Israel, Zionism and the Media

Tag: Israel (Page 27 of 34)

Nick Griffin – a supporter Israel can do without

The appearance of the British National Party’s leader, Nick Griffin, on the BBC”s prime political debating programme, Question Time, last night has for weeks been the subject of extraordinary media focus, heated debate and political demonstration.

The BBC devoted almost the entire programme to questions about the BNP, statements by Nick Griffin and the party’s policies.

Chairman David Dimbleby pressed Griffin on his history of Holocaust denial and Griffin lamely stated that he had changed his mind about it although he couldn’t express his views because of European Law which might lead to his arrest if he were to enter certain European countries. However, he did say that he had changed his mind on the ‘numbers’ after reading about a German radio intercept of 1945! The inadequacy and ludicrousness of this response was not lost on fellow panel members. Clearly Griffin is prepared to have his mind changed (somewhat) by German radio intercepts but not by the testimony and meticulous records of those same Germans, let alone thousands of survivors and other witnesses.

But the BNP is now no longer anti-Semitic, of course, its main scapegoat now is Islam and Muslims. At one time he was heard to say that ‘they’ can stay if ‘they’ accept this is a British and Christian country. How very generous of him. Where does he propose to send millions of British citizens were they not to accept his terms of tenure?

At one extraordinary moment he made a bid to show his pro-Semitic credentials by saying that he and his party supported Israel in Operation Cast Lead against Hamas. Well thanks for that, Mr Griffin’ with friends like you etc,

But isn’t this so typical of neo-Fascists. They delude themselves that by supporting Israel (Jews), who they hate, against Muslims, who they hate even more (only for now whilst it is politically advantageous to scapegoat Muslims), they are demonstrating some sort of moral purity and acceptability by trumping anti-Semitism with Islamaphobia.

The BBC’s reason for inviting Griffin was that since the BNP now had two MEP’s (including Griffin himself) and a million votes in the European elections, its charter had to be impartial and a BNP member had as much right to an invite as the Green Party or UKIP. But it then chose to atone for a sin it said it had not committed by focusing almost exclusively on Griffin and the BNP, something which has not been the case with other minority parties. So the BNP would be justified in complaining to the BBC about unfair treatment, would it not? Either Griffin is a panel member like all others or he is not. If he is not, then maybe he shouldn’t have been invited in the first place.

Whether the BBC’s biased attack on the BNP has any effect on that party’s standing remains to be seen. I hope there are a million people out there who watched Griffin and who now regret ever voting for him.

The Liberal Democrats might also be given pause to consider that their policy of Proportional Representation in the UK parliament would inevitably lead to candidates such as Griffin gaining a foothold in UK democracy as they have done with a PR system in Europe.

Griffin’s performance was appalling. He showed himself to be an oleaginous, sniggering, cowardly, intellectual midget who had no place on a panel of this calibre.

Israel’s Moral Dilemma

The 500+ page Goldstone Report, produced for the UN Human Rights Council by Judge Richard Goldstone and a distinguished group of Human Rights advocates, came to some damning conclusions about Israel’s conduct of its assault on Hamas in the Gaza Strip between December 2008 and January 2009. The report also criticised Hamas.

The report found that Israel and Hamas were probably both guilt of war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. The report was endorsed by UNHRC and will be sent to the UN Security Council for recommendation to be considered by the International Criminal Court.

Israel refused to co-operate with the Report on the grounds that some of the fact-finding members who were to produce the report had already decided in advance that Israel had committed war crimes and were, therefore biased. Israel and its supporters also saw the move to condemn it as yet another attempt by the UNHRC to delegitmise the State of Israel and pillory it internationally. The UNHRC’s activities have been disproportionately focused on Israel in the past and Israel sees the UNHRC as an instrument of its enemies and detractors.

Indeed, supporters of Israel like myself, have focused on the injustices and bias of the reporting of Operation Cast Lead, the manipulation of the world media and world opinion by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and the virtual free pass that Hamas and its seven year rocket attack on Southern Israel have received. The Goldstone report was seen by me and those of like opinion as yet another tool with which to bash Israel and whitewash the murderous and genocidal Hamas terrorists. This was a new opportunity to further advance Israel’s pariah status in the world.

By focussing on the one-sided nature of the report and the extraordinary moral equivalence which persists in the corridors of the UN and elsewhere between Hamas’s attempts to destroy Israel and Israel’s attempts to defend itself, we have to be careful about dismissing the findings of the Report out of hand.

