, he feared the situation would become explosive. Once, he asked the chief of staff what would happen if the Egyptians [who then controlled the Gaza Strip] simply marched the refugees - women and children in the vanguard - towards the border with Israel. [Yitzhak] Rabin said they would not do that, and if they did, as soon as the IDF had killed the first 100, the rest would go back to Gaza." (1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East, Tom Segev, 2007, p 524)
1949?
"Altogether between 2,700 and 5,000 infiltrators were killed in the period 1949-1956, the great majority of whom were unarmed." (Avi Shlaim, reviewing Benny Morris' Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation & the Countdown to the Suez War, 1993)
"The soldiers use of live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators is an affront; but it is in line with the brutal attitudes towards Palestinians that have been normalised by Israeli politicians." (The Guardian view on the Gaza protests: a new challenge to Israel's blockade, 23/4/18)
It's not an "affront," it's a fucking war crime!
That aside, if the Guardian's editor, Jonathan Freedland, is so bloody ignorant that he seriously thinks that Israeli brutality towards Palestinians is something new, then he doesn't deserve editorial space on a news website, let alone the job of boss cocky.
I mean, how far back do we have to go to understand that anti-Palestinian brutality is in the Zionist DNA?
1967?
"[Israeli Prime Minister Levi] Eshkol had already had reason to be worried about the Gaza refugees roughly two years before the Six-Day War [of 1967]. The refugees were multiplying, and when their numbers reached half a million, he feared the situation would become explosive. Once, he asked the chief of staff what would happen if the Egyptians [who then controlled the Gaza Strip] simply marched the refugees - women and children in the vanguard - towards the border with Israel. [Yitzhak] Rabin said they would not do that, and if they did, as soon as the IDF had killed the first 100, the rest would go back to Gaza." (1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East, Tom Segev, 2007, p 524)
1949?
"Altogether between 2,700 and 5,000 infiltrators were killed in the period 1949-1956, the great majority of whom were unarmed." (Avi Shlaim, reviewing Benny Morris' Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation & the Countdown to the Suez War, 1993)
Sunday, April 1, 2018
So You Think the Murdoch Press is the Only MSM Problem?
As unarmed Palestinian refugees, demonstrating behind the wire of their Gaza Ghetto for the right to return to the homes and lands from which they were ethnically cleansed by Israeli terror gangs in 1948, were being callously gunned down - 17 dead and over 1,500 wounded is the current Al-Jazeera count - by Israeli troops terror gangs, sniping from behind protective earthworks* on Good Friday, all the PEP (Progressive Except Palestine) Guardian editor, Jonathan Freedland, could reflect on this Easter is this:
"'Easter? The very word gives me a migraine.' Not my view, but that of an old family friend who couldn't shake the folk memory of Easter as pogrom season, a time of anti-Jewish attacks as Christians resurrected the libel that it was the Jews, rather than the Romans who killed Jesus. [FFS, that was in Tsarist Russia!] But this weekend is also Passover, when Jews retell the story that defines them as a people [Note, not 'as a faith community,' but "as a people," a tell-tale Zionist construct], sitting around a Seder table and recalling through words, song, and crucially, food their exodus from slavery in Egypt. [See my 29-30/12/14 posts The Exodus Master Narrative, 1 & 2.]
"The Easter/Passover combination means that at this time every year Jews are reminded of two core facts about themselves. The first is that they are raised, from the start, to remember that their place is with the oppressed and against injustice because, were it not for the exodus, they would still be slaves today. [So why then, despite this "core fact," inculcated "from the start," do the majority of Jews today see themselves as Zionists?] The second is that, from the start, they have been hated.
"Both of these messages feel timely this weekend, as Jews reflect on the way a movement that they long saw as their natural home - on the left, fighting oppression and injustice - has been rocked by the question of anti-Jewish hatred... " [Hello? So British Zionists are one and all leftist progressives - just not in Palestine?] (Antisemitism matters: Jews are the canary in the coalmine, 31/3/18)
Those, of course, are just the opening paragraphs. But the piece as a whole has bugger-all to do with genuine anti-Semitism, it's just another part of the witch-hunt currently being directed against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is seen as having strayed too far from the Zionist narrative.
The simple fact of the matter is that for Freedland and his PEP Zionist mates, no matter how many Palestinians are murdered and maimed in Israeli pogroms, all that really matters is Israel.
Or, to put it in his own morally repugnant words: "[The Zionist movement] had the right to act, even though the cost for another people, the Palestinians, was immense." (Quoted in my 24/5/14 post Orwell Turns in His Grave.)
[*In addition, the Guardian's accompanying Associated Press report on Israel's latest bloody massacre of Palestinians typically obfuscates the reality with its talk of "deadly clashes between Palestinians and Israeli troops," and features this predictable dollop churned out by the Israeli army's propaganda mill: "The Israeli military said thousands of Palestinians threw stones and rolled burning tires towards troops, Palestinian gunmen fired toward soldiers in one incident and militants were trying to conduct attacks under the cover of protests." (Gaza deaths: UN secretary general calls for 'transparent' investigation, 31/3/18). Now go to the Electronic Intifada website and compare this Guardian shite with EI's report, Israel admits, then deletes, responsibility for Gaza killing, 31/3/18.]
"'Easter? The very word gives me a migraine.' Not my view, but that of an old family friend who couldn't shake the folk memory of Easter as pogrom season, a time of anti-Jewish attacks as Christians resurrected the libel that it was the Jews, rather than the Romans who killed Jesus. [FFS, that was in Tsarist Russia!] But this weekend is also Passover, when Jews retell the story that defines them as a people [Note, not 'as a faith community,' but "as a people," a tell-tale Zionist construct], sitting around a Seder table and recalling through words, song, and crucially, food their exodus from slavery in Egypt. [See my 29-30/12/14 posts The Exodus Master Narrative, 1 & 2.]
"The Easter/Passover combination means that at this time every year Jews are reminded of two core facts about themselves. The first is that they are raised, from the start, to remember that their place is with the oppressed and against injustice because, were it not for the exodus, they would still be slaves today. [So why then, despite this "core fact," inculcated "from the start," do the majority of Jews today see themselves as Zionists?] The second is that, from the start, they have been hated.
"Both of these messages feel timely this weekend, as Jews reflect on the way a movement that they long saw as their natural home - on the left, fighting oppression and injustice - has been rocked by the question of anti-Jewish hatred... " [Hello? So British Zionists are one and all leftist progressives - just not in Palestine?] (Antisemitism matters: Jews are the canary in the coalmine, 31/3/18)
Those, of course, are just the opening paragraphs. But the piece as a whole has bugger-all to do with genuine anti-Semitism, it's just another part of the witch-hunt currently being directed against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is seen as having strayed too far from the Zionist narrative.
The simple fact of the matter is that for Freedland and his PEP Zionist mates, no matter how many Palestinians are murdered and maimed in Israeli pogroms, all that really matters is Israel.
Or, to put it in his own morally repugnant words: "[The Zionist movement] had the right to act, even though the cost for another people, the Palestinians, was immense." (Quoted in my 24/5/14 post Orwell Turns in His Grave.)
[*In addition, the Guardian's accompanying Associated Press report on Israel's latest bloody massacre of Palestinians typically obfuscates the reality with its talk of "deadly clashes between Palestinians and Israeli troops," and features this predictable dollop churned out by the Israeli army's propaganda mill: "The Israeli military said thousands of Palestinians threw stones and rolled burning tires towards troops, Palestinian gunmen fired toward soldiers in one incident and militants were trying to conduct attacks under the cover of protests." (Gaza deaths: UN secretary general calls for 'transparent' investigation, 31/3/18). Now go to the Electronic Intifada website and compare this Guardian shite with EI's report, Israel admits, then deletes, responsibility for Gaza killing, 31/3/18.]
