The post AJC Reality Check appeared first on Jewcy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now likely to weigh in on the Swedish government’s refusal to condemn the article published in the daily Aftonbladet alleging – without a shred of what proper journalists would define as evidence – that IDF troops “harvested” the organs of Palestinians.

Thusfar, the Swedish government has portrayed the concept of press freedom as equivalent to the right to chuck vicious, unsubstantiated allegations at anyone you don’t like, especially if they are Israeli. The truth – and the Swedes know this – is that governments interact with and intervene in the media all the time, from off-the-record comments to press conferences, from letters of complaint and demands for clarification through to op-ed articles. If Donald Boström, the author of the Aftonbladet piece, had come up with allegations about a Swedish government minister and his secretary based on similarly invisible foundations, you can rest assured that press freedom would not be an issue.

In sum, Sweden’s government is not being asked to revoke press freedom but to comment on an article entirely built on lies that was published in the country’s principal daily newspaper.

However, there is a long-established tendency in Sweden to take Palestinian claims at face-value, no matter, apparently, how outlandish these may be. Gerald Steinberg points out that the Swedish government is a “major source of funding” for NGOs whose strategy is based upon vilifying Israel with scant regard for such pesky considerations as facts:

An NGO Monitor research report on Swedish government funding, published on June 29 2009, documented this pattern in detail, and warned of the incitement and anti-Semitic language being used routinely by these organizations. This systematic study examined over 20 major NGOs funded through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), Diakonia, the multi-national NGO Development Center (NDC), and the Swedish Mission Council (SMR). Many of these NGOs routinely accuse Israel of “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “apartheid,” and some compare Israeli military and political officials to Nazis. This propaganda warfare is waged through the façade of “research” reports which routinely quote Palestinian “testimonies,” taken and repeated without question. The path from this demonization to the blood libels of Aftonbladet is short and direct.

The Israeli historian Tom Segev does not appear to be troubled by this contemporary culture, focusing his disapproval upon Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s depiction of Sweden’s record during the Second World War. “What is much more important is that Sweden saved the lives of some 20,000 Jews,” says Segev, who then goes on to recall the valiant efforts of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who disappeared into the Soviet gulag system after risking himself to save thousands of Hungarian Jews during 1944.

All this is true and no-one is denying it; indeed, Wallenberg’s heroism is an integral component of what Israeli schoolchildren learn about the Holocaust. What, then, is the implication of what Segev is saying? That this aspect of what he himself acknowledges as Sweden’s complex and often dishonorable World War Two role should block criticism of what Aftonbladet publishes now? This seems to be an inversion of what anti-Zionists routinely accuse Israel’s defenders of doing: instead of using the Holocaust to blunt criticism of Israel, it’s invoked to silence the criticisms of those who, if they thought about it properly, really ought to be more grateful.

In other words, you can’t win.

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As of this afternoon, the French Justice Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, apparently agrees with Ruth Halimi. Fourteen members of the gang, known as “The Barbarians,” now face a retrial, on the grounds that their original sentences were too lenient.

Mme. Alliot-Marie has done the right thing. Her decision should be welcomed by anyone who understands the depths to which human beings can sink when they are poisoned by racism.

Every so often, you come across a hate crime possessed of the most breathtaking depravity. Just recently, there was the murder of Egyptian immigrant Marwa El Sherbini in a German courtroom, at the moment that she was giving evidence against a man who had verbally abused her for the offense of being a Muslim. Three months pregnant, she was stabbed 18 times by the very man whom she was testifying against, while her three year-old son watched helplessly. Her husband, who tried to intervene, was himself shot by the court security guards.

Or remember the case of Matthew Shepard. In October 1998, Shepard, a young gay man, accepted the offer of a lift home from two men he met in a bar near Laramie, Wyoming. Eighteen hours later, he was found, barely alive, tied to a fence in a remote rural area, having been pistol-whipped and tortured. The man who discovered Shepard initially thought he’d come across a scarecrow.