Although it may be unfair that Israel is once again singled out and it may be galling that most of the nations voting in the UNHRC to recommend the Report have themselves human rights records which are far worse than even the most partisan interpretation of the report, nevertheless, Israel must investigate every allegation and every criticism of its conduct because that is the only moral and, indeed, politically expedient route to take. Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Dan Meridor has told Ha’aretz “[he] thinks Israel should establish its own independent committee to investigate Israel Defense Forces activity in the Gaza Strip during last winter’s Operation Cast Lead.”

If Israel can rebut the accusations then it should find the means to do so via a truly independent internal investigation. Just how it does that and what would be considered fair and independent by the outside world is hard to say, but, it is important for Israel itself to make the investigation and to act on any findings. Not because that’s what the UN requires but because Israel must preserve its own moral compass, it must prove primarily to itself that either it is guiltless or if it is not, then how to remedy and rectify its transgressions.

Of course, the Report calls on Hamas to do the same, to investigate its own conduct. This is ludicrous; terrorists do not have a conscience or moral scruples. For Hamas ALL is justified in their Jihad against Israel and, indeed, against the Jews. They have no regard or respect for International Law except to use it to beat Israel with. Their objection to the report was that it confused aggressor with victim – on that score they were dead right, except the aggressor was Hamas and the victim Israel.

The question Israel has to address now is whether there own aggressive act of self-defence, to destroy or disable Hamas before it could pose an existential threat to Israel, was conducted not just according to International Law but Israeli Law and customary law; was their strategy morally and ethically sound, could they have achieved the same goal with less destruction and fewer casualties.

For those whose default position is ‘Israel: evil, rabid, colonial, apartheid, illegitimate, expansionist, American proxy state. Palestine: freedom fighters, oppressed, impoverished victims of injustice and dispossession’, no accounting by Israel will ever be enough; they just want Israel destroyed and look no further than that goal, the consequences of which would be far worse than the status quo.

For those of us with a more temperate view and who have Israel’s and, indeed, the Palestinians’ long-term well-being at heart, Israel must bite the bitter bullet and formulate its own investigation into Operation Cast Lead which avoids accusations of whitewash from all but its bitterest enemies.

Colonel Richard Kemp and the truth about Operation Cast Lead

If you want an expert, unbiased, dispassionate assessment of the Israel Defense Force during Operation Cast Lead then I refer you to Colonel Richard Kemp who knows more about asymmetric warfare then the whole of the UN Human Rights Council combined:

But the HRC is not interested in truth, only politics and deligitimisation.

Col. Kemp tells it as it is. Thank you,

Goldstone the patsy

Now that the United Nations Human Rights Council has voted to send the Goldstone report to the UN General Assembly, the head of the fact-finding team that produced the report, Richard Goldstone, is back-pedalling.

Goldstone has been exposed in all his naivety. Just like a ghetto Jew policeman, collaborating with his people’s murderers, Goldstone accepted the role of heading the fact-finding mission. And no sooner than the report is presented to the UNHRC, the resolution recommending it to the UN General Asembly becomes doctored to exclude any mention of Hamas and  to include extraneous materials attacking Israel which were not part of the original brief.

And Goldstone, like a naive Jew collaborator never saw it coming.  The revered jurist, the impartial investigator who produced a report so one-sided as to be obscene. Now he is widely reported as being “saddened” by the resolution as jta.org reports, Goldstone went on to say “”There is not a single phrase condemning Hamas as we have done in the report”

Well that’s naive and disingenuous, isn’t it? Even in the report the condemnation of Hamas was a mere after-thought thrown in, probably at Goldstone’s embarrassed insistence, as a fig-leaf to cover a deeply nasty biased and dangerous report.

So Goldstone finds himself surprised at being the patsy of the anti-Israel league.

You see the resolution of the UNHRC does not mention Hamas AT ALL! Surprise, surprise. The murdering, lying terrorist abomination that calls itself Hamas and who committed every war crime and broke every rule of war, the Geneva convention, customary law and human decency get off scot free whilst Israel is now called a war criminal and its pariah status no doubt enhanced. Meanwhile other countries for whom no investigation and no resolution will ever see the light of day (Russia in Chechnya and South Ossetia, China in Tibet, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and probably Pakistan) laugh on the sidelines or actively participate in condemning Israel.

This moral inversion, this moral blindness towards Israel and Israel alone is the real crime.

