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Anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias in the media and State Dept.

October 7, 2015

Anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias in the media and State Dept. | Anne’s Opinions, 7th October 2015

As I write this, events are overtaking me with a huge wave of terror attacks (145 at the last count) hitting throughout Israel, including my own hometown of Petach Tikva. I wonder how the media will cover this – if at all. — anneinpt)

I have been documenting anti-Israel bias in the media since I started this blog. In fact it was one of the reasons I st this blog up in the first place. Sadly it seems to be getting worse despite the fact that there are so many media-monitoring websites out there, at least in certain media outlets (Haaretz, the BBC, the NYT, I’m looking at you – and others besides). This is besides the built-in hostility towards Israel in international institutions like the UN. But it goes further. Much more egregiously, the double standard to wards Israel has become blatantly clear in the US State Department. Following are several examples from the past week which saw several terrorist atrocities in Israel.

CAMERA billboard posted opposite the NYT building

The Algemeiner has an “interesting” (i.e. enraging) roundup of the blatant bias of the New York Times with examples from just the past month (there are many more recent exampels at the following links) documented by two media watchdogs: CAMERA and Honest Reporting):

On September 10, the NYT singled out Jewish lawmakers on the Iran deal. [At the link you will read that this was a blatantly antisemitic act, targeting Jews for no other reason than that they are Jewish. The NYT has yet to be made to pay for this racial discrimination. -Ed.]

On September 15, the NYT suggested that the Israeli who was murdered by rock-throwing Palestinians had died of a “self-inflicted accident” after the attackers had merely “pelted the road” (rather than his car). The National Review provided a detailed critique of this farcical “reporting.”

Unbelievably, Diaa Hadid, a NYT “journalist” responsible for reporting on Israel, used to work for an anti-Israel hate group, so it’s no surprise that she authored an article suggesting that Palestinian attackers pelted a road with stones on which an Israeli’s self-inflicted car accident just happened to cause him to die.

On September 29, Hadid used an anonymous European advocate of Palestinian rights as a witness to contradict Israeli army claims that a Palestinian woman who was shot at an IDF checkpoint had been armed with a knife. Hadid then omitted confirmatory reports from another witness mentioned in the article, a Palestinian named Fawaz Abu Aisheh, who said the woman had dropped her knife after being shot. (Hadid ignored this evidence even though Amnesty International mentioned Aisheh’s corroborating testimony about the knife).

On September 30, the NYT struck again with false historical information and tendentious coverage of Abbas’ UN speech. The article, by Rick Gladstone and Jodi Rudoren, noted that “Mr. Abbas accused Israel of having systematically violated these pacts,” without mentioning the many violations of the Oslo Peace Accords by Palestinians. In an article exceeding 1,000 words, the reporters made not even one reference to Palestinian terrorism, a basic historical fact that is essential to any fair and balanced understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, since the Oslo Peace Accords, there have been 22 years of Palestinian terrorist attacks — including 140 suicide bombings — which have murdered more than 1,500 Israelis (in U.S. population terms, about 60,000 people killed) and made Israeli compliance with a complex and risky “peace” agreement even harder.

…

The reporters shamelessly failed to note that the “new strife over contested religious sites in Jerusalem” was produced by Palestinian incitement, anti-Jewish harassment and violence.

Equally egregious is their patently false claim that “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most protracted dispute vexing the United Nations since the organization’s founding 70 years ago.” Some basic Wikipedia research reveals that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began in 1948 and has produced about 24,000 fatalities since then, while the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan began in 1947 and has produced about 47,000 fatalities, and the conflict over Kurdish separatism in Iran began in 1946 and has caused at least 30,000 fatalities.

Moving on to the events of last week, the BBC outdid itself (if that is at all possible) in its outrageous headlines which even they themselves were persuaded – eventually – to change – four times! – until they matched the events on the ground. Honest Reporting gives us a screenshot of the initial BBC headline after a Palestinian terrorist stabbed and murdered two Israeli Rabbis and injured the wife and child of one of them in the Old City of Jerusalem:

BBC biased headline

Note how the headline focuses on the poor Palestinian murderer.

BBC Watch follows up on how the BBC flunked the headlines on the Jerusalem terror attack: – and includes a reference to the BBC’s misleading reporting on the murder of the Henkin’s two days previously, in which they did not mention the Palestinian Authority’s connection to the murder:

Predictably, that headline prompted considerable protest on social media and shortly after its publication the title was changed to one displaying yet another regular feature of BBC reporting; the use of superfluous punctuation.

Pigua Lions Gate art vers 2

Following further complaints, the headline was amended again.

Pigua Lions Gate art vers 3

And later on – yet again.

Pigua Lions Gate art vers 4

In other words, professional journalists supposedly fluent in the English language had to make three changes to the article’s headline in not much more than an hour.

