I have a photograph in my gallery that makes me feel wretched every time I loook at it. It is a poor quality photograph in black and white, taken in the early 1940s. The image is fuzzy, but stark. It shows three figures, etched against a vague background. Three human figures: a woman, whose body is bent at her hips and knees; a small child in her arms, cradled protectively; and, behind them, an SS soldier with a rifle pointed at this helpless pair, ready to fire. The woman and child, if I am right, were Jewish. Well, that doesn't take much guesswork. We don't know for sure what happended in the seconds or minutes after this photograph was taken. But we can all too painfully hear the crack of the rifle, and perhaps a second shot as the soldier despatches the little boy or little girl. It is a photograph to haunt us. It speaks directly to us, because we know only too well the context.
A photograph like this raises a lot of questions. Seeing it, every decent-minded person wishes someone had been there to save the woman and child. In all likelihood, we are witnessing part of a mass killing by an einsatzgruppe, a detachment responsible for killing Jews in the days before mass killings in the camps were developed. There will have been other soldiers present, including officers, and they will have been acting on orders from higher command. No mercy will have been shown to any of the victims. Now, here's the hard bit. Those who disapprove of the use of violence (and they aren't wrong in abhorring the taking of life) would ask permission to negotiate this killing with the soldier or his superior officer. Now, it is far from impossible that is someone — a priest, say — were to speak with the soldier and set out the revulsion with which most men would regard his intended action, the soldier might have a change of conscience and set down his rifle. In doing so, however, he would know that he has added his own life to those already threatened or snuffed out. He might die on the field, or be arrested and sent to headquarters to be hanged. Few men have the courage to adopt such a position. And, admirable as such a sacrifice might be, it would be ineffective. The officer would order another soldier to carry out the deed, or would carry it out himself. Under such circumstances, lives cannot be saved.
Which takes us to the other possibility, that had the einsatzgruppe been surrounded by Allied troops or partisans, they would have been forced to surrender or would have been shot. Shooting men engaged in the taking of innocent life does n ot awaken sentiments of outrage except in the minds of those who are already morally corrupt.
After the war, many Jewish rabbis and intellectuals engaged in a debate focussing on the Hebrew phrase hester panim, which I understand to mean 'the covering of the face of G-d'. The Holocaust presented the world's surviving Jews with a theological dilemma of masssive proportions. How could a loving Creator have allowed his chosen people to go to the gas chambers, yet (apparently) protected Hitler from several suicide attempts? Had God broken with the Jews, severed his covenant with them, abandoned them? I can't answer any of those questions, but I am very aware that the general response among Jews was to re-assert the connection. Two thousand years of persecution had innured them to a sense of abandonment while giving them the strength to find meaning in the indifference or cruelty of the world through which they journeyed.
But something had changed. That something is best expressed in the words of American rabbi and novelist, Chaim Potok, in his history of the Jewish people, Wanderings. Writing of the post-Holocaust era, he writes: 'There are no more gentle Jews'. Now, there are plenty (especially on the left) who take that badly. They don't much like Jews getting uppity, and when they see Jews fighting back against military attack or terrorist assault they take the moral high ground and declare it to be something unnatural. Jews, they seem to think, are G-d's and the world's victims. Whichever, they are born to be victims. To walk to the auto-da-fe reciting the Psalms or to the gas chamber with the Shema on their lips personifies, for many, the Jew of their choice.
That takes us back to the woman and child. This, when we add it together, is Potok's referrant. The gentle Jews did not, could not save those innocents. A troop of Sayaret Matkal fighters might well have done so. And given the SS a bloody nose into the bargain. The truth is that the Allied troops didn't turn up until it was too late for most of those who had gone through the camps. As we all know, the Allies placed the Jews very low on their list of priorities. Anyone who has read Tom Bowers's A Blind Eye to Murder or The Allies and Auschwitz will have seen in detail how stopping the killing in the camps carried no weight in the eyes of those responsible for prosecuting the war. Now, some of that failure may be set at the gate of anti-Semitism among politicians and civil servants, and some of it may have been due to a sincere belief that the defeat of the Third Reich was the priority, whatever the cost. That's not what concerns me here. Whatever the motives and whatever the correctness of saving all firepower for the Russian or Italian front, the fact is that the Jews could see that it wasn't just G-d who had hidden his face, it was much of humanity. And subsequent British antagonism to Holocaust survivors entering Palestine and the decision to keep survivors in camps on Cyprus brought many up with a jolt. How could those who had fought so hard to bring down the most evil empire in history, knowing now that 6 million Jews had died in death camps, now turn aside from those whom they and their allies had saved, turn their boats back from the shores of the Holy Land, let them drown only a short distance from the one place they had longed to make their homes in?
And then God took the veil away from his face and the state of Israel came into being. I'm not a believer, but I write that with full awareness of how the creation of a Jewish state was seen by a majority of the Jewish people. It was — and perhaps this is pushing things a little — almost a divine reward for the suffering the Jews had just passed through. And one of the many things Israel allowed was the creation of an army, an air force, and a navy. Time and again, when Israel's enemies have attacked her, threatening genocide, they have had their noses bloodied. Many have died, but there has never been a second Holocaust, however much the Arab and Muslim worlds may long for one. A strong Israel is the answer to the horror of that photograph. Today the world whines about the actions Israel takes to defend herself and her people. That same world would have stood next to our woman and child and told her to take it and not complain.
Today, rockets land in Sderot and Ashkelon. Hizbullah and Hamas amass armaments that would pose a threat to any country on earth. Their leaders echo the Nazi-speak of 1930s Germany. Back then, Jews felt powerless, and sat and waited for an indication that the worst was over, that Germans would come to their senses, that the rhetoric would come to nothing, that Der Sturmer was a sick joke at best. Who can blame them? But today, who can blame the Israelis for thinking their lives and their nation are at serious? Who can deny that, once again, the nations will look on, will pass by on the other side of the road, will deny they are anti-Semitic while they shake hands with Hamas and Hizbullah and the rulers of Iran? Today, Israel is a women, bent at the knees and hips, a child in her arms, waiting for the bullet that will pound through her head. But today, she will put the child on his feet and turn to face the SS soldier, and she will hold an Uzi sub-machine gun in her hand. Is it grotesque for that to happen? So many left-wingers, Jews and non-Jews together, say that it is, that Israel has less right to exist than our woman in the photograph. If rockets were landing in their back gardens, they mightg well ring for the police and ask for some sort of action by the military. They would not be supine in the face of an existential threat. But they will not go out there, sniper's rifle in hand, to shoot the SS guards who threaten innocent women and children. That will be their eternal shame.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
Myths and Historical Fact
The following was sent recently to the Irish Times in response to a long letter that had appeared there. I don't know if the Times ever published my reply, but it's long enough to fit this blog, so here it is.
Despite Tomas McBride (Letters, 22 May), supporters of
Israel do not need to resort to myth in order to
justify the existence of a modern Jewish state. Let's
leave the Torah to one side for a moment. Israel came
into being, not from a mythical 'Jewish invasion' of
British mandate Palestine, but as the result of a long
political process that started in the late 19th
century as the Ottoman empire drew to its end. After
the second world war and a long debate, the United
Nations voted by a majority for the creation of a
small Jewish state alongside other mandate or
ex-mandate states. In other words, Israel was carved
out of the old empire much as modern Iraq, Lebanon,
Syria, or Jordan. This happened in part because
post-war re-apportionment of land in general is
commonplace, but for the greater part because the UN
was a new way to administer international law and the
necessary adjustments between nations. The nearest
parallel was the resettlement of 2 million people
following the partition of India to create Pakistan
(and, later, Bangladesh) — oddly enough, no Muslim
voices are raised to complain about this.
Unfortunately, nations in the modern form, modelled on
the concept of the Westphalian state, had never
existed in Islam (though various forms of Arab
nationalism, like Jewish nationalism, were being
advocated in this period). This is why the Arab states
who invaded Israel with the expressed intention of
driving all Jews into the Mediterranean simply refused
to behave like UN member states at all. That Jews had
taken control of even a tiny sliver of Islamic
territory was anathema, giving rise to what was in
essence a religious animus calling for genocide. By
that time too, Palestinian politics had been
irredeemably tainted by association with the Third
Reich. The Reich's leading Arab collaborator, Hajj
Amin al-Husayni, the Palestinian leader, had fled
after the Nazi defeat and was feted in Cairo as a hero
of the Arab people.
To dismiss Jewish longing to return to Israel as
merely a myth-centred nonsense displays an absolute
insensitivity to aspirations, whether religious or
national. All peoples, religions, and nations have
founding myths. The Jews have one of the strongest.
Their belief in a land that was given them by God may
or may not be historically true, but it is a vivid,
enduring, and necessary expression of the significance
Jews have placed in Israel for thousands of years.
Jerusalem is sacred to Jews much as Mecca and Medina
are to Muslims. It is certainly much better attested
than the historically invalid attempt of modern
Palestinians (a hybrid group) to assert Palestinian
occupation of that land for a similar length of time;
or to claim a link between modern Palestinians and the
ancient Philistines; or, most glaringly, that the Jews
have never had a historical connection to the land.
Pull the other one.
For two thousand years, Jews have expressed a daily
hope of return to the Holy Land. That sense of
belonging, that connection to history, are something
greater than myth, though often inspired by it. We do
not mock other religions for holding non-rational
beliefs, we do not try to make political capital out
of national struggles based on a longing for a return
to a Golden Age. The statue of Cuchulainn outside the
General Post Office is there for a reason. Or consider
the opening words of the Proclamation of Independence:
'IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of
the dead generations from which she receives her old
tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons
her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.'
