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Israel’s traitorous intellectuals

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

The phenomenon of Israel-hatred among Jewish Israeli academics and journalists has gone far beyond what can be explained by the distribution of Jewish Israelis across the political spectrum. Here in the US, it seems to me that Jewish attitudes toward Israel are more or less the same as those of the general population, with a few exceptions in either direction like the anti-Zionist Hasidic sects and the pro-Zionists of the Young Israel movement. For most other American Jews, their position depends on their overall political orientation, with the Left tending to be anti-Zionist and the right pro-Zionist. Only a small number hold extreme positions, and even fewer seem to be activists.

This makes me unhappy — I think there should be a natural tendency for Jews to be Zionists — but it is far from the pathological death wish found among Israeli academics and media elite:

Dr. Anat Matar of [the Tel Aviv University] Philosophy Department will be speaking on February 17 at London University’s School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) – a campus renowned for anti-Israel activity. [link added by editor]

Matar’s talk is to be titled “Supporting the Boycott on Israel: A View from Within.”

She is taking part in a series of events over the coming weeks organized by the Palestinian societies at five University of London campuses – University College London, SOAS, Imperial College, Kings College and Goldsmiths – as well as at the University of Westminster.

In an article in Haaretz in August, Matar accused her own university of being complicit with the “occupation” and questioned Israel’s stance on Palestinian academic freedom and basic education…

The series of events is titled, “Gaza: Our Guernica,” in reference to the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. The 1937 attack caused widespread destruction and civilian deaths, with 1,650 reportedly killed…

The series of events opened last Thursday with a candlelight vigil at University College London, recently in the headlines after it was discovered that failed Detroit airline bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a former president of the Islamic Society there.

Two other Israelis are taking part in the series. On Monday, journalist Daphna Baram spoke at SOAS in a talk titled, “Besieged in Self-Righteousness: Israeli public discourse after the last invasion of Gaza.”

Next Wednesday, Israeli academic Avi Shlaim, professor of International Relations at Oxford University, will speak about “Gaza: Past and Present” at Goldsmiths. — Jerusalem Post

This is in addition to Prof. Neve Gordon of Ben Gurion University who recently called for an international boycott of Israel like that of apartheid South Africa, to “save Israel from herself.” In addition, we can’t ignore Ha’aretz pundits Akiva Eldar, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, etc. And then there are the Jewish workers in Israeli NGOs such as the European-funded B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights — Israel whose activities directly support the campaign to delegitimize the state.

Everyone agrees that free speech has limits. During time of war — and Israel has been at war since its founding — the limits are even narrower. And these Jewish Israelis, especially since they speak to foreign audiences, clearly cross the line. Dr. David Hirsh, who is British and no right-winger, said this:

Israeli anti-Zionists boast that their country carries out the most important and horrific genocides in the world… The delusions of grandeur of Israeli anti-Zionists are as puerile as those of the most naive and proud nationalists. But it is dangerous to tell Europeans that the Israelis are a unique evil on the planet, because this lie finds a resonance in the collective memory and it feels plausible to some contemporary Europeans.

Regarding the obscene comparison of Israel’s action to the Nazi bombing of Guernica, Hirsh added some historical dimension:

In April 1937, on a market day, the Nazis attacked Guernica from the air, first with bombs and then with incendiaries. Fighter planes followed the bombers to machine-gun survivors. It was the first time anybody had launched an attack from the air to kill a civilian population. A third of the population was killed or seriously injured in an afternoon.

This, of course, is how the Gaza operation is portrayed by Hamas and its sympathizers, but the reality — an operation in which unprecedented care was taken to reduce civilian casualties and damage — was exactly the opposite. This reality has by now been almost entirely obliterated in  the public mind by a massive disinformation campaign, of which the notorious Goldstone report is emblematic.

Nothing is more effective in this campaign than its support by Israeli Jews. And since the object of it is to pave  the way to the destruction of the state, these Israelis are in effect guilty of treason.

Of course I don’t expect them to get their just deserts, but it is unacceptable that there are no negative consequences for them at all.

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A world of propaganda

Monday, January 18th, 2010

This past Saturday night (January 16), our local public radio station, KVPR, aired the most anti-Israel 55 minutes that I’ve heard anywhere. And that is saying something, because KVPR’s competition in the listener-supported radio world carries the Pacifica network, home of Amy Goodman.

The weekly program is called “A World of Possibilities”, and is produced by an outfit called Connexus Communications”, which is supported by grants from ‘progressive’ foundations, especially the Ford Foundation. It’s provided free for download and broadcast by anyone who wants it.

Saturday’s episode was called “Victims No More: Seeking the Middle Way in the Middle East,”  but there was no “middle way” or balance about it. The host, the snotty Mark Sommer — who often peppers his remarks on unrelated programs with anti-Israel comments (in a program about Darfur, he said conditions were “as bad as the Palestinian territories”) — interviewed five guests. Let’s look at what each one contributed to the program:

Amal Jadou, deputy chief of the PLO mission in Washington spoke for about fifteen minutes, delivering an unrelieved rant about the horrors of occupation, all the humiliations suffered by the Palestinians, whom she calls “the Jews of the Jews” in support of her offensive position that Jews have persecuted Palestinians just as they themselves were persecuted in Europe. Need I remind you that Jadou’s PLO practically invented terrorism as a political tool and has murdered thousands of Israelis, more than any other terrorist group?

