No Jews, three synagogues

I first found this report in the Detroit Free Press before seeing it plastered all over the net. Israel's Chief Rabbinate has petitioned the Supreme Court to prevent the demolition of synagogues in Gaza. Even though there will be no one to attend them, according to the report, the rabbis say that demolishing synagogues is against Jewish law.

On Tuesday, Israel's Supreme Court stepped into the emotional conflict over whether the Gaza synagogues should be torn down, ordering the government to check into whether the Palestinian Authority, the United States or the United Nations would be willing to preserve the buildings.

This is very strange because, not that long ago, Stanley Kalms wrote a report on the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth and how it should function in future. He argued for the disposal of various shuls (synagogues) on the grounds that it was uneconomic to keep them. I remember one in Earlham Grove in London E7. My nan used to go there. Even I went there sometimes. Well it's not there now. Stanley Kalms (CEO of Dixons et al.) had other plans. It's just, I don't remember any ballyhoo over it and we're always told that diaspora Jews are more frum than our Israeli counterparts. I love Israel; it always gives me lots to think about to keep my mind off things.

Jews against the Board of Deputies

I've just had this article sent to me. It appears on the Something Jewish website and it's a calculated and well overdue slap in the collective face of the Board of Deputies of British Jews over their (mis)handling of the Ken (concentration camp guard) Livingstone saga. Headed "Board should shut up" (a double entendre if ever there was one) the article berates the Board for lacking perspective over the Livingstone "issue" and it dares to suggest that the Board may not be as democratically representative as is made out.

So the Board of Deputies of British Jews finally got what they wanted, an appointment for London Mayor Ken
Livingstone with the Standards Board for England.

The so-called "representative body of British Jewish community" took exception when London's colourful and outspoken Mayor in February likened a reporter from the Evening Standard newspaper with that of a Nazi concentration camp guard despite letting the Mayor know he was a member of the tribe.

It's curious that the article understates Ken's previous run-ins with the Board over Israel, gay rights and (I think) Jewish representation. I think the old GLC gave a grant to the Jewish Socialist Group and it rubbed the Board up the wrong way. They do mention it but almost in passing.

you can't accuse him of hating Jews in London or indeed anywhere else. His views on Israel and Palestine are another issue, but jumping on Livingstone as a way to knock him down because of what he has said about Israel is not the right way to go about things.

Maybe the Board has something against the Mayor and this is the first time in Livingstone's political life that they can get back at him?

It's time the Board started to come clean about its motives and why it does what it does.

If only someone could take the Board to a standards authority for their lack of standards and care shown to the Jewish community over the years in not addressing real issues of concern and importance to the Jewish community in London and across Britain.

That last line reminds me of something I wrote about the Board over a year ago.

Nick Cohen Watch

Actually my headline is a bit iof a ruse. This post is actually a pointer to a blog I stumbled on just the other day. It's called Aaronovitch Watch (incorporating "NICK COHEN WATCH") and it specialises in er, David Aaronovitch watching with a bit of Nick Cohen bashing thrown in. It's a relatively young blog but it's worth a look at.

Katrina, Katif and Katyusha: are they by any chance related?

I've already posted an article by a religious nut claiming that America was hit by hurricane Katrina because it is deemed to have foisted the disengagement plan on Israel. Well now I've found the most ludricous report on the same thing, but this time it is via the site of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee. The article is actually on the Israel Insider site, which seems to be a subsidiary site of AIPAC. AIPAC likes to quote the New York Times as saying that it is "the most important organization affecting America's relationship with Israel." Two of its senior officer have recently been charged with spying on America. Anyway, back to Israel Insider, which I assume must be considered to be a mainstream zionist website given its relationship with AIPAC. Tamar Yonah doesn't "want to be so bold as to say that the U.S. was hit with Hurricane Katrina because President Bush pressed his Road Map upon Israel, but"

Consider:

1) The obvious: 'Katrina' sounds very similar to 'Katif'.

2) According to a Russian friend of mine, 'Katrina' in Russian is equivalent to 'Katyusha'. A katyusha is the name of a rocket that has been fired frequently at Israeli towns and villages, one of which just recently hit Israel's port city of Eilat, near its airport. This katyusha rocket was fired against Israel at the same time when Jews were being expelled from Gush Katif.

3) Bush pushed for the abandonment of Israel's southern coastal region, and America's southern coastal region is now in ruins as well.

4) President Bush is from Texas, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is from Alabama. Together, they pressured Israel to uproot Gush Katif. Hurricane Katrina hit the states in between Texas and Alabama where Bush and Rice are from (Louisiana and Mississippi).

