Hadley Freeman accuses George Galloway of Antisemitism

I didn't see the BBC's Question Time (#BBCQT or @BBCQT on Twitter) with George Galloway and Jonathan Freedland.  I could have watched it on iPlayer or some such but I find GG and JF pretty cringe-worthy.

Jonathan Cook wrote an article about it slagging Jonathan Freedland's behaviour in the proceedings and calling him The Guardian's "resident antisemitism obsessive".  Now I would have preferred "resident zionist" because "antisemitism obsessive" could imply that he is obsessed with genuine cases of racism against Jews and this of course would be wrong, Freedland has quite a lot of form for false allegations of antisemitism.

Well another resident zionist at The Guardian, Hadley Freeman, didn't like the "resident antisemitism obsessive" jibe either and got into a bit of a Twitter exchange with Glenn Greenwald about it.

@ggreenwald Yeah, he lost me at "resident anti-Semitism obsessive" and the Palin-esque "liberal media elite." As tho Galloway is not "elite"
— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) February 10, 2015

Hadley Freeman also has form for false allegations of antisemitism over campaigning against Israel.

Now at some point George Galloway enters the Twitter fray.  I should say I came to all this very late when someone drew my attention to it when the hubbub was dying down.  I always find Twitter hard to follow beyond one tweet and a reply but here's the first tweet from GG that I noticed:

@HadleyFreeman @ggreenwald you must withdraw this tweet or face the legal consequences
— George Galloway (@georgegalloway) February 10, 2015

Wow! What tweet? Let's have a look at Hadley Freeman's tweets.  Too late, look:

@georgegalloway Seriously? I'm sure our lawyers have better things to do... To save us both a day in court, I'm happy to delete it.
— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) February 10, 2015

But someone challenged Freeman over what she had claimed in her tweet:

Can @HadleyFreeman cite 'plenty of' examples to back this up about @georgegalloway? cc: @ggreenwald @Jonathan_K_Cook pic.twitter.com/5cdrEbf1gZ
— Media Lens (@medialens) February 10, 2015

As far as I can tell Freeman hasn't risen to the challenge of finding Galloway saying and doing "plenty of things that cross the line from anti-Israel to antisemitic" and Galloway is insisting that he is taking legal action because her deletion was too late.

So what will come of this?  It would be interesting blowback if Jonathan Freedland had to refrain from his negative hasbara because of the dishonesty of one of his zionist comrades and colleagues at The Guardian.

Galloway misrepresents BDS as does BICOM

Now look what George Galloway has gone and done.  Admittedly there are supporters of BDS who support Galloway's refusal to speak to an Israeli recently but the general BDS idea is better summed up on the BDS Movement website:

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition of Palestinian unions, mass organisations, refugee networks and NGOs that leads and and sets the guidelines for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, supports all principled action in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality that is in line with universal human rights and international law.

In its 2005 BDS Call, Palestinian civil society has called for a boycott of Israel, its complicit institutions, international corporations that sustain its occupation, colonization and apartheid, and official representatives of the state of Israel and its complicit institutions. BDS does not call for a boycott of individuals because she or he happens to be Israeli or because they express certain views. Of course, any individual is free to decide who they do and do not engage with.

The global BDS movement has consistently adopted a rights-based approach and an anti-racist platform that rejects all forms of racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

These guidelines and the fact that BDS has been initiated and is led by Palestinian civil society are major reasons behind the rapid growth and success that the BDS movement has enjoyed around the world.

Now take a look at what BICOM, the Britain Israel Communication and Research Centre are saying in the Huffington Post:

What is so abhorrent to him about conversing with an Israeli? Why is he so adamant that the Israeli should not be seen; that the Israeli should not be heard?

Perhaps he is afraid that if people hear from Israelis first hand, it will belie the demonic image he would like to create of them. 

Now that's just plain silly because the mainstream media always puts Israel and Israelis in the most favourable light possible and there's not a whole lot Galloway can do about that.  And, the writer of the HuffPo piece, Toby Greene, comes close to admitting as much:

Galloway himself is of course irrelevant. His repeated, ridiculous acts of buffoonery are a gift to those who reject his opinions and a liability to anyone who might share them.

So what's the problem from the Israel lobby perspective?

Unfortunately, Galloway is the thin end of a more disturbing wedge. There is a small but energetic movement to silence the voices of Israelis and prevent them from being heard more widely. Most people completely reject this movement, but they are nonetheless succeeding at times to impose their will.

On Wednesday, Israel's deputy ambassador, Alon Roth-Snir, was prevented from speaking at Essex University, where he had been invited by the Department of Government, and forced to leave the campus. This month the student union at Oxford University is considering whether or not to endorse a motion to promote a boycott of Israel.

Such attempts to silence Israelis extend even to Israeli academic work and cultural expressions that have nothing to do with politics. In the past year there have been attempts to disrupt Israeli dance performances, plays and concerts, carried out by individuals who simply cannot stand the sight or sound of an Israeli.

