Adloyada

Anti-semitism in pink: the uniquely selective assumptions of the "pinkwashing" campaign

 

 

 

Let’s hear it for Israel's mainstream left-wing newspaper, Ha’aretz, which can teach The Guardian a thing or two when it comes to publishing articles delegitimizing and demonizing israel, zionism and its democratically elected politicians.

Yesterday, their home page headlined an-oped “Michael Oren pinkwashes the truth about Israel and gay Palestinians” by one Aeyal Gross which expands the delegitimizing “pinkwashing” theme that the evil Israelis only host support for Palestinian lesbians and gays as a deliberate and cynical subterfuge to cover up their crimes and evil ways:

 

And if Oren’s bit about Dana speaks to the appropriation that was, a different part of his speech constitutes a rewriting of the facts for the sake of waving gay rights as a fig leaf, perhaps the last for Israeli democracy, in order to obscure the injustices of the occupation. In both his speech as well as in an interview given later, Oren clamed that Israel was fighting for gay rights before the 1967 war. Perhaps Oren should be reminded that in 1967, and actually until 1988, homosexual intercourse was considered illegal under Israeli law. Despite the fact that the Attorney General issued instructions not to use that law when the subjects in question are men in a consensual relationship back in the 1950s, the shadow of discrimination has never really disappeared.

Israel did not fight for the rights of gays, not in the sixties nor in the seventies. Only at the end of the eighties and in the nineties, in the wake of vigorous activism on the part of members of the LGBT community and a small number of politicians who supported them, did any progress take place. This included the cancelation of the criminality of homosexual intercourse and the creation of a law and a ruling that would prevent discrimination. Now, said progress, part real and part imagined, is being appropriated for Israeli hasbara.

Here he explicitly states that the only reason for Israel to host  and be publicly proud of having two Israeli-Palestinian LGBT centres is to divert attention from Israeli oppression of Palestinians:

 

While the headquarters of two LGBT Palestinian organizations that operate in both Israel and in the West Bank are located in Israel, the state does not give them “shelter,” and their appropriation for Israel’s propaganda needs is outrageous – not only because of the ongoing oppression of Palestinians in Israel and in the territories, but also because the appropriation is done in order to divert the conversation from Palestinian oppression in an attempt to present Israel as a liberal democracy.

The protesters, among them Israelis, were right to blame Oren for what is known across the world as “pinkwashing.

The clip at the head of this post from a young Palestinian woman involved in the organizations Gross' article slams as propaganda ruses makes clear that the issue of Palestinian gay identities and Israeli ones alike is a profoundly complex and individual as well as collective one for both Israeli and Palestinian gays. It belies the simplistic and partisan reductionist smearing Gross presents.

Israel is a state whose legal and official policy framework grants quite remarkable legal rights, freedoms and protection from harassment and discrimination to lesbians and gays, unknown in the rest of the Middle East and many other countries of the world. Culturally, Israel is far from having a monolithic attitude to lesbians and gays, ranging from active condemnation and hostile campaigning from some Haredi groups to overt courtship and celebration by far left secular parties such as Meretz and an extraordinarily lively lesbian and gay scene in Tel Aviv. 

By contrast, in both the Palestinian Authority and in Hamas-controlled Gaza, not only is homosexuality viewed as an unacceptable individual and social evil, but there is no shortage of cases which show that families and communities, whether Muslim or Christian, are prepared to execute their own relatives and members found to be involved in homosexual activity, let alone taking up gay advocacy

As Fabian from Israel pointed out in a recent comment on a previous post, the underlying political theme is that a Jewish state founded on zionism, like the traditionally anti-semitic stereotype of the Jew, is inherently evil, murderous, bent on domination and dispossession and deceptive with it. If it does good for a persecuted section of its enemies, that’s solely to sugarcoat and gloss over its evil actions.

And his view, with which I agree, is– that’s anti-semitism. Because I can’t think of any other contemporary state to which such inherent and ineradicable motives of radical bad faith are attributed and made the subject of a worldwide campaign for which no objective evidence is ever adduced.

For example, have you ever seen an article suggesting that the UK or the US gave refuge to persecuted gays from Iran solely in order to cover up their supposed crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and which in the course of doing so reminds you that homosexual acts were punishable under UK law with imprisonment till 1957?

Have you ever seen a blog post from the gay activists promoting the “pinkwashing” campaign against Israel, or any other gay activists, accusing David Cameron of making speeches sympathetic to gay marriage and highlighting the UK's positive attitudes to gay rights solely to gloss over and divert attention from the UK’s persecution of its Muslim community and its participation in supporting the campaign to destroy Muslim freedom struggles and resistance movements worldwide?

I haven’t.

 

The most prolific liar in public life in a generation: Livingstone then and now

 

 

“Every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”.

So wrote Mary Maccarthy of Lillian Hellman, but it is equally true of the statements made by Ken Livingstone, who Andrew Gilligan names as

“the most prolific liar to have sought high public office in Britain in at least a generation”.

Gilligan listed yesterday the last of his total of 85 Livingstone election lies. His total for Boris lies was 12.

These are a relevant couple of Livingstone’s lies that most incensed me, not least because I heard him telling them in person at the London Jewish Forum meeting on 24th April:

Anti-semitic attacks

67. Claim: “In each year I was mayor, anti-semitic attacks [in London] declined” (Guardian, March 26; when pressed about his poor relationship with the Jewish community)

Reality: The London figures, from the Community Security Trust’s annual reports, are as follows (reports before 2003 are not readily available online): 

2003: 215 2004: 311 2005: 213 2006: 300 2007: 247 2008: 236
As will be seen, the number of anti-semitic attacks in London rose substantially – by up to 45% – in two of these years.

Hosting extremist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi

84. Claim: “All I knew about Qaradawi when he came was that the Sun had praised him as a true voice of Islam.” (Newsnight 4 April)

Reality: Livingstone had actually been furiously lobbied by liberal, Jewish and gay groups not to host Qaradawi. A Labour Home Office minister, Fiona McTaggart, pulled out of the City Hall event with the hate preacher, urging Ken not to meet him and saying that “a perfectly good cause had been hijacked” by Qaradawi and his supporters. The shadow home secretary, David Davis, asked Ken not to give Qaradawi “the oxygen of publicity.” When Qaradawi touched down in the UK, the Sun in fact proclaimed: “The evil has landed.”

The video clip I've included with this post shows that so many of Livingstone's present aims, especially that of establishing London as a city-state go back to the Trotskyist programme of the Socialist Action group coterie who were his highly paid enforcers when he was Mayor, and whose Simon Fletcher is the head of his campaign team today.

What a stain on the record and reputation of the Labour Party. I heard Miliband parroting Livingstone’s election promises to slash fares and restore the EMA on BBCR4 a few days ago, claiming he’d be the best Mayor for London. As they say, the fish stinks from the head.

