Prejudicing Public Opinion against Israel – Al Beeb and the History Channel

With its loathsome left-liberal bias against the interests of Britain, the United States, and the West in general, the BBC has long dealt in half-truthes and distortions where reportage and (all too often gratuitous and unwarranted) commentary regarding Israel and "Palestine" is concerned. But it seems that, sadly, the History Channel, which puts out so many fascinating and popular programmes, can’t be trusted for scrupulous accuracy or fairness either. The following, courtesy of J-Wire, is by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer. It’s entitled "Palestine – the BBC and the History Channel Bias Distort Debate"  (I've added illustrations of anti-Israel demos in London and the USA).

The BBC and the History Channel stand accused of denigrating Israel by the use of factually incorrect statements or misleading and deceptive statements that are factually correct but only tell half the story. Take this gem from the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11988018:

"Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the 1967 war. It withdrew its troops from Gaza in 2005."

No mention is made of the fact that Israel also simultaneously evacuated all 8000 Jewish civilians who had been living there as well. Was the omission of the words "and 8000 Jewish civilians" due to space constraints?

The BBC did not have to mention that such evacuation was done unilaterally to advance the peace process, such evacuation was subsequently followed by a Hamas takeover of Gaza that threatens any further progress in peacefully ending the conflict and that the civilian population of Israel has been subjected to incessant and indiscriminate rocket attacks from Gaza ever since the evacuation was completed.

However – failing to mention those 8000 civilians in this news item as part of Israel’s pull out from Gaza can only be viewed as an attempt to downgrade the extent and significance of Israel’s withdrawal.

The History Channel’s release http://www.history.com/this-day-in.../un-votes-for-partition-of-palestine for one of its programmes illustrates a similar bias that is ugly in its contemplation.

Consider these statements:

"Despite strong Arab opposition, the United Nations votes for the partition of Palestine and the creation of an independent Jewish state"

No mention is made of the fact that the UN also voted for the creation of an independent Arab State.  Again the inclusion of just nine words "and an independent Arab state which the Arabs rejected" would have clearly indicated that the UN had not only offered the Jews a state but also offered the Arabs one as well – which the Arabs rejected.

The failure to insert those missing words carries the innuendo that only the Jews were offered a state in 1947 but the Arabs missed out and begs the question – isn’t it time the UN now rectified that injustice in 2010?

"The modern conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine dates back to the 1910s, when both groups laid claim to the British-controlled territory"

Actually the conflict had started about thirty years earlier – so that chunk of history is either unknown to the History Channel’s researchers or was deliberately overlooked.

The territory was not "British-controlled" until the conclusion of World War 1. It was part of the Ottoman Empire until then. 

Pity the poor students who use this material in their projects – and their teachers – who rely on this material as being accurate and reliable.

"The native Palestinian Arabs sought to stem Jewish immigration and set up a secular Palestinian state"

Really? Are the history buffs at the History Channel unaware of the following facts*?

"The three main political organizations in Palestine-the Arab Club, the Literary Club, and the Muslim-Christian Association (the lack of mention of Palestine in their names is revealing) — all worked for union with Syria. The first two went farthest, calling outright for rule by Prince Faysal. Amin al-Husayni was president of the Arab Club; the extremism which later made him notorious as the leader of Palestinian separatism (and an ally of Hitler) already showed itself in 1920, when he instigated riots for union with Syria. A member of the Arab Club, Kamil al-Budayri, co-edited from September 1919 the newspaper Suriya al-Janubiya (“Southern Syria”) which advocated Palestine’s incorporation into Greater Syria.

Even the Muslim-Christian Association, an organization of traditional leaders-men who expected to rule if Palestine became independent-demanded incorporation in Greater Syria. Its president insisted that “Palestine or Southern Syria-an integral part of the one and indivisible Syria-must not in any case or for any pretext be detached.” The Muslim-Christian Association held a Congress in early 1919 to draw up demands for the Paris Peace Conference. It declared that Palestine, a “part of Arab Syria,” is permanently connected to Syria through “national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic, and geographical bonds,” and resolved that “Southern Syria or Palestine should not be separated from the independent Arab Syrian government.” Musa Kazim al-Husayni, Head of the Jerusalem Town Council (in effect, mayor) told a Zionist interlocutor in October 1919: “We demand no separation from Syria.” The slogan heard everywhere in 1918-19 was “Unity, Unity, From the Taurus [mountains in Turkey] to Rafah [in Gaza], Unity, Unity."

"Beginning in 1929, Arabs and Jews openly fought in Palestine"

Staggeringly the History Channel seems to be unaware of the 1920 riots which saw four Arabs and five Jews killed, while 216 Jews were wounded – 18 critically – and 23 Arabs wounded – one critically.

"Radical Jewish groups employed terrorism against British forces in Palestine"

Since when is fighting the armed forces of your adversary – not its civilians – described as "terrorism"? The History Channel’s biased slip is surely on display for all to see.

"At the end of World War II, in 1945, the United States took up the Zionist cause"

The United States had taken up the Zionist cause on 30 June 1922 when both Houses of Congress unanimously endorsed the Mandate for Palestine.

On 21 September 1922 President Warren Harding signed the joint resolution of approval to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine

"The Jews were to possess more than half of Palestine…"

It is a pity the History Channel could not have added: "more than 70% of which was the arid and sparsely populated Negev Desert"

"The Palestinian Arabs, aided by volunteers from other countries, fought the Zionist forces"

Strange that the History Channel should be unaware that these “volunteers” comprised the “Arab Liberation Army” set up in Damascus under the command of Fawzi Kaukji. Seven of these detachments with a strength of about 5000 had made their way into Palestine by March 1948. They were divided into four commands.

"The next day, forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded"

Oops – the History Channel forgot to include Saudi Arabia – a small oversight.

The History Channel then has the gall to state at the end of this outrageous release:

"Fact Check. We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us! "

Creating myth instead of stating fact is one of the greatest impediments to securing a resolution of the conflict between the Arabs and Jews.

The next time you watch the History Channel (if you ever do so again) – don’t take what you hear and see as the truth. There are apparently a lot of dunderheads employed there or – perhaps more insidiously – persons deliberately bent on misleading the public.

[*From Daniel Pipes, “Palestine for the Syrians?”, Commentary, December 1986, which begins:

‘During a meeting with leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1976, Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad referred to Palestine as a region of Syria, as Southern Syria. He then went on to tell the Palestinians: "You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Do not forget one thing: there is no Palestinian people, no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria! You are an integral part of the Syrian people and Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the real representatives of the Palestinian people."

Although unusually candid, this outburst exemplifies a long tradition of Syrian politics, and one that has gained increasing importance in recent years. The Asad government presents itself as not just an Arab state protecting the rights of the Palestinians but as the rightful ruler of the land that Israel controls. According to this view, the existing republic of Syria is but a truncated part of the Syrian lands; accordingly, the government in Damascus has a duty to unite all Syrian regions, including Palestine, under its control.

The growth in Syrian military capabilities in recent years makes these ambitions a major source of instability throughout the Levant. Indeed, the Syrian claim to "Southern Syria" has become central to the Arab-Israeli conflict; Syrian has become not only Israel's principal opponent, but also the PLO's. Damascus is likely to retain this role for many years, certainly as long as Hafiz al-Asad lives, and probably longer.

When Asad uses the term Southern Syria, he implicitly harks back to the old meaning of the name "Syria." Historically, "Syria" (Suriya or Sham in Arabic) refers to a region far larger than the Syrian Arab Republic of today. At a minimum, historic Syria stretches from Anatolia to Egypt, and from Iraq to the Mediterranean Sea. In terms of today's political geography, it comprises all of four states-Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon-as well as the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and substantial portions of southeastern Turkey. To distinguish this territory from the present Syrian state, it is known as Greater Syria.

Until 1920, Syria meant Greater Syria to everyone, European and Middle Easterner alike; For example, an early nineteenth-century Egyptian historian, 'Abd ar-Rahman al-Jabarti, referred to the inhabitants of El Arish in the Sinai Peninsula as Syrians. Palestine was called Southern Syria first in French, then in other languages, including Arabic. The 1840 Convention of London called the area around Akko "the southern part of Syria" and the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (published in 1911) explains that Palestine "may be said generally to denote the southern third of the province of Syria." These examples could be multiplied a thousand-fold.’] For the full article see http://www.danielpipes.org/174/palestine-for-the-syrians

The Heroine from the Harem – and Jewish Dhimmitude in Old Barbary

My latest dip into historical archives turns up this not uninteresting little item from the London Voice of Jacob (24 June 1842). It tells of a stubbornly Christian captive rescued from Muslim slave traders by two Jews. If only the Coptic girls of the present day, seized from their families and forced to convert to Islam, could be rescued from their living nightmare the way the trafficked (and uncommonly lucky) Christian girl in this report – probably captured somewhere along the Mediterranean coast by Barbary corsairs, who took innumerable Europeans (and Americans) into captivity and enslavement over the centuries – was rescued from hers:

"According to private communications ... from Alexandria [is] a curious fact concerning two Jews, Messrs. T. Sonino and Guiseppus di L. Marpurgo [sic; Guiseppe di L. Morpurgo?], of Trieste, who succeeded whilst travelling near the mouth of a channel of the Nile, called Mahmudin, in releasing, though not without endangering their own lives, a Christian female slave from Turkish captivity. She had been conveyed, some time previously, into the harem of a powerful dignatory of Constantinople, who out of revenge, because she persisted in remaining faithful to her belief, sent her to Alexandria, to have her sold there as a slave.

