Love of the Land: Getting Israel Right

Getting Israel Right

As the annual hate-circus known as “Israel Apartheid Week” pitches its tent again, it is incumbent on us once more to reconsider what Israel actually is.


David Solway
Pajamasmedia.com
10 March '10

Any open-minded person who has either visited Israel, kept apace of the documentary evidence, or honestly examined the tainted “bona fides” of Israel’s accusers would realize that Israel has been set up as the target for what is nothing less than an illegitimate campaign of delegitimation. Orwell’s Hate Week has escaped the boundaries of the novel, whose “Enemy of the People” is someone with the surname — what else? — Goldstein. (Oddly, the enemy of the Jewish people is someone with the surname Goldstone.) And as Orwell writes about the Two Minutes Hate period instituted by the Party, “Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.”

Watch the YouTube video of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren addressing a group of students at UC Irvine for real-world confirmation.

A triple alliance comprising leftist ideology, Islamic anti-Semitism, and vast commercial interests has coalesced into an aggressive bloc of anti-Zionist calumniators and malevolent defamers of the one genuine democracy in the Middle East. The international left sees Israel as a colonial outpost of the detested United States and a resolute defender of the national patriotic spirit which the left believes is obsolete. Islam continues to prosecute its 1400-year war against the Jews. And powerful economic interests are concerned with opening export markets and preserving and expanding their ties with the oil-rich Muslim states — it truly is all about oil: “Arab oil is thicker than Jewish blood,” Robin Shepherd pointedly writes in his important new book, A State Beyond the Pale.

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Love of the Land: Getting Israel Right

Love of the Land: Muslim anger rises in Britain: A portrait of extremism from a prominent “moderate”

Muslim anger rises in Britain: A portrait of extremism from a prominent “moderate”

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
08 March '10

"Bravado"

Consider the following remarks from one of Britain’s leading “moderate” Muslim journalists, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing about Israeli actions in Gaza:

“First systematically starved, the [Palestinian] population was denied escape and more than 1,200 were slaughtered like animals in an abattoir… On the letters pages Zionists say the violence – including phosphorus burns on children – are “regrettable” but necessary. A nation that asks the world not to forget what was done to its people by Hitler, has advocates who believe brutal ethnic cleansing is “regrettable”. How many Palestinian Anne Franks did the Israelis murder, maim or turn mad?”

That was in January 2009. Here she is again, writing today in the Independent. This time she takes matters a stage further, emulating the Jew-baiting president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, following the visit to Britain last week of Geert Wilders, the anti-Islamist politician currently on trial for offending Muslims in the Netherlands.


“…the crypto-fascist, Aryan Geert Wilders, is invited into the Lords by [the United Kingdom Independence Party] UKIP and crossbench peers to show his vile anti-Islam film in the name of freedom of expression. Freedom my arse. It is just another entertaining episode of Muslim-baiting. I dare the same peers to now invite David Irving, the Holocaust denier, to share his thoughts freely in the Lords…”

These vile and appalling sentiments echo precisely the attitudes and strategy of Ahmadinejad who after the publication in Denmark in 2005 of a set of political cartoons deemed offensive to Muslims immediately set about organising a conference aimed at questioning the reality of the Holocaust.

Alibhai-Brown, like Ahmadinejad, adopts the following strategy: Offend us Muslims and we’ll show you a thing or two about offending people. First up, we’ll stick it to your friends, the Jews.

Quite why the invitation of Wilders — who has much less a claim on being a “crypto-fascist” than Alibhai-Brown herself — should immediately lead someone to think about calling in a Holocaust denier to even up the score, as it were, is perhaps something that only a “moderate” like Alibhai-Brown could explain.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Muslim anger rises in Britain: A portrait of extremism from a prominent “moderate”

Love of the Land: A rational article provokes bigoted frenzy at the FT

A rational article provokes bigoted frenzy at the FT

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
07 March '10

A few days ago, the historian Andrew Roberts wrote a piece in the Financial Times trenchantly defending the presumed assassination by Israel in Dubai of the Hamas terrorist Mahmoud Habhouh. In this article, which was itself a response to two examples of standard boilerplate bigotry that the paper had run about this, Roberts wrote:

