Spanning a period from 2006 until December 2014, they include
detailed briefings and internal analyses written by operatives of South
Africa's State Security Agency (SSA). They also reveal the South
Africans' secret correspondence with the US intelligence agency, the
CIA, Britain's MI6, Israel's Mossad, Russia's FSB and Iran's operatives,
as well as dozens of other services from Asia to the Middle East and
Africa.
The files unveil details of how, as the post-apartheid South African
state grappled with the challenges of forging new security services, the
country became vulnerable to foreign espionage and inundated with
warnings related to the US "War on Terror".
Scared by BDS'ers, al-Guardian rejects Dershowitz ad on Hamas tactics
Al-Guardian has rejected an ad on Hamas tactics by Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz because, among other things, it called into question the status of Gaza as 'the most densely populated area on earth' (Hat Tip: Haaretz).
“The British media is divided,” Dershowitz said in an interview. “But The Guardian,
which holds itself out to be a purveyor of diverse truth, clearly
reflects a bias against Israel on its editorial pages, as well as in its
presentation of the news. Now that bias has spread to the advertising
pages.”
The advertisement was based on an older editorial written by
Dershowitz for the Gatestone Institute and was sponsored by the Wechsler
Family Foundation, which had offered The Guardian
approximately $21,000 to run the piece, a New York City-based agency
specializing in overseas advertisement placements confirmed.
Dershowitz told JNS.org that newspapers “have a right to decide which ads to accept and reject,” but questioned The Guardian’s decision not to run his advertorial.
“My column was factually sound and not a personal attack on anybody.
It simply laid out the geographic facts of the Gaza Strip and its
implications,” he said.
“Dershowitz was presenting a new point of view in this article,” Harry Wechsler of the Wechsler Family Foundation told JNS.org in an email.
“Hamas was not forced into shooting their rockets from pads located
in urban areas, thereby leading to unavoidable civilian deaths,” wrote
Wechsler. “They were not shooting from some of the densest population
centers anywhere because they had no other choice. No—the choice was
there. Though not large, Gaza had ample space that was not densely
populated—farm land, empty spaces where rockets could have been stored
and shot from. Furthermore, the U.N. could easily have developed
temporary quarters in these same spaces for the sheltering of civilian
refugees, far away from the sites of battle.”
The editorial board of The Guardian, which screens political
or issues-based advertisements before they are published in the
newspaper, “turned us down and refused to take our ad, even after
working with their people for several days,” according to Wechsler.
In response to a comment request by JNS.org regarding The Guardian’s decision not to publish the Dershowitz advertisement, a spokesperson for the newspaper said, “The Guardian reserves the right to reject any advertisement.”
You might recall that last week, al-Guardian ran an ad by Eli Wiesel which had been rejected by the Times of London. What you may not know is that as a result of running that ad, al-Guardian received 140 complaints and felt obligated to issue a clarification related to that ad.
A spokesperson for Guardian News & Media, which owns the
Guardian, said: "The decision to run any display advertisement in the
Guardian is made on a case-by-case basis and there was a full discussion
about accepting the advert in question.
"However, the acceptance of advertising
from any organisation does not equate to support or endorsement for the
views expressed in that advert. The Guardian is fully committed to
reporting from the Middle East and our coverage will continue to be
independent and robust."
Who says writing letters to the editor doesn't make a difference? It scared the Guardian out of making the same 'mistake' with Dershowitz that it made with Wiesel.
The ad was rejected by The Times, which claimed by way of
explanation "that the opinion being expressed is too strong and too
forcefully made and will cause concern amongst a significant number of Times readers'."
The advert has already run in a number of major US publications, including The Times' sister publication, the Wall Street Journal, as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post.
But the decision to run it in the Guardian - which is
well-known for its hostile editorial line towards Israel - will come as
particularly surprising, and raises further questions about The Times' decision not to run it.
Condemning the decision by The Times to reject the ad, Rabbi Boteach accused the paper of "catering to bigotry."
The Guardian and the Independent are the last two British papers I would have expected to run that ad.
For those who don't recognize it, the picture is Dresden February 1, 1945.
Here's a great piece from author Naomi Ragen, who lives here in Jerusalem.
