Comparing Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto at The Guardian or not....

I've just left the following comment using the name, Burgher (long story) at The Guardian's article on Ed Miliband's criticism of David Cameron's silence on Israel's attack on Gaza

burgher

03 August 2014 9:15am

Is The Guardian deleting any comments that compare Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto, Israel to Nazi Germany or Zionism to Nazism?

Someone told me that comments that do any of the above are being routinely disappeared.

Let's see if anyone answers by saying "no" or by deleting the comment.

UPDATE: 10:00 am, Comment still in place and it's generated some replies, mostly to say that it does appear to be Guardian policy to delete such comments but none of the replies have come from the mods.  I'll check in again later.

When Israeli Hasbara serves the Palestinian cause

The Guardian's Comment is Free saw fit to publish some ludicrous hasbara in the form of an article by Dani Dayan.  Read the article and you might not need telling that Dani Dayan is some kind of ambassador at large specifically to promote the occupation.  Here's The Guardian's description of him:

Dani Dayan is chief foreign envoy of the Yesha Council of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria

Ok, so The Guardian describes him slightly differently from the way I do.  But rather than torture myself and yourselves by going through the article, here's one comment out of the now closed 565 comments that sums it up:

daysofhope

08 June 2013 6:46pm

Recommended

22

This article serves the Palestinian cause.

There can be very few readers today who are unaware of the facts regarding Israel's conquest, occupation and colonisation of remaining Palestinian territory. For the author to present a wholly fictive account of this process can only remind his public of the truth. The bizarre, parallel universe flavour of his narrative includes the long discredited claim- abandoned by Israeli officials themselves- that Israel was attacked in 1967, and that their military faced overwhelming odds in defeating the Arab armies. Who today even bothers with a myth of this type? Israel struck first in a co-ordinated pre-emptive manner, using superior force, technology and tactics. The war was over in six days.

As for Carter's statement that he could not foresee a dismantling of the settlement in question, nothing in his remarks indicates a sense of rejoicing. The tone is one closer to despair. He understands the colonisation process to be one of the most intractable obstacles to a just solution to the conflict.

In this article we are treated to the spectacle of a man talking into a mirror and imagining his reflection as the world. That's a measure of where Zionists stand today. Their propaganda becomes ever more revealing of the futility of "constructive engagement" with them. Whether they're even able to understand what it's like not to be them, not to live as they do, is an open question.

But as long as Western media outlets are willing to extend a welcome to the sort of grotesque apologetics offered by Major Dayan, the Palestinian cause will benefit.

While FIFA disregards calls to move its football tournament out of Israel, this article is a very timely own goal.

There's a rumour that The Guardian is now succumbing more than ever to Zionist pressure to tow a softer line on criticism of Israel or, put another way, to tow the Zionist line.  The article by Dani Dayan together with his benign self-description avoiding any hint of the occupation, of racist rule or of illegality, suggests that the rumour is true.

Can you be anti-apartheid but pro-zionist?

Well you can certainly try if your name's Benjamin Pogrund. You see there's been a little wave of panic sweeping over the zionist movement since a poll established that rather a lot of Israelis favour a formalised apartheid system if they found themselves in a Jewish minority situation.  This is rather like saying that if the ethnic cleansing lets them down they could get really nasty.

But anyway, Benjamin Pogrund was born and grew up in the old apartheid South Africa and now he has exercised his privilege as a Jew to live in occupied Palestine, aka, The State of Israel.  Here he is in The Guardian's Comment is Free section explaining how his personal background equips him for this rather tricky hasbara exercise:

I know about apartheid. I was born in South Africa and spent 26 years as a journalist specialising in reporting apartheid; I have also written several books about it. I only left South Africa because my newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, of which I was then deputy editor, was closed down by its commercial owners under pressure from the government. We paid the price for being the country's leading voice against apartheid.

I also am familiar with Israel. I have lived in Jerusalem since 1997 and for more than 12 years was founder director of the Yakar Center for Social Concern whose purpose was to promote dialogue between Jews and Christians, Jews and Muslims, and Israelis and Palestinians. I was surprised by the survey's findings: could it really be true that most Jews in Israel support apartheid?