And what of the report itself? In line with standard BBC practice, the word terror does not appear in any of the versions of an article describing a terror attack on Israeli civilians. Readers are told that:

“It comes two days after an Israeli couple, who were in a car with their four children, were shot dead in the West Bank.”

Of course BBC audiences had not been informed that was a terror attack either.

Readers of the third version of the report were told that:

“Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, issued a statement praising the attack which it described as “heroic”.”

They were not, however, informed that social media accounts belonging to Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party similarly praised the attack and described its perpetrator as a ‘hero’. The information concerning Hamas was later removed.

As BBC Watch remarked on its report on the BBC’s coverage of the Henkin murders:

The BBC cannot claim to be meeting its remit of building “a global understanding of international issues” as long as it continues to conceal the role played by the Palestinian Authority in inciting violence and executing terror attacks on Israeli civilians.

But the Beeb’s bias doesn’t seem to worry anyone in the British halls of power.

As for international coverage of the terror attacks that killed four Israeli civilians in 2 days, besides the countless attempted murder attacks via rock-throwing on the roads, firebombs, tossing firecrackers at the police, and arson, Israel experienced agricultural terrorism in the form of uprooted vineyards, as well as the destruction of priceless Bar Kochba-era antiquities.

Uprooted vines in the Shilo region

Kiryat Aravia caves before the destruction

The site after Palestinians bulldozed it

If you live outside Israel I’m pretty sure you haven’t heard of any of this. Edgar Davidson has produced another great (but sad) info-graphic showing the disparity in political reactions and the bias in reporting: (click to enlarge):

Compare and contrast responses to terror in Israel

Sadly, I find none of this surprising. We have become so inured to biased, misleading, distorted or simply missing reporting on Israel that, at least speaking for myself, I have no expectations at all from the foreign media and am pleasantly surprised when I find an accurate report.

However the bias at the US State Department which is also not new (it is dominated by Arabists, rather like the “Camel Corps” of the British Foreign Office), seems to have hit a new low.

The blogger “First One Through” at Jews Down Under created an instructive table comparing the State Department’s reactions to Israeli and Arab casualties of warfare and terrorism. Even with the knowledge that State is biased, I admit I was shocked by this (I edited the heading of the chart for errors):

Event July 1 Attack on Arabs October 1 Attack on Jews October 3 Attack on Jews
Words in Statement 122 68 77
Condemnation “condemns in strongest possible terms” “strongly condemns” “strongly condemns”
Terrorist attack “vicious terrorist attack” AND “terrorism” “terrorist attack” Not called terrorism
Condolences “profound condolences” “condolences” No condolences
Prayer for Injured “prayers for a full recovery” None None
Families mentioned “Dawabsheh family” None None
Location of Incident “Palestinian village of Douma” “West Bank.” Not Israeli; not Samaria “Old City of Jerusalem today”. Not Israeli
Call for Justice “murderers” “the perpetrators” “all perpetrators of violence” A general term

Furthermore, in an outrageously undiplomatic move, the White House instructed Secretary of State John Kerry and Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power to stay away from the UN while Binyamin Netanyahu delivered his speech to the UNGA last week.

https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/649679192511135749

I cannot recall ever such a disgraceful, overtly antagonistic act being taken – for no reason other than hurt personal feelings – by the White House or the State Department. Shame on them!

But history is a cycle. Do you remember the “outrage” and “appalled” feelings at State when Israel hit a school or hospital – or rather, NEAR the buildings – in Gaza? That was described as a war crime and Israel was villified in every media outlet that you can think of, besides the State Department (reminder: the US is supposed to be Israel’s ally!) and of course the UN.

This week the tables have turned. Russia has begun brazenly bombing civilian targets in Syria. Meanwhile the US Air Force bombed an Afghan hospital, and it is instructive to note the media coverage and its comparison with Israel’s attack in Gaza, as Honest Reporting reports:

It will certainly be interesting to compare the media coverage of Russian and U.S. air strikes to the reports that Israel had to contend with. All too often, the media attributes a level of malevolence when it comes to Israeli military actions.

So, while, for example, the New York Times’s headline from July 2014 actively attributes responsibility to Israel for the alleged shelling of a UN school, its headline covering the Afghan hospital incident passively attributes the air strike rather than those who carried it out.

nytimes300714

nytimes031015Ultimately, both Israel and the U.S. have shared values when it comes to the ethics of war. It is hard to believe that the U.S. has intentionally targeted civilians in a hospital. It does, however, comparatively demonstrate the lengths that Israel goes to in order to avoid just such a scenario as the Afghan hospital.

It is a tragic inevitability that civilians will die in war. Russia does not appear to be influenced by morals or ethics. Meanwhile the U.S. may be realizing that it has something to learn from Israel when it comes to ethics on the battlefield.