Under the pretext of a walk, she was brought to Mahmudin, to be embarked for Cairo; she, however, resisted vigorously, and attracted by her cries, the above gentlemen, among many other persons, came to the spot; recognising that the person so ill-used was a Christian, they interfered, without being deterred by the imminent danger to which they exposed their lives, and a great crowd of fanatical Arabs having gathered round them, and having succeeded in releasing the heroic girl, they brought her to Alexandria, where the Russian vice-consul took her under his protection, and thus put a stop to all further persecution [of her]."

And here’s a report from the same newspaper (28 March 1845), concerning the degraded dhimmi Jews of the Barbary States; it’s actually an extract from Notes on North Africa, the Sahara and Soudan (New York, 1844) by William Brown Hodgson, formerly US Consul in Tunis:

"Jews are numerous in all the villages of Biscara and the Wadreng. They enjoy an efficient protection among the Berber tribes in all the wide regions of Algiers and Morocco. This is afforded by a system of individual relationship, which may be compared to that of patron and client. Every Jew has his particular Sidi, patron or magister, who is responsible for his acts, and to whom he looks for counsel and protection. The defence of his Jewish dependant is a point of honour with the free Amazirgh, or Numidian; and he will protect him from injury or aggression at the risk of his life. Such is the patronal relation of the Israelites among the Scbelechs [sic] or Berbers of Morocco, where their numbers are estimated at half a million. The Arabs do not yield to them this protection. Deprived of civil rights in Barbary, the social condition of the Jews merits investigation."

The Beauty, the Beasts, and Birobidjan

General Sir John Monash (1865-1931), the son of German-born parents and a civil engineer by profession, commanded Australia’s Expeditionary Forces during the First World War. The grandson of a well-known printer/publisher in Krotoszyn, Baer Loebel Monasch, and nephew by marriage to the great historian Heinrich Graetz, he was not a religious Jew – he famously joked that on Yom Kippur he fasted from breakfast until lunch – but he was a proud one, accepting the honorary presidency of the Australian Zionist Federation when the latter was formed in 1927.

So esteemed was he by his fellow-countrymen and women that during the Great Depression, when there was widespread anxiety over the leftist direction of New South Wales Premier Jack Lang and other politicians, Monash was approached to, in effect lead, a rightwing coup, and his state funeral cortège in 1931 (some months after this photo was taken, showing him at the annual Anzac Day parade) attracted the densest crowds – about 250,000 people – seen in Australia up to that time. He’s still commemorated in a variety of ways, with his name that of a university in his native Melbourne and his face on the $A100 banknote. There’s little doubt that his very presence on the national scene – in fact, his consensual status among his contemporaries as the greatest living Australian – helped to keep antisemitism disreputable and marginal.

Not that antisemitism has been very prevalent in Australia at any time. The fact that Jews arrived in Australia on the first day of European settlement in 1788 meant that they could not easily be depicted as strangers or aliens. Nineteenth-century Australia epitomised what the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner defined as a "frontier society", and Jews have done well in such societies, helping to pioneer them alongside non-Jews.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries antisemitism in Australia consisted largely of stereotypical depictions, especially cartoons, in certain populist periodicals – Jews as flashy, hook-nosed, money-grubbers, and there were scurrilous allegations of Jewish "money-power" during the Boer War. During the Nazi era, the German consul in South Australia, where a number of pro-Nazi Germans lived, drew up a list of Jews in Australia in the event of a Nazi invasion, and after the war there was some resentment against the arrival of Holocaust survivors, who were portrayed in some populist circles as taking jobs away from Australians still to be demobbed. (This cartoon, of Jews arriving under the approving gaze of immigration minister Arthur Calwell, is from a 1946  issue of the Sydney Bulletin, long an offender in carrying that sort of thing.)  Post-Second World War, antisemitism – sometimes including Holocaust denial – surfaced in the ravings of the far-right League of Rights, and among some formerly pro-Nazi elements within such immigrant groups such as Croatians and Hungarians, while anti-Zionism (not always devoid of antisemitic utterances) has been a feature of the far left, and of some sections of the Muslim community.

Nevertheless, in the scheme of things, antisemitism in Australia is and always has been relatively insignificant – after all, two native-born Jews, Sir Isaac Isaacs and Sir Zelman Cowen, reached the highest office in the land, the governor-generalship – and so it’s easy to forget and startling to be reminded that the laid-back "Lucky Country" produced the woman whom Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, has described as "especially dangerous, because she is so attractive and can put a pretty face on a very ugly movement".

Born in 1946, Michèle Mainwaring was a beauty queen – Miss Newcastle [NSW], 1968 – who went on to marry, in 1970, an Australian psychiatrist of Russian background, she controversially styling herself Countess Griaznoff on the basis of a disputed title in his family, before making a brief marriage in 1991 to the Australian financier Sir Frank Renouf, nearly thirty years her senior, with whom she set up home in London, where she continues to be based.

As Lady Renouf, she has become notorious for her support of and personal friendship with some of the big beasts of the Holocaust denial movement including Germar Rudolf and Ernst Zündel – here she is (at right) with the Frenchman Robert Faurisson at his 80th birthday party in Paris – and here she is (below) with the Australian Holocaust denier Frederick Toben – as well as Bishop Richard Williamson and the Holocaust minimiser – he denies that he’s a denier altogether – David Irving. When Irving brought his unsuccessful civil libel action in 2001 against American historian Deborah Lipstadt, Lady Renouf approached her friend, Saudi Prince Fahd bin Salman, for funds for Irving, but the prince died before anything was finalised.

That same year she wrote a letter to the London Evening Standard newspaper complaining of biased BBC coverage of the Irving-Lipstadt trial, giving her address as the Reform Club in Pall Mall, where she had already taken Irving as her guest, and from which she was later expelled in consequence.

In 2005, during his trial in Vienna for Holocaust denial, which she attended, Lady Renouf organised financial support for Irving's family, maintained his website, and called for "so-called Holocaust victims" to be "exhumed to see whether they died from typhoid or gas". Although, at David Duke’s EURO Conference at New Orleans in 2005, she’d shared a platform with the notorious Nick Griffin (who’d once done a little Holocaust denying himself, it seems), in 2006 Griffin’s British National Party (BNP) barred her from addressing its Croydon branch on Irving's situation since "her presence would put the BNP in a bad light".

She’s described Judaism as a "repugnant and hate-filled religion" and travelled to Teheran in 2006 for the "International Conference - Holocaust Review: A Global Vision", where she reportedly declared that Judaism possesses a "dangerously misanthropic tendency" and a "fundamentally anti-gentile narcissism", and that “the anti-gentile nature of Judaism” causes antisemitism. She’s made documentary films called Palestine Scrapbook (featuring interviews with British ex-servicemen who served in Palestine during 1945-8, which was screened twice at the Westminster Parliament) and Israel in Flagrante, which features the meshugge Neturei Karta movement, and was aired in Cairo in 2004. Jailing Opinions, focusing on Holocaust denial, followed in 2006, to be itself followed by Pious Piracy, which casts doubt on the existence of Jesus.

Lady Renouf is obsessed with the bizarre notion that Birobidjan – the Jewish autonomous oblast in the far east of the Soviet Union, that Stalin dreamed up, is the true destination of the Jews; she wants the Israelis to up sticks and relocate there. She has a website dedicated to what she terms "an all round common sense campaign option for the first Jewish homeland" of Birobidjan, and spoke on the subject of Birobidjan in January this year at a conference on the UN Security Council and on 3 June (the day following the Commemoration Conference for Imam Khomeini)at the presidential headquarters in Teheran, when Ahmadinejad and 1000 international guests were on hand to hear her, in Muslim attire, say:

‘ Most Excellent President – unparalleled in our time. Our admirable hosts; and fellow lucky colleagues.

