On May 11, 3:03=A0pm, last_permutat...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> On May 11, 6:03=A0am, "peace.seeker.27" <vesuvian.doppelga...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> wrote:
>
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> > 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
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> > 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.
>
> So, are you beginning to get it now?
What the spam filter doesn't catch, I delete without reading.
> > 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=
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> > 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?"
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