Saturday, October 7, 2017
UK Labour's Arbiter of Anti-Semitism
Remember when anti-Semitism used to be a matter of hating, or discriminating against, Jews for no other reason than that they were Jews? Well, times change, and now, apparently, it means something quite different:
"Politicians and media pundits are starting to push the debate about anti-semitism in disturbing new directions... and this process has accelerated since [Jeremy] Corbyn became leader. This dangerous trend was highlighted in a commentary last week in the midst of the [Labour Party] conference. Jonathan Freedland, a senior columnist at the Guardian newspaper and the Jewish Chronicle, is highly influential among Britain's liberal Zionist community. He is possibly the most prominent arbiter of 'anti-Semitism' on the British left. He used his column to attack three well-known Labour figures closely identified with Corbyn who had each dismissed 'Labour's anti-Semitism plague' as mischief-making. Freedland accused former London mayor Ken Livingstone, award-winning film-maker Ken Loach, and trade union leader Len McCluskey of anti-semitism denial and leading Labour into a 'dark place'.
"In a circular proof of Labour's anti-semitism crisis, Freedland cited calls from some Labour activists - in fact, a handful - to expel the JLM [Jewish Labour Movement, the sister organisation of Israel's own Labour Party] from the party. He avoided mentioning why: that the JLM had been caught redhanded conspiring against the party leader by the Al Jazeera investigation... Freedland, a former winner of Britain's Orwell Prize, then indulged in some trademark Orwellian 'newspeak'. He argued that the three leading Labour lights, as non-Jews, were not in a position to assess whether there was an anti-Semitism crisis in the party. Only Jews could make that call - and, he added, Labour's Jews were adamant that the party had a big problem. Here Freedland effectively backed the draconian and rejected definition of anti-semitism originally proposed by the JLM at the conference. According to both the JLM and Freedland, anti-semitism cannot be adduced through objective criteria, or by applying tradtional methods, such as hateful statements or actions against Jews because they are Jews. Instead, Freedland and the JLM believe that anti-semitism can be defined more broadly. It exists, they say, if it is perceived as such by its victims, even if no tangible evidence can be identified. It is like a mood sensed only by those - Jews - who are attuned to it through their firsthand experience of anti-semitism." (As battle rages in UK Labour Party, Moshe Machover expelled after asserting 'Anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism, Jonathan Cook, mondoweiss.net, 5/10/17)
"Politicians and media pundits are starting to push the debate about anti-semitism in disturbing new directions... and this process has accelerated since [Jeremy] Corbyn became leader. This dangerous trend was highlighted in a commentary last week in the midst of the [Labour Party] conference. Jonathan Freedland, a senior columnist at the Guardian newspaper and the Jewish Chronicle, is highly influential among Britain's liberal Zionist community. He is possibly the most prominent arbiter of 'anti-Semitism' on the British left. He used his column to attack three well-known Labour figures closely identified with Corbyn who had each dismissed 'Labour's anti-Semitism plague' as mischief-making. Freedland accused former London mayor Ken Livingstone, award-winning film-maker Ken Loach, and trade union leader Len McCluskey of anti-semitism denial and leading Labour into a 'dark place'.
"In a circular proof of Labour's anti-semitism crisis, Freedland cited calls from some Labour activists - in fact, a handful - to expel the JLM [Jewish Labour Movement, the sister organisation of Israel's own Labour Party] from the party. He avoided mentioning why: that the JLM had been caught redhanded conspiring against the party leader by the Al Jazeera investigation... Freedland, a former winner of Britain's Orwell Prize, then indulged in some trademark Orwellian 'newspeak'. He argued that the three leading Labour lights, as non-Jews, were not in a position to assess whether there was an anti-Semitism crisis in the party. Only Jews could make that call - and, he added, Labour's Jews were adamant that the party had a big problem. Here Freedland effectively backed the draconian and rejected definition of anti-semitism originally proposed by the JLM at the conference. According to both the JLM and Freedland, anti-semitism cannot be adduced through objective criteria, or by applying tradtional methods, such as hateful statements or actions against Jews because they are Jews. Instead, Freedland and the JLM believe that anti-semitism can be defined more broadly. It exists, they say, if it is perceived as such by its victims, even if no tangible evidence can be identified. It is like a mood sensed only by those - Jews - who are attuned to it through their firsthand experience of anti-semitism." (As battle rages in UK Labour Party, Moshe Machover expelled after asserting 'Anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism, Jonathan Cook, mondoweiss.net, 5/10/17)
Sunday, July 2, 2017
The Balfour Declaration Centenary: 4 Months to Go
Here, in part, is Manchester Guardian editor C.P. Scott's editorial of 7/11/1917 on the British war cabinet's November 2, 1917 issue of the Balfour Declaration, the decision by which the world's then dominant colonial power, which had absolutely no right to do so, handed the homeland of the Palestinian people, who were deliberately disregarded in the matter (written off, in the Declaration, merely as Palestine's "existing non-Jewish communities"), to the European Zionist movement, a bunch of East European Jewish-nationalist fanatics hell-bent on transforming a multi-sectarian Arab land into a Jewish state by hook or by crook.
And speaking of crook, the extraordinary thing about today's Guardian, under the editorship of another Zionist, Jonathan Freedland, is that it would, likely as not, 100 years along, find in Scott's outrageous editorial endorsement of British perfidy a source of pride and inspiration. Watch this space, as they say.
"We speak of Palestine as a country, but it is not a country; it is at present little more than a small district of the vast Ottoman tyranny. But it will be a country; it will be the country of the Jews. That is the meaning of the letter which we publish to-day written by Mr Balfour to Lord Rothschild for communication to the Zionist Federation. It is at once the fulfilment of an aspiration, the signpost of a destiny. Never since the days of the dispersion has the extraordinary people scattered over the earth in every country of modern European and of the old Arabic civilisation surrendered the hope of an ultimate return to the historic seat of its national existence. This has formed part of its ideal life, and is the ever-recurring note of its religious ritual. And if, like other aspirations and religious ideals which time has perhaps worn thin and history has debarred from the vitalising contact of reality, it has grown to be something of a convention, something which you may pray for and dream about but not a thing which belongs to the efforts and energies of this everyday world, that is only what is to be expected, and in no degree detracts from the critical importance of its entry to that world and the translation of its religious faith into the beginnings at least of achievement. For that is what the formal and considered declaration of policy by the British government means. For 50 years the Jews have been slowly and painfully returning to their ancestral home, and even under the Ottoman yoke and amid the disorder of that effete and crumbling dominion they have succeeded in establishing the beginnings of a real civilisation. Scattered and few, they have still brought with them schools and industry and scientific knowledge, and here and there have in truth made the waste places blossom as the rose. But for all this there was no security, and the progress, supported as it was financially by only a small section of the Jewish people and by a few generous and wealthy persons, was necessarily as slow as it was. [...]
"Not that it is to be supposed that progress in such a movement can be other than slow. Nor does the British Government take any responsibility for it beyond the endeavour to make it possible. In declaring that 'the British Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use its best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object', the Government have indeed laid down a policy of great and far-reaching importance, but it is one which can bear its full fruit only by the united efforts of Jews all over the world. What it means is that, assuming our military successes to be continued and the whole of Palestine to be brought securely under our control, then on the conclusion of peace our deliberate policy will be to encourage in every way in our power Jewish immigration, to give full security, and no doubt a large measure of local autonomy, to the Jewish immigrants, with a view to the ultimate establishment of a Jewish State. Nothing is said, for nothing at present can be said, as to the precise form of control during the period of transition, which may be a long one...
"The existing Arab population of Palestine is small and at a low stage of civilisation. It contains within itself none of the elements of progress, but it has its rights, and these must be carefully respected. This is clearly laid down in the letter, which declares that 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing communities in Palestine'...
