DAPHNE ANSON: THE YEAR IN REVIEW, THE GOOD AND THE BAD PART 2 ****
http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2014/01/he-said-she-said-good-bad-perplexing-of.html
A Jewish Chronicle editorial (22 November) regarding the unconscionable leniency of the Lib Dems towards antisemitism in the party, following another whiff of judeophobia by yet another of its parliamentarians, David Ward:
‘….The real issue here is not his antisemitism. It is his party’s reaction to it. To say the LibDems have a track record of excusing antisemitism barely comes close to the reality. It took years for the party to remove Baroness Tonge, despite her form of antisemitic Tourette’s. But its treatment of Mr Ward takes its acquiescence in race hate to another level.
When the LibDems finally decided to act against the Bradford East MP they suspended him over the summer recess, then swiftly readmitted him in time for the party conference. It was a ‘non-punishment punishment’ and implied the party did not believe any serious action was really necessary. That impression has now been confirmed by the LibDems’ refusal to utter even a word of criticism against Mr Ward for his latest outpouring of hate, despite it being a clear restatement of the most basic antisemitic theme of all — that wealthy Jews buy up power.’
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Jill, the indefatigable poster-wielding heroine from Sussex Friends of Israel, in her customary sock-it-to-’em-with-a-smile pose:
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Sir Tom Jones, on completing a concert tour of Israel (where he memorably sang “My Yiddishe Momma”):
“I was in Israel … where a lot of singers won’t go. I don’t agree with that. I think entertainers should entertain. They should go wherever – there shouldn’t be any restrictions. I did two shows in Tel Aviv, and it was fantastic….
I wanted to go, because the Israeli people asked me. They would like me to sing, and I don’t see any problem in doing that. I don’t see why anyone would mix up the two things – entertainment and politics.”
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Isi Leibler, inveighing against the reckless Israeli leftist newpaper Haaeretz, which in addition to its other despicable acts such as lending its columns to propagation of the most-Jews-are-Khazars myth has stooped so low as to print a contemptible article by Eli Gat belittling and vilifying the heroes and heroines of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising:
Against all odds: three doomed heroines “…. Haaretz’ unprofessionalism is simply inexcusable. In its zeal to undermine the core principles of Zionism, it has done irrevocable damage. The distortion of facts and outright lies have aided our enemies and confused our friends, including Jews living in the Diaspora with limited understanding of Jewish or Israeli history. The Gat article demonstrates to what depths Haaretz will sink, twisting the facts – even of Holocaust history – in order to provoke its readers and disallow them even the smallest measure of Jewish pride.
Freedom of the press allows Haaretz, like any newspaper in Israel, the right to publish what it deems fit. However, newspapers are dependent on readers and the rapidly diminishing number of Haaretz subscribers should do what is necessary and take the most effective steps to influence the publisher and editor to prevent the paper from serving as a launching pad for enemies of Israel and the Jewish people.”
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Ego Leonard, Dutch “anonymous guerrilla artist and painter,” with this extraordinarily misleading exhibit (deliberate propaganda or plain ignorance?) at the “Other Art Fair” in London’s Brick Lane, showing Muslims as victims of Nazi concentration camps along with Jews and gays. (Edgar Davidson exposed this ultimate-in-Muslim-victimhood myth; see here ):
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Antony Loewenstein, l’enfant terrible of Australian Jewry, had not one, but two bloopers that The Guardian felt compelled to remove from a piece in that Israel-demonising rag!
CiFWatch reported the delicious facts here and here
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Jake Lynch, University of Sydney associate professor and committed BDSer, embroiled in controversy regarding an unsuccessful application for a research grant:
‘Academic Jake Lynch has instigated a union investigation into whether his support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel influenced the Australian Research Council to reject a grant….
Professor Lynch’s support for BDS became headline news last year when he boycotted Israeli academic Dan Avnon, refusing to help the Hebrew University academic with his application for a Sir Zelman Cowen fellowship.
This year Professor Lynch submitted an application to the federally funded ARC for $290,000 to study the work of journalists in South Africa, Nepal, Australia and Britain….
The ARC recently rejected his application….
Labor MP Michael Danby, a fierce opponent of BDS, said he found it ironic Professor Lynch was whinging about not getting a research grant when he had refused to help Professor Avnon get one. Rather than being the result of a “political conspiracy”, Mr Danby said, the ARC would have made its decision based on academic rigour. “Jake Lynch is not a very highly regarded academic, he’s just basically an ex-BBC journalist,” he said….’
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Curtiz Marez, president of the BDS-supporting American Studies Association, on being asked why the Jewish State (not Cuba, North Korea or China) was singled out for a boycott:
“One has to start somewhere.”