5) Many believe that U.S. President George Bush is selling out Israel to control the price of oil and keep it cheaper for Americans. Perhaps Bush thought that he could set the price for oil by appeasing the Arabs. Yet, this hurricane hit right at the oil refineries in America's Gulf Coast states, temporarily closing down these refineries, which brought UP the price of gasoline. Is G-d telling us that He, not Bush, controls the price of oil?

She goes on to make seven more specific points before finishing on a more general note thus

And finally, President Bush needs to go back to reading the Bible and remind himself that those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse her will be cursed.

No wonder Sharon was in such a hurry to offer aid to America. Which I guess is another inverted parallel. The US has given much aid to Israel and now Israel is offering America aid. All part of God's intelligent design.

Also posted to Lenin's Tomb

Calling Ken Loach or someone very similar

you know, like someone all cuddly and sweet and leftish who makes films. That's what Sharga Elam is after; look

Dear all,

Does any of you have connection with Ken Loach or at least have his email-address?

I want to suggest to him to make a film about Jaac van Harten, an important Jewish Nazi agent that found refuge in Tel-Aviv and enjoyed the protection of the Mossad and the Israeli government.

Van Harten, who had helped to rob Hungarian Jews, worked later for the SS laundering machine of faked British pounds in the framework of the Nazi Operation Bernhard.

After WWII van Harten gave some of this faked money to the Zionist underground in North Italy and became the main financial source for the illegal immigration (Mossad Le'Aliyah Beth and "HaBricha") and for buying weapons. A very sophisticated laundering machinery was established in Geneva under the Mossad cashier Pino Ginsburg.

In Tel-Aviv van Harten was introduced to the High-Society by one of the Haganah leaders and was able to sell jewellery partly obviously robbed from Hungarian Jews. He died in 1973 as a very wealthy and honoured person in the posh Tel Aviv suburb Savyon.

This affair which contains many elements of a thriller is a good vehicle to transport to a broader public the very complicated story of the relationships between the Jewish Agency leadership and Nazis during and after the Nazi era. A story of hypocrisy, deception and betrayal of the European Jewry by the Zionist leadership which ever since has not stop to try to profit from the suffering inflicted during the Judeocide.

I'm now trying now to find a main stream publisher for an updated and modified English version of my German book on the van Harten affair and thought that a movie and not just a dry documentary (I have also interesting filmed interviews with Israeli former agents) might be an important "supplement".

I'm very thankful for every tip.

Best regards

Shraga

Shraga Elam was born in 1947 in Haifa (today Israel) and took part in three wars as an Israeli soldier. He studied philosophy and political ethnology and lives, since 1979, in Zurich, Switzerland. In the mid-80's he started his research about the Nazi Judeocide and on the role of the Jewish Agency at that time. He exposed, as of the mid-90's, several explosive affairs concerning Switzerland and Jewish organizations during the Nazi era. In 2004 he won the prestigious Australian Gold Walkley Award for his revelation about Swiss accounts of three prominent Australian figures held by Bank Leumi Switzerland.

He should try Spielberg for the film because he's very interested in the holocaust etc. And Weidenfeld for the publisher. What do others think?

David Aaronovitch on New Orleans

No need to panic, I'm not sure that Aaronovitch has written anything on the disaster that has befallen New Orleans over the past few days. I only mention it because while I was looking for information on New Orleans I remembered Aaronovitch writing a sneering racist gloat in the Guardian about the disaster in the Iranian city of Bam, and how things are so much better in America, back in late 2003. I googled Bam "David Aaronovitch" and up came 192 sites, most of which expressed outrage at his Guardian article. Here's how PeaceUK introduced the piece

This comment is posted, not because I agree with it, but because there is an urgent need for those of us who care for peace and harmony in the world to replace this arrogant racist nonsense with something positive and productive. People like Aaronovich feed the worst anti-Arab instincts of the rabid right, and their arguments provide exactly the kind of justifications that lunatics like Bush and Rumsfeld will use for deciding on forceful "regime change" in Iran. Please, please let me know the moment you find something with which I can replace this destructive bile. Email me instantly on john@iraqbodycount.org]

Anyway I tried - "New Orleans" "David Aaronovitch" - and whilst lots of sites appeared, in fact 262, none were articles by David Aaronovitch sneering at the people of New Orleans during their time of distress. You know it's almost as if he prefers Americans to Iranians. I know this is an apparently gratuitous swipe at the man but while I was looking for info on New Orleans and finding many websites down, his disgusting Bam article just popped into my mind. I wonder if he feels at all chastened by what is happening in the USA.

To see the multi-cultural splendour that was (and hopefully will be) New Orleans see this site. I know they're trying to sell the place but it's uplifting after all the scenes of distress. And if you know of Mike West and Katie Euliss's whereabouts, please let me know. They should have been gigging in Florida but I noticed that they had a break between dates from 28/8 to 1/9 and I wondered if they went back to New Orleans. Thanks!