All this criticism comes mainly from the European press: The
Guardian, the BBC, papers in Italy, Norway, France, and don’t forget
America: The New York Times, CNN. And I’m thinking: Gee, the British
should understand. After all, they lived through the blitz, Nazis
raining bombs indiscriminately down on them, the way Hamas is raining
bombs down on us. And when the brave pilots of the RAF aimed their bombs
at Dresden and killed 300,000 men, women and children, they didn’t
throw down leaflets telling people to politely evacuate; didn’t send
their soldiers to knock on doors to see if they’d followed the leaflets
instructions ( as CNN complained Israel failed to do at an UNRWA school,
which was probably hit by a Hamas bomb anyway.)
And I think of the rest of Europe, who rounded up our grandparents
and great-grandparents, and relatives —men, women and children—and sent
them off to be gassed, no questions asked. And I think: They are now the
moral arbiters of the free world? They are telling the descendants of
the people they murdered how to behave when other anti-Semites want to
kill them?
As for Americans, represented by the New York Times, that bastion of
high-minded hypocrisy and mediocre journalism parading as the “newspaper
of record,” one has only to read the article by Professor Auerbach in
the New York Observer (“Two Weeks of Shallow, Facile Moral Equivalency From the New York Times“)
to see how Jodi Rudoren and other Times apparatchiks have learned to
close their minds and love Hamas. After all, there are CHILDREN DYING.
It doesn’t matter that the Palestinians have educated an entire
generation to be little Nazi-wannabes, who worship death and hate Jews,
murdering their souls, and are now callously putting their bodies in
harm’s way to use for touching photo ops. We shouldn’t be shocked by
this omission by the Times. After all, The New York Times was one of the
last news outlets to bring to the attention of the reading public the
Nazi atrocities in Europe. Read the Times during the nightmare years,
and see if you can’t find a pattern here.
And so, as an Israeli, brought up with Jewish values, and an
American, taught to love freedom, justice, democracy and fair play, I
have to tell all of you – Europeans, Americans, and last of all Muslim
terrorist sympathizers and barbarians, that what you are saying no
longer moves anyone of good moral judgment and intelligence. The current
crisis in Gaza is so morally clear-cut, so absolutely a case of
self-defense, that I must say to you, as someone finally said to Senator
McCarthy: “Sir, have you no shame?”
I prefer that you – writers of these lies and libels - hate me and my
country, if it means that you can save your tears for other peoples’
dead. We aren’t greedy for sympathy. After all, we got so much after the
Holocaust, we prefer other people to have their share now. These days,
we prefer to live, rather than have people cry over us and the
injustices done to us.
Regarding the “Nakba”, here’s their remarkably skewed narrative:
Nowhere are numbers on
refugees more contentious than the 1948 Palestinian exodus. An attack by
a Zionist military group on an Arab village realised the Palestinians’
worst fears and combined with Zionist expulsion orders, military
advances, virtually non-existent Palestinian leadership and
unwillingness to live under Jewish control on their homeland. The result
was a mass exodus of around 80% of Arabs on the land that was to become
Israel. Later absentees property law in Israel would prevent the return
of those Arabs. Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” is commemorated on 15 May
each year. The UN set up a special agency, UNRWA, to deal with the
enormous numbers of refugees requiring assistance that now number around
5 million.
There are so many omissions, misleading
and flatly untrue claims about their tale of the flight of Palestinians,
but, suffice to say that, in reading the summary, you could be forgiven
for not knowing that there was an even an Arab-Israel War in the first
place – a war of aggression against the nascent Jewish state without
which there wouldn’t have been a refugee problem. However, this isn’t
at all the most egregious historical error in the piece.
The Guardian then proceeds, from the “Nakba”, to the next refugee crisis: Idi Amin’s Order (Uganda 1972).
What is it exactly that drives her opponents
so crazy? Many of her views are politically incorrect, but she is not
the only one to hold them. Perhaps it is her blunt style; she is
routinely accused of hyperbole, hysteria and anger.
Phillips thinks she is hated because she is an “apostate.”
“I was considered to be a signed-up member of the liberal left. I departed and they won’t forgive me,” she says.