Ilan Halimi belongs in that category of hate crime victims whose stories leave you wrecked by anger and sorrow. Like Matthew Shepard, Halimi was alive – just – when his body was discovered. And like Shepard, Halimi died a few hours later, having suffered more than three weeks of the most gruesome torture at the hands of the gang that kidnapped him. Suffering, moreover, that was rooted in one simple, immutable fact. Ilan Halimi was a Jew.

The facts of what happened bear recalling. On the evening of 20 January 2006, Halimi met up with an attractive girl in her late teens, known as “Yalda,” who’d first approached him in the cellular phone shop where he worked. She lured him into the clutches of The Barbarians, who kidnapped and imprisoned him. The following day, Halimi’s family received a note demanding a ransom of more than half a million dollars.

No matter that the Halimis were a family who lived modestly, on a small income, alongside other working class Jewish and Muslim families in their suburban Paris neighborhood. The Barbarians kidnapped a Jew because, they were certain, all Jews are rich. Youssef Fofana, an Ivorian Muslim in his late 20s and the gang’s leader, told Halimi’s family that if they couldn’t afford the ransom, they should “go and get it from the synagogue.”

Out of all the defendants, Fofana is the only one to have received the maximum sentence under French law: life, with no prospect of parole for 22 years. That is a fitting sentence for a man who directed and participated in the beating of Halimi, who burned him with cigarettes and acid, who photographed him, his face and hands bound with masking tape, in a Daniel Pearl pose, and who dumped him after twenty-four days outside a Parisian train station with – said the police – 80 per cent of his body butchered.

But what about those who played an enabling role, like “Yalda,” aka Sorour Arbabzadeh, who received nine years for her role as honey-trap? What about the acquittal of two of Fofana’s accomplices? There is good cause to believe, as Minister Alliot-Marie says, that these verdicts are too lenient. France’s legal system must now define what punishment, in a case as grotesque and as disturbing as this one, actually means.

The French courts also now have an opportunity to right another wrong: the refusal, despite persistent pleas from Ruth Halimi, to hold the trial in public. There are difficult, painful questions to be asked about, for example, the relationship between the tropes of antisemitism and the furious, bestial cruelty they unleashed in this case; about the prevalence of casual antisemitism among young people in France, many of them – but, like the Barbarians themselves, by no means all – Muslims; about the way in which Fofana portrayed his irredeemably reactionary crime as an act of resistance, in language that conjures up the image of a clenched fist (”Mon nom, c’est ARABS, Africain révolte armée barbare salafiste;”) about much else besides. And they should be asked in public.

Above all, those on the left and the right who insist that Israel’s actions are responsible for today’s antisemitic outrages would do well to reflect that Ilan Halimi – the victim of toxic notions about Jews which predate the existence of a Jewish state – is finally at peace in the country where, had he lived there, he would now still be alive. One day soon, perhaps, Ilan’s relatives will be able to recite Kaddish for him in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul cemetery in the knowledge that justice has at last been served.

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Despite the fact that the signed agreements shook the foundations of accepted Palestinian norms and expectations, the PLO did not fail to develop rhetoric that emphasized the extent of its continued commitment to, and perhaps even conformity with, the traditional Narrative, despite obvious contradictions.

He goes on to say:

There is a unique set of dynamics to this ring of contradiction, most which involve attempts to compensate for secretly deviating from the Narrative by engaging in more eloquent rhetoric that invokes the themes of the constants, the conjuring of memory and the supposed optimism of the will. All these compensatory gestures are effective only in preventing any accumulation of political wisdom, and lead us time and again to the same errors. Therefore, the Palestinians continuously return to square one, as if the sixty years of Nakba and a hundred years of conflict in and over Palestine, could not yield a moment of reflection or a single lesson learned.

Khader’s entire piece, thoughtfully translated by the American Task Force on Palestine, can be read here.

