x-ratedraghead@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> SO PISS OFF IN YOUR PANTY AND **** OFF FROM THE JEW!
SO SUCK ME OFF AND **** OFF FROM THE UK, KOOKOO.
>
>
>
> 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 – 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 – including Honest Re****ting and Camera – 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 – in labour – 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 – 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 – who made it through Maidenek and two slave-
>> labour camps – 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 – the majority – 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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