Or all those murals of King Billy crossing the Boyne.
Jews trace their origins back as far as that and
further. That is why they chose and were given a
homeland where every town, every hill, every river,
every archaeological excavation, and every stone in
the Western Wall resonates. And given the momentous
horror of the Holocaust and how close mankind came to
witnessing an extermination of the Jewish people, that
resonance could not have been greater. Persecuted
though we may have been by the British occupation, we
were never in danger of being wiped out. Since 1948,
the Palestinian Arabs have increased from 1,700,000 to
2.5 million (with claims of over 3 million). That is
the truth of the 'Palestinian Holocaust', another myth
that is swallowed too readily. If I am to believe in
the right of the Irish people to a homeland where
Cuchulainn may or may not have walked, how can I deny
the Jews their unarguable right to seek refuge for the
first time in two millennia in a land they have prayed
for every day of their lives? By contrast, Jerusalem
has little resonance in Islam: soon after migrating to
Medina, the prophet Muhammad, who had prayed towards
Jerusalem in imitation of the Jews, turned his back on
the city and chose instead to pray towards Mecca, as
all Muslims do today. Jews recite the words of the
Psalm: 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right
hand wither, let my tongue cleave to my palate if I do
not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my
highest joy'. The Qur'an doesn't even mention
Jerusalem.
The Arabs cannot have it both ways. They cannot belong
to the United Nations and work to undermine its very
principles. Their states are dictatorships and absolute
monarchies, they deny their citizens basic human
rights, they reduce women to an inferior status, they
deny religious minorities the freedoms called for in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet they
denounce Israel, the only country in the Middle East
that implements those rights in a democratic state.
What are we looking for, in the end? Stability,
democracy, the rule of law, rights for everyone
regardless of colour, sex, or creed? Or genocide by
Hamas and Hizbullah, followed by theocratic rule that
will bring executions, stonings, and the minimum of
rights for any remaining religious minorities? Israel
has achieved great things. It has some way to go, but
every time we attack it or snipe at it or give
terrorists succour, we undermine the very things we
claim to stand for.
Despite Tomas McBride (Letters, 22 May), supporters of
Israel do not need to resort to myth in order to
justify the existence of a modern Jewish state. Let's
leave the Torah to one side for a moment. Israel came
into being, not from a mythical 'Jewish invasion' of
British mandate Palestine, but as the result of a long
political process that started in the late 19th
century as the Ottoman empire drew to its end. After
the second world war and a long debate, the United
Nations voted by a majority for the creation of a
small Jewish state alongside other mandate or
ex-mandate states. In other words, Israel was carved
out of the old empire much as modern Iraq, Lebanon,
Syria, or Jordan. This happened in part because
post-war re-apportionment of land in general is
commonplace, but for the greater part because the UN
was a new way to administer international law and the
necessary adjustments between nations. The nearest
parallel was the resettlement of 2 million people
following the partition of India to create Pakistan
(and, later, Bangladesh) — oddly enough, no Muslim
voices are raised to complain about this.
Unfortunately, nations in the modern form, modelled on
the concept of the Westphalian state, had never
existed in Islam (though various forms of Arab
nationalism, like Jewish nationalism, were being
advocated in this period). This is why the Arab states
who invaded Israel with the expressed intention of
driving all Jews into the Mediterranean simply refused
to behave like UN member states at all. That Jews had
taken control of even a tiny sliver of Islamic
territory was anathema, giving rise to what was in
essence a religious animus calling for genocide. By
that time too, Palestinian politics had been
irredeemably tainted by association with the Third
Reich. The Reich's leading Arab collaborator, Hajj
Amin al-Husayni, the Palestinian leader, had fled
after the Nazi defeat and was feted in Cairo as a hero
of the Arab people.
To dismiss Jewish longing to return to Israel as
merely a myth-centred nonsense displays an absolute
insensitivity to aspirations, whether religious or
national. All peoples, religions, and nations have
founding myths. The Jews have one of the strongest.
Their belief in a land that was given them by God may
or may not be historically true, but it is a vivid,
enduring, and necessary expression of the significance
Jews have placed in Israel for thousands of years.
Jerusalem is sacred to Jews much as Mecca and Medina
are to Muslims. It is certainly much better attested
than the historically invalid attempt of modern
Palestinians (a hybrid group) to assert Palestinian
occupation of that land for a similar length of time;
or to claim a link between modern Palestinians and the
ancient Philistines; or, most glaringly, that the Jews
have never had a historical connection to the land.
Pull the other one.
For two thousand years, Jews have expressed a daily
hope of return to the Holy Land. That sense of
belonging, that connection to history, are something
greater than myth, though often inspired by it. We do
not mock other religions for holding non-rational
beliefs, we do not try to make political capital out
of national struggles based on a longing for a return
to a Golden Age. The statue of Cuchulainn outside the
General Post Office is there for a reason. Or consider
the opening words of the Proclamation of Independence:
'IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of
the dead generations from which she receives her old
tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons
her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.'
Or all those murals of King Billy crossing the Boyne.
Jews trace their origins back as far as that and
further. That is why they chose and were given a
homeland where every town, every hill, every river,
every archaeological excavation, and every stone in
the Western Wall resonates. And given the momentous
horror of the Holocaust and how close mankind came to
witnessing an extermination of the Jewish people, that
resonance could not have been greater. Persecuted
though we may have been by the British occupation, we
were never in danger of being wiped out. Since 1948,
the Palestinian Arabs have increased from 1,700,000 to
2.5 million (with claims of over 3 million). That is
the truth of the 'Palestinian Holocaust', another myth
that is swallowed too readily. If I am to believe in
the right of the Irish people to a homeland where
Cuchulainn may or may not have walked, how can I deny
the Jews their unarguable right to seek refuge for the
first time in two millennia in a land they have prayed
for every day of their lives? By contrast, Jerusalem
has little resonance in Islam: soon after migrating to
Medina, the prophet Muhammad, who had prayed towards
Jerusalem in imitation of the Jews, turned his back on
the city and chose instead to pray towards Mecca, as
all Muslims do today. Jews recite the words of the
Psalm: 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right
hand wither, let my tongue cleave to my palate if I do
not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my
highest joy'. The Qur'an doesn't even mention
Jerusalem.
The Arabs cannot have it both ways. They cannot belong
to the United Nations and work to undermine its very
principles. Their states are dictatorships and absolute
monarchies, they deny their citizens basic human
rights, they reduce women to an inferior status, they
deny religious minorities the freedoms called for in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet they
denounce Israel, the only country in the Middle East
that implements those rights in a democratic state.
What are we looking for, in the end? Stability,
democracy, the rule of law, rights for everyone
regardless of colour, sex, or creed? Or genocide by
Hamas and Hizbullah, followed by theocratic rule that
will bring executions, stonings, and the minimum of
rights for any remaining religious minorities? Israel
has achieved great things. It has some way to go, but
every time we attack it or snipe at it or give
terrorists succour, we undermine the very things we
claim to stand for.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The stand-bys
We Westerners have become the stand-bys, the people who protest about everything and never actually do anything useful. In Burma, where over a million may die in an epidemic, the government refuses to let aid agencies and aid into the country. Cue photographs of Western diplomats smiling and shaking hands with members of the ruling junta. There is much wringing of hands, but nobody actually does anything. A great crime is being committed, but its perpetrators know all too well that no international policeman will arrive to arrest and imprison them. In Lebanon, Hizbullah threaten to take control from the legitimate government. UN troops, sent there to prevent Hizbullah re-arming, whistle through their teeth as they watch the rockets being shipped in. Hizbullah captures a southern village that gives them a vantage point over northern Israel and thus betokens another war; and the United Nations does sod all. I have just watched a gruelling video of four men being stoned to death in Iran. I had to switch it off. No-one stepped in to prevent this vile act, an act that debases a great nation and all humanity. James Bond did not arrive by plane or supercharged sports car, no-one took a pistol and shot the mullah in charge of the event, I don't think a question was asked in the House of Commons or in Congress, and I don't recall the Iranian ambassador ever being hauled in to explain these or any other deaths.
What are we scared of? World opinion? We are the world, or at least the richest and strongest part of it. What do we care about some two-bit tinpot dictatorship in Africa or the Arab world? Why should they outvote the democracies in the General Assembly or the UN Commission for Human Rights? Robert Mugabe destroys an entire country, its economy, and the lives of its people. We shake our heads because it would be improper to assassinate him or even go in and arrest him. If we apply that logic to Britain or any other country, the police would stand back from arresting drug dealers and criminal masterminds. Israel is the only country that says, if someone is a mass murderer and threatens to kill more innocent people, it is ethical to go in and take him out. If Saddam Husayn has built a nuclear reactor, it is for everyone's benefit to blow it to pieces. If terrorists have taken a plane-load of your people and threaten to kill them, you send hard men in after the terrorists, you kill them, and you rescue the hostages.
It is a mockery of the international system that Israel, a member state of the UN, has fought wars and terrorist attacks for 60 years, yet not one other member state has come to its aid. Nato was founded on the basis that an attack on any member country was to be considered an attack on everyone, and that retaliation would follow from all member states. That is still true. Similar alliances exist elsewhere. Of course, the UN is not a military alliance; but it still makes no sense to me that there can be no role for the UN when Israel is attacked by wholly illegal entities like Hamas or Hizbullah. It's not even a case of asking the UN to send in fighting troops to go into battle alongside Israelis, simply wondering why the UN chooses not to enforce international law when it is so blatantly broken by a group like Hizbullah that was founded and is backed by a regime who record in human rights or in international relations is consistently black. What do you have to do to get the UN, to which you pay your membership dues, to do what it was set up to do?