 

 

Caught in the act: Ken Livingstone's anti-semitic conspiracy smear of Labour government minister

 

 

At 3:16 minutes into this clip, you'll hear Ken Livingstone, speaking in 2009 in Tower Hamlets, push this anti-semitic conspiracy smear against  Labour MP Ivan Lewis and a Jewish "they" who he says conspired to keep the voice of the elected representatives of the Palestinian people silenced by keeping it out of the mainstream press.

Here's my transcript of the key section:

 

A character called Ivan Lewis who- I discovered- I'd seen hanging round the House of Commons, and he's saying- I'd assumed he was a lobbyist for the Israeli government- I'd no idea he was a Labour MP! [laughter] And he'd been given a job, because he’s one of that small group of Labour MPs who only ever seems to talk about the defence of the state of Israel, and denounce any Arab that may have a different point of view! And he came out and said, I had made a huge mistake in having this interview, and publishing it, and I assumed   avalanche of denunciations and outrage, and how someone like me should never stand for mayor again or something! And then, it went completely quiet – a little bit in the Jewish Chronicle in the next week – and of course! – the last thing they wanted to do, was, they realised this-- a lot of denunciations would mean people would buy it! More of them would read it!

I wish there had been more denunciations! I wish great extracts of it, had been published in the Sun! And the Daily Mail! And the Express! They’re not gonna do that. So, do get hold of copies of that, and just take a few photocopies and circulate it amongst your friends, groups at work, in your community, so more people get to see that. The silence spoke volumes, of how they don’t really don't want the Palestinians to express themselves through their elected leaders.

 

What Livingstone doesn't say is that Ivan Lewis’ statement was made in his capacity as a then junior Foreign Office Minister of State in Gordon Brown’s Labour government. It was issued by the Foreign Office in support of the official and continuing foreign policy of the UK, of considering Khaled Meshaal to be the head of a designated terrorist organization. It’s still on the Foreign Office web site to this day.

Here, Livingstone contrives to misrepresent and spin this story using some modern classic anti-semitic conspiracy stories.

Firstly, Lewis supposedly did nothing in the House of Commons but speak for Israel, and in such a way that he could have been assumed to be a lobbyist of the Israeli government. Not only that, but on that basis he'd been "given a job".

Lewis had in fact been a junior Minister in the Blair and Brown Labour governments going back to June 2003, when he took on a succession of roles in the Education ministry, going on in 2005-2006 to being a junior Treasury minister , to May 2006 when he was given responsibilities for Care Services in the Health Ministry. He was then promoted to a junior role in the Foreign Office as Parliamentary Secretary of State for International Development by Gordon Brown in October 2008 and further promoted to the Minister of State role in June 2009.

Whether Livingstone's reference to him being "given a job" was to Lewis' former role as Vice Chair of the Labour Friends of Israel, or to his Ministerial role at the time is unsurprisingly, given Livingstone's reputation for political evasiveness, unclear. If it is the latter, the smear implies that he got his job as a Minister because he was a lobbyist for Israel.

Whichever way, there is no way Lewis could have made the statement he did out of personal animus, let alone, as Livingstone suggests, as a mouthpiece of the Israeli government or some shadowy "they" Jewish lobby.

All UK government ministers, however junior, are required to make only statements which are fully in line with the UK government policies and priorities of the day. The Foreign Office will only publish statements which conform with those policies. And the policies include condemning Israeli settlements over the Green Line as being illegal, as well as supporting radical anti-zionist Palestinian groups protesting against Jewish purchasers of homes in the overwhelmingly Palestinian-inhabited quarters of East Jerusalem and Hebron. Any Minister who uses his position to voice the view of any lobby group great or small which conflicts with government policy will find himself, quite rightly, instantly relieved of his office and sent back to the back benches.

In fact so far was Lewis from being in any position to impose his views on the government of Gordon Brown that in 2008, he was regarded as having had his personal reputation deliberately undermined in a classic Gordon Brown coterie revenge attack job, because he'd had the temerity to publish a highly coded criticism about the Brown administration's need to refresh and renew itself.

Then we come to Livingstone's portrayal of Lewis as the mouthpiece of the unspecified Jewish “they,” who then conspired to make no further condemnations of the propaganda coup Livingstone gave Hamas, because "they" wanted to see the interview kept out of view. This was supposedly because "they" realised that "they'd" end up drawing the attention of ordinary British people to his very rosy presentation of Damascus resident and Hamas terrorist group leader Meshaal, who he pushes as those of the elected representative of the Palestinian people. Khaled Meshaal was incidentally never elected to the leadership of Hamas by the Palestinian people; it's difficult to find any evidence that he ever reached any position through any election, let alone a free one involving the Palestinian electorate.

 Livingstone conveniently makes no reference to the more damning reasons Lewis cited in his Foreign Office condemnation of Livingstone's action in choosing to fly to Damascus to interview Meshaal and use the entirely supportive interview as the big central feature of his guest edited New Statesman:

It is therefore particularly regrettable that he learned the wrong lessons from history by handing a propaganda coup to the leader of a terrorist organisation.

 

Hamas has not only breached international law by firing rockets at civilian populations in Israel but continues to violate the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza“.

I posted a couple of weeks ago on the significance of the role the New Statesman played in 2009 in Ken Livingstone's campaign to rebrand himself from tired dinosaur far left has-been to contest-winning candidate for the Labour Party nomination for the London 2012 Mayoral election. I included a link to this fisking of the interview and the way Livingstone conducted it.

The New Statesman gave Livingstone the opportunity of a lifetime by inviting him to be a guest editor, with carte blanche to determine the main features and most of the content of the magazine, at the crucial period just before the Labour Party Conference of that year. And it's clear that in making the speech to the Tower Hamlets PSC back late in 2009, long before the Labour Party nomination for its candidate for the Mayoral election 2012 was decided, Livingstone saw the Hamas interview as central to securing the nomination in mid 2010. He fantasises about  a goal of the imagined conspiracy of the Jewish "them" to being to prevent it.

It's not clear why the New Statesman did so much to help Livingstone on his way to the nomination. Martin Bright, the most high profile NS Political editor in recent years had left early in 2009. He had played a major role with a series of articles and contributed to a Channel 4 TV programme in exposing Livingstone's far left coterie and manipulation of his then Mayoral office,  which contributed to his defeat by Boris Johnson in 2008.

The New Statesman had appointed the Shia Islamist activist Mehdi Hasan as their Senior Editor (political) in the Spring of 2009. 

It's not clear whether it was the new editor and management of the NS who first decided to given Livingstone the guest editorship, or whether it was the result of an initiative from Mehdi Hasan or some other key NS staffer.

It's very curious that although the New Statesman WIkipedia site lists the people who have been offered guest editorships of the magazine since the start of 2009, there's just one left out. And that's Ken Livingstone.

In the New Statesman in the week following the Foreign office statement, the anonymous “Staff blogger” quoted the statement, whilst dropping in the additional information that Lewis was formerly chair of Labour Friends of Israel (in fact, he was actually Vice Chair). 

However, the “staff blogger” did not attempt to suggest Lewis was still actively acting as a Labour Friends of Israel spokesman, since he would have had to relinquish that position on being appointed to the Foreign Office.

