"Israeli soldiers have shot 16 people at the Gaza frontier on a day of rallies commemorating the mass displacement of Palestinians during the war that led to Israel's creation in 1948. Each year... on 15 May, Palestinians mark the nakba, or catastrophe..." (Israeli forces shoot 16 Palestinian protesters at Gaza frontier, Oliver Holmes/ Hazem Balousha, theguardian.com, 16/5/19)
Quite how the above squares with this later paragraph is anyone's guess:
"Gaza's health ministry said a total of 65 people were wounded by live fire, shrapnel, rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas. It said the 65 included 22 children and three paramedics." (ibid)
Certainly Israel's Haaretz made no bones about it. Here's their lead paragraph:
"Sixty five Gazans were injured Wednesday as Israeli security forces used live fire, tear gas and skunk spray against 10,000 protesters commemorating Nakba Day along the Gaza border, the Palestinian Health Ministry reported." (10,000 Gazans march on Nakba Day, 65 injured in clashes with Israeli forces, Yaniv Kubovich & Jack Khoury, 15/5/19)
Showing posts with label Guardian Australia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guardian Australia. Show all posts
Thursday, May 16, 2019
Monday, May 6, 2019
More Guardian Stenography for Israel...
... but, interestingly, someone at the Guardian inadvertently neglected to pull a sentence contradicting it.
Guardian Australia headline:
Six killed in Gaza as Israel responds to multiple rocket attacks
First sentence of report:
"An infant and her pregnant mother were among six people killed in Gaza after Israel responded with airstrikes and tank fire to about 250 rockets being fired over the border by Palestinian militants..." (Emma Graham-Harrison, 5/5/19)
Paragraph 5 of same report:
"The spike in violence began on Friday when two Palestinians were shot and killed by Israeli security forces during protests along the Israeli-Gaza perimeter fence."
So the headline and first sentence of the report, both of which toe the insidious Israeli propaganda line of 'Palestinians always attack/Israelis merely respond', is discredited in paragraph 5 of the same report.
Guardian Australia headline:
Six killed in Gaza as Israel responds to multiple rocket attacks
First sentence of report:
"An infant and her pregnant mother were among six people killed in Gaza after Israel responded with airstrikes and tank fire to about 250 rockets being fired over the border by Palestinian militants..." (Emma Graham-Harrison, 5/5/19)
Paragraph 5 of same report:
"The spike in violence began on Friday when two Palestinians were shot and killed by Israeli security forces during protests along the Israeli-Gaza perimeter fence."
So the headline and first sentence of the report, both of which toe the insidious Israeli propaganda line of 'Palestinians always attack/Israelis merely respond', is discredited in paragraph 5 of the same report.
Monday, April 15, 2019
Jonathan Freedland's Dream Zionists
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.
"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.
Monday, March 4, 2019
The Guardian: Buyer Beware
This being the internet age, I suspect that many consumers of international news are now resorting to the Guardian, whether the UK original, or the Australian spin-off.
'Buyer beware' is my advice. On Palestine/Israel, you invariably get softcore Zionism, and on Syria, crap like this:
"The hope must be that criminal justice will one day close in on Syria's murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad, his henchmen and enablers... It may take time... but criminal investigators will eventually work their way up the chain of responsibility to incriminate Syria's tyrant for the slaughter of his own people for almost eight straight years... The Khmer Rouge trials in Cambodia were held two decades after the genocides. Pinochet was arrested eight years after his dictatorship ended in Chile. Slobodan Milosevic dies in jail, not in a palace." (Assad can still be brought to justice - and Europe's role is crucial, Natalie Nougayrede, 1/3/19)
The good news is that a scan of the comment thread which follows Nougayrede's purple prose reveals that the overwhelming bulk of readers just aren't buying her regime change line.
As one astute reader wrote scathingly, "I am utterly amazed that the comments were ever opened for this article. In fact, there are hardly any Guardian articles open for comment these days. Sometimes I think I might as well be reading Hello magazine."
Exactly why he was amazed becomes clear from his/her second comment: "Natalie Nougayrede - I've never read an article so out of touch with reality. The US, UK, and one or two others, were responsible for fomenting this war; and it never was a civil war. The people who belong in the dock in the Hague are the leaders of these countries. And, as has been known for a long time, Assad did not use chemical weapons against his own people or anyone else. Assad, the Russians, and the Iranians deserve credit for preventing the destruction of yet another Middle Eastern country by Western forces and their proxy terrorist groups which, as always, when it suits them, ignore or flout international law. Iraq was an eye-opener for me. The lies and complicity of our Western mainstream media and its journalists are utterly deplorable, and this article and its like deserve the utmost condemnation."
That comment, by the way, had garnered 42 likes last time I looked.
'Buyer beware' is my advice. On Palestine/Israel, you invariably get softcore Zionism, and on Syria, crap like this:
"The hope must be that criminal justice will one day close in on Syria's murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad, his henchmen and enablers... It may take time... but criminal investigators will eventually work their way up the chain of responsibility to incriminate Syria's tyrant for the slaughter of his own people for almost eight straight years... The Khmer Rouge trials in Cambodia were held two decades after the genocides. Pinochet was arrested eight years after his dictatorship ended in Chile. Slobodan Milosevic dies in jail, not in a palace." (Assad can still be brought to justice - and Europe's role is crucial, Natalie Nougayrede, 1/3/19)
The good news is that a scan of the comment thread which follows Nougayrede's purple prose reveals that the overwhelming bulk of readers just aren't buying her regime change line.
As one astute reader wrote scathingly, "I am utterly amazed that the comments were ever opened for this article. In fact, there are hardly any Guardian articles open for comment these days. Sometimes I think I might as well be reading Hello magazine."
Exactly why he was amazed becomes clear from his/her second comment: "Natalie Nougayrede - I've never read an article so out of touch with reality. The US, UK, and one or two others, were responsible for fomenting this war; and it never was a civil war. The people who belong in the dock in the Hague are the leaders of these countries. And, as has been known for a long time, Assad did not use chemical weapons against his own people or anyone else. Assad, the Russians, and the Iranians deserve credit for preventing the destruction of yet another Middle Eastern country by Western forces and their proxy terrorist groups which, as always, when it suits them, ignore or flout international law. Iraq was an eye-opener for me. The lies and complicity of our Western mainstream media and its journalists are utterly deplorable, and this article and its like deserve the utmost condemnation."
That comment, by the way, had garnered 42 likes last time I looked.
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Jeremy Corbyn & the 7 Dwarfs
A group of 7 MPs have just announced their resignation from the UK Labour Party, setting up a so-called Independent Group. This has been long expected. (See in particular my 3/8/18 post Lord Balfour Sabotages Britain's Labour Party. )
One of them, Angela Smith, in the course of a BBC television panel discussion of racism in the UK, blurted out all we really need to know about the 7 dwarfs: 'The recent history of the party I've just left suggests [racism] is not just about being black or... a funny tinge... but... the Jewish community equally."
No surprise then that 5 of its members, including Smith, are "supporters" of Israeli embassy front group, Labour Friends of Israel. Palestinians, presumably, in addition to the crime of not buckling to the Zionist project in their ancestral homeland, could also be marginalised as "funny tinged."
This mix of racism and Zionism, of course, will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the history of the Zionist movement, and, in particular, those notorious words of its founder, Theodor Herzl: "The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends."
And just look at how the congenitally Zionist Guardian (to focus on just one establishment media outlet) leapt on the 7 dwarfs' bandwagon, leveling yet more false smears of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and his party. This, for example, is from today's editorial:
"It is no secret that many, probably most, Labour MPs wish someone other than Jeremy Corbyn was leader. Many Labour MPs wish that Mr Corbyn would make the case for Britain in Europe, and that he did not equivocate about antisemitism in the party."
And this is from an opinion piece by Labour peer, Andrew (Lord) Adonis:
"Corbyn must treat antisemitism as an evil to be ruthlessly defeated. No one who expresses prejudice against Jewish people or the existence of Israel - including those who try to hide behind semantics when we all know exactly what they are talking about - has any place in our party. Corbyn has too many supporters and allies who are antisemitic. They must leave the party and Corbyn should require them to do so. Corbyn must give a speech deploring not just 'all forms of racism' but the particular horror of hatred of Jews." (If Corbyn doesn't want the Labour split to worsen, he has to listen, Andrew Adonis, 19/2/19)
But then what would you expect from the Guardian?
It should never be forgotten that the renowned editor of the Manchester Guardian (as it was known in 1917), C.P. Scott, editorialised, on the occasion of the issuing of the Balfour Declaration, that "the Jews... have succeeded in establishing the beginnings of a real civilisation [in Palestine]," and were "making the waste places blossom as the rose," while "the existing Arab population... is small and at a low stage of civilisation... " (See my 2/7/17 post The Balfour Declaration Centenary: 4 Months to Go.)