I would have been angrier at the duplicity of the State Department, but I must admit I’m finally enjoying a great surge of schadenfreude at their expense as their spokesman squirmed, evaded and tried to wriggle out of a straight answer to a direct question posed by Matt Lee of AP about the Afghan hospital bombing. Watch the video at Israellycool:

Matt Lee decided to ask the State Department’s Mark Toner exactly what kind of standards they hold themselves to because it would seem to be a different set that they applied to Israel last year.

I’ll spoil it. He’s got no answer. They can’t justify it. They hold Israel to an impossible standard, one to which they cannot themselves match because this is war and bad stuff happens. We join the briefing for Matt’s follow up question after his first is left completely unanswered in over 3 minutes of bluster.

You can read the transcript of the entire question and answer session at the Israellycool link.

Enjoy! Maybe the State Department will think twice before again condemning Israel’s perfectly legal actions taken in self-defense.

—

One update before I go: there has been another terrorist stabbing in the Old City, near the site of the double murder on Saturday night:

Watch out for biased reporting about this one too – if it even gets a mention.

Categories: Media, State Department
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After the Paris murders: Islam and the West, and blaming the Jews

January 15, 2015

After the Paris murders: Islam and the West, and blaming the Jews | Anne’s Opinions, 14th January 2014

The horrific terrorist murders in Paris have led to much thinking and opining about the root causes of the attacks and Muslim hostility towards the West and the Jews. The prime root cause in my humble opinion is Western denial about such hostility in the first place. The Blaze for example has a detailed article about President Obama’s denial of the link of Islam to any one of the multiple terror attacks that have taken place around the world in recent years.

David Horovitz in an excellent article (all his articles are excellent) in the Times of Israel really hits the nail on the head in The death cult ideology that France prefers not to name:

The obsession with Netanyahu’s words and deeds in Paris, and with what Hollande did or didn’t want, might seem trivial in the context of the day’s great exhibition of determined resistance to terrorism. The question of whether France would have mobilized in the way it did solely for Jewish victims might seem jaundiced and small-minded after a day of such grand display.

Netanyahu at the Grand Synagogue in Paris

But now that the 3.5 million marchers have all gone home, we are left with the question: What are the French actually going to do about the mounting challenge of Islamist terrorism? More security? Evidently so. More vigilance? Doubtless, at least for a while. More substantive action, truly designed to eliminate the danger? Don’t bet on that.

France promised the world to its Jewish community after the murderous Toulouse attacks. Hollande vowed time and again that France would do everything to counter anti-Semitism, to fight hatred, “to tear off all the masks, all the pretexts.” This time, too, he pledged unity and vigilance in the battles against racism and anti-Semitism. What he didn’t explicitly promise, then or now, however, was to tackle violent Islamic extremism. On Friday, indeed, he asserted in an address to the nation that “these terrorists and fanatics have nothing to do with the Islamic religion.”

It would be nice to think that they didn’t. But it is their perverted interpretation of obligation to that religion that they invoke in carrying out their acts of terror and fanaticism. And it is the growing brutal resonance of their kill-and-be-killed ideology, and the failure of mainstream Islam to effectively challenge it, that led Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to appeal to Muslim clerics in a remarkable speech on January 1 to promote a more “enlightened” interpretation of Islamic texts. As things stand, el-Sissi warned, the Islamic world is “making enemies of the whole world. So 1.6 billion people (in the Muslim world) will kill the entire world of 7 billion? That’s impossible … We need a religious revolution.” [I blogged about Sisi’s speech last week -anneinpt.]

Islamist jihad cannot and will not be defeated if it is not honestly acknowledged. The enemies of freedom will not be picked out at border crossings, tracked on the internet, targeted, thwarted and ultimately marginalized if insistent self-defeating political correctness means those enemies are not even named.

Jonathan Spyer, writing in “Reflections on the murders in Paris” in Middle East Forum provides some background to the motivations of political Islam which lead to Jihad and offers some remedies:

The Islamic world is currently in the midst of a great historic convulsion. This process is giving birth to political trends and movements of a murderously violent nature. These movements offer a supposed escape route from the humiliation felt at the profound societal failure of the Arab and to a slightly lesser extent the broader Muslim world.

The escape is by way of the most violent and intolerant historic trends of Islam, into a mythologized and imagined past. The route to this old-new imagined utopia is a bloody one. All who oppose or even slight it must die. The simple and brutal laws of 7th century Muslim Arabia are re-applied, in their literal sense. The events of last week in Paris were a manifestation of this trend.

…

The political trend in question is called political Islam. It manifests itself in its most extreme form in the rival global networks of the Al Qaeda movement and the Islamic State. But these, alas, are only the sharp tip of a much larger iceberg.

Political Islamists are not all, or mainly, young men from slums. On the contrary, its adherents include heads of state, powerful economic interests and media groups, and prominent cultural figures. Some of these, absurdly, were even present at the “solidarity rally” in Paris.