Her journey makes the left feel insecure about its own positions, she adds.
“The left is obsessed by me because it knows
this right-wing label they’ve pinned on me isn’t true,” she says,
settled into a large armchair in her central London apartment. “Where I
stand is the true left. I remain where I was originally – standing for a
better society, standing up for the vulnerable, fighting oppression and
tyranny, standing up for truth against lies. The change was that I came
to believe that the people who I thought were on my side in that great
battle were on the other side, keeping the poor mired in disadvantage.”
She wrote “Guardian Angel” to show that she wasn’t the creature of caricature.
“It was important to set the record straight,”
she says. “I was being so misunderstood and misrepresented, it was
getting in the way of my ability to convey what I was trying to say.”
I've met Melanie several times here in Israel (and I once met her getting off a British Airways flight from London in Tel Aviv - she walks so fast it was difficult keeping up with her on the way to passport control :-). She's definitely not 'mad' as the British Left likes to call her. She's very sharp and quick, but her opinions are well thought-out.
By far my favorite British columnist. I'm shocked to read that she used to write for al-Guardian....
The New York Times' Jodi Rudoren and al-Guardian's Harriet Sherwood are staying at Gaza City's al-Deira hotel, which I have reported on before as the Grand Palace. This is from Rudoren's Facebook page.
At the Al-Deira Hotel in Gaza City, the lights
keep going on and off, and we've heard about a dozen F-16 strikes over
the last six hours, most not seemingly terribly close, though the
terrace restaurant is off limits, just in case. Hamas triumphantly
declared that it had downed an Israeli drone, which the IDF denied. A
blogger staying here excitedly reported that the ground invasion had
begun, whi
ch the IDF also debunked.
We only spent a few hours on the streets today, since I got here so
late. It was dark and empty, mostly, really "a ghost city," as our cab
driver put it. We visited a marketplace in the older part of town,
normally bustling on a Thursday afternoon but today most of the shops
were shuttered. There were a few vegetable sellers, and a kiosk doing
brisk business in battery-operated radios and lights, since the
electricity is sporadic. Some kids kicked a soccer ball in the street.
My favorite quote (tomorrow's kicker today!) was from the owner of a
sweet shop, Mohammed Elmzaner, who said, "Who will think of eating
sweets in these bitter circumstances?"
Funny how they never hesitate to roll out the sweets for a terror attack.
And this morning, during Egyptian Prime Minister Kandil's visit, Rudoren writes:
Despite
supposed ceasefire during PM visit, we just heard an F16 in #GazaCity.
Then again, there have been rockets to #Israel all morning.
Over at Israellycool, Brian from London explains that Rudoren and Sherwood are probably safer than any Israelis.
They are confident while the bombs may fall within meters of their pampered, luxury accomodation,
the IDF wouldn’t be stupid enough or incompetant enough to blow up the
entire world’s media (though don’t think a few of us in a darker moment
haven’t dreamed this).
...
No, its definitely safer than say, Ashdod or Ashkelon or even Rishon
LeZion or Tel Aviv now that all of those massive cities have taken
indiscriminate incoming fire.
So as we can see from their twitter and facebook musings, the media
all scurry off to Gaza and write “human interest” pieces on the
poor schlubs who Hamas are murdering. Yes, Hamas murder eveyone killed
in Gaza, didn’t you know that?
For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the International Atomic Energy Agency on Thursday offered findings validating his longstanding position that while harsh economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation may have hurt Iran, they have failed to slow Tehran’s nuclear program. If anything, the program is speeding up. But the agency’s report has also put Israel in a corner, documenting that Iran is close to crossing what Israel has long said is its red line: the capability to produce nuclear weapons in a location invulnerable to Israeli attack. With the report that the country has already installed more than 2,100 centrifuges inside a virtually impenetrable underground laboratory, and that it has ramped up production of nuclear fuel, officials and experts here say the conclusions may force Israel to strike Iran or concede it is not prepared to act on its own.
In other words PM Netanyahu, whom the New York Times has been portraying as eager to to war regardless of the cost, was right about Iran. Now the New York Times tells us, Netanyahu and Israel have a problem.
