SO PISS OFF IN YOUR PANTY AND **** OFF FROM THE JEW!
On 11 May, 11:03, "peace.seeker.27" <vesuvian.doppelga...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
> Johann Hari: The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics
> Independent.co.uk
> Thursday, 8 May 2008
>
> In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries
> to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to
> intimidate and silence =96 and to a large degree, it works. There is
> nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as
> anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.
>
> My own case isn't especially im****tant, but it illustrates how the
> wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both
> the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to
> expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to
> challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death
> threats calling me "a Jew-lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more.
>
> Ah, but wait. I have also re****ted from Gaza and the West Bank. Last
> week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being
> pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land,
> contaminating their reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been
> do***ented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own
> eyes.
>
> The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered.
> Instead, some of the most high profile "pro-Israel" writers and media
> monitoring groups =96 including Honest Re****ting and Camera =96 said I
an
> anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh,
> while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people
> in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came
> flooding in calling for me to be sacked.
>
> Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is
> met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian
> land, "Honest Re****ting" claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth
> of Jews "poisoning the wells." If you interview a woman whose baby
> died in 2002 because she was detained =96 in labour =96 by Israeli
> soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, "Honest Re****ting" will
> say you didn't explain "the real cause": the election of Hamas in, um,
> 2006. And on, and on.
>
> The former editor of Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, David
> Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups "nascent McCarthyism".
> Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them
> way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie
> Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack
> anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer,
> Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic
> cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: "Political solutions often
> require the movement of people, and such movement is not always
> voluntary ... It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to
> some massive urban renewal." If a prominent American figure takes a
> position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the
> airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.
>
> The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain.
> Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established
> with this mission statement: "Palestinians and Israelis alike have the
> right to peace and security." Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry
> and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them "Jews
> For Genocide", and said they "encourage" the "killers" of Jews. Where
> does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an "artificial"
> people who can be collectively punished because they are "a terrorist
> population". She believes that while "individual Palestinians may
> deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a
> national project". Honest Re****ting quotes Phillips as a model of
> reliable re****ting.
>
> These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that
> by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic
> tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter's decision to speak to the
> elected Hamas government "border[ed] on anti-Semitism." A Ha'aretz
> poll last month found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their
> government to do just that.
>
> As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by
> giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace
> deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants
> to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it =96 so last year he
> wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and
> factual canter through the major human rights re****ts. There is
> nothing there you can't read in the mainstream Israeli press every
> day. Carter's comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel)
> to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the
> interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the
> Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human
> rights group B'tselem says this "bears striking similarities to the
> racist Apartheid regime". Yet for repeating these facts in the US,
> Carter has widely called "a racist". Several universities have even
> refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.
>
> These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political
> scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the
> Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood
> relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time
> Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually
> empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be
> Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to
> cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and
> gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an
> anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when
> Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without
> acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters' hoax for his book The
> Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make
> sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed
> that Finkelstein's mother =96 who made it through Maidenek and two
slave-
> labour camps =96 had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked.
> Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the
> truth.
>
> Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Re****ting becoming
> more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument?
> Liberal Jews =96 the majority =96 are now setting up rivals to the hard-
> right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign
> of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians,
> because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the
> Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile
> path. And it damages dias****a Jews, because it makes real anti-
> Semitism harder to deal with.
>
> We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch
> said to Joe McCarthy himself: "You've done enough. Have you no sense
> of decency, sir, at long last? H ave you left no sense of decency?"
>
> http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-...
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