Update: Got an email from Mike and Katie aka Truckstop Honeymoon and they're safe on the road but their home was under twenty feet of water.

Update II: Aaronovitch has written an article on New Orleans now. (hat-tip Particleist) It contains none of the gloating superiority of his piece on the disaster at Bam in Iran. A couple of lines hit me. Take this one "it only tells us how vulnerable we are." Whereas the Bam disaster tells us how incompetent or corrupt the Iranians are/were. But hold on

Well, not all of us equally. When disasters or fires or bombings happen, you discover just who was travelling on your trains, who was crammed into your hostels or who was living in the low-lying areas. It isn’t the failure to act in New Orleans that is the story here, it’s the sheer, uninsured, uncared for, self-disenfranchised scale of the poverty that lies revealed. It looks like a scene from the Third World because that’s the truth. It’s a quiet disaster that ’s been going on for years — a pudding-basin-full-of-poverty situation.

"self-disenfrachised"? Whatever can he mean? Anyway, check out the article and see how Aaronovitch's main thrust is to defend America from any criticism, especially, as you'd expect, over the war in Iraq.

Boycott Israel Breakfast

Now there's a curious concept: a boycott Israel breakfast. But that's what's on offer here.

Join defendants at Uxbridge Magistrates' Court for breakfast on the first day of their trial and support the campaign to sever military, economic, cultural and academic ties with Israel while the occupation of Palestine continues.

Following the ruling of the International Court of Justice in the Hague that Israel's building of a wall on Palestinian land was illegal, activists from London and Brighton successfully blockaded the main Carmel-Agrexco depot in the UK. This prevented tens of thousands of pounds worth of agricultural produce from reaching its destination on British supermarket shelves.

Carmel is the main brand for Israeli agricultural exports and the company is 50 per cent owned by the Israeli state. It exports goods from settlements in the West Bank and Gaza in violation of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

The action at the depot led to the arrest of seven activists who had d-locked themselves across the gates and prevented access to lorries. They have all been charged with aggravated trespass: the prevention of lawful activity. Their defence will challenge the legality of Carmel-Agrexco's trade in the UK and is hoped to act as a springboard for the whole boycott campaign.

We invite you and your organisations to join us on the opening day of the trial, Monday 5th September at 9am at Uxbridge Magistrates' Court, for a Palestinian breakfast in support of the defendants, in support of the boycott campaign and in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle to end the occupation.

For further information please email The Wall Must Fall.

Beyond recognition

Every so often an individual case brings the reality of Israel's apartheid system into view. A couple of days ago the Guardian reported the case of Israel trying to force Bedouin Arabs into a township by refusing amenities to a village that predates the existence of the state itself. The case is that of cancer victim Ennas Al-Atrash

Ennas was diagnosed with cancer in her chest cavity in January and subjected to weeks of chemotherapy and two operations. She was sent home to recover with a daily injection of medicine to boost her collapsed immune system. The drug has to be stored at a steady temperature between zero degrees and 4C (32F-39F).

But the Atrash family has no reliable means to do so because the Israeli government refuses to allow 80,000 Bedouin Arabs to be connected to the power, water or sewerage infrastructure on the grounds that their villages are illegal - even though many have stood since before the modern Israeli state existed.

The day after this report appeared (ie yesterday), a spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in London, Dan Shaham wrote this to the Guardian

However, like every modern state, Israel has a system of planning permission. When a nomadic group settles illegally on state or privately owned land, it is simply unrealistic to expect that they be permanently connected to water and electricity; no modern state can be expected to provide limitless residential amenities.

Now, today, Physicians for Human Rights have responded thus

We would like to draw attention to the historical context of the unrecognised Negev villages to shed light on some of the problematic remarks of Mr Shaham from the Israeli embassy (Letters, September 1). Enass al-Atrash's village was established before the state of Israel came into existence. Israel's policy aims to move the Arab-Bedouin from their land and place them in what can only be termed as townships. One way of encouraging the residents of these "unrecognised" villages to leave their villages is by denying them basic services and rights, such as water and electricity.

Physicians for Human Rights and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, together with the al-Atrash family, petitioned the Israeli high court demanding that the girl's home receive a steady supply of electricity, because it is wrong to use the child's illness as a way to force the family to leave its home and move to a township. As every other modern state, Israel should supply the girl, a citizen of the state, with all she needs for a healthy life - in her family's home. What Enass - a three-year-old who suffers from cancer - needs to fight her terrible disease and save her life is electricity. That's all we've asked.
Shabtai Gold and Orly Almi

So nearly sixty years after the establishment of the state, the zionists are still. not simply demolishing houses, but destroying, or trying to destroy, whole villages.

