Is it now antisemitic to accuse Jonathan Freedland of "disgusting subliminal nastiness"?

I ask because I just saw an Twitter exchange between Linda Grant and the Community Security Trust's Dave Rich.  See here:

Jeremy Corbyn: The Outsider | VICE News - watching this I now know Labour's antisemitism problem comes from the top https://t.co/phhqs6V6v7

— Linda Grant (@lindasgrant) June 1, 2016

I just watched maybe half of the excruciating thing and all I could see that touched on anything to do with the antisemitism malarkey was Corbyn talking to Seumas Milne about Freedland.  I thought accusing someone as nasty and lacking in integrity as Freedland was pretty fair comment. But here's Dave Rich of the CST:

@lindasgrant if Milne was a mensch he would have replied "no, I've known him for years he's a decent guy we just disagree." But he didn't.

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) June 1, 2016

So I'm not sure if Linda Grant is accusing Corbyn or Milne or both of antisemitism but in the little that I watched I couldn't see anything else they could have been referring to.

If I'm right, Linda Grant is saying that to dislike Freedland, who many of us believe is a thoroughly dishonest nasty piece of work, is antisemitic and that Dave Rich thought that Milne would be a better man if he simply passed off smearing Israel's critics and supporting racist war criminals as just little quirky blind spots of an otherwise decent chap, Jonathan Freedland.

I think Linda Grant and Dave Rich make a large part of their living yabbering on about Israel and antisemitism.   I don't know much else about them. Maybe there isn't anything else to know.

Guardian Opinion Editor denies all knowledge of Guardian Editorial Opinion

An utterly bogus hasbara piece on The Guardian website titled The Guardian view on the war of knives in Israel and the West Bank and subtitled Editorial prompted an interesting twitter exchange.

Here are some chunks from the editorial:

For openers:

Off-duty soldiers go jogging with submachine guns slung across their chests. Men and women who have never owned a firearm hesitate at the door of gun shops after the laws on weapon ownership were relaxed. People eat at home, and plan their trips to the supermarket or their bus journeys to avoid the places where the Palestinian stabbing attacks, which have surprised and frightened Israelis in recent weeks, seem most likely.

The issue here is "the Palestinian stabbing attacks" and the Israeli response.  Palestinian actions couldn't possibly themselves be a response.

On the Arab side, parents worry that a loved son or daughter will decide to trade their own life for that of an Israeli, or that a family member will be caught in crossfire.

Not deliberately killed by Israelis simply for being Palestinian.

at the last count, nine Israelis dead, although with more than 60 Palestinians killed as armed Israelis reacted to the attacks or tried to forestall attacks they thought imminent. The Palestinian dead include some who were demonstrators, not perpetrators, some who were killed in error, and some who just got in the way. 

Wow, a concession to the idea that Palestinians might, just might, get killed by Israelis simply for demonstrating.

Well it was only a small concession and it was soon marred by this little gem:

For one thing it is hard to imagine that the influence of jihad movements beyond Israel’s and Palestine’s borders has not played a part in inflaming young minds, a development that must be bad news for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Which brings us to Twitter and a tweet from Ben White:

.@guardian: "the influence of [regional] jihad movements" has "played a part in inflaming young [Palestinian] minds" https://t.co/hTwAnNGNp9

— Ben White (@benabyad) October 29, 2015

He quickly followed up with a question to Jonathan Freedland whose profile page at The Guardian reads:

Jonathan Freedland is the Guardian's executive editor, Opinion, overseeingComment is free, editorials and long reads.

Here's the question:

Just wondering, but perhaps @freedland can provide some insight into how such an 'observation' made it into the editorial.

— Ben White (@benabyad) October 29, 2015

And here's Jonathan Freedland's response:

@benabyad nope. Am on holiday for half term this week.

— Jonathan Freedland (@Freedland) October 29, 2015

Then David Aaronovitch appears in the thread:

@Freedland But Jonathan it must have been you because, well, you know.... @benabyad

— David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) October 29, 2015

"Well, you know..", as Ben White points out, it's in Jonathan Freedland's job description and he often opines in The Guardian and elsewhere in favour of Israel.  I'm fed up with embedding, copying and pasting but you can follow the thread for yourself where you'll see that Aaro seems to be saying that there are lots of people at The Guardian with the same JD and who write about Palestine.  But I think there is only one person with the JD which states, that the person in question is the Guardian's executive editor, Opinion, overseeing Comment is free, editorials and long reads and that is Jonathan Freedland.