And the UNHRC resolution did not stop at the Goldstone Report. Here’s the extraneous stuff

Reaffirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and the inadmissibility of the acquisition of land by the use of force, as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations

So what’s that got to do with the Gaza conflict?

Affirming the applicability of international human rights law and the international humanitarian law, namely the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,

That’s OK until ‘to the Occupied Palestinian Territory..’ bit. This has nothing to do with Gaza but a lot to do with final status negotiations. Clearly those sponsoring the resolution have already decided that East Jerusalem is occupied Palestinian Territory even though there is and never has been a Palestinian state. Indeed, the resolution’s title is:

HUMAN RIGHTS SITUATION IN PALESTINE AND OTHER OCCUPIED ARAB TERRITORIES.

Do they mean Iraq? Probably the Golan Heights and Gaza which the UN is determined to call ‘occupied’ even though Israel abandoned it and withdrew all its troops several years ago. It was that very withdrawal which led to Gaza being taken over by Hamas and other terrorist groups who used the Gaza Strip to launch thousands of rockets against Israeli towns and cities and whose actions precipitated the conflict.

Only the naive and the blind could say that the text of the resolution includes Hamas by implication.

Goldstone, meanwhile has defended his Report in the Jerusalem Post and this defence is analysed brilliantly by Alan Baker here.

So like the ghetto policeman, Goldstone, a man of impeccable credentials, has sold his soul. But not because of self-serving, but because he has failed to spot the trap. He has failed to see how many lies and distortions Israel’s enemies are prepared to use against it. He has failed to expose the lies of Hamas, the lies of the Palestinian Authority and the moral inversion of the bleeding-heart human rights lobby for whom the narrative is simple: Israel is the aggressor and Palestinians the victim. End of.

Hizbullah’s Pallywood moment

On Tuesday the Israel Defense Force (IDF) released a video in black and white, using night vision and taken by an unmanned drone.

The video followed a series of explosions in a residential area near Tyre in Southern Lebanon.

The video clearly shows rockets being transferred by truck from the site of the explosion to another location.

UN Security Council Resolution 1701 forbids arms to be brought into Southern Lebanon following the war between Israel and Hizbullah in 2006.

Today the Jerusalem Post has a story about Hizbullah’s release of a video taken on the ground and showing a similar exercise to that witnessed by the Israeli drone but claiming that the objects being moved were metal posts.

Just as the Palestinians have a wonderful film industry which fabricates evidence against Israel on a regular basis, Hizbullah now appear to be bidding for their place at the Cannes Film Festival.

Why would anyone take a video of metal posts and doors (so they also claim) being moved?

Why is the film taken in the daytime when the drone video was at night?

Why are there UNIFIL soldiers in the Hizbullah video and not not the IDF video?

The very fact of this blatant fabrication is an indicator of guilt.

Now the Lebanese want to report the IDF to the UN for breaching 1701!  If Israel witnesses explosions of munitions in an area which is supposed to be free of munitions it has a right to investigate. And what does it find? Hizbullah are stashing rockets which can reach many parts of Israel.

And what does the UN do? Nothing. What does the pathetic Lebanese government do? Nothing. No international outrage. Nothing. Well no change there then. Just continue pillorying Israel for defending itself.

The Moral Bankruptcy of the UN Human Rights Council

Following the Goldstone Report and its seriously flawed and biased findings against Israel, the enemies of freedom and justice are having a field day at the UN.

On Tuesday this week (13th October 2009) the UNHRC reported that 18 of its 47 members had supported, or co-sponsored a request from the Palestinian Authority for a Special Session of that august body to discuss the report.

The Jerusalem Post reports the following list of countries as being the 18 countries supporting the PA, presumably to express their moral outrage at the report’s findings and to seek every avenue to pillory Israel in the UN and beyond.

So here are the Magnificent 18: Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Senegal.

Does it not make your blood boil when you see names like China, Cuba, Egypt and Saudi Arabia so keen on human rights? Some of the others don’t have much to be proud of either.

Let’s just remind ourselves that these countries have the audacity to take a morally superior stance against Israel, a tiny country, fighting for its very existence for decades and now the victim of lawfare of the most morally bankrupt and cynically hypocritical kind.

The same Jerusalem Post article points out that 6 of the 12 special session of the UNHRC have been about Israel. How many about Sudan or Zimbabwe or China, or Russia or Turkey or Syria or Sri Lanka?

This obsession with Israel can only mean one thing and we all know what that is. The Jews are still the world’s favourite people to hate.