From US to AUS

You will have read about Norman Finkelstein's difficulties in getting his book Beyond Chutzpah published in the US. Well now here's a guy, Antony Loewenstein, in Australia who seems to be about to have similar problems. Antony is writing a book on the Middle East for publication some time next year. He wrote to an Aussie politician with some questions about where the Australian Labor Party stands on Israel and this was the response, not to Antony but to the Australian Jewish News

The graduating class of Mount Scopus of 1972 had some interesting people, many of whom made a mark on wider Australian society. One of my fellow graduates of that year is Louise Adler, the current publisher of Melbourne University Press (MUP).

Louise was and is an intellectually engaging person, if a little predictable with her inevitable criticism that Labor is a "sell-out" and that supporting Israel, moderate democratic Israel, as I do, makes me a "Zionist right-winger". It's a badge of honour, Louise.

However, faint praise for Adler is a sidebar to the substance of the issue. I want the entire Jewish community to know that I absolutely dissociate myself from her decision to publish a book edited by Anthony Loewenstein about the Australian Jewish community.

In preparation for writing his book, Loewenstein sent me a number of questions, based on assumptions, which made his views so blatantly obvious that I refused to answer them or participate in his book.

I will have no part in his and Adler's propaganda tract scheduled for publication in 2006, which will be an attack on the mainstream Australian Jewish community.

MUP should drop this whole disgusting project. If they proceed, I urge the Australian Jewish community, and particularly the Australian Jewish News, to treat it with dignified silence. That is our best response. If, God forbid, it is published, don't give them a dollar. Don't buy the book.

MICHAEL DANBY MHR
Federal member for Melbourne Ports

Imagine how he's feel if he actually read the book. Anyway, Louise isn't a happy bunny. She wrote to the AJN thus

I HAVE not had a conversation of any substance with Michael Danby either prior to 1972 or since. It was a surprise therefore to find him slandering me in the AJN (26/8) with views that are pure invention and palpable nonsense.

Whatever conventions one might expect a politician to adhere to — accuracy might be presumed to be basic. These statements are malicious and derogatory. Irrelevance is the fate of local politicians who remain locked in to a dogmatic, insular and ultimately self-serving view of the world. Smear campaigns are normally the stuff of the gutter press.

I am surprised therefore that the AJN reproduces character assassinations without following the standard journalistic practice of checking the facts.

As the CEO and publisher of Melbourne University Publishing, I am proud of our 80-year history of independent publishing. MUP’s mandate is to publish books of public interest.

That venerable tradition continues with the publication of such titles as Jacqueline Rose’s The Question of Zion and Antony Loewenstein’s forthcoming book Voices of Reason.

I am dismayed that a fellow publisher such as the AJN gives space for proposals to boycott ideas. Condemning a book prior to publication is appalling.

Perhaps the AJN should review the book now, nine months out from publication. Danby’s proposal is inimical to the central Jewish values of tolerance and open debate.

LOUISE ADLER
CEO & publisher,
Melbourne University Publishing

Check out Antony's blog for the whole story to date. I think it's going to run and run.

like mice into a trap

I'm reading Beyond Chutzpah at the mo'. Where I'm up to at the minute is, Finkelstein's ripping Dershowitz to shreds and in the course of that he quotes something that looks familiar to me. It's a quote from the journalist, Chris Hedges

Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered - death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo - but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

I googled "like mice into a trap" and the link in the above headline was the first site out of 732 to come up. The quote is from 2001. The reason it's in the Finkelstein book is because it's in the Dershowitz book - The Case for Israel. Dershowitz is calling Hedges a liar; in fact a liar motivated by anti-semitism because it's a medievel blood libel to suggest that Israel deliberately kills children. Here's the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem's take on the same thing

Soldiers would enter in jeeps to areas where friction was common. Their objective was to provoke Palestinians to throw stones and petrol bombs. When Palestinians approached, soldiers who had taken up positions at preplanned positions would shoot at them. The stated goal of this procedure was to move the demonstrations further away. In fact, however, the soldier said,

It is a kind of sport, to "remove" as many petrol-bomb throwers as possible. It is an obsessive search. It’s called "strive to make contact." What bothers me is, if the jeeps had not entered, there would not have been any disturbances of the peace.

Next up Finkestein casts a critical eye over Dershowitz's condemnation of the Palestinians' culture of death.

God punches America for Gaza's sake!

Also posted to Lenin's Tomb

Jerusalem Newswire suggests, well insists, that the destruction being wrought by hurricane Katrina in America is God's punishment for America foisting the disengagement plan on poor little Israel

What America is about to experience is the lifting of God’s hand of protection; the implementation of His judgment on the nation most responsible for endangering the land and people of Israel.