It matters hugely to the West that Hizbullah does not set the Middle East alight, that Iran and Syria do not take joint control of Lebanon, that they do not use their alliance with Hamas to engage in another war with Israel, and that Syria does not try to drag Jordan into it. But surely this is the point. It is precisely because the West (like the UN) stood aside during the last war in Lebanon, and put heavy pressure on Israel to end the war prematurely, that Hizbullah was able to come out of the conflict ready to re-arm and re-group. thereby creating the present situation. To be honest, if the West (or the UN) had acted years ago, Hizbullah could have been flattened before they got the missiles they now use. The same with Hamas.
Everyone is afraid — and rightly afraid — of starting a war with Iran. Attacking Hizbullah could lead to that. Taking out Iran's nucleaer installations could lead to it. Iran is a big country with difficult terrain and a large population. A war would be foolish and Western troops would get even more bogged down than they are now in Iraq or Afghanistan. US blunders in Iraq have made life easier for Ahmadinezhad and his generals. I cannot suggest the right course of action. Perhaps no-one in the West really cares: if Israel is all that's at stake, no doubt a lot of people can live with that. We don't reward heroism any longer, not if it ruffles feathers in high places. We are politically correct, which means we hate Israel and love the terrorists masquerading as freedom fighters who want to destroy her body and soul. They want to destroy Israel's spirit, and they know no-one out there has a spirit like it, and that no-one dare trespass the laws of 'do not speak', 'do not call on others to speak', 'do not act', and 'do not urge others to take action'. Let us prove them wrong.
What are we scared of? World opinion? We are the world, or at least the richest and strongest part of it. What do we care about some two-bit tinpot dictatorship in Africa or the Arab world? Why should they outvote the democracies in the General Assembly or the UN Commission for Human Rights? Robert Mugabe destroys an entire country, its economy, and the lives of its people. We shake our heads because it would be improper to assassinate him or even go in and arrest him. If we apply that logic to Britain or any other country, the police would stand back from arresting drug dealers and criminal masterminds. Israel is the only country that says, if someone is a mass murderer and threatens to kill more innocent people, it is ethical to go in and take him out. If Saddam Husayn has built a nuclear reactor, it is for everyone's benefit to blow it to pieces. If terrorists have taken a plane-load of your people and threaten to kill them, you send hard men in after the terrorists, you kill them, and you rescue the hostages.
It is a mockery of the international system that Israel, a member state of the UN, has fought wars and terrorist attacks for 60 years, yet not one other member state has come to its aid. Nato was founded on the basis that an attack on any member country was to be considered an attack on everyone, and that retaliation would follow from all member states. That is still true. Similar alliances exist elsewhere. Of course, the UN is not a military alliance; but it still makes no sense to me that there can be no role for the UN when Israel is attacked by wholly illegal entities like Hamas or Hizbullah. It's not even a case of asking the UN to send in fighting troops to go into battle alongside Israelis, simply wondering why the UN chooses not to enforce international law when it is so blatantly broken by a group like Hizbullah that was founded and is backed by a regime who record in human rights or in international relations is consistently black. What do you have to do to get the UN, to which you pay your membership dues, to do what it was set up to do?
It matters hugely to the West that Hizbullah does not set the Middle East alight, that Iran and Syria do not take joint control of Lebanon, that they do not use their alliance with Hamas to engage in another war with Israel, and that Syria does not try to drag Jordan into it. But surely this is the point. It is precisely because the West (like the UN) stood aside during the last war in Lebanon, and put heavy pressure on Israel to end the war prematurely, that Hizbullah was able to come out of the conflict ready to re-arm and re-group. thereby creating the present situation. To be honest, if the West (or the UN) had acted years ago, Hizbullah could have been flattened before they got the missiles they now use. The same with Hamas.
Everyone is afraid — and rightly afraid — of starting a war with Iran. Attacking Hizbullah could lead to that. Taking out Iran's nucleaer installations could lead to it. Iran is a big country with difficult terrain and a large population. A war would be foolish and Western troops would get even more bogged down than they are now in Iraq or Afghanistan. US blunders in Iraq have made life easier for Ahmadinezhad and his generals. I cannot suggest the right course of action. Perhaps no-one in the West really cares: if Israel is all that's at stake, no doubt a lot of people can live with that. We don't reward heroism any longer, not if it ruffles feathers in high places. We are politically correct, which means we hate Israel and love the terrorists masquerading as freedom fighters who want to destroy her body and soul. They want to destroy Israel's spirit, and they know no-one out there has a spirit like it, and that no-one dare trespass the laws of 'do not speak', 'do not call on others to speak', 'do not act', and 'do not urge others to take action'. Let us prove them wrong.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Reflections on the Nazi State
I’m afraid. Let me try to explain why. I was born four years after the end of the Second World War. Throughout my childhood and early youth, I was taught about why that war had been fought, why it had been essential to defeat Nazi Germany, and why we must never let something like that happen again. Above all, it was instilled in me that we must never allow a second Holocaust to happen. It had been the greatest crime in human history, and the Nazis had been the greatest criminals of all time.
The worst thing about the Third Reich was that it came to power in a modern nation, a nation that prided itself on its culture, its science, its legal system, its religious and social values. This was the horror, that something primitive, bestial, and anti-human came out of what both Germans and their neighbours considered a civilized and progressive people. Even today, when we read or watch newsreels about the Reich, the Nazi Party, the SS, the vast apparatus of that singular evil, we are confronted by a cold-hearted wickedness that has no parallel in modern history. It remains the supreme evil of modern times, despite the emergence of many tyrannies and tyrants since its time.
When we think of German fascism, we think of the ruthlessness of the blitzkrieg, the extermination of villages, the destruction of Warsaw, the mass killings of Jews by einzatsgruppen, the torture and murder refined by the Gestapo, the utter abuse of innocence by a conscious option for evil, and, above all, the death camps. To my generation, the swastika and the totenkopf, the chic black uniforms, the rallies, the goose-stepping formations, the diving stukas, the barbed wire, the piano-wire hangings, the gas chambers, the watchtowers, the jackboots, the Hitlergrüss salutes, the lightning-flash SS badges, the black coats of the secret police, the U-boat packs, and the overweening arrogance all spoke of one thing: an evil so removed from good that it should never be repeated, however long the human race endures.
I began by saying I am afraid. Afraid of what? Of the truth that, just over sixty years after the end of that long and costly war, after the Nuremberg trials that laid bare Germany’s infamy, after the sorrow and grief that consumed Europe and Russia, I hear our understanding of that evil abused. It is as if a new generation has forgotten what Nazism was all about, as if all our common understandings have been twisted until they are no longer recognizable.
In what way? In the repeated statements found among sections of the left and centre that describe Israelis as Nazis, that speak of a ‘Palestinian Holocaust’, that define Israel as the new Reich and its actions on a par with those of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. It is scarcely possible to say how sick and frightened it makes me to read such remarks, not least when I realize that they are often made by seemingly intelligent, well-educated people. What is worse, they have become part of a wider distortion of historical truth that denies the Holocaust, blames the Jews for having provoked Hitler and everyone who ever persecuted them throughout history, and finds an excuse for its anti-Semitism in mealy-mouthed declarations of guiltlessness: ‘I am only anti-Zionist’.
So let’s put some of this to rest. Leaving aside the Suez debacle (in which Britain and France were also involved), Israel has only ever fought defensive wars. Again and again, Israelis have fought, not just for their own lives, but for the life of their nation — a nation created to provide a haven for Jews in a world that had just disposed of six million of them. They have never used the total war tactics of the Nazis, nor have they once envisaged the genocide of the Palestinians. If they had really been Nazis, does anyone imagine they would have left a Palestinian alive? If they really used Nazi military tactics, do you think the death toll in the recent war in Lebanon would have been around 1,000, most of the dead Hizbullah guerrillas?
There’s simply no point in using derogatory terms like ‘Nazi’, ‘genocidal’, or ‘racist’ if they don’t fit. And such language doesn’t fit Israel. Criticize Israel by all means — Israelis do it all the time — but play fair. Too many people on the Left have betrayed their own ideals of honesty and justice by demonizing a people whose only wish is for peace and security. There are things wrong about Israel, and you should take care to identify them and write to your nearest Israeli embassy about them: you’ll find a listening ear, and maybe your criticisms will do real good. But there’s no point in standing on street corners with a megaphone, yelling to the general public that Israelis are Nazis, because only someone as badly informed as yourself will listen to you.
What frightens me more than anything, though, is the hypocrisy. Left-wingers and liberals always had an honourable history of opposition to anti-Semitism. They stood up for Jews, in the same way Jews in the 60s were among the most active figures in the American Civil Rights Movement. Back in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, it was a matter of honour for liberals to defend the Jews in their own countries and Israel abroad. But now? The Left has sold out totally to the lure of anti-Semitism. ‘We only hate Israel, not Jews,’ you say? Then why have so many left-wingers and liberals joined forces with the Palestinians and other Arabs, or with Iranians or Pakistanis, whose cultures are saturated with the most obnoxious anti-Jewish imagery and rhetoric that has existed outside the Third Reich? I’m not talking here about something half-hidden, some dirty secret that you might well not have come across. I’m talking about mainstream TV shows, broadcasts on a variety of national radio stations, children’s cartoons, school textbooks, mosque sermons, and large political rallies.