Rami Khouri, a Palestinian/Jordanian journalist living in Beirut, also got about 15 minutes. Khouri, educated in the US, speaks excellent English and specializes in sounding moderate while delivering his zingers, such as talking about Israel’s “colonization program,” saying that “the Israelis have shifted very sharply to the right,”  that “both sides fight in vicious and barbaric ways,” that the “core of the [Mideast] conflict” is the Palestinian question, that the US has not historically been a “fair mediator” but has leaned toward Israel, that the US has “echo[ed] the views of the right wing in Israel,” and that Israel “overreacts[!]” to Iranian threats.

Haleh Esfandiari, a Iranian/American scholar who was imprisoned in Iran got about 7 minutes. She didn’t talk about Israel or the Palestinians at all, and — because of her opposition to the Iranian regime — seems to have been included as a form of balance.

Motti Cristal, an Israeli who served as a negotiator when Palestinian terrorists invaded and occupied (and damaged and desecrated) the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem for 40 days in 2002, had his seven minutes of fame. He explained his theory of “interest-based” negotiation and the power relationships between Israel and the Palestinians. Nothing earthshaking, and I wasn’t sure why he was included until he dropped his payload, in response to a question from host Sommer: “in order to reach a comprehensive settlement … you have to include representatives of Hamas in any negotiation table set between Israel and the Palestinians.” You could almost see Sommer licking his lips with glee.

Josh Weiss, an academic and ‘negotiation consultant’, had the final 5  minutes. Weiss’ contribution was the idea that the issues on both sides were primarily ’symbolic’. Palestinians didn’t want to actually exercise a right of return, he said, they just wanted to overcome their sense of “being wronged.” You could have fooled me. But Weiss really shone when host Sommer, apropos of nothing, asked him about ‘occupation’. “When I go [to Israel], you know, I feel it, I feel the connection to that, to being part of the occupier. In some way it’s like what white South Africans might have felt,” Weiss said.  Why thank you, Josh.You can go back to your Harvard office now.

“Most people on both sides are victims of an argument they had no part in creating,” says Sommer in conclusion, ignoring the fact that the Palestinian leadership, by refusing to accept any solution that implies the end of the conflict and the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, has played a very big part in keeping the argument alive. Indeed the whole thrust of the program is to repeat the mantra “both sides, both sides, both sides,” ignoring  small asymmetries like the fact that Israel’s goal is to live peacefully in the Middle East and the Palestinian goal is to prevent this!

KVPR, as I mentioned before is a listener-supported station. I do not believe for a moment that most of its listeners share the vicious point of view of Mark Sommer, or think that a program composed of blatant anti-Israel propaganda belongs on the schedule. If your local public radio station carries “A World of Possibilities,” please write to it (in Fresno, you can contact KVPR Program Director Jim Meyers — I intend to) and tell them that this is not the way you want your donations used.

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Organs, organs

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

The following article is so important that I chose to reprint it here (with permission), in order to give it the widest possible distribution. I’ve taken the liberty of changing some of the links in the original version for more complete or authoritative citations — editor

Selective Outrage
A subject for an objective academic study
By Maurice Ostroff

China’s Grisly Practices
With the launching last month of David Matas and David Kilgour’s book “Bloody Harvest,” every fair minded person must wonder why there has been no public outrage at its gruesome revelation of wide-scale harvesting of organs from live prisoners of conscience in China. The authors estimate that 41,500 organ transplants using Falun Gong prisoners have been done in the past five years. Their vital organs were seized involuntarily for sale at high prices, sometimes to foreigners, who normally face long waits for voluntary donations of such organs in their home countries.

This is not merely a journalist’s report that can be taken lightly. Matas is a lawyer who received the Order of Canada for his human rights work, and Kilgour is a  former crown prosecutor and former Member of Parliament.

The allegations are not new. According to the British Medical Journal of Nov. 24, 2001 prisoners in China can be executed for crimes such as black market activities, in addition to murder. Ambulances wait at the site of the executions and the fresh organs from healthy young persons are harvested, to be transplanted into recipients from abroad.

10,000 African Albinos in hiding
And why, one must ask, is there no outrage at reports by the International Federation for the Red Cross and Crescent societies, that 10,000 Albinos have gone into hiding in East Africa because of the common belief that body parts of albinos have magical powers?

India’s Black Market in Organs
And are we too indifferent to express outrage at India’s black market organ scandal as reported in Time magazine of Feb. 1, 2008, revealing an organ transplant ring that has been harvesting kidneys from poor Indian laborers, sometimes against their wishes? Doctors pay $1000 for the kidneys and sell them for $37,500. Another massive transplant ring in Punjab was uncovered in 2003. Police there believe at least 30 of the donors, died, despite promises that they would receive excellent post-operation medical care. Some donors were forcibly brought to clinics at gunpoint and forced to undergo operations that they didn’t want.