Scratch the 7 dwarfs - or 5 of them at least - and you'll get racism and/or Zionism. Scratch the liberal Guardian and you'll invariably get a Zionist perspective on Palestine.
One of them, Angela Smith, in the course of a BBC television panel discussion of racism in the UK, blurted out all we really need to know about the 7 dwarfs: 'The recent history of the party I've just left suggests [racism] is not just about being black or... a funny tinge... but... the Jewish community equally."
No surprise then that 5 of its members, including Smith, are "supporters" of Israeli embassy front group, Labour Friends of Israel. Palestinians, presumably, in addition to the crime of not buckling to the Zionist project in their ancestral homeland, could also be marginalised as "funny tinged."
This mix of racism and Zionism, of course, will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the history of the Zionist movement, and, in particular, those notorious words of its founder, Theodor Herzl: "The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends."
And just look at how the congenitally Zionist Guardian (to focus on just one establishment media outlet) leapt on the 7 dwarfs' bandwagon, leveling yet more false smears of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and his party. This, for example, is from today's editorial:
"It is no secret that many, probably most, Labour MPs wish someone other than Jeremy Corbyn was leader. Many Labour MPs wish that Mr Corbyn would make the case for Britain in Europe, and that he did not equivocate about antisemitism in the party."
And this is from an opinion piece by Labour peer, Andrew (Lord) Adonis:
"Corbyn must treat antisemitism as an evil to be ruthlessly defeated. No one who expresses prejudice against Jewish people or the existence of Israel - including those who try to hide behind semantics when we all know exactly what they are talking about - has any place in our party. Corbyn has too many supporters and allies who are antisemitic. They must leave the party and Corbyn should require them to do so. Corbyn must give a speech deploring not just 'all forms of racism' but the particular horror of hatred of Jews." (If Corbyn doesn't want the Labour split to worsen, he has to listen, Andrew Adonis, 19/2/19)
But then what would you expect from the Guardian?
It should never be forgotten that the renowned editor of the Manchester Guardian (as it was known in 1917), C.P. Scott, editorialised, on the occasion of the issuing of the Balfour Declaration, that "the Jews... have succeeded in establishing the beginnings of a real civilisation [in Palestine]," and were "making the waste places blossom as the rose," while "the existing Arab population... is small and at a low stage of civilisation... " (See my 2/7/17 post The Balfour Declaration Centenary: 4 Months to Go.)
Scratch the 7 dwarfs - or 5 of them at least - and you'll get racism and/or Zionism. Scratch the liberal Guardian and you'll invariably get a Zionist perspective on Palestine.
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
I Read the Guardian Today, Oh Boy
The latest dollop of liberal Zionist claptrap in that media repository of liberal Zionist claptrap, the Guardian, is a little homily by a certain Simon Baron-Cohen, director of Cambridge University's Autism Research Centre, author of Zero Degrees of Empathy, and yes, brother of Sacha. It is based on the following premise:
"Empathy is all about imagining other minds, appreciating that different people have different perspectives, and responding to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion. After a career studying autism and the nature of empathy, I see empathy as one of our most valuable natural resources. It has particular promise as an approach to conflict resolution... We can see this if we look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, where both communities have different views of the same historic period, both claim the same piece of land and both have valid emotional reactions to the conflict that must be acknowledged." (22/1/19)
Now one might reasonably expect that anyone who is serious about the need to "imagine other minds" and "appreciate different perspectives" as a means to resolving conflict would draw on considered accounts of same by both parties. But this is not what Baron-Cohen does. He only cites Israeli views, specifically those of novelist Amoz Oz and journalist Ari Shavit, author of My Promised Land: The Triumph & Tragedy of Israel.
No Palestinian voice gets a look in - unless one excepts what "one Palestinian friend said to me: 'It's hard to empathise with someone when you are looking up the barrel of their gun'." (Indeed!)
Baron-Cohen's way out of this dilemma - "Israelis should take the initiative, because they are the stronger party" - is pure ivory tower, and flies in the face of the logic of colonialism which rules out equality between coloniser and colonised. I've dealt with this issue before in my 16/11/19 post Dialogue of the Colonizer and the Colonized (just click on the colonialism label below) where I highlighted the words of a Palestinian prisoner, Ta'er Hamad, who had been approached by the mother of one of his Israeli victims: "I cannot hold a dialogue with someone who insists on equating the occupation with its victims."
The problem with reading this kind of liberal Zionist claptrap - and the Guardian is full of it - is that it wastes the reader's time, time better spent understanding, and calling out, the worse-than-apartheid reality of the colonial-settler Zionist project (projectile?) in Palestine.
To home in on just one of Baron-Cohen's fairy tales, aka the "Israeli perspective":
"If you ask Jewish Israelis why their families came to Palestine before 1948, they'll likely refer to two major waves of antisemitism. The first included the horrific pogroms of eastern Europe in the 1880s and 90s. In the second wave in the 1930s and 40s, two out of every three European Jews were killed by the Nazis... the Jews were drowning, looking for a piece of wood they could cling on to. Palestine, which for two millennia they had thought of as their ancient homeland, was that piece of wood."
The problem here is the colossal conceit that the Zionist movement was primarily a rescue mission. The reality, of course, is that it was a colonial settler movement from its inception. One only has to read the Basel Program, which emerged from the First Zionist Congress of 1897 to see this. As for the aforementioned Tsarist pogroms of the 1880s and 90s, only a minority of Russian Jews ever headed for Palestine, and most of them were not political Zionists. Many more emigrated to Western Europe, or the United States, while others joined Russian revolutionary currents.
As for "the second wave," Western Europe and the United States were again the preferred destination for European Jews impacted by the Nazi era.
Yosef Grodzinzky's 2004 book In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews & Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II is well worth a read on this matter:
"Post-Holocaust Displaced Persons, who lived in miserable conditions, became a human reserve of great migration potential, hence a prime target for the Zionists, who planned to transfer the entire DP population to Palestine. On the face of it, this task was easy: Mostly Holocaust survivors, the DPs were supposedly convinced by now that a Jewish state was the only viable solution. All it should have taken was thus immigration permits - as Palestine was still in British hands - and a sufficient number of boats that would ship the DPs to the safe haven. This, indeed, has been the official line. It has been said that with few exceptions, the shadow of the Holocaust made almost all the DPs want to go to Palestine; as immigration quotas were extremely limited while the British were in control, only few could enter; yet on May 15th 1948, the British left and with them went the quotas. An independent Jewish state was declared, and its doors were immediately opened; previously unable to immigrate to Palestine, the rest of the DPs now rushed to make 'aliyah (immigration) to Israel, and became proud citizens of the Jewish state. This is what I learned in school.
"Yet the documentary record I found in archives helped me discover two numerical discrepancies which call for an explanation. a. Polls taken in the camps at different times indicate that the vast majority of Jewish DPs (80-96.8 percent) stated their intention to immigrate to Palestine. If not to Palestine, they said, they would rather go back to the crematoria of the death camps. Yet, of the hundreds of thousands, only 40 percent (at most) actually went to Palestine/Israel, despite the fact that other migration routes were more difficult to follow at any point in time. b. A voluntary draft drive in the camps for the Israel Defense Force (IDF), then in formation, drew only 700 volunteers in the spring of 1948 (0.3 percent of the 250,000 Jewish camp dwellers then)... The failed attempt to mobilize volunteers led the Zionists to enact forced conscription of DPs in Germany and Austria to the IDF. Just months later, the headcount of camp draftees who fulfilled their 'national duty' went up eleven fold to 7,800...
"What happened? Why did so many say they wanted to go to Palestine, when only a minority actually did so? What justified forced conscription of survivors to fight for a cause they did not necessarily support, in a land they had never seen, and whose language they did not speak? How was a non-sovereign body able to force conscripts on German and Austrian soil to embark on boats that took them to the battlefield in Palestine?
"To forecast, the Zionists successfully took control of the Jewish DP camps early on, which later enabled them to enforce a draft... Zionist planners and organizers followed a clear line of reasoning: To them, a Jew not wanting to go to Palestine adversely affected the struggle for the establishment of an independent state in two ways. First, it was a net loss to the effort to populate Palestine... Secondly, reluctance to make 'aliyah weakened the Zionist pressure to open the gates of Palestine for unlimited Jewish immigration. As the suffering of the DPs was used as a bargaining chip in the struggle against immigration quotas imposed by the British, who controlled Palestine until the state was established, a Jew immigrating to the West was one less suffering Jew knocking on Palestine's doors. The migration of Jews to places other than Palestine was thus discouraged, sometimes even blocked by force. Attempts to evacuate child survivors to England and France immediately after Liberation in 1945 were thus thwarted, on Ben-Gurion's explicit instructions." (pp 9-12)
So much for Baron-Cohen's "drowning" Jews, just itching to reach Palestine after "two millennia" of longing. Boilerplate Zionist dogma, of course. But, where the issue of Palestine/Israel is concerned, Zionist dogma, framing, bias, and embroidery, in one form or another, is invariably what you get at the Guardian.