The Bible talks about Him shaking His fist over bodies of water, and striking them....

...Many in America couldn’t have cared less about Jews being forced out of their homes and losing everything they have built. Here in Israel, many Jews will be feeling for the Americans who are now facing similar tragedies, tragedies brought about by the forces of heaven rather than through the political power of men.

Can’t you see the link, America? Won’t you see the link?

Here, read the whole thing.

Israel: Jews can't be terrorists

From the Israeli defence ministry via the BBC

Families of Israeli Arabs shot dead on a bus in Galilee are not considered terrorism victims because their killer was Jewish

If they were victims of terrorism then their dependants could receive pensions as a result of their love ones' deaths. An Arab member of the Israeli parliament is seeking an amendment to the law which at present states that "only attacks by enemies of Israel are considered terrorism." Now there's a dilemma for Israel. If they change the law to include the victims of Jewish terrorists, how will they distinguish between Jewish terrorists and Israeli soldiers?

Retaliate first?

Here are two curious reports from the BBC website. In the first, Israel kills five Palestinians in a raid on Tulkarm in the West Bank. According to Israel, the five were wanted in connection with suicide bombings. Further down the report we see that according to Reuters, Palestinian witnesses said that three of those killed were unarmed teenagers and that only two of the five were armed; one from Al-Aqsa Martyrs and one from Islamic Jihad. Funny how the BBC prefers to take its cue from a state that has murdered one of its staff in preference to a prestigious news organisation, but it gets curiouser. The latest report expresses the bewilderment of the Israeli press at the fact that there was a suicide bombing yesterday. Now the first report has Islamic Jihad threatening revenge for Thursday's Israeli raid. None of the Israeli papers quoted by the Beeb in the later report mention the Israeli raid at all. Again the BBC has taken its cue from Israel. Now in my last post on the Muslim Council of Britain I had a comment from the Muslim Anarchist describing the MCB as "useless". It's pro-zionist reporting like this from the BBC that's in danger of giving the MCB a good name.

Arise Sir Iqbal

I first became aware of some rumblings on the part of Muslims over an edition of BBC's Panarama about the Muslim Council of Britain a couple of weeks ago when the Observer ran a story on its front page (and editorial) on 14/8/2005. It worried me when the editorial said:

It is not right that the Muslim Council of Britain, a group that boycotts a ceremony to honour the multi-faith victims. of the Holocaust and often supports hardline views that are far from universally accepted by all Muslims, should monopolise that function [of community representation].

"Multi-faith victims?" That's interesting. Zionist propaganda has it that the only holocaust victims worthy of note were the Jewish victims. Ask most people to define the holocaust and I am sure they would say something like it being when the nazis killed 6 million Jews. I don't think most people see the holocaust, or its commemoration, as being "multi-faith". Are there any Hollywood movies dealing with Roma, gay, communist or slav experiences during the holocaust? At a zionist demonstration back in 2002, Peter Mandelson told the Trafalgar Square faithful that Israel exists because of the holocaust. No gypsy or Jehovah's Witness state exists because of the holocaust. And if Israel exists because of the holocaust and the holocaust is "multi-faith" why is Israel a Jewish state and not a "multi-faith" state? It's particularly annoying that when Israel reopened its holocaust museum, the Guardian reported that

The exhibition for the first time also acknowledges other victims of the Nazis, such as Gypsies and homosexuals, who were ignored in the old museum, established in 1957.

But in spite of that "painful concession"

The Nobel prize laureate and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, told those assembled that the Holocaust was not about man's inhumanity to man, but man's inhumanity to Jews.

And just in case anyone thought that even the zionists would never stoop so low as to use the holocaust for propaganda purposes

Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, said the museum was a testament to the need for Israel to exist.

Now since the Guardian is the sister paper of the Observer, how did an Observer leader writer not notice, in just one fairly recent article, that the zionists clearly see the holocaust as a purely Jewish affair? Bizarre isn't it?

Now to Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain and the MCB's media secretary, Inayat Bunglawala. I was going to avoid a post on this because it was covered quite ably on the Lenin's Tomb blog, here and here. But then I bought Friday's Jewish Chronicle and I am still shocked with the shrill expressions of delight appearing in this zionist rag at the discomfiture of Sir Iqbal Sacranie over the kind of disrespectful grilling to which the known liar, the Chief Rabbi Jonothan Sacks, will never be subjected in our zionist controlled media. First up was a page 2 opinion piece by Jenni Frazer headed MCB Chief wilts under grilling

By turns looking sick and slick Sacranie writhed and wriggled on Ware's hook

Then there was Alex Brummer, the City Editor of the formerly nazi, now zionist (see if you can spot the difference), Daily Mail. His article is headed The BBC has done the country a favour. Maybe, but which country? This article is truly absurd. Brummer denounces the MCB's boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day and emulates the Observer editorial thus

All the victims of the Holocaust, including gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, Catholic priests - and no doubt some Muslims - were properly memorialised, and not just Jews.