Even Britain
In 2000, pathologist Dick Van Velzen at the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool confessed to removing hundreds of thousands of organs from children’s bodies and storing them in hospitals all over the country. In addition to over 2,000 hearts, there were a large number of brain parts, eyes taken from over 15,000 stillborn foetuses and perhaps most disturbingly of all, a number of children’s heads and bodies.

Gaza’s Grisly Trophies
And there was not even a hint of outrage when Mideast Dispatch Archive reported on May 11, 2004 that body parts of six murdered Israelis were paraded around in Gaza as trophies by Palestinian mobs, including members of the PA security forces. Some even played football with body parts in the street. One disembodied head was placed on a table so television cameras could film it close up.

But there is no lack of outrage when Israel is in the dock
How does one explain the glaring difference between the mild media reactions to the above well documented reports and the immediate frenzied response to the unsubstantiated inference that the IDF harvested body parts of Palestinians, in the article by Donald Bostrom in the Swedish Aftonbladet? And how does one explain the instant fame acquired by the author whose name suddenly achieved over 400,000 Google results.

Bostrom’s own words confirm that his accusations are based on flimsy inferences rather than evidence. In an interview with the Jerusalem Post on August 20, he said critics “think I’m accusing the IDF of stealing organs. That’s not what I’m doing. I just recorded the Palestinian families saying that.” He went on to say “I don’t think there is a connection between the New York thing and what happened in the West Bank in the 90s.” Astonishingly, Mr. Bostrom nevertheless used the NY story in his leading paragraph together with a prominent photograph of one of the accused, a bearded Mr. Rosenbaum. More egregiously, Mr. Bostrom omitted to tell his readers that there were only five Jews among the 44 people arrested in the NY corruption and organ brokering scandal, including two New Jersey mayors, an assemblyman, and a city deputy mayor.

Evidently, when Israel is in the dock, an accusation doesn’t need to meet even the minimum requirements of journalistic integrity to be widely accepted.

The tenuous nature of Bostrom’s accusations are all too obvious when one considers that he refers to hearsay incidents in 1992, to imply that the IDF harvested organs in the Cast Lead operation in 2008-9

Exaggeration
In enjoying his new fame, Mr. Bostrom is evidently not averse to exaggeration. On receiving an award for excellence from the National Federation of Algerian Journalists he casually increased the number of Palestinian victims whose body parts had been harvested, to more than 1,000.

Prof. Hiss
Most of the articles that followed Bostrom’s see a conspiratorial link between the IDF in 2009 and the unrelated 1990 incident in which Professor Hiss, who was then head of Israel’s forensic institute, admitted that he had harvested organs from cadavers without permission of their families. This incident closely resembles the Dick Van Velzen case in Britain cited above.

Israel’s Health Ministry responded that the guidelines at that time were not clear, but that they have been severely tightened and strictly enforced since then. Although Professor Hiss still works as chief pathologist, he was dismissed as head of the forensic institute.

Israel’s attorney-general Rubenstein at the time decided not to indict him since “there is no suspicion of corruption or profiteering on the part of Prof. Hiss, and the only interest he had was the advancement of medical research.”

There was a great deal of dissatisfaction with Rubenstein’s decision. Former Health Minister Dahan said he was sure that there was room for a criminal investigation but that there was at least one encouraging result, namely, that the questionable practices in the Forensic Institute would not continue.

Disgusting as this episode was, it is dishonest journalism to draw a false link from it to the IDF’s behavior in Operation Cast Lead.

Journalistic standards
Even one of Israel’s severest critics, Matthew Cassel, assistant editor of The Electronic Intifada, cannot close his eyes to the obvious defects in the Bostrom article. Cassel regards Bostrom’s baseless organ theft accusations as a propaganda gift for Israel. He wrote,

I support uncovering human rights violations and war crimes wherever they occur, especially in Palestine, where I have worked for many years. I do believe Bostrom’s intentions were to do much the same but that his process was highly irresponsible. The problem is not that he is accusing the State of Israel of wrongdoing, but that he is making accusations of what would amount to extremely serious war crimes while providing absolutely no evidence to support his claims…

The editors at the Swedish daily Aftonbladet who published this piece, should’ve sent it back to the author and told him to investigate the issue further until he found evidence to corroborate his claims.

Conclusion
Like all types of incitement to hate, this example of reckless journalism, is harmful to peace efforts. Like real viruses and computer viruses they spread and mutate and acquire long lasting lives of their own. Predictably, Boström’s story has spawned cartoons of Jews stealing body parts and drinking Arab blood. Algeria’s al-Khabar newspaper has fantasized Jewish-directed gangs of Algerians and Moroccans capturing children for harvesting of their body parts.