You will note the blatant admission, right from the very beginning, that the phrase 'national home for the Jewish people in Palestine' implied "the ultimate establishment of a Jewish State."
And speaking of crook, the extraordinary thing about today's Guardian, under the editorship of another Zionist, Jonathan Freedland, is that it would, likely as not, 100 years along, find in Scott's outrageous editorial endorsement of British perfidy a source of pride and inspiration. Watch this space, as they say.
"We speak of Palestine as a country, but it is not a country; it is at present little more than a small district of the vast Ottoman tyranny. But it will be a country; it will be the country of the Jews. That is the meaning of the letter which we publish to-day written by Mr Balfour to Lord Rothschild for communication to the Zionist Federation. It is at once the fulfilment of an aspiration, the signpost of a destiny. Never since the days of the dispersion has the extraordinary people scattered over the earth in every country of modern European and of the old Arabic civilisation surrendered the hope of an ultimate return to the historic seat of its national existence. This has formed part of its ideal life, and is the ever-recurring note of its religious ritual. And if, like other aspirations and religious ideals which time has perhaps worn thin and history has debarred from the vitalising contact of reality, it has grown to be something of a convention, something which you may pray for and dream about but not a thing which belongs to the efforts and energies of this everyday world, that is only what is to be expected, and in no degree detracts from the critical importance of its entry to that world and the translation of its religious faith into the beginnings at least of achievement. For that is what the formal and considered declaration of policy by the British government means. For 50 years the Jews have been slowly and painfully returning to their ancestral home, and even under the Ottoman yoke and amid the disorder of that effete and crumbling dominion they have succeeded in establishing the beginnings of a real civilisation. Scattered and few, they have still brought with them schools and industry and scientific knowledge, and here and there have in truth made the waste places blossom as the rose. But for all this there was no security, and the progress, supported as it was financially by only a small section of the Jewish people and by a few generous and wealthy persons, was necessarily as slow as it was. [...]
"Not that it is to be supposed that progress in such a movement can be other than slow. Nor does the British Government take any responsibility for it beyond the endeavour to make it possible. In declaring that 'the British Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use its best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object', the Government have indeed laid down a policy of great and far-reaching importance, but it is one which can bear its full fruit only by the united efforts of Jews all over the world. What it means is that, assuming our military successes to be continued and the whole of Palestine to be brought securely under our control, then on the conclusion of peace our deliberate policy will be to encourage in every way in our power Jewish immigration, to give full security, and no doubt a large measure of local autonomy, to the Jewish immigrants, with a view to the ultimate establishment of a Jewish State. Nothing is said, for nothing at present can be said, as to the precise form of control during the period of transition, which may be a long one...
"The existing Arab population of Palestine is small and at a low stage of civilisation. It contains within itself none of the elements of progress, but it has its rights, and these must be carefully respected. This is clearly laid down in the letter, which declares that 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing communities in Palestine'...
You will note the blatant admission, right from the very beginning, that the phrase 'national home for the Jewish people in Palestine' implied "the ultimate establishment of a Jewish State."
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
Why Do I Get the Feeling?
OMFG, Jonathan Freedland's Guardian is so bloody depressing.
I've just taken a peek, God help me, at the 1,000+ torrent of (overwhelmingly) garbage and bile, aka comment, on its website following Gabrielle Chan's article, Bob Brown endorses action against Lee Rhiannon as Greens turmoil deepens (26/6/17).
What vile, stagnant swamp, I wonder, breeds these sadsacks and mental defectives? Is it any wonder we've got swamp monsters like Abbott, Trumble, Shorten, Dutton, Hanson and the like plaguing us?
In over a thousand 'comments' only one got why the admirable Senator Lee Rhiannon has come under fire from the know-nothings (di Natale) and has-beens (Brown) in her party:
"Why do I get the feeling that Lee's strong stand on the atrocities happening to the Palestinians is behind the hostility to Lee? The Greens may not accept corporate donations, but that does not mean that there are not forces behind the scene pulling strings."
Whoever you are, you have that feeling because you know what's going on.
Update (28/6/17): "'What is happening here is that someone is anonymously feeding journalists misinformation about me. I know that Greens members and our MPs condemn such behaviour.' The campaign against her was about much more than the Turnbull government's Gonski 2.0 school funding 'con-job', she said. 'It is a vicious attempt to destroy my reputation'." (Rhiannon vows she won't be driven out of Parliament, Adam Gartrell, Sydney Morning Herald)
I've just taken a peek, God help me, at the 1,000+ torrent of (overwhelmingly) garbage and bile, aka comment, on its website following Gabrielle Chan's article, Bob Brown endorses action against Lee Rhiannon as Greens turmoil deepens (26/6/17).
What vile, stagnant swamp, I wonder, breeds these sadsacks and mental defectives? Is it any wonder we've got swamp monsters like Abbott, Trumble, Shorten, Dutton, Hanson and the like plaguing us?
In over a thousand 'comments' only one got why the admirable Senator Lee Rhiannon has come under fire from the know-nothings (di Natale) and has-beens (Brown) in her party:
"Why do I get the feeling that Lee's strong stand on the atrocities happening to the Palestinians is behind the hostility to Lee? The Greens may not accept corporate donations, but that does not mean that there are not forces behind the scene pulling strings."
Whoever you are, you have that feeling because you know what's going on.
Update (28/6/17): "'What is happening here is that someone is anonymously feeding journalists misinformation about me. I know that Greens members and our MPs condemn such behaviour.' The campaign against her was about much more than the Turnbull government's Gonski 2.0 school funding 'con-job', she said. 'It is a vicious attempt to destroy my reputation'." (Rhiannon vows she won't be driven out of Parliament, Adam Gartrell, Sydney Morning Herald)
Sunday, June 11, 2017
What Makes Corbyn Shine?
So what is it about British Labour's Jeremy Corbyn that makes him shine - despite an unremittingly hostile mainstream media, the constant undermining of Blairats-in-the-ranks, and a smear campaign by the Israel lobby?
If Corbyn can elicit a letter from the Labour Friends of Israel head, Joan Ryan MP (Enfield North), to her constituents that opens thus:
"Dear Resident, I know from speaking to people around here that many who have previously voted Labour are thinking hard this time because, they tell me, they have more confidence in Theresa May as PM than they would have in Jeremy Corbyn" (2/6/17)...
Or if he can prompt a post-election confession such as this from the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland:
"I opposed Jeremy Corbyn when he first stood for the Labour leadership in 2015, and thereafter, and I did so on two grounds. First on principle: I was troubled by his foreign policy worldview, with its indulgence of assorted authoritarian regimes, and by what I perceived as his willingness to look past antisemitism on the left... " (Jeremy Corbyn didn't win - but he has rewritten all the rules, 10/6/17)...
(The Zionist Freedland really means here Corbyn's willingness to criticise Israel.)
... then we have reason to conclude that he passes Kishore Mahbubani's infallible litmus test for intellectual and moral courage, namely, speaking truth to power on the Middle East in general, and on Palestine/Israel in particular.
And all intelligent, right-thinking people respect those qualities in a leader.
If Corbyn can elicit a letter from the Labour Friends of Israel head, Joan Ryan MP (Enfield North), to her constituents that opens thus:
"Dear Resident, I know from speaking to people around here that many who have previously voted Labour are thinking hard this time because, they tell me, they have more confidence in Theresa May as PM than they would have in Jeremy Corbyn" (2/6/17)...
Or if he can prompt a post-election confession such as this from the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland:
"I opposed Jeremy Corbyn when he first stood for the Labour leadership in 2015, and thereafter, and I did so on two grounds. First on principle: I was troubled by his foreign policy worldview, with its indulgence of assorted authoritarian regimes, and by what I perceived as his willingness to look past antisemitism on the left... " (Jeremy Corbyn didn't win - but he has rewritten all the rules, 10/6/17)...