But then he went and put his foot in it by lauding Rod Liddle's denunciation of Sacranie's "anti-semitism".

Liddle notes that critics of Israel's policies are usually at pains to point out they are not being anti-Semitic, merely anti-Zionist. It is not the Jews they are against, just the Zionists.

If that is the case, Liddle argues, why on earth would they be uncomfortable spending a few moments remembering the six million people murdered by the Nazis?

"Six million people"? Didn't Brummer say that "gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, Catholic priests - and no doubt some Muslims - were properly memorialised, and not just Jews." But the six million figure is only ever used to state the approximate number of Jews. The fact is that the MCB sees, as so many of us do, the memorialisation of the holocaust as being a specifically Jewish affair because the zionists have promoted and used it as such, and that for the purpose of zionist propaganda.

Anyway, unfortunately there's more. Next we have the editorial headed, simply, Panoramic view which concluded that

This Panorama should be compulsory viewing for the bright sparks at the Home Office who chose to appoint Mr Bunglawala to a task force to tackle extremism among young Muslims - a move as sadly laughable as accusing the BBC of a pro-Israel bias

It's still not over, there's still a letter that begins

Thank heavens for last week's Panorama [enough said]

Well, almost enough because finally we have Daniel Finkelstein (no relation of Norman I hope) on the MCB's boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day and their suggestion of zionist control of the media

It's astonishing that they still can't see that that attendance would have been a matter of simple human decency. It wasn't about Israel....I think this incident, while small in itself, is terribly revealing. The MCB, which is regarded by most non-Muslims as the community's leadership, has put its name to an absurd conspiracy theory alleging Zionist control of the media.

So there we have it. The holocaust is always promoted (even by zionists) as a multi-faith affair and to suggest that decades of zionist propaganda emanating from the mainstream media amounts to zionist control is an insane conspiracy theory that only a, well, Muslim would believe.

Has anyone read The Case for Israel?

Here's a comment to an earlier post

someone has just lent me a copy of "The case for Israel". I didn’t want to buy it. I have browsed through it and it looks just ridiculous. I have literally read about three sentences. One of them is "I have never heard a mere critic of Israel called anti-Semitic". I don’t know what to make of this. Maybe he mixes with extraordinarily unusual Zionists, but I think its likely he’s not telling the truth. My experience is that many (most?) Zionists do this at the drop of a hat. It has even made indirectly on this blog.
anyway, I'm expecting to have an amusing and irritating time reading it. Maybe Finkelstein is right and Dershowitz hasn’t written or even read the book. But I cant imagine it has take Finkelstein too much effort to demolish most of this shoddy bit of polemic. Unfortunately, I think many people will have read it and believed it.
Has anyone read it?

Not me, that's for sure.

I got Jacqueline Rose's The Question of Zion the other day and, maybe I'm too shallow, but I'm finding it kind of pretentious and possibly Judeo-centric.

Iraqi Kurdish "leadership" and Israel

See Lenin's Tomb for details. The comments are worth a look at too.

What 99.5%?

Here's Ha'aretz's Amira Hass in an article titled The other 99.5%. All media focus has been on Gaza and the "painful concession" made by its Jewish former population. Here Amira Hass considers the concessionnaires. It wasn't immediately clear from the title what she meant by 99.5%, either the Palestinian population of Gaza who have been completely ignored this past fortnight or the rest of Palestine itself. It becomes clear when a Jewish tourist asks her if it was possible "that the Israelis ..... are unaware of the injustice they have caused here"

the question was like a breath of fresh air. Here was a Jew who was voicing his opinion on the fate of 1,300,000 people, while the entire world appeared to be focused on every one of the 8,000 Jews who are moving house. Here was a Jew who was moved by what have become dry numbers - 1,719 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip from the end of September 2000 until today; and according to various estimates, some two-thirds of them were unarmed and were not killed in battles or during the course of attempts to attack a military position or a settlement.

Based on figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, of those killed, 379 were children under the age of 18; 236 were younger than 16; 96 were women; and 102 were the objectives of targeted liquidations during the course of which the Israel Defense Forces also killed another 95 individuals who, according to the military too, were "innocent bystanders."