Even Al Jazeera Magazine has been infected with the hysteria. In a December 3, article it refers to an international Israeli conspiracy to kidnap children and harvest their organs and repeats a Pravda story that Israel has brought some 25,000 Ukrainian children into the occupied entity over the past two years in order to harvest their organs.

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Ha’aretz writers are subversive

Friday, October 9th, 2009

The Ha’aretz newspaper is… something else.

Called the “NY Times of Israel”, Ha’aretz writers are often far more anti-Israel than those of the NY Times, which is no slouch in that department.

The previous editor, David Landau, famously told former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Israel was a ‘failed state’ which needed to be ‘raped’ into a settlement with the Arabs by the US (I originally thought that Landau must have been thinking of the Hebrew word “לאנוס” which means both ‘to force’ and ‘to rape’, but then I discovered that he had come to Israel from the UK at the age of 23). He also said that this would be a “wet dream” for him.

One writer, Gideon Levy, accused Israel of committing ‘war crimes’ on the first day of the Gaza war. And Amira Hass, here validating the libels of the Goldstone report, is as eloquent a spokesperson for the Palestinian cause as you will find anywhere.

Today it’s Akiva Eldar doing the devil’s work:

The U.S. administration is furious over Israeli incitement against President Barack Obama, Democratic congressmen close to Obama told an Israeli source who returned from a visit to Washington this week.

The congressmen even hinted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been personally involved.

The source, who met in Washington with administration officials and members of Congress, told Haaretz he was stunned by the level of anger there over attempts to portray Obama to the American public as an enemy of Israel because of his efforts to restart peace talks and freeze settlement construction.

This appears in the ‘diplomatic news’ section of Haaretz.com (English).

So an unnamed source is ’stunned’ by unnamed congressmen who are ‘furious’.  One of the most basic principles that an intelligent person applies when making  judgments about accusations like this is to ‘consider the source’, but Eldar — in a news article — doesn’t tell us. This is more ‘National Enquirer’ material than responsible journalism.

I haven’t heard Netanyahu say anything like “Obama is an enemy of Israel”, have you? And if Obama is “furious” at Netanyahu, I haven’t heard him say that either. So why present an unsourced slander against the PM in a news article?

There can be only one reason, which is to strike a political blow against him in Israel and to discredit him in the US.

This is not a bit surprising, when you consider Eldar’s degree of left-wing extremism. Recently, he argued that the concessions Olmert offered in negotiations with the Palestinians were insufficient to compensate them for years of ’struggle’! Struggle indeed.

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We don’t have to take this

Thursday, October 8th, 2009
2005 antisemitic cartoon in Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida

2005 antisemitic cartoon in Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida. Courtesy Palestinian Media Watch, www.palwatch.org

Jonathan Rosenblum wrote,

Shimon Peres once remarked, “I don’t care what the Palestinians say, only what’s written in the agreements.” But what the Palestinians say to one another, and particularly what they teach their children, is far more important than what’s written in peace agreements.

Incitement and demonization are not just one more treaty violation. They reflect the failure of the Palestinians since the beginning of Oslo to create a constituency for peace with Israel, to educate the Palestinian population to the idea of living side-by-side with a Jewish state or to make clear that peace will also require concessions on the Palestinians’ part.

That has never happened. Even worse, there has been no education to accept the existence of Israel in any borders or to renounce once and for all the dream of throwing all the Jews into the sea.

The Palestinian Authority [PA] has gone out of its way to make heroes of the most vicious terrorists – not exactly the way to encourage thoughts of reconciliation and peace. Mahmoud Abbas sent his warmest congratulations to child-murderer Samir Kuntar, upon his release from an Israeli jail, and commissioned festive celebrations in honor of Dalal Mughrabi, the mastermind of the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre in which 38 Israelis were murdered.

Day in and day out, Palestinians are exposed to clearly antisemitic rantings and wild accusations on their radio, TV and newspapers, in their mosques and their schools. Here are a few of them that Rosenblum mentions:

…Israel will pay NIS 4,500 to any Palestinian who can prove he is a drug addict; Israel produced and distributed to Palestinians 200 tons of drug-laced bubble gum designed to destroy the genetic systems of Palestinian youth; it also distributes carcinogenic food and fruits for Palestinian consumption and children’s games that beam radioactive x-rays. And don’t forget the HIV-infected Jewish prostitutes whom Israel unleashed on Palestinian youth. Or Suha Arafat’s accusation to Hillary Clinton that Israel poisons Palestinian wells.

The very outlandishness of these slanders — like the IDF organ-stealing story, which also originated in the Palestinian press — shows that the Palestinian audience has been conditioned to regard them as believable, by years of being fed similar poison.

The effect of decades of incitement to destroy Israel is fully reflected in Palestinian polls. A June 5-7 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that three-quarters of Palestinians reject any possibility of reconciliation with Israel in this generation, even if a final peace agreement were signed and an independent Palestinian state created.