This is not the first time that Khader has characterized the Nakba as a form of ideological cage. An article he wrote for Al Ahram in 1998, on the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Israel, offered the following observation:

Palestine, in reality, was never a paradise; nor was it lost. It was a remote part of the Ottoman Empire, inhabited by poor peasant-farmers. The West Bank and Gaza, which were in and of Palestine, possessed the constituent elements for the perpetuity of Palestinian existence that might have stemmed the deterioration resulting from the annihilation of the larger entity.

However, for the idea of nakba to be complete, the idea of entity could not exist. Consequently, ‘refugee’ became the catchword for identity, which in turn required ignoring the existence of approximately 180,000 Palestinians who remained in that portion of Palestine that was lost. Their continued presence in their country was not viewed as proof of the impossibility of uprooting a people from their land, or as proof of their attachment to their land. Rather it was viewed as cause for embarrassment due to the certain contamination engendered by their daily contact with the usurpers of the land.

Those who read the entire piece will note that Khader is hardly generous when it comes to Zionist readings of Middle Eastern history. He also leaves his reader unsure as to precisely what his political conclusions are (commenters who might be tempted to explain this in terms of “traditional” Arab “duplicity” or “slipperiness” really shouldn’t bother).

But none of this should mask the significance of either his piece from 1998 or today’s offering, which appeared in the leading Arabic daily Al Hayat. Actually, those anti-Zionists who jump up and down with glee whenever an Israeli academic questions, say, the justice of the 1948 War of Independence might want to ponder Khader’s implicit challenge to the kind of historical representations contained, for example, in the opening paragraphs of PACBI’s call to boycott Israel. And, as this account of Palestinian intellectual responses to the 1998 Nakba commemorations shows, Khader is not alone in arguing against the “levelling, nationalist” explanation of the events of 1948.

Ultimately, to puncture the narrative of the Nakba, and to expose the political imperatives which underlie its pretensions to absolute truth, is to simultaneously dispense with the “original sin” theory of Israel’s creation. As Khader writes, the Palestinian leadership has wanted to preserve and deepen the Nakba narrative at the same time as pursuing negotiations with Israel. As a result, the past subsumes the present, so that the “collapse of the Palestinian national movement, and the disasters in education, health and human suffering in Gaza, are thus all rendered merely temporary problems that will pass and are not deserving of any attention.”

It’s an approach – or, as Khader puts it, a “contradiction” – that is no longer sustainable. Those who style themselves as “friends of Palestine” should stop perpetuating it. They might even want to think about how to move beyond it.

The post The “Nakba Narrative” appeared first on Jewcy.

Mindful of his audience, Mann declared: “Let me quote from Rosa Parks: ‘As I got up on the bus I saw that there was only one vacancy, so this was the seat that I took.’ This world and past generations are full of Rosa Parkses. People going about their everyday business quietly and with dignity. But people not prepared to be bullied and cowered and intimidated. No doubt a little scared, but those who do their bit by doing what is right.”

You can read the entire speech here and watch highlights of it on YouTube here.

And here are some highlights of what BHL had to say, again on YouTube.

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You could reasonably assume that of all the myriad pursuits available to humanity, mountaineering is one which has an obvious affinity with the Tibetan cause. So what are we to make of the news that a mountaineering equipment cooperative in Vancouver is considering a ban not on Chinese products, but Israeli ones?

Reports the JTA:

“The Mountain Equipment Co-Op (MEC) will likely propose the motion April 30 at its annual general meeting in Vancouver, the Vancouver Sun reported.

Members of the Vancouver Teachers for Peace and Global Education, many of whom are members of the co-op, will likely introduce the motion.

The chain sells seamless underwear and a hydration system for hikers and bikers produced in Israel.”

I looked at some of these products on the coop’s website. They do sell a range of materials produced in Israel. They also – look at the bottom of this page – sell quite a few products made in the country that has ravaged Tibet for the last fifty years.

I’m not, by the way, advocating a boycott of Chinese goods. I’m just pointing out that double standards like these – coming from people who climb mountains and advocate “global education” – are almost comical. As the Calgary Herald says, “if MEC members can stomach bounding over the West Coast’s foggy trails in Chinese-made togs while the Chinese are harvesting the organs of the Falun Gong, what’s the problem with seamless Israeli underwear?”