It’s all there: the hooked noses, the grasping hands, the conspiracies, the sacrifice of Christian and Muslim children, the mixing of their blood with matzo flour, the secret cabals, the sheer Nazi-like horror of the filthy, blood-sucking, world-dominating Jew. If you think you’re a liberal, then what in God’s name induces you to throw in your lot with real Nazism, pour scorn on Jews who have been fighting for their lives for well over sixty years, and then gallingly call those same Jews Nazis?
You say you haven’t seen any of this? Then you really are a fool to give your support to a society you know next to nothing about. You consider Hamas ‘freedom fighters’: have you noticed the salute they give in rallies? You think of Hizbullah as ‘heroes of the resistance’: have you ever seen how they salute? If it was Hitler up on the podium, no-one would be surprised.
This all requires a more detailed discussion. For the moment, I will only say that this link between modern Arab anti-Semitism and the Third Reich variety is not accidental. While Jews were dying in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Birkenau, the Palestinian leadership was collaborating with the Reich, recruiting troops for the SS, and planning to build a death camp in Hebron. Jew-hating fascism did not die with the overthrow of the Third Reich: it moved to the Arab world where, believe it or not, the world’s liberals now sing its praises, thinking they are fighting for Palestinian freedom. If you are still in any doubt about how sick this is, read the Hamas Charter, which openly calls for the slaughter of all the Jews in Israel, or early documents of Hizbullah, where the same aim is made explicit, or the more recent calls by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad, to wipe Israel from the map. They want to finish the job Hitler started. Don’t take my word for it, read any of the books and pamphlets in which just this claim is made. I forgot, you probably don’t read Arabic. I do. Don’t you think that you, as an intelligent and open-minded liberal, might actually base your view of this on something more solid than a couple of articles in The Guardian? I read The Guardian too, but I don’t swallow everything its extraordinarily biased op-eds say about the Middle East.
Where does this leave us? You, the anti-Israel liberal, me, the pro-Israel liberal. At loggerheads, I suppose. But there is a difference: I believe in your inherent goodness because some sort of love of humanity must inform your political options, your love of free speech, of human rights, of the right of all peoples to independence and nationhood. I know you are impelled to support the Palestinian cause because of such imperatives, and I admire your impulse. But I also think — or, rather, know — that you are ignorant, perhaps profoundly so. Otherwise, I cannot in all conscience imagine why you would so freely give your voice and your actions to support a people who seek only genocide, and withhold your support from the very people that has suffered the greatest act of genocide in the last or any other century.
If you believe in the self-determination of peoples, why do you condemn the establishment of the single state of Israel, the only Jewish state in two thousand years? From the very beginning, the people of Israel have sought for the creation of an Arab state next to theirs. Given peace and security, there are few limits to what Israel would do to make a Palestinian state an economic and social success. They have never talked of genocide. The Palestinians talk of little else. Hamas explicitly rejects peace treaties, peace conferences, compromises, and negotiations. Why would a peace-loving liberal extend the hand of greeting to such intransigence and spit on the hand that offers all of that and more? If liberals can support the worst sort of anti-Semitism, doesn’t that open the way to forces that will crush us all, Jews and non-Jews alike?
Now do you understand why I am afraid?
The worst thing about the Third Reich was that it came to power in a modern nation, a nation that prided itself on its culture, its science, its legal system, its religious and social values. This was the horror, that something primitive, bestial, and anti-human came out of what both Germans and their neighbours considered a civilized and progressive people. Even today, when we read or watch newsreels about the Reich, the Nazi Party, the SS, the vast apparatus of that singular evil, we are confronted by a cold-hearted wickedness that has no parallel in modern history. It remains the supreme evil of modern times, despite the emergence of many tyrannies and tyrants since its time.
When we think of German fascism, we think of the ruthlessness of the blitzkrieg, the extermination of villages, the destruction of Warsaw, the mass killings of Jews by einzatsgruppen, the torture and murder refined by the Gestapo, the utter abuse of innocence by a conscious option for evil, and, above all, the death camps. To my generation, the swastika and the totenkopf, the chic black uniforms, the rallies, the goose-stepping formations, the diving stukas, the barbed wire, the piano-wire hangings, the gas chambers, the watchtowers, the jackboots, the Hitlergrüss salutes, the lightning-flash SS badges, the black coats of the secret police, the U-boat packs, and the overweening arrogance all spoke of one thing: an evil so removed from good that it should never be repeated, however long the human race endures.
I began by saying I am afraid. Afraid of what? Of the truth that, just over sixty years after the end of that long and costly war, after the Nuremberg trials that laid bare Germany’s infamy, after the sorrow and grief that consumed Europe and Russia, I hear our understanding of that evil abused. It is as if a new generation has forgotten what Nazism was all about, as if all our common understandings have been twisted until they are no longer recognizable.
In what way? In the repeated statements found among sections of the left and centre that describe Israelis as Nazis, that speak of a ‘Palestinian Holocaust’, that define Israel as the new Reich and its actions on a par with those of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. It is scarcely possible to say how sick and frightened it makes me to read such remarks, not least when I realize that they are often made by seemingly intelligent, well-educated people. What is worse, they have become part of a wider distortion of historical truth that denies the Holocaust, blames the Jews for having provoked Hitler and everyone who ever persecuted them throughout history, and finds an excuse for its anti-Semitism in mealy-mouthed declarations of guiltlessness: ‘I am only anti-Zionist’.
So let’s put some of this to rest. Leaving aside the Suez debacle (in which Britain and France were also involved), Israel has only ever fought defensive wars. Again and again, Israelis have fought, not just for their own lives, but for the life of their nation — a nation created to provide a haven for Jews in a world that had just disposed of six million of them. They have never used the total war tactics of the Nazis, nor have they once envisaged the genocide of the Palestinians. If they had really been Nazis, does anyone imagine they would have left a Palestinian alive? If they really used Nazi military tactics, do you think the death toll in the recent war in Lebanon would have been around 1,000, most of the dead Hizbullah guerrillas?
There’s simply no point in using derogatory terms like ‘Nazi’, ‘genocidal’, or ‘racist’ if they don’t fit. And such language doesn’t fit Israel. Criticize Israel by all means — Israelis do it all the time — but play fair. Too many people on the Left have betrayed their own ideals of honesty and justice by demonizing a people whose only wish is for peace and security. There are things wrong about Israel, and you should take care to identify them and write to your nearest Israeli embassy about them: you’ll find a listening ear, and maybe your criticisms will do real good. But there’s no point in standing on street corners with a megaphone, yelling to the general public that Israelis are Nazis, because only someone as badly informed as yourself will listen to you.
What frightens me more than anything, though, is the hypocrisy. Left-wingers and liberals always had an honourable history of opposition to anti-Semitism. They stood up for Jews, in the same way Jews in the 60s were among the most active figures in the American Civil Rights Movement. Back in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, it was a matter of honour for liberals to defend the Jews in their own countries and Israel abroad. But now? The Left has sold out totally to the lure of anti-Semitism. ‘We only hate Israel, not Jews,’ you say? Then why have so many left-wingers and liberals joined forces with the Palestinians and other Arabs, or with Iranians or Pakistanis, whose cultures are saturated with the most obnoxious anti-Jewish imagery and rhetoric that has existed outside the Third Reich? I’m not talking here about something half-hidden, some dirty secret that you might well not have come across. I’m talking about mainstream TV shows, broadcasts on a variety of national radio stations, children’s cartoons, school textbooks, mosque sermons, and large political rallies.
It’s all there: the hooked noses, the grasping hands, the conspiracies, the sacrifice of Christian and Muslim children, the mixing of their blood with matzo flour, the secret cabals, the sheer Nazi-like horror of the filthy, blood-sucking, world-dominating Jew. If you think you’re a liberal, then what in God’s name induces you to throw in your lot with real Nazism, pour scorn on Jews who have been fighting for their lives for well over sixty years, and then gallingly call those same Jews Nazis?
You say you haven’t seen any of this? Then you really are a fool to give your support to a society you know next to nothing about. You consider Hamas ‘freedom fighters’: have you noticed the salute they give in rallies? You think of Hizbullah as ‘heroes of the resistance’: have you ever seen how they salute? If it was Hitler up on the podium, no-one would be surprised.
This all requires a more detailed discussion. For the moment, I will only say that this link between modern Arab anti-Semitism and the Third Reich variety is not accidental. While Jews were dying in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Birkenau, the Palestinian leadership was collaborating with the Reich, recruiting troops for the SS, and planning to build a death camp in Hebron. Jew-hating fascism did not die with the overthrow of the Third Reich: it moved to the Arab world where, believe it or not, the world’s liberals now sing its praises, thinking they are fighting for Palestinian freedom. If you are still in any doubt about how sick this is, read the Hamas Charter, which openly calls for the slaughter of all the Jews in Israel, or early documents of Hizbullah, where the same aim is made explicit, or the more recent calls by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad, to wipe Israel from the map. They want to finish the job Hitler started. Don’t take my word for it, read any of the books and pamphlets in which just this claim is made. I forgot, you probably don’t read Arabic. I do. Don’t you think that you, as an intelligent and open-minded liberal, might actually base your view of this on something more solid than a couple of articles in The Guardian? I read The Guardian too, but I don’t swallow everything its extraordinarily biased op-eds say about the Middle East.