"Empathy is all about imagining other minds, appreciating that different people have different perspectives, and responding to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion. After a career studying autism and the nature of empathy, I see empathy as one of our most valuable natural resources. It has particular promise as an approach to conflict resolution... We can see this if we look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, where both communities have different views of the same historic period, both claim the same piece of land and both have valid emotional reactions to the conflict that must be acknowledged." (22/1/19)
Now one might reasonably expect that anyone who is serious about the need to "imagine other minds" and "appreciate different perspectives" as a means to resolving conflict would draw on considered accounts of same by both parties. But this is not what Baron-Cohen does. He only cites Israeli views, specifically those of novelist Amoz Oz and journalist Ari Shavit, author of My Promised Land: The Triumph & Tragedy of Israel.
No Palestinian voice gets a look in - unless one excepts what "one Palestinian friend said to me: 'It's hard to empathise with someone when you are looking up the barrel of their gun'." (Indeed!)
Baron-Cohen's way out of this dilemma - "Israelis should take the initiative, because they are the stronger party" - is pure ivory tower, and flies in the face of the logic of colonialism which rules out equality between coloniser and colonised. I've dealt with this issue before in my 16/11/19 post Dialogue of the Colonizer and the Colonized (just click on the colonialism label below) where I highlighted the words of a Palestinian prisoner, Ta'er Hamad, who had been approached by the mother of one of his Israeli victims: "I cannot hold a dialogue with someone who insists on equating the occupation with its victims."
The problem with reading this kind of liberal Zionist claptrap - and the Guardian is full of it - is that it wastes the reader's time, time better spent understanding, and calling out, the worse-than-apartheid reality of the colonial-settler Zionist project (projectile?) in Palestine.
To home in on just one of Baron-Cohen's fairy tales, aka the "Israeli perspective":
"If you ask Jewish Israelis why their families came to Palestine before 1948, they'll likely refer to two major waves of antisemitism. The first included the horrific pogroms of eastern Europe in the 1880s and 90s. In the second wave in the 1930s and 40s, two out of every three European Jews were killed by the Nazis... the Jews were drowning, looking for a piece of wood they could cling on to. Palestine, which for two millennia they had thought of as their ancient homeland, was that piece of wood."
The problem here is the colossal conceit that the Zionist movement was primarily a rescue mission. The reality, of course, is that it was a colonial settler movement from its inception. One only has to read the Basel Program, which emerged from the First Zionist Congress of 1897 to see this. As for the aforementioned Tsarist pogroms of the 1880s and 90s, only a minority of Russian Jews ever headed for Palestine, and most of them were not political Zionists. Many more emigrated to Western Europe, or the United States, while others joined Russian revolutionary currents.
As for "the second wave," Western Europe and the United States were again the preferred destination for European Jews impacted by the Nazi era.
Yosef Grodzinzky's 2004 book In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews & Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II is well worth a read on this matter:
"Post-Holocaust Displaced Persons, who lived in miserable conditions, became a human reserve of great migration potential, hence a prime target for the Zionists, who planned to transfer the entire DP population to Palestine. On the face of it, this task was easy: Mostly Holocaust survivors, the DPs were supposedly convinced by now that a Jewish state was the only viable solution. All it should have taken was thus immigration permits - as Palestine was still in British hands - and a sufficient number of boats that would ship the DPs to the safe haven. This, indeed, has been the official line. It has been said that with few exceptions, the shadow of the Holocaust made almost all the DPs want to go to Palestine; as immigration quotas were extremely limited while the British were in control, only few could enter; yet on May 15th 1948, the British left and with them went the quotas. An independent Jewish state was declared, and its doors were immediately opened; previously unable to immigrate to Palestine, the rest of the DPs now rushed to make 'aliyah (immigration) to Israel, and became proud citizens of the Jewish state. This is what I learned in school.
"Yet the documentary record I found in archives helped me discover two numerical discrepancies which call for an explanation. a. Polls taken in the camps at different times indicate that the vast majority of Jewish DPs (80-96.8 percent) stated their intention to immigrate to Palestine. If not to Palestine, they said, they would rather go back to the crematoria of the death camps. Yet, of the hundreds of thousands, only 40 percent (at most) actually went to Palestine/Israel, despite the fact that other migration routes were more difficult to follow at any point in time. b. A voluntary draft drive in the camps for the Israel Defense Force (IDF), then in formation, drew only 700 volunteers in the spring of 1948 (0.3 percent of the 250,000 Jewish camp dwellers then)... The failed attempt to mobilize volunteers led the Zionists to enact forced conscription of DPs in Germany and Austria to the IDF. Just months later, the headcount of camp draftees who fulfilled their 'national duty' went up eleven fold to 7,800...
"What happened? Why did so many say they wanted to go to Palestine, when only a minority actually did so? What justified forced conscription of survivors to fight for a cause they did not necessarily support, in a land they had never seen, and whose language they did not speak? How was a non-sovereign body able to force conscripts on German and Austrian soil to embark on boats that took them to the battlefield in Palestine?
"To forecast, the Zionists successfully took control of the Jewish DP camps early on, which later enabled them to enforce a draft... Zionist planners and organizers followed a clear line of reasoning: To them, a Jew not wanting to go to Palestine adversely affected the struggle for the establishment of an independent state in two ways. First, it was a net loss to the effort to populate Palestine... Secondly, reluctance to make 'aliyah weakened the Zionist pressure to open the gates of Palestine for unlimited Jewish immigration. As the suffering of the DPs was used as a bargaining chip in the struggle against immigration quotas imposed by the British, who controlled Palestine until the state was established, a Jew immigrating to the West was one less suffering Jew knocking on Palestine's doors. The migration of Jews to places other than Palestine was thus discouraged, sometimes even blocked by force. Attempts to evacuate child survivors to England and France immediately after Liberation in 1945 were thus thwarted, on Ben-Gurion's explicit instructions." (pp 9-12)
So much for Baron-Cohen's "drowning" Jews, just itching to reach Palestine after "two millennia" of longing. Boilerplate Zionist dogma, of course. But, where the issue of Palestine/Israel is concerned, Zionist dogma, framing, bias, and embroidery, in one form or another, is invariably what you get at the Guardian.
Thursday, November 22, 2018
About Those Bloody Comment Threads...
A most interesting corporate media phenomenon is the alacrity with which those 'readers' who, like moths to a flame, respond whenever Guardian Australia deigns to allow them the opportunity to do so. I say 'deigns' because these opportunities are quite rare.
In addition to Katharine Murphy's report of November 17, with its categorical assertion that Israeli PM Netanyahu was part of Australian PM Morrison's "circle of trust" in the lead-up to the latter's announcement, during the Wentworth by-election, that he would be moving Australia's embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem - a truly stunning revelation which all of our corporate media outlets have, inexplicably, thus far ignored - Guardian Australia also posted an eminently sensible opinion piece by former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr, giving the idea of the embassy move the thumbs-down. (See my 18/11/18 post Morrison's 'Circle of Trust'.)
Guardian Australia allowed comments on Carr's piece, but, interestingly, not on Murphy's, which brings us back to my first paragraph. Carr's piece attracted almost 170 comments, just about every one of which hammered Morrison and his embassy proposal in no uncertain terms. Morrison was slammed variously as stupid, a moron, an idiot, an imbecile, a clown, a buffoon, a blunderer and, even, 'deranged', and his proposal as a brain-fart or a thought-bubble. He was fingered as a plaything of Trump or the US State Department and Defence/ intelligence community and a lickspittle. Many commenters cited his evangelical faith as the reason for his announcement. They spoke of 'fundamentalist Christian apocalypticism', 'prayerful clappers', 'playing the religion card', 'enmeshed in religious extremism', and 'the fanatical US religious right'. His senior ministers were referred to as a rabble and Frydenberg in particular was singled out as 'incredibly immature' and wanting to 'raise awareness of his heritage'. Not one revealed any knowledge of the hold exercised by the Israel lobby over the two major parties. The word 'Zionist' was conspicuous by its absence.
Only one, it seems, had taken the trouble to read Katharine Murphy's article, yet even his/her comment was problematic. I quote it here in full so you'll see exactly what I mean:
"What KM's related reporting suggests is that while the timing might have been all about Morrison's desperation as he saw Wentworth slipping away from the Liberals, this particular idea was hardly unspoken within the Liberal Party right wing faction that has secured power..."