Now surely that makes it fair to assume that Jonathan Freedland was responsible for an editorial comment at The Guardian or if he's not directly responsible he could "provide some insight into how such an 'observation' made it into the editorial."

He claims that he can't.

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.

Guardian fills (un)subscriber with disgust

Here's a letter to the Guardian from my friend Deborah Maccoby to her former friends at The Guardian:

Dear Sir,

As a signatory of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, I am so outraged by your decision to publish the infamous Eli Wiesel/Shmuely Boteach ad that I have decided to make a protest by cancelling my subscription to the Guardian.  I do this with great regret, as I have been a long-standing Guardian reader and subscriber.  I switched many years ago from reading the Times to reading what seemed to me to be the much more interesting and informative pages of the Guardian. But even the Times refused to publish this ad.  

Freedom of speech does have some limits in a newspaper with civilised standards. The ad includes the sentence:  "It is a battle of civilisation versus barbarism".  This ad is barbaric.   After 1,400 Palestinian civilians, including over 400 children, have been massacred in an utterly unnecessary and avoidable onslaught, in what is a war crime and a crime against humanity, it is an outrage to publish an ad that effectively exculpates from responsibility the Israel soldiers who did the killing.  Even the Murdoch press could not stomach this ad, so why did the Guardian publish it?

Deborah Maccoby

Sadly there's a crop of letters in today's Guardian all (most anyway) making the same bogus argument that they wouldn't know what the zionists were saying if the advert hadn't been published.  That's absurd, the reason there were so many complaints before the ad was run was because the ad had been shown elsewhere so its content was known and The Guardian had already reported on it.  Of course, if they want to know broadly what Zionists are saying all they have to do is read Jonathan Freedland.

Minor BDS Victory over Gaza has Zionist Lunatics taking over Guardian Asylum

The Guardian is sinking fast under a welter of Zionist penned articles wantonly blurring distinctions between opinion and fact and fact and falsehood.

It all began with a calm factual article about the UK Jewish Film Festival's withdrawal from The Tricycle Theatre because of the latter's objection to the receipt of £1,400 from the Israeli embassy.  There were Zionist reports of how the Tricycle had simply banned this generalist Jewish festival.  In fact the Jewish Chronicle has a front page article now with the headline, Film festival BANNED, in spite of the facts of the case now being well known.

There has been tremendous coverage of this throughout the print media and on-line but the Zionists are in such a panic they are swarming all over The Guardian to smear BDS supporters and the Tricycle people as antisemitic.

The first I noticed was an editorial that could only have been written by Jonathan Freedland who, a friend of mine told me, has considerable editorial influence at The Guardian.  I know The Guardian is often described as anti-Israel by Israel advocates but there are lines it rarely crosses so as to stay on the right side of the Zionist movement.  And of course, without getting into details, how can it be anti-Israel if Jonathan Freedland writes for it and wields editorial influence?

Anyway, the editorial is headed, The Guardian view on Gaza and the rise of antisemitism.*  I just did a word search for Gaza because I just had a feeling he wasn't writing about Gaza at all.  I was right. The word Gaza doesn't appear in the text.  Yup, in an article supposedly about Gaza and antisemitism Freedland has fulfilled an important part of the Zionist dream: he's made Gaza disappear.  Actually, he does nod to the slaughter by reference to the (you guessed it) "conflict between Israel and Hamas". 

He writes mostly about something that wasn't antisemitic at all and that's the Tricycle saga though he also detours to France and Germany where he writes of what would be genuine cases of antisemitism if only they could be verified by a more reliable source than himself.  Apparently it is true that synagogues have been attacked in France but the first report of an attack on a synagogue was actually a counter-attack by Palestine solidarity demonstrators against the openly racist terrorist group, the Jewish Defense League (banned as terrorists in the USA, the UK and even in Israel) who had come from the synagogue to attack the demonstrators, the JDL having the protection of the police.  Richard Seymour aka Lenin is very good on this.

Now, what else does he do?  Ah of course, he gets downright silly over the boycott campaign:

Some have made the argument that, if receiving money from a state implies endorsement of that state’s policy, then the Tricycle ought to return the £725,000 it receives from the taxpayer-funded Arts Council, lest that be read as backing for, say, UK participation in the invasion of Iraq.