All that the Dubai operation will do is remind the world that the security services of states at war – and Israel’s struggle with Hamas, Fatah and Hizbollah certainly constitutes that – occasionally employ targeted assassination as one of the weapons in their armoury, and that this in no way weakens their legitimacy. As for the ‘separation walls’ and checkpoints that one sees in Israel, the 99 per cent drop in the number of suicide bombings since their erection justifies the policy. There is simply no parallel between apartheid South Africa – where the white minority wielded power over the black majority – and the occupied territories, taken by Israel only after it was invaded by its neighbours. To make such a link is not only inaccurate, but offensive.

Not nearly as offensive, however, as what then followed. For as Robin Shepherd points out, the readers’ comments on Roberts’s article constituted an outpouring of vicious hatred, lies and libels about Israel. Not for the first time, one has to wonder at the unique and profoundly unbalanced frenzy of this particular hatred, based on a startling ignorance of the history of the Middle East which is thus comprehensively inverted. Here’s a taster, if you can stomach it:

Is it terrorism when a thief invades my house, kills my family and ends up complaining to the ‘police’ after I try defend my place against him and his criminal acts? Now transport yourselves to years and years and years of ethnic cleansing, bulldozing of homes, killing of unarmed civilians in filthy refugee camps and use of prohibited weapons. Add to that the stockpiling of illegally obtained and undeclared nuclear weapons, the official statement that a certain State is ‘Jewish’ (probably the most blatantly racist qualification ever to grace the constitutional texts of a single State) and HAS to preserve its ‘jewishness’, or the catastrophe brought about by a colonial power that was too incompetent and biased to ensure a home to the REAL inhabitants of Palestine.

(Read full story)

Love of the Land: A rational article provokes bigoted frenzy at the FT

Love of the Land: Financial Times website gives platform for anti-Semitic bigotry following rare piece supporting Israel

Financial Times website gives platform for anti-Semitic bigotry following rare piece supporting Israel

Robin Shepherd
Robinshepherdonline.com
05 March '10

One consequence of traditional media’s move to online platforms is that the threads which follow many articles are now open to readers to make comments of their own. This not only provides an insight into the kind of people who are attracted to a given article, it also places a responsibility on newspapers to police their websites in order to prevent libellous, bigoted or racist opinions from becoming associated with them.

Few issues reveal the nature of the problem more starkly than the Israel-Palestine conflict where extreme hostility to the Jewish state now masquerades as “normal” commentary in much of the British media. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that fanatics and open anti-Semites feel they have licence to let rip.

The Guardian, of course, has come in for much criticism in this respect but equally egregious in its attitude to Israel has been the Financial Times which is rapidly acquiring a reputation as one of the most rabidly anti-Israeli outlets in the English speaking world’s mainstream press. Following a rare pro-Israel piece by the historian Andrew Roberts in the comment section of the newspaper earlier in the week, the online threads have featured some of the vilest anti-Semitic bigotry to have been sanctioned by a British newspaper for quite some time.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Financial Times website gives platform for anti-Semitic bigotry following rare piece supporting Israel

Love of the Land: Canadian Leaders Standing Tall Against Israel Apartheid Week

Canadian Leaders Standing Tall Against Israel Apartheid Week

Barbara Kay
Pajamasmedia.com
04 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

In the aftermath of what emerged, against early predictions, as a wildly successful Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, Canadians are basking in an uncharacteristically bullish glow of national pride. With a stunning fourteen gold medals to the USA’s nine, Canadians are relishing their moment in the sun.

The road to this overflowing pot of Canadian gold was paved with a costly and therefore somewhat controversial “Own the Podium” funding program for athletes’ development and expenses. But $66 million of taxpayers’ money now seems a small price to pay for a formerly unassuming nation’s long-deferred sporting honor.

Hard on the winged heels of an inebriating Olympics that sought to ennoble the ideal, for two weeks anyway, of a mature global polity, with nation rivaling nation through positive, amicable achievement, there slouched into Canada (amongst other countries) a rough beast that shames the very idea of man as political animal: the annual eight-day immiseration known as Israel Apartheid Week (IAW).

