"The Campaign To Boycott Israel is An Antisemitic Policy ... The Problem Starts With The World's Media": Aussie newspaper publisher

The Cambridge Union has voted that Israel is "a rogue state": ayes 51 per cent; noes 19 per cent; abstentions 30 per cent.  Ben White, the ubiquitous anti-Israel campaigner who spoke in favour of the motion along with Ghada Karmi and Norman Finkelstein, has his triumphant take on the sordid matter here.

Miriam Margolyes, coincidentally herself a Cambridge graduate, the "star of stage and screen" known to young audiences as "Professor Sprout" of Harry Potter fame, but whose longest-running, not to say infamous, role seems to be that of an "Ashamed Jew" (see Ray Cook's unforgettable review here) has been up to her old tricks.

And as a result of her demonisation of Israel an the ABC's Q&A show (Australia's answer to the BBC's "Question Time") the  veteran leftist has been enjoying rather too much of the limelight in the Australian press this past week or so, especially from its Israel-bashing elements.

She's attracted attention not only because she repeated her despicable mantra that Israel is responsible for the rise of antisemitism worldwide, but because she described  prime minister Tony Abbott as "a tit".

Liberal Party minister Josh Frydenberg, assistant treasurer in Abbott's team, did his best to refute her ignorant views, in a courteous manner.

Pity another visiting Brit (actually, Margolyes now has dual Aussie/British citizenship) Melanie Phillips was not on the panel to show her up.

Or the alter ego of Dame Edna Everage, who rather splendidly dealt with Margolyes on a previous Q&A when she spouted similar invective against the Jewish State.

As Ted Lapkin, a former adviser to the Abbott government, has observed in The Australian newspaper:

'The moment actress Miriam Margolyes opened her mouth to opine on anti-Semitism during the ABC’s Q&A this week, the moral rot at the heart of 21st-century leftist thought came on full display. Responding to an audience question on the issue of Jew-­hatred, the ever-so-progressive Margolyes indulged in a nauseating exhibition of “blame the victim” pathology. The reason “people don’t like Jews”, she didactically intoned, “is because of the actions of the state of Israel”.

Margolyes declared during a BBC interview in 2010 that she “totally understood” Palestinian anti-Jewish hostility because Is­rael “foments it”. Using Margolyes’s line of reasoning as a guide, the slaughter of Jews in Paris and Copenhagen should not be blamed on the jihadi fascists who actually pulled the triggers. The true culprits responsible for the shedding of Jewish blood in France and Denmark are instead those dastardly Zionists whose ­actions incite justifiable Islamic resentment.

.... Through her uncritical pro-Palestinian activism she provides political aid and polemical comfort to one of the most noxious theofascist movements in the world today.

....  Margolyes is Jewish, a fact that marks her for death in the Hamas covenant that explicitly invokes a genocidal campaign to kill every Jew on earth. She is also openly gay, another capital offence in the Hamas playbook. And she’s a woman, and thus consigned to second-class citizenship under the strictures of sharia law.

.... [J]ust as the Islamic Middle East is consumed by civil war and genocide, Margolyes seeks the downfall of the sole democracy in that tortured region. Margolyes’s ethical disorientation is a symptom of a greater malady. She’s a microcosm of the “long march through the institutions of power” advocated in the late 1960s by Marxist student radical Rudi “the Red” Dutschke.

Across the past half-century much of our media and many centres of cultural authority have devolved into leftist monocultures of self-flagellation that preach moral relativism, the evils of free-market capitalism and the black-armband narrative of Western history.

As a result we’ve become so timidly PC that many of us are incapable of recognising the obvious fact that Westminster democracy is superior to Wahhabi theocracy.'

But enough of the objectionable (some say the "Jewish anti-semite") Margolyes.

"If I can speak on behalf of the community tonight I would like to express my appreciation to the prime minister, Tony Abbott, who has been a staunch friend of both the Australian Jewish community and Israel"

So proclaimed Australian Jewish News publisher Robert Magid at the launch in Sydney of a book celebrating 120 years of his newspaper. 