This shows the anti-BDSrs' failure to consider what BDS is aimed at achieving and on whose behalf.  Many Palestinian groups have called for a boycott of Israel and that is what the solidarity movement supports.  Israel is a foreign aid junkie and it gets privileged access to EU markets.  The boycott movement is aims to neutralise that.  Who among those oppressed by the war on Iraq is calling for a boycott?  What could it achieve?  Boycotting is not simply a principle, it is a tactic that could work against Israel, a joint colonial project of western powers.

In the same paragraph he comes close to saying that support for colonial settlement, ethnic cleansing and Jewish supremacy is an innate Jewish characteristic.  In fairness he falls just short of that but look at what he does say:

most, not all, Jews feel bound up with Israel, even if that relationship is one of doubt and anxiety. To demand that Jews surrender that connection is to tell Jews how they might – and how they might not – live as Jews. Such demands have an ugly history.

 It's tempting simply to say, "Oh fuck off!" but let's not be nasty to the self-indulgent prick.  He is saying that if most Jews support a political project then the rest of humanity has to accommodate that.  As it happens, it's impossible to know what most Jews want because it's impossible, in the west anyway, to know who most Jews are.  Thankfully, in spite of the ravings of one mad Zionist blogger, we don't have to register as Jews here.

But what if most Jews do support the State of Israel? So what?  Does everyone have to support or tolerate the political persuasion of most Jews?  I've seen Palestinian flags flying around London's East End.  What if most Jews object, should they come down?  No matter where you stand on the question of Palestine, support for a state, any state, is political and there is no reason why everyone should support the politics of a proportion or the entirety of any ethno-religious community, especially if the political persuasion is so clearly racist.

He ends on a totally bogus line:

Nor should [Jews] be required to declare their distance from Israel as a condition for admission into polite society. We opposed such a question being put to all Muslims after 9/11 and, though the cases are not equivalent, the same logic applies here

The logic is not the same.  The UK "Jewish" Film Festival came to the Tricycle declaring their support for and from Israel.  Tricycle said that they could not host Israeli embassy funded events at the present time.  The equivalent for Muslims would be if a Muslim group asked the Tricycle to host an event celebrating 9/11.  Tricycle did not ask the UKJFF where they stand on Palestine.  UKJFF volunteered the information, evidently with some pride.  And that flight from logic was in an editorial in a supposedly serious liberal newspaper of record.

So who's next?  Ah yes, someone I'd never heard of before called Hadley Freeman.  Now if that self-seeking tosh from Freedland wasn't enough, on the same day (yesterday August 8, 2014) we get a lecture from another zionist at The Guardian - two on the same day and both saying the same thing in response to the same thing.  Here goes, but we probably won't need as much detail as the previous one.

It's headed Please don’t tell me what I should think about Israel.  Now I suppose from the heading it could go either way.  Zionists are forever trying to impugn the Jewish identity of those who, like me, think the wrong thoughts on Israel but the sub-heading is an early giveaway:

To a liberal American Jew in Britain, the Gaza crisis reveals some very unsavoury attitudes among those on the left

Uh oh, it's those lefties again, those nasty people who as an article of faith object to colonial settlement and ethnic cleansing.  Right, a quick scan, I promise (myself).

Ah, I think I can use the Gabriel scale on this one.  You know, we rock, they suck, you suck, everything sucks.

Let's see:

Yes, there's a little glimpse of "we rock":

Israel, like America, was a country made from desperate immigrants

Well they certainly had a disproportionate number of refugees but the state was made by a well armed, well trained and well organised army, or armies if you count the minor terror gangs.  In fairness you can't quite tell if Ms Freeman is calling out the myth or promoting it.

How about, they suck?  Well she skipped straight to "you suck" with a false allegation of antisemitism leveled at the pro-Israel Rory Carroll:

This week it was reported in this paper that it’s “unthinkable” in Hollywood to criticise Israel (that pesky Jewish mafia – displease them and they’ll force-feed you matzos until you explode).

The article was actually about how new Israel-critical voices were being heard and support for Israel was rather muted. Needless to say this style guru offered nothing to refute the idea that criticism of Israel used to be ""unthinkable" in Hollywood". And then there came the "everything sucks" whataboutery with a swipe at "India’s not exactly perfect human rights record" and the UK's war on Iraq.