IAW is something like a multi-site Olympiad itself, except that in this cheerless, failure-glorifying anti-Olympiad, the world does not come together. Instead, it is prised apart in a scapegoating orgy of thinly disguised Jew-hatred.

On this front, ironically without spending a cent, by dint of political courage and real leadership, Canadian politicians have begun in earnest to take ownership of a long-empty moral podium by addressing the escalating pathology of anti-Semitism fueling IAW and reaffirming Israel’s legitimacy — and more, Israel’s importance to Western interests.

Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) has for some years now been a well-oiled engine of hate belching toxic black smoke as it chugs in full-throated spate across a good part of the academic globe. It may have reached a tipping point of its own making in Canada (whose University of Toronto campus “boasts” the dubious distinction of having provided the venue for this continent’s first IAW).

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Love of the Land: Canadian Leaders Standing Tall Against Israel Apartheid Week

Love of the Land: The wisdom of Ahmadinejad

The wisdom of Ahmadinejad

Fresnozionism.org
03 March '10

Some recent wisdom from the Iranian President:

Existence of Zionist regime an insult to humanity

Tehran, Feb 28, IRNA — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday that existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to the entire humanity.

Addressing International Conference on ‘National and Islamic Solidarity for Future of Palestine’, he said that it is well-known for all that the Zionist regime’s mission is threat, violence and beating drums of war. Supporters of the Zionist regime who are shouting slogans of human rights and anti-terrorism, support systematic crimes of the occupying regime, the president said.

He said that everybody knows that the regime is seeking hegemony over the world.

He said that the Zionist regime is the origin of all the wars, genocide, terrors and crimes against humanity and that they are the racist group not respecting the human principles.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: The wisdom of Ahmadinejad

Love of the Land: Franchising “Apartheid”: Why South Africans Push the Analogy

Franchising “Apartheid”: Why South Africans Push the Analogy

Rhoda Kadalie & Julia Bertelsmann
Z-Word Blog
Originally Posted March '08

ON A COLD NIGHT IN Johannesburg last year, a bus pulled up outside the American consulate. It was the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War in the Middle East-June being a winter month in South Africa-and several dozen activists planned to mark the occasion by protesting U.S. support for "Apartheid Israel." The protest was organized by the Palestine Solidarity Committee and most of the demonstrators were South African Muslims.[1] Among their number, however, were black South Africans who shared the organizers' hostility to Israel.

Or so it seemed. A reporter discovered that some of the black demonstrators "were not pro-Palestinian activists, but homeless people bused in from the surrounding townships," he told Ha'aretz. "[M]ost of them refused to protest, opting to sit on the warm bus. The organizers refused to allow it. When I asked one black 'protester' if he was for Palestine, he replied: ‘I am for nobody.'" The organizers soon ejected the reporter. [2]

Like the ‘protester' on the bus, most South Africans feel indifferent towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a study conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2007. Of those with clear opinions on the matter, the majority sympathized more with Israel: 28 per cent of South Africans overall sided with Israel compared to only 19 per cent with the Palestinians. [3]

Nevertheless, South Africa has increasingly become the flash point of virulently anti-Israel demonstrations. Many of the country's leaders routinely compare the State of Israel to the apartheid regime that governed South Africa from 1948 to 1994 and imposed an oppressive system of segregation and discrimination on grounds of race. "End Israeli Apartheid" rallies are usually organized by radical Muslim organizations, but some black South Africans have also entered the fray.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Franchising “Apartheid”: Why South Africans Push the Analogy

Love of the Land: Another Hit Job By The Financial Times

Another Hit Job By The Financial Times

Marty Peretz
The New Republic
02 March '10

Hardly a day goes by that the Financial Times doesn’t do a hit job on Israel. The otherwise sober pink sheet has such an obsession with the Jewish state that I’ve come to wonder what its views were on the rescue of Jewish children into England during the Nazi onslaught on them and on their parents.