'....[T]here are dark clouds on the horizon.

Only yesterday it was revealed that at a rally in Sydney demonstrators chanted: "Khaibar ya yahud, jaish Muhammad saya'ud" – Look out Jews the armies of Mohammad are coming."

While the chanting is seen on the streets of Sydney, the problem starts with the world's media. 

Hamas is a terrorist organisation that rules Gaza with an iron fist, tortures Palestinians, throws people from the roofs of buildings and executes citizens without due process.  It diverts humanitarian aid to build rockets and terror tunnels.  Its schools teach children to kill Jews.

Its aim is the extermination of the State of Israel.  Yet none of this is reported by the media for fear of retribution by Hamas.

On the other hand, Israel is a free society.  One can write the most mendacious reports about Israel with impunity and the international media takes full advantage.  There is group-think among international journalists based in Israel which has contributed to the demonisation of Israel.

Many of the appalling features which are prevalent in Palestinian society are perversely attributed to Israel in a complete inversion.

Most of us in this room know about Israel's amazing technological advances, its flourishing culture and the fact that it sends rescue teams to natural disasters throughout the world.

But you will not see the media reporting this because they are focusing rather on settlements, conflicts, the lack of progress in negotiations for which Israel is purportedly solely to blame.

Non-Jewish Australian businessmen who visited Israel last year during the war with Hamas said that media reporting of Israel in Australia did not reflect the reality they experienced.

In a recent British poll asking which country people most abhor, Israel came second only to North Korea.

Every murderous, totalitarian regime which kills gay people, treats women as chattels, practises apartheid, arrests dissidents without charge, tortures prisoners, executes for misdemeanours and where no freedom exists is preferred to Israel.

 The Boycott Israel movement is spreading around the world.

So should we boycott Israel?

Only if we use the same yardstick for Israel as for every other country, such as China, Russia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, all Arab, African and Latin American countries.  The result would be total isolation.

.... The campaign to boycott Israel is an antisemitic policy.  Why would you boycott the only liberal democracy in the Middle East?

There is only one answer: because you have an irrational hatred of Jews.

....  While the majority of Muslims in the West might be repulsed by the behaviour of jihadis in their midst, their distorted understanding of the Israeli Palestinian conflict contributes to their widespread anger and hatred toward Israel, which morphs into hatred of Jews.

As a result, the main threats to the Jewish communities come mainly from hotheads in the Muslim community....

Our immigration policies have been a success because immigrants have been free to express their values insofar as they are consistent with Australian values, values such as sexual equality, tolerance of their fellow citizen's beliefs, freedom of expression and the rule of law.

But this isn't the case for all communities.

There is a small but vocal section of the Muslim community that has not accepted Australian values.  The onus is on the leaders of the Muslim community to purge imams, teachers and other members of their community who promote violence and hate speech and refuse to embrace the moral foundations of Australian society....

We should support an immigration policy which blocks entry to anyone who is likely to destabilise Australian society....' {Emphasis added]

Media Most Foul: David Singer demolishes Richard Falk's attempt to justify Israel's status as "a special case" for obloquy

In this, his latest article ("Israel – Media Imbalance Incites Jew-hatred"), Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer brings his own perspective  to the chorus of condemnation by Israel's friends over the way in which an irresponsible western media has stoked the flames of antisemitism in recent weeks.  He proceeds to focus on Richard Falk's "very disturbing" insistence that Israel constitutes "a special case" as a target for press and public opprobrium.

Writes David Singer:

The incessant media focus on Israel – compounded by misleading and factually incorrect reporting  – has materially contributed to inciting the growth of Jew-hatred world-wide. Organisations such as HonestReporting and CAMERA expose inaccurate reports appearing daily in the most widely read and supposedly reputable international newspapers, television stations, radio networks and on-line publications.