No such reservations held back  Muslim Brotherhood-supporting Islamist mouthpiece for the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawallah, writing in the Guardian that same day in September 2009> He's always been a routine promoter of tropes about ” traditional zionist tactics” of attempting to “silence critics of Israel”. Here’s what he wrote about Ivan Lewis’s statement and his affiliations:

It is worth noting that Lewis did not appear similarly outspoken during the visits to the UK of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli PM, and Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, despite the very credible reports of Israeli war crimes perpetrated in Gaza during the Israeli bombardment and invasion in December 2008/January 2009 as documented by Amnesty International, the Israel campaign group Breaking the Silence and, most recently, by the UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict.

Indeed, while the bombing of Gaza was going on earlier this year, Lewis attended an Israel solidarity rally in Manchester, where he declared: “It is essential that we send a clear and responsible message from the great city of Manchester that this community stands shoulder to shoulder with Israel.” 

Just as Livingstone left out the key contextual information in his speect, Bunglawallah didn’t mention in his article that at the time of all those events, Lewis was not a Foreign Office minister, so would have had no official role in making statements about visits by Israeli politicians and the events of Cast Lead.

It also makes it all abundantly clear whose politics Livingstone was following then and now on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And they certainly weren’t those of the Labour Party then or now.

 

HAT TIP  Joseph W in this Harry's Place blog post, who included his version of what I've transcribed above.

Where do Livingstone & the Labour Party stand on Co-op decision to boycott Palestinian farmers' produce? UPDATE And channel money to Hamas?

 

Yes, you read that right. 

The UK's Co-operative Group has announced that it's going to ban imports from Israeli companies which export or deal in produce from the West Bank or otherwise beyond the Green Line.

Here's a ringing statement of the political rationale for this boycott decision:

 Hilary Smith, Co-op member and Boycott Israel Network (BIN) agricultural trade campaign coordinator, was quoted by The Guardian as saying that the Co-op "has taken the lead internationally in this historic decision to hold corporations to account for complicity in Israel's violations of Palestinian human rights. We strongly urge other retailers to take similar action." 

The Co-op has fallen over itself to announce that, no, they're not actually boycotting Israel, you understand. Just any Israeli companies that deal with produce from not just the West Bank, but any from over the Green Line. So that will include all the wines from the Golan Heights, and matzos and other religious goods baked or made in the Old City of Jerusalem but also all the produce that's exported from Gaza. And of course all the produce which Palestinian farmers in the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights produce.

You see, Palestinian Arab farmers are completely dependent on the high-tech logistics and technologies of the Israel-wide exporters like Agrexco, Mehadrin and all those other companies the Co-op's decided to boycott for the fast processing, refrigeration, air transport, EU certification and marketing. Without those companies exporting their produce to the UK, guess what? Those Palestinians will lose money hand over fist, if they're not driven completely out of business, by the loss of their currently very efficient Israeli exporters. There aren't any other local non-Israeli companies they can turn to. Try Jordan or Egypt? Not a chance.

Here's the viewpoint of a Gazan woman producer whose business and family was hit by the closing of the route to Europe via Agrexco after the Israelis shut the Keren Shalom checkpoint after an outburst of Hamas terrorist action.

 

Um Hajjar Al-Ghalayini, 46 years old, owns half an acre of sandy Gaza land that produces two tons of strawberries every season. Since her husband died two years ago, the crop is the sole means of support for her nine children, mother-in-law and widowed sister, so every one of the bright red berries counts.

Last year, she had no choice but to sell her produce to the local market. That filled the Gaza markets with fruits and vegetables to the benefit of consumers, but for growers like Um Hajjar it was a disaster. Her earnings dropped by more than half and the family had a tough year economically. This week, as Israel took another step in easing its economic blockade of the Gaza Strip, Um Hajjar delivered her strawberries to the Kerem Shalom checkpoint on the Israel-Gaza border, their first leg of a journey to the more profitable markets in Europe.

“Now I can say that things are getting back to normal, if not on the right track,” she told The Media Line.

Just last week in London, Livingstone declared himself against boycotts of Israeli goods and services at a meeting with Jewish Londoners. His Deputy Mayoral candidate running mate Val Shawcross proudly declared herself a member of the Co-operative Party.

The Co-operative Group is formally affiliated with the Co-operative Party which although nominally independent is an organization whose sole party political link is to the Labour Party. Co-operative Party election candidates stand for election as Labour candidates.

So, apart from Livingstone and Val Shawcross, there's a long list of 29 Co-operative Party MPs, who include many who are usually supportive of Israel and strongly opposed to boycotts. Those MPs include Louise Ellman, Luciana Berger, Stephen Twigg and Mike Gapes amongst others. And quite a few of them are London Assembly members, too, like Nicky Gavron and Murad Qureshi.

Are they in favour of boycotting the produce of Palestinian farmers? Do they think kosher wines from the Golan Heights and matzos baked in the Old City of Jerusalem should be boycotted?

Will the Labour London Assembly members be pressing for Palestinian and Israeli produce exported by Agrexco, Mehadrin and the other companies fingered by the Co-op to be banned from the GLA's premises?

I think they should be asked to tell us.

(H/T Elder of Ziyon, for the image and the lowdown on what this brilliant move means)

UPDATE

Elder of Ziyon now draws attention to the fact that the so-ethical Co-op's Co-op Bank is also the official channel for donations to the Hamas regime via the Viva Palestina fund so enthusiastically promoted by George Galloway:

According to their stated policies:

"We will not finance any organisation that advocates discrimination and incitement to hatred."

The right to freedom of speech underpins the values of a democratic society and individuals and organisations should be free to express their views or beliefs. However, 99% of customers who participated in the review supported the bank's decision to withhold finance from those extremist organisations that advocate not only discrimination but hatred.

Yet they are the main way to fund Viva Palestina, which has numerous ties with Hamas. 

 

Can Livingstone, Val Shawcross and all those Co-op MPs and London Assembly members let us know whether they support the Viva Palestina project of collecting funds which are given to Hamas regime officials? Can they also explain to us how they are satisfied that the Co-op Bank is not contravening its own policies in allowing itself to be used to collect and pass wads of used banknotes to and through Hamas, which has a stellar record of suppressing free speech and inciting hatred of Jews and Israel, not least through its own Charter?  

If they think the money is just going to charitable work and is untouched by the Hamas hate machine, what are the processes they have used to monitor that?

Oh, and by the way, that's bankers in the spotlight again, isn't it? Only somehow, I can't quite see Ed Miliband getting up on his hind legs to fulminate about this at Prime Minister's Question Time, can you?

 

 

The anti-Israel propagandists who faked the "Amina Arraf" Gay Girl blog

 

 

The worst and most irresponsible internet hoax for some considerable time-- the Amina Arraf hoax--has now been exposed.

The supposed "Gay Girl in Damascus blogger", who was supposed to have been arrested and abducted by the Syrian regime, has turned out to be an invention of a couple of extreme anti-Israel activists, Tom MacMaster and his partner Britta Froelicher.