Imam Khomeini is our role model. Indeed he is a role model for the West, and it surely is our duty to make the West aware of why. For Imam Khomeini answers the question of what is Justice, to advise: "Ask your Reason, for Reason is the eye of Justice". Iran and the West share the ancient classical Greek tradition of scientific attitude, which Imam Khomeini has sustained whilst the West has been led astray and fallen prey to what I call predatory "swindle-speak". The Classical Greek tradition is based on the four inseparable virtues, namely temperance, wisdom (with scientific attitude), justice and courage.

In the last two days I have been asked which quality I most admire in Imam Khomeini, yet the reason why he is a role model for both Iran and the West is because he sustains all four virtuous qualities which are useless if separated. For, as he and President Ahmadinejad - himself a role model as exemplified in his Teheran Conference in 2006 - show us, "historical truth goes by evidence not emotion" (to quote the last courageous Christian Bishop, Richard Williamson), and that without historical truth there can be no international justice.

Imam Khomeini was a great champion of Palestine and understood that the League of Nations and later the UN were Zionist initiatives which defied historical truth and thereby created the anti-democratic, pro-Zionist, privileged veto. The very basis of the UN is the self-same specious nature of the Nuremberg Trials of 1945 and 1946. At the time five Supreme Court judges in America denounced the Nuremberg show-trials, conducted by the so-called victorious Allies, as a "judicial farce" by a "lynch mob". These forgotten Judges declared that hearsay evidence and testimony obtained by torture are illegitimate instruments and that parties who act both as judge and jury fly in the face of natural justice.

Imam Khomeini would surely wish us to make known the two fundamental swindles by those who create and control the media and public information narrative. These refer to the fact firstly that the Zionist Entity had no moral right at any time to pirate Palestine, and secondly that European Jewry had no such necessity. Half a century before World War II (and therefore making World War Two irrelevant to the issue) Theodor Herzl’s 1895 blueprint for The Jewish State instituted the genocidal policy towards the indigenous Palestinians, who to use his euphemistic term were to "disappear", to be replaced by Jews.

Inter-war Birobidjan propaganda poster

Herzl’s 1895 genocidal policy means that the Jews were the culprits not the victims, and thus had no moral right at any time to Palestine. Indeed after 1928 European Jews had no need to pirate Palestine, and to this day a Jewish Autonomous Region called Birobidjan exists peacefully and available on Russia’s south-east border with China, having never displaced an indigenous people for its creation. Today some Jews try to claim that it was an act of anti-semitism when Stalin gave this region of 30,000 sq. km (the size of Switzerland) to Jews. The truth is that Stalin was providing every ethnic group comprising the Soviet Union with its own autonomous region, and nothing "antisemitic" has ever endangered Birobidjan. Furthermore in 1945 when European Jews were crying "We have no homeland, we need and deserve Palestine" – again they lied, for in 1945 there was no political impediment to prevent European Jewry heading for the welcome arms of their vast and long-established Jewish Autonomous Region in Birobidjan.

The same is true today, yet in our mainstream media we hear not a word of Birobidjan. Only rarely does the Jewish Telegraphic Agency mention Birobidjan, and when it does it refers to it disingenuously as a "district". Which district in the world is the size of Switzerland? The fact is that since the dissolution of the Soviet Union its ethnically autonomous regions have been entitled to republic status, yet the JTA lets us know that due to so-called "sensitivity" to Israel, Birobidjan has declined, due to fear of raising gentile public awareness of its existence, to acknowledge this first Jewish homeland, and all but state and republic.

My hope is that our President Ahmadinejad, who speaks the whole truth bravely, will promote awareness of the first Jewish homeland and that there is no need for European Jews to go back to Germany, Poland or Austria when they have their own state whose first language is Yiddish. Please view my first homeland option website at www.birobidjan.co.uk for, in the spirit of Imam Khomeini, there you will find a campaign for moral and morale rearmament. The Palestinians whose Nakba constitutes the greatest tragedy of the 20th century – those brave voters who democratically elected the long heroic Hamas - deserve the return of every inch of their tormented land, and not any part in the specious "one-state two-state" farce. The immediate vacation of European Jews from all of Palestine and compensation to the indigenous Arab people is more than overdue to those who, for more than a century, continue to fight for Reason at the front line of historical truth and international justice for all of us.'  [My emphasis]

Below is an agency report that appeared in a Sydney Jewish newspaper in the 1950s. It made the not unreasonable assumption that the Holocaust, by revealing the horrors of where Jew-hatred can lead, had put paid to antisemitism. But as we’ve since found, the Holocaust only made the utterance of anti-semitism shocking – and unacceptable in polite society.

As Conor Cruise O’Brien remarked, the monstrous old beast is “a very light sleeper”. And as we have seen in recent years, the monstrous old beast is fully awake once again. The Hebrew Standard’s headline was just another case of "famous last words".

Recognition for Peace? Or Recognition for Jihad?



Map courtesy of Edgar Davidson's blog (see text)

 With the help of Arab money the Israel-delegitimisers in the UK have been hard at work.  Yet again.  The new UAE-funded Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics seems to know something the rest of us don’t about the composition of the Middle East – as Edgar Davidson shows on his blog, it’s produced a map in which Israel is conspicuous by its absence (http://www.http//edgar1981.blogspot.com/)

 Of course, this is the vision of the Middle East that the majority of Palestinians themselves seem ultimately to want to see, if the October poll that I posted about on 22 November (“Still Crazy After all These Years”) is an accurate reflection of their attitudes. As some commentators have pointed out, if the Palestinians were to recognise Israel as it is, "the Jewish state", and not as what they seem to want it to become, an Arab-majority nation, then they might convince the Israelis that their intentions are honourable. As things stand, it’s no wonder that there are widespread fears among Israelis and genuine friends of Israel that in the Palestinians’ eyes there is no place for Israel, long-term, in a Muslim-dominated Middle East: the Jews will either be in a position of dhimmitude or the Caliphate will be judenrein. The Hizb ut Tahrir Islamic fundamentalist movement has become active among Palestinians, and there are fears that independent statehood would not hold back the movement’s determination to bring about the eradication of Israel and its Jews.

Some observers , fearing that cries of “Itbar al-yahud” – “Kill the Jews” – will resound in the region one day, point to the Islamic concept of peace, which holds that a "peace" can be but a stop-gap measure,  a temporary truce, a self-serving prelude to the ultimate objective, the annihilation of the enemy with whom such a "peace" is signed.

Reinforcing that impression are statements by leading Palestinian figures themselves. Last month in Ramallah the Fatah Revolutionary Council in convention voted to "affirm its rejection of the so-called Jewish state or any other formula that could achieve this goal" well as its opposition to the principle of swapping land for peace, since "illegal settler gangs cannot be placed on an equal footing with the owners of the lands and rights". Abbas and his colleagues expressed support for "adhering to the basic rights, first and foremost the right of return for Palestinian refugees" and avowed their resistance to "pressure aimed at resuming the peace talks without achieving the demands of the Palestinians". Abbas also vowed not to return to the negotiating table unless Israel completely froze Jewish construction throughout the West Bank and all areas of Jerusalem claimed by the Palestinian Authority for its mooted new country. And at a separate ceremony he lavished praise Abu Daoud, "the shahid [martyr] commander Amin al-Hindi", who masterminded the slaughter of eleven members of the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

We’ve had their bizarre claims that Rachel’s Tomb and the Kotel are not Jewish holy sites but theirs. We’ve seen this performance by a dance group on the official PA TV station (chaired by Abbas) two days before the latest peace talks began(hat tip: Palestine Media Watch), making it quite clear that Israel proper, and not merely the “occupied territories” remains just as much the target for "liberation" as ever:

Band member recites a poem:
"Fight, brother, the flag will never be lowered,
the torches will never die out.”
On [Mount] Carmel and in the [Jordan] Valley,
we are rocks and streams.
In Lod we are poems, and in Ramle - grenades.
We, my brother, shall remain the revolution of the fighting nation.”

Vocalist sings:
"The Zionists went out from [their] homelands,
compounding damage and enmity.
But the Palestinian revolution awaits [them].
The orchard called us to the [armed] struggle.
We replaced bracelets with weapons.
We attacked the despicable [Zionists].
This invading enemy is on the battlefield.
This is the day of consolation of Jihad.
Pull the trigger.
We shall redeem Jerusalem, Nablus and the country."

On the same station there’s also recently been this:

"My brother! The oppressors [Israelis] have gone too far.
Therefore Jihad is a right, and self-sacrifice is a right.
Shall we let them steal the Arab nature -
the patriarchal glory and rule?
And only through the sound of the sword
They respond, with voice or echo.
Draw from the sheath your sword;
And let it not return.
My brother, my brother, O proud Arab
Today is our moment, not tomorrow.
My brother, the time of our nation's sunrise has arrived,
[the time] for you to repel those who are misled
And bring renaissance to Islam."