The PA is not alone in this, although the effect of its propaganda on the prospects of the ‘peace process’ has been huge. Egypt is probably the world leader in production of antisemitic propaganda of all kinds, from films and TV programs — for example this 30-part series based on “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — to publication of “Mein Kampf” and the Protocols translated into Arabic.

You know what? We don’t have to take this.

It’s difficult for Israel to pressure Sweden, for example, to control its hate-mongers, although perhaps more could have been done diplomatically in response to the Aftonbladet scandal.

But the PA is wholly dependent on Israel and the US. And Egypt receives $3 billion a year from the US. Even without the help of the US, Israel can make life very difficult for the PA.

It is remarkable that Israel does not take decisive action to force the PA to finally put an end to the incitement — which after all comes from their state-controlled institutions. Perhaps Israelis, too, are so accustomed to hearing themselves compared to pigs and apes that it doesn’t register any more.

The Obama administration appears to be devoting a large amount of effort and political capital to an attempt to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such as its unfortunate demand for a settlement freeze. Ending Palestinian and other Arab incitement would be one of the most constructive steps it could take.

Or — don’t bother. Take them at their hateful word. Make no further concessions and do what’s necessary to ensure Israel’s safety. If they insist on being Nazis, treat them as such.

Either way, self-respect demands that we don’t continue to accept this, not for one more day.

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Max Blumenthal is a video terrorist

Friday, August 28th, 2009
Max Blumenthal -- Oops, no, its Josef Goebbels. I always mix them up!

Max Blumenthal -- Oops, no, it's Josef Goebbels. I always mix them up!

Max Blumenthal is a video terrorist. His target is the Jewish state and like many terrorists he is driven by hate — it oozes from his work — and he really doesn’t care what ethical principles (in this case, basic journalistic ones about truth and fairness) he needs to violate in order to kill his enemy. Blumenthal is a ‘journalist’ like Goebbels was a journalist.

He began his career by making fun of the Christian Right in the US, but he became really well-known for his intrepid interview with dangerous drunken American students in a Jerusalem bar.  His footage of scheming Zionist racists pronouncing the words “Fuck Obama!” before passing out is classic investigative journalism. In response to complaints that, after all, they were drunk, American, and to a certain extent idiots, he turned to tricking Israelis with poor English skills into saying embarrassingly right-wing things on camera.

His early work was quite amateurish but he apparently has professional help now, because his latest effort — a trailer for a documentary called “Israel’s terror inside” is slicker than snot and just as objective. His point — which I’m sure the full documentary will belabor effectively — is that Israel is not a democracy, it’s ruled by fascists who want only to to commit genocide against innocent indigenous Palestinians.

You know — this really isn’t all that funny. The trailer is 5 minutes 48 seconds of lies, false implications and slander. It is really well put together — he probably had generous funding from the usual suspects — and I presume the documentary is also. I absolutely guarantee that my friends at Peace Fresno will be showing it to everyone they can get to watch it, college teachers will show it to their classes, etc. Despite the fact that it will be unmitigated rubbish, people will be influenced by it.

Meanwhile, I want to address myself to Blumenthal himself:

You probably know that you are producing pure propaganda and claiming that it’s journalism. The slander in your work is compounded by the lie that what you are doing is honest work. Probably you think that’s justified, that the end of helping the oppressed Palestinians makes it OK to bend the truth a little. Maybe you ask, “what is truth, anyway?” or think about it in a postmodern way in which truth is relative to politics.

Or maybe you like the funding that you can get for doing the devil’s work [note: no, I don't believe in the devil. It's a figure of speech]. Maybe you like to see your name in print, and like seeing those fat numbers of views on YouTube. Maybe being famous helps you meet interesting women. Whatever.

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? — Joseph Welch, to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, June 9, 1954.

***

(Thanks to Dvar Dea for bringing this to my attention).

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Swedes, Palestinians use time-honored smear technique

Monday, August 24th, 2009
Texan chicken (see text for relevance)

Yes, it's relevant -- read the post.

Swedish Israel-haters are in good company. The Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine is a Marxist PLO faction which holds that Israel is illegitimate, does not accept the Oslo agreements, and demands a ‘right of return’ for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants. The PFLP was quite active in terrorism in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and again during the second intifada. Their leader, Ahmad Sa’adat, is presently serving a 30-year sentence for directing the assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi in 2001.

It’s not a surprise that they support the Aftonbladet newspaper and slime journalist Donald Boström:

Gaza – Ma’an – International human rights organizations must carry out a serious and immediate investigation on media reports published by a Swedish newspaper alleging Israeli forces harvested organs from Palestinian youth, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine demanded Saturday.

The report in Aftonbladet quoted Palestinians claiming Israeli soldiers detained young men who died in custody, and alleged their bodies were returned with organs missing.

A PFLP statement said such reports, given the detailed names, dates and photographs included and the staunch support of the Swedish government of the reporter, must be taken seriously. The group said the story was similar to alleged violations carried out by soldiers in the 1980s in Gaza, where they were said to have stolen organs from children taken to Israeli hospitals.