Ultimately he is saying that Israel isn't an apartheid state and that its Jewish population doesn't particularly want it to be and he should know because he lived under apartheid as a dissident working for a dissident newspaper. As luck would have it, Ben White has made quite a speciality out of exposing the apartheid nature of the State of Israel before and after the occupation of 1967 and here he is on the al Jazeera website explaining what Benjamin Pogrund ought to know. It is not addressed to Pogrund but it could be. Here's a little taster:

Firstly, a clarification about terminology. To talk about Israeli apartheid is not to suggest a precise equivalence with the policies of the historic regime in South Africa. Rather, apartheid is a crime under international law independent of any comparison (see here, here, here, and here). As former UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard put it in the foreword to my first book: "It is Israel's own version of a system that has been universally condemned."

It is impossible to understand this "system" without remembering that its foundations were laid by the ethnic cleansing that took place in the Nakba. With the establishment of Israel in 1948, up to 90 per cent of the Palestinians who would have been inside the new state were expelled, their properties confiscated, and their return prevented. As these refugees were denied citizenship and their right to return ignored, Israel passed legislation to open up the new borders to Jews everywhere.

 Benjamin Pogrund has some form for this defence of zionism using his former opposition to apartheid.

Guardian repeals banana skin

I didn't think anything about this Joshua Treviño guy when Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada ran a post denouncing The Guardian's dishonesty in changing an announcement from the appointment of Treviño as a "correspondent" in its "US editorial team" to a mere "commentator" in its "commentary team" whilst The Guardian was demanding a retraction and apology from Abunimah for reporting the original announcement correctly. I didn't think that much about it when Tony Greenstein ran several posts denouncing the appointment.

It looked to me that The Guardian had just overstepped it a tad in trying to balance out some of its leftish types with a rightist.  After all they've had David Aaronovitch and Julie Burchill on the books before and they still have Nick Cohen at The Observer.  

But really the guy was completely off of my radar and then a fairly regular JSF commenter called Mooser said, off topic at the time, "The Guardian just hired Josh Trevino? Is that possible?" I simply replied with what I knew, "Apparently but they've already downgraded him from editorial to commentary."

Now I just noticed Mondoweiss reporting that Treviño has been ditched altogether by The Guardian.  The stated reason is that he failed to declare an interest when he wrote this Cif piece.

The Guardian keeps slipping on these banana skins but the way they've handled this one has been so shabby Charlie Pottins is asking, "Guardian does the right thing but is it the right way?" Actually, if you read nothing else about this whole sorry saga, read Charlie's post at Random Pottins.  It's a very handy round-up.

Antony Lerman says "Enough already!" in The Guardian and Mike Marqusee says "Enough already!" to The Guardian

Two very different issues only related by my own perception.

Antony Lerman is saying, "Enough already!" to the Jewish establishment in the UK and not for the first time.  He has an article today in  the Guardian's Comment is Free section on line titled,  The abuse of dissenting Jews is shameful.

The Jewish establishment in the UK – which includes the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, the Zionist Federation and numerous private groupings of the great and the good – is highly experienced at this. I saw it happen in the 1980s when communal leaders sought to make life impossible for the small but highly active radical Jewish Socialists' Group. And I became a target for such treatment myself when I was appointed head of the influential Jewish Policy Research (JPR) thinktank for a second time in 2005, an experience I recall in my book The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist.

By then I had served the community professionally for 26 years. A Zionist for decades, I was one no longer. But I wished passionately that Israel would become a democratic state for all its citizens, end the occupation, recognise the Palestinians' right of return, and acknowledge that Israel's establishment in 1948 was a Nakba, a catastrophe, for the Palestinians. I had no intention of using JPR as a platform for advocating these views but rather made one of my principal aims creating space for Jewish critical thinking and debate about how Jews should relate to Israel, to its policies towards Palestinians and to the serious impact of its actions on European Jews. I believed that only through open and civil discussion of these issues could the necessary change in diaspora Jewish opinion occur.

I looked for the "article history" which used to be a feature of The Guardian's on line articles but they no longer have it so I don't know if the article appeared in print.  It made me think of a complaint Mike Marqusee made recently about how The Guardian exploits journalists by relegating their articles to Comment is free.  Here's Mike on MikeMarqusee.com:

I submitted the article (below), on the tension between the Olympic packaging and the reality of sports, to the Guardian Comment page, hoping that some of it at least would find its way into print. The editors liked the piece and asked me to cut it down to the appropriate length, which I was happy to do. Then, without consulting with me, they stuck it on the Cif website (not the print edition) under the crass and inapposite headline “Spare us the jingoistic Olympic hype.”