MacMaster, who  is presently studying and working in Scotland, and is very active in Edinburgh University's Students for Justice in Palestine, has admitted having written every one of the posts supposedly written by an out lesbian in Damascus. This is a hoax which he has been running since 2007.

It's yet to emerge how he got hold of the photos of the young woman, Jelena Lecic, featured in the YouTube video above, whose image was appropriated by him and presented as that of Amina. The Guardian used those images, and went on using others of Jelena, even after she protested about her identity theft.

 Froelicher, according to today's Harry's Place post, has a deep interest in Syria.

She presented a paper to the British Society of Middle East Studies this year, in which she argued:

The external perception of Syria’s economy is relatively negative. Most scholars find that Syria is moving into a Russian-style ‘crony capitalism’, in which well-connected individuals have de-facto monopolies with the government’s blessing. [...] My research hypothesizes that the reasons for this course of development have little to do with culture and religion or that – as the ‘transition paradigm’ tried to claim – any particular form of development is ‘natural’. Rather, the negative external perceptions of Syria’s economy also impact the desire and ability of western governments to interact positively with Syria, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of mistrust and suspicion. Furthermore, security concerns deepen an existing conservatism towards reform internally.

Froelicher is an associate fellow at the University of St. Andrews. She is researching the topic  ”Economic Reform and the Syrian Textile Industry“. The University of St Andrews has been taking money from dubious Syrian sources for promoting research which happens to burnish the cultural credentials of Syria.

Some of the posts from "Amina Arraf" tried to paint the Syrian regime as not as repressive as the western publicity suggested. Maybe MacMaster was planning to resolve her apparent abduction with a sudden release with her proclaiming how kindly she'd been treated by Assad's regime.

He previously repeatedly denied to The Electronic Intifada that he was “Amina Arraf”. The Electronic Intifada, itself also a strongly anti-Israel blog, deserves credit for continuing to question and research the veracity of the Amina Arraf blog and MacMaster's and Froelich's connections to it, despite such categorical denials as this one: 

I am not the blogger in question. Whomever that person ‘really’ is, I have doubtless interacted with her at some point. I do not know further than that about her. When I first read the news story, I momentarily thought I had an idea who she was. As time has progressed that seems much less likely. I understand there are a number of unusual coincidences regarding the blogger and either me or my wife. Those are, as far as I am aware, simply unusual. I am not going to make more of that.

MacMaster deserves to be sanctioned for creating and promoting this particular bit of “hoaxing”– he’s shown himself to be a hardened liar and deceiver who shouldn’t be allowed to use a University IP.

Not only is he pretty well unrepentant about what he’s done, but he uses his admission of the hoax to try and get on a moral high horse about the supposed “liberal orientalism” of the people he deceived:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone -- I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.

This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.

Some of the posts from "Amina Arraf" tried to paint the Syrian regime as not as repressive as the western publicity suggested. Maybe MacMaster was planning to resolve her apparent abduction with a sudden release with her proclaiming how kindly she'd been treated by Assad's regime.

But the supposed beautiful lipstick lesbian had quite a turn of phrase when it came to characterizing the people of Israel and the actions of its governments and people. Quite something to know that every word of this supposedly authentic Syrian Arab voice came from Mr Tom MacMaster, sometime of Georgia USA, now of Scotland and Edinnburgh University's Students for Justice in Palestine.

 As soon as I post this, I know, the defenders of the Holy Nation will come and denounce me, will ask why it is that I do not see their cause as holy and my own people, my own heritage, my own history, as nothing more than the squawkings of baboons.

Don’t laugh; I am sure they will come. And they will again and again demonstrate their arrogance and their ignorance. When not claiming that their innate superiority in all things means that democracy is not for the likes of me (after all, how else to justify their state?) or that we are all needing just a firm, pale hand to guide us, they will show their ignorance of history.

I for one know my own history. And I know my own country. I know that Jaulan was lost after the Syrians had agreed to cease fire. I know who started that war; it wasn’t us. I know that the Israelis hold Jaulan because they would steal our water and need a nice platform to keep Damascus in their gunsights. I know that there is no difference between what keeps them there and what took Saddam to Kuwait … I know of American sailors who died to keep the world from knowing … I know that their own generals admitted that all the ‘vicious wicked Syrian attacks’ were provoked by them, not us …

I know also of the ethnic cleansing that they undertook up there; 131,000 people made homeless so that Russian migrants might have a place to illegally live. 

And whatever happens in Palestine, no Syrian can forget that they stole our land and made our people homeless.

And we also know who here was guilty of collusion; we know who worked closest with the Soviets then to start the war, who it was who gave the orders to pull back troops from impregnable strongholds on the Jaulan, who it was who would surrender our patrimony without a shot;

The one who gave those orders, the order that, for what it’s worth, meant the death of my father’s older brother, now has a son. And that son is called the President.

Every Syrian knows that; every Syrian knows that Traitor of the Naksa’s second son is President and that another runs his squads of killers. Every Syrian knows that Bashar has never lifted a finger to redeem Jaulan.

So when the lying liars and propagandists, the makers of hasbara and singers of paeans to the so-called Chosen claims that “Bashar tricked us into killing people (if you can call mere Arabs humans and not two-legged dogs) so as to distract fromhis own crimes”, tell them to stuff it. They lie. 

 

Guardian splashes shocking new Israeli cage prisoners revelations

 

Is there no end to the revelations of Israeli inhumanity and cruelty the Guardian bravely publishes day after day? Tuesday's story, by Harriet Sherwood, is truly shocking. Prisoners, huge numbers of them, kept in tiny cages in Israel, barely able move, and forced to seek out their food through the wire mesh they're caged behind. As usual, it's a small anonymous NGO that's brought the story to the attention of The Guardian. They've had a smuggled in secret camera filming a group of three of the prisoners. The story is so shocking that it's on the front of The Guardian's web page as a World News story, taking precedence over carnage in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechniya and other world trouble spots.

 

Here's the shocking description of the conditions under which the prisoners are kept:

 

Oh, so it's all about battery hens, not people? Well, yes, but this is Israel! That makes it a major world news story in the eyes of The Guardian. And one which can be used to evoke all those stock phrases of Israel-as-occupier cruelly persecuting and removing from their land defenceless Palestinians who have only activists with hidden cameras to defend them, whilst themselves being hunted down by the ruthless and previously totally secret hen prisoners security branch of Mossad.

There is of course the nightmarish image of rows of caged chickens in these Israeli Gitmos of the poultry world, stretching relentlessly into the distance, reduced to squatting helplessly in their iron hell as a bored guard brings the rations round.

Hang on! Isn't there something not quite right about that picture? Yes, battery hens..clearly taken in...oh, Beijing, China. So that's how the Guardian illustrates its shock horror story...about Israel.

So is there also a shock horror story about the plight of battery hens in China, because after all, here's David Cameron, currently in China that very day, being criticised for not doing enough to raise the question of a Nobel Prize Winner who's been imprisoned by the Chinese? 