They rendered this event an empty spectacle by their presence.

…

Political Islam is a reaction to profound societal failure. It is also a flight into unreality. It has nothing practical to offer as an actual remedy to Arab and Islamic developmental problems. Economic, legal and societal models deriving from the 7th century Arabian desert are fairly obvious impediments to success in the 21st.

Where they are systematically imposed, as in the Islamic State, they will create something close to hell on earth. Where they remain present in more partial forms — as in Qatar, Gaza, Iran, (increasingly) Turkey, and so on — they will merely produce stifling, stagnant and repressive societies.

But the remedy for failure that political Islam offers is not a material one. It offers in generous portions the intoxicating psychological cocktail of murderous rage and self-assertion, and the desire to strike out and destroy those deemed enemies — infidels who transgress binding religious commandments, Jews and so on.

…

In contemporary western European societies, political Islam meets a human collectivity suffering, by contrast, from a profound loss of self. No one, at least in the mainstream of politics and culture, seems able to quite articulate what western European countries are for, or what they oppose — at least beyond a sort of vapid belief in everyone doing what they want and not bothering each other.

The result is that when violent political Islam collides with the satiated, lost societies of western Europe, the response is not defiance on the part of the latter, but rather fear.

This fear, as fear is wont to do, manifests itself in various, not particularly edifying, ways.

The most obvious is avoidance (“the attacks had nothing to do with Islam,” “unemployment and poverty are the root cause,” “the Islamic State is neither Islamic nor a state,” etc etc).

Another is appeasement — “maybe if we give them some of what they want, they’ll leave us alone.”

This response perhaps partially explains the notable adoption in parts of western Europe of the anti-Jewish prejudice so prevalent in the Islamic world.

The ennui of the western European mainstream will almost certainly prevent the adoption of the very tough measures which alone might serve to adequately address the burgeoning problem of large numbers of young European Muslims committed to political Islam and to violence against their host societies.

Such measures — which would include tighter surveillance and policing of communities, quick deportations of incendiary preachers, revocation of citizenship for those engaged in violence, possible imprisonment of suspects and so on — would require a political will which is manifestly absent. So it wont happen. So the events of Paris will almost certainly recur.

And lastly, since the elites will not be able to produce resistance, it will come from outside of the elites. Hence the growth of populist, nationalist parties and movements in western Europe. But Europe being what it is, such revivalist movements are likely to contain a hefty dose of the xenophobia and bigotry which characterized the continent of old.

Both these articles clearly illustrate the West’s problem with facing up to the awful brutal reality of religiously inspired political Islam which leads to the Jihadism that we are facing today on the streets of Europe and Israel.

Much of the media however appears to blame Israel, or even the Jews as a whole, for the murders of the four French Jews at the supermarket on Friday.

The BBC’s Tim Wilcox hit a new low by comparing Palestinian deaths to the murder of the French Jews, and then compounding the insult by claiming the Palestinians deaths were “at the hands of the Jews” – not Israel. BBC Watch reports:

Tim Willcox interrupts an interviewee talking about the recent antisemitic attacks in France to inform her – forty-eight hours after four Jewish hostages had been murdered in a terror attack on a kosher supermarket – that:

“Many critics of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.”

He then goes on to lecture her:

“But you understand; everything is seen from different perspectives.”

Here’s a short clip of his interview:

Wilcox later apologized but the “apology” was such a travesty that it itself became a further insult:

The reporter later took to social media platform Twitter to offer an apology of sorts. “Really sorry for any offense caused by a poorly phrased question in a live interview in Paris yesterday – it was entirely unintentional,” Willcox wrote.

Campaigners against anti-Semitism were unimpressed, however. “Tim Willcox is right to have apologized for the question, but the thinking behind it was just as problematic as the way he phrased it,” Dave Rich, Deputy Director of Communications for the Community Security Trust, the official communal security body of British Jews, told The Algemeiner. “There are simply no grounds on which to suggest that random Jewish shoppers in a Paris kosher grocery might be responsible for the fate of the Palestinians.”

Michael Salberg of the Anti-Defamation League accused Willcox of engaging in “anti-Semitism, plain and simple,” describing the reporter as “a proponent of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and stereotypes.” As The Algemeiner reported last November, Willcox caused a separate furore during a BBC television panel discussion when he suggested that Jewish voters uncomfortable with British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband’s stance on Israel were motivated by financial concerns. “A lot of these prominent Jewish faces will be very much against the mansion tax,” Willcox said, referring to a Labour proposal for an additional tax on properties worth $3.5 million or more.

Wilcox is a disgrace and the fact that he hasn’t been fired by the BBC reflects as much on the BBC as on himself.

CNN downplayed the targeting of the Jews:

On CNN, meanwhile, reporters Chris Cuomo and Isa Soares implied that the assault on kosher supermarket Hyper Casher had not intentionally targeted Jews since the store was located in an “ordinary” part of Paris and Muslims also shopped there.

