Another Letter by Loach, Another Lie by Rich

Ken Loach has had a letter published in the New York Times refuting demonstrably false claims made about him by Howard Jacobson.

Here's the letter:

To the Editor:

Re: “Now Labour is the Enemy of the Jews,” (front page, Oct. 7-8):

Howard Jacobson alleges that I defended questioning the Holocaust. I did not and do not. In a confused BBC interview, where question and answer overlapped, my words were twisted to give a meaning contrary to that intended. The Holocaust is as real a historical event as World War II itself and not to be challenged. In Primo Levi’s words: “Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.”

Exaggerated or false charges of anti-Semitism have coincided with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Discredit his supporters, and you weaken his leadership. The Jewish Socialist Group wrote: “accusations of anti-Semitism are being weaponised to attack the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party.”

We will not be intimidated. The Labour Party will continue to assert “the values of peace, universal rights and International law” as proclaimed in its manifesto.

KEN LOACH

LONDON

And here's what he was refuting:

In a moment that will live in infamy, the distinguished film director Ken Loach defended questioning the Holocaust. “I think history is for all of us to discuss,” he said, dodging the question of why the Labour Party should have chosen the Holocaust, of all historical events — and not slavery, say — to subject to scrutiny. 

But the defaming of Ken Loach didn't start with Howard Jacobson and didn't end with him either.  Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust thought he detected a claim of victimhood in Loach's letter.  He tweeted:

Ken Loach declares himself a victim. https://t.co/sBusGY95hI

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) October 15, 2017

I immediately knew he was lying but I was pleased Ken Loach had another chance to answer his slanderers so I followed the link and word searched "victim".  Obviously, you don't have to use the word "victim" to claim to be one.  But on reading the letter and re-reading it, there was nothing there to suggest that he was claiming that he was a victim.  Scroll back up.  See what he wrote.  Any sign of self-pity?  This is a guy who supports the Palestinian cause.  It's inconceivable that he would claim victim status when the only reason he's being smeared is because he supports the cause of a victimised nation.  Of course, Ken Loach has been victimised but I think he has enough self-awareness to refrain from complaining about it.  He was simply setting the record straight.

So did he write anything at all that could be construed as claiming victimhood?  Let's take it line by line.

1.   Howard Jacobson alleges that I defended questioning the Holocaust.

Nothing there.

2.  I did not and do not.  

Nope, not there.

3.   In a confused BBC interview, where question and answer overlapped, my words were twisted to give a meaning contrary to that intended. 

 Nor there.

4.   The Holocaust is as real a historical event as World War II itself and not to be challenged.

Hmm, nothing in that line about Ken at all.  I'm starting to think Dave Rich made this up.  Surely there was a kernel of truth, as Goebbels used to say.  Let's keep looking:

5.   In Primo Levi’s words: “Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.”

Aha!  Now I could give Dave a bit of a pass here and say that he might have thought that in agreeing with Primo Levi, Loach was actually likening himself to Levi.  See if he tries that one.  It would be all he's got because, well, let's see some more...

6.   Exaggerated or false charges of anti-Semitism have coincided with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader.

Nope, that's about Corbyn, not Ken.

7.   Discredit his supporters, and you weaken his leadership. 

Again. mostly about the leadership but also about the supporters.  Discrediting isn't necessarily victimising.  Dave to me is an utterly discredited figure.  He's hardly a victim.

8.   The Jewish Socialist Group wrote: “accusations of anti-Semitism are being weaponised to attack the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party.”

Now that's not a claim of victimhood, in fact it looks like Dave's job description.

Ok, to the final paragraph and what have we here?

9.   We will not be intimidated.

What we have here is a flat contradiction of what Dave Rich is claiming Ken Loach said.  What's extremely concerning is that Dave was so confident that his followers would "agree" with him, he even helpfully provided the link to the letter that he so flagrantly lied about.  If you look at the tweet, look at the replies too.  Last I checked I was the only one pointing out that Dave was misrepresenting what Ken Loach had said.

So to the last line:

10.  The Labour Party will continue to assert “the values of peace, universal rights and International law” as proclaimed in its manifesto.

And so we see, er, nothing to see.  And that is Dave Rich, one of the UK's most prominent antisemitism hunters.

But I did say in the headline, "Another Lie by Rich". So what else have we.  How far before yesterday do we have to go.  Well, the day before yesterday.  Really.  Check out this exchange between Rich and Jamie Stern-Weiner.  Here's a tweet that sums up the whole thing but there's a whole thread above and below it:

2. Your allegation, made explicitly now, that Machover agrees with Heydrich's account of Nazi Jewish policy is really scandalous.