(The Zionist Freedland really means here Corbyn's willingness to criticise Israel.)
... then we have reason to conclude that he passes Kishore Mahbubani's infallible litmus test for intellectual and moral courage, namely, speaking truth to power on the Middle East in general, and on Palestine/Israel in particular.
And all intelligent, right-thinking people respect those qualities in a leader.
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
The Guardian's Skewed Coverage of Palestine/Israel
What happens when a news site is under the control of a Zionist editor - in this case, The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland?
Here's the sobering conclusion to Ben White's piece, How the Guardian continues to exclude Palestinians from its comments page:
"As shown by the absence of voices from the West Bank and Gaza, or the lack of a Palestinian perspective on critical issues such as Zionism, when it comes to The Guardian's comment pages, Palestine is just not a story - and when it is, it's an Israeli one." (middleeastmonitor.com, 28/11/16)
Here's the sobering conclusion to Ben White's piece, How the Guardian continues to exclude Palestinians from its comments page:
"As shown by the absence of voices from the West Bank and Gaza, or the lack of a Palestinian perspective on critical issues such as Zionism, when it comes to The Guardian's comment pages, Palestine is just not a story - and when it is, it's an Israeli one." (middleeastmonitor.com, 28/11/16)
Monday, November 28, 2016
Good Grief!
Where would we be without Islit? Just imagine having to make do with Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Zola and the rest!
An extract from Jonathan Freedland's promo of David Grossman (David Grossman: 'You have to act against the gravity of grief - to decide you won't fail' Guardian, 26/11/16), annotated:
"The turning point was the 1967 war, when Israel gained the territories it has occupied ever since."
Gained? Just fell into Israel's lap! As these things do.
"He sees that as a kind of navigational error, when Israel strayed off course..."
Israel as babe in the woods. See also, 'We live in a tough neighborhood.'
"I suggest to him that plenty, especially on the European left, would dispute the notion that all was fine until 1967: their disagreement would go further back, to the circumstances of Israel's founding in 1948."
Well they would, wouldn't they? Only a leftie could possibly believe such things!
"'I do not want to idealise the Israel before 1967,' he replies. 'Of course there are terrible things that happened in '48'."
Of course, but,
"'... before '67, there was still a hope that things can be corrected, that we are not doomed to continue to fight with our neighbours for another 50 years'."
Yeah, we thought then that all those bloody Palestinians we'd taken such time and trouble to drive out in '48 would just get up off their bums and somehow blend in with the Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis and Lebanese, and let them know just how wonderful we are so they'd all be banging on our door, wanting to open embassies.
"'To live by the sword and to die by the sword'."
Or rather, us living by the sword, and them dying by it.
"'What we have now is the belief that this is the only option open to us. That there is a kind of divine decree... It was not like that before 67'."
Yep, us living by the sword, and them dying by it. You know how it goes: "When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations... and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy."
"It is this fatalism, this defeatist sense among his fellow Israelis that the situation with the Palestinians is immutable, an act of God or nature that cannot be reversed, that incenses Grossman most. It turns the Israelis into a nation of victims, he says, helpless before their fate."
But not quite so helpless that they can't blame their victims!
An extract from Jonathan Freedland's promo of David Grossman (David Grossman: 'You have to act against the gravity of grief - to decide you won't fail' Guardian, 26/11/16), annotated:
"The turning point was the 1967 war, when Israel gained the territories it has occupied ever since."
Gained? Just fell into Israel's lap! As these things do.
"He sees that as a kind of navigational error, when Israel strayed off course..."
Israel as babe in the woods. See also, 'We live in a tough neighborhood.'
"I suggest to him that plenty, especially on the European left, would dispute the notion that all was fine until 1967: their disagreement would go further back, to the circumstances of Israel's founding in 1948."
Well they would, wouldn't they? Only a leftie could possibly believe such things!
"'I do not want to idealise the Israel before 1967,' he replies. 'Of course there are terrible things that happened in '48'."
Of course, but,
"'... before '67, there was still a hope that things can be corrected, that we are not doomed to continue to fight with our neighbours for another 50 years'."
Yeah, we thought then that all those bloody Palestinians we'd taken such time and trouble to drive out in '48 would just get up off their bums and somehow blend in with the Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis and Lebanese, and let them know just how wonderful we are so they'd all be banging on our door, wanting to open embassies.
"'To live by the sword and to die by the sword'."
Or rather, us living by the sword, and them dying by it.
"'What we have now is the belief that this is the only option open to us. That there is a kind of divine decree... It was not like that before 67'."
Yep, us living by the sword, and them dying by it. You know how it goes: "When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations... and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy."
"It is this fatalism, this defeatist sense among his fellow Israelis that the situation with the Palestinians is immutable, an act of God or nature that cannot be reversed, that incenses Grossman most. It turns the Israelis into a nation of victims, he says, helpless before their fate."
But not quite so helpless that they can't blame their victims!
Sunday, June 19, 2016
The Guardian: What Palestinian Refugees?
In the face of an ailing Fairfax press, a tepid, harassed and self-censoring ABC, and a ferociously zioconservative Murdoch press, I assume that some (how many?) Australians are turning to the online Guardian website as a news source. Few, I imagine, are aware that, with Jonathan Freedland at the helm, the Guardian is virtually a no-go zone for critical commentary on the subject of Palestine/Israel.
It should come as no surprise then to find there Guardian columnist Giles Fraser's warm and fuzzy, Israel-you're-better-than-this rubbish: You'd think that Israel, of all places, would respect its refugees: Africans facing genocide are making a modern-day Exodus, fleeing through the Sinai. But the Israeli government has no time for non-Jewish asylum seekers (17/6/16).
An extract:
"At the [Tel Aviv] bus station, I meet up with Mutasim Ali. who runs an advice centre for African refugees. He tells me that as legitimate refugees the state cannot deport them. Instead, the government is 'making conditions so hopeless that asylum seekers feel they have no choice but to leave'. Officially classed as 'infiltrators', they are subject to daily racism and harassment, being taken to the miserable Holot detention centre in the Negev, for no other reason, he says, than to 'break your spirit' and 'stop you integrating into Israeli society'. Some are offered cash sums of up to $3,500 to get on a flight to Rwanda or Uganda and basically bugger off. All of which is massively disappointing from the government of a country that inspired the first international agreement protecting the rights of refugees."
The problem here, of course, is a complete absence of context. The entire piece makes no reference whatever to Israel as a nation founded on the forced deportation of up to a million Palestinian Arabs in 1948.
Any who tried to return were shot out of hand as infiltrators.
Those Palestinians now under occupation, many of them the descendants of 1948 refugees, are subject to daily racism, harassment and worse designed to break both their spirit and their bodies.
The blockaded inhabitants of the Gaza ghetto, most of whom are also the descendants of 1948 refugees, are serially bombed and shelled, with the same aim of breaking both their spirit and their bodies.
And yes, the idea of throwing money at Palestinian refugees to basically bugger off has, from time to time, been mooted by Israeli officials.
The assertion that Israel has inspired anything even remotely humane with respect to the treatment of refugees is an obscene distortion of the truth. What dishonest, shoddy journalism this is.
It should come as no surprise then to find there Guardian columnist Giles Fraser's warm and fuzzy, Israel-you're-better-than-this rubbish: You'd think that Israel, of all places, would respect its refugees: Africans facing genocide are making a modern-day Exodus, fleeing through the Sinai. But the Israeli government has no time for non-Jewish asylum seekers (17/6/16).