So what happened to "they suck?"  Well they, of course, are the Palestinians and like the Freedland editorial, Gaza gets a mention in the headline (well the sub-heading) but the Gazans are absent from the article. It's all about Jews according to these two articles that appeared in today's print edition of The Guardian.

Now the third hasbara by smear piece I saw on The Guardian website was published the day before the previous two.  Headed, Obsessive Gaza coverage is fanning antisemitism, thankfully it's so ludicrous I can dismiss it out of hand.  It's basically a plea not report on the atrocities committed by a state that's given more privileged access to EU markets than any other non-European state and receives more US aid than any other state.  Oh ok, here's a taste:

The Everyday Antisemitism Project, which I established two weeks into the current round of conflict

As it happens it used to be the case that you could tell when Israel was behaving badly without knowing what it was doing by the number of allegations of antisemitism that flew around.  This guy so realised that Israel was on the PR ropes he went out and formed yet another antisemitism project.  But now the media is reporting more the crimes of Israel.  The Daily Mail has been a bit of a revelation.  The Beeb was pretty dodgy at first but there have been some useful appearances and tweets by Orla Guerin and Jeremy Bowen.  Channel 4 too has been very informative on tv and in tweets.

Even The Times refused to take in an advert containing the nastiest racist hasbara I would ever have seen in a mainstream UK paper.  Israel's sheer ferocity has had the facts of its violent racist nature speaking for themselves and there does seem to have been a new-found openness in the media to reporting stuff that paints Israel in an unfavourable light.

Whatever has happened it has led to some influential hasbarista or other at The Guardian asserting enough control to get 2 articles in today's print edition that falsely allege antisemitism at BDS whilst clumsily coming close to insisting that support for the racist war criminal State of Israel is somehow intrinsic to the Jewish identity.

And hold that thought about The Times.  The Guardian has now, via the blog of Roy Greenslade, announced that it will be running the advert in its Monday edition.  This is particularly dismaying because Times owner Rupert Murdoch is very pro-Israel and The Guardian is supposed to be liberal or even left-leaning.  Let's have a look at what Greenslade is saying:

The Times is under attack for refusing to run an advert about the conflict in Gaza. The paper is accused of being part of a British media "infamously skewed against Israel."

Straight away there is something wrong here.  Greenslade must know that The Times of all papers is not "skewed against Israel".  He is also of course using his blog to announce that The Guardian is joining in this attack on The Times for a rare instance of it doing the decent thing.

Greenslade goes on to quote from the ad and one its makers,  Shmuley Boteach, without any question, criticism or correction of his own:

It [the ad] calls on President Obama and other political leaders across the world "to condemn Hamas's use of children as human shields", which amounts to "child sacrifice".

It's left to me to point out that no evidence at all has been presented to support the "human shields" endless run of repeat stories.  It doesn't point out that it is actually Israel killing this large number of children and even more parents.  Nowhere does Greenslade contradict what the ad or its maker says, so for one racist ad these extreme murderous Zionists get two bouts of publicity one of which is free.

And we get more quotes from Boteach:

At a time when Israel is fighting for its very existence against the genocidal terrorists of Hamas, the British media, already infamously skewed against Israel, refuses a paid ad that every major American outlet... was proud to run as a full page ad

Criticism came there none.

The only partial distancing of The Guardian from the content of the racist ad is Greenslade's parting line:

But the Guardian's acceptance of an advert does not mean, of course, that it endorses the views and claims made within it.

Well it definitely means that The Guardian finds such racism acceptable and it does mean that some Zionist or other at The Guardian wants the ad run because for the past 3 days they have been pulling out all the stops to place The Guardian firmly in the Zionist camp.

Curiously I noticed Roy Greenslade hasn't tweeted his article but he has recently done two tweets supporting demonstrations for Gaza.  It's almost like his heart wasn't in this piece.  I wonder why he wrote it.

Anyway, I have an update on Jonathan Freedland's editorial from reading the print edition.  Don't worry I didn't buy it nor would I.  The title is completely different.  Gone (again) is "Gaza" and instead it's headed, Intolerable Intolerance.  Got that?  Most of the article is about the Tricycle Theatre and after time to think The Guardian is accusing the theatre of intolerable intolerance.  So what, apart from self-indulgent whingeing, are the Zionists going to do?