Oh no, I’m not saying Israel is perfect, but is it really responsible for 50 percent of the world’s human rights violations?

If the UN would not be so obsessed with five and a half million Jews and take a look at the real villains in the world then perhaps we could take it seriously and perhaps they would actually do some good rather than just be a mouthpiece for international Jew-hatred.

The Goldstone Report – an important resource

A new website has been created which systematically dismantles the findings of the Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead.

The report accused Israel of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in its offensive against Hamas in Gaza in December 2008-January 2009.

Hamas got off lightly.

Now the Israeli Defense Force and individual officers and members of the government of the day may be accused of war crimes and subject to arrest and trial in the International Court of Justice if the UN finds cause to recommend further action.

This new website – www.goldstonereport.org is an intelligent and well-argued and meticulously documented analysis which exposes the lies, bias and bankrupt forensics of the report.

I urge you to read it.

Libyan chutzpah

Libya, that bastion of democracy and human rights has forced the UN Security council to meet ahead of schedule to discuss the Goldstone report on alleged war crimes in Gaza by Israel and Hamas in Operation Cast Lead.

Presumably it’s Israeli war crimes Libya has in mind, not Hamas’s war crimes.

This is just as extraordinary as the original Palestinian Authority’s request to the UN Human Rights Council to delay the debate.

Now Libya and other Arab states say that October 14th is the day when the debate must take place. They can’t wait to accuse Hamas of its egregious human rights violations, can they.

Now the PA has made a U-turn and supports Libya’s request.

Of course Libya can force this issue as a member of the UN Human Rights Council.

A natural choice as a defender and investigator of Human Rights, of course. It’s rather like having Hannibal Lecter running a vegetarian restaurant.

For example, one of the most important of all human rights is the ability of a nation to choose its leaders and remove that leadership in regular elections.

Libyans have no human right to replace Colonel Gadaffi.  No political parties are allowed in Libya.

For a full explanation of Libya’s right to serve on the UNHRC you might do well to visit the US Department of States’s website here.

You will see a litany of abuses including arbitrary arrest, detention without trial, torture, trumped up charges.

Look at this – remember?:

Trial Procedures

The law provides for the presumption of innocence, informing defendants of the charges against them, and the right to legal counsel. In practice defendants often were not informed of the charges against them and usually had little contact, if any, with their lawyers. Defense lawyers automatically were appointed, even if the defendant declined representation.

On two occasions, in 2004 and 2006, a court sentenced to death six foreign health workers accused of deliberately infecting 426 children with HIV‑tainted blood in 1999. The sentences reportedly were based on confessions that the accused made under torture. International observers reported serious concerns about the lack of investigation into allegations of torture and delays in bringing the case to a conclusion. In 2005 the Supreme Court accepted the appeal of the medics and ordered a retrial by the criminal court, which began in May 2006 and concluded with a second guilty verdict in December 2006.

During the second criminal trial, authorities denied the defendants and their lawyers the right to call witnesses or present evidence while giving wide latitude to the prosecution. Defendants and their lawyers had limited access to government‑held evidence. Following the December 2006 guilty verdict, the medics again appealed to the Supreme Court, which held its first hearing on the defendants’ appeal on June 20. On July 11, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s conviction and reinstated several lesser charges to the indictment, including alcohol consumption and currency violations. On July 17, the Higher Judicial Council intervened and commuted the death penalty to life imprisonment after the victims’ families expressed satisfaction with a compensation arrangement, which included a payment of one million dollars for each infected child, substantial foreign investments in the local health infrastructure, and European promises to provide medical care abroad for some affected children.

On July 24, the government allowed the medics to depart to serve their remaining prison terms in Bulgaria, where authorities pardoned the six medics upon arrival. (my emphasis)

The Libyans thus managed to kidnap innocent people and hold them to ransom and extort millions from European governments before releasing their hostages. If this had not been state kidnapping but some terrorist group in Iraq the hostages would not have been bartered.

Libya. The same country that greeted Lockerbie bomber and mass-murderer, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, with celebration and triumph on his release from a Scottish prison.

A fundamental human right is freedom of religion, is it not? Surely the UNHCR could not allow its council to have a member where a government proudly professes its anti-Semitism.  Wrong. Gadaffi has just done just that. On March 27th 2007  Gadaffi said “”Jews will go extinct because everyone hates them.”

For Libya to be so exercised about the Goldstone report is rank hypocrisy of the most cynical kind. A country, run by a lunatic, who condones and supported terrorism across the world, a dictatorship,  has the chutzpah to want to bring Israel to justice.