Tobias Buck is virtually on call full time to twist Israeli reality into his own jaundiced view of Zionism. Last week in the FT, he came to conclusions about Israel’s diplomatic isolation which he himself had trumpeted. Since Buck is the paper’s Israel correspondent, all you have to do is pick up the daily or log on to its web site, and you’re almost sure to find the same story he wrote yesterday or last week and will surely write tomorrow.

Sometimes the FT sinks so low that it will even ask Henry Siegman, a dreary old Jewish bureaucrat who found glory in being asked to speak at gentile soirees and left-wing “getting-to-yes” talkfests, to write. So, on the very same day, Siegman picked up Buck’s theme and argued that “for Israel, defiance comes at the cost of legitimacy.”

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Another Hit Job By The Financial Times

Love of the Land: Antisemitism and anti-Zionism, joined at the hip

Antisemitism and anti-Zionism, joined at the hip

Fresnozionism.org
01 March '10

Recent anti-Israel propaganda seems, more and more, to be mixed with traditional antisemitic images and themes.

[Louis] Farrakhan, speaking to a crowd of 20,000 followers at Chicago’s United Center on Sunday, said that Obama’s political problems began when he, according to the Chicago Sun Times report, stood up to the Jewish lobby during a White House meeting. When they left the White House, his problems began,” Farrakhan said, adding that “the Zionists are in control of the Congress.”

Minister Farrakhan also referred to the U.S. president’s chief economical advisors, Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson and Larry Summers, asking “Who does he have around him? The people from Goldman Sachs.” [Geithner and Paulson are not Jewish -- ed.] The leader of the Nation of Islam added that “bloodsuckers of the poor” were rewarded with a bailout…

Further on in his address, Farrakhan also reiterated his claims that the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was “an inside thing…”

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Antisemitism and anti-Zionism, joined at the hip

Love of the Land: “Israeli Apartheid Week”: Festival of bigotry kicks off across the globe but it’s not going according to plan

“Israeli Apartheid Week”: Festival of bigotry kicks off across the globe but it’s not going according to plan

Robin Shepherd
Robin Shepherd Online
02 March '10

This week saw the start of the annual festival of bigotry known as “Israeli Apartheid Week” (IAW). In the UK, universities from the London School of Economics, University College London (alma mater of the would be Detroit panty bomber) to Oxford join forces with places of “learning” in more than 40 cities across the world. The aim is to deligitimise Israel with a view to the Jewish state’s eventual destruction.

But it is not all going according to plan. In Canada, there are signs that the organisers may already have run into some embarrassing problems. As the National Post reports in a scathing editorial which rightly describes the event as “an odious and bigoted annual ritual” a motion denouncing Israeli Apartheid Week has been unanimously passed (even leftist members of parliament supported it) in the Ontario provincial parliament. This is a serious blow since Canada has been one of the worst offenders in the Western world in terms of anti-Israeli bigotry and has traditionally been at the forefront of IAW campaigning.

While it is still early days, what is going on in Canada should serve as an inspiration to those opposed to anti-Israeli extremism worldwide. Careful and consistent campaigning in favour of reason and decency over Israel can pay off, leaving the opposing camp looking isolated and obsessive.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: “Israeli Apartheid Week”: Festival of bigotry kicks off across the globe but it’s not going according to plan

Love of the Land: Something's seriously wrong at York University

Something's seriously wrong at York University

David Frum
National Post
27 February '10

Next week, York University will once again open its halls and classrooms to “Israel Apartheid Week,” so-called. This year as every year, militants and activists will use the taxpayer-funded facilities of York to vilify the Jewish state. Well, that’s free speech, isn’t? Everybody gets to express his or her point of view, no matter how obnoxious, right?

No, not right. Not at York. At York, speech is free — better than free, subsidized — for anti-Israel haters. But for those who would defend Israel, York sets very different rules.

In advance of York’s annual hate-Israel week, the campus group Christians United for Israel applied to use university space to host a program of pro-Israel speakers. The university replied that this program could only proceed on certain conditions. It insisted on heavy security, including both campus and Toronto police — all of those costs to be paid by the program organizers. The organizers would also have to provide an advance list of all program attendees and advance summaries of all the speeches. No advertising for the program would be permitted — not on the York campus, not on any of the other campuses participating by remote video.

