Daphne Anson: None So Blind As Those Who Won't See

Eretz Israel is our unforgettable historic homeland...The Jews who will it shall achieve their State...And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind. (Theodor Herzl, DerJudenstaat, 1896)

We offer peace and amity to all the neighbouring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all. The State of Israel is ready to contribute its full share to the peaceful progress and development of the Middle East. (From Proclamation of the State of Israel, 5 Iyar 5708; 14 May 1948)

With a liberal democratic political system operating under the rule of law, a flourishing market economy producing technological innovation to the benefit of the wider world, and a population as educated and cultured as anywhere in Europe or North America, Israel is a normal Western country with a right to be treated as such in the community of nations.... For the global jihad, Israel may be the first objective. But it will not be the last. (Friends of Israel Initiative)

Friday, 4 March 2011

None So Blind As Those Who Won't See

Courtesy: Edgar Davidson blog (see text)

The BBC (you know by now how much I love Al Beeb, don’t you?!) has kept shtum about all sorts of developments in the Middle East that suggest that not all within the protest movement is sweetness and light.

On its execrably left-leaning CoJo (College of Journalism) website – which I advise all concerned about Al Beeb’s anti-Western, anti-Israel bias to keep an eye on regularly – it carries, for example, a piece by a suitably tame Israeli about the brutal attack on CBS reporter Lara Logan by a Muslim mob in Cairo, a piece which omits the rather salient fact that the mob yelled “Jew! Jew!” and focuses instead on the “ugly media reactions” in the West that display male chauvinism towards working women in conflict zones and Islamophobia.

Here’s a snippet:

‘Debbie Schlussel, the ultra-conservative columnist and commentator, claimed in her blog:

"Lara Logan was among the chief cheerleaders of this 'revolution' by animals. Now she knows what Islamic revolution is really all about."

She added:

"So sad, too bad, Lara. No-one told her to go there. She knew the risks. And she should have known what Islam is all about. Now she knows ... How fitting that Lara Logan was 'liberated' by Muslims in Liberation Square while she was gushing over the other part of the 'liberation'."

For Al Beeb that kind of talk won’t do at all.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/blog/2011/02/february-11th-the-day-egypts.shtml

Courtesy: Edgar Davidson blog (see text)

Nor will any hint of antisemitism among the protesters – as captured in the composite photos I've reproduced here – they were put together by Edgar Davidson and I took the liberty of copying them from recent posts on his admirable blog (http://www.edgar1981.blogspot.com/)

And, as I’ve said more than once, neither will any suggestion that the Muslim Brotherhood, is in fact (despite the blatherings of Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen and his acolytes) a dangerous Jihadist organisation.

All of which brings me to Professor Barry Rubin’s post on his blog entitled “Muslim Brotherhood's New Campaign: Seize Control of Egypt's Islamic Institutions”.

He writes:

‘MEMRI has pointed out the opening of a Muslim Brotherhood campaign to replace Egypt's current clerical hierarchy with its own people. If that happens...you can imagine.. Once Islamists are in place making the "official" decisions on what constitutes proper Islam, an Islamist state cannot be far away.

.... Knowing that control over Islam was vital to maintaining control of the country, the Egyptian regime (like nationalist regimes elsewhere) set out to build a systematic structure for doing so. The head of the al-Azhar Islamic university, the chief qadi, the clerics of different mosques, are government-appointed. Sermons are government-approved. A ministry in charge of awqaf (religious foundations) and religion supervises all of this and hands out the money. And the government also decides which clerics appear on television and radio, or even have their own programs.

Over the last decade or so, the "official" clerics have been radicalized, and they support terrorism against Israel. Yet there is still a huge gap between those who accepted the rule by Mubarak's regime and those who demand an Islamist regime. They hate the Brotherhood and the Brotherhood hates them.

Now, if all of these official clerics are declared to be corrupt instruments of the old regime and are thrown out of office, the Brotherhood will control "Islam" in Egypt. Equally important, they will control a vast amount of patronage and money. Every cleric will have to get along with them or be unemployed. They could authorize which mosques could open. They would control religious education.