We’ve heard what the supposedly moderate and pragmatic Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar really thinks, when in an unguarded moment he declared that owing to their "crimes" Jews have been expelled from every country in which they’ve been domiciled, and will be and will be expelled from Palestine too. We’ve read of his recent statement "that the [Hamas] movement was launched to continue the jihad until the liberation of all Palestine", that he burned an Israeli flag and said :

"The journey of jihad and martyrdom began 23 years ago and will continue until the liquidation of the masses of aggression, treachery and even high banners of faith and bring us day after day, year after year from Palestine .. all of Palestine. The Jihad will continue until the liberation of the Palestinian city of Jerusalem to pray a prayer of thanks after the liberation of all Palestine..."

We know too, that the Hamas Charter states:

"For our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave, so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails.

Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree.

When our enemies usurp some Islamic lands, Jihad becomes a duty binding on all Muslims. In order to face the usurpation of Palestine by the Jews, we have no escape from raising the banner of Jihad. This would require the propagation of Islamic consciousness among the masses on all local, Arab and Islamic levels. We must spread the spirit of Jihad among the [Islamic] Umma, clash with the enemies and join the ranks of the Jihad fighters."

And we’ve read that Major-General Amos Yadlin, on his recent retirement as head of the Israel IDF's Intelligence Branch, warned in his final briefing to Cabinet that Iran is the major threat against Israel, and not only with regard to its nuclear ambition. "Iran is reaching out with octopus-arms to anyone who acts against Israel". Furthermore, "In the next confrontation, there is a chance that war will break out on more than one front, and that Tel Aviv will become a front. There is also a struggle against the very legitimacy of Israel's existence, and to face it we need intelligence and to mobilize the nation. Israel's deterrent power is very strong, but the quiet should not deceive us – to the contrary. Our enemies are getting stronger and arming themselves."

In the view of many a hawk (or should I say "clear-headed realist"?) who insists that the true solution to the conflict lies in the concept that “Jordan is Palestine”, the creation of a Palestinian State would spell suicide for Israel, squeezed between Hamastan on its western flank and Fatahstan on its eastern one. Within days if not hours, goes this doomsday scenario, Israel would be shelled from both Palestinian components, as well as from Hezbollah to the north.

However, despite Palestinian intransigence and well-grounded Israeli fears (look at this photo of Abbas this October with a stone model of his future state! Notice anything, well, ambitious about it?  Quite so!) , Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay have recognised a Palestinian State with the pre-Six Day War borders, and in retaliation for Israel’s refusal to renew the settlement freeze the European Union is threatening to do the same by next Spring, with Palestine being given a seat at the UN.

 If the European Union makes good its threat, such a move would mean that Abbas had achieved his aim (Israel pushed back to its 1967 boundaries) without the need to negotiate or make concessions to Israel. Not for nothing are the pre-Six Day War boundaries (the 1949 lines, dubbed by Abba Eban, not exactly the most hawkish of Israeli statesmen, the "Auschwitz borders") widely considered militarily indefensible – just consider the proximity of the West Bank to Tel Aviv and imagine the damage rockets would do – they could hardly be agreed to by an Israel that wishes to survive, and since that is so, the Jewish State would be set on a permanent collision course with Palestine and the rest of the world. (See Robin Shepherd’s analyses http://www.robinshepherdonline.com/first-big-step-to-unilateral-palestinian-%20declaration-of-independence-as-brazil-formally-recognises-palestini...
and
http://www.robinshepherdonline.com/argentina-and-other-latin-american-countries%20-to-follow-brazil-in-recognising-palestinian-state-on-1967-lines/).

Whether through ignorance, stupidity or malevolence, there’s a sizeable component of western public opinion that, forgetting why the Israelis “occupy “ the disputed territories in the first place – the refusal of the Arabs to recognize Israel and determination to eradicate Israel by force – would heartily concur with recognizing a Palestinian State – and damn the Israelis.

Israel got out of Gaza and was rewarded with terrorism. Would any territorial concessions that the Palestinians might accept be land for peace – or land for jihad? Would the Palestinians just be biding their time before an all-out strike or are they genuine partners for perpetual peace?  I wonder ...

In the present circumstances, as the Jewish State seems on the eve of being offered up on the slab (I refuse to call it "the altar") of appeasement by allies who themselves face global jihad, how bittersweet it is to read what a keen Zionist had to say thirty years ago:

'Israel’s present struggle to maintain its hold over Judea and Samaria touches on its fundamental capacity to assure the strategic requirements of national survival. What lies in the balance is Israel’s need to prevent this territory from falling into Arab hands whereby, through political extremism and military hostility, it will serve as a springboard for the final onslaught on the reconstituted state then squeezed into the narrow, exposed coastal strip, with Jerusalem encircled on the eastern border. However, no Israeli government since 1967 managed to convince the world (and most of the Jewish People) that the question of Judea and Samaria actually had little to do with regional negotiations or with Zionist “expansionism” – but with the very survival of the State.

On strategic, political, and ideological grounds Judea and Samaria are as vital to Jewish survival as Zionism was vital to Jewish survival at the close of the 19th century.

Then the massive misery of Jewry, particularly in Eastern Europe, helped galvanize the belief in a return to Eretz-Israel as the solution to the Jewish problem. It was credible to argue then that without the creation of a Jewish entity, home, or state, Jewry – or large parts of it – might be wiped out through sheer pauperism, exhaustion, persecution, and loss of collective will. All might be lost if Zion was not claimed and controlled by the Jewish People committed to the physical welfare and the dignity of the nation.

Today, the value of Judea and Samaria does not immediately rest upon its critical importance as a refuge for Jews in distress. That may certainly become the case when two conditions are realised:

• when diasporas like Iranian, South African, Russian, Moroccan, Argentinian, Quebec, and other Jewries overwhelmingly conclude that secure Jewish life is attainable only in Israel; and

 • when the authorities in Israel realize that considerations of population dispersion, quality, and ecology of life, strategic needs in conventional and nuclear terms, and ideological authenticity all demand that the abnormal Mediterranean statelet yield its primacy to the heartland of the country – historically and geographically – in the mountainous terrain of Judea and Samaria.

However, since neither of these two conditions obtain now the immediate value of Judea and Samaria for world Jewry is based on that area’s elemental importance for the security of Israel. The State of Israel is the domain of the entire Jewish People: Israel’s welfare is its welfare, and Israel’s demise could well be the spiritual, moral – perhaps physical – demise of Jewry everywhere.



View of Tel Aviv from the West Bank

 The analogy is then clear: Jewish sovereignty as the Zionist solution to the nation’s ills then is comparable to the need for Israeli sovereignty now over all Eretz-Israel, including Judea and Samaria. The original Zionist enterprise might well be undone and the state wither if Israel does not succeed in maintaining Judea and Samaria as integral parts of the territorial patrimony – in solid political terms – for the Jewish People.

...Historical analogy and contemporary circumstances both suggest that the impetus for more organized action regarding Judea and Samaria must come from the large Jewish community in the United States. That is the core of Jewish financial, demographic, and political power; and that is the major international arena for global pressure on Israel to relinquish Judea and Samaria to Arab rule. Therefore, for Jewish and non-Jewish reasons, the struggle must be fought in America – first and foremost.

There may not be in this era a Dreyfus Trial to focus Jewry’s attention on the abysmal condition of the marginal Jew – seemingly part of Gentile society yet subject arbitrarily to its sudden wrath. There may also not be a Herzl to raise up Jewish masses and instil into them the hope of national freedom and disgnity. Anti-semitism and the quality of Jewish leadership may both have waned considerably in our days. Jewish collective consciousness, leading to a Zionist formula, is pathetically weak; the external and internal conditions for its development are not propitious. [Remember, he was writing before the rise of Eurabia, and its inherent antisemitism.]

But something must be done and time is short. With the failures of the secular, and in part, religious Jewish establishment, a new radical beginning must be made to create an authentic Zionist framework for Jewish action....

If Gush Emunim has been (unjustifiably) accused of illegal settlement, the new Zionist leadership will fully support legal settlement. If settlement seemed to be the partisan endeavour of basically only religious Israeli society, then future construction in Judea and Samaria will be the enterprise of the national collectivity as a whole. If the Israeli government has sometimes behaved surreptiously, now everything will be open and public in all ways. There is nothing to be ashamed of, and there is nothing to fear.' ("A Herzlian Zionist Model for Judea and Samaria" by Dr Mordechai Nisan, in  Forum on the Jewish People, Zionism and Israel, Spring/Summer 1981, No. 41, pp. 85-90)

Slaughter of the Innocents: Iraq’s Christians face extinction

On 3 December the Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV issued a video with the following chilling transcript: “Allah, O Our Lord, vanquish Your enemies, enemies of [Islam] in all places. Allah, strike the Jews and their sympathisers, the Christians and their supporters, the communists and their adherents. Allah, count them and kill them to the last one, and don’t leave even one.” (Hat tip: Christians for Zion). The refrain’s getting to be a familiar one – and will not surprise those of us who know the genocidal antisemitism of the antisemitic Hamas Charter; now, it seems, the genocidal intent's been widened to include others besides Jews.  Clearly, although we prefer to fancy otherwise, it's Jihad4Us.  Yet the plight of the Christians in the Middle East is still largely overlooked by the western media –  and especially that part of it that is preoccupied with undermining Israel.

