Do not be deceived. The murdered innocents of Gaza are not those who are really suffering. It is the liberal Jews like Hadley Freeman, victims of the new anti-Semitism.
Israel is a state openly founded on racist and theocratic grounds, in which Jews have an absolute right to live in Israel, wherever in the world they were born and their families have been for centuries, and nobody else does. The unfortunate pre-1946 occupants of the land have been mostly driven out into refugee camps, including in Gaza, while religiously motivated settlers continue apace to grab the best Palestinian land and water. The state does this for them precisely and explicity because they are Jewish. Those non-Jews who remained in Israel proper are subject to a whole raft of apartheid style legislation, even governing whom they may marry, and the quantity of this legislation is increasing. 140 Israeli laws specify treatment by race.
Israel is as a state entirely based and run on a racist premise. Its very foundation is racist. But while the Israeli state may steal land specifically for Jews, make provision for Jews, and make life difficult for non-Jews, anybody else who mentions Jews in the context of Israeli behaviour is a vicious racist and anti-Semite. This warped and ludicrous logic is enforced by political orthodoxy and the mainstream media.
It is as though, in opposing apartheid, it was taboo to mention it had been invented for the benefit of white people.
Reading Freeman’s long self-pitying self-centred whinge I was waiting to find out what had actually happened to her to occasion some distress. Had she had a brick through her window? Had she been assaulted in the street? Has somebody hurled racial abuse at her?
Apparently none of the above. It appears that she feels under unfair pressure to denounce the actions of Israel. And- horror of horrors – the Tricycle Theatre has cancelled a Jewish Film Festival in Kilburn because it was financed by the Israeli Embassy. Oh no, the agony! How can a poor girl survive in a North London which is so rife with anti-Semitism! It reminded me forcefully of the very first diplomatic social engagement of my professional career, in 1985 when our Afrikaaner hostess held forth on how she thought people looked down on her in Harrods.
I deplore racism with every part of my being, all racism. Freeman makes what is intended to be a smart observation that the Tricycle’s act “reminds me how very far I am from the States”. It is very plain that she regrets that and believes that the US attitude to Israel is better than the British one.
This then morphs into the meme that the reaction to the Gaza massacre is part of a wave of the “new anti-Semitism”. There have indeed been several deplorable anti-Semitic incidents in Europe in the last few months. But they have killed absolutely nobody in the last two years, while Israel has killed 1,500 people. There have been three terrible examples of racial murders of Jews in the past eight years, and there needs to be continued and unremitting vigilance against all hate crime. The disruption of Hadley’s cinema treats and the daubing of paint on a synagogue are in themselves bad things. But do they really compare to the massive disproportionate force being used to destroy over 1,000 women and children in a month in Gaza, and the context of the entire seventy year programme of ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people?
You are right, Hadley. Just because you are Jewish does not mean you should be under special pressure to condemn Israel’s actions. But if you take it upon yourself to write a long article on the subject, we are entitled to expect you – as a human being – to condemn the massacre. And as in the article you write about nothing but your own angst and the evils of anti-Semitism, and manage not a single word of sympathy or regret for the victims of the terrible massacre in Gaza, we are entitled to form our own opinion.
And my opinion is that you are a wholly self-centred and self-regarding little person with an abject lack of moral perspective, who seems to think the murder of 1500 people is about the impact on your feelings.
Hadley, you are not disgusting because you are Jewish: you are just a disgusting human being.
por definición, lo que dijo el anterior presidente de Irán: ¿es Legal quitarle a un pueblo su territorio y dárselo a otro debido al sufrimiento y exterminio que ha sufrido? por qué si es así, no le quitaron un pedazo a Alemania y fundaron allí ´Israel´? por otra parte, JUDÍO, define una religión, no un país; una religión no necesita territorio, de hecho los judíos sanos desaprueban ´Israel´, los judíos enfermos viven allí y conviven con toda la invasión haciéndose en muchos casos los de la vista gorda…
O/T Baroness Warsi’s thread is too far down but another one hits the dust.
Foreign Office Minister Mark Simmonds resigns
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-28737781
I see he was hauled over the coals by the Parliamentary Commissioner for this.
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/Mr%20Mark%20Simmonds%20MP.pdf
“When he’s not relaxing by trying to disrupt this blog, he has a blog of his own and even makes some good points there”
Link, Ba’al?
Karel
“You {Komodo} have probably noticed that I never engage in a serious discourse with him {Habbabkuk}”
_______________________
Glad not to be in a minority for a change, Karel; you never engage in serious discourse with anyone! 🙂
What’s the common thread connecting the dots? I can’t think about it because it gives me ‘GAS’.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article185028.html
What did you think of the speech, Fred…
Speech was fine.
I just don’t like Hi Viz vests.