If the Brotherhood is a participant in government, even as a junior member of a coalition, its highest priority will be the religious affairs ministry. To call this dangerous is an understatement.

So we should watch carefully this battle over who governs Islam in Egypt.

To save you a click, here is what Muhammad Zoghbi of the Brotherhood says:

"Al-Azhar was subjected to...the politicization of the positions of the sheikh of Al-Azhar and the mufti of Egypt, as well as the position of the minister of religious endowments. These positions must be filled through elections. By no means should these officials be appointed by the president....

Therefore I say to the 'sons' of Al-Azhar: Let us all join the campaign, led by Sheik Khaled Al-Gindi, until we liberate Al-Azhar, just like Egypt was liberated....The president of Egypt must be subordinate to Al-Azhar and respect it....

Therefore, I say to the sheikh of Al-Azhar...resign immediately.... The mufti and the minister of religious endowments should step down, leaving their positions to God-fearing imams...."

"God-fearing" imams means Muslim Brotherhood cadre. The president of Egypt "must be subordinate" to al-Azhar means an Islamist state. This strategy also suggests that the Brotherhood is recognizing that it will not choose Egypt's next president – who is more likely to be the nationalist Amr Moussa – so it must start building an independent base of support outside of the government's and president's control for its long march toward Islamism at a later date.'

Barry Rubin, in another post entitled “The Turkish Camouflage Model: Arab Radicals Learn How to Hide Your Islamism,” draws attention to a pertinent passage from Newsweek magazine (http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/27/an-islamist-makeover.html)

“As revolutions across the Mideast bring religious parties within sight of real political power, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is becoming the region’s go-to man for Islamist leaders looking for a makeover.”

Adds the professor:

“In other words, be an Islamist but pretend you aren't. The fact that Erdogan is an ally of Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hizballah is not a good sign for those who follow what might be better called the Turkish Camouflage-Your-Extremism Model.”

http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2011/03/muslim-brotherhoods-new-campaign-seize.html
http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2011/03/turkish-camouflage-model-arab-radicals.html

2 comments:

Mark Wright5 March 2011 at 09:56
Daphne

Thanks for the links to the pictures. The story behind those was that I did a simple google picture search on the demonstrations and was astonished how many came up with anti-semitic images. So it was not hard to put a few together.

That BBC article you pointed out is really incredible. It actually attempts to classify the Logan attack as part of the wider attacks on Western reporters that were previously carried out by Mubarak's thugs. The BBC is simply conditioned to reject any story, no matter how strong the evidence, that does not fit their narrative. And when they fail to stop one of these stories reaching at least part of the MSM, they simply rewrite the story to fit their narrative hoping that their readers will not find out the truth.
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Daphne Anson5 March 2011 at 19:29
Thanks, Edgar. But fair dues to yourself for finding those pictures - a comparable google search didn't really yield much for me!
I totally agree with your take on the BBC - in an early post ("The Man Who Begat a Multitude")I suggest that Keith Kyle was the first of Al Beeb's reporters to display bias against Israel.
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'For as long as these antisemites wrap themselves up in the Palestinian flag, too many people are willing to turn a blind eye. Only against Jews is this type of racism openly tolerated. It is flourishing in schools, colleges, universities, unions and in city councils. In fact, so rampant is the disease now, in some settings you can be ostracised if you do not partake in the frenzy yourself. Bashing Jews has becomes a trendy position for the ignorant social justice warrior. "Palestinianism" is a viral "ponzi scheme" and as it spreads, it carries antisemitism in the undergrowth.' David Collier (2017)