Where does this leave us? You, the anti-Israel liberal, me, the pro-Israel liberal. At loggerheads, I suppose. But there is a difference: I believe in your inherent goodness because some sort of love of humanity must inform your political options, your love of free speech, of human rights, of the right of all peoples to independence and nationhood. I know you are impelled to support the Palestinian cause because of such imperatives, and I admire your impulse. But I also think — or, rather, know — that you are ignorant, perhaps profoundly so. Otherwise, I cannot in all conscience imagine why you would so freely give your voice and your actions to support a people who seek only genocide, and withhold your support from the very people that has suffered the greatest act of genocide in the last or any other century.
If you believe in the self-determination of peoples, why do you condemn the establishment of the single state of Israel, the only Jewish state in two thousand years? From the very beginning, the people of Israel have sought for the creation of an Arab state next to theirs. Given peace and security, there are few limits to what Israel would do to make a Palestinian state an economic and social success. They have never talked of genocide. The Palestinians talk of little else. Hamas explicitly rejects peace treaties, peace conferences, compromises, and negotiations. Why would a peace-loving liberal extend the hand of greeting to such intransigence and spit on the hand that offers all of that and more? If liberals can support the worst sort of anti-Semitism, doesn’t that open the way to forces that will crush us all, Jews and non-Jews alike?
Now do you understand why I am afraid?
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Israel, the dirty little virus...
Israel, the filthy germ
Denis MacEoin
One of the first things that strikes the visitor to Iran is how polite everybody is. Hands go on chests (male chests anyhow) in a gesture of humility, it is commonplace to address someone as jenab, ‘your excellence’, to call oneself ‘your sacrifice’, and much besides. It’s an old fashioned society in which interpersonal relations are valued at all levels.
But ever since the revolution of 1979, there are more and more ways of insulting anyone perceived to be the enemy of Iran or Islam. Almost the first slogan of that revolution was marg bar-Amrika, ‘death to America’. Later, marg bar-Isra’il was added to the chants after every Friday prayer meeting. Verbal insults were matched by vicious disrespect for the most basic human dignity, in the parading of the US embassy hostages, the broadcasting of film of the US pilots burned in their helicopters during the failed Eagle Claw operation to rescue those hostages, the 2006 exhibition of cartoons mocking the Holocaust and its victims, or the conference on Holocaust denial held later that year.
Now, Ahmadinejad has made a speech in which he describes Israel as ‘a filthy germ’ and ‘a savage beast’. A few days earlier, Muhammad ‘Ali Ja’fari, commander-in-chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards wrote to Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, saying ‘In the near future, we will witness the destruction of the cancerous germ of Israel by the powerful and competent hands of the Hezbollah combatants’. Clearly, Ahmadinejad’s words are not just the expression of some personal pique. They could even spark a war.
All of this talk of germs and viruses is disturbingly old hat, but none the less vicious for that. In 1942, Adolf Hitler declared that ‘the discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world’. Elsewhere, he says Jews are like ‘tubercles which can infect a healthy body’. You find this everywhere in Nazi discourse. German has been infected by the Jews, their destruction will bring it back to health. Dr. Fritz Klein, one of the infamous Nazi doctors, said ‘The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind’ and continued ‘whether you want to call it an appendix or not, it must be extirpated (exterminated, eradicated: ausgerottet)’
Familiar? On many occasions, Iran’s outspoken president has called for the destruction of Israel. Don’t be misled by attempts to water this down: in one speech he calls on the Islamic nations to ‘exterminate’ Israel (qal’ o qam’ kard). His aim, like that of Hezbollah and Hamas among others, is the total elimination of Israel. Since Hezbollah’s apparent (though only apparent) victory in the 2006 war with Israel, Iran and its allies have grown in confidence. They now think they are only a short time from total success. Yet the international community does next to nothing to prevent a second Holocaust, a second cleansing of the Ewige Jude, the eternal virus.
One might ask some pointed questions. For one thing, in what way does the existence of Israel threaten Iran, whether in the short or long term. In all the years it has existed, there have been no signs of the Israeli virus passing on infection to its surrounding states — quite the contrary, in fact. Some virus. Some threat. Does Israel plan to expand aggressively beyond its current boundaries? If that had been the Israeli scheme, they would have done it many years ago. Israel doesn’t border on Iran, and the countries between them are all hostile to Israel.
The only way Iran would ever benefit from Israel’s death would be to raise its own esteem among the anti-Israeli nations. Given that Iran’s theological position is many football fields away from that espoused by other Muslims except the Iraqi and Lebanese Shi’a, that boost to Iran’s status would be undeniably welcome; but it would do absolutely nothing to expunge the taint of being a Shi’ite country.
But let’s just look at what Ahmadinejad is saying about Israel in another light. The fact is that Israel is the only genuine democracy for a long way about. There is no other country in the Middle East that is a successful multi-party state, that has a democratic system of law, that gives full rights to religious and ethnic minorities, women, and homosexuals; that does not censor its press or book publishers; that has such high numbers of university graduates; that participates so seriously in international aid provision; and that has such an international standing in medical and technological research, producing the most vibrant economy in the region.
If this is indeed a virus, we must surely expect democracy and human rights to spread like a benign plague across the region. In fact, Israel’s Arab (and Iranian) neighbours have proved remarkably resistant to every strain of the virus that has reached them. Surely any decent-minded person should be hoping for the Israel virus to get its teeth into Egypt or Syria or Jordan.
If there is a virus, it has to be the curious one that has infected so many in the West, notably on the left. No matter how strong the moral and rational arguments in Israel’s favour, this benighted group persists in mouthing slogans, calling for boycotts, boosting terror groups like Hamas (freedom fighters even when they are attacking kindergartens), and denying any rights to Israel whatever. And when the Islamic state has been established, and they start stoning women and hanging gays and killing the Baha’is, and imprisoning the socialists, no doubt our brave enemies of Israel will slink off to find another cause. May that day never come.
Denis MacEoin
One of the first things that strikes the visitor to Iran is how polite everybody is. Hands go on chests (male chests anyhow) in a gesture of humility, it is commonplace to address someone as jenab, ‘your excellence’, to call oneself ‘your sacrifice’, and much besides. It’s an old fashioned society in which interpersonal relations are valued at all levels.
But ever since the revolution of 1979, there are more and more ways of insulting anyone perceived to be the enemy of Iran or Islam. Almost the first slogan of that revolution was marg bar-Amrika, ‘death to America’. Later, marg bar-Isra’il was added to the chants after every Friday prayer meeting. Verbal insults were matched by vicious disrespect for the most basic human dignity, in the parading of the US embassy hostages, the broadcasting of film of the US pilots burned in their helicopters during the failed Eagle Claw operation to rescue those hostages, the 2006 exhibition of cartoons mocking the Holocaust and its victims, or the conference on Holocaust denial held later that year.
Now, Ahmadinejad has made a speech in which he describes Israel as ‘a filthy germ’ and ‘a savage beast’. A few days earlier, Muhammad ‘Ali Ja’fari, commander-in-chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards wrote to Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, saying ‘In the near future, we will witness the destruction of the cancerous germ of Israel by the powerful and competent hands of the Hezbollah combatants’. Clearly, Ahmadinejad’s words are not just the expression of some personal pique. They could even spark a war.
All of this talk of germs and viruses is disturbingly old hat, but none the less vicious for that. In 1942, Adolf Hitler declared that ‘the discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world’. Elsewhere, he says Jews are like ‘tubercles which can infect a healthy body’. You find this everywhere in Nazi discourse. German has been infected by the Jews, their destruction will bring it back to health. Dr. Fritz Klein, one of the infamous Nazi doctors, said ‘The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind’ and continued ‘whether you want to call it an appendix or not, it must be extirpated (exterminated, eradicated: ausgerottet)’
Familiar? On many occasions, Iran’s outspoken president has called for the destruction of Israel. Don’t be misled by attempts to water this down: in one speech he calls on the Islamic nations to ‘exterminate’ Israel (qal’ o qam’ kard). His aim, like that of Hezbollah and Hamas among others, is the total elimination of Israel. Since Hezbollah’s apparent (though only apparent) victory in the 2006 war with Israel, Iran and its allies have grown in confidence. They now think they are only a short time from total success. Yet the international community does next to nothing to prevent a second Holocaust, a second cleansing of the Ewige Jude, the eternal virus.
One might ask some pointed questions. For one thing, in what way does the existence of Israel threaten Iran, whether in the short or long term. In all the years it has existed, there have been no signs of the Israeli virus passing on infection to its surrounding states — quite the contrary, in fact. Some virus. Some threat. Does Israel plan to expand aggressively beyond its current boundaries? If that had been the Israeli scheme, they would have done it many years ago. Israel doesn’t border on Iran, and the countries between them are all hostile to Israel.
The only way Iran would ever benefit from Israel’s death would be to raise its own esteem among the anti-Israeli nations. Given that Iran’s theological position is many football fields away from that espoused by other Muslims except the Iraqi and Lebanese Shi’a, that boost to Iran’s status would be undeniably welcome; but it would do absolutely nothing to expunge the taint of being a Shi’ite country.
But let’s just look at what Ahmadinejad is saying about Israel in another light. The fact is that Israel is the only genuine democracy for a long way about. There is no other country in the Middle East that is a successful multi-party state, that has a democratic system of law, that gives full rights to religious and ethnic minorities, women, and homosexuals; that does not censor its press or book publishers; that has such high numbers of university graduates; that participates so seriously in international aid provision; and that has such an international standing in medical and technological research, producing the most vibrant economy in the region.