Freedland avoids zionism as cause of Israel's rightward drift

Jonathan Freedland had a comment piece in The Guardian just the other day.  It was one of those where he tries to explain away Israel's increasingly overt racism by reference to anything other than its racist official ideology, zionism:

the blame can be shared evenly between the Israeli centre-left, Palestinian leaders and the international community.

But there were two responses in yesterday's Guardian, one offering an ideological explanation and the other being more technical:

While Jonathan Freedland's evident horror at Israel's shift to the right is welcome (Comment, 5 January), his explanations fail to account for the country's steady drift to the right since its inception and the ineluctable logic of imposing a Jewish state in someone else's country. The internal contradictions of a state in which the rights of Jewish and Palestinian citizens were supposedly "separate but equal" could only be resolved by the transformation of the state into one of genuine equality, ie a secular democracy, or by the rising hegemony of those who celebrated separateness and inequality.

That religious extremism and rightwing anti-egalitarians have become dominant in Israel is inextricably linked to the theocratic underpinning of the state. Like most other European Jews, I lost family in the Holocaust and I have experienced racism in the country of my birth, but my survival as an English Jew does not depend on the existence of the state of Israel and my right to "return" to a country to which I have never been. It depends on my being treated as a human being with the same rights and needs as everyone else. The same rights that everyone born in Israel or Palestine or anywhere else in the world should have.
Keith Lichman
London

• Jonathan Freedland's analysis that the nationalist right filled a vacuum is flawed. The radical right had been infiltrating the echelons of government for years. Ben Gurion's weakness in allowing religious parties into his coalitions has led to the fragmented nature of the Knesset, and its eventual dominance by settlers, and the rise of parties like Shas and now Jewish Home. Netanyahu's financial backers for the leadership of Likud, and the saviours of its finances in 1993, exerted their influence on the settlers and subsequent land-grabbing techniques. Politicians like Avigdor Lieberman and Sharon were purveyors of land and finances to the settlers.
Richard Morris
London

There just seems no other place for a self-defined state for Jews to go but to the right.

Another why oh whine from Jonathan Freedland

Here he is in today's (or yesterday's) Guardian:

I'm weary of those who get so much more exercised, so much more excited, by deaths in Gaza than they do by deaths in, say, Syria. An estimated 800 died under Assad during the same eight days of what Israel called Operation Pillar of Defence. But, for some reason, the loss of those lives failed to touch the activists who so rapidly organised the demos and student sit-ins against Israel. You might have heard me make this point before, and you might be weary of it. Well, so am I. I'm tired, too, of the argument that "We hold western nations like Israel to a higher standard", because I see only a fraction of the outrage that's directed at Israel turned on the US – a western nation – for its drone war in Pakistan which has cost an estimated 3,000 lives, nearly 900 of them civilians, since 2004.

Well it's easy to simply say, it's the ethnic cleansing stupid!  That is the ethnic cleansing, recent, current and on-going, without which Israel could not exist as a state for Jews that rubs a lot of people up the wrong way.  Those of us who remember apartheid in South Africa remember being told that there were more human rights abuses elsewhere in Africa but racist rule, enshrined in a state's basic laws was considered a no-no.

There is also the fact that Israel has apologists throughout the western media and enablers and supporters in all western governments.  This doesn't apply in the case of Syria.

The question about the USA could be more serious.  Remember that Jonathan is:

tired, too, of the argument that "We hold western nations like Israel to a higher standard", because I see only a fraction of the outrage that's directed at Israel turned on the US – a western nation – for itsdrone war in Pakistan which has cost an estimated 3,000 lives, nearly 900 of them civilians, since 2004.

Here the media cover for the US is about the same as it is for Israel but he might be wondering, why demonstrations against America's wars tend to be smaller than demonstrations against Israel. Unfortunately the basic premise is wrong. Demonstrations against America's wars tend to be between 10 and 20 times the size of Palestine Solidarity demos. Actually, I think there should still be more outrage against Israel because of its core lack of legitimacy than there is against America. After all, if America stopped the drone strikes the USA would still be the USA. If Israel stopped the colonial settlement, the ethnic cleansing and the segregation it  would no longer be Israel and then it's periodic culls would end and so, I'm guessing, would the outrage they cause.

Jonathan Freedland's problem with getting his head around the sheer repugnance of the State of Israel in the eyes of humanist opinion is that he, like the Israel he supports, is in a perpetual state of denial.