You'll notice at this point that the commenter has failed to register the fact that Murphy includes Netanyahu in Morrison's 'circle of trust'. This is quite an oversight to say the least. He/she goes on to provide a link to Murphy's article and then wanders off course with this comment: "It's worrying how much more of this fundamentalist Christian apocalyptisism is going to inform Liberal Party policy... "
Frankly, one wonders whether even if Guardian Australia had allowed its 'readers' to comment on Murphy's report, just how many would have overlooked her revelation about Netanyahu's involvement in the decision to shift the Australian embassy to Jerusalem.
Let me hazard a generalisation as to why this may be the case here: those who flock to comment on Guardian Australia's (and other such websites) are more interested in hearing the sound of their own voices than in informing themselves through a little wide reading on the subject at hand. Typical of this phenomenon is the following comment from the same thread:
"The whole issue of Israel and Palestine has been going on with various intensity since the day I was born. It has been in the background of all of our lives... for most of our lives. There never seems to be any end to this conflict, the never ending war..."
Makes me want to scream: well, pick up a few reputable books on the subject and find out WHY the issue has been on the boil for as long as you can remember!
In addition to Katharine Murphy's report of November 17, with its categorical assertion that Israeli PM Netanyahu was part of Australian PM Morrison's "circle of trust" in the lead-up to the latter's announcement, during the Wentworth by-election, that he would be moving Australia's embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem - a truly stunning revelation which all of our corporate media outlets have, inexplicably, thus far ignored - Guardian Australia also posted an eminently sensible opinion piece by former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr, giving the idea of the embassy move the thumbs-down. (See my 18/11/18 post Morrison's 'Circle of Trust'.)
Guardian Australia allowed comments on Carr's piece, but, interestingly, not on Murphy's, which brings us back to my first paragraph. Carr's piece attracted almost 170 comments, just about every one of which hammered Morrison and his embassy proposal in no uncertain terms. Morrison was slammed variously as stupid, a moron, an idiot, an imbecile, a clown, a buffoon, a blunderer and, even, 'deranged', and his proposal as a brain-fart or a thought-bubble. He was fingered as a plaything of Trump or the US State Department and Defence/ intelligence community and a lickspittle. Many commenters cited his evangelical faith as the reason for his announcement. They spoke of 'fundamentalist Christian apocalypticism', 'prayerful clappers', 'playing the religion card', 'enmeshed in religious extremism', and 'the fanatical US religious right'. His senior ministers were referred to as a rabble and Frydenberg in particular was singled out as 'incredibly immature' and wanting to 'raise awareness of his heritage'. Not one revealed any knowledge of the hold exercised by the Israel lobby over the two major parties. The word 'Zionist' was conspicuous by its absence.
Only one, it seems, had taken the trouble to read Katharine Murphy's article, yet even his/her comment was problematic. I quote it here in full so you'll see exactly what I mean:
"What KM's related reporting suggests is that while the timing might have been all about Morrison's desperation as he saw Wentworth slipping away from the Liberals, this particular idea was hardly unspoken within the Liberal Party right wing faction that has secured power..."
You'll notice at this point that the commenter has failed to register the fact that Murphy includes Netanyahu in Morrison's 'circle of trust'. This is quite an oversight to say the least. He/she goes on to provide a link to Murphy's article and then wanders off course with this comment: "It's worrying how much more of this fundamentalist Christian apocalyptisism is going to inform Liberal Party policy... "
Frankly, one wonders whether even if Guardian Australia had allowed its 'readers' to comment on Murphy's report, just how many would have overlooked her revelation about Netanyahu's involvement in the decision to shift the Australian embassy to Jerusalem.
Let me hazard a generalisation as to why this may be the case here: those who flock to comment on Guardian Australia's (and other such websites) are more interested in hearing the sound of their own voices than in informing themselves through a little wide reading on the subject at hand. Typical of this phenomenon is the following comment from the same thread:
"The whole issue of Israel and Palestine has been going on with various intensity since the day I was born. It has been in the background of all of our lives... for most of our lives. There never seems to be any end to this conflict, the never ending war..."
Makes me want to scream: well, pick up a few reputable books on the subject and find out WHY the issue has been on the boil for as long as you can remember!
Sunday, November 18, 2018
Morrison's 'Circle of Trust'
Paul Kelly, the Australian's editor-at-large, gives the thumbs down to Morrison's Israel embassy fizzer. Although he gets many things right, it seems that he's wrong when he claims that "nobody" had "sought or requested - neither the US nor Israel" shifting our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem:
"The first truth is Australia didn't need Indonesia to tell it this is an unwise decision - the originating problem is not Indonesia's reaction but Australia's bad judgment. The second truth is that it is folly for Australia to embark on a Middle East policy change that nobody has sought or requested - neither the US nor Israel - that was taken without any proper assessment, that was recommended by no government agency and that will damage our critical relations close to home." (There is no upside in Jerusalem shift, 17/11/18)
In a truly stunning revelation Guardian Australia's Katharine Murphy contradicts Kelly in no uncertain terms:
"Roll forward now to mid-October, the week before the Wentworth byelection, and a growing sense of alarm that the government would not hold Turnbull's vacated seat... Morrison consulted his leadership group (but few others, as it turned out, although one of the people in the circle of trust was the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu) and then flagged the embassy shift publicly." (Morrison's Israel embassy policy cannot be fathomed - and risks his political survival, 17/11/18)
If the Israeli PM was behind the decision to move our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, why isn't this news all over the msm?
"The first truth is Australia didn't need Indonesia to tell it this is an unwise decision - the originating problem is not Indonesia's reaction but Australia's bad judgment. The second truth is that it is folly for Australia to embark on a Middle East policy change that nobody has sought or requested - neither the US nor Israel - that was taken without any proper assessment, that was recommended by no government agency and that will damage our critical relations close to home." (There is no upside in Jerusalem shift, 17/11/18)
In a truly stunning revelation Guardian Australia's Katharine Murphy contradicts Kelly in no uncertain terms:
"Roll forward now to mid-October, the week before the Wentworth byelection, and a growing sense of alarm that the government would not hold Turnbull's vacated seat... Morrison consulted his leadership group (but few others, as it turned out, although one of the people in the circle of trust was the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu) and then flagged the embassy shift publicly." (Morrison's Israel embassy policy cannot be fathomed - and risks his political survival, 17/11/18)
If the Israeli PM was behind the decision to move our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, why isn't this news all over the msm?
Friday, November 16, 2018
Breaking News...
Can you believe it? The Guardian has, for the first time in recent memory, admitted that the Israelis struck first:
"Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups have accepted an Egyptian-mediated agreement to halt two days of intense fighting with Israel sparked by a botched Israeli special forces raid miles inside Gaza." (Israel & Hamas agree to Gaza ceasefire after intense violence, Oliver Holmes, 14/11/18)
Extraordinary!
Mind you that descriptor "special forces" (a euphemism for death squad) is still vintage Guardian.
"Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups have accepted an Egyptian-mediated agreement to halt two days of intense fighting with Israel sparked by a botched Israeli special forces raid miles inside Gaza." (Israel & Hamas agree to Gaza ceasefire after intense violence, Oliver Holmes, 14/11/18)
Extraordinary!
Mind you that descriptor "special forces" (a euphemism for death squad) is still vintage Guardian.
Saturday, August 4, 2018
The Guardian Sabotages Britain's Labour Party
You've heard of the PEP (Progressive Except Palestine). Now meet the subspecies SEP (Socialist Except Palestine). Self-proclaimed "natural Labour voter," and Guardian columnist,Gaby Hinsliff, mutters darkly in her drive-by smear of UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn:
"Dare to criticise Jeremy Corbyn as a natural Labor voter, and sooner or later you'll be accused not only of 'smearing' the leader, but of being morally liable for every bad thing that ever has happened or will happen under a Tory government... God forbid he should take responsibility for creating a party that doesn't make some of its longest-standing supporters feel morally tainted by association. Even Momentum - which dared to publicly abandon its support for Peter Willsman as an NEC candidate after a tape emerged of him apparently challenging the very existence of antisemitism in Labour - faced a vicious backlash from its own members. It was a stark illustration of the difficulty facing a younger generation of Corbynites, who are no keener than your average millennial to upset minorities and are genuinely seeking a way out of this mess, but who belong to a movement encouraged to view any criticism of Corbyn or his friends and allies as a full-frontal assault on socialism itself. Well, they should stick to their guns. It's perfectly possible to offer progressive taxation, more social housing, renationalised railways and and a welfare system in which people don't visibly starve without an unwanted side order of Mossad conspiracy theories. The idea that you can't have one without another [sic] - that unless we all agree that there's nothing wrong with calling Jews Nazis, then leftwing economic beliefs will somehow die - is grotesque. And if Corbyn, laden as he is with the personal baggage and friendships of the past 40 years, struggles to separate the two in the public mind, then sooner or later the Labour Party must find someone who can." (Dark forces gather as UK politics heads for rock bottom, 3/8/18)
Note the irony in the title of Hinsliff's witless piece: the Guardian, not Corbyn's Labour, is in fact one of the "dark forces" working to send UK politics to "rock bottom."