WATCH the CNN video below:

It was only a “surprise” to anyone who has not been following the huge rise in antisemitism in France. CNN is a prime example of politically-correct blindness.

CNN’s Jim Clancy went on a total anti-semitic meltdown in a Twitter screed documented by the Elder of Ziyon, yet Clancy, like Wilcox, is still employed by CNN. Again, this reflects as much on CNN as on Clancy.

Meanwhile the New York Times found the eve of the funerals of the Jewish victims the perfect timing to publish an anti-Israel op-ed by an Israeli:

Even a week of terrorist outrages in Paris wasn’t enough to convince the New York Times editorial page to temporarily suspend its obsession with the supposed evils of Israeli policy.

On Monday morning, alongside a piece signed by the Times Editorial Board which discussed anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in France in several places – but did not deign to mention the fear among French Jews of rising anti-Semitism – readers of the “newspaper of record” were confronted with another article, entitled “Why I Won’t Serve Israel.”

…

Gilead Ini, a senior analyst with media watchdog CAMERA, slammed the Times for “perversely using the emigration of over one percent of the French Jewish population as an occasion to do what the newspaper does so often: Undermine Israel’s right to exist or, in this case, its ability to defend itself, by giving the country’s most marginal and hateful critics a platform.”

Added Ini: “It is a reminder that the New York Times opinion editor recently admitted to treating Israel with a harsher standard.”

For Rabbi Cooper, however, the publication of the piece “inadvertently highlighted an important truth.”

“Israel the only democracy in the neighborhood,” he said. “Good luck to the author if he had dared pen such a piece from Beirut, Damascus or Tehran.”

Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post quotes Canadian PM Stephen Harper and Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu’s statements on the terror attacks and then notes:

Israel is the beacon of light, the representative of democratic values and civilization itself in the Middle East. This is obviously why jihadists seek to destroy “Little Satan”; it is a warm-up to taking on Big Satan, the United States.

Like it or not, the Europeans and the left more generally have taken up anti-Israel doctrine as part of their creed, not realizing that Israel is essential to their survival and the values of democracy, pluralism and tolerance. It is not merely that Israel battles the jihadists in the Middle East, although this is crucial to the West. More important, Israel’s existence is confirmation that the West will defend itself, that those who yearn for a new caliphate do not get a free pass. Its presence is a refutation of the Islamists’ vision.

Killing Jews as the first step in a barbaric onslaught is, alas, not unique to the Islamic terrorists. It is an uncomfortable truth that whatever the latest “ism,” forces of tyranny and suppression target Jews, whether it is Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or the jihadists in Gaza and Tehran. If ever there is confusion about who is the enemy of civilization itself, look at who is seeking to kill Jews.

The trouble is that the West, its leadership and its media, are having great difficulty in internalising and acknowledging that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Israel or Jews per se, nor with anything Israel is perceived to have done.

The West has a problem understanding or agreeing that those same Hamas terrorists that Israel is fighting in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon are of the same jihadist mindset as the Paris murderers or the 9/11 terrorists or the Muslim terrorists who blew up buses and trains in Madrid and London on 7/7, and committed mass murder in Bali and Mumbai, and who killed hostages in an Australian cafe. Israel’s building settlements or demanding the right to pray on the Temple Mount is irrelevant to the Jihadis, no matter what they say to willing ears in the Western media. The Muslim terrorists’ problem with Israel is that it exists, full stop.

It’s long beyond high time that the world stopped hectoring Israel on what it “must” or “must not” do. As long as Israel exists we will be the target of terrorism, and Western antagonism to us only encourages the terrorists.

Moreover this Western hostility to Israel makes the Jihadists miscalculate and think that since the world blames Israel for the terrorism targeting it, they can similarly get away with targeting the West. And thus the roundabout continues. As one Twitter user observed:

https://twitter.com/ThisIsPalestine/status/555036840496209921

Categories: Antisemitism, Europe, France, Islam, Terrorism
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Comments: 1 Comment

Anti-Zionism = Antisemitism: The hypocritical obsession with Gaza

August 11, 2014

Anti-Zionism = Antisemitism: The hypocritical obsession with Gaza 

by anneinpt | Anne’s Opinions 11th August 2014

The media feeds antisemitism with its biased articles about Israel and then is shocked! shocked! at the surge of antisemitism.– AP)

The longer Israel’s war against the barbaric nihilist jihadists of Hamas drags on, the more anti-Israel protests take place around the world, and the more antisemitic those protests become. I addressed this subject a few weeks ago when the Gaza war began, but as we can see, the phenomenon has only worsened. What’s more, this obsession with Gaza’s victims highlights the hypocrisy of the protestors when you consider their utter lack of response to the barbaric atrocities being carried out by ISIS, Assad in Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria and so much more Muslim-on-Muslim violence.