Lindsey German responds to Jonathan Freedland's whataboutery

Thanks to Frank Fisher for posting this to the Just Peace UK list.  It's Lindsey German, in The Guardian's Comment is Free, responding to a shameless hasbara effort by Jonathan Freedland where he made out that Syria was getting a free pass to do what "we" condemn Israel for doing, for example, during Cast Lead in 2008/9:

Operation Cast Lead was the deliberate targeting of the Palestinians in Gaza by a highly sophisticated air force funded and armed by the US and its allies. Freedland talks of a "bias against Jews that regards an Arab or Muslim death as only deserving condemnation when Israel is responsible". This dangerously confuses criticism of Israel's domestic and foreign policy with bias against Jewish people. The international outcry sparked by this daily bombardment represented opposition to Israeli policy and in the UK was a condemnation of our own government's collusion.

The conflict in Syria has become a civil war. Contrary to Freedland's claims that western intervention is nigh on impossible, the west and its supporters – Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar – are already directly intervening, providing arms and other military support. Their interests are hardly humanitarian, given Saudi Arabia's terrible human rights record and Turkey's longstanding oppression of the Kurds. They are about strategic power and control in the region, which is why those now intervening in Syria also want regime change in Iran.

Last I looked (just now) comments were still open.

Zionists try the what about Syria routine

It would be trite for me to say that I can't believe the hasbara brigade sometimes because I can never believe them and nor should you.  But Jonathan Freedland abuses the privilege of being the resident hasbarista at The Guardian.  See the headline of his article from some time last week and you don't need to read the article itself to know what it is saying:

We condemn Israel. So why the silence on Syria?

When Israelis kill Arabs there is outrage. But Assad's brutal campaign has cost 30,000 lives and there've been no protests

 Except of course, Freedland rarely condemns Israel.  The article attracted well over 800 comments most of which seemed to notice that there has been nothing like "silence on Syria".  And Chris Doyle of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding had a withering criticism of Freedland published in the letters page a couple of days after Freedland's piece appeared:

Jonathan Freedland's argument about contrasting reactions to events inIsrael and Syria is significantly flawed (Comment, 20 October). First, there has been huge outrage over the Assad regime's brutality, including weekly protests outside the Syrian embassy and others in Trafalgar Square. Is there any credible figure in British politics who has not condemned its behaviour?

Second, the British government has quite rightly unequivocally opposed the Assad regime's crimes and supported 19 rounds of sanctions against regime figures and entities. Though Israel's crimes are not directly comparable, when its forces bomb schools, level villages, use human shields, demolish houses, torture civilians, and steal land there is little more than routine tame verbal criticism and a business as usual approach. Britain cannot even support Palestinian statehood. This rank hypocrisy and double standards rankles with many.

There is little more that we can expect the British government to do on Syria short of engaging in a dangerous war, while the Assad regime hardly cares what British protesters think, any more than it cares about peaceful Syrian demonstrators. In contrast, there is much our government could do tangibly to demonstrate that it takes Israel's consistent violations of law and Palestinian human rights seriously, not least a full arms embargo.

In both cases there has been plenty of prominent media coverage, not least in the Guardian. Those suffering in other conflicts such as Congo would love even a fraction of the attention.
Chris Doyle

 Luckily for the hasbaristas Jenny Tonge also had a letter published saying,

Jonathan Freedland makes the usual plea "why condemn Israel?". Israel claims to be a western-style democracy that respects human rights and international law. The US and the EU, as well as our own country, have social, academic, cultural and trade links with Israel, and many of us have friends or colleagues in Israel. To many UK citizens, it is their home too. Israel drove the Palestinians from their homeland and livelihoods in 1948 and for 45 years Israel has occupied the West Bank. The treatment of the Palestinians is brutal and humiliating, as I have witnessed. We are right to condemn Israel for its actions. We are right to demand a higher standard of behaviour from Israel than from Arab states that are only now struggling to achieve political change. I have been to Syria. Does Mr Freedland really want Israel to be judged by the same standards by which we judge Syria?
Jenny Tonge
House of Lords

Darling of the hasbara bloggers, Norman Geras, couldn't believe his luck skipping past every point to the nugget that Israel should be held to a higher standard than Syria. Of course Israel should be held to the same standard as Syria but it isn't held to any standard at all.