Well, no. Not at all. In fact that home page of Tuesday's web Guardian has not so much as a single link to the Cameron and Chinese prisoners and human rights story, whereas it was the top story on the web site of its ideological soulmate, the BBC News site. The imprisoned Nobel prize winner was the top story on the web site of its other ideological soulmate in the campaign to delegitimize Israel, the Independent.

OK, then. We know that there are political prisoners everywhere. So how could a trivial non event like the plight of an imprisoned Nobel prize winner  in China begin to compare with the horrors of Israel's caged battery hens, surely unique in the world?

After all, how many caged battery prisoner hens are around anywhere today?

Ooops! Seems there are a socking 390,000,000 egg laying hens in the European Union, always so ready to tell Israel how to be more humanitarian, of which over two thirds are kept in battery cages. So that's way over 200,000,000 EU battery hens. Of which at least 16,000,000 are imprisoned in Britain today. And not a single Guardian editorial tear being shed for any of them. Tuesday or any other day recently. But the plight of Israeli battery hens? Shocking headline news. Caged prisoners. Guardian front page story.

Still, I'm sure that Alan Rusbridger and all his colleagues on The Guardian only ever eat free range eggs. You know, those ones produced far from cages, and, unlike their caged colleagues, where the dear little chickens can run free through eternally sunlit fields,stopping only to be petted by members of the English aristocracy in a dreamland of pastoral English wish-fulfilment, and.... peck and bully and cannibalise each other.

I find that a very touching and apt thought.

 

 

Meet the new generation, same as the old generation

 

Well, he's Leader of the Labour Party now. And here he is, setting out his new broom visions in his first speech as Labour leader. How's this for the voice of the "new generation"?

But Israel must accept and recognise in its actions the Palestinian right to statehood.

That is why the attack on the Gaza Flotilla was so wrong.

And that is why the Gaza blockade must be lifted and we must strain every sinew to work to make that happen.

 

OK, so Ed Miliband thinks that the Israeli halting of the Turkish terrorist group attempt to run the legitimate blockade of Gaza was an act of denial of the right to Palestinian statehood.

And he thinks it’s an important enough point for him to make that he puts it into his “speech of a lifetime” inaugural speech as the new leader of the Labour Party.

Oh, yes, definitely a brilliant thinker. A man of the Centre, indeed. Red Ed? How could anyone possibly think that?

 

 

 

Oliver Miles: ex-Ambassador Arab Lobbyist who wants no Jews on the Iraq Enquiry

Stephen Pollard, Harry's Place and Normblog have all drawn attention to a blatantly anti-semitic article by a former Ambassador in today's Independent which objects to the presence of two of the distinguished historians on the panel of the Iraq Enquiry on the grounds that they are Jews. And that's taken by the writer, Oliver Miles, as of itself proof that the panel is unbalanced. Presumably Miles thinks all Jews, and especially all zionists, think alike, and in ways not congenial to him.  Here's what he has to say about it:

Rather less attention has been paid to the curious appointment of two historians (which seems a lot, out of a total of five), both strong supporters of Tony Blair and/or the Iraq war. In December 2004 Sir Martin Gilbert, while pointing out that the "war on terror" was not a third world war, wrote that Bush and Blair "may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill" – an eccentric opinion that would se em to rule him out as a member of the committee. Sir Lawrence Freedman is the reputed architect of the "Blair doctrine" of humanitarian intervention, which was invoked in Kosovo and Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism. Such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream British and American media, but The Jewish Chronicle and the Israeli media have no such inhibitions, and the Arabic media both in London and in the region are usually not far behind.

All five members have outstanding reputations and records, but it is a pity that, if and when the inquiry is accused of a whitewash, such handy ammunition will be available. Membership should not only be balanced; it should be seen to be balanced.

Oliver Miles is Chairman of MEC International, a lobbying group which is mainly focused on lobbying on behalf of Arab and other Middle Eastern regimes and of companies which seek to do business with them. Inter alia it offers the services of a group of ambassadors:

MEC International therefore offers a holistic response to these challenges with an Ambassadorial Service run by senior Ambassadors and those with many years of experience in the region. Risk related questions receive a rapid response from a specially selected MEC task force headed in each case by a consultant ambassador. 

This service offers a complete tailored response supported by MEC publications, its Analytical Group services and consultancy advice available through a hot line and through a team of selected senior consultants. 

The Brief 

The first step is for a company to prepare a brief of its requirements to which an initial written response is prepared by MEC offering both the scope of the service and the personnel involved. For example, one company may wish to track key developments and build in risk protection across its operations in the Middle East to include Central Asia and Iran, Turkey, Israel, the Levant, the Gulf and the Maghreb. The MEC ambassadorial response may not be restricted to the company ’s main business sectors but will also look at wider but related developments including politics, economics, energy and technology which will impact the company’s level of political risk and future stability and development of the region. 

The ambassadorial service seeks to identify important underlying developments and provide concise analytical insights to allow forward planning. The focus will vary from week to week changing with the issues of the day.

As one example of this "ambassadorial service", Miles organized from an internet cafe in Tripoli the well remembered letter to Tony Blair signed by 52 ex-ambassadors, urging him to change his policies on Palestine and Iraq. In other words, Oliver Miles is the leader of the "Camel Corps" of bought and paid for former Foreign Office Arab lobbyists. What's the betting that he and his lobbying group gave substantial help to Peter Oborne for the recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme that UK politicians and media were bullied and controlled by a secretive lobby of Israeli government and associated British zionist businessmen? 

 Just for starters, that programme starred Sir Richard Dalton, the former Director General, now Director of the Libyan British Business Council. The Deputy Chairman of the Libyan British Business Council is none other than Oliver Miles whose MEC has played a major role in setting up and developing the lucrative business contracts that were finally put on offer once Britain agreed to release Abdelbasset El Megrahi to the Libyan regime.

The YouTube clip shows Oliver Miles shilling as a Libyan mouthpiece on the Iranian regime's propaganda channel Press TV, on a panel chaired by Yvonne Ridlley, suggesting that the evidence pointed away from Libya being the organizers of the PanAm 103 bombing.

Much more importantly, Oliver Miles and his MEC consulting lobbyist firm played a major role in setting up a very rosy and enticing portrayal of the trade opportunities in Libya offered to EU businesses. It was a report on the new opportunities following the co-operation contracts finally signed by the Libyans on the release of Megrahi to Libya  by the UK. You can download and read the final draft report here. All the facts and data about Libya were supplied by the entirely trustworthy Libyan one-man dictatorship regime and its various wholly controlled agencies. Which means they are as likely to be reliable as were statistics of tractor production in the Urals in the Soviet Union under Stalin. As it was jointly sponsored by the EU, the creators of the report were obliged to consult Libyan "stakeholders". We're not given a very clear picture of how that was done, but back at page 92 of the report, following a good few pages of stupefying macroeconomic modelling equations, we can see a few squeaks of opposition from some brave souls who complained that the proposed Libyan plans would destroy the environment and further impoverish the poorest Libyans. With typical Civil Service finesse, the comments were simply marked "noted" and the report left intact.