In Egypt and in Pakistan Christians are being brutally persecuted. And so, too, in Iraq, as the following account (10 December) by a senior church figure working in Syria with Christian refugees from Iraq shows.

Released by the Barnabas Fund, and sent to me by reader Ian G (thank you, Ian), it reveals the desperate plight of the Christians still inside Iraq. Their situation has worsened since the major attack on a church in Baghdad in October, and in the wake of Al-Qaeda’s statement that all Christians and Christian institutions make “legitimate targets”:

Plight of Iraqi Christians; photo collage: Middle East Fellowship

"Their conditions are no longer bearable. The people are living behind locked doors, they are compelled to take long leaves of absence from work, in Mosul and other cities, as a result of the dangers they face at work.

The universities are almost empty of Christian students, as are the schools. In some of the cities even the streets are almost empty of Christians.

It is as if they are in prison: without work, without study, without Church meetings. Fear rules over all situations and in all places.

Threats and insults are daily occurrences, and offensive graffiti is daubed on the walls of the homes of these innocent people.

There is no getting around this problem nor is there a solution to it. The people are deprived of everything that could bring security to their lives; all they can do is depend on God’s mercy or leave for the north. However, travelling to the north requires great financial means for paying the very high rent of homes there, and meeting the cost of living.

If a Christian wishes to rent out his house and leave, the terrorists will force the person renting the house to pay the rent to them, because according to them this house is theirs by right. And, if he dared to sell it they would threaten the person who bought it, so in the end all the money would go to the terrorists.

Here are some examples of people's stories:

A family in the north received a knock at their door at night, and the head of the household went to the door, and found a bird, slain, nailed to the door. The message was clear: you will be slain like this bird.

Saad and Raad, two young men working in the industrial area in Mosul as blacksmiths, used to pay 300,000 Iraqi Dinars a month to the terrorists in order to be spared their lives. This however, in the end, did not prevent them from being killed in their workshop, leaving eleven people unsupported.

A 26-year-old man, who was working in a mini-market, had his shop entered by terrorists demanding some items. He was fired upon and killed, without warning. This took place in broad daylight in Mosul, at the beginning of this month (December 2010).

Many are thinking of leaving these tragic circumstances, but without any means of doing so.

This month three families have arrived from Mosul, fleeing the extremely difficult circumstances, and they are now in Hassake and Kamishly.

There are many other horrific stories of tragedy, which could fill pages and pages. They tell of terrorism, fear, unbearable living conditions and children being threatened, having their very lives coloured with deep blackness."

Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, the Barnabas Fund's international director, has called for immediate international intervention to help Iraq’s Christians, and for prayer on their behalf:

"This Christmas the Christians in Iraq face an unfolding tragedy. The past seven years of war have seen their community devastated. Now they face a wave of attacks that has reduced many of them not just to abject poverty, but also to terrible fear.

A senior Iraqi Christian leader recently asked if the time has now come to evacuate the entire Christian community from Iraq. Others have suggested that its only future lies in an independent homeland.

What is crystal clear is that the international community cannot wash its hands of this beleaguered minority. Intervention must happen urgently. Intervention should be now."

Screwing the Right – the "Organ of Anglo-Jewry"

A pro-Israel demo in Brazil

Early this month Brazil, its example soon followed by Argentina and Uruguay, announced its recognition of an independent State of Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital. A not insignificant development, you might think. Certainly, those astute analysts Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post and Robin Shepherd of the Henry Jackson Society consider it so: they’ve devoted several paragraphs to this circumstance and what it may portend if it has a domino effect that causes other nations – especially France and others within the EU – to follow the South Americans’ example. (Scroll down to my blogroll for the Caroline Glick and Robin Shepherd blogs)

Not so, it seems, Britain’s Jewish Chronicle – the "Organ of Anglo-Jewry".  I've looked in vain on its website for any mention of this breaking news – there has been none. The website (an award-winning one, no less, though that was some years ago) is as shtum about that development as it was about the speeches of Geert Wilders and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Israel last week. The reasons for these omissions appears not far to seek – the JC obviously doesn’t approve of Mr Wilders and Ms Sabaditsch-Wolff for their robust unpolitically correct opposition to the islamification of Europe, so instead of reporting their speeches, vigorously pro-Israel though both were, and letting readers make up their own minds, they don’t report them at all.

That’s if the reporters ever learned about them in the first place – for while the JC does carry hard-hitting analytical reports from time to time, and mercifully still has several impressive columnists gracing its hardcopy editions, the thrust and quality of its online reportage is all too frequently inconsequential and poor.  The impression given is that a quick skim of Al Beeb's news website or a cursory google is all that's been done, and all too often it's the readers' blogs that contain the important stories.  I've even seen the reporters take their cues from readers' blogs and post a belated report.  But not often. The blogs get superseded by others and the news gets buried.

Indeed, about many matters that we might reasonably expect a Jewish newspaper of its supposed calibre to report, the JC website is silent. Instead, the seeming lightweights among its reporting staff  (they're of the female variety, I regret to say) were this past week, as usual, very much in evidence, displaying their characteristic preference for “news lite”, much of it revolving around “celebrities”, and with poking fun (not for the first time) at that good friend of Israel, Sarah Palin.

“You'll probably be shocked, but that kind of story will cause more of a stir around Shabbat dinner tables than all of the Israel-related stories put together”, noted a former world news editor of the newspaper, the man who was responsible for setting up the website in the first place. He might be expected to know. But – oh, surely not. Is the Britannic component of the People of the Book really that dumbed-down?

And are those not-so-intrepid reporters so clueless about world events impacting (and that deleteriously) on the Jewish State that they’re likely to imagine “the Brazilian initiative” is something to do with a trends in coffee-drinking or in hairstyles or in body waxing? Alas, I suspect so. (Don’t get me wrong, froth, frivolity, flippancy and – er – fluff do have their place, but not in every increasing measure on the paper’s website at the expense of important news.)

Initially launched in 1841, and in continuous publication since 1844, the Jewish Chronicle is British Jewry’s oldest-surviving newspaper, and still its most influential. For generations of Jewish families across this country, Erev Shabbos has not been complete without “The JC” –as the paper is affectionately known. Back issues of the paper are indispensable for historians and genealogists, and I’ve done more than my fair share, over the years, of digging into its archives – a wonderful resource. And, believe me, I’m something of a connoisseur of Jewish newspapers, having intimate knowledge of the contents of the JC’s original rival the Voice of Jacob (a grand read itself), as well as of the Jewish press in Australia, past and present.

In 1895, during Theodor Herzl’s first visit to England, the JC’s then editor, Asher Myers, asked Herzl for an article. The great man did not disappoint, and duly sent one from Austria. Translated from the German, it appeared in the issue of 17 January 1896 under the headline ‘A “Solution of the Jewish Question”’ and was a scoop for the paper, being the first time that Herzl’s vision of a Jewish homeland appeared in print. (The pamphlet Der Judenstaat was published shortly afterwards.)

In its issue of 8 December 1933 the JC wrote presciently of “the Hitlerist extermination regime”. And so on – a fascinating read guaranteed, at the local, national, and international level.

Below is a London newspaper vendor’s placard from the mid-1960s, when the JC was still a considerable force in the Jewish world. In common with other newspapers, as they compete with electronic media and try to carve out a viable online presence for themselves, the JC has its problems – there have been rumours of falling readership and revenue and of recent staff redundancies. But the quality of the paper has declined compared to what it was when that photo was taken; the amount of editorial news and solid features has diminished – I do not intend to imply that they have vanished altogether.  That would be churlish and untrue.

Today, an unprecedented campaign, ruthless and well-orchestrated, threatens Israel, uniquely of all the countries in the world. Yet the Jewish Chronicle – wrongly and indeed irresponsibly in my view – permitted its vocal enemies a voice on its website readers' blogs until finally shamed into removing them by an ongoing campaign waged by a number of concerned readers. Not least among those is keen Jewish Chronicle-watcher Avraham Reiss of Jerusalem, whose website http://jcwatch.wordpress.com/contains probably all you would wish to know about the episode – as well as rather alot more! ( The JC staff are said to look in at frequent intervals, wondering what the often somewhat intemperate Mr Reiss will come out with next!)