— JamieSW (@jsternweiner) October 13, 2017

And from exactly one year ago, here's Dave smearing Jonathan Rosenhead of  Free Speech on Israel.

whoever's responsible it's a disgrace. "Wily" Jews "fabricate" antisemitism?

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) October 16, 2016

And here's what he was referring to on Free Speech on Israel:

It is impossible to know from the outside exactly what and who have made this moral panic [the antisemitism smear campaign] go with such a swing. Key individuals may well be Jeremy Newmark, well-placed in JLM, though only just in time, to fan these flames. The wily Mark Regev took up his post as Israeli ambassador in London at the start of April. In July Ella Rose left her job as public affairs officer at the Israeli Embassy to become Director of JLM. Who knows? Organisationally, judging by their public pronouncements there is an at least informal coalition of forces involving JLM, Progress (the Blairite pressure group), and Labour Friends of Israel which have all been promoting the idea that the left is permeated with antisemitism.

 See that?  Dave was clever here. He put the word "wily" in quotes but not the word "Jews".  So he could, and did, claim that he wasn't actually misquoting.  Again check out the thread.

And this is Dave Rich's job and, apparently his hobby too.

Dave Rich is just one player in this annoying and damaging game.  He's not a particularly bright one by any means, in fact, a sure sign that Rosenhead wasn't generalising about wily Jews is that, whilst many of the merchants of smear can be justly accused of fabrication, Dave Rich and many others can never be accused of being wily.

NYT equates Israel intensifying occupation and reneging on past agreements with Palestinians, er, asking for stuff

See this in the New York Times:

Mr. Kerry is not about to give up on the process. But like Mr. Baker, he is dealing with two parties that are paralyzed by intransigence and fall back on provocations: Israel announcing new Jewish settlements and refusing to release Palestinian prisoners; the Palestinians, in response, applying to join international organizations and issuing a list of new demands.

Have I missed something here?  Israel has reneged on its commitment to release prisoners and announced more breaches of international law on racist colonial settlement.  In response the Palestinian Authority has asked for some stuff that the NYT doesn't see fit to print.  Could it be that whatever it was the Palestinians did couldn't possibly be held by reasonable observers to interfere with any peace process worthy of the name?

Israel's Tangled Web?

The instagram picture of a Palestinian boy in the crosshairs of an Israeli sniper's gun has done the internet rounds now largely thanks to Electronic Intifada:



Here's a blog post at The New York Times's The Lede which sets out how use of the internet isn't quite turning out to Israel's advantage:

Before the 20-year-old Israeli sniper who uploaded the photograph was able to delete his Instagram account, Mr. Abunimah and other bloggers copied itand the snapshot was published on news sites in Israel and around the world— dealing another self-inflicted blow to the Israeli military’s effort to use the Web to burnish its image.

After a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces told reporters that sharing the photograph was “a severe incident which doesn’t accord with the I.D.F.’s spirit and values,” the young man also deleted his Facebook account, where he had posted images of himself using his sniper rifle as a comic prop.

A screenshot from the Facebook account of Mor Ostrovski, a young Israeli soldier.

The Israeli veterans’ group Breaking the Silence, which collects testimony from soldiers who have served in the Palestinian territories first occupied by Israel in 1967, posted a screenshot of the photograph on Facebook side by side with a very similar image “taken by another Israeli soldier in Hebron in 2003.”

Breaking the Silence, via Facebook

But the bit I found most interesting was this about zionist tampering with Wikipedia:

As The Lede reported in 2010, the battle between supporters of Israelis and Palestinians is even waged on Wikipedia entries about the history of the conflict. That year, Naftali Bennett, a rising political star and a leader of Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank, explained that he was training a group of about 80 activists to edit Wikipedia entries to make sure that information in the online encyclopedia reflected the worldview of Zionist groups. For example, he said, “if someone searches ‘the Gaza flotilla,’ we want to be there; to influence what is written there, how it’s written and to ensure that it is balanced and Zionist in nature.”

"Balanced and zionist"?  Now how do they do that?