This tweet illustrates the one-sidedness so clearly:

Here is the Bolt Report from (I think) Australian TV giving just a short list of the antisemitic protests that have taken place recently – and that does not include all of the protests in my above-mentioned post.

Since I’m an ex-Londoner I’m going to concentrate for now on the ugly displays of antisemitism that have occurred in Britain.

To start with, some politicians have gotten in on the act in a most despicable way, and it must be borne in mind that politicians act when they feel they have the public behind them, and conversely many members of the public take their lead from their politicians. This has therefore carries the danger of a ripple effect for Britain’s Jewish community.

The Respect Party (pfft!) MP George Galloway declared his constituency of Bradford an “Israel-free zone”:

The notoriously anti-Israel Galloway told a meeting of the Respect Party which he heads that Israelis of any persuasion were “not welcome” in Bradford, where serves as MP.

“We have declared Bradford an Israel free zone,” he told party activists at the meeting in Leeds.

“We don’t want any Israeli goods. We don’t want any Israeli services. We don’t want any Israeli academics, coming to the university or the college. We don’t even want any Israeli tourists to come to Bradford if any of them had thought of doing so.

“We reject this illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel. And you have to do the same.”

As noted on the Guido Fawkes blog which initially posted the video, Israeli tourists are hardly going to be rushing to make changes to their holiday plans, as Bradford is not a tourist attraction by any means. Some areas of the city suffering from the worst levels of social deprivation in all of the UK, and is a hot spot for Muslim extremism.

Galloway has a long history of anti-Israeli bigotry. He was branded a racist when he stormed out of a debate after finding out that his opponent was Israel, saying “I don’t debate with Israelis.” He has also publicly aired several bizarre anti-Israel conspiracy theories, including claims that Israel was engineering unrest in Ukraine, and that the Jewish state had given chemical weapons to Al Qaeda – comments he then denied making despite them having been recorded.

His declaration notwithstanding, a crowd of cheeky Israelis challenged his authority with a visit to Bradford, complete with flags!

Personally, I wouldn’t have graced the place with my presence, but good for them.

Lord John Prescott wrote a revolting article in the Mirror accusing Israel of turning Gaza into a concentration camp resembling the Warsaw Ghetto (I shall not link to his execrable screed). Blogger Ray Cook took him to task for his ignorance and provocation in an excellent fisking.

Earlier last week Baroness Sayeeda Warsi resigned from the government in protest at the British Government’s policy on Gaza – i.e. they didn’t condemn enough for her liking. A Daily Telegraph editorial dismissed her resignation:

She alleges that the even-handed position adopted by Britain towards the two combatants is “morally indefensible”. This suggests that Lady Warsi wanted far greater condemnation of Israel than has been forthcoming from David Cameron and his ministers. But how would that have helped matters? “Megaphone diplomacy,” as Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary called it, might make some people in the West feel better – but it does not deal with the issues that brought about the carnage in Gaza. Nor is Lady Warsi impartial in her interpretation of what is “morally indefensible”. She might have been on surer ground had she been equally condemnatory of Hamas and its bombardment of Israel with rockets.

Palestinian flag flies from Glasgow City Hall

The Glasgow local council also got in on the act of supporting Hamas by flying a Palestinian flag from City Hall, causing consternation, antagonism and a general outcry:

Glasgow’s council has provoked controversy by flying the flag of the Palestinian people from the City Hall.

They seemed oblivious of the hurt and fear this would cause the local Jewish community:

“We met with people from the Jewish Representative Council … The last thing we want to do is offend anyone and we absolutely condemn any anti-Semitism anywhere and we feel for the victims of the conflict no matter which side they are on.

“We are working with the Jewish Representative Council to try and allay any fears they might have but we feel absolutely that we have to show solidarity with the victims of this conflict, many of whom are innocent children.”

Hmm. But not Israeli children obviously. They don’t deserve anyone’s solidarity or sympathy.

The Daily Telegraph slammed Glasgow’s decision as “gesture politics”:

David Meikle, the Scottish Conservative councillor, said he was disappointed the decision was taken without consulting members and said it could cause division in the city.

He added: “I not that the Lord Provost has also written to the mayor of Bethlehem advising them of the decision to fly the flag. I failed to read in the letter where the Lord Provost mentions the plight of the Christian population in Bethlehem who are leaving owing to harassment.

“I also failed to see in the letter any condemnation of the Hamas terrorists who have declared war on Israel and their use of civilians as human shields to protect its forces.”

The Daily Express too condemned Glasgow’s provocative flag-waving and said Glasgow had lost the admiration of the world after the success of the Commonwealth Games last week:

Since only the Palestinian flag will be seen fluttering above the chamber’s Victorian cupolas, we can presume that Ms Docherty’s sympathies do not extend to the men, women and children terrorised day and night by Hamas’s rockets, 180 of which have been fired into Israel within the space of just three days.