It has always been normal  for Israeli hospitals to treat Palestinians, even wounded terrorists. They return the favor by sending suicide bombers to blow up hospitals, firing missiles at them and even shelling crossing points between Gaza and Israel while Palestinian patients are being transferred. And tell lies about organ stealing.

One of the interesting points about the organ stories is that Palestinians often talk about bodies of dead Arabs being taken. Of course, it is impossible to harvest organs from cadavers, which is why brain-dead accident victims are in demand as organ donors.

While admitting that there was no actual evidence — other than Palestinian accusations — the author of the Aftonbladet article continues to insist that an ‘investigation’ is called for:

…in an article published Friday, Arab media site Menassat interviewed Donald Boström, the Swedish journalist who wrote the original Aftonbladet story. Boström emphasized that there was “no conclusive evidence” that organ hartvesting was a systematic IDF practice, but rather a “collection of allegations and suspicious circumstances.”

“The point is that we know there is organ trafficking in Israel. And we also know that there are families claiming that their children’s organs have been harvested. These two facts together point to the need for further investigation,” Boström was quoted as saying. — Jerusalem Post

Here we have a time-honored smear technique. I call it the “Texas chickens” method, and it’s attributed to famous Texan Lyndon B. Johnson:

Johnson: Tell the press that our opponent has sex with chickens.
Aide: But we can’t possibly prove that!
Johnson: I know, but I want to see the son-of-a-bitch deny it on television.

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Swedish Jews don’t get it

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

The Aftonbladet scandal — in which the Swedish government refused to condemn an antisemitic and Zionophobic newspaper article which accused the IDF of stealing organs from dead Palestinians, falsely claiming that to do so would violate the Swedish constitution — brings the difference between the attitudes of Jews in the Diaspora and the Jewish state into sharp focus.

Here is how Israeli officials responded:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We do not want the Swedish government to apologize, we want it to issue a condemnation.” Netanyahu called the accusations “outrageous” and equated them to blood libels.

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz (Likud) also addressed the affair, saying “there is a crisis until Sweden offers a different response. The Jewish state cannot ignore such a manifestation of anti-Semitism. “Anyone who is unwilling to condemn such a blood libel could be considered unwanted in Israel,” Steinitz said. — YNet

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that the government’s position would not have been as sharp had Sweden not reprimanded its own envoy for condemning the inflammatory article. The foreign minister said there was a degree of hypocrisy in the Swedish position – claiming they don’t interfere in freedom of the press – when in 2006 the Swedish foreign minister sent a letter to a Yemenite leader apologizing for offensive caricatures of the prophet Mohammed…

Ambassador to Sweden Benny Dagan lashed out at a Swedish reporter Sunday who asked him whether Israel should investigate the claims. “You know what, I have a suggestion for you,” Dagan retorted. “Why won’t you investigate why the Mossad and the Jews were behind the bombing of the twin towers? Why won’t we investigate why Jews are spreading AIDS in the Arab countries? Why won’t we investigate why Jews killed [Christian children to bake Matzot on Pessah]?” — Jerusalem Post

But some Swedish Jews don’t see it this way. It was painful to read the following:

According to Lena Posner, head of the Jewish community in Stockholm and president of the Official Council of Jewish Communities in Sweden, “Israel caused all this mess.”

Posner told Ynet, “The article was published here on Monday, but no one paid any attention to it. It wasn’t a news report and was buried in the back pages of a tabloid. The writer is known to many of us as anti-Israel, and so it the entire paper. This is why no one took it seriously – until Israel got involved.”

It appears that the affair has turned the Aftonbladet reporter, Donald Boström, into the star of news broadcasts. How did he get the great “scoop” on the Palestinian organ theft?

“He met a Palestinian youth in 1992 and based an article on an interview with him, because he wanted 15 minutes of fame for himself,” said Posner. “Now he is extorting this whole thing to the very end. He is a no-good, and has now become a famous person appearing on prime-time TV and radio every day. If the Israeli elements had avoided responding like they did, no one would have noticed and it would have never become part of the agenda. This is why we are so agitated here.” — YNet

They should be agitated, but for a different reason.

They should be agitated because, just as happened in pre-war Germany, the heat is being turned up on the pot of hatred, and their government is close to complicit in it. Do they think that the vituperation poured out on Israel is ‘legitimate criticism of policy’ and doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that Israel is the state of the Jewish People?

Do they think that expressions like Boström’s article will simply go away if ignored? Do they think that because they are Swedish Jews they are not connected to accusations against Israeli Jews? Do they think that their ‘progressive’ government will protect them against Jew-hatred? If there is a pogrom in Stockholm next week, will the government claim that it is a legitimate expression of the antisemites’ right to free speech? Next year?

The precedent is not encouraging.

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Swedish PM ignorant of his own constitution

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009
Reinfeldt: proof that forehead size and intelligence are not correlated

Reinfeldt: proof that forehead size and intelligence are not correlated

News item:

The Israeli-Swedish ping-pong over an offensive article in the Swedish Aftonbladet daily continued over the weekend, with Jerusalem calling for a Swedish government condemnation of the article [accusing the IDF of stealing organs from dead Palestinians], and Stockholm pointedly refusing to do so…

…Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said on Saturday his government would not condemn the report.