In contrast an editorial in the Washington Post, Iran at the brink, concludes:
Tehran’s refusal to negotiate seriously and its continuing buildup of nuclear capacity is nevertheless steadily increasing the danger that the Middle East will be engulfed by a new war — one that could interrupt oil supplies, damage the global economy and exacerbate the sectarian conflict already underway in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. An optimistic view would be that Iran is playing a familiar game of brinkmanship. If so, there may not be much more time to step back.
Both the New York Times news story and the Washington Post editorial present substantially the same information. The difference is in how they portray the actors. In the simplest terms, the Times portrays the problem of nuclear Iran as Israel's problem whereas the Post portrays it as a threat to the world.
Everything you have heard about the personal hostility between Obama and Netanyahu is true, and then some, according to the insiders from both the pro- and anti-strike camps. The prime minister thinks the president is unreliable and misguided on matters Israeli, Middle Eastern and Islamist. Holding to “a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” as Obama put it in his AIPAC speech in March, is not the same as vowing explicitly to use whatever tools are needed, up to and including force, in order to guarantee that Iran does not gain a nuclear weapons capability.
It strikes me that if President Obama now views Netanyahu as reckless regarding Iran, part of the problem is that he unnecessarily antagonized Netanyahu over the past three and a half years. If Israel needs to trust the United States regarding Iran, it seems that President Obama has recklessly frittered away that trust.
But Jamal Abdi, policy director of the National Iranian American Council, says U.S. policy toward Iran is doing more harm than good. "We've gone from a policy that was supposed to be smart sanctions or targeted sanctions instead to ones that are designed to cripple the entire Iranian economy, and this is a counterproductive approach," he said. "This hurts ordinary people. It obstructs rather than facilitates diplomacy. And at the end of the day, I think it's going to put us on a collision course for a military confrontation with Iran."
What the article doesn't say is that the NIAC is an apologist for the current regime in Iran. Needless to say, its first priority is not the welfare of "ordinary" Iranians. Yet the VOA presents this not disinterested party as an "expert."
2) Eye on the prize
Radical professor Judith Butler has been awarded the Theodor Adorno prize from the city of Frankfurt, Germany. Given her support for Hamas and Hezbollah and her hatred of the state of Israel, giving her any award should be controversial.
Apparently in an effort to defend her, Columbia University Press has excerpted a selection from her recent book.
Let us reflect first on what it means to derive a set of principles from a cultural tradition and then move to the larger political issues at hand. As I noted, to say that principles are “derived” from Jewish resources raises the question of whether these principles remain Jewish once they are developed within a contemporary situation, assuming new historical forms? Or are they principles that can and must be, always have been, derived from various cultural and historical resources, thus “belonging” exclusively to none of them? In fact, does the generalizability of theprinciples in question depend fundamentally on their finally not belonging to any one cultural location or tradition from which they may have emerged? Does this nonbelonging, this exile, help to constitute the generalizability and transposability of the principles of justice and equality? If such principles are derived from Jewish sources, others might conclude that they are Jewish values originally, fundamentally, even finally. It follows from that argument that one must look to that religious, secular, or historical set of traditions to understand those values, at which point Jewishness becomes a privileged cultural resource, and the Jewish framework remains the only or at least the privileged one by which to think the problem of cohabitation and even binationalism. We thus fail to depart from the exclusive cultural framework of Jewishness. And this has especially contradictory and unacceptable conclusions of we are trying to think about equality and justice in Israel/Palestine. Even as such a conclusion is unacceptable, there seems to be no easy way around this paradox. One point, however, already seems clear: equality, justice, cohabitation, and the critique of state violence can only remain Jewish values if they are not exclusively Jewish values. This means that the articulation of such values must negate the primacy and exclusivity of the Jewish framework, must undergo its own dispersion. Indeed, as I hope to show, that dispersion is a condition of possibility for thinking justice, a condition we would do well to remember during these times. One might say, “ah, dispersion—a Jewish value! Derived from messianic scattering and other theological figures for diaspora! You attempt to depart from Jewishness, but you cannot!” If, however, the question of the ethical relation to the non-Jew has become definitive of what is Jewish, then we cannot capture or consolidate what is Jewish in this relation. Relationality displaces ontology, and it is a good thing, too. The point is not to stabilize the ontology of the Jew or of Jewishness, but rather to understand the ethical and political implications of a relation to alterity that is irreversible and defining and without which we cannot make sense of such fundamental terms as equality or justice. Such a relation, which is surely not singular, will be the obligatory passage beyond identity and nation as defining frameworks. It establishes the relation to alterity as constitutive of identity, which is to say that the relation to alterity interrupts identity, and this interruption is the condition of ethical relationality. Is this a Jewish notion? Yes and no.