These are radically different and much harsher terms than anything required from the hate-Israel program. The hate-Israel program is not required to pay for its own security. It is free to advertise. Its speakers are not pre-screened by the university.

The pro-Israel event, scheduled for this past Monday, Feb. 22, was cancelled when the organizers declined to comply with the terms. A university spokesman told the Jewish Tribune that it insisted on the more stringent requirements on pro-Israel groups “due to the participation of individuals who they claim invite the animus of anti-Israel campus agitators.”

The logic is impressively brazen: Since the anti-Israel people might use violence, the speech of the pro-Israel people must be limited. On the other hand, since the pro-Israel people do not use violence, the speech of the anti-Israel people can proceed without restraint.

(Read full story)

Love of the Land: Something's seriously wrong at York University

Love of the Land: 'EU aid funds PA incitement'

'EU aid funds PA incitement'

UK watchdog group unveils reports of anti-Israel curriculum in PA schools.

Ben Hartman
Middle East/JPost
02 February '10

A British taxpayer watchdog group unveiled two reports on Monday detailing the role of European foreign aid in the transmission of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic narratives in Palestinian Authority schools and media in Jerusalem.

The reports, “Palestinian Hate Education Since Annapolis” and “Funding Hate Education,” detail what the Taxpayers’ Alliance refers to as a campaign of “demonizing Israel” largely funded by European taxpayers, a policy it says diminishes long-term hopes for peace.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance said it has taken up the issue of incitement against Israel in the Palestinian territories because it believes there must be greater scrutiny of aid programs for the PA, so that taxpayer money from the UK and the EU no longer funds programs that harm the peace process and the national interests of British and EU citizens.

Matthew Sinclair, research director for the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said at a press briefing in Jerusalem, held with Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, that in Palestinian society, “we’re looking at a population where 42 percent are under the age of 15. You have a huge younger generation whose views are going to shape the situation for a long time.

“Peace lies in the hearts and minds of people and it’s vital that the right attitudes are encouraged in people and the right conditions are created for peace,” Sinclair continued.

“It’s rare we see it [foreign aid] doing as much harm to the British taxpayers as we do in this case,” he said.

According to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, European foreign aid provided to the PA, including €420 million and £63.6m. in 2007 alone, “create[s] a responsibility to ensure that the Palestinian Authority does not misuse its budget.”

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Love of the Land: 'EU aid funds PA incitement'

Love of the Land: Anna Baltzer - Jewish Defamer of Israel

Anna Baltzer - Jewish Defamer of Israel

Steven Stotsky
CAMERA
25 January '10

In 1505, a Moravian Jew named Joseph Pfefferkorn denounced his faith and undertook a campaign to get the Talmud banned by claiming it blasphemed Christianity. Pfefferkorn was unschooled and a criminal, but that didn't stop the Dominicans in Cologne, who at the time were eager to cast aspersions on the Jews, from employing him. They recognized the value of a Jew accusing other Jews.

The practice of finding Jews to bear false witness against other Jews has been repeated in many venues. Today, in America, some mainline Protestant churches have eagerly adopted this practice in an effort to demonize Israel. In November 2009, the Wyoming Presbyterian church in Milburn, New Jersey invited Jewish anti-Israel activist Anna Baltzer to speak and present her slide show alleging Israeli crimes against the Palestinians.

Baltzer is an acolyte of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a cult-like group that recruits naive Westerners to interfere with Israeli anti-terror operations. Its founders have spoken approvingly of suicide bombings. Baltzer boasts a busy schedule of speaking engagements at churches, universities and even an appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Her message consists mostly of rehashed accusations against Israel made by Palestinian speakers. But Baltzer uses her Jewish heritage to accrue credibility before predominantly non-Jewish audiences who often fail to see through her deception.

