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| President Higgins and friends |
"As soon as you walked out of the hotel, she recalled, you could see something was terribly wrong. Arabs shrinking back on the pavements to allow Jews to pass, being literally, physically pushed out of their way if they didn’t move fast enough, and, worst of all in her account, the Arabs’ heads-down acceptance of it all."
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| Courtesy: Jean Vercors |
'Browne's diatribe -- if his incoherent drivel merits such a lofty term -- included the allegation that Israel "stole the land from the Arabs". Only partly true. Vast tracts of land were bought from Arabs by early Zionist settlers, and funded by the Eretz Yisrael Office.
Much the same is true of settlements in the West Bank. To be sure, some atrocious things happened in 1948, and many Arabs were intimidated into flight. But that is nearly 65 years ago: as much time as elapsed between the Battle of Little Big Horn and Pearl Harbour. Who would have proposed in 1941 that Montana and the Dakotas should be given back to the Cheyenne and Lacota Indians?
The Arabs who fled Israel were not then assimilated into the populations of neighbouring Arab states, but were confined in refugee camps, which remain to this day.
Compare roughly contemporaneous events in Pakistan and India, where 14 million people fled in waves of terror and mass-murder that dwarfed events in Israel.
Refugees were then incorporated into the lives of both new states. And in 1945, millions of ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe and were duly assimilated into the Federal Republic of Germany.
In other words, bad things happened: so get on with it. But the one ethnic group that cherishes a grievance, and picks at the scab until it is an open and weeping abscess and finally, yes, cancerous, are Israel's Arab neighbours, who have ruthlessly used the Palestinian refugees as a propaganda tool in their existential war against the Jewish state.'Read Myers' entire article here
"I'm tired of Israel always having to stand alone. I am a Christian. I love Israel. I wish to support them in all their troubles."
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| An Irish activist posing beside IPSC wares |
'I used to hate Israel. I used to think the Left was always right. Not any more. Now I loathe Palestinian terrorists. Now I see why Israel has to be hard....
....[T]he Palestinian mantra was one of "non-violent resistance". It was their motto, repeated over and over...
Yet when I interviewed Hind Khoury, a former Palestinian government member, she sat forward angrily in her chair as she refused to condemn the actions of the suicide bombers. She was all aggression.
This aggression continued in Hebron, where I witnessed swastikas on a wall. As I set up my camera, an Israeli soldier shouted down from his rooftop position. A few months previously I might have ignored him as my political enemy. But now I stopped to talk. He only talked about Taybeh, the local Palestinian beer.
Back in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011, I began to listen more closely to the Israeli side. I remember one conversation in Shenkin Street -- Tel Aviv's most fashionable quarter, a street where everybody looks as if they went to art college. I was outside a cafe interviewing a former soldier.
He talked slowly about his time in Gaza. He spoke about 20 Arab teenagers filled with ecstasy tablets and sent running towards the base he'd patrolled. Each strapped with a bomb and carrying a hand-held detonator.
The pills in their bloodstream meant they felt no pain. Only a headshot would take them down.
Conversations like this are normal in Tel Aviv. I began to experience the sense of isolation Israelis feel. An isolation that began in the ghettos of Europe and ended in Auschwitz.
Israel is a refuge -- but a refuge under siege, a refuge where rockets rain death from the skies. And as I made the effort to empathise, to look at the world through their eyes. I began a new intellectual journey. One that would not be welcome back home.
The problem began when I resolved to come back with a film that showed both sides of the coin. Actually there are many more than two. Which is why my film is called Forty Shades of Grey. But only one side was wanted back in Dublin. My peers expected me to come back with an attack on Israel. No grey areas were acceptable.
Irish President Higgins at an anti-Israel demo
An Irish artist is supposed to sign boycotts, wear a PLO scarf, and remonstrate loudly about The Occupation. But it's not just artists who are supposed to hate Israel. Being anti-Israel is supposed to be part of our Irish identity, the same way we are supposed to resent the English...'Read the entire superb article here (Thanks again, Ian and Rita!)
"Your Irish fans and the many Irish lovers of Fado music will be eager to give you a warm Irish welcome when you perform in our National Concert Hall on 19th January next.
However, if you persist with your plan to perform in Israel on 27th January, in violation of the Palestinian call for a cultural boycott of the Israeli state, that welcome will be balanced by a demonstration against your indifference to the fate ... of the Palestinian people....
Please ensure that your welcome to Ireland will be unconditional by cancelling your planned performance in Tel Aviv."
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| Higgins at an anti-Israel rally in Galway in 2007 |
'I was blindfolded and kept in the dark for a large period of my four and a half years’ incarceration in Beirut. I would wake up not knowing whether it was day or night. The darkness was palpable. You could touch it with your fingers. I wondered in that blackness: how do they know I’m alive. How do I know? .... Your self-awareness is swallowed up in the black incubus all around you. You may hear moaning or screaming or swearing, but you are gone. You question your own existence. You have no point of reference without being able to see another’s face.