This is so much gibberish. Using terms such "generalizability," "transposability," "alterity" and "relationality," (all four are flagged by my spell checker) sound impressive but do they mean anything? Or are these just concepts that Butler conceived for the sole purpose of making her argument? There is no clarity in her argument, just obfuscation. If I understand the third paragraph quoted here, she's saying that since Israel doesn't adhere to Jewish values (according to her judgment) and since Jews have survived in exile, Israel doesn't deserve to exist as a Jewish state. Given her explicit support for Hamas and Hezbollah (which she denies though the audio is quite clear) which are committed to destroying Israel and have acted on those commitments, how does she find Israel's resorting to "state violence" unacceptable? Terrorists targeting civilians is implicitly acceptable to her, but Israel fighting to protect its citizens is objectionable. It's not only hypocritical, it's illogical. She bases her appeal on Jewish culture, but a culture that abjures self-defense won't last very long.
3) A measured response
Irish pro-Israel activist Tom Carew wrote a letter to the Guardian:
I am a life-long reader and I measured the extent of today's Guardian *coverage* on the Rachel Corrie case - and it is really astounding. Well over 20,000 Syrians have been slaughtered by the Assad regime in recent months, and 400 bodies were found yesterday in Darraya, but that horrendous massacre gets- [a] no Cartoon, [b] no Editorial and [c] no Comment piece,plus only [d] 28.44 Sq Ins of a News story,along with a headline of *Claims of 400 dead* And also placed along the lower inside corner column of Page 19, where it could readily be overlooked. In contrast the Corrie story gets - [a] a large and vicious Cartoon, on Page 31, covering 61.88 Sq Ins, with an Israeli Bulldozer with the Star of David ploughing into the blindfolded figure of Justice, [b] an Editorial, covering 39.84 sq Ins, on Page 32, [c] a Comment piece below that, on Page 32, covering 43.45 Sq Ins, along with [d] a News story, taking over the whole top half of Page 18, and covering 86.26 Sq Ins
Their overall coverage for Corrie totals 231.43 Sq Ins, which is 8.14 times that given to Syria
Josh Trevino writes for al-Guardian... for ten days
One of the sharper pundits I follow on Twitter is Texan Josh Trevino. Trevino, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, was recently hired by al-Guardian to write on their Comment is Free page. He lasted ten days. The moonbats went wild.
The main complaint of all Treviño’s critics is the now-famous flotilla-related tweet by Treviño in June 2011 – 106 characters which, according to Abunimah and his anti-Zionist friends, represent “incitement to murder:”
Dear IDF: If you end up shooting any Americans on the new Gaza flotilla -- well, most Americans are cool with that. Including me.
The hypocrisy of this group of hardcore Israel-haters and apologists for Islamist extremists — who comically wear the mantle of “anti-racists” — is staggering.
None of these sensitive souls was the least bit bothered by “Comment is Free” publishing, for instance, Azzam Tamimi – who supports suicide bombing against Israelis. Indeed, in 2011, Guardian editors published a letter by a UK professor explicitly endorsing, on ethical grounds, deadly terrorist attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians — a decision which was later defended by Guardian readers’ editor Chris Elliott.
And none of those protesting Treviño’s appointment have seen fit, of course, to object to the fact that the Guardian has repeatedly published articles by Hamas leaders
Its publication of an op-ed by Hamas Gaza ruler Ismail Haniyeh prompts Robin Shepherd to ask whether al-Guardian is the most bigoted newspaper in Britain.
