Engage apologises!

Well look at this. An apology from Engage.

But Engage apologises. We were wrong. How could this piece have been antisemitic? It was written by a Jewish blogger. So it couldn't possibly have been antisemitic, could it?

Well, actually, no we don't apologise. MPAC are today running with a piece which proclaims: "Jewish Brother Stands with MPAC". It is a piece that identifies Engage as a "Zionist smearsite".

The argument seems to run both ways. Firstly, if MPAC's argument is endorsed by two anti-Zionist Jewish bloggers, then it is kosher and not at all antisemitic. And secondly, the inference is that Engage is anti-Muslim because it responded to MPAC rather than the two Jewish bloggers. The two Jewish bloggers, you see, are very keen to receive responses.

It began yesterday with Engage smearing the Muslim Public Affairs Committee of the UK (MPACUK) as being antisemitic for running an article that likened the wall that the zionists are building in Palestine to the wall around the Warsaw Ghetto. It was typically dishonest like the quote above. It didn't acknowledge that the piece was from a Jewish guy's blog verbatim. It wasn't a report by MPAC. It was a copy and paste job. Engage's dishonesty lay in the fact that they (he) didn't even acknowledge that the piece had come from somewhere else.

See where David Hirsh (or Alf Green) has said "MPAC's argument is endorsed by two anti-Zionist Jewish bloggers." See that? Dr Hirsh knows that neither Desert Peace nor Jews sans frontieres were endorsing what MPAC had written. It wasn't MPAC who had written what was written. It was Desert Peace. MPAC was endorsing Desert Peace. I (that is Jews sans frontieres) was simply reporting on yet more dishonesty by the Alf Green posse.

So let's look at this again. MPAC ran a piece likening the zionist wall to the Warsaw Ghetto wall. Engage accused them of antisemitism for this. Engage knew that the piece was written by a Jewish guy but decided not to tell its readers, Muslims being so much easier to smear as antisemitic than Jews. I picked up on their dishonesty. That's it. And now Engage has run a spoof apology piece "explaining" that Jews can be antisemitic but it is more important to focus on MPAC because MPAC are influential. That last line comes close to relevance. It becomes problematic when you consider that between Engage, Desert Peace and Jews sans frontieres, the only one that has ever, on its own account, ever written anything that could be construed as antisemitic is Engage. Lest anyone has forgotten here is a post by Charlie Pottins to the Engage site:

Obviously Sue Blackwell can do no right by you. After all, she moved a resolution in the AUT to boycott two Israeli institutions on account of specific issues, and in your book this places her "behind the campaign to blacklist Israeli scientists, academics, teachers, students, musicians and artists".
Presumably you had some arguments against the proposal to boycott Haifa and Bar Ilan, but why trouble with details when you can so much more easily scare the kinder with tales about a completely different and imaginary boycott.

There was more but this will do. Now see the doyen of the anti-antsemites response:

please write in English Charlie, not in Yiddish. This is not a forum for you to perform your anti-Zionist Jewish identity.

The full quotes are here.

So the antisemitism watchdog, Dr Hirsh, aka Alf Green, is himself antisemitic, and he lectures others. But then antisemitism isn't the issue for Engage/David Hirsh/Alf Green. Protecting the racist war criminals of the State of Israel from meaningful criticism and campaigning is his (their) thing.

A couple of comments to the original post are worth a look at here. The first was by Charlie Pottins:

Engage is a bit slow on the uptake. It is four years since an Israeli military commander was quoted in Ha'aretz as saying Israeli forces could learn from Nazi tactics in subduing the Warsaw ghetto, and this was applied in the onslaught on Jenin.

Admittedly this comparison may not have got the publicity it deserved here, but it was noted.

I remember someone quoting it at a Jewish Socialists' Group Warsaw Ghetto revolt commemoration event.

Now when we see the Wall carving Palestine into shrinking enclaves which are besieged and cut off from the world, subjected to starvation and denial of essential supplies, as well as frequent razzias, we are inevitably reminded of how the ghetto was reduced beoore the final revolt.

Of course the line for we fainthearted Diaspora Jews and those Israelis without stomach for such tasks is that Israel is the besieged ghetto about to fall to vastly superior forces unless it takes desperate measures. I have seen Israeli officers unable to keep a straight face when hearing such Zionist persecution-fantasies. But I guess claims to identify with Holocaust victims is part of the stock-in-trade of propaganda outfits like Engage, and they are bound to protest if anyone infringes on their patent.

Incidentally, I may as well outrage them even more by mentioning that at the hight of the Nazi genocide against the Jews, Germans were telling themselves that the Fatherland and race were threatened with annihilation unless they defended it against the Jewish menace. I expect psychologists have a name for this.

The second by Stephen Marks:

Marek Edelman, the last surviving member of the three-man command of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, addressed an appeal to Palestinian fighters a few years ago, urging them to abandon suicide attacks on civilians.

To underline the point that he defended their right to armed resistance, he addressed the appeal 'to the partisans and soldiers of the fighting organisations of the Palestinian people', deliberately echoing the official title of the ghetto fighting organisation.

Another antisemite?

Another antisemite? Only Dr Hirsh has the answer.