In her appearance at the Presbyterian church, Baltzer told the audience that they were responsible for alleged Israeli transgressions on the West Bank because "if the Israeli government does it, in fact its really U.S. taxpayers doing it." Settlers carry U.S-made weapons, she said. Her attempt to conflate the privately owned small arms of Israeli citizens with American support for Israel's national defense is typical of her deceptiveness.

Baltzer's core message is to delegitimize Israel.

(Read full report)

Love of the Land: Anna Baltzer - Jewish Defamer of Israel

Love of the Land: A world of propaganda#links#links#links

A world of propaganda

Fresnozionism
18 January '10

This past Saturday night (January 16), our local public radio station, KVPR, aired the most anti-Israel 55 minutes that I’ve heard anywhere. And that is saying something, because KVPR’s competition in the listener-supported radio world carries the Pacifica network, home of Amy Goodman.

The weekly program is called “A World of Possibilities”, and is produced by an outfit called Connexus Communications”, which is supported by grants from ‘progressive’ foundations, especially the Ford Foundation. It’s provided free for download and broadcast by anyone who wants it.

Saturday’s episode was called “Victims No More: Seeking the Middle Way in the Middle East,” but there was no “middle way” or balance about it. The host, the snotty Mark Sommer — who often peppers his remarks on unrelated programs with anti-Israel comments (in a program about Darfur, he said conditions were “as bad as the Palestinian territories”) — interviewed five guests. Let’s look at what each one contributed to the program:

Amal Jadou, deputy chief of the PLO mission in Washington spoke for about fifteen minutes, delivering an unrelieved rant about the horrors of occupation, all the humiliations suffered by the Palestinians, whom she calls “the Jews of the Jews” in support of her offensive position that Jews have persecuted Palestinians just as they themselves were persecuted in Europe. Need I remind you that Jadou’s PLO practically invented terrorism as a political tool and has murdered thousands of Israelis, more than any other terrorist group?

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Love of the Land: A world of propaganda

Love of the Land: Michael Scheuer: terrorists should focus on Israel, not the U.S.

Michael Scheuer: terrorists should focus on Israel, not the U.S.

Adam Holland
05 January '10

In an interview televised on C-SPAN on January 4, former CIA bin Laden Unit Chief Michael Scheuer advocated that the United States should "dissuade" terrorists from focusing their anger on the U.S. by "persuad(ing) them to focus their anger on what they themselves perceive as their enemy: the governments that ... oppress them and Israel". His comment is viewable at 10:30 of the below-linked video:

C-SPAN Video Player - Michael Scheuer, Former CIA Bin Laden Unit Chief (1996-99)

Following this modest proposal to throw Israel to the wolves, Scheuer received the following grossly anti-Semitic question from a caller called John from Franklin, NY who identified himself as a political independent (viewable at 15:00 of the above-linked video). Question and answer are presented below in their entirety. Scheuer's response is instructive:

(This specific clip can also be seen by clicking here at Elder of Zion)

John from Franklin: I for one am sick and tired of all these Jews coming on C-SPAN and other stations and pushing us to go to war against our Muslim friends. They're willing to spend the last drop of American blood and treasure to get their way in the world. They have way too much power in this country. People like Wolfowitz and Feith an the other neo-cons -- they jewed us into Iraq -- and now we're going to spend the next 60 years rehabilitating our soldiers -- I'm sick and tired of it.

C-SPAN host: Any comment on that?

Scheuer: Yeah. I think that American foreign policy is ultimately up to the American people. One of the big things we have not been able to discuss for the past 30 years is the Israelis. Whether we want to be involved in fighting Israel's wars in the future is something that Americans should be able to talk about. They may vote yes. They may want to see their kids killed in Iraq or somewhere else to defend Israel. But the question is: we need to talk about it. Ultimately Israel is a country that is of no particular worth the United States.

C-SPAN host: You mean strategically?

Scheuer: Strategically. They have no resources we need. Their manpower is minimal. Their association with us is a negative for the United States. Now that's a fact. What you want to do about that fact is entirely different. But for anyone to stand up in the United States and day that support for Israel doesn't hurt us in the Muslim world is to just defy reality.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Michael Scheuer: terrorists should focus on Israel, not the U.S.