She then quickly returns to typical Israeli wonderment at the true grit of the 0.5%

What talent it takes to live for 35 years in a flourishing park and splendid villas just 20 meters from overcrowded, suffocated refugee camps. What talent it takes to turn on the sprinklers on the lawns, while just across the way, 20,000 other people are dependent on the distribution of drinking water in tankers; to know that you deserve it, that your government will pave magnificent roads for you and neglect (prior to Oslo, before 1994) to the point of destruction the Palestinian infrastructure. What skill it takes to step out of your well-cared-for greenhouse and walk unmoved past 60-year-old fruit-bearing date trees that are uprooted for you, roads that are blocked for you, homes that are demolished for you, the children who are shelled from helicopters and tanks and buried alongside you, for the sake of the safety of your children and the preservation of your super-rights.

For the sake of about half a percent of the population of the Gaza Strip, a Jewish half-percent, the lives of the remaining 99.5 percent were totally disrupted and destroyed - worthy of wonderment indeed. And also amazing is how most of the other Israelis, who did not go themselves to settle the homeland, suffered this reality and did not demand that their government put an end to it - before the Qassams.

This is vintage Hass now. No wonder so many Israelis hate her. Go read the rest (click on the headline above) and, if you've a strong stomach, look at the comments.

Beyond Chutzpah updated update

It appears that Barnes and Noble have relented on their decision to scrap an event for the release of Norman Finkelstein's book Beyond Chutzpah. (Hat-tip David). Here's what Finkelstein had to say about it

GOOD NEWS! Barnes and Noble has agreed to reschedule the store event for Beyond Chutzpah. Finkelstein wishes to thank everyone who expressed support, and B&N for respecting the opinions of its customers.

Good news indeed.

But no so good from Harvard Bookstore - not sure if the commenter (should that be commentor?) who posted this on 17/5 is the same David as above but hat-tip David anyway.

Dear _____,

Thank you for your note relating to Professor Norman Finkelstein and his book Beyond Chutzpah. Our intention here is to clarify the situation to which Professor Finkelstein refers on his website and clear up what we believe are mistaken assumptions stemming from that posting.

Harvard Book Store was contacted by University of California Press in late April and asked to host an event with Professor Finkelstein. We corresponded with the Press regarding the book, and discussed holding an event on September 29th. However, by late May, the controversy between Professor Finkelstein and Professor Alan Dershowitz had taken on a distinctly personal cast. After seeing via the press that both men’s books had become inseparable from the charges each was making about the other, and reluctant to put Harvard Book Store in the middle of a personal feud, we informed University of California Press that we had decided not to sponsor an event. We then worked with them to find another Boston-area venue, without success.

Harvard Book Store supports Professor Finkelstein’s right to free speech. Over the years, we have carried seven of his books. Our order for Beyond Chutzpah was placed in January 2005, when the University of California Press announced its publication. That order stands and we will continue to carry Professor Finkelstein’s books.

The decision not to host Professor Finkelstein was made solely by the staff at Harvard Book Store. We have not been contacted by Professor Dershowitz, by anyone acting on his behalf, or by Harvard University, in any way relating to Professor Finkelstein. Harvard Book Store is an independent bookseller, unaffiliated with Harvard University.

Harvard Book Store’s devotion to an exchange of ideas is undiluted. We choose not to hold an event with either of these two scholars at this time, because we feel that the personal nature of their feud has overshadowed the real intellectual and political debate at the heart of their books. This fall, we will feature a display of books on the breadth of dialogue about the relationship between Israel and Palestine--both Beyond Chutzpah and The Case for Peace will be included in this display.

If you are from an organization that is interested in sponsoring an event with Professor Finkelstein, please contact Alexandra Dahne, Publicity Director of the University of California Press at alex.dahne@ucpress.edu.

Thank you again for contacting us. We hope we’ve answered some of your concerns and questions about this difficult decision. We regret that we are not able to respond individually to each of you.

Frank Kramer, Owner
Harvard Book Store
frank@harvard.com

Cindy Sheehan

I thought I ought to take a look at the case of Cindy Sheehan and the article linked above in the New York Times.

Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother of Casey Sheehan, a 24 year old American soldier killed in Iraq, has come under attack from the usual right-wing forces for camping outside the Bush residence in Crawford, Texas by way of an anti-war protest. One bright spark at the New York Times has called the attack "Swift boating".

Once Ms. Sheehan could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character assassination is the Karl Rove tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by his media surrogates, whenever the White House is confronted by a critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift Boating is especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had "other priorities" during Vietnam.

The article, if it's to be believed, points to a collapse in support for the Iraq war among the American public. It's also a resumé of the various victims of Bush smears over the reasoning behind and the conduct of the war

But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is yet another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of political support for the Iraq war.

When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke's character, then we stop talking about the administration's pre-9/11 inattentiveness to terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an insubordinate plant of the "liberal media," we forget the Pentagon's abysmal failure to give our troops adequate armor (a failure that persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we focus on Joseph Wilson's wife, we lose the big picture of how the administration twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam's nonexistent W.M.D.'s.