Corrections eventually made usually come too late to remedy the initial sensationalist reporting. Matti Friedman sums up this phenomenon:

“Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of little else. Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep. A representative article from a recent issue of The New Yorker described the summer’s events by dedicating one sentence each to the horrors in Nigeria and Ukraine, four sentences to the crazed génocidaires of ISIS, and the rest of the article—30 sentences—to Israel and Gaza.”

This pre-occupation with Israel at the expense of covering far more serious conflicts in the region prompted one concerned person to ask Professor Richard Falk – the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on "the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” – the following questions:

“Nowhere on the face of the earth will you find a country that has been unremittingly attacked in the language used to attack Israel, or at all – not truly genocidal nations like Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria, Serbia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Turkey; not the world’s worst violators of human rights like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Somalia, Russia, China, North Korea and Cuba; not seizers and occupiers of land like Russia, Armenia, Turkey (Northern Cyprus), Morocco and Azerbaizhan. Where are the BDS movements, Prof. Falk? Where are the blogs? Where are the armies of blog crawlers? Where are the videos? Where are the links? What do you think it is that draws all these “critics” to Israel and nowhere else?”

Falk’s reply – designating Israel as a “special case” – is very disturbing.

“Israel is a special case for at least three reasons: – its legitimacy was established by UN and League initiatives without any effort to take into account the views of the population physically present in the country; – the US as the world’s self-appointed global leader has singled out Israel for the most massive financial assistance over a period of many years, and has lent controversial support to Israel to shield it from censure by the UN; –Israel itself claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East and otherwise posits itself as a shining example even extending to the boast that the IDF is the most moral army in the world. These three reasons explain and justify the attention given to Israel’s alleged wrongdoing. Beyond this, the fact that worse offenders are not scrutinized to the same extent as Israel is more an argument for according more attention to such offenders. It is not excuse for Israel’s behavior. Whether we like it or not the Israel-Palestine conflict has become the litmus test of international morality ever since the collapse of apartheid South Africa.”

Falk’s reasons for assigning only Israel and none of the other nominated states “special case” status are outrageous and can be dismissed on the following grounds:

1. The “League initiatives” to which Falk refers is the Mandate for Palestine unanimously endorsed by the League of Nations in 1922. Syria, Lebanon and Iraq – products of the same Mandates system – are currently humanitarian and politically dysfunctional disaster areas. Yet Falk does not regard them as “special cases”.

2. The views of “the population physically present” were taken into account  being both politically and violently expressed from the moment Britain assumed its role as Mandatory. Arab riots in 1920, 1929 and between 1936-1939 expressed opposition to the Jewish National Home. The 1922 decision on Transjordan, the 1937 Peel Commission, the 1939 White Paper restricting Jewish emigration to Palestine, and the 1947 United Nations Special Committee on Palestine all recommended changes to the Mandate’s stated policy to the detriment of the Jewish people.

3. Israel’s legitimacy was not established by the United Nations – but by the League of Nations, seven decades of State building and defeating six invading Arab armies in 1948.

4. Since when did financial aid received from another country qualify the recipient to be classed as a “special case” because other countries received lesser aid or no aid from the same donor country?

5. America has not always vetoed resolutions against Israel in the Security Council. America has also vetoed resolutions affecting countries including Panama, Nicaragua, Namibia and South Africa – but never have they been regarded as “special cases”

6. Israel is indeed the only democracy in the Middle East and its army is certainly one of the most moral armies in the world – yet Falk has long advocated support for the PLO and Hamas whose stated objectives are to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

Falk’s discredited assertion that Israel is a “special case” setting it apart from the world community for special treatment encourages

* the media to keep focusing disproportionately on Israel

* Arab and Islamic countries justifying their continuing non-recognition of Israel

* Jew-haters and self-hating Jews world-wide maintaining their campaigns denigrating and delegitimising Israel.

“Jews are always good for news” needs an urgent media rethink and policy overhaul – if increasing Jew-hatred world-wide is to be effectively silenced.