If this is indeed a virus, we must surely expect democracy and human rights to spread like a benign plague across the region. In fact, Israel’s Arab (and Iranian) neighbours have proved remarkably resistant to every strain of the virus that has reached them. Surely any decent-minded person should be hoping for the Israel virus to get its teeth into Egypt or Syria or Jordan.
If there is a virus, it has to be the curious one that has infected so many in the West, notably on the left. No matter how strong the moral and rational arguments in Israel’s favour, this benighted group persists in mouthing slogans, calling for boycotts, boosting terror groups like Hamas (freedom fighters even when they are attacking kindergartens), and denying any rights to Israel whatever. And when the Islamic state has been established, and they start stoning women and hanging gays and killing the Baha’is, and imprisoning the socialists, no doubt our brave enemies of Israel will slink off to find another cause. May that day never come.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
An Open Letter to PM Gordon Brown on anti-Semitism
The following is the text of a letter I shall be posting in a few days. It is addressed to Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, asking him to take more serious steps, both domestically and internationally, to tackle the rampant evil of anti-Semitism. I originally intended to send it to him after he came into office, then realized that that was probably the worst time to do so. With Tony Blair seeming to do nothing in the Middle East, I think it's still worth raising the subject. Perhaps this could spark off a concerted approach from all of us and all our contacts. A torrent of letters, all with different texts, all from different people, all on this issue might communicate why, at this juncture, this is such a pressing matter.
The Hon. Gordon Brown
Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London
Dear Mr Brown,
I seldom write to politicians. I am not much of a lobbyist, nor am I someone who gets a kick from writing letters that may be unwelcome or that may simply be overlooked. But I have started this letter on the day after you became Prime Minister with the thought that I will send it later, when you have had time to settle into your new job. Following last month's parliamentary debate on the Holocaust, I think the moment has come to send it.
I would not be writing this at all were it not that I feel something untoward is happening in modern Britain. Not, I hasten to say, a plot, a conspiracy, or anything of that kind. It is more tangible than that, but I see little sign of widespread recognition that it exists at all.
It is, quite simply, the recrudescence of anti-Semitism, both in its old forms and in new ones that make it palatable to wider and wider sections of the British public, an anti-Semitism that conflates all too easily with anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism. I'm not a Jew, and I could well distance myself from all this and sit at my desk reading or writing something else. I am a busy person, the world has much to preoccupy me. But the Jewish problem troubles me, if only because anti-Semitism has been at the heart of so much evil down the centuries in Europe and because it still flourishes here and abroad in increasingly dangerous forms and threatens to grow into something ever more tangible, nestling as it does with such ease among the rising wave of Islamic radicalism and terror. They have become part of a single thing, nourished from abroad and suckled within, by the far right and the far left alike.
You and I were born two years apart. I grew up in Northern Ireland, you in Scotland. As you were growing up, did you not experience that strong awareness of a war that had been fought not that long ago, a war in which our parents had been involved? And with that awareness, a consciousness that grew in childhood and over our teenage years that the greatest crime in history had taken place only years before we were born? I can remember it vividly. Photographs and films of the concentration and death camps, bodies piled like images from Bosch, revelations about Nazi atrocities, movies like the Diary of Anne Frank. It was all part of our consciousness, was it not? I have never forgotten the moment when one of my teachers at the drama school I attended rolled back her sleeve to reveal the numbers tattooed on her arm at Theresienstadt. Like me, I'm sure you will remember feeling that it was no longer possible for people to hate the Jews the way so many had done, in that smug, uninformed way typical of my parents' generation, the conviction that the wickedness of the Nazis had been so vast, so all-encompassing and so past common humanity that anti-Semitism had been consigned to oblivion for good.
And then I remember, as I do not doubt you do as well, a growing awareness that not everyone felt as decent people felt, that there were old and new Nazis, that there were still men and women whose dearest wish was to carry out the extermination of the Jews. The Neo-Nazis were then incomprehensible, for the defeat of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, indeed of fascist groupings and ideologies throughout Europe had been so complete, so devastating, and so damning that it was hard to understand just what would motivate people to dream dreams that they surely knew would turn to nightmare. But so it was.
I went to university three times and emerged with qualifications in English, Arabic, Persian, and Islamic Studies. I got to know the Middle East. I visited Israel three times and found it an exciting and beautiful country. In the course of my studies, I discovered something that remains unknown to most people in Europe, that anti-Semitism is alive and well in the Middle East.
Almost without anyone noticing, anti-Semitism has shifted its course. As you will be aware, and as last year's Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism
http://thepcaa.org/Report.pdf
clarified, much of the threat to Jews in this country now comes from within the Muslim community. This point has been emphasized in the unpublished 2003 EU report, Manifestations of anti-Semitism in the European Union: 'The data of the CST show that an increasing number of incidents are "caused by Muslims or Palestinian sympathisers, whether or not they are Muslims". This indicates a change of direction from which anti-Semitism comes, which is closely connected to the tensions in the Middle East conflict.'
http://haganah.us/hmedia/euasr-20.html
As you will know, the forces of liberal democracy faced a threat throughout the Middle East during World War II, when Britain and its allies were waging a battle against Germany in North Africa. Widespread anti-British feeling created a fifth column throughout the region, in particular in the 1941 Rashid 'Ali coup in Iraq, the strong anti-British feeling in Egypt, and the activities of the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, a major war criminal who escaped justice after 1945 and died in his bed many years later.
It was during this period and with considerable help from al-Husayni that the milder anti-Jewish sentiments of Islam came to be blended with Nazi-style racism. As a result, that anti-Semitism has infected whole parts of the Middle East and may be seen today in newspaper cartoons, children's TV shows, or soap operas.
Those are, perhaps matters your predecessor, Tony Blair, will want to look at in his new role as an envoy to the Middle East. But this singular evil is not restricted to that region, or even to wider parts of the Muslim world. It is, as I have pointed out, here with us, in Europe and here in the UK. And it is being met half way by a left-wing (and sometimes right-wing) coalition of anti-war protesters, pro-Palestinian activists, and generic anti-Western campaigners.
Middle East anti-Semitism has from its inception been linked to anger over the creation of the state of Israel. In the Islamic theory of international law, Israel, despite having been brought into being by a majority vote of the United Nations, remains illegitimate. This is for two reasons: one, that Islamic international law is based on jurisprudential outcomes from jihad regulations, which do not permit Islamic territory to be made non-Islamic (as happened to Islamic Spain and Portugal); and two, that Jews, as inferior 'People of the Book' are not entitled to rule over Muslims.
Out of this comes the now common conflation of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Israelism that now infects a substantial part of Britain's non-Muslim left. It is, in other words, a political combination that sits well with exactly the same people who are most bitter about this country, about America, and about democratic societies in general. Fighting against terror and extremism has become something despicable in the eyes of those who proclaim 'we are all Hezbollah now' and who march for the destruction of the Jewish state. Their banners describe Israel as 'a Nazi state', 'a terrorist state', and 'an apartheid state', making horrors of those who survived the Holocaust and their offspring.
Last year witnessed a rapid increase in the number of British organizations threatening to boycott or actually boycott either the state of Israel or parts of it (such as Israeli universities and their staff). The NUJ, the UCU, and now UNISON have passed votes that show deep prejudice against Israel and, by extension, Jews. They condemn an open democracy and say nothing of the dictatorships that surround it; they focus on Israeli behaviour and make no comment on the human rights abuses that are so common elsewhere; they see Zionism as an unprecedented evil, yet support every other claim to national identity. Such outrageous imbalance passes for justice today. So common has it become to talk in these terms that it's clear we are sliding towards an easy acceptance of language and actions that might have caused our generation to blench. When the United Nations Humans Right Council seems to exist for no other purpose than to issue resolutions against one state, Israel, and when that body is itself made up in part of regimes that abuse human rights on a daily basis with impunity, we may conclude, may we not, that something is afoot that may yet tear down the very bases on which the UN itself is based: democracy, justice, and liberty for all.
The fight against terror focuses increasingly on these islands, as the first days of last July brought home yet again. For the security services, there are many doors into that struggle. For politicians, however, it is often too easily forgotten that the battle against anti-Semitism and its proxy, anti-Israelism is itself a crucial part of that wider battle against internal forces that seek to damage this country, often in conjunction with elements of radical Islam.
I would like to ask you to take whatever action you deem fit to tackle this multi-headed evil before it gets out of control. It threatens me, my Jewish friends, my moderate Muslim friends, indeed, everyone I know. You don't have to be Jewish to be deeply affected by this new form of anti-Semitism, mixed as it is with loathing for British liberal values, a preference for dictatorships over democracy, and sympathy for terrorists as 'freedom fighters' rather than for their victims. If unchecked, it will poison British politics beyond remedy. As the principal guardian of British values, I address this letter to you in the hope that you may find ways to encourage the Home Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Commission for Racial Equality to prioritize this most important of issues and to work to bring an end to all its manifestations in this country. I also implore you to become more frank than has been the custom in your talks with Arab and other Muslim leaders, and to draw their attention to the unacceptability of such lies and distortions as anti-Jewish speech or Holocaust denial on their TV and radio channels, their print media, and in political speeches or mosque sermons. They must be made to understand that anti-Semitism, in whatever guise, cannot be tolerated among civilized nations.