Captain Haddock would have one part of the answer. It’s because these boycotters are troglodytes and ectoplasms.

UPDATE: I’m happy to report that MEC’s management is rejecting the boycott proposal. Here is an excerpt from an email sent by MEC’s Janet Stollar. Frankly, her words speak volumes about the malice of the boycott movement. 

I want to clearly state that MEC is NOT considering boycotting Israeli suppliers. Any information that you have read on the Internet or elsewhere on the subject of MECs potential from Israel has been written by individuals that have no association with our Co-op, other than potentially being counted amongst our 3 million members. They do not speak for MEC, nor do they represent our point of view on the political situation in Israel (We have no point of view on the Israel/Palestinian conflict). MEC chooses suppliers based on their ability to make MEC-brand outdoor clothing and gear to meet our rigorous ethical sourcing requirements, quality and value expectations, and technical specifications. These are the criteria we use to make decisions as to where our goods are produced and we will continue to choose suppliers on this basis.

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“Of particular concern is the widespread practice of maiming people by shooting them in the legs, which Hamas first used in June 2007, when it seized control inside Gaza from Fatah,” says the HRW report. And there’s this too: “Abductions and severe beatings are another major concern. According to ICHR, unidentified perpetrators physically abused 73 Gazan men from December 28 to January 31, causing broken legs and arms. Human Rights Watch documented three such cases of Fatah supporters assaulted during and after the Israeli offensive, as well as one case of what appeared to be a politically motivated house arrest.”

This particularly harrowing story does not, thusfar, appear to have inspired any demonstrations from the “We Are All Hamas” crowd who took to the streets to protest Israel’s invasion of Gaza earlier this year:

In the case resulting in death, at around 6 p.m. on January 4, 2009, members of the al-Najjar family were sitting outside their home in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City when four men wearing masks and carrying AK-47 assault rifles approached the house. Two family members who were present told Human Rights Watch that the gunmen wore unmarked black uniforms and ammunition vests, but the family did not identify them as Hamas. When the gunmen ordered everyone to stand up and raise their hands, the head of the household, Hisham al-Najjar, age 55, protested, the two witnesses said. An argument ensued and one of the gunmen fired a shot, hitting no one. At least five women inside the house came rushing out, and in the chaos the gunmen opened fire, killing Hisham al-Najjar and wounding ten members of the family and a family friend. The victims ranged in age from a 12-year old girl, Ahlam Hisham al-Najjar, who was shot in the leg, to Zakkia al-Najjar, 70, Ahlam’s grandmother, who was shot in both legs. Human Rights Watch observed the bandages on both her legs.

“After the gunmen left, I saw a sea of blood,” said Amar Hisham al-Najjar, 25. He told Human Rights Watch that the gunmen shot his father Hisham in the chest, the abdomen, and the legs.”There was no electricity and no ambulances because of the war, so we tried to stop the bleeding and got our friends to drive the wounded to al-Shifa hospital, where my father died,” he said. “The Hamas police at the hospital questioned me about what happened, and they said they’d get back to me, but there’s been nothing. I’m not accusing anyone, but we demand a real investigation.”

Human Rights Watch is hardly regarded as a friend of Israel. Many Israel advocates view them as a foe, pure and simple. I’ve always thought that take is too crude. Of course, HRW’s reports should not, a priori, be regarded as beyond challenge or reproach. But to portray them as a mere cog in the Israel demonization machine is, as this new report demonstrates, deeply unfair. What’s really interesting here is whether HRW’s documentation of the hideous character of Hamas rule will compel at least some of those who regard the Islamists as a resistance movement to think again.

The post The Hideous Face of Hamas Rule in Gaza appeared first on Jewcy.