The paper seemed and indeed seems blissfully unaware that blogs on its website are reproduced on sites such as Jewish Press International – whose readers are no doubt startled and affronted to see the kind of blogs that were (until editor Stephen Pollard tardily heeded outraged readers' pleas and imposed a crack-down) and lamentably sometimes still are posted there. I’m not talking about blogs that criticise aspects of Israeli policy. I’m talking about blogs that demonised Israel and spewed out obnoxious vitriol about the Jewish State and its supporters, even comparing Zionists and the IDF to Nazis, and using words like "ubermenschen" and "liebensraum" [sic] in connection with Israeli attitudes.

A taunting poster who perpetually insulted Jews and Israel, including the Israeli flag, and addressed a zealous pro-Zionist poster, no less a communal personage than Jonathan Hoffman,  as "Mr Ten Per Cent", constantly personally insulting him and other pro-Israel posters, was allowed to remain for weeks and weeks, even after having numerous antisemitic posts flagged.  Some posts, including ones mocking and scorning the EUMC definition of antisemitism – were removed following complaints. There were many similar examples. I can only assume that the JC staff tolerated bloggers and posters such as that antisemite because they wanted to impress advertisers and potential advertisers with the impression that the website’s readers’ blogs (a feature that was almost as lifeless as a dodo only a year or so ago) are jumping with activity.

But advertisers can read – and if they did bother to find out what is actually being written by some bloggers and posters, with the apparent full blessing of the paper, they may well have taken their revenue elsewhere.

Moreover, readers’ blogs on interesting relevant topics were often summarily and inexplicably closed by the JC staff – under the signature "Anonymous" – although they had been onscreen for less than a day, a galling happening especially given the fact that the "Anonymous" moderator was rumoured to be a cadet reporter on work experience. Certainly, the suspect was herself (I'm sorry to sound unkind but it's true) a mediocre writer. Whoever was to blame, some serious meaty blogs were prematurely closed in this way, apparently on a mere whim, while others were left unscathed. Queries from bloggers as to why this occurred went unanswered until – out of the blue – JC editor Stephen Pollard (pictured) announced a set of guidelines, which has largely although not entirely curtailed the abuses.

The paper is still biased against certain viewpoints, or at any rate certain individuals who voice them. It’s failed to print letters this past week from two redoubtable rightwing Zionists, Jonathan Hoffman and Jon Cohen (of course, the reason could be that the paper had no space, has held them over, and will print them next week, although I believe both gentlemen – through past experience – believe such optimism to be misplaced!) "If your name is Stanley Walinets then you have a letter published weekly", grumbles Jon Cohen, a regular poster on the paper’s website, today, referring to a well-known activist within the fringe group Jews for Justice for Palestinians. This, incidentally, is presumably the same Mr Walinets who posted the following tasteful piece on the JC’s website not so long ago (8 November) as a blog; following complaints, the paper was prudent enough to remove it:

Said Hitler "I wanted the world to hate Jews!
But how can I do it? I’m dead…
I know! Re-incarnate as hard-right Israelis
And let them do it instead!"

"Apart [from] the token letter disagreeing with the JC's left-wing stance, no other letters of an opposing viewpoint are published. Why is that?" asks Mr Cohen. The reason for the JC’s willingness to post letters from people like Mr Walinets and its tendency to ignore letters from people like Messrs Hoffman and Cohen lies, it’s widely thought (and the assumption sounds reasonable), in the paper’s apparent connection to the New Israel Fund via the JC’s proprietor, the Kessler Foundation. The New Israel Fund’s links to dubious organisations aimed at the undermining of Israel as a vibrant Jewish State and to elements pushing the Goldstone Report have been fully explored and demonstrated by that eminently useful site NGO Monitor in a series of hard-hitting investigative reports that can be accessed here http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/new_israel_fund
The JC’s editor, Mr Pollard, is perhaps haplessly in thraldom to this state of affairs, and possibly despite his better judgment. After all, the poor fellow clearly has to eat. He has written of his own disavowal of leftist attitudes in the wake of 9/11. In 2006, before assuming the JC’s editorship, he wrote:

"...large, mainstream sections of the Left – typified by the [then] Mayor of London [Ken Livingstone]– now choose to ally themselves with Islamists who seek to destroy the essence of Western civilisation, who would put to death homosexuals and Jews, and who would put women in metaphorical – and sometimes literal – chains, and the moral cancer that has taken hold of the Left becomes clear.

.... It is not easy to acknowledge what the Left has become, and the mindset of leftists.... The mainstream Left has demonstrated clearly which side of the battle to preserve Western civilisation and freedom it is on. The Left, in any recognisable form, is now the enemy." http://www.stephenpollard.net/002558.html

And before the May General Election he revealed, in his usual  felicitous literary style, that he was endorsing the Conservative Party after a lifetime of voting Labour.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest.../article7108874.ece

Moreover, Mr Pollard began a book review in the New York Times last year with these words:

"There is no more important issue facing the West than Islamism, Islamofascism or –  to use yet another label –  radical Islam.  And there is no more necessary precondition to countering that threat than understanding it: where it springs from, how it is expressed and the ways in which it is spreading.  But before we do any of that, we have to agree that the threat exists".  (From the rest of the review there's scant doubt that he most certainly does.) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/.../Pollard-t.html

At the end of last month, at the height of the outrage over Mick Davis’s tomfoolery (see my post of 28 November, "Princes in Israel..."), Melanie Phillips (who, incidentally, the JC has the good sense to retain as one of its regular columnists) wrote on her Spectator blog:

"I hear that one or two Jewish community leadership figures have even been going round bad-mouthing certain non-Jews who defend Israel in public. Behind the scenes these leadership figures are viciously attacking people such as Douglas Murray or Robin Shepherd as ‘extremist’, ‘Islamophobic’, ‘right-wing’ and so forth, and urging other community figures not to support them.

This is utterly astonishing. Heaven knows these courageous, decent and principled people are rare enough in these terrible times; if only there were more of them. They are putting themselves on the line to support Israel and fight for the defence of the west in the teeth of mass hysteria, thus courting the threat of professional and social ostracism. Jews owe them an enormous debt of gratitude. Yet incredibly, these British Jewish community leaders, driven by a combination of ideological spite, empire-building and egomania, are blackening their names and thus trying to squeeze them into silence.

I have said before that the ingrained servility of British Jewish leaders, who believe in working behind the scenes in trying to influence the great and the good rather than putting their heads above the parapet and making their case in public, explains why they have so conspicuously failed to stand up in public against the madness over Israel that has engulfed Britain and the west. But the reality is far, far worse than that. By endorsing the positions of those who are demonising and delegitimising Israel through echoing their distortions, decontextualisations and grotesquely inverted morality, it has now become clear that Britain’s most senior Jewish community leadersheep [sic – well-characterised!] are simply, and tragically, on the wrong side." http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6493974/the-british-jewish-leadersheep.thtml#comments

This prompted Edgar Davidson (who on his own blog has made a number of strictures about the JC’s editorial bias against the Israeli and the British right and against the EDL such as this post of 27 June http://www.edgar1981.blogspot.com/.../jewish-chronicle-gets-it-all-wrong.html) to comment beneath Ms Phillips’s post:

'The increasingly indifferent (and at times hostile) attitude of British Jewish Leadership toward Israel is reflected in the deterioration of the Jewish Chronicle over the last two years. The JC is increasingly taking on the mantle of standard left-wing Jewish critics of Israel. This can be seen in the prominence it now gives every week to articles, letters and interviews with anti-Zionists. The JC is increasingly obsessed with the 'radical right wing threat to British Jewry' while continuing to ignore the real threat from the Islamist-leftist alliance. To confirm its total ignorance of what is really going on, it continues to refer to the American J-Street organisation as a "pro-Israel liberal lobby" even after the evidence that its leaders had hidden the fact is was being secretly funded by the anti-Zionist Soros and even Arab propagandists.'

He was supported by a comment from a certain Michelle, who observed:

'I agree with you wholeheartedly about the JC. This story is obviously boosting their declining circulation. It is to be expected when we know the connections between the JC’s owners - the Kessler Foundation and the New Israel Fund.

Nicholas Saphir, (a Sussex-based [actually Kent-based] farmer, is a trustee of the Kessler Foundation which oversees the running of the JC.  He is also Chairman of the New Israel Fund as well as being involved in "overseeing the running of the JC."  In such circumstances, could The JC’s current editorial policy actually be influenced by Nicholas Saphir and his New Israel Fund’s political views?

If so, are we to conclude, that the "Organ of British Jewry" is now moving very much left of centre in the various debates concerning Israel and diaspora Jewry?' [Hat tip to Michelle, for thereby inspiring the title of the present blogpost!]