Didn’t have people in high viz vests at the demonstrations I used to go to. Authoritarianism is what we were protesting against. The population have become a load of sheep with dayglow sheepdogs.
A letter to Duncan Smith who was on The World at One with James Robbins today.
‘Dear Mr Duncan Smith,
Re: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04d1kvn @ 23:51
Three minutes into an interview on domestic politics on the World at One today you were asked by James Robbins to comment on the resignation of Mark Simmonds from the Foreign Office following that of Baroness Warsi. It is understandable that you should have assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the two resignations had a common motive.
What is not so understandable is how a mature and no doubt excellently educated Brit can be so ignorant about the story of Palestine as not to know that the reason there is a Palestinian armed resistance is because world Zionism, spearheaded since 1948 by Israel, not only wants to destroy but for almost a hundred years has conspired to destroy Palestine, its land, resources, culture and people.
You say you support the two-state-solution. But Israel has wriggled out of every so-called “peace process”. It is Israel’s aggression and intransigence that have created Hamas. Israel and the West must talk to Hamas. Israel and Palestine should be one democratic country with a shared capital where each person has one vote and people are no longer segregated along ethnic or religious lines any more than they were under the Ottoman Empire.’
From his comments, I assume he is a member of Conservative Friends of Israel.
Simmonds has been to Israel under the auspices of the Conservative Friends of Israel.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/regmem/?p=11224
Further to Je’s analysis of the BBC Statistician’s article on whether there are enough dead women and children in Gaza to warrant criticism of Israel, here’s how such an article can add to the debate from the Jewish perspective.
http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/08/08/bbc-wakes-up-to-hamass-exaggerations-warning-caution-needed-with-gaza-casualty-figures/
Airdrieonian – you mean Zionist perspective.
Yes, Reuben uses his position to parrot and endorse an absurd Zionist bloggers appologism. And they’re still not entirely happy.
You should try reading articles in the Jerusalem post (where Reuben used to work) where Britain is mentioned. Anything not entirely pro-Israeli leads to a torrent of anti-British bile in the comments underneath.
The fact that people with such a madcap perspective that they say things like “the BBC of Britanistan is the mouthpiece of Hamas”… the fact that they give Reuben approval should give him a clue as to how valid his article was.
Is this the first time the zionist scum bags having killed and maimed thousands then start the campaign of “lying Palestinians”?
These zionist beasts and evil murderers are pretty adept at mass murder and cover ups. anyone recollect Jennin massacre? The same practice the evil zionist scum murdered and took human shields and then decried they have only killed a few and it is all an exaggeration.
Mohammed Omer reporting for AJ. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2008. I attended the award ceremony when John Pilger presented the award to Mo and to Dahr Jamail who reported unembedded in Iraq. He wrote Behind the Green Line.
Israel’s attacks in Gaza town ‘a war crime’
Witnesses say Israeli soldiers used Palestinians as human shields and fired on civilians in Khuza’a in southern Gaza.
Mohammed Omer
11 Aug 2014
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/08/israel-attacks-gaza-town-war-crime-20148109292997298.html
In a previous Israeli attack, he came home from school one day to find his house in the Rafah refugee camp being demolished, the furniture thrown around on the ground and his mother distraught.
Earlier. ‘Omer told a chilling tale of how one of his brothers, Hussam, was killed recently by an Israeli sniper. He said that he was only “17 years of age and was going to school, at six in the morning.” Omer called him: “The most peaceful guy I have ever seen. He was not going to fight. He was not carrying a gun. What was worse, he was killed by seven bullets.” When a 32-year-old neighbor, Wedad Al Ajrami, tried to evacuate his brother’s punctured, badly bleeding, body to the hospital, she was killed, too, by the deadly, cowardly Israeli sniper, who was shooting from high up in a watchtower. Her husband was also shot twice, when he arrived on the scene and attempted to help out. Mercifully, he survived the horrific ordeal. Omer said, “I feel guilty for this sometimes.” He added, they were all gunned down “because of my brother.”’
http://newswire.mediamonitors.net/layout/set/print/content/view/full/38226
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Omer
Looking at Reuben’s linkedin his qualifications to be the grandly titled “Head of Statistics” at the BBC is a BA Hons in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. The nearest he’s got to a qualification in statistics is A-level Maths.
He writes
“A position has been created for me for by the BBC Innovation Fund to be a champion of statistical robustness across BBC News.”
Right… a position created for him. Instead of getting an actual statistician…
He was being challenged on Twitter, about his BBC online article, by Ben Goldacre and pretty much suggested that they take the discussion away from Twitter. Maybe wants to draw a veil over it?
Link, Ba’al?
I’m tempted, but no. He doesn’t seem to get a lot of comments, and that’s the way it should be, I think.