"The Israeli Army Killed Palestinian Children For Sport": Vivid imaginations run rampant

It's instructive to note how elements within the Western BDS movement reacted to the kidnapping crisis that began on 12 June and had its tragic denouement this week.

From the start, conspiracy theories abounded.  The earliest consisted of allegations that Israel had faked the kidnapping of the three tragic teenagers as a pretext to mount an offensive against the Palestinian Arabs, and an article in Ha'aretz (see below), the despicable rag that's the Israeli newspaper of choice for foes of Israel everywhere, played its inevitable part in the dissemination of the theory.

There were suggestions that Israel had made sure to include among the abductees a youngster with American as well as Israeli nationality in order to whip up outrage on the part of American Jews and ensure their support for Operation Brother's Keeper.

There was indignation on the part of some Israel-haters that the media had given publicity to the three boys' disappearance and subsequent fate, alleging that the media values Jewish lives above Palestinian ones: amazingly (as the above photo indicates), there was a demonstration outside the BBC's headquarters over this point.  But look at BBC Watch's posts (latest one here) to be persuaded of the unsubstantiated nature of the allegation! (Presumably the Israel-haters want the BBC to be biased at all times against Israel, whereas what the BBC should at all times be is impartial and objective, favouring neither side over the other. But as I've observed before, such demonstrations enable the smug, self-satisfied BBC to claim that, since Israel's supporters also perceive it as biased against their side, the Corporation's reportage is balanced: "just about right".)

There was a desperate recourse to the "Israel has killed 1518 Palestinian children since 2000" mantra,  citing "official figures from Ramallah".  Needless to say, these "official figures" are highly suspect, manipulated and politicised, and the definition of "children" is deeply flawed. "Children" implies non-combatants, and persons below, say, 16 years of age.

Elder of Ziyon, in a post of 1 July titled "How NGO's make up lies about Israel", happens to discuss highlights one of the very graphic summaries that the Israel-haters have been citing. (Hat tip: reader Yosef)

Some of the reaction to the kidnapping and the ensuing Operation Brother's Keeper in representative images:

Is that the gospel truth, vicar?

This report seized many an anti-Zionist imagination

By an American heavy-duty antisemite whose posts infest Facebook

Widely shared on Facebook by the usual suspects

A well-peddled poster with the anti-Israel set

Numerous Israel-haters took up this theme, with various images

No "Christian charity" here for the mourning Israeli families

From the Scottish PSC chief

From a pin-up of the Israel-haters in Britain and abroad

Veteran anti-Israel MP Jeremy Corbyn in the Morning Star

Moral relativism and conspiracy

See here for Tony Gratrex

Australia's Israel-demonising Left gets into the act

A link to a conspiracy-theory video

Another conspiracy theory; Note that the boys are termed "soldiers" here!

Protesting Al Beeb's "pro-Israel" bias! (Should have gone to SpecSavers!)

Steve Bell's cartoon in today's Guardian

A vile crime, but the perpetrators aren't yet known for sure

Al Beeb's Jon Donnison tweets his ten cents' worth here and below

 

Now that he's been told as much by another Twitter member, Eugene Kontorovich, Donnison will in future perhaps bear in mind that the policy of home demolitions was adopted as a punitive necessity against families rewarded by the Palestinian Authority with both money and adulation for producing terrorist shahids; unlike the PA, Israel is not disposed to reward those of its people who are found to have carried out heinous acts. 

 For their part, the Palestinian media shamelessly manipulated the facts.  As reported inter alia here,

'the Palestinian media routinely referred to the three murdered boys as “settlers” and in some cases, also as “soldiers.”   The Palestinian news agency Wafa condemned Israel for collectively punishing Palestinians, but did not denounce the murder of the three Jewish youngsters.   They merely referred to them as “the three settlers” that disappeared.