I had no contact with the outside world. The only sound I heard was the call to prayer. If someone is communicating with you, the confinement seems less. At least for a while. Once the reality hits - that liberation might not come - strange things happen inside the body, brain, and mind. When you are trapped, or in captivity, "mind time" is totally different from ordinary time. It is out of time. It has no structure. That is the struggle. Strategies to "kill time", which I often tried, are absurd and don't work.' http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2010/08/for-hostage-of-hamas-another-unhappy.htmlSo I was surprised and disconcerted to read, in journalist Kevin Myers's article on Friday in the Irish Independent, that during a discussion on the Middle East at a recent book festival in the Emerald Isle Mr Keenan had joined the rest of the panel (all except Myers) in putting the boot into Israel.
"Not merely was I the only pro-Israeli person in the panel of four, but the chairwoman of the session, [journalist and broadcaster] Olivia O'Leary, also felt obliged to throw in her three-ha'pence worth.
Israeli settlers on the West Bank were on stolen land, she sniffed. Palestinians in their refugee camps had title deeds to the ancient properties. The UN had repeatedly condemned Israel. Brian Keenan, who was held hostage by Arab terrorists for four years, then detailed Israeli human-rights abuses, to loud cheers.
Israel - and its sole defender on the panel ... were then roundly attacked by members of the audience. But what was most striking about the audience's contributions was the raw emotion: they seemed to loathe Israel."In the latest flotilla is the Motor Vessel Saoirse ("Freedom"), from Ireland:
'What is it about Israel that prompts such a widespread departure from common sense, reason and moral reality? As another insane flotilla prepares to butt across the Mediterranean bringing "aid" to the "beleaguered" people of Gaza, in its midst travelling the MV Saoirse, does it never occur to all the hysterical anti-Israeli activists in Ireland that this is like worrying about the steaks being burnt on the barbecue, as a forest fire sweeps towards your back garden?....
But how can anyone possibly think that Gaza is the primary centre of injustice in the Middle East? According to Mathilde Redmatn, deputy director of the International Red Cross in Gaza, there is in fact no humanitarian crisis there at all. But by God, there is one in Syria, where possibly thousands have died in the past month.
However, I notice that none of the Irish do-gooders are sending an aid-ship to Latakia. Why? Is it because they know that the Syrians do not deal with dissenting vessels by lads with truncheons abseiling down from helicopters, but with belt-fed machine guns, right from the start?
What about a humanitarian ship to Libya? Surely no-one on the MV Saoirse could possible maintain that life under Gaddafi qualified it as a civilised state. Not merely did it murder opponents by the bucketload at home and abroad, it kept the IRA campaign going for 20 years, and it also - a minor point, this, I know - brought down the Pan Am flight at Lockerbie. Yet no Irish boat to Libya. Only the other way round.
And then there's Iraq. Throughout the decades of Saddam Hussein, whose regime caused the deaths of well over a million people, there wasn't a breath of liberal protest against him. Gassing the Kurds? Not a whimper. Invading Kuwait? Not one single angry placard-bearing European liberal outside an Iraqi embassy.
Destroying the drainage systems of the Marsh Arabs? Silence. Manipulating UN oil-for-food programme so that thousands died? Nothing.
Next, Saudi Arabia, whose revolting practices cannot be called medieval without doing a grave injustice to the Middle Ages. It is led by savages who have studiously turned their backs on knowledge - even as they sip their Krug and their Bollinger in their €100m apartments in Belgravia. They behead and behand, they torture and they mutilate, and they have spent billions on their foul madrasahs teaching young Muslims right across the world to hate us kaffirs. But what demonstrations are there outside Saudi embassies? What flotillas to defend the human rights of the millions of immigrant serfs, who toil without any rights in Saudi homes and in the oil industry?
There isn't a single Arab country, not one, with the constitutional protection that Israel confers on all its citizens, regardless of religion or ethnicity or sexual orientation....
The last 'aid flotilla' to Gaza carried a large number of Islamists who wanted to provoke: and aided by some quite astounding Israeli stupidity, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Now another convoy is under way, and again with an utterly disingenuous plan to bring "assistance" to the "beleaguered Gazans", some of who, funnily enough, can now cross into Egypt any time they like, and buy their explosives and their Kalashnikovs in the local arms-bazaar.
And as for human-rights abuses: why, nothing that Israel has done in the 63 years of its existence can possibly compare with the mass-murders of Fatah members by Hamas firing-squads over the past five years.
The colossal western intellectual dissonance between evidence and perception on the subject of Israel at this point in history can perhaps only be explained by anthropologists.