"Dare to criticise Jeremy Corbyn as a natural Labor voter, and sooner or later you'll be accused not only of 'smearing' the leader, but of being morally liable for every bad thing that ever has happened or will happen under a Tory government... God forbid he should take responsibility for creating a party that doesn't make some of its longest-standing supporters feel morally tainted by association. Even Momentum - which dared to publicly abandon its support for Peter Willsman as an NEC candidate after a tape emerged of him apparently challenging the very existence of antisemitism in Labour - faced a vicious backlash from its own members. It was a stark illustration of the difficulty facing a younger generation of Corbynites, who are no keener than your average millennial to upset minorities and are genuinely seeking a way out of this mess, but who belong to a movement encouraged to view any criticism of Corbyn or his friends and allies as a full-frontal assault on socialism itself. Well, they should stick to their guns. It's perfectly possible to offer progressive taxation, more social housing, renationalised railways and and a welfare system in which people don't visibly starve without an unwanted side order of Mossad conspiracy theories. The idea that you can't have one without another [sic] - that unless we all agree that there's nothing wrong with calling Jews Nazis, then leftwing economic beliefs will somehow die - is grotesque. And if Corbyn, laden as he is with the personal baggage and friendships of the past 40 years, struggles to separate the two in the public mind, then sooner or later the Labour Party must find someone who can." (Dark forces gather as UK politics heads for rock bottom, 3/8/18)
Note the irony in the title of Hinsliff's witless piece: the Guardian, not Corbyn's Labour, is in fact one of the "dark forces" working to send UK politics to "rock bottom."
Saturday, July 21, 2018
Who is Mohammad?
Ever notice how corporate journalists sometimes feature in their reports the views of a member of the public who appears to be, at one and the same time, both a village idiot and an apologist for imperial military intervention?
Meet Guardian journalist Saeed Kamali Dehghan's 'Mohammed':
"A combination of factors ranging from economic grievances and a lack of social and political freedoms to international pressure and sanctions has put [Iran] under unprecedented pressure. Many Iranians would now agree with Mohammad [?] that the country faces a pivotal moment. 'People are desperate to find a way out,' he says. 'If it's war, so it be, but quick; if it's reaching an agreement, so it be, but quick; if it's regime change, so it be, but quick'." ('Desperate to find a way out': Iran edges towards precipice, Saeed Kamali Dehghan, theguardian.com, 20/7/18)
I mean, surely only a complete dill could possibly imagine war or regime change as "quick."
Then there's this bizarre assertion from 'Mohammad':
"All the 'down to America', 'down to Israel' chants put us in this agony."
I mean, hello? doesn't it occur to him that launching an economic war (aka sanctions) on Iran is just a tad over-the-top for protests against USraeli bullying in the region.
Who the fuck is 'Mohammad'? Sacha Baron Cohen?
Meet Guardian journalist Saeed Kamali Dehghan's 'Mohammed':
"A combination of factors ranging from economic grievances and a lack of social and political freedoms to international pressure and sanctions has put [Iran] under unprecedented pressure. Many Iranians would now agree with Mohammad [?] that the country faces a pivotal moment. 'People are desperate to find a way out,' he says. 'If it's war, so it be, but quick; if it's reaching an agreement, so it be, but quick; if it's regime change, so it be, but quick'." ('Desperate to find a way out': Iran edges towards precipice, Saeed Kamali Dehghan, theguardian.com, 20/7/18)
I mean, surely only a complete dill could possibly imagine war or regime change as "quick."
Then there's this bizarre assertion from 'Mohammad':
"All the 'down to America', 'down to Israel' chants put us in this agony."
I mean, hello? doesn't it occur to him that launching an economic war (aka sanctions) on Iran is just a tad over-the-top for protests against USraeli bullying in the region.
Who the fuck is 'Mohammad'? Sacha Baron Cohen?
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
Don't Mention Israel
The Guardian 'explains' why Trump - who couldn't find Iran on a map of the world even if he wanted to wipe it off said map - wants the Iran nuclear deal scrapped:
"Trump believes the agreement is a bad deal, which falls short of addressing Iran's regional behaviour or its missile program. He is emboldened by a group of Iran hawks in his inner circle, such as the national security adviser, John Bolton, and the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. Critics also say it is another example of Trump dismantling Barack Obama's legacy - the Iran deal was his signature foreign policy achievement." (The Iran deal explained: what is it and why does trump want to scrap it? Saeed Kamali Dehghan, 9/5/18)
"Trump believes..."? In Trump. Full stop. End of story.
Now note how coy the Guardian is on the subject of Bolton and Pompeo. "Iran hawks" doesn't begin to do justice to either.
I've already sketched the former's Zio-con affiliations (AEI/PNAC/JINSA/ZOA) in my 28/3/18 post Bolton Out of the Blue. But there's a further, loopier dimension to this rabid warmonger: "Bolton was shepherded into politics by Senator Jesse Helms, a passionate Christian Zionist and a hero of Jerry Fallwell's, who once admiringly described Bolton as 'the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon...'" (Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism, Victoria Clark, 2007, p 250)
If Bolton lies at the interface between the US Zio-cons and its Trumpist Christian Zionist hordes, Evangelical Islamophobe Pompeo is, it seems, the real Christian Zionist deal:
"The threat to America is from people who deeply believe that Islam is the way and the light and the only answer. They abhor Christians and will continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure we know that Jesus Christ as our savior is truly the only solution for the world." (Pompeo in 2014, quoted in Bolton & Pompeo comments on Islam alarm American Muslims, Tom Gjelten, npr.org, 6/4/18)
"This evil [Islam] is all around us. We will continue to fight these battles. It is a never-ending struggle... until the rapture." (Pompeo in 2015, speaking at the Summit Church's God & Country Rally.)
Certainly, Netanyahu is the only political leader anywhere on the planet in raptures over Trump's latest move, but, hey, don't expect the Guardian to factor that into its pathetic little explainer.
"Trump believes the agreement is a bad deal, which falls short of addressing Iran's regional behaviour or its missile program. He is emboldened by a group of Iran hawks in his inner circle, such as the national security adviser, John Bolton, and the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. Critics also say it is another example of Trump dismantling Barack Obama's legacy - the Iran deal was his signature foreign policy achievement." (The Iran deal explained: what is it and why does trump want to scrap it? Saeed Kamali Dehghan, 9/5/18)
"Trump believes..."? In Trump. Full stop. End of story.
Now note how coy the Guardian is on the subject of Bolton and Pompeo. "Iran hawks" doesn't begin to do justice to either.
I've already sketched the former's Zio-con affiliations (AEI/PNAC/JINSA/ZOA) in my 28/3/18 post Bolton Out of the Blue. But there's a further, loopier dimension to this rabid warmonger: "Bolton was shepherded into politics by Senator Jesse Helms, a passionate Christian Zionist and a hero of Jerry Fallwell's, who once admiringly described Bolton as 'the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon...'" (Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism, Victoria Clark, 2007, p 250)
If Bolton lies at the interface between the US Zio-cons and its Trumpist Christian Zionist hordes, Evangelical Islamophobe Pompeo is, it seems, the real Christian Zionist deal:
"The threat to America is from people who deeply believe that Islam is the way and the light and the only answer. They abhor Christians and will continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure we know that Jesus Christ as our savior is truly the only solution for the world." (Pompeo in 2014, quoted in Bolton & Pompeo comments on Islam alarm American Muslims, Tom Gjelten, npr.org, 6/4/18)
"This evil [Islam] is all around us. We will continue to fight these battles. It is a never-ending struggle... until the rapture." (Pompeo in 2015, speaking at the Summit Church's God & Country Rally.)
Certainly, Netanyahu is the only political leader anywhere on the planet in raptures over Trump's latest move, but, hey, don't expect the Guardian to factor that into its pathetic little explainer.
Tuesday, May 1, 2018
The 3 Unwise Monkeys
Journalist Jonathan Cook, as usual, is bang on the mon(k)ey(s):
"The response from the US, UK and France to a briefing on Thursday at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague was perverse, to say the least. Russia had brought 17 witnesses from Douma who stated that there had been no chemical weapons attack there earlier this month - the pretext for an illegal air strike on Syria by the three western states.
"The witnesses, a mix of victims and the doctors who treated them, told accounts that confirmed a report provided last week from Douma by British reporter Robert Fisk - a report, it should be noted, that has been almost entirely blanked by the western media. According to the testimony provided at the OPCW, the victims shown in a video from the site of an alleged attack were actually suffering from the effects of inhaling dust after a bombing raid, not gas.