Fatah’s official Facebook page, however, referred to them as “the three killed soldiers, whose bodies according to Israeli claims, were found in Hebron.” Two weeks ago, Fatah had celebrated the kidnapping of the three boys with a caricature posted to their Facebook page showing three mice with Stars of David attached to a fishing hook. According to an article [Dr Mudar] Zahran [the exiled leader of the Palestinians in Jordan, who is of course a friend of Israel; see for example his recent video here] wrote in the Gatestone Institute, the official PA daily had written that “Israel was behind the kidnapping,” alleging that the three were soldiers. He noted that the kidnappings were celebrated by average Palestinians with glorifications of the kidnappers and the passing out of sweets.... 

[R]eferences to the three boys as soldiers tend to be retweeted more than any other mention of them within the Palestinian Authority [as in Adnan Abdulal's post reproduced above]....

As Zahran wrote in the Gatestone Institute, “Keep in mind that the PA exerts extreme monitoring and control over social media used by Palestinians in the West Bank. A Palestinian man was jailed for six months for liking an anti-PA post on Facebook. The PA, therefore, is fully responsible for encouraging the celebrations of the kidnappings over Palestinian social media.”

.... Zahran stressed, “My comment as the leader of the Palestinians in Jordan, which numbers 6.2 million people is it is with our sincere sense of sadness and disgust that we extend our condolences to the families of the killed children and to Prime Minister Netanyahu, as well as to the Israeli people. We are forced to remind everyone that the death of these young men is yet another result of the Oslo Agreement and its time to consider different options.”

Zahran called on the Israeli leadership to hold the Palestinian leadership within the Palestinian Authority responsible for what happened: “As much as it is a tragedy, it’s a chance for all of us, Israelis and Palestinians, to have Oslo ended forever. Everyone in Judea and Samaria is better off under Israeli sovereignty and now in Jordan, while we have the Israeli Army protecting us from ISIS, we have another reason to see that Israel’s power is the only guarantee of safety and security for Palestinians in Jordan and inside Israel.”'

"This Evening We Buried Our Boys .... Hamas is responsible. Hamas will pay and Hamas will continue to pay"

Declared Binyamin Netanyahu a few hours ago, before the start of a Security Cabinet meeting at the Defence Ministry in Tel Aviv, following the funeral for the three murdered teens:

"This evening we buried our boys – Naftali, Gilad and Eyal, may God avenge their blood.

The entire nation supports the families and the entire nation is united in our struggle against murderous terrorism. We are fighting it decisively and with determination.

We have three tasks:

First, to reach the murderers and all those who participated in the kidnapping. Whoever was involved in the kidnapping and the murder will bear the consequences. We will neither rest nor slacken until we reach the last of them and it does not matter where they will try to hide. We will reach them all even if it takes time. This is our first goal and it will be carried out.

Second, we must vigorously strike at Hamas members and infrastructures in Judea and Samaria. We have already arrested hundreds of Hamas activists. We have closed dozens of institutions. We have demolished homes. We are still active.

Third, is that we must act against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hamas is continuing to encourage the abduction of our citizens and it is directly responsible for firing rockets and mortars at our territory, including in the past few hours. The IDF has been active in recent days against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip and here as well we are still active. If need be, we will expand the campaign.

Anyone who thinks that they can achieve anything by using terrorism against us will continue to be mistaken and will achieve the opposite results.

Hamas is responsible. Hamas will pay and Hamas will continue to pay. We are acting with determination, sagacity and responsibility with the top consideration – of myself, the Defense Minister and the Chief-of-Staff – being to ensure the security of Israel's citizens."

By Jonathan S. Tobin in Commentary magazine (read his entire article here):

'Now that the bodies of the three kidnapped Israeli teenagers have been found, we can expect the usual chorus of pro forma condemnations of terrorism and sympathy for the victims to be voiced by many world leaders. But the willingness of so many of the same people to treat deliberate attempts to target civilians by the Palestinians as morally equivalent to the fate of those Arabs killed while conducting violence against Israelis gives the lie to their pose of objectivity.