What all this suggests is not so much that Miles is an anti-semite, but that he is a paid lobbyist mouthpiece for regimes which subscribe to and propagate anti-semitic conspiracy theories. And that the British government and the EU are partners with the Libyan dictatorship regime, whilst publicly taking a sniffy high moral stance about human rights and the like. In other words, it's evidence for a much more rational and low key version of the grossly exaggerated Eurabia thesis. It's not that Europe is becoming Islamised, as that the EU and member states like the UK trim their morals and their stances on Middle East issues to ensure that lucrative trade deals stay onside.

Meanwhile, both the Independent and the Guardian regularly publish this Arab regime lobbyist's articles, including those which express hostility to Jews, Israel and zionists, as if they were entirely bona fide disinterested analyses written by a man whose only interests have been representing the UK government.

Quite a few ex-Ambassadors take up part time consultancy for dubious regimes after they leave their posts. In most cases, they are awarded knighthoods or at least a certain amount of commemorative regalia. Why has Oliver Miles never been awarded such honours? Or is he just hiding the honours under a bushel?

The painful attempts of a Muslim to come to terms with Jewish history

Fiyaz Mughal of an organization called "Faith Matters" has written a very moving and interesting account of his visit to Poland, to learn about the Jewish community of the past and present, and of the history of the Holocaust. It has been posted on "Harry's Place" under the title "Most Roads Lead Back to Poland". This post started as a comment on his post, but it turned into an open letter to him:

Dear Fiyaz

Your post is a moving account of your experience. I'm touched that you were motivated to go, that you remain committed to finding out more about what happened to the Jews of Poland, and those of every Jewish community and that you wish to learn more. I'm very surprised, though, at your underplaying the role played by mainstream Poles--not just those you label "collaborators" and the actual minute numbers, by contrast of those Poles who did anything of any sort to help Jews, and the relatively tiny numbers who were saved were no more than a few thousand out of a nation of many millions. For every person who saves a life, it is as if they saved a whole world. So says the Jewish religious tradition. So each and every Pole who did try to help deserves honour and gratitude on the level as if they had indeed saved a whole world. Some paid for their humanity with their lives. That is why Yad Vashem has its "Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles" which commemorates those who did act in this way. I am very glad that they are honoured in this way. Yad Vashem, though, does not recognise as "Righteous Gentiles" those who saved or hid Jews or forged passports for them because they were given money to do so by the desperate Jews they helped. Sometimes the sums of money they were given were huge. Nevertheless, if they saved lives, I believe they earned a right to be recognised. And of course, many of them argued that they wanted the pay for risking their lives--and some of them did pay with their lives. Saving a life or many lives is always a very great achievement, even if it comes with exploitation of the potential victims who were saved. However, there are many, many historically reliable accounts that show that the number of Poles who took an active part in the roundups and the persecutions, or who actively celebrated and cheered when they saw the Jews persecuted beyond belief, slaughtered before their eyes, and taken away to the death that those Poles knew was coming to them when the Jews did not, is vast -- it is the majority of the Polish population. A huge number of these Poles simply looted the houses and such property of the Jews as was not taken by the Germans, and made them their own. When tiny numbers of those Jews who did survive tried to return to their homes, the overwhelming majority were driven away and threatened. There are numerous documented instances of these Jews then being murdered by the Poles who feared they might have to give back the looted homes. One of my cousins, a woman who had survived the camps, was murdered this way in Kanczuga in 1946. There were also those who took part in pogroms which murdered en masse Jews who returned to their villages. Many millions of Poles were terrified bystanders. They rightly feared for their lives. If they were caught helping Jews, they faced almost certain death or at the very least fearsome punishments, which would often include the murder or removal of their children. I can understand what make them bystanders. Who can be sure they would have not acted in the same way? I would like to think I would in such a position have done something. But I can't be sure because I've never had to face such a terror and I hope that none of us ever will. But at the end of the day, out of their very understandable fear, they stood by whilst their neighbours were persecuted, tortured, murdered and dispossessed. There are many people in Iran today who stand in such a position in relation to their neighbours, though they are of the same ethnic and religious group. They of all the people in the world today are closest to those of the Poles in Poland. An act of support or knowing concealing a person who has done no crime other than raising an entirely peaceful voice against a most brutal, lying and ruthless regime can result in hideous torture, death and the dispossession and arrest of their entire families. I wonder if you recognise the parallels. What you have given here, Fiyaz, is a grossly distorted view of the role of the vast majority of the Poles in relation to the Jews under the German occupation. I would like to think that this is the result of historical ignorance, and that for some reason you have not read the main historically reliable histories of what happened and what the Poles did, as opposed to selective accounts written by apologists for the role of the Poles, the Soviet Union and even the Germans. You also owe it to yourself if you are going to be committed to exploring the history of Poland in relation to its former Jewish population to exploring the history of Polish anti-semitism in all its depth, as well as such historical evidence as can be found for relationships of tolerance, as well as the rare evidence of genuine and warm appreciation historically by Poles for Jews and particularly for Jews, Judaism and Jewish culture. The role of the Polish Church in all this is something that will reward study. However, before you do that, and in relation to the rosy picture of many, many Poles resisting the persecution of the Jews and of their being a small minority of collaborators, you will need, if you have not already done so to read the history of democratic Polish politics before World War II, when the newly restored nation first voted for its own representative parliament. You will need to look at the record of democratically elected majority parties which either had or voted for anti-semitic policies which pauperized religious Jews by insisting that all businesses had to open on Saturdays or Jewish religious holidays or close down. You will need to read how the Polish post Word War I democratically elected government refused to carry out the obligation laid on them to provide the full range of political rights and faciiities promised to the linguistic, religious and ethnic minorities of what became Poland, of which Yiddish-speaking Jews and Ukrainians were the main groups failed by the Poles. You will also need to read the history of the Polish legislation, passed by the democratically elected parties of the Polish people in 1938 that proposed to strip Poles living for extended periods abroad of their Polish nationality. The vast majority of the Poles thus affected were Yiddish-speaking Jews, and it was done for the express purpose of ridding themselves of Yiddish speakers, as the debates and justifications of this law analysed by historians will show.

The notorious mass deportation by the Nazis of the Polish Jews of Germany which took place at the end of October 1938 was an action taken by the Nazis to ensure that they were not left with hundreds of thousands of hated stateless Polish Jews. My grandfather and uncle were amongst those taken--they were rounded up by the Gestapo in their Berlin home at 3:00am. My father escaped being rounded up by sheer luck and chance but had to spend the rest of his six months in Berlin in hiding. And what did the Poles do about all these terrified and destitute Jews dumped by the Germans at their border? Why, their new law had come into force. They refused to take them in. They were left in a miserable camp in the no-man's land between the borders. Did these Jews threaten them in any way or say that they wanted to drive the Poles out of Poland and make a Jewish state in Poland? Of course not. But, unless they could find relatives or friends from amongst the Poles prepared to take them in, they were left in misery at the border camp--till the war came and they were taken off to their deaths? Are the Poles responsible for the evils the Nazis did? No. But they bear some responsibility for their attempts to strip the diaspora Polish-born Jews of their nationalities (my grandfather and uncle had proudly chosen Polish nationality after WWI, although they lived in Berlin--they could have taken Austrian or German nationality.) They were both very proud to be Polish Jews. But in October 1938 it was only because they had cousins in Krakow who came out to help them that they were able to get away from the misery of the camp and live in the cousins' house in Krakow. The action of the Poles in leaving in misery, destitution and terror those Polish Jews who had become stateless through Polish legislation which was aimed at getting rid of them is an abiding shame, and absolutely inexcusable.

