Love of the Land: Demonizing Israel in Spain

Demonizing Israel in Spain

Monica Cooper slams lacking, biased news reporting by leading Spanish daily El Pais


Monica Cooper
Opinion/Ynet
14 March '10

Monica Cooper is the Director of ReVista de Medio Oriente, the Spanish outlet of CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America

A few weeks back, the well-known author Alfonso Ussia wrote in Spain’s La Razón about a young Catalan woman picked up by Israeli police in Ramallah. Ussia relates that she was presumably campaigning against the Jewish state while holding an expired entry visa on her Spanish passport. Had she been in an Arab state doing something similar, writes Ussia, she would be - most probably - stoned to death in the public square. Instead, Ariadna Jové Martí was sent in good health back to Spain, with an airplane ticket – probably paid for by the State of Israel.

How was all this viewed in Spain? The Foreign Relations Office expressed outrage to Israel’s diplomats over the affair, while the press got busy lambasting the Jewish state. All this, as Ussia rightly points out, while ignoring or justifying every ignominy of any other country around the globe.

Are Israelis aware of the Israel-bashing and demonizing carried out in the Iberian press?

Do they know, for example, the case of Madrid’s El País? With 430,000 daily copies and an Internet readership of over two million, El País is considered the “leader of the mainstream press in Spain.” And alongside every single article about Israel on the website of this pre-eminent newspaper is a profile of Israel that lists Tel Aviv as the country’s capital.

In its section “Corresponsales” (reporters), El País explains that reporter Juan Miguel Muñoz reports from “Jerusalem, Near East.” No other reporter is identified like this as based in a geographic area; they are all in a named country (except those who report on the EU from Brussels).

ReVista de Medio Oriente, a Spanish media watchdog organization, asked El País’ editors why this different treatment of Israel. About their placement of Israel’s capital in the “Near East,” they said that Muñoz “reports from Jerusalem on Lebanon and Syria too” - hardly a convincing answer on the face of it, and even less so because the reporter almost never writes about those countries but writes practically daily on Israel. About Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel, the editors told ReVista that the “directive to maintain this designation the way it is comes from the paper’s directors and can’t be changed.”

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Love of the Land: Demonizing Israel in Spain

Love of the Land: El País, Pots And Kettles

El País, Pots And Kettles

Eamonn McDonagh
Z-Word Blog
20 February '10

El Páis of Madrid is a wonderful newspaper. In the lead editorial of today’s edition it fearlessly condemns the supposed assassination by Israel of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

As well as being legally reprehensible and morally unacceptable the policy of selective assassination, or to put it another way, the dirty war only contributes to the illusion that there are alternative solutions to the one that Israel will sooner or later have to face: an end to the occupation and the opening of talks with the Palestinians on the basis of a two state solution.

Stirring stuff. Spain is a member of NATO and has a large contingent of troops in Afghanistan. Those troops regularly kill members of the Taliban and - as do all troops faced with the challenges they are faced with - regularly kill civilians too. No doubt tomorrow’s lead editorial in El País will call for the immediate withdrawal of Spain’s contingent in Afghanistan on the grounds that its activities in that nation are legally reprehensible and morally unacceptable and are doing nothing to address the root causes of violence there.

Spain is an ally of the United States. As I write this post there are American UAVs prowling the skies of Pakistan and Afghanistan looking for leaders of the Taliban to assassinate.

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Love of the Land: El País, Pots And Kettles

Love of the Land: Stop the Solar Decathlon Boycott! Promote Education & Peace

Stop the Solar Decathlon Boycott! Promote Education & Peace

StandWithUs.com
January '10

Israeli Jewish and Arab students make their case, in Hebrew, Arabic and Spanish. Energy conservation and sustainability is one of the major issues facing the planet. Students worldwide are competing in The Solar Decathlon, to be held in Spain in June 2010, to try and find solutions to our common problem. Israeli students in the competition found an ingenious way of making homes more efficient so why have these students been kicked out of the competition?



Please sign the petition at www.shameonspain.com

Love of the Land: Stop the Solar Decathlon Boycott! Promote Education & Peace

Love of the Land: Spain, Israel and the Row Over UNIFIL

Spain, Israel and the Row Over UNIFIL

Soeren Kern
Hudson New York
16 November 09

Senior Fellow, Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Strategic Studies Group

Both friends and foes believe that Zapatero’s increasingly erratic anti-Israel antics are undermining Spain’s international credibility. And indeed, the Zapatero government’s is becoming more radical in its anti-Israel bias.