Love of the Land: Analysis: Hedy Epstein's European media sex appeal: Anti-Zionism and survivor of the Holocaust

Analysis: Hedy Epstein's European media sex appeal: Anti-Zionism and survivor of the Holocaust

Benjamin Weinthal
Berlin/JPost
03 January '10

There is a tried-and-true Jewish method in Europe to garner instant media coverage and awards of recognition: Scream the trendy anti-Israeli slogans equating the Jewish state with Nazi Germany and the former apartheid regime in South Africa, while highlighting one's background as a Holocaust survivor.

According to seasoned media observers in Germany, the formula of Shoah survivor coupled with anti-Israeli activism helps to explain the public relations coup of Hedy Epstein, an anti-Zionist 85-year-old German Jew who fled the Nazis in 1939, and is now promoting her hunger strike in Egypt to advance the so-called "Free Gaza Movement."

Epstein declared her hunger strike on Monday, as part of a campaign involving 1,400 activists from 42 countries in Egypt hoping to enter Gaza, in a bid to compel Israel to end its restrictions on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. She has attracted widespread press coverage in Europe.

Prompting the activists, many of whom are from organizations affiliated with Hamas, to march into Gaza, is the one-year anniversary of the start of Operation Cast Lead to stop Hamas rocket attacks on Israel's southern periphery.

The European laws of supply and demand (similar ones apply on many American college campuses) show an endless demand for Jewish senior citizens willing to invoke anti-Israeli language that meets the definitions of contemporary anti-Semitism. According to a Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs report, Epstein had "compared Israel to a Nazi state and Israeli soldiers to Nazis" during a lecture at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Writing this past week from Beirut, the liberal Huffington Post site reported that Epstein said, "The issue for Israeli Jews and the American Jewish community is the Holocaust, and everything is due to the Holocaust. But Israel is not being persecuted now. Israel is the persecutor."

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Analysis: Hedy Epstein's European media sex appeal: Anti-Zionism and survivor of the Holocaust

Love of the Land: Comic Book Hate: a New Chapter in Anti-Israel Bias at the New York Times

Comic Book Hate: a New Chapter in Anti-Israel Bias at the New York Times

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
29 December 09

The debate about the extent of the New York Times’ anti-Israel bias was revived this past weekend in the book-review treatment of Joe Sacco’s Footnotes From Gaza, a volume that purports to tell the story of massacres of innocent Palestinian Arabs in Gaza by evil Israelis in 1956 during the Sinai Campaign.

The review is notable for two reasons.

First is the fact that the review is a rave for what can only be described as a 418-page piece of anti-Israel propaganda. Masquerading as history, this graphic novel is a detailed compendium of slanders against Israeli forces engaged in a counteroffensive against Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, an area used as a base for murderous terror raids into Israel since the 1949 armistice. But that fact is ignored by the reviewer, who accepts the author’s single-minded obsession with placing all of the blame on the Jews for the fighting in Gaza at that time and for the entire duration of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The piece claims that it is a “bias against history” that has prevented the publication of more such accounts of Israeli brutality. Yet this book has nothing to do with a genuine search for historical truth and everything to do with anti-Israel bias. Indeed, the core accusation of Sacco’s book—that these incidents in 1956 “planted hatred” in Palestinian hearts against Israelis—is absurd.

The fighting in that year had been precipitated by Arab cross-border murder raids, whose brutality was rooted in anti-Jewish hatred and intolerance for the Jewish presence in the land, which long predated the events this cartoon purports to explain. The point of Sacco’s cartoons is not very different from more recent attempts to portray last year’s invasion of Gaza as aggression when, in fact, it was merely a response to missile attacks on Israel. But as with other such examples of “journalism” aimed at vilifying the Israelis, Sacco’s only goal is to paint Israeli self-defense as illegitimate and to portray the Palestinians as innocent victims whose agenda to destroy the Jewish state cannot be mentioned.

(Read full article)

Related: Footnotes in historical fiction

Love of the Land: Comic Book Hate: a New Chapter in Anti-Israel Bias at the New York Times