There was such a terrible price to pay when anti-Semitism was allowed to get out of hand in the first part of the 20th century, when countries, the UK included, turned a blind eye to so many threats and so much violence. It seems we have to defeat this evil for a second time. But we cannot let the torch fall from our hands lest the poison of Jew-hatred seep deeper and deeper into the hearts and souls of the British people, lest it spread through Europe again and bring dreadful consequences in its wake. You have my trust in this matter. Please take action to honour that trust.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin
Royal Literary Fund Fellow
Newcastle University
Author 'The Hijacking of British Islam'
The Hon. Gordon Brown
Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London
Dear Mr Brown,
I seldom write to politicians. I am not much of a lobbyist, nor am I someone who gets a kick from writing letters that may be unwelcome or that may simply be overlooked. But I have started this letter on the day after you became Prime Minister with the thought that I will send it later, when you have had time to settle into your new job. Following last month's parliamentary debate on the Holocaust, I think the moment has come to send it.
I would not be writing this at all were it not that I feel something untoward is happening in modern Britain. Not, I hasten to say, a plot, a conspiracy, or anything of that kind. It is more tangible than that, but I see little sign of widespread recognition that it exists at all.
It is, quite simply, the recrudescence of anti-Semitism, both in its old forms and in new ones that make it palatable to wider and wider sections of the British public, an anti-Semitism that conflates all too easily with anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism. I'm not a Jew, and I could well distance myself from all this and sit at my desk reading or writing something else. I am a busy person, the world has much to preoccupy me. But the Jewish problem troubles me, if only because anti-Semitism has been at the heart of so much evil down the centuries in Europe and because it still flourishes here and abroad in increasingly dangerous forms and threatens to grow into something ever more tangible, nestling as it does with such ease among the rising wave of Islamic radicalism and terror. They have become part of a single thing, nourished from abroad and suckled within, by the far right and the far left alike.
You and I were born two years apart. I grew up in Northern Ireland, you in Scotland. As you were growing up, did you not experience that strong awareness of a war that had been fought not that long ago, a war in which our parents had been involved? And with that awareness, a consciousness that grew in childhood and over our teenage years that the greatest crime in history had taken place only years before we were born? I can remember it vividly. Photographs and films of the concentration and death camps, bodies piled like images from Bosch, revelations about Nazi atrocities, movies like the Diary of Anne Frank. It was all part of our consciousness, was it not? I have never forgotten the moment when one of my teachers at the drama school I attended rolled back her sleeve to reveal the numbers tattooed on her arm at Theresienstadt. Like me, I'm sure you will remember feeling that it was no longer possible for people to hate the Jews the way so many had done, in that smug, uninformed way typical of my parents' generation, the conviction that the wickedness of the Nazis had been so vast, so all-encompassing and so past common humanity that anti-Semitism had been consigned to oblivion for good.
And then I remember, as I do not doubt you do as well, a growing awareness that not everyone felt as decent people felt, that there were old and new Nazis, that there were still men and women whose dearest wish was to carry out the extermination of the Jews. The Neo-Nazis were then incomprehensible, for the defeat of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, indeed of fascist groupings and ideologies throughout Europe had been so complete, so devastating, and so damning that it was hard to understand just what would motivate people to dream dreams that they surely knew would turn to nightmare. But so it was.
I went to university three times and emerged with qualifications in English, Arabic, Persian, and Islamic Studies. I got to know the Middle East. I visited Israel three times and found it an exciting and beautiful country. In the course of my studies, I discovered something that remains unknown to most people in Europe, that anti-Semitism is alive and well in the Middle East.
Almost without anyone noticing, anti-Semitism has shifted its course. As you will be aware, and as last year's Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism
http://thepcaa.org/Report.pdf
clarified, much of the threat to Jews in this country now comes from within the Muslim community. This point has been emphasized in the unpublished 2003 EU report, Manifestations of anti-Semitism in the European Union: 'The data of the CST show that an increasing number of incidents are "caused by Muslims or Palestinian sympathisers, whether or not they are Muslims". This indicates a change of direction from which anti-Semitism comes, which is closely connected to the tensions in the Middle East conflict.'
http://haganah.us/hmedia/euasr-20.html
As you will know, the forces of liberal democracy faced a threat throughout the Middle East during World War II, when Britain and its allies were waging a battle against Germany in North Africa. Widespread anti-British feeling created a fifth column throughout the region, in particular in the 1941 Rashid 'Ali coup in Iraq, the strong anti-British feeling in Egypt, and the activities of the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, a major war criminal who escaped justice after 1945 and died in his bed many years later.
It was during this period and with considerable help from al-Husayni that the milder anti-Jewish sentiments of Islam came to be blended with Nazi-style racism. As a result, that anti-Semitism has infected whole parts of the Middle East and may be seen today in newspaper cartoons, children's TV shows, or soap operas.
Those are, perhaps matters your predecessor, Tony Blair, will want to look at in his new role as an envoy to the Middle East. But this singular evil is not restricted to that region, or even to wider parts of the Muslim world. It is, as I have pointed out, here with us, in Europe and here in the UK. And it is being met half way by a left-wing (and sometimes right-wing) coalition of anti-war protesters, pro-Palestinian activists, and generic anti-Western campaigners.
Middle East anti-Semitism has from its inception been linked to anger over the creation of the state of Israel. In the Islamic theory of international law, Israel, despite having been brought into being by a majority vote of the United Nations, remains illegitimate. This is for two reasons: one, that Islamic international law is based on jurisprudential outcomes from jihad regulations, which do not permit Islamic territory to be made non-Islamic (as happened to Islamic Spain and Portugal); and two, that Jews, as inferior 'People of the Book' are not entitled to rule over Muslims.
Out of this comes the now common conflation of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Israelism that now infects a substantial part of Britain's non-Muslim left. It is, in other words, a political combination that sits well with exactly the same people who are most bitter about this country, about America, and about democratic societies in general. Fighting against terror and extremism has become something despicable in the eyes of those who proclaim 'we are all Hezbollah now' and who march for the destruction of the Jewish state. Their banners describe Israel as 'a Nazi state', 'a terrorist state', and 'an apartheid state', making horrors of those who survived the Holocaust and their offspring.
Last year witnessed a rapid increase in the number of British organizations threatening to boycott or actually boycott either the state of Israel or parts of it (such as Israeli universities and their staff). The NUJ, the UCU, and now UNISON have passed votes that show deep prejudice against Israel and, by extension, Jews. They condemn an open democracy and say nothing of the dictatorships that surround it; they focus on Israeli behaviour and make no comment on the human rights abuses that are so common elsewhere; they see Zionism as an unprecedented evil, yet support every other claim to national identity. Such outrageous imbalance passes for justice today. So common has it become to talk in these terms that it's clear we are sliding towards an easy acceptance of language and actions that might have caused our generation to blench. When the United Nations Humans Right Council seems to exist for no other purpose than to issue resolutions against one state, Israel, and when that body is itself made up in part of regimes that abuse human rights on a daily basis with impunity, we may conclude, may we not, that something is afoot that may yet tear down the very bases on which the UN itself is based: democracy, justice, and liberty for all.
The fight against terror focuses increasingly on these islands, as the first days of last July brought home yet again. For the security services, there are many doors into that struggle. For politicians, however, it is often too easily forgotten that the battle against anti-Semitism and its proxy, anti-Israelism is itself a crucial part of that wider battle against internal forces that seek to damage this country, often in conjunction with elements of radical Islam.
I would like to ask you to take whatever action you deem fit to tackle this multi-headed evil before it gets out of control. It threatens me, my Jewish friends, my moderate Muslim friends, indeed, everyone I know. You don't have to be Jewish to be deeply affected by this new form of anti-Semitism, mixed as it is with loathing for British liberal values, a preference for dictatorships over democracy, and sympathy for terrorists as 'freedom fighters' rather than for their victims. If unchecked, it will poison British politics beyond remedy. As the principal guardian of British values, I address this letter to you in the hope that you may find ways to encourage the Home Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Commission for Racial Equality to prioritize this most important of issues and to work to bring an end to all its manifestations in this country. I also implore you to become more frank than has been the custom in your talks with Arab and other Muslim leaders, and to draw their attention to the unacceptability of such lies and distortions as anti-Jewish speech or Holocaust denial on their TV and radio channels, their print media, and in political speeches or mosque sermons. They must be made to understand that anti-Semitism, in whatever guise, cannot be tolerated among civilized nations.
There was such a terrible price to pay when anti-Semitism was allowed to get out of hand in the first part of the 20th century, when countries, the UK included, turned a blind eye to so many threats and so much violence. It seems we have to defeat this evil for a second time. But we cannot let the torch fall from our hands lest the poison of Jew-hatred seep deeper and deeper into the hearts and souls of the British people, lest it spread through Europe again and bring dreadful consequences in its wake. You have my trust in this matter. Please take action to honour that trust.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin
Royal Literary Fund Fellow
Newcastle University
Author 'The Hijacking of British Islam'
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
An example of Israeli/Jew elision and modern anti-Semitism
Please read at least some of the following. The piece came from a comment in today's Scotsman online, a respectable newspaper that assumes an intelligent readership. I've reported it as anti-Semitic, but it's actually more than that. I've put all of it here, obnoxious though it is, to ilustrate an important point, that, when anti-Israel activists claim they are not anti-Semitic, they ared for the most part lying. It could not be clearer: the writer shifts between Israelis and Jews with gay abandon. Add in some gratuitous anti-Americanism, and you have in its full glory the modern answer to knowing anything about anything. Apart from the eliding of Israelis and Jews, we can see the use of exaggeration and outright falsehood typical of much earlier anti-Semitism, now re-expressed in terms of Israel. Thus, Israel is a tyranny that oppresses Europeans and Canadians, the President of the US takes his orders from the Israeli PM, the US is a 'slave state' of Israel, and so on. In other words, the Jews/Israelis possess almost supernatural powers and are simultaneously the most powerful people on earth yet the most persecuted and hated. The author is clearly not well educated, but he's not entirely ignorant either. I present it to you as a particularly vivid example of the new anti-Semitism (on which, do read Walter Lacqueur's The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism). It appeared, as I said, on the website of a very respected paper, showing just how far this bigotry is spreading. I had to object to another anti-Semitic posting on The Washingon Times today as well. Here it is:
'Talking about blood on the hands and lying I thought you might want to reflect on the following.