'This new rise in antisemitism, which I had thought long dead, was not shaven-headed white imbeciles from the far right. It was Muslims, a large chunk of it.... Suddenly I grasped that the British far left didn’t want people to know about antisemitism because it pointed the finger at people they really, really liked. From that moment on, it all fell into place.... Time and again the same tropes emerged, the same sort of stuff that Streicher and Goebbels would have commended – and uttered.... And from that a whole bunch of other stuff emerged: the old blood libel business (a favourite of the repulsive Jenny Tonge).... Nice, avuncular, Jeremy Corbyn, with his peace badges, happily laying a wreath at the graveside of Palestinian terrorists who murdered innocent Jewish athletes, oh, and much much more.... It is the same antisemitism, exactly the same: the obsession with Israel to the exclusion of everything else, the conspiracy theory paranoias, the derangement.... Here’s the test – if you cannot see the flagrant racism in the BDS movement, and if you are obsessed with the perfidy of the Middle East’s only democracy to the exclusion of all else, you are an antisemite. That means a good proportion of the Labour Party, including the leader, and almost all of Momentum: no brown shirts, no marching bands, but the same old filth, dressed in the clothes of a polytechnic geography lecturer.'
Rod Liddle (2018)

'Before the June 1967 Six Day War, there were no such things as "settlements". Palestinians were trying to destroy and displace Israel anyhow. The core problem is not, and never was, "settlements," but the right of Israel (or any non-Muslim nation) to exist inside any borders in that part of the world.
If you take a stand that is based on a lie, then that stand cannot succeed. If you try to oppose antisemitism but pretend it is the same thing as "Islamophobia," then the structure on which you have made your stand will totter and all your aspirations will fail. If you try to make a stand based on the idea that settlement construction rather than the intransigence of the Palestinians to the existence of a Jewish state is what is holding up a peace deal, then facts will keep on intruding.' Douglas Murray (31 December 2016)
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9685/britain-little-lies

'Islamophobia does NOT come from the same wellspring of hatred as antisemitism. Antisemitism is a true prejudice because the hatred and demonisation it promotes derive entirely from lies and a repudiation of rationality itself.
Islamophobia is a false allegation of prejudice which is deployed to silence rational criticism based on actual facts about attitudes and practices within the Islamic world.
[L]ethally compromised even-handedness is to misunderstand, and thus minimise, antisemitic attitudes and behaviour while shutting down legitimate and necessary discussion of the threat from the Islamic world – even to demonise as “Islamophobic” anyone who draws attention to the extent and consequences of Muslim antisemitism.' Melanie Phillips (14 December 2016)

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Europe is today facing a crisis as serious as the confrontation with Nazism. If Western leaders continue behaving like Chamberlain and fail to stand up to this global threat, it could usher in a new Dark Age in which the Judeo-Christian culture is subsumed by primitive barbarism. The writing is on the wall Isi Leibler (12 January 2015)

Expose The Lies!

There is a war of lies and deceit on the internet generating unbelievable hate by denigrating and delegitimising the legal rights conferred on the Jewish people by the League of Nations in 1922 and the United Nations in 1945. The idea that there are two narratives on the Arab-Jewish conflict is rubbish. There is only one – the factual truth that details the return of the Jewish people to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in its ancient biblical, ancestral and historic homeland after 3500 years of dispersion with the unanimous endorsement of the nation states then comprising the League of Nations.... Generals can’t fight a war without soldiers. Jews around the world need to join the fight or vacate the internet to the Jew-haters and their lies that repeated often enough eventually become accepted as truth. David Singer (2016)