Jim Denham at Shiraz Socialist was also rather pleased about Jenny Tonge's letter.  He describes Freedland's ludicrously transparent zionist propaganda as "wisdom" and he just loves Norman Geras's "devastating reposte" to Jenny Tonge.  But even Jim Denham is forced to concede that western bankrolling and arming of Israel makes a real difference from the west's approach to Syria.

But it was thanks to Jim Denham jumping through hoops to serve the racist war criminals of the State of Israel that I saw what truly was a "devastating reposte" to Freedland's effort.  It was in one of the below the line comments to the original (well, not that original) article from a David Pavett.  It's a long comment so I won't reproduce it in full here. Let these few lines suffice:

[Freedland writes] They say nothing because there is no pressure on them to say anything. Here and abroad, there is virtual silence, save for the desperate pleas of a few Syrian expats and yesterday's cry for humanitarian help from the Turkish foreign minister.

Virtual silence! What can he mean? Later he says "The story is rarely on the front page or on the TV bulletins."

Whatever political universe JF lives in it is clearly not the same as the one I am familiar with. In mine I have watched hours and hours of news footage of the fighting in Syria (largely filmed on the mobile phones of opposition activists). I have read acres and acres of front page news items and endless discussion of the problems.

Many comments make a similar point and it is encouraging to see that zionists are no longer getting away with their hasbara antics though it is worrying to think that Freedland thought that he could get away such nonsense without people noticing.

Palestinian bid for statehood

As anyone who follows these things will know, the Palestinian Authority leadership is intending to make a bid for statehood at the UN. Quite honestly I can't say what it all means but I have grave misgivings about the exercise because I don't see how a state with no land and no power differs from the situation for the Palestinians now. Of course the PA has nominal power in the West Bank but it is considered by many to be hopelessly corrupt both financially and criminally and so in thrall to Israel as to be an appendage of the Israeli state. So, if the UN recognises such an entity as a state can't zionists carry on expanding, colonising, segregating, ethnic cleansing and slaughtering business as usual only at the same time as saying that the Palestinians have what they wanted?

That was just off the top of my head but there are also warnings coming out of Palestinian quarters to the effect that the PA does not represent the entirety of the Palestinian people so the statehood bid would not enhance the rights of the Palestinians but curtail them. The PA does not represent the Palestinians in Israel, Gaza or the diaspora. It doesn't even truly represent the Palestinians of the West Bank. This means that the PA doesn't have the required authority to make the bid but also any state emerging from the bid would have the same lack of authority but would be assumed by many to have authority, even to write off the rights of the bulk of the Palestinian people.

There's a statement here from the Palestinian Youth Movement titled Statement on the September 2011 Declaration of Statehood.  Here's a little chunk:

This declaration serves as a mechanism for rescuing the faulty peace framework and depoliticizing the struggle for Palestine by removing the struggle from its historical colonial context. The attempts to impose a false peace with the normalizing of the colonial regime has only led us to surrender increasing amounts of our land, the rights of our people, and our aspirations by delegitimizing and marginalizing our people’s struggle and deepening the fragmentation and division of our people. This declaration jeopardizes the rights and aspirations of over two-thirds of the Palestinian people who live as refugees in countries of refuge and in exile, to return to their original homes from which they were displaced in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) and subsequently since then. It also jeopardizes the position of the Palestinians residing in the 1948 occupied territories who continue to resist daily against the ethnic cleansing and racial practices from inside the colonial regime. Furthermore, it corroborates and empowers its Palestinian and Arab partners to act as the gatekeepers to the occupation and the colonization of the region within a neo-colonial framework.

Still, The Guardian's main resident zionist, Jonathan Freedland, supports the bid, and why wouldn't he?

Omar Barghouti and Jonathan Freedland: BDS debate audio

I'm a bit late with this but there was a debate last Sunday night on the motion,

Where basic freedoms are denied and democratic remedies blocked off, cultural boycott by world civil society is a viable and effective political strategy indeed a moral imperative.

Omar Barghouti and Seni Seneviratne spoke for the motion and Jonathan Freedland and Carol Gould. The audio is here.

Tony Greenstein wrote it up here. It's about as close to a transcript as I have seen. The Jewish Chronicle website has a partial write up here:

A culture of "impunity, racism and genocidal tendencies has overtaken Israeli society", according to Palestinian boycott activist and author Omar Barghouti.