In part, that is because the Spiegel journalists were admirably direct with their questions, particularly on the deceit and concealment which has characterized Iran’s nuclear program. But one also has to give credit where it’s due: Ahmadinejad is guided by strong convictions when it comes to the conduct of international relations, and he wants everyone to know about them.

When Spiegel interviewed Ahmadinejad three years ago, much of the discussion involved the journalists trying to persuade the Iranian President that the Holocaust was an indisputable historical fact. Though they return to that subject again, this time the discussion is more wide-ranging, with Iraq, Afghanistan and relations with the US sharing space with Ahmadinejad’s barbed missives against the "Zionist enemy."

On Afghanistan, he adopts the "lack of opportunity" explanation for terrorism; if only the money spent on the military campaign had been spent on infrastructure, then we wouldn’t be in this mess. "Factories and roads could have been built, universities established and fields cultivated for the Afghan people," he says. "If that had happened, would there have been any room left for terrorists?"

Well, yes, particularly if those universities were open to women. Correctly, the Spiegel journalists conclude that Ahmadinejad has no interest in combating the Taliban. His formula for Afghanistan is his formula for Iraq, craftily exploiting the rhetoric of popular sovereignty but convincing to only the most asinine of anti-imperialists.

In some ways, what we have here is classic power politics. Ahmadinejad understands that changing the local balance of power, and remaking the region in the image of Khomeini’s revolution, requires the rolling back of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. Above all, it entails not making compromises on the nuclear front.

As in the 2006 interview, in 2009 Ahmadinejad again denies that Iran’s aim to is to weaponize its nuclear program. But saying so is one thing; offering concrete guarantees is quite something else. Pressed by Spiegel as to why Iran continues to enrich uranium, Ahmadinejad answers that this line of questioning is old hat. The countries of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organization of the Islamic Conference have all accepted Iran’s right to enrich uranium, so who cares about Security Council resolutions? Were he better briefed, Ahmadinejad might also have pointed out that some leading western commentators, particularly a certain individual recently enamoured by the regime’s hospitality, feel the same way.

Throughout the interview, Ahmadinejad portrays Iranian foreign policy as based upon righting historic wrongs. The rot set in, he says, sixty years ago, when the victors of the Second World War distributed power among themselves in disproportionate clumps. "If things were done fairly in the world, Iran would also have to be a member of the Security Council," he argues.

Here is where we come back to both the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Ahmadinejad, nothing symbolizes the bankruptcy of the post-war settlement more than the Palestinian plight. And why, he continues, does the west continue to support the "unnatural" Zionist state? With Ahmadinejad poised to let rip on the Holocaust once more, one of the Spiegel journalists cuts in and asks whether he watched the DVD about Nazi crimes which they sent him after their last interview. One can safely conclude that he didn’t.

But Ahmadinejad’s fixation with the Holocaust seems to me more important than the speculative debate over whether he is a confirmed rational actor or an apocalyptic fanatic. The Holocaust – more precisely, the "Jewish question"  – is the starting point of his politics, much as it was with European fascism in the last century.

For that reason, we should oppose an Iran armed with nuclear weapons even if we know absolutely that there is scant chance of these weapons being dispatched into enemy territory. The political power of nuclear weapons is rooted in the fear which they generate, in the compromises they enforce upon others; you can use them without exploding them. An Iran emboldened by nuclear weapons means a Middle East in which antisemitism, homophobia and theocratic tyranny become even further entrenched.

Next week, there will be a golden opportunity to make that point when Ahmadinejad arrives in Geneva for the Durban Review Conference. Some will be surprised to learn of his attendance; but as we now live in a world where racists consistently appropriate the language of anti-racism, you could also say that the news was entirely predictable.

The post Ahmadinejad Speaks appeared first on Jewcy.

My two small boys dashed in and asked me – as they invariably do – "Who ya cheering for, Daddy?" I had to think about this one. They are too young for a lecture on Middle Eastern politics and I knew that if I said "neither," I’d get pressed as to why. When you’re seven years old, you have to cheer for someone.