It is worth reminding ourselves who started the present conflict in Gaza because it is plain that Glasgow, and other councils who have also decided to fly the Palestinian flag, seem congenitally incapable of trying to understand its byzantine roots, preferring to demonstrate their “caring” attitude by implying that all the blame lies at the feet of the Israelis and their government.

The Daily Express bravely reminds its readers how these pro-Palestinian gestures rapidly descend into antisemitism:

Indeed, the very idea that we have a government in Edinburgh who seek to aid organisations endlessly committed to the destruction, not just of Israel, but also of the Jewish people, is sickening.

It is, of course, unthinkable that any of these councillors would agree to a similar gesture demonising any other ethnic group or nation. Just imagine the furore if the Italian, the Polish, the Chinese, the Pakistani, the Indian or even the English communities were effectively being held up to general vilification.

Yet it seems that demonstrations of anti-Jewishness are somehow allowable in the world of right-on municipal thinking.

The British cultural elite have also displayed their antisemitism once again as the Tricycle Theatre cancelled its Jewish (not Israeli) Film Festival because it receives backing from (gasp!) the Israeli Embassy in London:

In a move condemned as “anti-Semitic”, a London theater has shocked the British Jewish community by refusing to host the UK Jewish Film Festival this coming November, because the event is sponsored by the Israeli embassy.

The Tricycle Theatre was to have been the main venue for the UKJFF for the eighth year running, hosting 26 separate screenings and six gala events, according to the Jewish Chronicle, but venue directors told festival organizers that they did not want to be “associated” with the Israeli embassy.

…

But when asked by Arutz Sheva whether they had ever previously refused to host an event which had ties to a country involved in an armed conflict, and how it could justify asking Jews to renounce ties to their own homeland as a precondition to being hosted at the venue, the theater said it had “nothing to add” to Rubasingham’s comments.

The decision has been attacked as anti-Semitic by prominent British Jews, including the Jewish Chronicle‘s editor, Stephen Pollard:

https://twitter.com/stephenpollard/statuses/496692124004651008

In Cambridge meanwhile a pro-Palestinian antisemitic demonstration was cancelled following huge outrage (via Harry’s Place). It was intended to have been held outside a synagogue on Friday night! (a clear-cut case of antisemitism):

One user Jay Stoll wrote on Twitter: “There is a planned protest outside Cambridge Synagogue on Shabbat? Is this some sick joke? Unjustifiable.”

Another, Diana Muir Appelbaum described it as “vile anti-Semitism gnawing at the heart of a university.”

Michael Cahn, one of the organisers, initially posted the invitation to the Cambridge Palestine Forum’s Facebook page.

Sunday Express journalist Ted Jeory was abused as he asked about black flag in Tower Hamlets[Ted Jeory]

A horrifying article by Ted Jeory, a non-Jewish journalist, tells us how he was verbally abused and physically threatened simply for taking a photo of an ISIS flag flying in the Muslim-majority borough of Tower Hamlets:

WAS told this morning by a community activist in east London to be kind in this article to the Bengali Muslim youths who threatened violence last night…and who told me to “F*** off Jew, you’re not welcome here.”

So let me state her well-meaning view that they’re “good boys” and that they’ve been raising much money for the victims of the terrible violence in Gaza.

My wife, a Bengali Muslim herself, disagrees.

She thinks they’re a “disgrace”, both to their families and to their shared community.

My wife is always right.

…

A few more youths, all of them mid-late teens, a couple a little older, joined the group.Then one stared at me.“Are you a Jew?” he asked.I’m not. I have a large nose; I fitted his stereotype.
I glared back at him. “What if I were? Would that be a problem for you?” I asked.“Yeah,” he said. “F*** off Jew, you’re not welcome here.”

 

The Mayor of Tower Hamlets is a controversial figure in himself. To give him credit however he did try to calm the situation down:

About five minutes’ walk away from the Will Crooks estate is the Tower Hamlets town hall.

There last week, the borough’s directly elected mayor, Lutfur Rahman, ordered the flag of Palestine be raised as a “humanitarian gesture of solidarity” with Gaza.

His decision created national headlines.

Some applauded his principles; others worried his action would stoke the fires of division, that his example would somehow legitimise hatred among those less able, or willing, to spot the difference between the policies of an Israeli government and the views of the British Jewish community at large.

But to the mayor’s credit, when he heard about the incident in Poplar last night, he asked council officials to have the black flag taken down.

Sometimes it takes a non-Jew to see the situation with clarity: (emphases are mine):

It may well be that yesterday’s incident was just local hooligans looking for a cause and identity, and acting territorially on their estate.

But I think there’s probably more to it than that. They seemed to want a Jew-free zone.

The conflict in Gaza has unleashed what I think has been latent anti-Semitism in the minds or far too many in Tower Hamlets.