(To quote Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, here:
‘….The ASA has not gone on record against universities in any other country: not against those that enforce laws against homosexuality, not against those that have rejected freedom of speech, not against those that systematically restrict access to higher education by race, religion or gender. No, the ASA listens to civil society only when it speaks against Israel. As its scholarly president declared, “One has to start somewhere.” Not in North Korea, not in Russia or Zimbabwe or China — one has to start with Israel. Really?….’)
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Rupert Murdoch, owner of such pro-Israel newspapers as The Times and The Australian, reiterating his pro-Israeli position in November:
“[A]s Israel goes, so goes […] our morality and our very existence as freedom loving citizens of the world.
This beleaguered nation and its people are beacons of hope and justice …their enemies are our enemies, glorifiers of death, seeking to impose their bloody doctrine through violence.”
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Melanie Phillips, telling Canadian broadcaster Michael Coren of how her “unconventional wisdom” that involves “saying the unsayable” has cost her dear in a Britain dominated by a culture that has demonised the political centre by dubbing it “the Right,” has gone to absurd lengths to abase itself before Islam, and by a complicit media which “starts with a conclusion and wrenches the evidence to fit”:
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Denis Prager, Middle East commentator, castigating the Church of Scotland’s odious report “The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the ‘Promised Land'” (issued in May):
‘The essence of the report is that according to the Bible, Jews have no more attachment to the land of Israel than anyone else. Hence “promised land” is in quotation marks in the report’s title – because there is no promised land….
Even during the worst excesses of Christian anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, it is doubtful that any normative Christian body declared that “Israel,” “the temple,” “Jerusalem” and “the land” no longer meant or were ever intended to mean what those words represent.
This claim is not only profoundly anti-Semitic. It is an act of theological forgery; it makes a mockery of the Bible as a coherent document and renders Christianity inherently anti-Semitic….
I have never equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. But the Church of Scotland report is not about criticism of Israel; it is about invalidating the Jewish people and invalidating the Jews’ historically incontestable claims to the land upon which the only independent states that ever existed were Jewish.
It asserts that justice and the existence of a Jewish state are mutually exclusive: “There is a direct conflict of interest between wanting human rights and justice for all and retaining the right to the land.”
It asserts that the Jews’ return to Israel has no biblical basis.
It asserts that the notion that the Jews have or ever had a special relationship with God – one of the most oft repeated ideas in the Hebrew Bible – is negated in that very same Bible: “That exclusivist tradition implied Jews had a special, privileged position in relation to God. But the prophetic tradition stood against this.” The Chosen People is not chosen, in other words.
It asserts that God’s promise of the land to Abraham has nothing to do with the Jews; it is only about Jesus: “The promise to Abraham about land is fulfilled through the impact of Jesus, not by restoration of land to the Jewish people.”
It asserts that even Jesus – that proud, religious Jew – did not believe in any special relationship between God and the Jews: “Jesus offered a radical critique of Jewish specialness. … “
At the same time, this truly immoral document does not devote a word to why there were Palestinian refugees: While the Jews accepted the 1947-48 partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, all the neighboring Arab states rejected the partition and invaded the Jews in order to annihilate Israel at birth.
Nor does the report devote a single sentence to how Israel’s occupation of the West Bank came about: In 1967, Israel’s neighbors sought to exterminate Israel just as Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and most Palestinians and other Muslims in the Middle East wish to now. And that only because of that war, won by Israel, did Israel come to occupy the West Bank of Jordan.
Nor is a word devoted to Palestinian national honoring of their numerous terrorists, or to the exterminationist and anti-Semitic propaganda that saturates Middle East media or to the widespread Palestinian support for terrorism (according to the just-released Pew Forum poll of Muslims, 40 percent of Palestinians support suicide terror).
And the Church of Scotland did not think it important to even hint at what happened in Gaza after the Israelis gave the whole of Gaza to the Palestinians: The Palestinians converted it into a terror-state that regularly launches rockets into Israel to kill as many Israelis as possible.
And, most vile of all, the Church of Scotland never once notes, let alone condemns, the Muslim countries and organizations that seek to annihilate Israel, an existential threat that no other country or people in the world face….
…. The report is a combination of medieval Christian anti-Judaism and contemporary leftist anti-Zionism. For Jews and Israel, that’s a lethal combination.’
(Another fine indictment of the Church of Scotland here)
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Jonathan S. Tobin in a powerful indictment here of the the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s backing of the despicable Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel:
‘…. That another group of campus radicals with doctorates in subjects that are geared toward furthering left-wing theories would join the boycott of Israel is no surprise. That they don’t boycott China in sympathy with Tibet or any number of Arab and Muslim countries for their oppression of minorities is just the usual hypocrisy to be found on campus these days….