But that’s the problem with the UNHRC and the UN, They are seriously compromised by an obsessive, biased and politically motivated animus against Israel whilst the true criminal regimes in the world merit scant and mealy-mouthed condemnation. How does Libya stand on Sudan or Zimbabwe? Sri Lanka anyone? Russia and Georgia – where’s that investigation? China and Tibet? Where are the Goldstone reports on these countries?

Why should any country or any individual pay any attention to anything spewed out of the hate-filled mouths of just about every UN body. Judge Goldstone as next Secretary General? It’s a distinct possibility.

Ahmadinejad and the history deniers

That nice Mr Ahmadinejad from Iran is at it again.

Having found himself in hot water at home because of accusations of a rigged election, he has apparently sought to unite the people against, you guessed it, the Jews.

Ho hum.

His latest Holocaust denial came on Quds (Jerusalem) Day:

He is reported to have said:

“[The Holocaust] a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim”.

He also repeated the canard that the Zionist entity (Israel) was created as a result of this supposed lie.

Not only is this historically illiterate (and this faulty historical narrative can be heard in many places, not just in the Middle East) but he and those like him are attempting to create another Holocaust. But this time it isn’t the physical extermination of the Jewish people (although that is a much desired outcome for Hamas and Hizbollah to name the prinicpal culprits) but this time the Holocaust will begin with the extermination of Jewish history.

Anyone who knows anything about the Jewish people will know that history is central to identity. This is true of most nations but for Jews it defines them even more deeply because for 2000 years they were scattered across the nations of the world with only their history to unite them.

That history was not just one of persecution, migration and expulsion but also a history of yearning for a return to the Land, to the holy city of Jerusalem whose importance in history is solely due to its Jewish history. Without the connection to the Land, to Israel and Jerusalem there would be no Jewish people at all. Look at Jewish liturgy: the Torah, the three daily services, literature, poetry, art.

The Jews and their ancestral land have always been two sides of the same history: the People and the Land.

Now you can argue, and I’m sure you will, about the right to that land today and it’s an argument of history that is a valid one to discuss. And it should be because there are so many lies and misconceptions about the Jews’ return to the Land.

But if you accept that, whatever you may think of Israel and the events of the last sixty or hundred years, that Judaism and the Jewish soul identify completely with that land, (and it is a spiritual as well as a religious and historical connection), then you will see that to deny that connection in effect denies the existence of the Jewish People and its right to exist; to exist anywhere, not just in Israel.

And this is what Ahmadinejad does, but it is also what is taught in the Middle East; not just by the perverted purveyors of hatred that are known as Hamas and Hizbollah but by clerics, publishers, academics, politicians, archaeologists, teachers and broadcasters across the Middle East. They daily trot out lies which deny that Jeruslaem was the site of the two Jewish Temples, deny any Jewish connection whatsoever to the Land and characterise the Israelis and, therefore, of course, all Jews, as part of a (Zionist) plot to deprive them, the Palestinians and the Muslim umma in general, of their land. And part of this ruse perpetrated originally by a few hundred thousand Jews was to fabricate or exaggerate their own suffering to prick the conscience of those who persecuted them, or allowed them to be persecuted, and thereby allow them to steal the Land. That ruse, they claim, was the Holocaust.

And don’t take this lightly. because those who deny history – the ‘history deniers’ (Richard Dawkins uses this term in rather a different context in his latest book) who use it now against the Jews will and, in fact, do use it against everyone else. They denigrate and deny others’ holy books whilst being ready to kill the denigrators of their own, they deny what happened on 9/11 whilst in a breathtaking example of double-think and hyprocisy, celebrate it as a victory over the Zionists who they also say carried it out!

Mahmoud Abbas wrote his doctoral thesis on the Holocaust and you won’t be surpised to find that he found it was a lie.

You can get a flavour of it here: http://www.pmw.org.il/holocaust.htm which shows very starkly that the oh so moderate Palestinian Authority is Holocaust-denying to its rotten core.

So Ahmadinejad is not alone. He is part of a vast army of Muslims who actively seek to deny Jews their history, any land whatsoever and in some cases, their lives. And it is widespread because it is promulgated and taught not just in the Middle East but across the world.

Shana Tova

Shana tova – Happy New Year – to you all, Jew or Gentile.

May it bring peace to the world and especially to Israel and Palestine and their people.

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