🙂
Its here
https://twitter.com/bengoldacre/status/498935574842318848
They’ve rewritten the article
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-28688179
This bit is now attributed to IDF Spokesman Capt Eytan Buchman whereas it wasn’t attributed to anyone in the original
“It’s important to bear in mind that in Operation Cast Lead [the last Israeli ground offensive in December 2008-January 2009], Hamas and Gaza-based organisations claimed that only 50 combatants were killed, admitting years later the number was between 600-700, a figure nearly identical to the figure claimed by the IDF.”
Part of Reuben’s article was verbatim from an IDF spokesman without quotes or attribution!!!
That was my recollection anyway. Which may be wrong. The original article isn’t available now of course.
My recollection was wrong on that point. I’ve found some quotes from the original but not the full article.
In the original Reuben said.
“Nonetheless, if the Israeli attacks have been “indiscriminate”, as the UN Human Rights Council says, it is hard to work out why they have killed so many more civilian men than women”.
That’s the quote that’s been requoted on websites the world over. Its now turned into:
“Nonetheless, the proportion of civilian men over 18 killed seems high and it is not immediately obvious why.”
Quite a change! And this time he’s managed to get some explanations as to why that might be the case – whereas my recollection is that before he couldn’t think of a single thing.
Its a different tone. Now he says:
“The point is that it is hard to say with certainty at this stage how many of the dead in Gaza are civilians and how many were fighters.”
Nice to clarify that. Or rather modify it. The point of the previous version was overtly to discredit the idea that attacks were “indiscriminate”.
It still doesn’t tell us about the context of civilian casualties in other wars for comparison.
Says “Hamas said only 50 fighters had been killed” which is innaccuarate as it was 48 of their own fighters, amongst 120 in total according to another BBC page.
Still doesn’t challenge anything the IDF spokesman said.
Still doesn’t offer a place for comments at the bottom.
Or tell us about the Zionist blogger origins of this story.
Or about the author’s stint at the Jerusalem Post.
Or that he doesn’t appear to have any statistics qualifications. (for context)
Or tell us about the first version he wrote
Unlike other individuals who write for various rags, Reuben needs to realise that he’s now a “civil servant” working for a nationalised organisation which is directly funded from “taxes”. The standard of output from him needs to higher than he maybe got away with previously. His manager has got to deal with this (unless of course the article entirely fits with BBC policy).
Suggestion for BDS -app.
http://rt.com/news/178704-app-buycott-israel-palestine/
Here is a litany of the names of White House spokespersons who refused to condemn Israel’s acts of war – Harf, Psaki and Kerry. Josh Earnest did speak out.
U.S. Avoided Threat to Act on Israel’s Civilian Targeting
by Gareth Porter / August 11th, 2014
Washington, August 12, 2014 (IPS) — United Nations officials and human rights organisations have characterised Israeli attacks on civilian targets during the IDF war on Gaza as violations of the laws of war.
During the war, Israeli bombardment leveled whole urban neighbourhoods, leaving more than 10,000 houses destroyed and 30,000 damaged and killing 1,300 civilians, according to U.N. data. Israeli forces also struck six schools providing shelter to refugees under U.N. protection, killing at least 47 refugees and wounding more than 340.
The administration’s public stance in daily briefings in the early days of the war suggested little or no concern about Israeli violations of the laws of war.
But the Barack Obama administration’s public posture during the war signaled to Israel that it would not be held accountable for such violations.
/..
http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/08/u-s-avoided-threat-to-act-on-israels-civilian-targeting/
karel, 11 Aug, 2:26 pm: you stated you’d been advised that editing Wikipedia is a waste of time; you referred to it as “Jewpedia” in an earlier comment.
Do you think Jews should be banned from editing Wikipedia?
YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNXBnCfq0_I (Preview)
Published on 11 Aug 2014
19 year old school student activist Barnaby Raine, organiser of the Jewish Bloc against Zionism, speaking at the Gaza demo outside the BBC on Saturday 9 August 2014:
Barnaby: I am proud to stand here today as a Jewish boy from North London in solidarity with the people of Gaza. Make no mistake: the lesson of the Holocaust is not that we should close our eyes to other people’s suffering in the name of self-protection. The lesson of the Holocaust is not that some lives are worth more than others or that only some deaths are worth grieving [over]. The lesson of the Holocaust is that crimes are perpetrated when people forget that we are all human beings. So, I’m not here today in spite of Jewish history; I’m here today because of Jewish history. I’m here today because my great-grandparents knew what it meant to be excluded and to be the victims of racism. They knew what it meant to be booted out of their homes and turned into refugees. So I can never turn a blind eye to dispossession and discrimination, to occupation and marginalisation wherever it takes place and whoever its victims are and whoever its perpetrators are.