An extract:
"At the [Tel Aviv] bus station, I meet up with Mutasim Ali. who runs an advice centre for African refugees. He tells me that as legitimate refugees the state cannot deport them. Instead, the government is 'making conditions so hopeless that asylum seekers feel they have no choice but to leave'. Officially classed as 'infiltrators', they are subject to daily racism and harassment, being taken to the miserable Holot detention centre in the Negev, for no other reason, he says, than to 'break your spirit' and 'stop you integrating into Israeli society'. Some are offered cash sums of up to $3,500 to get on a flight to Rwanda or Uganda and basically bugger off. All of which is massively disappointing from the government of a country that inspired the first international agreement protecting the rights of refugees."
The problem here, of course, is a complete absence of context. The entire piece makes no reference whatever to Israel as a nation founded on the forced deportation of up to a million Palestinian Arabs in 1948.
Any who tried to return were shot out of hand as infiltrators.
Those Palestinians now under occupation, many of them the descendants of 1948 refugees, are subject to daily racism, harassment and worse designed to break both their spirit and their bodies.
The blockaded inhabitants of the Gaza ghetto, most of whom are also the descendants of 1948 refugees, are serially bombed and shelled, with the same aim of breaking both their spirit and their bodies.
And yes, the idea of throwing money at Palestinian refugees to basically bugger off has, from time to time, been mooted by Israeli officials.
The assertion that Israel has inspired anything even remotely humane with respect to the treatment of refugees is an obscene distortion of the truth. What dishonest, shoddy journalism this is.
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
Blowing the Whistle on Murdoch's Australian
An extract from Ideology runs rampant at Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspaper by Jim Buckell, News Corpse escapee:
"Under the editorship of Paul Kelly and then David Armstrong this extremist tendency ['unwavering, often knee-jerk conservative ideology'], while not unknown, was usually kept in check by a range of views. Sadly, in the noughties this position gradually gave way to the thundering of the neoconservatives. The paper began to act like more of a propaganda sheet for the rightwing of the Liberal Party than a broad-based sounding board for big ideas and public policy. This period roughly corresponded with [Chris] Mitchell's ascendancy as editor-in-chief. And therein lies the dilemma. No matter how well written, no matter how well edited, the paper's right-wing bias is overwhelming. The tone is hectoring and unforgiving, making it frustrating to read and tricky to work around as a journalist. As a reporter you learn how to navigate around masthead biases that don't fit in with your own values or approach to news gathering. It's a survival technique you have to master to balance the demands of editors with the fragile trust you build with your sources... I can't read the paper anymore. It's too distressing seeing ideology run rampant because it suits the ideology of Rupert Murdoch and his allies. The influence the Australian and News Corp Australia wield by setting a market-based, small-government agenda is widely understood because it's so blatant. Less well scrutinised is the impact of groupthink on the profession of journalism within Fortress News. When dissent is marginalised and self-censorship is an unquestioned norm, the newsroom culture becomes self-serving. Chris Mitchell may have been a conjuror but we should be under no illusion about the price he extracted." (theguardian.com, 7/12/15)
Buckell's piece, while welcome, is too short on detail. If only he could eventually write an extended analysis of the beast, along the lines of Robert Manne's 2011 Quarterly Essay - but without Manne's selective vision - see my 2 posts, The Silence of the Intellectuals 1 & 2 (6-7/9/11).
A trawl through the hundreds of comments which followed on the Guardian Australia website was an interesting experience given that so few of the commenters actually read The Australian (and, I suspect, are blissfully unaware of its malign hold on our political class). Typically, therefore, only 3 were sufficiently aware of its ferocious Zionism to refer to the fact:
"I've read the Australian since 1980, and the last few years the constant bashing of the ABC, and extreme slant to the right makes it hard to read more than half the paper. Worst of all are the diatribes of Greg Sheridan, sycophant of murderous regimes like China, and an appalling apologist for the crimes of Israel and its occupation of the West Bank. I remember back in the 80s before Timor gained independence his shameful apologia for the murder of Timorese by the Indonesian government."
"The Australian Goebbels. Heil Rupert. But now he prays to the mountain of Zion. The rest is just business."
"The Australian - cheerleader for Israel, relentless Muslim-basher, climate change denier. Try getting a pro-Palestinian letter published - no chance - while some members of the pro-Israel brigade seem to have a season ticket to the letters page."
And, apart from that last comment, no one - not one! - mentioned The Australian's now dominant feature, its rampant Islamophobia.
On the other hand, it was good to see so many Guardian readers taking the opportunity to have a swipe at the Guardian itself, although none mentioned its insidious liberal Zionist line, which emanates from its (relatively) new editor-in-chief Jonathan Freedland, and surfaces in opinion pieces by him and the likes of Nick Cohen, Hadley Freeman and Rafael Behr.
"Under the editorship of Paul Kelly and then David Armstrong this extremist tendency ['unwavering, often knee-jerk conservative ideology'], while not unknown, was usually kept in check by a range of views. Sadly, in the noughties this position gradually gave way to the thundering of the neoconservatives. The paper began to act like more of a propaganda sheet for the rightwing of the Liberal Party than a broad-based sounding board for big ideas and public policy. This period roughly corresponded with [Chris] Mitchell's ascendancy as editor-in-chief. And therein lies the dilemma. No matter how well written, no matter how well edited, the paper's right-wing bias is overwhelming. The tone is hectoring and unforgiving, making it frustrating to read and tricky to work around as a journalist. As a reporter you learn how to navigate around masthead biases that don't fit in with your own values or approach to news gathering. It's a survival technique you have to master to balance the demands of editors with the fragile trust you build with your sources... I can't read the paper anymore. It's too distressing seeing ideology run rampant because it suits the ideology of Rupert Murdoch and his allies. The influence the Australian and News Corp Australia wield by setting a market-based, small-government agenda is widely understood because it's so blatant. Less well scrutinised is the impact of groupthink on the profession of journalism within Fortress News. When dissent is marginalised and self-censorship is an unquestioned norm, the newsroom culture becomes self-serving. Chris Mitchell may have been a conjuror but we should be under no illusion about the price he extracted." (theguardian.com, 7/12/15)
Buckell's piece, while welcome, is too short on detail. If only he could eventually write an extended analysis of the beast, along the lines of Robert Manne's 2011 Quarterly Essay - but without Manne's selective vision - see my 2 posts, The Silence of the Intellectuals 1 & 2 (6-7/9/11).
A trawl through the hundreds of comments which followed on the Guardian Australia website was an interesting experience given that so few of the commenters actually read The Australian (and, I suspect, are blissfully unaware of its malign hold on our political class). Typically, therefore, only 3 were sufficiently aware of its ferocious Zionism to refer to the fact:
"I've read the Australian since 1980, and the last few years the constant bashing of the ABC, and extreme slant to the right makes it hard to read more than half the paper. Worst of all are the diatribes of Greg Sheridan, sycophant of murderous regimes like China, and an appalling apologist for the crimes of Israel and its occupation of the West Bank. I remember back in the 80s before Timor gained independence his shameful apologia for the murder of Timorese by the Indonesian government."
"The Australian Goebbels. Heil Rupert. But now he prays to the mountain of Zion. The rest is just business."
"The Australian - cheerleader for Israel, relentless Muslim-basher, climate change denier. Try getting a pro-Palestinian letter published - no chance - while some members of the pro-Israel brigade seem to have a season ticket to the letters page."
And, apart from that last comment, no one - not one! - mentioned The Australian's now dominant feature, its rampant Islamophobia.
On the other hand, it was good to see so many Guardian readers taking the opportunity to have a swipe at the Guardian itself, although none mentioned its insidious liberal Zionist line, which emanates from its (relatively) new editor-in-chief Jonathan Freedland, and surfaces in opinion pieces by him and the likes of Nick Cohen, Hadley Freeman and Rafael Behr.
Sunday, September 6, 2015
When Zionists Advocate for Refugees...