“No one can demand that the Swedish government violate its own constitution. Freedom of speech is an indispensable part of Swedish society,” Reinfeldt was quoted as telling the Swedish news agency TT. [my emphasis]

But it appears that the Swedish PM is not familiar with his constitution.

The Swedish Constitution says:

Chapter 1 Basic Principles
Article 3
The Instrument of Government, the Act of Succession and the Freedom of the Press Act are the fundamental laws of the Realm.

And the Freedom of the Press Act begins:

Chapter 1 On the Freedom of the Press
Article 1
(1) The freedom of the press means the right of every Swedish subject, without prior hindrance by a central administrative authority or other public body, to publish any written matter, and not to be prosecuted thereafter on grounds of the content of such matter other than before a court of law, or to be punished therefor in any case other than a case in which the content is in contravention of an express provision of law, enacted to preserve public order without suppressing information to the public.

The act is quite long, but I could find nothing that even suggested that the government is prohibited from expressing disapproval after the fact of anything published in a newspaper.

Interestingly, there are some things that cannot be published:

Chapter 7 On Offenses Against the Freedom of the Press
Article 4
With due regard to the purpose of a universal freedom of the press as set forth in Chapter 1, the following acts shall be regarded as offenses against the freedom of the press if they are committed by way of printed matter and if they are punishable under law:

…

11) persecution of a population group, whereby a person threatens or expresses contempt for a population group or other such group with allusion to its race, skin color, national or ethnic origin, or religious faith;

…

14) Libel, whereby a person alleges another is a criminal or is blameworthy in his way of life, or otherwise communicates information liable to expose the other to the contempt of others, and, if the person libelled is deceased, to cause offence to his survivors or which might otherwise be considered to violate the sanctity of the grave except, however, in cases in which it was justifiable having regard to the circumstances, or in order to provide information in the matter concerned and proof is presented that the information was correct or that there were reasonable grounds for it; and

15) affront, whereby a person insults another by means of offensive invective or allegations or by any other insulting behavior towards him.

It seems to me that a decent case could be made that Aftonbladet has violated all of the above.

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A warning from history

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009
The Nazis: A Warning from History

The Nazis: A Warning from History

My wife is away for a week and I’ve been taking the opportunity to watch videos that she wouldn’t enjoy. No, not what you are thinking! Rather, historical documentaries, war movies, Clint Eastwood films, etc.

Now I’m watching a BBC documentary called “The Nazis: A Warning from History”. It’s quite interesting, loaded with period footage that I’d never seen and including many interviews with former Nazis (they always are listed as becoming ‘former’ in 1945).

An early episode describes the persecution of the German Jews before the war, of which Kristallnacht was the culmination (and the beginning of the Final Solution). What is interesting — not that there is anything new in this — was the way in which the antisemitic predilections of ordinary Germans were nurtured for years, while at the same time the Jews were gradually excluded from every aspect of German society: the professions, the arts, political life, education, business, even the right to marry non-Jews (by the 1935 Nuremberg laws).

With every succeeding year, new indignities were heaped on the Jews which would have been unthinkable the year before. But like the proverbial frog placed in water which is slowly raised to the boiling point, the German people (even many Jews) didn’t perceive the horror of the situation until it was too late. The combination of the continuous antisemitic input from the German media and political establishment, the step by step promulgation of exclusionary laws and the gradually increasing paramilitary violence against individual Jews made the later recruitment of soldiers and police for einsatzgruppen [extermination squads] possible.

One of the former Nazis said something like this: “In 1933, who could have imagined what would be in 1945?  Only 12 years — but it was unimaginable beforehand.”

So why do I mention this?

Because a precisely parallel process is underway today. It is not aimed at individual Jews, but at the Jewish state. It is not limited to a single country, but is taking place worldwide. The anti-Israel rhetoric continues to reach new heights and every day things are said which would never have been said before. What was unimaginable last year — like the Aftonbladet accusations — becomes standard fare this year. Just like Nazi propagandists, there are writers and media that specialize in Israel-hatred. I can imagine Max Blumenthal (see here and here) looking in the mirror every morning and asking himself “how can I stick it to them today?”

The parallel is not exact, because unlike most German Jews the state of Israel is capable of defending herself. But the process of isolation — the product boycotts and divestments, the UN resolutions, the attempts to restrict Israeli participation in international sporting events, the academic boycotts, the anti-Israel conferences, and the escalating vilification in the media — are all intended to disconnect Israel from the world, to ensure that she will have no friends to stand by her when her enemies feel ready to challenge her directly.

The response has to be to not allow the temperature to be raised imperceptibly, to not get used to the anti-Israel rhetoric as, for example, “just what one expects from NPR, the Guardian, the LA Times, etc.,” but to push back vigorously against each attack, each lie, each fake ‘investigation’ and every ‘pro-Israel’ group that is actually the opposite.