I thought for a few more seconds. I noted the electrified crowd. I studied the Iranian players, many of them groomed and pouting in the style of Manchester United’s Ronaldo. It struck me that what seems banal and irritating in the context of the European game is positively subversive in this context. "Iran," I mumbled. Blank looks. "The white team," I clarified. On hearing that, my contrarian sons decided to go for the green team – the Saudis. Islam’s civil war was now in our living room.

I’ve seen the Iranians play impressive football in the past, but on this occasion, the action off the field was more compelling. This being Iranian TV, every time the ball went out of play, even for a second, the cameras would sweep to the Presidential box, where Ahmadinejad and his unsmiling cronies sat looking thuggish and self-important. Whether or not you were actually in the stadium, there was no forgetting Mahmoud’s presence in the house.

As Saudi Arabia snatched a 2-1 victory, I remembered the story of how Saddam Hussein’s son Udai ordered the feet of the Iraqi national team to be whipped after they lost a vital match. Defeated in this crucial qualifier, Iran, which has played in the last three World Cup tournaments, has virtually no hope of going to the next one, next year in South Africa. For Ahmadinejad, revealing the nationalist lurking inside of the Islamist, this was little short of a disgrace.

I haven’t heard, yet, of any Iranian players being dragged into the chamber of horrors that is Evin prison. Instead, Ahmadinejad focused his wrath on the Iranian coach, Ali Daei. No matter that Daei, as a player, enjoyed the same status in Iran as did Bobby Charlton in England or Roberto Baggio in Italy. Reported The Guardian:

Daei was fired as team coach after Iran lost 2-1 to Saudi Arabia in a vital World Cup qualifier at Tehran’s Azadi stadium on Saturday. The match was witnessed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, who is said to have been instrumental in ousting him.

Ahmadinejad had hoped a victory would bring him political capital before the presidential poll in June. The desire to score a propaganda coup even prompted the president’s fans to credit him when Iran took a 1-0 lead. But the euphoria evaporated in the last 12 minutes and Daei’s fate was sealed as a mass mobile phone text to Ahmadinejad’s supporters went out, reading: "Due to the importance of national public opinion to Dr Ahmadinejad, Ali Daei has been forced out."

Ironically, as Daei was falling upon the mullah’s sword, Israel’s World Cup bid was also being decided. Playing Greece in Ramat Gan on Saturday night, the Israelis managed a disappointing 1-1 tie. They played another match against Greece the following Wednesday, one they absolutely had to win; they lost 2-1 after conceding a penalty to the Greeks late in the second half.

The worlds tyrannies will have their representatives at the 2010 World Cup. Football being the most global of sports, it necessarily encompasses those countries which hold their leaders accountable and those countries which have their leaders imposed on them. Judging by current form, both North Korea and Saudi Arabia have good reason to believe that they will be flying to South Africa.

But we will be denied the spectacle of Iran and Israel playing – and perhaps being drawn against each other – in the most glorious contest which world sport has to offer. In some ways, that will come as a disappointment to those campaigning for the exclusion of Israel from global competitions, especially as South Africa has become fertile soil for such braying mob politics. You could say that, in the end, it was not the politicians who decided their joint fate, but the players themselves. As Ali Daei might tell you, there is an inherent fairness in football which is absent from politics.

Except that football is not so pure. Missing in the coverage of Israel’s dashed World Cup hopes – the Israeli press was utterly scornful of the national team and its coach, Dror Kashtan, with Yossi Sarid practically frothing at the mouth – was a reminder of why Israel was playing Greece in the first place. Being located in Asia, Israel should be playing in the Asian qualifying group. However, most of the states in that group refuse to play against a country they don’t recognize.

Were Israel allowed to play in its own region, its chances of qualification would be virtually assured. Europe, where it is forced to play, is a much tougher prospect. Those disappointed that they won’t now be greeting the Israeli team with banners denouncing "Zionist apartheid" will probably take some comfort from the fact that while Iran was denied by the ball alone, when it comes to Israel, the boycott was the opposing team’s twelfth man.

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