Now this is nonsense.  The issue here is the extent to which an individual or group can be said to represent the Israeli state.  An Israeli diplomat is obviously a representative of the Israeli state.  I know of no other diplomat from a notoriously human rights abusive state being invited to address a university in the UK.  That doesn't mean it hasn't happened but it seems unlikely.  A dance troupe from Israel might be harder to discern as boycottable but this is the first paragraph of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel's call to boycott the troupe that Greene is referring to, ie, Batsheva:

The Batsheva Dance Company of Tel Aviv is touring the US and Canada in January, February, and March, 2009. A recipient of public financing since the 1990s, the dance troupe is clearly an Israeli apartheid cultural institution. Writing October 26, 2008, in The Independent of London, Jenny Gilbert reports that the dance company is "funded by Israel's government, its performers include none of Arab extraction, and it is 'proud to be considered Israel's leading ambassador.'"

Read the whole thing and see for sure that clearly this isn't a case of people being unable to "stand the sight or sound of an Israeli".

Galloway did manage to convey that impression to non-initiates but it's hard to believe that there is anyone at BICOM who doesn't know the general thrust of the BDS Movement.

George Galloway can't take the foot out of his mouth.

George Galloway has a tendency to draw circles around himself and then argue that this is where the truth is. This time he took upon himself to define what BDS is, and did it in the Bull-in-China-Shop manner that is his trademark.

He was apparently invited to an Oxford debate club to debate a Zionist. He agreed. I have a lot of respect for people who are able to participate in such debates calmly. I don't. Of course it would be nice if we could just not talk to racists, but sometimes the situation requires engaging them, so one cannot strategically always avoid participating in such fora where racism is being defended and even with official representatives of the state.

Then it turned out that the person who was to take the other side of the debate is Israeli. Galloway stormed out, explaining later that,

I refused this evening at Oxford University to debate with an Israeli, a supporter of the apartheid state of Israel. The reason is simple: no recognition, no normalisation. Just boycott, divestment and sanctions, until the apartheid state is defeated. I never debate with Israelis nor speak to their media. (The Guardian)

Noble sentiment. Unfortunately pinned on the wrong argument.

Needless to say, that statement immediately prompted accusations of racism against him. That's a load of tosh. Racism is a structure of discrimination and the historic prejudices that accompany it. Israelis are not the victims of racism as Israelis. So being personally boycotted by Galloway does not make one a victim of racism. At worst it might be called "to be given a taste of one's own medicine".

The Western media however has a fetish with "reverse racism." so obviously they would echo those accusations and give them credibility. As activists, we should expect to be called "racists" at every opportunity when we challenge mainstream racism. That's a good reason not to make it too easy for those who want to misrepresent us.

And that's the problem, however, misrepresentation, and also lack of logic and consistency. Normalization is accepting the legitimacy of Israel's apartheid practices and adopting a "business as usual" attitude towards them. To the extent that a political debate is real, that is, that it takes place in a context with consequences (for example, reaction to news), it is not normalization even if one is debating the news with the IDF spokesperson. In so far that there was normalization involved in this particular case, it consisted in the form of this kind of club debate itself, a kind of sportive entertainment in which the audience comes to see two gladiators exchange blows and to judge who was a better "advocate." One could argue that participation in such a debate constitutes indeed normalization, because the form of the debate itself is apolitical, a form of entertainment. In that sense, such debates are no different than putting together an Israeli film and a Palestinian film and calling it a "multicultural" evening. But if that was the case, the debate constituted normalization because of the way it was structured, not because of the identity of the speakers.

Galloway however made it about that, defining normalization as "debating with Israelis." He further described the refusal to debate with Israelis as "Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions". The BDS National Committee issued a statement directly clarifying that neither boycotting Israelis for the fact that they are Israelis, nor boycotting racists for their racist views, was what BDS strategy consisted in (although, everybody can decide when, if and how they engage with either):

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition of Palestinian unions, mass organisations, refugee networks and NGOs that leads and and sets the guidelines for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, supports all principled action in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality that is in line with universal human rights and international law.

In its 2005 BDS Call, Palestinian civil society has called for a boycott of Israel, its complicit institutions, international corporations that sustain its occupation, colonization and apartheid, and official representatives of the state of Israel and its complicit institutions. BDS does not call for a boycott of individuals because she or he happens to be Israeli or because they express certain views. Of course, any individual is free to decide who they do and do not engage with.
The global BDS movement has consistently adopted a rights-based approach and an anti-racist platform that rejects all forms of racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

These guidelines and the fact that BDS has been initiated and is led by Palestinian civil society are major reasons behind the rapid growth and success that the BDS movement has enjoyed around the world. (http://www.bdsmovement.net/2013/bds-movement-position-on-boycott-of-individuals-10679 )

There may have been good reasons to agree to participate in that Oxford debate. And there may have been good reasons not to. Making it about the fact that the speaker has a certain passport, or about the fact that the organizers did not informe Galloway in advance about the nationality of the participants, is not a good reason for anything. It is an example of needlessly feeding the media reinforcement for its already existing prejudices, an own goal. It is still Galloway's right to choose to speak or not to speak on the same podium with whomever. But it would be nice if he didn't insist on confusing his personal flair for drama with principles.