"The first strange thing to note is that the US, UK and France boycotted the meeting, denouncing Russia for producing the witnesses and calling the event 'an obscene masquerade' and 'theatre'. It suggests that this trio, behaving like the proverbial three monkeys, think the testimony will disappear if they simply ignore it. They have no interest in hearing from witnesses unless they confirm the western narrative used to justify the air strikes on Syria.
"Testimony from witnesses is surely a crucial part of determining what actually. The US, UK and France are surely obligated to listen to the witnesses first, and then seek to discredit the testimony afterwards if they think it implausible or coerced. The evidence cannot be tested and rebutted if it is not even considered.
"The second is that the media are echoing this misplaced scorn for evidence. They too seem to have prejudged whether the witnesses are credible before listening to what they have to say (similar to their treatment of Fisk). Tellingly, the Guardian described these witnesses as 'supposed witnesses', not a formulation that suggests that any degree of impartiality in its coverage. Notice that when the Guardian refers to witnesses who support the UK-UK-French line, often those living under the rule of violent jihadist groups, the paper does not designate them 'supposed witnesses' or assume their testimony is coerced. Why for the Guardian are some witnesses only professing to be witnesses, while others really are witnesses? The answer appears to depend on whether the testimony accords with the official western narrative. There is a word for that, and it is not 'journalism'.
"The third and biggest problem, however, is that neither the trio of western states nor the western media are actually contesting the claim that these 'supposed witnesses' were present in Douma, and that some of them were shown in the video. Rather, the line taken by the Guardian and others is that: 'The veracity [of] the statements by the Russian-selected witnesses at The Hague will be challenged, since their ability to speak truthfully is limited.' So the question is not whether they were there, but whether they are being coerced into telling a story that undermines the official western narrative, as well as the dubious rationale for attacking Syria.
"But that leaves us with another difficulty. No one, for example, appears to be doubting that Hassan Diab, a boy who testified at the hearing, is also the boy shown in the video who was supposedly gassed with a nerve agent three weeks ago. How then do we explain that he is now looking a picture of health? It is not as though the US, UK and French governments and the western media have had no time to investigate his case. He and his father have been saying for at least a week on Russian TV that there was no chemical attack.
"Instead, we are getting yet more revisions to a story that was originally presented as so cut-and-dried that it justified an act of military aggression by the US, UK and France against Syria, without authorisation from the UN Security Council - in short, a war crime of the highest order.
"It is worth noting the BBC's brief account. It has suggested that Diab was there, and that he is the boy shown in the video, but that he was not a victim of a gas attack. It implies that there were two kinds of victims shown in the video taken in Douma: those who were victims of a chemical attack, and those next to them who were victims of dust inhalation.
"That requires a great deal of back-peddling on the original narrative.
"It is conceivable, I suppose, that there was a chemical attack on that neighbourhood of Douma, in which people like Diab assumed they had been gassed when in fact they had not been, and that others close by were actually gassed. It is also conceivable that the effects of dust inhalation and gassing were so similar that the White Helmets staff filmed the 'wrong victims', highlighting those like Diab who had not been gassed. And it is also conceivable, I guess, that Diab and his family now feel the need to lie under Russian pressure about there not being a gas attack, even though their account would, according to this revised narrative, actually accord with their experience of what happened.
"But even if each of these scenarios is conceivable on its own, how plausible are they when taken together? Those of us who have preferred to avoid a rush to judgment until there was actual evidence of a chemical weapons attack have been invariably dismissed as 'conspiracy theorists'. But who is really proposing the more fanciful conspiracy here: those wanting evidence, or those creating an elaborate series of revisions to maintain the credibility of their original story?
"If there is one thing certain in all of this, it is that the video produced as cast-iron evidence of a chemical weapons attack has turned out to be nothing of the sort." (The west closes its ears to Douma testimony, jonathan-cook.net, 28/4/18)
"The response from the US, UK and France to a briefing on Thursday at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague was perverse, to say the least. Russia had brought 17 witnesses from Douma who stated that there had been no chemical weapons attack there earlier this month - the pretext for an illegal air strike on Syria by the three western states.
"The witnesses, a mix of victims and the doctors who treated them, told accounts that confirmed a report provided last week from Douma by British reporter Robert Fisk - a report, it should be noted, that has been almost entirely blanked by the western media. According to the testimony provided at the OPCW, the victims shown in a video from the site of an alleged attack were actually suffering from the effects of inhaling dust after a bombing raid, not gas.
"The first strange thing to note is that the US, UK and France boycotted the meeting, denouncing Russia for producing the witnesses and calling the event 'an obscene masquerade' and 'theatre'. It suggests that this trio, behaving like the proverbial three monkeys, think the testimony will disappear if they simply ignore it. They have no interest in hearing from witnesses unless they confirm the western narrative used to justify the air strikes on Syria.
"Testimony from witnesses is surely a crucial part of determining what actually. The US, UK and France are surely obligated to listen to the witnesses first, and then seek to discredit the testimony afterwards if they think it implausible or coerced. The evidence cannot be tested and rebutted if it is not even considered.
"The second is that the media are echoing this misplaced scorn for evidence. They too seem to have prejudged whether the witnesses are credible before listening to what they have to say (similar to their treatment of Fisk). Tellingly, the Guardian described these witnesses as 'supposed witnesses', not a formulation that suggests that any degree of impartiality in its coverage. Notice that when the Guardian refers to witnesses who support the UK-UK-French line, often those living under the rule of violent jihadist groups, the paper does not designate them 'supposed witnesses' or assume their testimony is coerced. Why for the Guardian are some witnesses only professing to be witnesses, while others really are witnesses? The answer appears to depend on whether the testimony accords with the official western narrative. There is a word for that, and it is not 'journalism'.
"The third and biggest problem, however, is that neither the trio of western states nor the western media are actually contesting the claim that these 'supposed witnesses' were present in Douma, and that some of them were shown in the video. Rather, the line taken by the Guardian and others is that: 'The veracity [of] the statements by the Russian-selected witnesses at The Hague will be challenged, since their ability to speak truthfully is limited.' So the question is not whether they were there, but whether they are being coerced into telling a story that undermines the official western narrative, as well as the dubious rationale for attacking Syria.
"But that leaves us with another difficulty. No one, for example, appears to be doubting that Hassan Diab, a boy who testified at the hearing, is also the boy shown in the video who was supposedly gassed with a nerve agent three weeks ago. How then do we explain that he is now looking a picture of health? It is not as though the US, UK and French governments and the western media have had no time to investigate his case. He and his father have been saying for at least a week on Russian TV that there was no chemical attack.
"Instead, we are getting yet more revisions to a story that was originally presented as so cut-and-dried that it justified an act of military aggression by the US, UK and France against Syria, without authorisation from the UN Security Council - in short, a war crime of the highest order.
"It is worth noting the BBC's brief account. It has suggested that Diab was there, and that he is the boy shown in the video, but that he was not a victim of a gas attack. It implies that there were two kinds of victims shown in the video taken in Douma: those who were victims of a chemical attack, and those next to them who were victims of dust inhalation.
"That requires a great deal of back-peddling on the original narrative.
"It is conceivable, I suppose, that there was a chemical attack on that neighbourhood of Douma, in which people like Diab assumed they had been gassed when in fact they had not been, and that others close by were actually gassed. It is also conceivable that the effects of dust inhalation and gassing were so similar that the White Helmets staff filmed the 'wrong victims', highlighting those like Diab who had not been gassed. And it is also conceivable, I guess, that Diab and his family now feel the need to lie under Russian pressure about there not being a gas attack, even though their account would, according to this revised narrative, actually accord with their experience of what happened.
"But even if each of these scenarios is conceivable on its own, how plausible are they when taken together? Those of us who have preferred to avoid a rush to judgment until there was actual evidence of a chemical weapons attack have been invariably dismissed as 'conspiracy theorists'. But who is really proposing the more fanciful conspiracy here: those wanting evidence, or those creating an elaborate series of revisions to maintain the credibility of their original story?
"If there is one thing certain in all of this, it is that the video produced as cast-iron evidence of a chemical weapons attack has turned out to be nothing of the sort." (The west closes its ears to Douma testimony, jonathan-cook.net, 28/4/18)
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)
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
Please Explain
Former senator for the Australian Greens, Scott Ludlam, has resurfaced as a Guardian Australia columnist... with mixed results. To deconstruct just these two sentences:
"Syria, and Yemen, and Gaza, each in their own way, are terminal signs that our system of global governance is truly broken." (Syria exposes the broken state of global governance. How do we respond? 16/4/18)
Why Gaza, and not Palestine?
"No party to these bruising conflicts can say with a straight face that they are acting in good faith, or with any regard to the 'international rules-based order' in which post-second world war generations have placed their trust."
To focus here just on Gaza/Palestine, by 'party to the conflict,' does Ludlam mean that neither Israel nor the Palestinians are 'acting in good faith,' or adhering to international law? If so, this statement of equivalence between the two suggests that he has no idea of the underlying settler-colonial nature of the problem. In 2018!