A few years ago, I was called ‘Ted Jewry’ by one former councillor.

He later apologised.

But social media, particularly during Ramadan, when the violence in Gaza was at its peak, was awash with pro-Hitler prejudice against Jews.

The terms ‘Jew’ and ‘Zionist’ have been used interchangeably as a form of abuse.

Official reaction to these displays of antisemitism have been predictably shock, horror and outrage. Even the Guardian (!) has denounced this phenomenon. And in the Independent, Yasmin Alibhai Brown turns herself into a pretzel worrying about the surge of antisemitism, but claiming at the same time that the charge of antisemitism is used by “Zionists” to “silence criticism of Israel” – otherwise described by David Hirsh as the Livingstone Formulation.

But there’s no reason that the UK media be given a clear pass when they themselves, through their tendentious reporting with its distortions, smears, libels of Israel in their reports from Gaza, have only encouraged such displays, and when their letters pages are full of leftist radical chic complaints about Israel’s behaviour from “Outraged from ‘Ampstead”. For examples see CiFWatch here and here and anything and everything on BBC Watch.

Until they confront their own built-in anti-Israel bias they are nothing but hypocritical.

Melanie Phillips tells us what our leaders would say if they really cared about defending Britain’s Jews:

People are aghast. Yet this lynch-mob mentality has been building for years. Every time Israel takes military action to prevent further Palestinian attacks, it is falsely presented as the aggressive persecutor of the innocent.

Unless British Jews join this demonisation, they are deemed complicit with Israel’s ‘war crimes’. As a result, attacks on British Jews always spike during Israel’s wars. So much for the supposed distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

Even more appalling is the silence in the face of all this of the political class.

…

Anti-Semitism can never be eradicated. Yet much could be done to push it back under its stone if both the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition were to display moral leadership and state a number of home truths. This is what David Cameron should say: ‘I am utterly appalled by the attacks on the Jewish people on the streets of Britain and in our public discourse. This hatred and bigotry is being fuelled by warped and distorted reporting about the Gaza war.

…

‘Frankly, in Iraq and Afghanistan we showed nothing like the care Israel is taking to avoid killing civilians wherever possible, even sacrificing its own soldiers to do so.

‘I have become aware that this Jew-hatred is fuelled by falsehoods about Israel’s historic and legal rights. Accordingly, Philip Hammond will ensure that the Foreign Office corrects its untrue claims about the ‘occupation’ and ‘illegal settlements’.

…

And this is what Ed Miliband should be saying: ‘I am horrified, not just because of the resurgence of the madness from which my own family so grievously suffered in the Holocaust, but also because we on the left bear no small responsibility for this current obscenity.

…

‘We ignore Muslim on Muslim violence in Iraq, Yemen, Libya or Gaza. We ignore the 800 or so civilians killed in Ukraine. In Syria, more than 200,000 people have been slaughtered, 2,000 in the past two weeks alone. Yet we don’t march against Assad or Putin, only against Israel.

‘We think we are progressives building a better world. We tell ourselves anti-Semitism is right-wing. We are terribly wrong. Today, anti-Semitism is overwhelmingly on the left.

…

All of that would help. So do you think there’s any chance that either of them will say it? No, me neither.

Such silence and worse by our politicians makes them complicit in this resurgence of the oldest hatred. Small wonder many British Jews now feel so betrayed, so nauseated and so alone.

Everything that Melanie Phillips writes is the truth, and moreover, is applicable to every single country in the world in which antisemitic demonstrations, disguised as fury at Israel’s actions in Gaza, have taken place.

As to the inherent hypocrisy in all this faux-outrage, Hillel Neuer of UN Watch puts it so clearly in his “Are you anti-Israel Test”:

If in the past year you didn’t CRY OUT when thousands of protesters were killed and injured by Turkey, Egypt and Libya, when more victims than ever were hanged by Iran, women and children in Afghanistan were bombed, whole communities were massacred in South Sudan, 1800 Palestinians were starved and murdered by Assad in Syria, hundreds in Pakistan were killed by jihadist terror attacks, 10,000 Iraqis were killed by terrorists, villagers were slaughtered in Nigeria, but you ONLY cry out for GAZA, then you are not pro HUMAN RIGHTS, you are only ANTI-ISRAEL.

We must not allow either the politicians or the media to get away with their slander and smearing of Israel which then incites the masses to antisemitism. They must be challenged at every turn. Certainly the likes of the IDF Spokesman Peter Lerner, Minister Naftali Bennett and MK Danny Ayalon amongst others have done sterling work in the English-speaking media. And yet – our message is not trickling down to the antisemite-in-the-street.

Perhaps local Jews have to step out of their comfort zone and confront the media like this New York Jewish protest outside the CNN offices, protesting their anger at their bias:

Kol hakavod to them!

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