Earlier this year, for example, a Spanish magistrate aligned with the Socialist party attempted to prosecute Israeli officials for war crimes. In August, the Zapatero government paid for 40 Spanish activists to travel to Israel to rebuild Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem that the Israeli government deemed illegal and tore down in 2008. More recently, Zapatero’s Housing Ministry disqualified a group of Israeli academics from a solar power design competition (which is being sponsored by the US Energy Department) because their university is in the West Bank.

But what about UNIFIL, where Spain has deployed around 1,000 troops?

Most analysts agree that UNIFIL’s mission has been compromised from the start. Although UN Resolution 1701, which brought an end to the Lebanon war in August 2006, is unequivocal in its call for an arms embargo, UNIFIL’s rules of engagement were deliberately muddled by countries like Spain to prevent the force from actively looking for Hezbollah’s weapons.

The lack of a clear commitment by UNIFIL to disarm Hezbollah is a shortcoming that Iran and Syria have been quick to exploit: They have rebuilt Hezbollah’s arsenal while Europeans have stood by and watched.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak has cancelled a November 4 and 5 visit to Spain amid a dispute over the command of the European-led United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The visit was called off after reports surfaced that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had secretly asked Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to keep Italy in command of the 13,000-strong UNIFIL force for six months longer than planned, instead of allowing Spain to take over.

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Love of the Land: Spain, Israel and the Row Over UNIFIL

RubinReports: When it comes to the Middle East: The Brains in Spain (and elsewhere) Fall Mainly Down the Drain

When it comes to the Middle East: The Brains in Spain (and elsewhere) Fall Mainly Down the Drain

(Please subscribe and then you don't have to come here, we do home delivery! And let's face it, you know something silly or crazy or dangerous is going to happen in the Middle East or with U.S. foreign policy every day! So don't miss it. )

By Barry Rubin

You’ve all seen horror movies in which the stupid characters just don’t look behind them at crucial moments.

And you want to yell: “Look out!” Or: “Can’t you see that he’s the murderer!” Or: “That innocent-looking green globule is actually a man-eating silicon-based creature from Andromeda!”

Welcome to my world, the world of analyzing the contemporary Middle East or, to put it a different way, yelling, “Look out!” to those who think the best way to handle a threatening regime or revolutionary foe is to take them out to dinner and a movie.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero and Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, who is widely considered in the European Union to be their big brain on the Middle East, visited Israel and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to reliable leaks, Moratinos told Netanyahu that Turkey will stop baiting Israel—excluding it at the last minute from long-planned joint military maneuvers, running antisemitic shows on state television, and a whole range of other insults—if Israel agrees to have it mediate between Israel and Syria.

One of the two Spaniards then remarked: "Assad is serious and more responsible….It is possible to reach an agreement with him."

Netanyahu politely, and no doubt firmly, demurred.

When last heard from before this, Moratinos, who seems to take his own middle name as meaning he is the Syrian dictatorship’s guardian angel, was advocating signing a major economic cooperation agreement with Damascus without conditioning it on that regime behaving better on human rights.

Israeli leaders know, largely across the political spectrum, that Assad isn’t interested in peace with Israel.

They also know:

--Iran is seeking nuclear weapons at all costs and will use them to further Tehran’s ambitions, and that halfhearted sanctions and falling for more of the regime’s stalling tactics won’t help matters.

--The Palestinian Authority is incapable of making a comprehensive peace and not that interested in trying. That doesn’t mean some cooperation can’t be fruitful but not a full resolution ending the conflict. At the same time, it is clearly recognized that the Palestinian Authority—being too weak and too radical simultaneously—is the main barrier to peace, and that the true moderate transformation of Palestinians and acceptance of a two-state solution has barely begun. Indeed, one can argue that public opinion and politics are moving in an even more intransigent direction.

--Hizballah and Hamas are not interested in becoming moderate and that concessions both enable and encourage them to be more aggressive.

--If radical Islamist groups take over Arab countries they won’t moderate, whatever their pretensions to fool the West, and this will be the source of massive war, terrorism, and suffering for the region.