It takes a special kind of chutzpah for a Zionist to bang on about refugees. Take Jonathan Freedland, for example. Prompted by the photograph of the drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi, the Guardian's new editor-in-chief writes:
"Until the prime minister's announcement [that it would take in more Syrian refugees], it had set an upper limit of 750 refugees a year. Indeed, in the 18 months since it established the vulnerable person's scheme, it has admitted just 216 such people from Syria. It has always had an alibi: there's no room, no one wants them, councils cannot cope with the extra strain. But if councils themselves step forward, that alibi is gone. There are 433 local and county authorities in the UK. If each one committed to take 50 people, that would be more than 21,000... Of course, this could never be a whole solution. Action for refugees means not only a welcome when they arrive, but also a remedy for the problem that made them leave." (Aylan Kurdi: this one small life has shown us the way to tackle the refugee crisis, theguardian.com, 5/9/15)
Reading the above, we need to keep in mind that there are 12 Palestine refugee camps in Syria and 560,000 registered Palestine refugees. All have been affected by the conflict in Syria. Almost 300,000 are internally displaced. There are over 40,000 in Lebanon and over 15,000 in Jordan. How many are part of the Syrian refugee exodus currently streaming into Europe is anyone's guess.
We need also to remind ourselves that all of these Palestine refugees in Syria (as elsewhere) are the product of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and 1967, and that none of them have ever been allowed to return to their homes and lands in Palestine/Israel - just in case Jewish Zionists - like Jonathan Freedland - should one day decide to avail themselves of the Jews-only option, courtesy of Israel's apartheid Law of Return, of automatic Israeli citizenship.
If Freedland is ever to be taken seriously on the subject of refugees, he should publicly:
1) renounce his right as a Jew under Israel's Law of Return to take up citizenship in Israel;
2) call for the immediate repatriation to Israel of all Palestine refugees in Syria;
3) call for the phased repatriation of all Palestinian refugees to Israel;
4) support a transition from Israel as a Jewish state to a state for all of its citizens regardless of their religious or ethnic affiliation.
Unless and until he does so, anything he has to say on the subject of refugees should be taken with one hell of a grain of salt.
For the full story on Freedland, I recommend: Why Jonathan Freedland isn't fit to be the new editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Blake Alcott, counterpunch.org, 13/2/15.
"Until the prime minister's announcement [that it would take in more Syrian refugees], it had set an upper limit of 750 refugees a year. Indeed, in the 18 months since it established the vulnerable person's scheme, it has admitted just 216 such people from Syria. It has always had an alibi: there's no room, no one wants them, councils cannot cope with the extra strain. But if councils themselves step forward, that alibi is gone. There are 433 local and county authorities in the UK. If each one committed to take 50 people, that would be more than 21,000... Of course, this could never be a whole solution. Action for refugees means not only a welcome when they arrive, but also a remedy for the problem that made them leave." (Aylan Kurdi: this one small life has shown us the way to tackle the refugee crisis, theguardian.com, 5/9/15)
Reading the above, we need to keep in mind that there are 12 Palestine refugee camps in Syria and 560,000 registered Palestine refugees. All have been affected by the conflict in Syria. Almost 300,000 are internally displaced. There are over 40,000 in Lebanon and over 15,000 in Jordan. How many are part of the Syrian refugee exodus currently streaming into Europe is anyone's guess.
We need also to remind ourselves that all of these Palestine refugees in Syria (as elsewhere) are the product of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and 1967, and that none of them have ever been allowed to return to their homes and lands in Palestine/Israel - just in case Jewish Zionists - like Jonathan Freedland - should one day decide to avail themselves of the Jews-only option, courtesy of Israel's apartheid Law of Return, of automatic Israeli citizenship.
If Freedland is ever to be taken seriously on the subject of refugees, he should publicly:
1) renounce his right as a Jew under Israel's Law of Return to take up citizenship in Israel;
2) call for the immediate repatriation to Israel of all Palestine refugees in Syria;
3) call for the phased repatriation of all Palestinian refugees to Israel;
4) support a transition from Israel as a Jewish state to a state for all of its citizens regardless of their religious or ethnic affiliation.
Unless and until he does so, anything he has to say on the subject of refugees should be taken with one hell of a grain of salt.
For the full story on Freedland, I recommend: Why Jonathan Freedland isn't fit to be the new editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Blake Alcott, counterpunch.org, 13/2/15.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Blowing the Whistle on Zionist Control of the MSMedia
From the opening paragraphs of British journalist Jonathan Cook's 24-page essay Publish it not! How Israel controls the way the international 'liberal' media portray its illegal and vicious occupation of Palestine & why the media allow them to get away with it:
"Probably like many other journalists, at some point in my childhood I fell in love with the idea of the crusading, fearless reporter - unafraid of bullying figures of authority and always looking out for the little guy... Life, of course, has proved to be less simple. Who is the bully and who is the little guy? I, like more notable reporters who preceded me, would find that conundrum expressed most powerfully in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"In the mid 1990s, I arrived in Jerusalem for the first time - then as a tourist - with another potent Western myth at the front of my consciousness: that of Israel as 'a light unto the nations', the plucky underdog facing a menacing Arab world ranged against it. A series of later professional shocks as a freelance journalist reporting on Israel would shatter my assumptions about both Israel and courageous reporters.
"These disillusioning experiences came in the early stages of the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising that began in late 2000. At the time I was writing for Britain's Guardian newspaper... The Guardian has earned an international reputation - including in Israel - as the Western newspaper most savagely critical of Israel's actions. That may be true, but I quickly found that there were still very clear, and highly unusual limitations on what could be written about Israel.
"During my years at the Guardian, I had regularly travelled to the Middle East from where I dispatched a number of reports. Only when I offered articles about Israel itself - or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict did I sense a reluctance, even a resistance, to publishing them. The standard of proof required to print anything critical of Israel, it became apparent to me, was far higher than with other countries. Particularly problematic for the Guardian - as with other news media - was anything that questioned Israel's claim to being a democracy or highlighted the contradictions between that claim and Israel's Jewish self-definition."
Google it and read the lot!
"Probably like many other journalists, at some point in my childhood I fell in love with the idea of the crusading, fearless reporter - unafraid of bullying figures of authority and always looking out for the little guy... Life, of course, has proved to be less simple. Who is the bully and who is the little guy? I, like more notable reporters who preceded me, would find that conundrum expressed most powerfully in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"In the mid 1990s, I arrived in Jerusalem for the first time - then as a tourist - with another potent Western myth at the front of my consciousness: that of Israel as 'a light unto the nations', the plucky underdog facing a menacing Arab world ranged against it. A series of later professional shocks as a freelance journalist reporting on Israel would shatter my assumptions about both Israel and courageous reporters.
"These disillusioning experiences came in the early stages of the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising that began in late 2000. At the time I was writing for Britain's Guardian newspaper... The Guardian has earned an international reputation - including in Israel - as the Western newspaper most savagely critical of Israel's actions. That may be true, but I quickly found that there were still very clear, and highly unusual limitations on what could be written about Israel.
"During my years at the Guardian, I had regularly travelled to the Middle East from where I dispatched a number of reports. Only when I offered articles about Israel itself - or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict did I sense a reluctance, even a resistance, to publishing them. The standard of proof required to print anything critical of Israel, it became apparent to me, was far higher than with other countries. Particularly problematic for the Guardian - as with other news media - was anything that questioned Israel's claim to being a democracy or highlighted the contradictions between that claim and Israel's Jewish self-definition."
Google it and read the lot!
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Orwell Turns in His Grave
We do indeed live in interesting times.
In 2011, an award for political journalism bearing the name of a Zionist, namely the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, went to anti-Zionist journalist Jonathan Cook. (You can see my series of posts on Gellhorn by clicking on the label below.)
