Dismantling a liar: The bankruptcy of the Left
To be honest with you, I try to ignore people on Twitter who don't have a lot of followers. Normally, it's not worth the time or the exposure I give them to respond to them. But this one has gone too far.
I'd like to introduce you to one @JamesMArcher. Here's his bio - a panoply of causes of the extreme Left, with the Democratic party being too far to the right for him.
A short while ago, Mr. Archer tweeted this at me:
He seems to use this picture fairly regularly - it's not the only time it's in his timeline.
There's just one small problem. Like so many other symbols of the Left,
the picture is a fake.
The Israeli boy in the yarmulke is Zvi Shapiro, the son of two
secular American-Israelis. The Palestinian boy is Zemer Aloni, an
Israeli Jew. The only real aspect of the photo is that the boys were
indeed friends and that the picture was taken in their Jerusalem
neighborhood of Abu Tor,
which straddles the 1949 armistice line and contains both a Jewish and
an Arab section. The boys grew up on the Jewish side of the
neighborhood, and while they both recall interactions with Palestinians,
neither counted close friends on the other side of the line.
The picture was taken by Ricki Rosen,
an American photojournalist who has been covering the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict for 26 years. Rosen snapped the photo on
assignment for Maclean’s, the national news magazine of Canada, for a
cover story about the Oslo Peace Accords. Rosen said that the magazine’s
art director was so specific in what he wanted that he even drew her a
picture — one boy in a yarmulke, the other in a keffiyeh shot from the
back walking down a long road, which was supposed to symbolize the road
to peace. He didn’t care whether the boys were actually Israelis or
Palestinians, nor did it occur to him that the Palestinian’s keffiyeh
would be styled in a way more typical for elderly Palestinian men than
for young boys.
“It was a symbolic illustration,” said Rosen. “It was
never supposed to be a documentary photo.” She also took other
real-life photos for the same article.
Oops.
Read it all.
Labels: fake Jews, fake photos, leftists, liberalism
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we set out to deceive
Gabriel Matthew Schivone really wanted to be a Jewish anti-Semite. So he tried to learn from the best of the best. He tried to pass himself off as a
Chicano Jewish-American. He
interviewed Noam Chomsky, one of the most prominent Jewish anti-Semites of our time. And then he tried to
pass himself off as a Jew on the flotilla of fools, thinking that his Jewishness would make Israel look worse.
But alas, it was all for naught. Schivone didn't even have a ten-minute conversion. He was born a
goy (non-Jew) and remains a
goy. He's finally been outed by someone else who apparently hates Israel nearly as much as he does, but at least does so honestly. Gabriel Matthew Schivone is just
a plain old anti-Semite.
On Aug. 1, Valerie Saturen of Tacoma, Wash., who personally knew Schivone, penned a letter-to-the-editor in Ha'aretz, writing: In his editorial about joining the flotilla to Gaza, Gabriel Schivone represented himself as a Jewish college student. I feel I must point out that this not his true identity, but one he has created in order to generate insider credibility, shield himself from accusations of anti-Semitism, and resonate with a target audience.
I met Gabriel in 2004 while attending the University of Arizona, where we became very close friends. I am a strong supporter of Palestinian human rights and agree with Gabriel that the blockade of Gaza has caused great humanitarian suffering. However, readers have a right to know the facts and reach their own informed conclusions.
Gabriel is not Jewish, whether in terms of ethnic ancestry, religious belief, or cultural identity. He has never identified as a Jew until it became useful in advancing his political agenda. During the High Holiday season of 2007, Gabriel told me that he discussed Israel with campus representatives of Chabad, identifying himself as a Jew. When asked why he did this, he explained that he has a distant Jewish relative and that "you use what you have."
In all the time I've known him, he has never expressed feeling morally conflicted about Israel, nor has he succumbed to pressure to be "silent." The editorial's narrative is not Gabriel's story, but one crafted to lend moral and emotional weight to his argument while appealing to the young, college-aged Jews whose participation is so vital to the pro-Palestinian movement.
The aim of this letter is not to discredit that movement or the flotilla, or to take a political side, but to alert readers to specific distortions in this editorial. It is a shame that the war of narratives so readily eclipses and manipulates the truth.
Ha'aretz uncharacteristically gives Schivone the opportunity to reply to Saturen's letter. Aside from attacking Saturen, he confirms having known her, and does not deny that his sole connection to Judaism is one distant relative.
And you wondered why while we Jews accept converts, we don't recruit them.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: fake Jews, flotilla of fools, Gabriel Matthew Schivone