The hope this time was that we'd change the subject to Cindy Sheehan's "wacko" rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups that have attached themselves to her like barnacles. That way we would forget about her dead son. But if much of the 24/7 media has taken the bait, much of the public has not.

There's more on why the "sliming" [yuk] of Cindy Sheehan hasn't been working.

The public knows that what matters this time is Casey Sheehan's story, not the mother who symbolizes it. Cindy Sheehan's bashers, you'll notice, almost never tell her son's story. They are afraid to go there because this young man's life and death encapsulate not just the noble intentions of those who went to fight this war but also the hubris, incompetence and recklessness of those who gave the marching orders.

so the generalised smears haven't been working. So now what? Have you guessed? Accuse her of anti-semitism that's what. Here's what Cindy Sheehan is alleged to have written, though I gather there is some controversy about that

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full-well that my son, my family, this nation, and this world were betrayed by George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agenda after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy...not for the real reason, because the Arab-Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy. That hasn't changed since America invaded and occupied Iraq...in fact it has gotten worse.

Well the right-wing blogs are apoplectic, as are Christopher Hitchens and David Horowitz. On one blog someone wondered why the MSM (mainstream media) hadn't picked up on this "Cindy is anti-semitic" business. I must say I was surprised that Frank Rich didn't mention it. Also if you google "cindy sheehan" "anti-semitism" you get lots of blogs and fringe type sites but not much mainstream.

Update - I have just received an email purporting to come from Cindy Sheehan. She says that she didn't write the "offending" email. Hmm. And while I'm here, Bat sent this link to Information Clearing House where Alexander Cockburn "incidentally also blows six shades of shit out of Hitchens" on the subject of Cindy Sheehan.

Christopher Hitchens attacked Cindy Sheehan, of course. Called her a LaRouchie! Why? No reason given. He obviously reckons "LaRouchie" is one of those let-her-deny-it slurs, like "anti-Semite". Let's suppose Hitchens was writing in similarly nasty terms about Hitchens. He'd probably remember that in 1999 Edward Jay Epstein publicly recalled a dinner in the Royalton Hotel in New York where Epstein said Hitchens had doubted the Holocaust was quite what it's cracked up to be. In Epstein's memory Hitchens belittled the idea that six million Jews died, said the number was much less.

So, under Hitchens' rules of polemical engagement, was does that make Hitchens? A holocaust denier, a guy who has Faurisson and David Irving's books under his pillow. A Jew hater, or--if you believe his sudden discovery (privately denied by his own brother on at least one occasion) at a mature age that his mother was Jewish--a Jewish self-hater. Of course Hitchens revels in Cindy Sheehan's denial that she said in an email that her son died in a war for Israel. Hitchens writes that this denial makes her "a shifty fantasist". What would Hitchens, who's an on-the-record admirer ("a great historian") of the work of Nazi chronicler David Irving say about Hitchens' shifty denial of Epstein's recollection? What fun he would have with the witnesses the panic-stricken Hitchens, well aware that "holocaust denier" is not part of the resume of a Vanity Fair columnist, hastily mustered for his defense, a woman and a man present at that famous dinner in the Royalton. One his close friend, Anna Wintour, the present editor of Vogue and the other, Brian McNally, a longtime friend and business associate.

What a truly disgusting sack of shit Hitchens is. A guy who called Sid Blumenthal one of his best friends and then tried to have him thrown into prison for perjury; a guy who waited till his friend Edward Said was on his death bed before attacking him in the Atlantic Monthly; a guy who knows perfectly well the role Israel plays in US policy but who does not scruple to flail Cindy Sheehan as a LaRouchie and anti-Semite because, maybe, she dared mention the word Israel.

Next year Jerusalem?

The Telegraph reports on how George Bush's new appointment to the UN (together with "Jewish groups") has protested about a UN group promoting withdrawal from the rest of the occupied territories in the wake of the so-called disengagement.

Jewish groups reacted with fury to banners, mugs, bumper stickers and T-shirts bearing the slogan "Today Gaza, Tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem" which bore the UN Development Programme logo.

Israelis view the slogan, and particularly the reference to Jerusalem, as an aspiration to destroy the Jewish state. [then why didn't they say "tomorrow Tel Aviv"?]

And what about the Jewish groups who claim to want Israel out of the occupied territories? Apparently the Anti-defamation league got in on the act as well, with Abe Foxman saying that it was

inappropriate for the UNDP, as an impartial global development organisation, to fund such a political and provocative message

Without getting into how a UN group echoing many a UN resolution by way of stickers and mugs etc is provocative, what on earth is the head of a group founded to protect Jews from defamation doing linking Jews in general with the occupation? Perhaps this is why some people call the ADL, the Anti-definition league.