But it’s not just as a Jewish person I am here but as a human being. You know, here we stand today outside the BBC. The BBC talks about a “conflict” in Gaza. A “conflict”! That is grotesque. It is not a conflict when the world’s fourth largest military power blockades, besieges and imprisons a stateless people who have no army of their own. Is that a conflict? [Crowd shouts: NO!] Is it a conflict when Israel bombs families in their homes and sick patients in their hospital beds? Is that a conflict? [Crowd: NO!] When people flee for their lives to United Nations shelters and then Israel attacks the United Nations shelters, is that a conflict? [Crowd: NO!] No, no, no, BBC, this is not a conflict. This is a massacre!
I am 19 years old. What future awaits the 19 year-olds of Gaza? Their diets are stunted because the Israeli siege blocks their access to food. There are hardly any jobs, because Israel has cut Gaza off from the rest of the world. And just a few days ago, Israel bombed a university. Inaction in the face of this scale of injustice is criminal. So we’ve got to send a message to our own government today: Stop arming Israel! And while we’re at it, let’s send a message to governments all over the world: If you call yourselves an international community, give that phrase some meaning! Let’s put sanctions on Israel until this barbarism ends!
So, I just want to leave you with one important point: In the early 20th century people all over the world from all backgrounds who stood with the oppressed might have declared “I too am a Jew!”. When apartheid besmirched the earth, people might have said: “I too am a Black South African!”. Well, today, people from all backgrounds, from all walks of life, all over the world, come together and say in our thousands and in our millions: “We are all Palestinians!”.
Responding to the Israeli aggression and the complicity of world governments
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) met in Istanbul in the shadow of the latest Israeli aggression on Gaza. We have watched atrocities being committed against an already besieged population. In the two day meeting (August 10th and 11th), the FFC concluded that it is the responsibility of civil society worldwide to sail to Gaza and challenge the Israeli blockade, the source of most problems facing the Palestinian population of Gaza.
We plan to sail to Gaza during 2014, the UN International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People: http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/solidarity.htm?OpenForm
This initiative, following in the footsteps of the 2010 and 2011 flotillas as well as other attempts to challenge the blockade of Gaza (between 2008 and 2014), is expected to include a wider and more diverse international participation. This new flotilla is a reflection of the growing worldwide solidarity with the Palestinian people; from the US to Malaysia, from Scandinavia to South Africa.
“Calls to end the blockade of Gaza need to move from words to actions,” said Ann Ighe, chairperson of Ship to Gaza and member of the FFC. We invite all interested citizens worldwide to participate in this initiative in any way you can.”
These boats are also expected to carry Palestinian commercial products purchased by buyers worldwide to complete the work of Gaza’s Ark, the cargo boat built by the Palestinians and the FFC in Gaza and was bombed by Israel on July 11th.
“We urge all governments to defend Human Rights and the right of the Palestinian people to freedom of movement, to facilitate the sailing of our ships to Gaza. It is their responsibility,” added Ehab Lotayef of the coalition.
In addition to sailing to Gaza, the FFC will organize demonstrations at sea and in ports worldwide over the next months. Along with other projects, the initiative will support the right of Palestinians to operate international marine lines in and out of the port of Gaza.
We support the Palestinian demand to open the port of Gaza to international marine traffic. The FFC also will work on twinning ports in the Mediterranean and beyond, with Gaza City, as a sign of solidarity and support.
Finally, we assert that all that we do is peaceful, civil society driven non-governmental actions.
Freedom Flotilla Coalition members:
European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza
Freedom Flotilla Italia
Gaza’s Ark
IHH
International Committee for Breaking the Siege on Gaza (ICBSG)
Rumbo a Gaza
Ship to Gaza Greece
Ship to Gaza Norway
Ship to Gaza Sweden
also participating in the project:
Palestine Solidarity Alliance – South Africa
Free Gaza
Haluan Palestin – Malaysia
Life Line to Gaza – Jordan
Miles of Smiles
Sahabat Al-Aqsha
Greta Berlin, Co-Founder, the Free Gaza movement
Editor, Freedom Sailors
I never knew this is UN International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People and we’re more than half way through, they’ve kept that quiet.
But solidarity can never lessen, only grow until all the people of Palestine can live freely, thrive and take their place alongside us in the united nations and in the extended family of humanity. Inspiring and informed words from student Barnaby, great stuff.
Thanks, Mary. Maturity beyond his years… also delivered very passionately.
@Fred: the hi-viz jackets may be a condition of allowing the demonstration to take place. Would you prefer hi-viz stewards or hi-viz police (as was the case with the January 2010 demonstration outside the BBC).
Zionism is the antithesis of Judaism. Zionists are amoral pragmatists using a convenient lie to perpetrate traditional European racist imperialsm, rather like you can find military regalia in buildings purporting to be C of E churches.
Craig, why do you assume she’s Jewish?
Keith Crosby
Because she says she is in the article I am replying to?