The "Apartheid" Slur

The division of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) into three separate areas “A”, “B” and “C” was agreed on by Israel and the PLO pursuant to the Oslo Accords.
95% of the West Bank Arabs live in Areas A and B and their daily lives are under the total administration and control of the PLO since the Palestinian Authority was disbanded by Abbas in January 2013. The PLO has total security control in A and shares security control in B with Israel. Israel has total administrative and security control in C.
Israel is entitled to and will continue to take responsibility for the security of Jews living in the West Bank.
Jews were given the legal right to settle in the West Bank under article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the UN Charter. They did so for decades until they were driven out in 1947 and not able to return there until 1967.
There are Arab roads only in the West Bank that Jews are not allowed to use. Jews are also forbidden from entering Area “A”. Selling land to Jews is forbidden by the PLO under pain of death. The PLO runs the daily lives of 95% of the West Bank Arabs and Hamas runs the daily lives of 100% of the Gazan Arabs. They have been under occupation – and subjugation – by these two evil groups for the last ten years and given no say in their future or any opportunity to elect others to lead them following the disastrous political decisions of their leaders over the past ten years. Hamas and the PLO do not accept the continued existence of a Jewish State and call for its disappearance.
The narratives did not begin in 1948 – they began in about 1917. How do you make peace with an enemy that has been obsessed with not recognising any Jewish national rights in former Palestine for the last 100 years? David Singer (2016)

The Jews of the Holy Land ... are surrounded by hostile states 650 times their territory and sixty times their population. Yet their last, best hope of ending two millennia of international persecution - the State of Israel - has somehow survived. When, during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Cross for bravery. Today, Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous onslaught that has lasted twenty times as long. Andrew Roberts (historian)

Israel is understandably obsessed with security, but its greatest security lies ultimately not in the Israeli Defence Forces, but in political warfare.... Most of the world is not deeply interested in what happens in Israel, and probably does not want to be deluged with legalistic defences of particular actions. What it wants is a clear, calm, repeated case. It is a case – aimed more at public opinion than at foreign ministries – about freedom, democracy, a Western way of life and the need for the whole of the free world to fight terrorism. Sometimes you hear Israelis say: “It doesn’t matter what we say. The whole world is against us.” You can see why they say it, for they are indeed unfairly treated. But when they say it, they are uttering a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they won’t say what needs saying, no one else will say it for them. Charles Moore (2010)

Once again the armies of the Arab nations are coordinating their military efforts to destroy Israel - whatever they say about wishing merely to regain the lost territories.... [I]f the present Arab offensive had been launched at the pre-1967 frontiers, then the Israelis would indeed have been fighting to avoid annihilation. It seems now that the Israelis were right to maintain the ceasefire lines gained in 1967, and that to do so is the only guarantee of their continued safety.
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Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam... In this deadly game of thrones, there’s no place for America or for Israel, no place for Christians, Jews or Muslims who don’t share the Islamist medieval creed, no rights for women, no freedom for anyone... [T]he greatest danger facing our world is the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons. To defeat ISIS and let Iran get nuclear weapons would be to win the battle, but lose the war. We can’t let that happen...[T]he days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over. We are no longer scattered among the nations, powerless to defend ourselves. We restored our sovereignty in our ancient home. And the soldiers who defend our home have boundless courage. For the first time in 100 generations, we, the Jewish people, can defend ourselves....Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel will stand. But ... I know that America stands with Israel... You stand with Israel, because you know that the story of Israel is not only the story of the Jewish people but of the human spirit that refuses again and again to succumb to history’s horrors. Bibi Netanyahu (12 Adar 5775; 3 March 2015)

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[I]t’s impossible to believe that an active antisemite wouldn’t – if only opportunistically – seek out somewhere to nestle in the manifold pleats of Israel-bashing, whether in generally diffuse anti-Zionism, or in more specific Boycott and Divestment Campaigns, Israeli Apartheid Weeks, End the Occupation movements and the like....[T]ell me that not a single Jew-hater finds the activity congenial, that criticising Israel can “never” be an expression of Jew-hating, not even when it takes the form of accusing Israeli soldiers of harvesting organs... Howard Jacobson (The Independent, 27 May 2013)

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I am duty-bound to defend freedom, culture, peaceful coexistence, the civic education of children, and all the principles that the Tablets of the Law have rendered universal. Principles which Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. This means that, since I am a Gentile, a journalist and a leftist, I have a triple moral commitment to Israel. Because, if Israel were to be vanquished, modernity, culture and freedom would also be crushed. Even though the world has failed to wake up to this fact, Israel's struggle is the world's struggle. Pilar Rahola

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