It comes out of a very long history of Polish anti-semitism besides which the help given to Jews by a tiny but noble minority ceases to have all but token significance. The Poles still have some difficulty in dealing with this dreadful history. I hope you do not. So, Fiyaz, it seems that you do have much further learning to do.But perhaps it is wiser to make sure you are better informed before you post an article which seems so historically under-informed that one could suspect it's biased in favour of a rosy view of the Poles. And lastly, you conclude in your last sentence with the formula "as a Muslim", which seems gratuitously introduced, and with no further explanation. You may not be aware that on Harry's Place and other internet forums, Jews have come to recognise that this "As A" is a marker of false authenticity or representativeness which is not merited by the quaifications it would need to be representative. I am a Jew. As it happens I am a proud Galitzianer (southern Polish) Jew whose father was born and lived till he was 22 in a shtetl there. As you may imagine, I have many, many relatives who were murdered (not perished, as if they were so much old rubber) by the German Nazis with the assistance of enthusiastic allies. 

I know also that many innocent Poles were persecuted, starved and murdered too. Some had their children stolen. But a great many of those Poles were not innocent in relation to the persecution of the Jews. There are very large numbers, historically authenticated, who betrayed Jews to the Nazi regime. They sadly vastly outnumber those who helped the Jews. 

In fact a number of bands of Jews were murdered by Polish Resistance fighters, and the majority of Polish resistance fighters did not help the Jews. That's why the heroic fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto had only tiny numbers of arms at their disposal. The Poles who rose against the Nazis when duped by Stalin and the Soviets into doing so had many, many more arms. There was one specific Polish gentile organization for the aid of the Jews. It included many women amongst its numbers. It is rightly remembered by love and gratitude by Jewish people for its heroic and selfless acts. But they were but a tiny minority who had to do as much to hide their acts from their fellow Poles as they did from the Germans. But if I wrote "as a Jew" it would not give me authority. Nor would my murdered relatives. I will therefore never use the phrase "as a Jew", because it smacks of claiming something beyond being one individual who should not be taken to be in any way informative about Jewish opinion at large. I could write "as one, possibly unrepresentative Jew". Or I could write, because I think I can demonstrate it beyond doubt, "like most Jews who know their own history and religious tradition". I write because I have taken the trouble to spend a great deal of time researching this history. That's why I claim the authority to write in as challenging a spirit as I have of what you write here. And I currently do my best to learn of the range and the dominant and minority trends in Muslim opinion in this country and elsewhere. If you care to look up my Twitterfeed "judyk113' you will see that I have greened my portrait. That of itself did not give me authority to write what I did above about the people of Iran, but I did feel that doing my best to follow both the official and the unofficial accounts of what came out of Iran after the election gives me at least the basis on which to claim some reliability for what I wrote. So, Fiyaz, I'm just as suspicious and sceptical about anyone using the formulation "as a Muslim" as I am of someone saying "as a Jew". It has all to often been a marker of quite a different agenda, and one based on attempts to pass off unrepresentative views as typical or as having an importance beyond their own speaker's presence. And one other piece of history intervenes in my response to your post. It is the history of the PLO under Arafat setting up some sort of ceremony where they would go and place wreaths at either Auschwitz or the site of the Warsaw Ghetto in mourning for the victims of the Holocaust. It was done at the time when they insisted that they had been made the victims of European guilt for the Holocaust, that European Jews have no connection to Israel or to Jerusalem. I am glad they did not as far as I am aware, invoke Islam in this ceremony, which utterly disgusted me, and I believe the vast majority of the Jews of the world. Of course they had and continue to have a retinue of some thousands of Jews (who would invariably invoke the As A Jew formula) who supported and continue to support those of them who wish to see an end to the State of Israel, and who wish to see all Jews removed from living in the occupied territories. I hope, Fiyaz, you are sincere in your learning. But for the Jews of Islamic lands, most roads do not lead back to Poland. They lead back to the history of Jewish settlement and migration in those lands and in Israel, going back centuries. And although their relations with their Muslim neighbours were often cordial and rich, and were incomparably greater than those of Jews with the Christians of Europe, they nevertheless faced institutionalized discrimination and humiliation, and sometimes forcible exclusion expulsion and murderous attacks imposed by the Islamic laws under which they lived. Never forget, indeed. It would be helpful to ensure first that we know every relevant thing we need to remember.

with best wishes

Judy

Guardian publishes Zizek's anti-semitic lies

British journalist and peace activist Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of former British premier Tony Blair who is now an international Middle East peace envoy, shops at a grocery store in Gaza City on September 3, 2008. 

Slavoj Zizek is a world-renowned intellectual. He is the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of the Humanities. He was a candidate for and came close to being elected President of Slovenia. Here's the potted bio (I presume it's self-penned) which appears on their web site:

World-renowned public intellectual Professor Slavoj Zizek has published over 50 books (translated into 20 languages) on topics ranging from philosophy and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to theology, film, opera and politics, including Lacan in Hollywood and The Fragile Absolute. He was a candidate for, and nearly won, the Presidency of his native Slovenia in the first democratic elections after the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1990. Although courted by many universities in the US, he resisted offers until the International Directorship of Birkbeck's Centre came up. Believing that 'Political issues are too serious to be left only to politicians', Zizek aims to promote the role of the public intellectual, to be intellectually active and to address the larger public.

Today, Zizek has published a post on the Guardian's Comment is Free site on the subject of the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The opinions he expresses include anti-semitic lies and recycling of various tropes and evasions routinely used in anti-semitic (as opposed to anti-zionist) discourse on Israel.

Here's the most significant quote which demonstrates the sophisticated way in which he does this:

Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as "the greatest concentration camp in the world".camp in the world". However, in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality that makes all abstract "prayers for peace" obscene and hypocritical. The state of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process, ignored by the media; one day, the world will awake and discover that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we must accept the fact.

He begins apparently innocuously by citing Palestinian references to the Gaza Strip as "the greatest concentration camp in the world" as "a problematic cliche". Zizek's statement can appear to the casual reader to be a rejection of the truth of the term. But of course a "cliche" is not as such a lie. A cliche is usually a particularly hackneyed way of expressing a truth. As such, it is an evasive way of evoking the designation whilst appearing to distance himself from it.

But then look at the next sentence: "in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth".

This statement is a lie. And it is an anti-semitic lie.