--That all too few people in Western governments either understand the above-mentioned facts or for a variety of reasons (greed for trade, fear of conflict, seeking easy popularity, naiveté, ideology, ignorance, antisemitism, and you name it) won’t face these facts.

At the beginning of this year, a new addition was made to this list:

--Turkey is governed by an Islamist party that has strong ant-Israel, anti-American, and anti-Western views no matter how much it pretends otherwise.

Now it can certainly be argued that Israeli analysts, journalists, and political figures have a vested interest in pushing these arguments. But that isn’t exactly true. Many or most of them would be far happier celebrating the great chance for a breakthrough to peace and how apparent enemies just want to get along.

The same goes for ideology as an explanation. A variety of different viewpoints are represented, one can find people who have changed their minds due to experience and developments. And even if you think that someone is “right-wing” or any other category you dislike, it is still worthwhile examining the facts and arguments presented to judge whether they are correct.

So this analysis cannot just be disregarded by assumptions about what the sources of it think or want or need.

How does much of the world respond to the Israeli analysis? Parts do understand it or are learning it to be correct. But many or most simply ignore or demonize it. Once Israel is viewed as an illegitimate state, a war criminal genocidal monster—in short, as all Islamist and most Arab and Muslim-majority state propaganda puts it—the ears can close completely.

Another element in this deafness is the unique argument that various dilettantes, visitors, intellectuals, self-proclaimed peacemakers, people in the entertainment world, U.S. and European officials, etc., want to save Israel in spite of itself. This is a standpoint practically never heard regarding any other country in history, certainly not a democratic country whose voters disagree with the assessment.

It is furthered by the taking up of the idea by certain Jews—usually quite ignorant of conditions in Israel and often committed to movements with different interests—who insist they are the true guardians of a country they know little about and (in many cases) have done little to help in the past.

And so delegation after delegation arrives in Jerusalem to tour around, talk to the usual suspects, and bestow advice on its potential victims—I mean, fortunate interlocutors!

In all cases, politeness inhibits explaining to these people that they are meddling in things of which they understand little or nothing. When they are high-ranking officials of the United States or European countries, there are additional reasons for not doing so. They can choose to listen or not to the explanations as to why Israel does not believe what they believe or do what they want it to do.

Ultimately, anyone who believes too much in soft power is soft in the head. Or as the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it: “Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”

As for the international affairs of the Middle East nowadays, however, one cannot do better than by paraphrasing the American political philospher Robert Zimmerman, also known as Bob Dylan: We're surrounded by people who don't want to "admit that the waters around you have grown" at the very same moment that "the pump don’t work cause the vandals took the handles."

RubinReports: When it comes to the Middle East: The Brains in Spain (and elsewhere) Fall Mainly Down the Drain

Israel Matzav: Whose side is Spain on?

Whose side is Spain on?

Back in the good old days of the Bush administration, there was moral clarity. As President Bush so famously put it, "are you with us or are you with the terrorists"? Today, with a new administration in Washington, any questions that are put are more muddled. And some countries are having difficulties articulating an answer. Take Spain for instance.

Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos was in Israel this week, and was scheduled to meet with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who just returned from a trip to Africa. But on Thursday morning, Moratinos was summoned back to Spain in a hurry to meet with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who had just come from promising a supply of sanctions-busting gasoline to Iran. Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad know where they stand. Do Spain and its foreign minister know where they stand?

Moratinos' office said Chavez had advanced his arrival in Spain and this was the reason he cut short his visit to Israel, but the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem expressed amazement at the cancellation, saying the time of the Venezuelan president's arrival in Spain was known in advance.

Moratinos has been in Israel for several days and has already met President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and opposition leader Tzipi Livni.

The Spanish Foreign Ministry said that Moratinos called Lieberman and apologized for the need to shorten his visit and explained he did so at the behest of the Spanish prime minister. The office of Moratinos also said that Lieberman and his Spanish counterpart have talked over the phone several times this week on current issues and will continue the good communications between the sides.

MK Robert Tibayev, No. 20 in Kadima, said that "despite our differences with Lieberman, the fact that the Spanish foreign minister cancels a meeting with the Israeli foreign minister in order to be present at a meeting with the dictator from Venezuela, testifies first and foremost to the distorted priorities of the Spanish government."

Indeed.

Israel Matzav: Whose side is Spain on?