On Friday, the Guardian ran a piece in its opinion section by none other than Ismail Haniyeh, leader of Hamas in Gaza and now, it appears, a perfectly acceptable room-mate for the leading voice in Britain’s Liberal-Left.
Let’s not even get into the question of Hamas‘s attitude to gays and women – they support hanging the former and suppressing the latter. (By the way, it’s the gay pride festival today in Tel Aviv, and of course Gaza – no, sorry that last bit was a joke, a sick one, but not as sick as the Guardian editors who commissioned Hamas to write a piece for them.)
The “substance“ of Haniyeh’s piece is the predictable dishonest garbage – it really doesn‘t merit a more respectful description. It’s the standard stuff: “Although under siege in the Gaza Strip, we have endured war and aggression, and withstood attempts to wipe us out without fading away“.
And: “ We do not want more blood. We want help in achieving justice for our people who lost their land and freedom decades ago, and in providing security for a region that has long endured oppression and suffering.“
All lies, of course. Israel has never attempted to wipe out the Palestinians. Hamas does want more blood – it glories in the slaughter of civilians; it has fired thousands upon thousands of rockets at Israel in recent years. Hamas does not want justice; it wants an extreme Islamist theocracy. Neither does Hamas want a two-state solution. It is fully and openly committed to the eradication of the State of Israel.
What would happen to the Jews under such a scenario is almost too awful to contemplate. But it’s not impossible. I will conclude this piece with direct quotations from the Hamas Charter, which is consistently re-affirmed by Hamas officials, day in day out.
If you think I have been too strong against the Guardian, or against Hamas, you are about to understand that if anything I have erred too much on the side of moderation. I urge you to read and share this with every single person you know. The BBC will never publish this sort of thing.
And if you think I’m cherry picking, read the whole thing for yourself.
Al-Guardian has removed its mask and disclosed itself to be completely anti-Semitic. This was published in Wednesday's editions (Hat Tip: Red Tulips).
All this, I fear, is simply an indication of how inured the world has become to the obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives. Netanyahu argues that he acted because he values Shalit's life so greatly.
Yet who is surprised really, to learn that Netanyahu sees one Israeli's freedom as a fair exchange for the freedom of so many Palestinians? Likewise, Hamas wished to use their human bargaining chip to gain release for as many Palestinians as they could. They don't have much to bargain with.
At the same time, however, there is something abject in their eagerness to accept a transfer that tacitly acknowledges what so many Zionists believe – that the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbours.
No one here was happy with the exchange ratio of the terrorists for Gilad deal. If it had been one-to-one, I doubt anyone who would have objected too strenuously to the identity of the one that we released.
But look at that miserable excuse for a human being with the bloody hands in the photo. He was one of the terrorists released this past week. Does anyone really believe that his life is worth as much as the life of an IDF soldier? I don't. By his actions he has deprived himself of the right to be counted among human beings. 1,000 of him are not worth the life of one IDF soldier.
As to the Guardian, as usual, they are beneath contempt.
Writing at al-Guardian, the head of the 'investigative team' that leaked the 'Palestinian' negotiation papers to the world media claims vindication.
Having cleared our name of theft, Ofcom formally laid to rest Erekat's principal claim, stating: "Material facts in relation to the negotiation meetings looked at in the programme were not presented or omitted in a way that resulted in unfairness to Dr Erekat". The statement added: "To the extent there was an infringement of privacy in relation to obtaining and using documents, the infringement was warranted, given the significant public interest, both in the Middle East and globally."
The Middle East desperately needs more truth-telling. To that end, the Ofcom ruling on the Palestine papers could be perhaps the UK's best contribution to the region in some time.
But the truth that was told was a half truth. Yes, the 'Palestinians' and their supporters were told that their negotiators had agreed to compromise with Israel on their demands. But instead of the 'Palestinian' leadership being pressured to come forward and finally tell their people that no deal can be reached without compromises on both sides, the 'leadership's denials were all the people heard about the documents. The 'leadership' then withdrew into its most intransigent position yet.
So yes, the documents were authentic and revealing them could have been justified, but only by media that would have forced the 'Palestinians' to acknowledge the necessity for compromise in order for a 'two-state solution' to be reached. That did not happen and it's not likely to happen in your lifetime or mine.