The JC – the "Organ of Anglo-Jewry" – has become more the tool of the mealy-mouthed Anglo-Jewish communal establishment. It has joined them in the kneejerk vilification of the EDL in a series of not-very-subtle articles that had even a rightwing sceptic like myself falling for their line that the EDL consists entirely of scumbag ruffians and neo-Nazis. That their interpretation of the EDL might not be altogether accurate is suggested by passionately indignant comments on my post of last Thursday (“The Sad Old State of Cloud Cuckoo Land”) by the head of the EDL’s Jewish Division, Roberta Moore (pictured, becomingly wrapped in the Israeli flag) and by another highly articulate Jewish Division member, who blogs at http://www.juniperinthedesert.blogspot.com/)as well as by observations by other commenters. Certainly the jury – make that Jewry – should still be out as far as the EDL is concerned. As one commenter remarked: "I think that we need to reserve judgment on the EDL unless or until there is a definite proven connection to the BNP."

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again –  it’s time Anglo-Jewry realised that it’s no longer fighting Oswald Mosley and the BUF. The enemy these days doesn’t wear a blackshirt but an entirely different garb. And quite frankly, if its hard news you want, especially about Israel and related international affairs, the jc.com is not the place for you. You’re better off making a personal google page and adding the Jerusalem Post as a module. But if you’re still tempted by the jc.com, do accept its opinions with at least two pinches of salt, and – as someone reminded me this week – don’t allow its take on events to shape yours.

Herzl and Messianism

The following is excerpted from an article of the above name by Israeli political scientist Professor Joseph Nedava.  The entire article was published in the Herzl Year Book, vol. 7, New York, 1971,  pp. 9-26.  I hope it proves of interest.

.... It seems that a Messianic drive had been part of Herzl’s mental makeup from his early childhood. This may account for the visionary quality that is evident in all the creative endeavours of his later years. But he only revealed his thoughts on the matter a few months before his death. The report he gave Reuben Brainin on December 25, 1903, is significant.

'....When I was about twelve years old I chanced upon a German book – I do not recall its title – where I happened to read about the Messiah, the King of Israel, whom many Jews even in our own generation were still awaiting, riding on a donkey like the poorest of the poor...[But] I felt that something was missing in [these legends]. Still, even these fragments stirred my imagination. My heart was filled with sorrow and vague yearnings. At first, I did not know the cause of my sadness and longing. And then, on night, I suddenly recalled the story of Exodus.

The historic tale of the Exodus from Egypt and the legend of the redemption by the King-Messiah ran together in my mind .... I got the idea to write a poem about the King-Messiah. This idea kept me awake several nights. I was ashamed to tell anyone about my thoughts. I knew everyone would only laugh and shout after me: "Behold, the dreamer cometh". Then came examinations at school, and new books ... [these] diverted my mind from its pre-Messianic tribulations, but apparently the legend contined to build up deep within my heart, although not consciously.

And then one night I had a wonderful dream. The King-Messiah came, a glorious and majestic old man, took me in his arms, and swept me on the wings of the wind. On one of the shining clouds we encountered the figure of Moses ....The Messiah called to Moses: "It is for this child that I have prayed!" And to me he said: "Go and declare to the Jews that I shall come soon and perform great wonders and great deeds for my people and for the whole world!"

I woke up. It had only been a dream. I kept it to myself, for I dared not tell it to anyone. A few days later there came to my hand one of the popular science booklets of Aaron Bernstein which said that electric power brought men closer to one another, restoring the hearts of the sons to their fathers by building a bridge over the entire world. [According to Bernstein] electricity was the King-Messiah whose wonders would bring liberation to all nations and to all enslaved human beings. I was outraged. What! The electron as Messiah! What blasphemy! No, the Messiah of the legend was much nobler and much more beautiful.

Then, a few days later, a sort of revolution occurred in my troubled mind. I said to myself: who knows, perhaps the electric current is really the redeemer whom we are awaiting and who will liberate us from the bondage of the dody and the spirit. I then decided to become an engineer.'

The combination of Moses and Messiah is a recurring theme throughout Herzl’s life and should be considered the élan vital of his historic mission. His Jewish State purports to be nothing but a reiterated version, with some technological improvements, of the Exodus.

Naturally, he was only too eager to record in his diaries [entry of August 18, 1895] the admission by one of his earliest opponents, Chief Rabbi Moritz Güdemann of Vienna: "You remind me of Moses". This statement filled him with new courage as he took his first steps on the road of Zionism.

In June, 1895, a new name from the pages of history made its first appearance in Herzl’s writings – that of Sabbatai Zvi. He records in his Diaries that his friend, Dr Schiff, referred to the idea of the "Jewish State" as “Something that a man tried to do in the last century. Sabbatai!” His statement is not entirely correct, for Sabbatai Zvi lived in the seventeenth, not in the eighteenth century. But Herzl had never heard of the pseudo-Messiah of Smyrna before. His curiosity aroused, he picked up a novel about Sabbatai and came to feel a great affinity with him, if not with his personality, then at least with respect to his historic mission. "There is a novel by Ludwig Storch, Der Jakobsstern [The Star of Jacob], which deals with Sabbatai Zvi," he notes on July 9, 1895. It is a pity that Herzl does not record his impressions after having read the novel, for it must have been a profound spiritual experience which haunted him for the rest of his life. We can safely assume that by March, 1896 Herzl had begun to identify with Sabbatai Zvi. His analysis of that strange, yet awe-inspiring leader is epitomized in terse, restrained passages.

"The difference between myself and Sabbatai Zvi [the way I imagine him], apart from the difference in the technical means inherent in the times, is that Sabbatai made himself great so as to be equal to the grat of the earth. I, however, find the great small, as small as myself."

From the very outset Herzl had been striving to differentiate between what Professor Gershom Scholem, the scholar of mysticism, calls "two trends in the crystallization of the Messianic idea, as they are found, side by side, throughout many ages of history: the popular-mythological and the philosophic-enlightened".

Apparently, Herzl was never willing to admit to even one iota of mythological mysticism in his mental makeup. He saw himself as a Realpolitiker through and through – completely rational in his approach to Jewish affairs, a statesman and a politician and not a visionary waiting for miracles.

Even assuming that he would have been ready to make public references to the activities of Sabbatai Zvi and his movement, or to go so far as to declare himself a modern Messiah, Herzl must have been completely weaned of[sic] such desires by a most significant conversation he had with Joseph S. Bloch, editor of the Österreichische Wochenschrift and founder of the Union of Austrian Jews to Combat Anti-Semitism.

The exact date of the interview is not recorded; the time is given approximately as November, 1895. The conversation dealt with the implications of The Jewish State:

'After long discussion back and forth, Bloch recommended that Herzl study the history of the Holy Land from the earliest times. He would find that it had enjoyed independence only under David and Solomon. Egyptians and Babylonians, Persians, Syrians, Romans, Arabs, Greeks, Christians and Mohammedans had succeeded one another as masters of Palestine and had fought their battles on its soil. He should also not forget the savage civil wars. Herzl did not yield, merely remarking jestingly that the Messiah would remove all obstacles. Bloch replied at once: "Among Jews, that word has an attractive and exalted but at the same time dangerous ring. If you should come forward in the role of Messiah, you will have all Jews against you". He told Herzl about the various Messiahs [in Jewish history], ending with Sabbatai Zvi, whose emergence had had fatal consequences for the Jews, and who had themselves come to a bad end, either turning their backs on Judaism or committing suicide. The Messiah, he said, must remain a veiled, hidden figure. The moment he takes on actual flesh and blood, he ceases to be the Redeemer. In a word, every Messiah was stricken with blindness and was damned and cursed by the people.'

Bloch’s interpretation may coincide with Franz Kafka’s aphorism: "The Messiah will come only when he is no longer needed; he will come only on the day after his arrival". But Herzl could have countered that argument with the dictum of Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai: "When will the Messiah come? Today, if ye hearken to His voice." (Sanhedrin, 98a)

To some extent, the belief in his own Messianism was forced on Herzl by outsiders. One of the principal propagators of the notion was the Rev. William Henry Hechler [pictured, in Bedouin attire], a British Protestant clergyman who served as chaplain to the British Embassy in Vienna. From his first meeting with Herzl in March, 1896, Hechler had become an enthusiastic friend and follower of the Zionist leader. The Englishman was a Zionist of the Romantic school in the tradition of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. He considered it the sacred duty of true Christians to restore the people of Israel to the land of its fathers. To him, it was an inevitable process in keeping with biblical prophecy. Having a strong psychic and mystical streak in his personality, Hechler viewed Zionism as a movement attesting to a "prophetic crisis"; he was constantly engaged in Messianic calculations, drawing blueprints of the Holy Temple and expressing the fervent hope that the lost original Ark of the Covenant would eventually be found. He would talk of these things to Jewish and Gentile leaders alike.