Routinely, the words "concentration camp" refer to the concentration camps run by the Nazis either directly or indirectly for the purpose of imprisoning and either preparing for or directly exterminating the Jews and the other designated groups the Nazis set out to murder or otherwise do to death.

Perhaps Professor Zizek meant to say that he is only referring to such concentration camps as are in operation today, such as those of North Korea? He offers no such qualifications or clarifications, but even if he did, it would be a lie even to claim that it is dangerously close to the truth to say that Gaza is a concentration camp of any sort, let alone the greatest in the world.

For a start, let's consider Wikipedia's listing of the characteristics of various forms of Nazi concentration camp:

• Labour camps: concentration camps where interned inmates had to do hard physical labour under inhuman conditions and cruel treatment. Some of these camps were sub-camps of bigger camps, or "operational camps", established for a temporary need.
• Transit and collection camps: camps where inmates were collected and routed to main camps, or temporarily held.
• POW camps: concentration camps where prisoners of war were held after capture. These POW's endured torture and liquidation on a large scale.
• Camps for rehabilitation and re-education of Poles: Camps where the intelligentsia of the ethnic Poles were held, and "re-educated" in light of German-Nazi values as slaves.
• Hostage camps: camps where hostages were held and killed as reprisals.

• Extermination camps: These camps differed from the rest, since not all of them were also concentration-camps. Although none of the categories is independent, and each camp could be classified as a mixture of several of the above, and all camps had some of the elements of an extermination camp, still systematic extermination of new-arrivals occurred in very specific camps. Of these, three were extermination camps, where all new-arrivals were simply killed -- The "Reinhardt Aktion" camps. Three others were concentration and extermination camps altogether. Others were at times classified as "minor extermination camps.   

Now, here's Wikipedia's summary of wider definitions of concentration camps past and present:

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. defines concentration camp as: a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African war of 1899-1902; one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organized by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939-45.

Similar camps existed earlier, such as in the United States (concentration camps for Cherokee and other Native Americans in the 1830s), inCuba (1868–78) and in the Philippines (1898–1901) by Spain under the Restoration and the US respectively^[5]. The term finds its roots in the "reconcentration camps" set up in Cuba by Valeriano Weyler in 1897 to quell opposition to Spanish rule in Cuba. During the Second Boer War(1899-1902), the term "concentration camp" was used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa.^[6] Ostensibly conceived as a form of humanitarian aid to the families whose farms had been destroyed in the fighting, the camps were used to confine and control large numbers of civilians as part of a scorched earth tactic.

Polish historian Władysław Konopczyński has suggested the first concentration camps were actually created in the 18th century, during Bar Confederation, when Russians organized 3 concentration camps in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for Polish rebel captives, where internees awaited deportation on to Siberia. ^[7]

Use of the word concentration comes from the idea of concentrating a group of people who are in some way undesirable in one place, where they can be watched by those who incarcerated them. For example, in a time of insurgency, potential supporters of the insurgents are placed where they cannot provide them with supplies or information.

 

Now, by no stretch of the imagination can Gaza be said to be "dangerously close" to being any sort of concentration camp.  Nor even could it be said to be even remotely close to such a designation being legitimate.

For a start, no concentration camp anywhere, ever, at any time has had inmates who are armed with military hardware. Let alone armed with machine guns, grenade launchers and rockets. Let alone regularly having an organised externally independently financed regime which has forces which use those arms to launch attacks on the nation supposedly imprisoning them, as well as on their own opponents. Here's an image taken yesterday of members of the ruling Gazan Hamas regime's fighters engaged in the process of eliminating a rival group of Islamists in Gaza City:

Neither has any concentration camp anywhere in the world ever had a border with another state which includes gates which it is free to open at will. In the case of Gaza, it has a border with Egypt, which it has chosen to either open or shut independently of Israel. On such occasions, Gazans have freely streamed out of Gaza and gone to trade in Egypt.

In any case, it stretches the imagination beyond the credible to suggest that Professor Zizek might have been thinking of the British concentration camps of the Boer War (where women and children starved to death in huge numbers by failures to provide them with food) or any other concentration camp of the past or the present.

Because Professor Zizek then goes on to state that, by what he claims are processes of stealth, the West Bank (not, you note, Gaza) "will become Palestinian-frei". What is this German-derived neologism but an unmistakable analogy to the Nazi policy of eliminating in its entirety the Jewish presence in any area it controlled, which it termed making it "Judenfrei" or "Judenrein"?

Any use of Nazi analogies in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is wholly unjustifiable. Are there any possible circumstances under which the Guardian condones the expression of such views as legitimate or acceptable? Incidentally, I equally deplore and consider unacceptable the use of Nazi analogies and transferred terminology of this kind by either citizens or supporters of Israel or anyone else. That includes the use of the term "Auschwitz borders" in the context of either the 1949 or 1967 borders of Israel (or any other international borders anywhere) and the all too common use of the word "Judenrein" in the context of critiquing Palestinian, Arab and Islamist demands about Jewish residence anywhere in the Middle East. However, one could at least argue that such discourse, deplorable as it is, can be related to explicitly exterminationist/expulsionist discourse as can readily found in the history of certain Palestinian, Arab and Islamist polemics and political programmes about the Jews of Israel or the occupied territories or indeed the wider Middle East. But such advocacy of exterminationism or proposed total ethnic group expulsion is quite appalling enough in its own right not to need the addition of Nazi-specific exterminationist/expulsionist terminology to justify exposing them for what they are.

Accompanying the history of real concentration camps of the past and present is not only unarmed and prisoner status but extreme physical deprivation resulting in huge numbers of deaths through starvation or murder. The image at the head of this post of Lauren Booth, another invoker of the designation of Gaza as a "concentration camp" visiting a very well stocked Gazan shop, staffed by visibly well fed people is just one of a whole series of such images previously featured in this post at Harry's Place.

There are of course many, many other reasons why there is not even remote comparability between Gaza and its continuingly increasing population and the reality of concentration camps, particularly those of the Nazis, but what I've set out so far should be quite enough to demonstrate that the effect of Professor Zizek's discourse is to create a "dangerously close" near equivalence between the policies and practices of the Jewish state of Israel and the Nazi regime which sought to exterminate every last Jew without exception. 

Professor Zizek seems to have some form in the matter of using anti-semitic discourse around debates on the Holocaust and Jews as well as on the subject of Israel. In this Guardian post, he appears to have produced a piece of writing which is a disgrace to any academic, let alone a Professor of philosophy proudly claiming "to promote the role of the public intellectual".

The Guardian's guidelines are published here. 

Given Israel's unique status as the only Jewish state in the world, and as the home of over forty percent of the world's Jews, and the history of the deliberate mass extermination of Jews at the hands of the Nazis, how can the Guardian have passed for publication a post which so clearly violates these three of its own guidelines?

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4. We reserve the right to redirect or curtail conversations which descend into flame-wars based on ingrained partisanship or generalisations. We don't want to stop people discussing topics they are enthusiastic about, but we do ask users to find ways of sharing their views that do not feel divisive, threatening or toxic to others.

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