Now, an award for political journalism bearing the name of an anti-Zionist, namely the Orwell Prize, has just gone to Zionist journalist Jonathan Freedland.
Stranger still, while Cook, one of the best journalists around on the subject of Palestine, was at least awarded his Gellhorn Prize for exposing "establishment propaganda" (in his case of the Zionist variety), Freedland's Orwell Prize was awarded, not for the content of his writing (which, as far as Palestine/Israel is concerned, invariably reduces to apologetics for the Zionist project) but for the "lucidity and elegance of his style." (Two Guardian journalists win Orwell prize for journalism, Martin Williams, theguardian.com, 22/5/14)
One can only imagine what Orwell himself would have thought about the awarding of an Orwell Prize for style alone. Still, it could have been worse. Imagine this Zionist apologist receiving an award for his content on the issue of Palestine/Israel.
To illustrate, take his July 18, 2012 article for the New Statesman, Yearning for the same land, essentially a defence of political Zionism:
Freedland here plays the game of Good Zionist vs Bad Zionist, contrasting what he calls "left-leaning Zionists who believe the original movement's goal was the liberation of people, not land," with "hawkish Zionists, heirs of Vladimir Jabotinsky, who are territorial maximalists, eager to fly the Israeli flag over the West Bank."
It's the former, he maintains, who are "the true Zionists," those who are "eager to see territory now occupied by Israel ceded [?] to become sovereign Palestinian land." Freedland, of course, places himself in the camp of the Zionist angels, if I may be allowed an oxymoron.
To assert, as he does, that the goal of the Zionist angels (LOL) was never really the acquisition of Palestinian land, when they, in collaboration with the followers of Jabotinsky, ethnically cleansed 78% of Palestine in 1948, regardless of the borders proposed by the 1947 UN partition plan, and stole all the Palestinian land they could lay their blood-stained hands on, is simply risible.
He defends the Zionist bulldozing of the cosmopolitan, multi-sectarian Palestine of old by trotting out the boilerplate dogma of his "socialist-Zionist youth": the Jews are a "people," and as such "have a right to self-determination in the historic land of their birth."
Freedland's Zionist sleight of hand is transparent: Jews are not what they so indubitably are - a diverse (because of a past history of conversion) faith community originating in the Middle East - but are imagined as an homogenous ethnic grouping, who, following a collective heave-ho by the Romans, ended up as a scattered diaspora, somehow managing, against all the odds, to preserve their ethnic purity.
It's as if, whenever Freedland sees himself in a mirror, he sees Moses or Joshua looking back. Read Shlomo Sand? Forget it!
Our self-designated left Zionist today, however, is trendier than his forbears, who swore blind for decades (with that famous shrug) that the Palestinians inexplicably just went walkies in 1948. He now concedes that the Palestinian Nakba (which he still can't spell, rendering it as Naqba) actually happened and even thinks Israelis should be commemorating it. But more than that... nah.
To bolster his case that Zionism is still kosher, Freedland draws on "left-leaning Zionist" author Amos Oz.
First the hard sell:
"[Oz] argues that, besides the legal right bestowed by the UN's 1947 resolution to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, Israel has a moral right - the right of the drowning man... entitled to grab hold of a piece of driftwood even if another man is already holding it. The drowning man can even make the other man share it, by force, if necessary. His moral right ends, however, the moment he pushes the other man into the sea. The Jewish people, scythed by the Holocaust and after centuries of persecution, were gasping for breath in 1948; their need for a home was as great as that of any other people in history."
All pedestrian Zionist propaganda of course:
1) The partition was essentially an exercise in the White Man twisting the arms of just enough brown men to get the desired result at the UN, not to mention a violation of the latter's charter;
2) Jews in displaced persons camps after the war were not drowning, though they were harassed and bullied by Zionist enforcers; and
3) Zionism, the militant settler-colonial movement which created Israel, was forced on the Palestinians by British bayonets long before the Holocaust, and busied itself not with the rescue of European Jewry from the perils of Nazism, but solely with accumulating the cannon fodder and the arms necessary to roll Palestine's weaker indigenous population and seize as much of its Palestinian homeland as possible.
Having cleverly diverted the reader's attention with the (alleged) drowning man, gasping for breath, Freedland then slips in the following, hoping you won't notice:
"They had the right to act, even though the cost for another people, the Palestinians, was immense."
Sorry about that, Palestinians. Nothing personal mind you!
So who awarded the Orwell Prize to Freedland? There were 3 judges: Robin Lustig (BBC Radio), Paul Anderson (Tribune/New Statesman), and Michael Parks (Professor of Journalism at USC). On the first, you might like to read BBC buries the bitter at mondoweiss.net (7/7/10), and on the second, his rationale for opposing an academic boycott of Israel, No to the Academic Boycott, Tribune, 29/4/05).
Orwell famously wrote that Journalism is printing what someone does not want printed: everything else is public relations. Poor man, a prize bearing his name has just gone to a peddler of Zionist PR.
In 2011, an award for political journalism bearing the name of a Zionist, namely the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, went to anti-Zionist journalist Jonathan Cook. (You can see my series of posts on Gellhorn by clicking on the label below.)
Now, an award for political journalism bearing the name of an anti-Zionist, namely the Orwell Prize, has just gone to Zionist journalist Jonathan Freedland.
Stranger still, while Cook, one of the best journalists around on the subject of Palestine, was at least awarded his Gellhorn Prize for exposing "establishment propaganda" (in his case of the Zionist variety), Freedland's Orwell Prize was awarded, not for the content of his writing (which, as far as Palestine/Israel is concerned, invariably reduces to apologetics for the Zionist project) but for the "lucidity and elegance of his style." (Two Guardian journalists win Orwell prize for journalism, Martin Williams, theguardian.com, 22/5/14)
One can only imagine what Orwell himself would have thought about the awarding of an Orwell Prize for style alone. Still, it could have been worse. Imagine this Zionist apologist receiving an award for his content on the issue of Palestine/Israel.
To illustrate, take his July 18, 2012 article for the New Statesman, Yearning for the same land, essentially a defence of political Zionism:
Freedland here plays the game of Good Zionist vs Bad Zionist, contrasting what he calls "left-leaning Zionists who believe the original movement's goal was the liberation of people, not land," with "hawkish Zionists, heirs of Vladimir Jabotinsky, who are territorial maximalists, eager to fly the Israeli flag over the West Bank."
It's the former, he maintains, who are "the true Zionists," those who are "eager to see territory now occupied by Israel ceded [?] to become sovereign Palestinian land." Freedland, of course, places himself in the camp of the Zionist angels, if I may be allowed an oxymoron.
To assert, as he does, that the goal of the Zionist angels (LOL) was never really the acquisition of Palestinian land, when they, in collaboration with the followers of Jabotinsky, ethnically cleansed 78% of Palestine in 1948, regardless of the borders proposed by the 1947 UN partition plan, and stole all the Palestinian land they could lay their blood-stained hands on, is simply risible.
He defends the Zionist bulldozing of the cosmopolitan, multi-sectarian Palestine of old by trotting out the boilerplate dogma of his "socialist-Zionist youth": the Jews are a "people," and as such "have a right to self-determination in the historic land of their birth."
Freedland's Zionist sleight of hand is transparent: Jews are not what they so indubitably are - a diverse (because of a past history of conversion) faith community originating in the Middle East - but are imagined as an homogenous ethnic grouping, who, following a collective heave-ho by the Romans, ended up as a scattered diaspora, somehow managing, against all the odds, to preserve their ethnic purity.
It's as if, whenever Freedland sees himself in a mirror, he sees Moses or Joshua looking back. Read Shlomo Sand? Forget it!