In his Diaries Herzl admirably recreates the aura of Messianism and prophecy with which Hechler succeeded in enveloping Herzl’s diplomatic moves throughout the years of his Zionist activity. "Judging from some of [Hechler’s] remarks," Erwin Rosenberger, Herzl’s collaborator on the staffof Die Welt, comments: "he may have had moments when he really did regard Herzl as the Messiah sent by God ... he regarded Herzl as the instrument chosen by Providence to carry out this messianic design ... [however] in personal contact with Herzl, Hechler expressed through neither word nor deed his conviction that, 'Thou art the Messiah, the anointed of the Lord.'"

The outbreaks of anti-Semitism in Austria brought the yearning for a Redeemer also to the Jewish student fraternity in Vienna, particularly the Zionist-oriented groups. The celebration of the Passover seder never failed to act as a recurring nostalgic reminder of past glory and future redemption. As we have seen, Herzl’s feelings would be profoundly stirred by any reference to Moses and the Exodus. This mood is apparent even in the following restrained entry in his Diaries (March 28, 1896):

'Seder at the Jewish student association Unitas. Friedmann, a lecturer at the University, explained the history of this festival which, after all, is our most beautiful and most meaningful one. I sat next to him. Later he spoke briefly with me in private, reminded me of Sabbatai Zvi, "Who enchanted all people," and winked in a way that seemed to say that I ought to become such a Sabbatai. Or did he mean that I already was one?'

One of the first to feel that Herzl was destined for a historic mission was his own mother, Jeanette Diamant Herzl. It was she who urged him to persevere in the face of the difficulties he encountered. It seems that during the hectic days of June, 1895, while Herzl was composing his Jewish State his mother, without knowing of the venture, had sent him a poem by the poetess Betty Pauli which she had happened to read that day and which described the destiny of a leader. Herzl considered it as a God-sent message, and noted on the margin of the poem: "From my good mother, who copied it for me at a time when I was working on my plan, as if my mother’s heart had divined it."

The crowning touch to Herzl’s private thoughts on the Messianic character of his mission may have been given by the "enthusiastic letter from Dr Bierer, Sofia. The Chief Rabbi there considers me the Messiah." (Diaries, entry dated 10 March 1896).

The year 1897 was a crucial period for the budding seeds of Herzl. It was the year of the First Zionist Congress, on which so many hopes and expectations had been placed. A gigantic wave of enthusiasm swept through the Jewish people. The Gentile world, too, was greatly stirred. The date coincided with Hechler’s Messianic calculations. The Congress met in an atmosphere of exaltation. Occasionally, delegates like the Hebrew writer Mordecai Ben-Ami would give vent to their Messianic emotions. Years later, Ben Ami himself aptly described the mood which prevailed at the congress as well as his own uncontrollable burst of feeling:

 "...and out of the silent darkness and despair we suddenly heard the voice of Herzl, as the shofar of the Messiah, summoning to the Congress all those who in their hearts were still aware of the ties that bound them to their people.

Herzl calmly mounts the rostrum... We see before us the magnificent figure of a prince, with a deep, powerful look in his eyes, handsome and sad at the same time. Now he is no longer the suave, elegant Herzl of Vienna, but a scion of the House of David, suddenly risen from the grave in all his legendary splendour.

The entire hall thrilled with the emotion of it, as if a historic miracle had taken place before our eyes. Indeed, was this not a miracle?...For minutes the hall shook with cheers, applause and the stamping of feet. It seemed as if the great dream cherished by our people for two thousand years had come true at last, and Messiah, the son of David, was standing before us."

Throughout 1897 Herzl’s correspondence from both Jews and non-Jews abounded with allusions to his Messianism.

"I still have many of the letters of love and veneration which Herzl received from his followers in every part of the world," Erwin Rodenberger writes. "One, for example, is from Salomon Farb of Focsani, Rumania. In a faulty German but with an impressive display of Biblical learning, the writer concludes from various words and numbers in the Old Testament that the Messianic era is approaching. ‘The Messiah,’ he adds, ‘may now be Theodor Herzl, the Anointed of the Lord.’

"In another letter [published in The Young Judæan, Oct. 1912], which reached Herzl after the First Zionist Congress, Rabbi N. Benjamin writes from the United States on behalf of a group of cantors: 'Everywhere the name of Dr Herzl is worshipped like that of a deity... You are the divine emissary to whom was given the mission of once again raising up Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, as the prophets promised... In New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, the idea is meeting with a great response among Jews of all religious shades.'"

The stupendous volume of correspondence which flooded the First Zionist Congress also had its comic aspects. One writer from Stockton-on-Tees in England claimed that he was the Messiah and as such demanded to be called to Basle without delay to take charge of Zionist affairs. As proof of his Messiahship, he quoted some words which, he said, had been formed by a drift of snow in his garden. Herzl asked one of his secretaries to advise the man that "one drift of snow cannot make a Messiah and a Congress leader", and in a jocular vein he wrote across the claimant’s letter: "The snows of yesteryear".

By this time Herzl might well have drawn certain parallels between himself and Sabbatai Zvi, Herzl could claim to have had in Max Nordau a disciple of the type Sabbatai Zvi had in Nathan of Gaza. The violent protest of some rabbis against Herzl’s idea might have seemed analogous to the animosity shown by the rabbis of an earlier age toward the man of Smyrna who had claimed to be the Messiah. Then there was the incidentat the synagogue of Sofia which Herzl reported in his Diaries: ‘I stood at the altar platform. When I was not quite sure how to face the congregation without turning my back on the Holy of Holies, someone cried: “It’s alright for you to turn your back to the Ark: you are holier than the Torah."'

This may well have recalled to him the account of the ceremony in which Sabbatai Zvi was "married to the Torah" before a gathering of leading members of the Jewish community at Saloniki.

Herzl’s attitude toward religion was a vital factor in the formulation of his Zionist concept. As a liberal of the nineteenth-century European school, he opposed the establishment of a theocracy in the future Jewish State. At the same time, however, he felt that without a foundation of Jewish religion and tradition the Jewish State would lack the solid bedrock it would require in a modern age. Although his Jewish education had not been extensive, he instinctively sensed the power of the Jewish faith and its historic heriage as a cohesive force. In fact, it was revealed after his death that he had given his blessing to the creation of a religious Zionist party as a countervailing force he felt was needed within the Zionist movement.

Yet most rabbis at the time were stubbornly opposed to Herzl’s plans ans activities.... One of their main reasons for their vociferous opposition to Herzlian Zionism was their fear that Herzl might openly procliaim himself the Messiah or act like one....Obviously, they were afraid of another Sabbatai Zvi, with all the dire consequences associated with the advent of a false Messiah.  In a private conversation, Dr Hirsch Hildesheimer, the famous Orthodox rabbi and opponent of Reform ... compared Herzl with Sabbatai Zvi.

Even Professor Herman Schapira (the initiator of the Jewish National Fund) hesitated to lend a helping hand to Herzl. "He was afraid of Herzl", [Shalom] Ben-Horin wrote, "He saw in him a kind of Sabbatai Zvi."

Herzl was careful at all times to divorce his Zionist activities from religion in order to impress the world with his political realism and to scotch any misconceived comparisons in this respect between himself and the visionary and fanatical Sabbatai Zvi.

....Beginning with the First Zionist Congress, and particularly during the latter part of 1898, Herzl was working under constant physical and mental pressure. He seemed to be nearing a crucial juncture in his lefe similar to that in the career of Sabbatai Zvi, planning as he did to approach the Turkish Sultan to negotiate the purchase of Palestine for the Jews. As he was preparing to visit Palestine, Herzl was suddenly seized with the fear that, like Shabbatai Zvi, he, too, might be arrested by the Sultan. This anxiety, which haunted him all through October, 1898, is clearly reflected in the fragmentary and haphazard entries in his diaries for that period....

Passing through Ramle on his way to Jerusalem, Herzl encountered yet another reminder of his Messianic "tribulations":

'From Ramle comes a group of Sephardic Jews. Two men near Herzl bless him and throw themselves on the ground to kiss the traces of his feet in the sand. Herzl steps back, moved. "This is due to the Messiah..." says one of the Sephardic Jews.'

Herzl was bewildered because he apparently did not know the Midrashic adage: "Wait for the feet of the Messiah."

....It is interesting to note that Herzl unintentionally resorted to methods akin to Messianic-Kabbalistic mysticism, as when he used name codes and ciphers to camouflage his negotiations with the Sultan and his entourage. Conversely, an emissary from Palestine whom Herzl had helped thanked him by pointing out that the Hebrew letters of his name, Theodor Herzl, had the same numerical value as the letters in the Hebrew words mal’akh moshi’a l’Yisrael – "angel and helper of Israel".

....In a chapter of his Old-New Land describing cultural life in the future Jewish State, he speaks of a play, “Moses,” performed at Haifa’s National Theatre, and of an opera entitled "Sabbatai Zvi". It seems that after his return from Palestine Herzl could no longer free himself from the magical spell of Sabbatai Zvi....