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How low they can go

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Recently a Swedish newspaper published an article reminiscent of medieval blood libels, and about as likely to be true.  Of course it was “criticism of Israel” and not “antisemitism”, so — no problem.

I didn’t write about this at the time because I didn’t think there was anything I could add. Every pro-Israel blog had already jumped on this. And another thing: I’m sick of this garbage. I had to take a shower after reading, for example, the recent Human Rights Watch report which was also nothing but disgusting slanders masquerading as investigation.

I have a 19-year old cat who has started making ‘mistakes’.  19 is very old for a cat and she’s been a good friend over the years, so I just clean up the ‘mistakes’… several times a day. This is how I am starting to feel about the ‘mistakes’ in the press and those made by the ‘human rights’ groups. Except that I like the cat.

But in the interest of disseminating the truth to those who still want to hear it, I present the following:

Stop the presses: Blood Libel Goes Mainstream: Swedish newspaper proves antisemitism is anti-Zionism is now acceptable

By Barry Rubin

We are not talking about a Saudi newspaper or Hamas radio station but a Swedish newspaper. We are not talking about a neo-Nazi rag but a daily closely tied to the Swedish Social Democratic Party. And we are not just talking about an obscure item but an article that received top billing.

On August 18, Aftonbladet, which claims 1.5 million readers, published an article by a man named Donald Boström. The editor responsible is named Åsa Linderborg. She is the newspaper’s cultural affairs’ editor.

This was no random decision for her. When asked once: “What do you wish for most in life right now?” She answered: “What a simple question. What I want is a free Palestine.”

And what did this article say? That Israel’s army deliberately kidnaps Palestinian civilians and then murders them so it can cut out and sell their organs to sick people needing transplants.

Read the rest of Barry Rubin’s article here…

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Mass PTSD afflicts Jews

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Today’s featured Jewish anti-Israel group is Americans for Peace Now (APN), doing their best to screw the state of Israel from their comfortable homes in the US, far from the front line that is Israel:

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Americans for Peace Now is urging U.S. senators not to sign a letter encouraging the Arab world to normalize ties with Israel because it does not mention efforts to halt Israeli settlements.

The bipartisan letter to President Obama, circulated by Sens. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and James Risch (R-Idaho) and backed by the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, is “unhelpful” because it “seems to make a straightforward and reasonable demand for the Arab world to normalize relations with Israel,” but “the subtext of the letter directly contradicts and undermines the efforts” of the Obama administration “to promote Middle East peace.”

The Senate letter notes that “over the past few months Israel has taken concrete measures to reaffirm its commitment to advancing the peace process,” and notes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s backing of the two-state solution and the removal of roadblocks and other measures to “improve the daily lives of Palestinians.”

But “the Bayh/Risch letter conspicuously ignores Israel’s continued refusal to stop settlement activity” and “never even once mentions the word ’settlements,’ ” states the Americans for Peace Now letter. “It sends a message that signers consider settlements more important than peace.”

APN’s message, on the other hand, is that kicking Jews out of Jerusalem, for example, is more important than … well, than anything else.

It goes without saying that APN’s position is not shared by the Israeli government but in addition it is opposed by the great majority of Israelis and even by Aluf Benn, Editor at Large of the left-wing Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz:

…in the past decade, repeated peace negotiations and diplomatic statements have indicated that larger, closer-to-home settlements (the “settlement blocs”) will remain in Israeli hands under any two-state solution. Why, then, insist on a total freeze everywhere? And why deny with such force — as the administration did — the existence of previous understandings between the United States and Israel over limited settlement construction? There is simply too much evidence proving that such an understanding existed.

APN is a primarily Jewish organization, as is J Street, as is the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and Jewish Voice for Peace, which brought Cindy Corrie to testify against Israel at the festival. And we mustn’t forget Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group funded by anti-Zionist European sources, which presented unverified and unverifiable accounts of IDF ‘war crimes’ in Gaza to the international media. Then there’s B’tselem, the Israeli ‘human rights’ group which only reports on violations of Arab rights.

But wait: in addition to these and countless other Jewish organizations that I haven’t mentioned, there are also the individual Jews that do so much in the struggle against Zionism. There are the obvious ones like well-known academics Noam Chomsky and  Norman Finklestein, and the less-well known but equally vicious ones like Lawrence Davidson. We can’t forget hack journalists and bloggers like Max Blumenthal and Philip Weiss, or even those who are competent writers like Roger Cohen. Israel haters all.

I could go on: Tali Fahima, Jeff Halper, Ilan Pappé, Neturei Karta — they never end. Oh yes, one more, the anarchist vegan collective I wrote about yesterday.

A friend of mine once said that he seriously believed that Jewish history — ghettoization, persecution, expulsions, pogroms, the Holocaust — had  somehow damaged the Jewish people, a kind of mass post-traumatic stress disorder.

How else can you explain it?

Member of Neturei Karta with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Member of Neturei Karta with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

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