Inevitably readers responded to the headline rather than the article, and within hours there were hundreds of angry posts abusing me for being a killjoy and / or ‘anti-British’. The abuse is what you get for contributing anything contentious to Cif and it goes with the territory. But in this case it was made even more pointless than usual by the way the Guardian packaged the article.

Of course, this is only a minor irritation. Editors reserve the right to write headlines and I accept that, though I do think they have an obligation to write headlines that reflect accurately the content and tone of the articles.

There is however a more important issue involved, which is the Cif website and how it treats contributors in general.

Some time ago I resolved not to contribute articles to Cif (as opposed to the print edition) because the rate of pay was so insulting and so injurious to journalism. Many contributors are not paid at all and those who are, including me, receive £90 for 800-1200 words, a small fraction of the minimum NUJ rate, and not remotely a reflection of the labour, skill, research, and accumulated expertise involved in creating the article. I know that for many free-lance writers, including myself, £90 is not to be sneezed at, but the long term cost to our dignity and our craft is just too high. We all want our writings to be circulated as widely as possible, but the Guardian is exploiting that desire to secure virtually cost-free copy. This copy is then used to attract readers and generate revenues for the Guardian, none of which trickles back to the contributors.

If free-lancers enjoyed the slightest degree of industrial muscle, the Cif scam would have been busted long before now. All I can say to my NUJ comrades on the Guardian staff is that you shouldn’t be letting this happen.

There are, of course, other issues with Cif.

PS, In his article, Antony Lerman mentions but modestly doesn't link to his book, The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist.

Pretext yes, context no

There's an article in today's Guardian print edition and of course on line titled, LSE nazi games in context. But don't expect context. Rather, an article with a news peg about some students from the LSE playing a nazi themed game resulting in a fight in which  a Jewish student got his nose broken has been used as the pretext for a bogus attack on Palestine solidarity activism and criticism of Israel.

You know early on where the article is going with an ahistorical passage such as this:

It is a sickness that emerges from generation to generation, always with a new resentment to prosecute – the murder of the Christ, well poisoning, usury, the Jewish invention of communism or its opposite libel, Jewish world domination through capitalism, and now a Jewish state that defends itself, kills Palestinians, and is corrupted. The crimes are different, but the criminal is always the same. It is just a shame the Jew from the LSE didn't have bigger fists, but I would always suggest that Jews avoid the Alps.

It's not just the pathetic attempt ("Jews avoid the Alps") of the writer, Tanya Gold, playing Woody Allen, that is at issue here.  She managed to sneak in a hasbara nugget, "a Jewish state that defends itself". But there's more.

Antisemitic discourse is now mainstream and to say it all comes from the crimes of the Jewish state feels disingenuous and a denial of the past. Antisemitism is too old to sprout anew from nothing. Leftwing antisemites despise Israel, but are less vocal on the crimes of other oppressive states (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia). They call it "whataboutery", and say that any defence of Israel is propaganda.

It is whataboutery and worse since Israel's existence is predicated on its crimes and defence of any state is propaganda it's just in the State of Israel's case it is always false propaganda,

But still there's more:

The incidents mount up – the heckling of an Israeli orchestra, the graffiti on university walls, the demand that Jews denounce Israel if they wish to be accepted in polite society, the plays and TV films written without context, the violence against Orthodox Jews (visible Jews), the sale of antisemitic toys in Poland, the terrible fact that 12,000 Facebook users think to mock the Holocaust, not lament it.

 Goodness! When did heckling musical hasbara become antisemitic? And which plays or films are being referred to here? I'm guessing she means one play, Seven Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill and probably only one tv programme, The Promise by Peter Kosminsky.  Nothing antisemitic about either but I can't think of anything else and Tanya doesn't say.

But what Tanya Gold has done here is write an article intended to defend the State of Israel and to smear the critics. The article is only ostensibly about antisemitism. And people wonder why real antisemites like, eg, Gilad Atzmon, are given a free pass. The fact is that the bad faith allegation of antisemitism has been overdone. People are now confused and Tanya Gold's crying of wolf isn't intended to help.