Clayton Swisher and his team at the Guardian have nothing of which they should be proud in this story.
Al-Guardian on the 'Palestinians' gift to the Arab world
I'd expect an editorial like this from a newspaper coming out of the Arab world. Oh wait, al-Guardian has become an Arab newspaper, hasn't it?
The leaders of Fatah and Hamas were obliged to reconcile by the forces stirring the Palestinian street. The negotiators of Fatah had stopped negotiating, and the fighters of Hamas had stopped fighting. Both had to respond to a simple idea: if one million Egyptians can fill Tahrir Square demanding Palestinian rights, why can’t Palestinians, who taught the Arab world how to mount insurrections, and mounted two intifadas of their own.
You got it. Al-Guardian believes that 'intifadas' are the 'Palestinians' gift to the Arab world.
UPDATE: Ms Sherwood left me a voicemail after seeingmy initial post, complaining that she did not scream. And you know what, listening to the conversation, it’s a fair point and I’m happy to change that. It felt like screaming to me as her voice was very loud on my phone. I’ve edited the post to take that out. I’ve also changed the post so that it’s made up of verbatim quotes, now that I have been able to transcribe the conversation.
How did I listen to it? Because she recorded it. She casually dropped into the voicemail the news that she had an MP3 of it.
At no point did she tell me that she was recording it. So she has broken the law. What a fantastic piece of Guardian hypocrisy, to (rightly) lead the charge against phone tapping but then to break the law so casually in recording our conversation.
Sherwood is simply out of control. Not only has she demonstrated that she sympathizes with the most ardent, vile Israel haters – destroying any semblance of claim to journalistic objectivity – but she may have violated UK law recording of the call with Pollard without his permission.
In her blog today Sherwood again defended Arrigoni against charges that he was anti-Semitic. How does she know this? Well, for one, she sought the sage advice of Jeff Halper, ICAHD director, and proponent of a one-state solution who employs the Nazi analogy in characterizing Israel’s behavior.
However, in her rigorous research into the question of Arrigoni’s feelings towards Jews, she apparently didn’t bother to look at his Facebook page.
OMG! The Jewish Chronicle's Stephen Pollard describes a screaming match with al-Guardian's Israel correspondent Harriet Sherwood.
Normally when a mainstream journalist calls it’s for help, for a quote or for something specific. Not this time. Ms Sherwood rang me to scream at me for publishing a piece by Geoffrey Alderman last week, which began:
Few events – not even the execution of Osama bin Laden – have caused me greater pleasure in recent weeks than news of the death of the Italian so-called “peace activist” Vittorio Arrigoni.
Pretty arresting, indeed, and not something I would have written. But then the editor of a paper doesn’t agree with everything in the paper. Ms Sherwood doesn’t seem to realise that.
‘How could you print that? Don’t you think that is a disgusting thing to say? You are happy to publish that?’
I pointed out that it’s not my view but it’s the view of the writer.
‘That is disgusting. He was a peace activist!’ she screamed back.
I pointed out that Mr Arrigoni was not a ‘peace activist’ but a member of ISM, a hardcore anti-Israel group. Ms Sherwood then started screaming at me in a frankly unintelligible manner, but which included more about him being a peace activist and asking me:
‘So you take pleasure in someone’s murder at the hands of Hamas?’
I pointed out again that it wasn’t my piece.
‘But you’re the editor! You must think it worth publishing’.
The fact that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange accused Jews of conducting a smear campaign against him is no big deal - that happens every Muntag and Danershtag (that would be Monday and Thursday for those of you who aren't members of the tribe that controls the world). The real news here is that he accuses al-Guardian - AL-GUARDIAN!?! - of being part of the conspiracy (Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan).
His remarks appeared in the magazine Private Eye, in an article by its editor, Ian Hislop, who outlined a rambling phone call that Mr. Assange made on Feb. 16 to complain about the coverage of WikiLeaks.
He was especially angry about a Private Eye report that Israel Shamir, an Assange associate in Russia, was a Holocaust denier. Mr. Assange complained that the article was part of a campaign by Jewish reporters in London to smear WikiLeaks.