Mr Barghouti was speaking in support of a boycott motion proposed at a London Literature Festival debate at the Southbank Centre on Sunday.

He was joined by Seni Seneviratne, a British-Sri Lankan poet who is a member of British Writers in Support of Palestine, in backing the motion, which questioned whether a cultural boycott could be a "viable and effective political strategy; indeed a moral imperative".

Mr Barghouti said: "Israel uses culture to brand itself and change its image around the world. Boycott is the most effective non-violent means available to us to end the occupation and apartheid."

Ms Seneviratne compared Israel to apartheid South Africa and said the boycott was "forcing Israeli journalists and politicians to recognise the shift in world opinion".

American writer Carol Gould, opposing the motion alongside JC and Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, challenged the comparison. She said: "If Israel is an apartheid state how is it that Omar has been able to study at Tel Aviv University? Did blacks study at Wits [in Johannesburg]?"But both Ms Gould and Mr Freedland were repeatedly shouted down by pro-Palestinian activists.

[Actually blacks did study in South African universities and were overwhelmingly supportive of a boycott]

A clearly shaken Mr Freedland told the audience: "Tonight has been hugely revealing. I thought my disagreement with the boycott movement was because I want to see the end of occupation and you want to see the end of occupation and it was an argument about tactics.

"What has come through loud and clear is your motivation is not actually just the end of occupation but it's with Israel itself - you have a fundamental problem with it."

A quick look at other Israel advocacy sites like Engage and Harry's Place shows that by common consent Freedland lost the argument. For Engage,

The Israel eliminationists won

For Harry's Place:

Jonathan lost

But the poster, Alan A, made the following request to the HP faithful:

can I ask as a special favour, please give the “kapo” and “court Jew” stuff a bit of a break. It is dull and nasty.

Well that was too much for some with a chap called Harvey offering a not too atypical response:

Oh and I don’t like the term kapo either . They were having to make life and death decisions . What’s freedlands excuse for selling out .

There we have it. Jonathan Freedland is worse than a kapo for talking to Omar Barghouti or possibly for getting into a position where he would lose a debate which often moved from the rights or wrongs of BDS to whether or not Israel should be characterised as an apartheid state or indeed whether Israel, as a state specifically for Jews should exist at all.

Both the pro-BDS position and the Israel is an apartheid state position won the argument.

Woops, I meant human rights ABUSES

Darn it. I've had a letter published in today's Guardian but I, not they, made a balls of it and by the time I sent an erratum they'd already gone to print.  The letter was a response to Jonathan Freedland's why-oh-why pick on Israel piece from yesterday.  Here's my letter, fairly hot off the presses:

While Arab regimes are oppressive to maintain the governments in power, Israel's oppression goes to the heart of its existence as a state to which Jews from around the world have more right to live than the native non-Jewish population. This involves the ethnic cleansing of the native Arab population in order to secure and maintain a Jewish majority.

Other states have carried out ethnic cleansing in the past. But Israel owes its ethno-religious majority to a recent, current and ongoing campaign of displacement of the indigenous population. That was true of the US, it was true of Australia. It has been true of many states. But Israel's crimes are more recent and, therefore, its continued existence is predicated on its human rights.

Even hotter off the presses (and more complete) is the correction I sent them:

There are major differences between the State of Israel and other serial human rights abusers that Jonathan Freedland names. Whilst Arab regimes are oppressive to maintain the governments in power, Israel's oppression goes to the heart of its existence as a state to which Jews from around the world have more right to live than the native non-Jewish population.  Freedland must know that this involves the ethnic cleansing of the native Arab population in order to secure and maintain a Jewish majority.  Other states have carried out ethnic cleansing in the past and others will attempt it in the future.  But Israel owes its ethno-religious majority to a recent, current and on-going campaign of displacement of the indigenous population.  That was true of the US, it was true of Australia.  It has been true of many states.  But Israel's crimes are more recent and, therefore, its continued existence is predicated on its human rights abuses.

Ok, they ditched all the stuff about Jonathan Freedland's sad lament for all those victims of human rights abuses outside of Palestine and therefore not Israel's responsibility, but it was me that dropped the word "abuses" from the end.  It was rushed of course, I didn't even separate the paragraphs.  But only the most ludicrous of hasbaranikim would posit that Israel's continued existence is predicated on its human rights.

Sorry about that.