Academics in the West Bank are not suppressed. Quite the contrary, they work, publish, and pontificate in public while working in the many Palestinian institutions of higher education that were all founded after Israel took control of the area in 1967. Far from censoring activity at those schools, Israel has no input or ability to influence them whatsoever. All Palestinian colleges exist as hotbeds of support for terror and the delegitimization of Israel. The Palestinian media, especially that run by the Palestinian Authority which governs the daily lives of Palestinians in almost all of the West Bank, is similarly unrestrained by Israel and, as Palestine Media Watch reports on a regular basis, is a steady source of incitement to hatred against Israel and Jews. Nor are there any restrictions on the right of assembly for academics as the kerfuffle over the student body-supported Islamic Jihad fascist-style military parade at Al Quds University in Jerusalem proved. As for freedom of movement, it is true that Palestinians must deal with some Israeli army checkpoints that make travel difficult at times. But that doesn’t prevent them from moving about as they please ….
By attempting to portray the Palestinians as the “indigenous people” of the territory on which the State of Israel and the administered territories exist and the Jews as the colonial settlers, they are perpetrating the big lie of Palestinian history. Jews are not foreigners in Israel as Europeans were in Africa. They happen to be the indigenous people of their ancient homeland and efforts to deny this isn’t scholarship. Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and those who would deny them the same rights accorded other peoples are practicing bias, not scholarship. As with Palestinian attempts to deny the Jewish connection with the country or with Jerusalem and ancient Jewish holy sites such as the Temple Mount or the Western Wall, attempts to cast the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one between foreign occupiers and natives is revisionist myth recast as left-wing politicized scholarship.
There can be honest disagreement and debate about Israel’s policies in the territories, settlements, and borders. But by extending their argument to all of pre-1967 Israel as well as by smearing the Jews as colonists in their own country, the Native American studies group forfeits its credibility. Rather than being seen as the cutting edge of enlightened opinion, their support for BDS should mark them as a pack of incorrigible haters who should be treated with the same disdain and isolation that they would like to dish out to Israelis.’
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Simon Schama, the historian, speaking recently in London:
‘Zionism is a complicated thing. It’s richly inculcated with fine Jewish values. My Zionism is a two-state Zionism, it always has been. It’s a Zionism of the necessity of refuge….
You don’t have to approve of every new settlement that’s stuck in the middle of the West Bank — God knows I don’t — in order to say “I’m an unapologetic Zionist”.’
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The [Curious Case of the] Vacillating Vicar:
First, our old chum the Anglican anti-Zionism crusader posted this:
jA day or two later, to the dismay of certain followers, this:
A few days later, to the acclaim of certain followers, this:
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Elie Wiesel in an ad produced by This World: The Values Network (LOGO); Executive Director, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach; sponsored by Michael Steinhardt, Board of Governors, This World: The Values Network; co-founder Birthright Israel:
‘Iran Must Not Be Allowed to Remain Nuclear
If there is one lesson I hope the world has learned from the past it is that regimes rooted in brutality must never be trusted. And the words and actions of the leadership of Iran leave no doubt as to their intentions.
Should the civilized nations of the world trust a regime whose supreme leader said yet again last month that Israel is “doomed to annihilation,” and referred to my fellow Jewish Zionists as “rabid dogs?”
Should we who believe in human rights, trust a regime which in the 21st century stones women and hangs homosexuals?
Should we who believe in freedom trust a regime which murdered its own citizens in the streets of Tehran when the people protested a stolen election in the Green Revolution of Summer, 2009?
Should we who believe in the United States trust a regime whose parliament last month erupted in “Death to America” chants as they commemorated the 34th anniversary of the storming of our Embassy in Tehran?
Should we who believe in life trust a regime whom our own State Department lists as one of the world’s foremost sponsors of terrorism?
America, too, defines itself by its words and actions. America adopted me, as it did so many others, and gave me a home after my people were exterminated in the camps of Europe. And from the time of the founding fathers America has always stood up to tyrants. Our nation is morally compromised when it contemplates allowing a country calling for the destruction of the State of Israel to remain within reach of nuclear weapons.
Sanctions have come at a terrible economic cost for the people of Iran. But, unfortunately, sanctions are what have brought the Iranian regime to the negotiating table.
I appeal to President Obama and Congress to demand, as a condition of continued talks, the total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and the regime’s public and complete repudiation of all genocidal intent against Israel. And I appeal to the leaders of the United States Senate to go forward with their vote to strengthen sanctions against Iran until these conditions have been met.
I once wrote that history has taught us to trust the threats of our enemies more than the promises of our friends. Our enemies are making serious threats. It is time to take them seriously. It is time for our friends to keep their promises.’
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