This dissonance is perhaps at its most acute in Ireland, where no empirical proof seems capable of changing people's minds. Israel, just about the only country in the entire region where Arabs are not rising up against their rulers, is also the only country that the Irish chattering classes unite in condemning. Rather pathetic, really.' http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/kevin-myers-how-can-dogooders-possibly-think-that-gaza-is-the-primary-centre-of-injustice-in-middle-east-2804748.htmlSadly and disturbingly, I doubt whether the IDF's Lieutenant-Colonel Avital Leibovich will succeed in convincing such fanatics of the error of their ways:
"I was honoured to meet Nelson Mandela when he was in Ireland. I took the opportunity to ask his opinion on the cultural and sporting boycott of South Africa. He replied by saying that the boycott was an essential weapon in the struggle against apartheid. His forceful words came back to me last year when I, along with many other Irish creative and performing artists, signed a cultural boycott pledge not to visit Israel (www.ipsc.ie/pledge). This was a positive response to the call by Palestinian film-makers, artists and cultural organisations for a cultural boycott of Israel. I believe that this non-violent cultural boycott will contribute to the struggle for justice for the Palestinian people.
Because I have signed up to support the cultural boycott I will not be travelling to Israel with Riverdance, and also I have decided to donate any royalties due to me for performances in Israel to the fund for the Irish boat which will be taking part in the international flotilla which is hoping to break the illegal and inhuman blockade of the citizens of Gaza."And in a long and inevitable "open letter" similarly drawing that preposterous libellous analogy between Israel and apartheid era South Africa, the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, through Raymond Deane, its so-called cultural boycott officer, says:
"Would Riverdance have toured South Africa during the dark years of Apartheid there? If not, then how can its creators and performers justify touring the rogue Israeli state that has devised its own form of Apartheid that in many respects is worse than that once practised in South Africa?....
Just as BDS - including the cultural boycott - played a part in isolating South Africa and helping to bring an end to Apartheid, similar tactics can help isolate the Apartheid Israeli state and compel it to end its illegal occupation and colonial settlement of Palestinian lands, and its refusal to negotiate a just peace without preconditions ...
Some say that, unlike Apartheid South Africa, Israel is a democracy and must be treated differently...Even if this were true, do the crimes of a democracy weigh less than those of a dictatorship? But it is not true: Israel calls itself "the state of the Jewish people", not that of its citizens, and discriminates against non-Jews; intent on continued expansion, it has never negotiated internationally recognised borders; it is in permanent violation of international law and international humanitarian law by virtue of its occupation and colonisation of Palestinian and Syrian territory and its cruel siege of the Gaza strip; and it holds thousands of Palestinian political prisoners (including over 200 children) subject, according to Amnesty International, “to torture and other ill- treatment.“ Does such a rogue state truly deserve the noble epithet "democracy"?
You may protest that culture is above politics and builds bridges between peoples, even opponents. But culture is not above being exploited for political ends by states that serially abuse human rights....'The crusading anti-Israel British cleric Stephen Sizer, vicar of an Anglican church in Surrey, reproduces both letters, dated 26 April, in full on his blog: http://stephensizer.blogspot.com/2011/05/riverdance-must-boycott-israel.html
"The upcoming inaugural visit by Riverdance to Israel follows an invitation by an independent concert promoter to perform in three cities next September and this tour will allow all Israeli citizens experience a show that has been seen live by over 22 million people across 35 countries for the past 16 years.
Riverdance supports the policy of the Irish Government and indeed the policy of every other EU state that cultural interaction is preferable to isolation."No doubt there will be a sustained campaign ahead, of the kind described in that same Hollywood Reporter article, to cajole Riverdance to cancel their plans. Let's hope they, so to speak, dig their heels in and resist the pressure!
“Being in Israel during the ‘Flotilla Incident’ was one of the most sobering experiences I have ever encountered. I was stationed in the north of Israel at the time, far away from the events on the high seas, yet the aftershock reverberated throughout the country. Our ‘madricha’, the soldier responsible for us volunteers, greeted us after the flag-raising ceremony that morning in an uncharacteristically depressed mood. Her voice quivered as she told us what happened.... As the ‘madricha’ spoke, tears welled in her eyes — not of anger, but of despair. It was a hopeless situation — either weapons would be smuggled into Gaza, thus supplying ammunition to Hamas’ terror campaign, or else when the Israeli Defence Forces intervened to stop them it would be a propaganda victory for the ‘innocent peace political — the Gazans are far from needy. During the last 18 months, more than one million tons of humanitarian supplies entered Gaza from Israel, equalling nearly one ton of aid for every man, woman and child. We volunteers were dumb-founded as we scrolled through our phones and read western media reports, each one damning Israel for ‘impeding humanitarian aid’. Shortly after the flotilla incident, I attended a peaceful demonstration outside the Turkish embassy in Israel, and as Israeli flags whirled above our heads, we all chimed with heartfelt sincerity “kol hakavod Yisrael” — “Well done, Israel.”See the entire article and photos of Cliona in Israel here http://dublin.mfa.gov.il/mfm/Data/184077.pdf