Bibi's one state solution

Here's an article by Saree Makdisi on the implications of Bibi's decision to further colonise the West Bank, separating north from south and the whole thing from Jerusalem.  It appears in the International Herald Tribune which is the "global edition of the New York Times".  This is just a snippet:

Once the fiction of a separate Palestinian state is revealed to have no more substance than the Wizard of Oz — which the E1 plan will all but guarantee — those Palestinians who have not already done so will commit themselves to the only viable alternative: a one-state solution, in which the idea of an exclusively Jewish state and an exclusively Palestinian one will yield to what was really all along the preferable alternative, a single democratic and secular state in all of historical Palestine that both peoples will have to share as equal citizens.

A campaign for rights and equality in a single state is a project toward which the Palestinians will now be able to turn with the formidable international support they have already developed at both the diplomatic and the grassroots levels, including a global boycott and sanctions movement whose bite Israel has already felt.

For Palestinians, in any case, one state is infinitely preferable to two, for the simple reason that no version of the two-state solution that has ever been proposed has meaningfully sought to address the rights of more than the minority of Palestinians who actually live in the territory on which that state is supposed to exist.

Things have been changing quickly lately. Israel was left isolated at the UN over the Palestinian UN bid and it had to settle for unfavourable terms over its recent lost war in Gaza. I'm guessing things haven't changed so much for Saree Makdisi's article to appear in the New York edition of the New York Times but I could be wrong.

Shindler's beef but where is the beef?

I keep seeing links to this article by Colin Shindler, lecturer - maybe a professor - at the School of Oriental and African Studies.  I suppose its a summary of his book, "Israel and the European Left: Between Solidarity and Delegitimization".  You can guess the content from the title and I already blogged about when Dave Osler read the book so you don't have to.  Anyway, the article is in the New York Times and is headlined, The European Left and Its Trouble With Jews and it doesn't even try to substantiate its claim.

Remember the title of the article. It's supposedly about the left. Now see this:

why do today’s European socialists identify with Islamists whose worldview is light-years removed from their own? In recent years, there has been an increased blurring of the distinction between Jew, Zionist and Israeli. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant group Hezbollah, famously commented: “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli.”

Ok, so even if the quote is accurate and it might be, what has that to do with the left? Now see this:

Ken Livingstone, a former newspaper editor and mayor of London, has a long history of insensitive remarks about Jews — from publishing a cartoon in 1982 of Menachem Begin, then Israel’s prime minister, in Gestapo uniform atop a pile of Palestinian skulls to likening a known Jewish reporter to “a concentration camp guard” 20 years later. Today, he contributes to Press TV, the English-language outlet for the Iranian government.

That's it? Yes, that's it. Where's the beef? Perhaps I should ask, what's the beef?

Sometimes the left distinguishes between vulnerable European Jews who have been persecuted and latter-day “Prussians” in Israel. Yet it is often forgotten that a majority of Israelis just happen to be Jews, who fear therefore that what begins with the delegitimization of the state will end with the delegitimization of the people.

But it's not leftists that conflate states with people.   Zionists and other racists do that.  Colin Shindler makes it easy to do that by glossing over or outright avoiding the facts of Israel's existence.  For example he likes Sartre because

He understood the legitimacy of Israel’s war for independence

Did he understand or acknowledge that the war was mostly a war on a civilian population? Did he know that it was a war of ethnic cleansing. I don't know and Shindler doesn't say. But if you avoid these facts then you might well make a case for "delegitimisation" of Israel being unreasonable but in his article, Colin Shindler hasn't even managed that.

The Soul of Israelis?

Here's a curious headline in the New York Times:

Crackdown on Migrants Tugs at Soul of Israelis

The first paragraph sets the scene for for an article which couldn't be postponed for much longer:

TEL AVIV — One by one, immigration inspectors escorted the migrants out of a dilapidated building into an alley teeming with African-run stores and hair salons. Then, they were led onto a waiting bus, in the first steps on the way to deportation to their native South Sudan.

Israel's treatment of migrants has been in the Israeli media for some time now but then one good thing about Israel is that it doesn't have an Israel lobby. When hasbara cannot speak well of Israel, the hasbaristas rely on silence and this has been the case with Israel and the "infiltrators". So here's the NYT breaking the mould, or is it? The headline alone sticks its neck out for Israel. It suggests that Israel has a moral rather than a practical problem here but it gets worse, look:

Critics say that Israel, a nation largely founded by refugees, lacks a proper immigration policy.

"A nation largely founded by refugees"?  Ok, many, even most early Israelis were refugees but might there be a precedent for the forced removal of people whose ethnicity didn't fit the state's desired profile? If the NYT wrote more about the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, its readers might understand how this "nation founded largely by refugees" can treat refugees so badly.