"Syria, and Yemen, and Gaza, each in their own way, are terminal signs that our system of global governance is truly broken." (Syria exposes the broken state of global governance. How do we respond? 16/4/18)
Why Gaza, and not Palestine?
"No party to these bruising conflicts can say with a straight face that they are acting in good faith, or with any regard to the 'international rules-based order' in which post-second world war generations have placed their trust."
To focus here just on Gaza/Palestine, by 'party to the conflict,' does Ludlam mean that neither Israel nor the Palestinians are 'acting in good faith,' or adhering to international law? If so, this statement of equivalence between the two suggests that he has no idea of the underlying settler-colonial nature of the problem. In 2018!
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.]
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Re-definitial Dizziness
I'm getting dizzy.
In the beginning was anti-Semitism.
Then along came the Zionist wordsmiths, who gave as 'the new anti-Semitism.'
(Somewhere along the line the hyphen got lost.)
Now, apparently, it's either 'rightwing antisemitism,' or "leftwing antisemitism usually presented as 'anti-Zionist or anti-Israel'." (Antisemitic incidents in Australia up nearly 10% over year, study* says, Helen Davidson, theguardian.com, 28/11/17)
I wonder what "leftwing anti-Semitism [not] usually presented as 'anti-Zionist or anti-Israel'" looks like.
And what tomorrow's debasing of the coin will bring.
[*By the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ).]
In the beginning was anti-Semitism.
Then along came the Zionist wordsmiths, who gave as 'the new anti-Semitism.'
(Somewhere along the line the hyphen got lost.)
Now, apparently, it's either 'rightwing antisemitism,' or "leftwing antisemitism usually presented as 'anti-Zionist or anti-Israel'." (Antisemitic incidents in Australia up nearly 10% over year, study* says, Helen Davidson, theguardian.com, 28/11/17)
I wonder what "leftwing anti-Semitism [not] usually presented as 'anti-Zionist or anti-Israel'" looks like.
And what tomorrow's debasing of the coin will bring.
[*By the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ).]
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Has Paul Daley Dropped the Ball on Beersheba?
Today, of course, marks the centenary of the Battle for Beersheba, about which I have posted much under the label 'AIF'.
I will be dealing more with the politics of its Israeli/Australian 'commemoration' this week.
For now, however, let me recall the following words by Guardian columnist and historian Paul Daley (Beersheba: A Journey Through Australia's Forgotten War, 2009), written on this very day last year (See my 2/11/16 post Keep Your Eye on Beersheba):
"It will pay to listen closely and to be wary about what you might hear from the Australian and Israeli governments. Israel? It didn't exist, of course, at the time of the charge, which took place in what was Ottoman Palestine. But Israel has gone to some lengths to claim what happened as something of a formative step in its establishment [...] I realised how readily certain groups - not least Zionists, Christian Zionists and evangelicals, were appropriating the stories of the Australian Light Horse [...] Some historians of the Middle East and Palestinian groups were, rightly, angry at the conflation. Beersheba, you can be certain, will be evoked next year as testimony to the 'special' Israel/Australia relationship... Well, they ain't seen nothing yet, I fear... I'll be writing a lot more here about Australians in the Middle East during world war one." (Beersheba: we must keep an eye on how the story is told & interpreted, theguardian.com, 31/10/16)
Is it just me, or is the take-home message here: I know what the Zionists and their camp followers are up to here. I'm on their case, and I'll be keeping a watching brief on their distortions in the lead-up to the Beersheba centenary, and reporting back on same?
In fact, to my knowledge, Daley has written nothing since on the subject of Beersheba... until yesterday that is, and even then most of its content consisted of military minutiae. Buried in said minutiae was this faint echo of last year's fighting words:
"For decade after decade the critical Australian role in the Beersheba victory was little more than a footnote in military history... But such is the politics of remembrance that the centenary of the battle of Beersheba, which falls at the end of the third year of Australia's $600 million-plus world war one commemoration extravaganza, will finally have its moment. Politicians, of course, are wont to commemorate significant moments in military history for many reasons, not least to justify participation in contemporary conflicts. Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull... and Labor leader Bill Shorten are due to attend Beersheba commemorations in Israel this week where the battle - and especially the charge - will be invoked as defining a special relationship between Canberra and Tel Aviv. The events will be marked with Australian flags and those of Israel, the modern Jewish state that did not actually exist until 1948." (Beersheba centenary: let's remember that story is not the same as history, theguardian.com, 30/10/17)
Again, is it me, or has Daley squibbed it? And why?
I will be dealing more with the politics of its Israeli/Australian 'commemoration' this week.
For now, however, let me recall the following words by Guardian columnist and historian Paul Daley (Beersheba: A Journey Through Australia's Forgotten War, 2009), written on this very day last year (See my 2/11/16 post Keep Your Eye on Beersheba):
"It will pay to listen closely and to be wary about what you might hear from the Australian and Israeli governments. Israel? It didn't exist, of course, at the time of the charge, which took place in what was Ottoman Palestine. But Israel has gone to some lengths to claim what happened as something of a formative step in its establishment [...] I realised how readily certain groups - not least Zionists, Christian Zionists and evangelicals, were appropriating the stories of the Australian Light Horse [...] Some historians of the Middle East and Palestinian groups were, rightly, angry at the conflation. Beersheba, you can be certain, will be evoked next year as testimony to the 'special' Israel/Australia relationship... Well, they ain't seen nothing yet, I fear... I'll be writing a lot more here about Australians in the Middle East during world war one." (Beersheba: we must keep an eye on how the story is told & interpreted, theguardian.com, 31/10/16)
Is it just me, or is the take-home message here: I know what the Zionists and their camp followers are up to here. I'm on their case, and I'll be keeping a watching brief on their distortions in the lead-up to the Beersheba centenary, and reporting back on same?
In fact, to my knowledge, Daley has written nothing since on the subject of Beersheba... until yesterday that is, and even then most of its content consisted of military minutiae. Buried in said minutiae was this faint echo of last year's fighting words:
"For decade after decade the critical Australian role in the Beersheba victory was little more than a footnote in military history... But such is the politics of remembrance that the centenary of the battle of Beersheba, which falls at the end of the third year of Australia's $600 million-plus world war one commemoration extravaganza, will finally have its moment. Politicians, of course, are wont to commemorate significant moments in military history for many reasons, not least to justify participation in contemporary conflicts. Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull... and Labor leader Bill Shorten are due to attend Beersheba commemorations in Israel this week where the battle - and especially the charge - will be invoked as defining a special relationship between Canberra and Tel Aviv. The events will be marked with Australian flags and those of Israel, the modern Jewish state that did not actually exist until 1948." (Beersheba centenary: let's remember that story is not the same as history, theguardian.com, 30/10/17)
Again, is it me, or has Daley squibbed it? And why?
Friday, October 27, 2017
The Palestinian Genocide
The Guardian has a piece by Gavin Haynes (26/10), The Stupidest thing a nation has ever done, in which he kicks off a discussion by citing 5 examples: The Trojan Horse; King Vortigan's mercenaries; Myanmar's nines; the Confederacy's cotton ban; and the Maginot Line. As of this morning it's garnered some 864 comments.
Predictably - this is Jonathan Freedland's Israel-friendly Guardian after all - the Balfour Declaration, even as it fast approaches its centenary of November 2 - wasn't on Haynes' list. However, it was cited twice, in the comment thread, the first time with 15 likes, the second with 20, more likes than most other examples, it should be noted. (Sykes-Picot, mentioned once, got 9 likes.)
Apropos the Balfour Declaration, one of the most interesting of the many essays currently appearing on the subject is Gideon Polya's 100th anniversary of Australian Beersheba Charge, UK Balfour Declaration & Palestinian Genocide Commencement.
Deploying the UN Genocide Convention's definition of the crime of genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group," Polya sets out to show that what has happened to the Palestinian people since the British takeover of their homeland in 1917 fits this definition, and quantifies the genocide as 2 million deaths from violence (0.1 million) or imposed deprivation (1.9 million) since WW I.
By way of encouraging a reading of the whole, here is section 4:
Summary of the horrendous dimensions of the ongoing Palestinian Genocide, the 50-year Occupation and egregious violations of Palestinian human rights:
(1) The Palestinian Genocide commenced in earnest with the famine deaths of 100,000 Palestinians after conquest of Palestine in WWI by the British and the Australian & New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACS).
(2) The violent killing of Indigenous Palestinians commenced with the 1918 Surafend Massacre by ANZAC soldiers.
(3) Since WWI there have been 2 million Palestinian deaths from Zionist violence (0.1 million) or Zionist-imposed deprivation (1.9 million).
(4) There are 8 million Palestinian refugees and all of the 14 million Palestinians are excluded from all or part of Palestine.