Our self-designated left Zionist today, however, is trendier than his forbears, who swore blind for decades (with that famous shrug) that the Palestinians inexplicably just went walkies in 1948. He now concedes that the Palestinian Nakba (which he still can't spell, rendering it as Naqba) actually happened and even thinks Israelis should be commemorating it. But more than that... nah.
To bolster his case that Zionism is still kosher, Freedland draws on "left-leaning Zionist" author Amos Oz.
First the hard sell:
"[Oz] argues that, besides the legal right bestowed by the UN's 1947 resolution to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, Israel has a moral right - the right of the drowning man... entitled to grab hold of a piece of driftwood even if another man is already holding it. The drowning man can even make the other man share it, by force, if necessary. His moral right ends, however, the moment he pushes the other man into the sea. The Jewish people, scythed by the Holocaust and after centuries of persecution, were gasping for breath in 1948; their need for a home was as great as that of any other people in history."
All pedestrian Zionist propaganda of course:
1) The partition was essentially an exercise in the White Man twisting the arms of just enough brown men to get the desired result at the UN, not to mention a violation of the latter's charter;
2) Jews in displaced persons camps after the war were not drowning, though they were harassed and bullied by Zionist enforcers; and
3) Zionism, the militant settler-colonial movement which created Israel, was forced on the Palestinians by British bayonets long before the Holocaust, and busied itself not with the rescue of European Jewry from the perils of Nazism, but solely with accumulating the cannon fodder and the arms necessary to roll Palestine's weaker indigenous population and seize as much of its Palestinian homeland as possible.
Having cleverly diverted the reader's attention with the (alleged) drowning man, gasping for breath, Freedland then slips in the following, hoping you won't notice:
"They had the right to act, even though the cost for another people, the Palestinians, was immense."
Sorry about that, Palestinians. Nothing personal mind you!
So who awarded the Orwell Prize to Freedland? There were 3 judges: Robin Lustig (BBC Radio), Paul Anderson (Tribune/New Statesman), and Michael Parks (Professor of Journalism at USC). On the first, you might like to read BBC buries the bitter at mondoweiss.net (7/7/10), and on the second, his rationale for opposing an academic boycott of Israel, No to the Academic Boycott, Tribune, 29/4/05).
Orwell famously wrote that Journalism is printing what someone does not want printed: everything else is public relations. Poor man, a prize bearing his name has just gone to a peddler of Zionist PR.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Zionist (Wet) Dreaming
I don't know how much more simple-minded commentary on Ariel Sharon in the corporate media I can take. Here, for example, is the concluding paragraph from Jonathan Freedland's obituary (?) in the Guardian online:
"The tragedy for both sides is that the right people to speak that truth [about the Palestinian nakba] were the founding generation. Those who fought the war of 1948 were best placed to close its wounds. An intriguing habit of Sharon's was to refer to places in Israel by their original, Arabic names - thereby acknowledging the truth that usually lies buried beneath the soil. Leading his nation to do the same could have been Ariel Sharon's final mission. They will have to do it without him." (Ariel Sharon's final mission might well have been peace, 4/1/14)
As if this "intriguing habit" - assuming it ever existed - meant anything more than the fact that Sharon was born and raised in ARAB PALESTINE.
Incredibly, while ms journalists/pundits such as Freedland have no problem spotting war criminals in every other corner of the globe, when it comes to the Israeli variety they go all fey and fall all over themselves in an effort to sanitise the unsanitisable. So here we have Freedland seriously speculating that had Sharon not fallen victim to a stroke in 2006 he'd now be leading an Israeli version of Australia's Sorry movement! Time, as always, to get real:
"Finally in power [in 1977] after 30 years in opposition, the [Israeli] right dreamed of a new map of Israel, and Begin knew how to galvanize the masses with his pioneering speeches. But Likud did not know how to make this map happen. For Sharon, however - a child of Kfar Malal - it wasn't complicated: irrigation systems needed to be set up, roads marked out and houses built. The division of labor was as follows: Begin would speak about the need to increase Israeli settlements... while Sharon would be the contractor. Sharon turned to a new generation of pioneers from Gush Emunim... inspired by the Bible... Ariel shared their love of the land of Israel and the certainty that they were the legitimate owners of the land of their ancestors... From 1977 to 1981 he established more than 60 settlements in Judea-Samaria. Then, in the course of his various later posts - defense, industry and commerce, infrastructure, housing - he reinforced these settlements and increased their number, until they reached 150. Sharon fought against the whole world to strengthen the Jewish presence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and he did not appreciate it when, years later, those in charge of the settlements preferred Benjamin Netanyahu over him as the right-wing candidate for prime minister." (Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait, Uri Dan, 2006, pp 77-8)
Fantasies like Freedland's do not arise spontaneously of course - they require a process of indoctrination, preferably from one's earliest days. In an obituary on his mother's death, Freedland wrote:
"Whatever view you ultimately take on the Israel-Palestine question, you cannot hope to understand that conflict unless you also understand this... craving for a place the Jews could call their own." (In death - as in life - my mother was rescued by love, The Guardian, 18/5/12)
Swallow the Zionist dogma that "Jews" must have "a place of their own" - preferably in Palestine - and even a butcher and thief like Sharon will come up smelling like roses.
"The tragedy for both sides is that the right people to speak that truth [about the Palestinian nakba] were the founding generation. Those who fought the war of 1948 were best placed to close its wounds. An intriguing habit of Sharon's was to refer to places in Israel by their original, Arabic names - thereby acknowledging the truth that usually lies buried beneath the soil. Leading his nation to do the same could have been Ariel Sharon's final mission. They will have to do it without him." (Ariel Sharon's final mission might well have been peace, 4/1/14)
As if this "intriguing habit" - assuming it ever existed - meant anything more than the fact that Sharon was born and raised in ARAB PALESTINE.
Incredibly, while ms journalists/pundits such as Freedland have no problem spotting war criminals in every other corner of the globe, when it comes to the Israeli variety they go all fey and fall all over themselves in an effort to sanitise the unsanitisable. So here we have Freedland seriously speculating that had Sharon not fallen victim to a stroke in 2006 he'd now be leading an Israeli version of Australia's Sorry movement! Time, as always, to get real:
"Finally in power [in 1977] after 30 years in opposition, the [Israeli] right dreamed of a new map of Israel, and Begin knew how to galvanize the masses with his pioneering speeches. But Likud did not know how to make this map happen. For Sharon, however - a child of Kfar Malal - it wasn't complicated: irrigation systems needed to be set up, roads marked out and houses built. The division of labor was as follows: Begin would speak about the need to increase Israeli settlements... while Sharon would be the contractor. Sharon turned to a new generation of pioneers from Gush Emunim... inspired by the Bible... Ariel shared their love of the land of Israel and the certainty that they were the legitimate owners of the land of their ancestors... From 1977 to 1981 he established more than 60 settlements in Judea-Samaria. Then, in the course of his various later posts - defense, industry and commerce, infrastructure, housing - he reinforced these settlements and increased their number, until they reached 150. Sharon fought against the whole world to strengthen the Jewish presence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and he did not appreciate it when, years later, those in charge of the settlements preferred Benjamin Netanyahu over him as the right-wing candidate for prime minister." (Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait, Uri Dan, 2006, pp 77-8)
Fantasies like Freedland's do not arise spontaneously of course - they require a process of indoctrination, preferably from one's earliest days. In an obituary on his mother's death, Freedland wrote:
"Whatever view you ultimately take on the Israel-Palestine question, you cannot hope to understand that conflict unless you also understand this... craving for a place the Jews could call their own." (In death - as in life - my mother was rescued by love, The Guardian, 18/5/12)
Swallow the Zionist dogma that "Jews" must have "a place of their own" - preferably in Palestine - and even a butcher and thief like Sharon will come up smelling like roses.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)