A lawyer for Mr. Assange could not immediately be reached for comment, but in a statement later released on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed, Mr. Assange said Mr. Hislop had “distorted, invented or misremembered almost every significant claim and phrase.”
The Private Eye article quoted Mr. Assange as saying the conspiracy was led by The Guardian and included the newspaper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, and investigations editor, David Leigh, as well as John Kampfner, a prominent London journalist who recently reviewed two books about WikiLeaks for The Sunday Times of London.
When Mr. Hislop pointed out that Mr. Rusbridger was not Jewish, Mr. Assange countered that The Guardian’s editor was “sort of Jewish” because he and Mr. Leigh, who is Jewish, were brothers-in-law. Later, the article recounted, Mr. Assange asked Mr. Hislop to “forget the Jewish thing,” but he continued to insist there was a conspiracy against WikiLeaks based on the friendship among Mr. Rusbridger, Mr. Leigh and Mr. Kampfner.
In the Twitter feed, Mr. Assange said that “in particular” the Private Eye report that he believed in a “ ‘Jewish conspiracy’ is false, in spirit and in word. It is serious and upsetting. Rather than correct a smear, Mr. Hislop has tried to justify one smear with another.”
One of the great advantages of being Jewish -- and there are many (we invented both ethical monotheism and whitefish salad, after all) -- is that though there are only about 14 million of us on the whole planet (18 million before World War II, Mr. Galliano), people can't stop talking about us! It is very exciting to be a part of so many different fantasies.
Actually, sometimes I think I'd rather be left alone to control the world.
In an editorial London's Jewish Chronicle rips the daily al-Guardian for the shameless way in which it used the Palileaks documents to cross the line between journalism and political activism, thereby endangering lives (Hat Tip: CiF Watch).
What is very wrong is the way the paper chose to present its story: the distortions, the bias, the agenda, the spin and the breathtaking arrogance of its handing down instructions to the Palestinians of how they should behave. Make no mistake: the Guardian's presentation was, as David Landau puts it, "intended to poison the Palestinians against their leaders". And to poison the world against Israel. Take the quote from Saeb Erekat, in which he was reported to have made an offer to Israel of "the biggest Yerushalayim in Jewish history". This was used to attack the Israelis for their intransigence.
"Israel spurned Palestinian offer of biggest Yerushalayim in history'' ran the headline. Nowhere was the preceding sentence from Erekat to be seen: "Israelis want the two-state solution but they don't trust. They want it more than you think, sometimes more than Palestinians."
Erekat himself was acknowledging the Israelis' desire for a solution. But because such a view does not fit with the Guardian's agenda, his words were brazenly distorted. The paper's editorial then attacked the Palestinian negotiators for being "craven", arguing that their apparent willingness to make concessions was a betrayal of the Palestinian people.
So it was hardly surprising, although still shameful, that on Wednesday it gave its main comment space to Hamas to threaten "practical measures" to "regain the initiative".
Al-Guardian's behavior was no better than al-Jazeera's. But al-Jazeera has the excuse that it is an Arab network spouting the line of the Emir of Qatar. Oh wait - al-Guardian has a largely Muslim readership and is spouting the line of David Cameron. How could I forget?
There's more anti-Semitism from Britain. Melanie Phillips reports.
[T]he Guardian publishes this letter from the philosopher Ted Honderich, a professor at University College, London:
The revelations in detail (Report, 25 January) of the intransigent greed, the escape from decency, of Israeli governments in negotiation with our selected leaders of the Palestinians, serve one purpose among others. They provide a further part of what is now an overwhelming argument for a certain proposition. It is that the Palestinians have a moral right to their terrorism within historic Palestine against neo-Zionism. The latter, neither Zionism nor of course Jewishness, is the taking from the Palestinians of at least their autonomy in the last one-fifth of their historic homeland. Terrorism, as in this case, can as exactly be self-defence, a freedom struggle, martyrdom, the conclusion of an argument based on true humanity, etc (my emphasis).
Ted Honderich
London
The UK has a law criminalising incitement to terrorism. Now that Professor Honderich has endorsed the murder of Israelis, will the Director of Public Prosecutions apply the law to him?
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