(5) Of about 14 million Palestinians (half of them children), 7 million are forbidden to even set foot in their own country, 5 million are held hostage with zero human rights under Israeli guns in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2.0 million) or in ever-dwindling West Bank Bantustan ghettoes (3.0 million), and 1.8 million live as Third Class citizens as Israeli Palestinians under Nazi-style Apartheid Israeli race laws.
(6) 90% of Palestine has now been ethnically cleansed of Indigenous Palestinian inhabitants in an ongoing war criminal ethnic cleansing that has been repeatedly condemned by the UN and most recently by UN Security Council Resolution 2334 that was unanimously supported (with a remarkable Obama US abstention but subsequently fervently pro-Zionist Trump America and Turnbull Australia opposition).
(7) GDP per capita is US$2,900 for Occupied Palestinians as compared to US$37,000 for Apartheid Israel.
(8) Through imposed deprivation, each year Apartheid Israel passively murders about 2,700 under-5 year old Palestinian infants and passively murders 4,200 Occupied Palestinians in general who die avoidably under Israeli Apartheid each year (this violates Articles 55 & 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War that demand that an Occupier must provide life-sustaining food and medical services to the Occupied "to the fullest extent of the means available to it.").
(9) Apartheid Israel violently kills an average of about 550 Occupied Palestinians each year.
(10) Occupied Palestinians are deprived of essentially all human rights and civil rights by Apartheid Israel (e.g. Apartheid Israeli home invasions, beatings, executions, killings, exilings, mass imprisonments, seizures of land and homes, and population transfers in violation of the UN Genocide Convention and the Geneva convention).
(11) Nuclear terrorist, serial war criminal, genocidally racist, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel determines that 74% of its now 50% Indigenous Palestinian subjects who are Occupied Palestinians cannot vote for the government ruling them (i.e. egregious Apartheid).
(12) US-, UK-, Canada-, France- and Australia-backed Apartheid Israel in its genocidal treatment of the Palestinians ignores numerous UN General Assembly Resolutions and UN Security Council Resolutions, the UN Genocide Convention, the Geneva Convention, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and many other aspects of International Law.
(13) Apartheid Israel has attacked 12 countries (including the US) and occupied 5 with 1950-2005 avoidable deaths from deprivation in countries neighbouring and variously occupied by Apartheid Israel totalling 24 million.
(14) 5 million Occupied Palestinians (half of them children) are routinely blackmailed through torture or denial of life-saving medical care to spy on fellow Palestinians for Apartheid Israel.
(15) 5 million Occupied Palestinians (half of them children) are excluded by checkpoints from Jews-only areas and Jews-only roads.
(16) 50% of Israeli children are physically, psychologically or sexually (17%) abused each year but 100% of the 5 million Occupied Palestinian children (2 million in Gaza Concentration Camp, 3 million in West Bank ghettos) are subject to traumatizing human rights abuse by the serial war criminal Israel Defence Force (IDF).
(17) There is a 10-year gap between Israeli and Palestinian life expectancy.
(18) Theocratic Apartheid Israeli laws prohibit all but religious marriages and marriage between Israelis and Occupied Palestinians is effectively excluded (they are forbidden from co-habiting).
(19) Decent, anti-racist Jewish Israelis, as well as decent, anti-racist Jews worldwide, are grossly and falsely defamed by conflation of Apartheid Israel and its appalling crimes with all Jews, as in the false appellation 'Jewish State'.
(20) There is an ever-present threat expressed by Apartheid Israeli ultra-extremists of a neo-Nazi Final Solution in which the Indigenous Palestinians, who presently constitute 50% of Apartheid Israeli subjects, will all be expelled from Palestine.
Predictably - this is Jonathan Freedland's Israel-friendly Guardian after all - the Balfour Declaration, even as it fast approaches its centenary of November 2 - wasn't on Haynes' list. However, it was cited twice, in the comment thread, the first time with 15 likes, the second with 20, more likes than most other examples, it should be noted. (Sykes-Picot, mentioned once, got 9 likes.)
Apropos the Balfour Declaration, one of the most interesting of the many essays currently appearing on the subject is Gideon Polya's 100th anniversary of Australian Beersheba Charge, UK Balfour Declaration & Palestinian Genocide Commencement.
Deploying the UN Genocide Convention's definition of the crime of genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group," Polya sets out to show that what has happened to the Palestinian people since the British takeover of their homeland in 1917 fits this definition, and quantifies the genocide as 2 million deaths from violence (0.1 million) or imposed deprivation (1.9 million) since WW I.
By way of encouraging a reading of the whole, here is section 4:
Summary of the horrendous dimensions of the ongoing Palestinian Genocide, the 50-year Occupation and egregious violations of Palestinian human rights:
(1) The Palestinian Genocide commenced in earnest with the famine deaths of 100,000 Palestinians after conquest of Palestine in WWI by the British and the Australian & New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACS).
(2) The violent killing of Indigenous Palestinians commenced with the 1918 Surafend Massacre by ANZAC soldiers.
(3) Since WWI there have been 2 million Palestinian deaths from Zionist violence (0.1 million) or Zionist-imposed deprivation (1.9 million).
(4) There are 8 million Palestinian refugees and all of the 14 million Palestinians are excluded from all or part of Palestine.
(5) Of about 14 million Palestinians (half of them children), 7 million are forbidden to even set foot in their own country, 5 million are held hostage with zero human rights under Israeli guns in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2.0 million) or in ever-dwindling West Bank Bantustan ghettoes (3.0 million), and 1.8 million live as Third Class citizens as Israeli Palestinians under Nazi-style Apartheid Israeli race laws.
(6) 90% of Palestine has now been ethnically cleansed of Indigenous Palestinian inhabitants in an ongoing war criminal ethnic cleansing that has been repeatedly condemned by the UN and most recently by UN Security Council Resolution 2334 that was unanimously supported (with a remarkable Obama US abstention but subsequently fervently pro-Zionist Trump America and Turnbull Australia opposition).
(7) GDP per capita is US$2,900 for Occupied Palestinians as compared to US$37,000 for Apartheid Israel.
(8) Through imposed deprivation, each year Apartheid Israel passively murders about 2,700 under-5 year old Palestinian infants and passively murders 4,200 Occupied Palestinians in general who die avoidably under Israeli Apartheid each year (this violates Articles 55 & 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War that demand that an Occupier must provide life-sustaining food and medical services to the Occupied "to the fullest extent of the means available to it.").
(9) Apartheid Israel violently kills an average of about 550 Occupied Palestinians each year.
(10) Occupied Palestinians are deprived of essentially all human rights and civil rights by Apartheid Israel (e.g. Apartheid Israeli home invasions, beatings, executions, killings, exilings, mass imprisonments, seizures of land and homes, and population transfers in violation of the UN Genocide Convention and the Geneva convention).
(11) Nuclear terrorist, serial war criminal, genocidally racist, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel determines that 74% of its now 50% Indigenous Palestinian subjects who are Occupied Palestinians cannot vote for the government ruling them (i.e. egregious Apartheid).
(12) US-, UK-, Canada-, France- and Australia-backed Apartheid Israel in its genocidal treatment of the Palestinians ignores numerous UN General Assembly Resolutions and UN Security Council Resolutions, the UN Genocide Convention, the Geneva Convention, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and many other aspects of International Law.
(13) Apartheid Israel has attacked 12 countries (including the US) and occupied 5 with 1950-2005 avoidable deaths from deprivation in countries neighbouring and variously occupied by Apartheid Israel totalling 24 million.
(14) 5 million Occupied Palestinians (half of them children) are routinely blackmailed through torture or denial of life-saving medical care to spy on fellow Palestinians for Apartheid Israel.
(15) 5 million Occupied Palestinians (half of them children) are excluded by checkpoints from Jews-only areas and Jews-only roads.
(16) 50% of Israeli children are physically, psychologically or sexually (17%) abused each year but 100% of the 5 million Occupied Palestinian children (2 million in Gaza Concentration Camp, 3 million in West Bank ghettos) are subject to traumatizing human rights abuse by the serial war criminal Israel Defence Force (IDF).
(17) There is a 10-year gap between Israeli and Palestinian life expectancy.
(18) Theocratic Apartheid Israeli laws prohibit all but religious marriages and marriage between Israelis and Occupied Palestinians is effectively excluded (they are forbidden from co-habiting).
(19) Decent, anti-racist Jewish Israelis, as well as decent, anti-racist Jews worldwide, are grossly and falsely defamed by conflation of Apartheid Israel and its appalling crimes with all Jews, as in the false appellation 'Jewish State'.
(20) There is an ever-present threat expressed by Apartheid Israeli ultra-extremists of a neo-Nazi Final Solution in which the Indigenous Palestinians, who presently constitute 50% of Apartheid Israeli subjects, will all be expelled from Palestine.
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)
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