.... The Hamas terror group that is believed to be behind the crime will feel the consequences of what appears to be the cold-blooded murders of these three boys shortly after their abduction. Hamas’s partners in the Palestinian Authority will also be put to the test as the Israelis will now see whether PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’s helpful rhetoric condemning the kidnapping will be matched by actions that disassociate his government from terrorists.

But once condolences have been given and the boys buried, the atrocity will probably be shoved down the global memory hole as Palestinians and their cheerleaders contend that the terror attack on the teens must be seen as either an understandable reaction to the “occupation” or morally equivalent to the fate of those Palestinians who die while attacking Israeli forces. The New York Times provided a prime example of such thinking this morning in an article published only hours before the bodies were found.....

.... Israel will be justified in taking drastic actions against Hamas in the coming days, especially in light of the news that, for the first time in years, the Islamist group is firing missiles into southern Israel from Gaza rather than farming out that duty to other Palestinian groups. But the point here isn’t so much the necessity to mete out retaliation for the kidnapping/murders as it is the necessity of the Palestinians to reassess their actions and belief system that set this chain of events in motion.

The tragic ending to the search should also cause those—like the New York Times—who routinely treat the victims of terror as somehow morally equivalent to those who aid and support terror to think again about what it truly means to be evenhanded in one’s thinking about the conflict. By treating these events as an excuse for superficial moralizing rather than an honest evaluation of a toxic Palestinian political culture that glorifies terror, the Western media plays a not insignificant role in perpetuating a conflict that they deplore.'

More Moral Relativism & The T Word

Some Israeli victims of terrorism

"Some of the prisoners have carried out militant attacks that claimed Israeli lives and were jailed for up to 30 years."  Thus reports the BBC in relation to Israel's current commitment to release 104 Palestinians in its gaols to facilitate the resumption of "peace" talks.

The BBC is evidently not alone in using the euphemism "militant" for depraved killers (killers of Israelis, that is) who merit the description "terrorists".

For example, in The American Thinker, Leon Rennert, a former White House correspondent, notes: "Israel and Israel alone it seems is immune from terrorism in the pages of the Washington Post."

That newspaper, he writes, "stoutly refuses to describe blood-soaked Palestinian murderers of Israeli children as terrorists. Instead, it substitutes a totally inaccurate euphemism, calling such depraved killers "militants."'

It's an inaccurate term, he continues, since

'"militant" is a non-judgmental, neutral noun. It carries no pejorative connotations. Whereas use of "terrorist" makes it crystal-clear that the writer and/or publication deems such depraved acts as beyond the pale. Which of course they are if they involve deliberate murders of innocent civilians in pursuit of a political agenda -- the basic definition of terrorism....

Never mind that children were firebombed on a bus or that Palestinian killers singled out women and the elderly as targets, these killers [the paper's Jerusalem correspondent William] Booth insists, are NOT "terrorists"; they are instead "militants." In so writing, Booth washes his hands of any trace of moral turpitude attached to such acts.

As he makes clear in the next paragraph: "The Israeli public views these prisoners as terrorists who have blood on their hands. Palestinians see them as freedom fighters struggling to reclaim their homeland and oust the occupiers."

So there you have it: Moral relativism carries the day at the Washington Post. Israel may call them terrorists -- but not Booth or the Washington Post. Message to readers who retain a modicum of absolute morality: Be grateful that we don't extol them as freedom fighters. Just take your pick. Call them freedom fighters or terrorists. But we won't. The Post sees nothing repulsive, nothing subhuman, nothing immoral in Palestinians murdering Israeli kids."

... and some more

Yet, again like the BBC, the Washington Post does not resile from employing the description "terrorist" in certain situations:

'Compounding this deliberate rejection of the T-for-terrorism word is the fact that the Post does not hesitate to use it in reporting on terrorist attacks elsewhere, including when such attacks occur in Europe or the United States....'

Read more here
Hat tip: Love of the Land blog