Bush invaded Iraq on the strength of his lie that Iraq possessed WMD. According to the New England Medical Journal some 100,000 civilian Iraqis died as a result of co-lateral damage in that initial rape of Iraq. American troops and foreign mercenarie hired by the Americans continue to add to the Iraqi death toll. "Baiting" of Iraqis seems to somehow ligitimise the murder of these suspects by American snipers.
In 1953 Iran had its first democratically elected government headed by Mohamed Mosaddeq. He soon gave notice that he would not be an American puppet like Maliki. The CIA covertly engineered a coup and the compliant American puppet, the Shah was installed. He kept power by torturing the Iranians on an industrial scale as in Abu Ghraib under the American occupying forces. This led the Iranian people to turn to their religion and thus fall prey to the mad Mullahs. On 3August1988 an American Captain on a state of the art warship murdered 290 Iranian civilians by shooting down their Jumbo jet. Americans talk about freedom, why then do you not "liberate" Europe and Canada from Jewish oppression? Israeli tyranny does not allow Europeans or Canadians the intellectual freedom of thought to critically and analytically investigate what the Jews force us to believe is history! If you demand the right to question what the jews dictate we must believe then prison awaits. The Jewish population of the Western world have become the new Spanish Inquisition dictating what the world will be forced to believe regarding the theology of the Holocaust. The joke is ultimately on America as the President of the USA has to take instructions from the Israeli Prime Minister. Israel will never allow the USA to leave Iraq! What is more you will be forced to invade Iran and Syria or whoever Israel wants you to. You are a slave state of Israel. The only way you will regain your freedom is by armed revolt against your slave-masters. You are mislead by the fact that you worship the son of the bloodthirsty Asian god that the Jews worship. The Jews exploited your religious guillibility and effected the intellectual equivalent of a pre-frontal lobotomy on you. Return to the worship of of the gods that are indiginous to the European people and the Jewish hold on your collective minds will weaken. The Muslims were content to practice their barbaric religion on their own people until the terrorist state of Israel was established. On 22July1946 Jewish terrorists blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killing 90 people. Begin was the head of the Irgun gang that perpetrated this introduction of terror to the Middle East. Israel was established by terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide.'
'Talking about blood on the hands and lying I thought you might want to reflect on the following.
Bush invaded Iraq on the strength of his lie that Iraq possessed WMD. According to the New England Medical Journal some 100,000 civilian Iraqis died as a result of co-lateral damage in that initial rape of Iraq. American troops and foreign mercenarie hired by the Americans continue to add to the Iraqi death toll. "Baiting" of Iraqis seems to somehow ligitimise the murder of these suspects by American snipers.
In 1953 Iran had its first democratically elected government headed by Mohamed Mosaddeq. He soon gave notice that he would not be an American puppet like Maliki. The CIA covertly engineered a coup and the compliant American puppet, the Shah was installed. He kept power by torturing the Iranians on an industrial scale as in Abu Ghraib under the American occupying forces. This led the Iranian people to turn to their religion and thus fall prey to the mad Mullahs. On 3August1988 an American Captain on a state of the art warship murdered 290 Iranian civilians by shooting down their Jumbo jet. Americans talk about freedom, why then do you not "liberate" Europe and Canada from Jewish oppression? Israeli tyranny does not allow Europeans or Canadians the intellectual freedom of thought to critically and analytically investigate what the Jews force us to believe is history! If you demand the right to question what the jews dictate we must believe then prison awaits. The Jewish population of the Western world have become the new Spanish Inquisition dictating what the world will be forced to believe regarding the theology of the Holocaust. The joke is ultimately on America as the President of the USA has to take instructions from the Israeli Prime Minister. Israel will never allow the USA to leave Iraq! What is more you will be forced to invade Iran and Syria or whoever Israel wants you to. You are a slave state of Israel. The only way you will regain your freedom is by armed revolt against your slave-masters. You are mislead by the fact that you worship the son of the bloodthirsty Asian god that the Jews worship. The Jews exploited your religious guillibility and effected the intellectual equivalent of a pre-frontal lobotomy on you. Return to the worship of of the gods that are indiginous to the European people and the Jewish hold on your collective minds will weaken. The Muslims were content to practice their barbaric religion on their own people until the terrorist state of Israel was established. On 22July1946 Jewish terrorists blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killing 90 people. Begin was the head of the Irgun gang that perpetrated this introduction of terror to the Middle East. Israel was established by terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide.'
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Hajji Baba of Natanz
In his 1824 picaresque novel of Iran, Hajji Baba of Isfahan, James Morier has his principal character say ‘If it wasn’t for the dying, how the Persians would fight’. No modern Hajji Baba would say that, of course. Anyone who has witnessed the alacrity with which Iranian fighters have embraced death during the Iran-Iraq war, or last summer in Lebanon, or currently in Iraq doesn’t have to be told that a desperate courage informs the warriors of the Islamic Republic. The centuries-old Shi’ite obsession with martyrdom has in recent years inspired a death cult that now embraces Sunnis as well, from Palestinian Hamas homicide bombers, to the threatened wave of Taleban martyrs. Hezbollah General Secretary Hasan Nasrallah, expresses this mood in chilling words: ‘We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.’
Imagine you’re an Israeli Jew. You see boasts about ‘martyrdom operations’ translated into real attacks on children. Then you hear Iranian leaders call for your extermination. Let’s not be in any doubt about this: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others are not talking about regime change. He has spoken of Israel being ‘exterminated’ (qal‘ o qam‘ shavad). Last year, Ayatollah ‘Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, declared ‘There is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state.’ In 2001, Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, ‘moderate’ cleric ‘Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was explicit about what this annihilation could mean: ‘… the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.’
If you go to www.myspace.com/teapacks, you can listen to ‘Push the Button’, this year’s Israeli entry to the Eurovision song contest. ‘The world is full of terror, if someone makes an error, he’s gonna blow us up to kingdom come.’ It takes me back to 1965 and Barry McGuire singing ‘We’re on the Eve of Destruction’. The threat back then was real enough; but today it has become commonplace to say that the Israelis are exaggerating the threat posed to them by Iran.
It’s hard to understand why anyone should think Israel has nothing to fear. For almost sixty years, the Jewish state has had to fight off enemies bent on its destruction, and it still faces daily peril from foes who prefer to train their own children to die than accept the reality of a Jewish state on their borders. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. And Israelis aren’t paranoid, they’re as worried as you and I would be in the same situation.
In northern Europe, we may no longer feel we’re on the eve of destruction, but Israelis know that, should anyone launch a nuclear weapon, they are the most likely targets. Either an upgraded Shahab 3 or Shahab 4 missile could carry a heavy nuclear warhead as far as Tel Aviv. Iran’s nuclear programme is on course to develop such warheads over the next few years. Having completing the nuclear fuel cycle, it’s just a matter of time before the system delivers weapons, somewhere between 2007 and 2015.
The Iranian regime is unstable by nature. Pragmatists and hardliners rub shoulders at all levels. No-one imagines the pragmatists want to embroil the country in a nuclear mess. But for others, an attack on Israel is very tempting. It would serve to reinforce Iran’s credentials as the state wiling to fulfil Muslim dreams. It would solidify Iranian ambitions to be the regional superpower. That in turn could trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
Israelis cannot rely on the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine to feel safe from attack. Leave Iran’s nuclear installations alone, and they have to live with uncertainty every time the political wind shifts in Tehran. If they do go in, they will find themselves at war again, possibly without US support.
Since 1948, all the Israelis have wanted is security. It may be chic in some circles to wink at the claims of Holocaust deniers, but Jews know better. The Middle East is awash with Jew-hatred of a kind we in Europe haven’t seen since the Third Reich. Literally. Mainline newspapers praise Hitler and say it’s a pity he didn’t finish the job with the Jews. Former Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, put Israeli fears succinctly last year: ‘It’s 1938,’ he said, ‘and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs.’
Imagine you’re an Israeli Jew. You see boasts about ‘martyrdom operations’ translated into real attacks on children. Then you hear Iranian leaders call for your extermination. Let’s not be in any doubt about this: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others are not talking about regime change. He has spoken of Israel being ‘exterminated’ (qal‘ o qam‘ shavad). Last year, Ayatollah ‘Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, declared ‘There is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state.’ In 2001, Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, ‘moderate’ cleric ‘Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was explicit about what this annihilation could mean: ‘… the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.’
If you go to www.myspace.com/teapacks, you can listen to ‘Push the Button’, this year’s Israeli entry to the Eurovision song contest. ‘The world is full of terror, if someone makes an error, he’s gonna blow us up to kingdom come.’ It takes me back to 1965 and Barry McGuire singing ‘We’re on the Eve of Destruction’. The threat back then was real enough; but today it has become commonplace to say that the Israelis are exaggerating the threat posed to them by Iran.
It’s hard to understand why anyone should think Israel has nothing to fear. For almost sixty years, the Jewish state has had to fight off enemies bent on its destruction, and it still faces daily peril from foes who prefer to train their own children to die than accept the reality of a Jewish state on their borders. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. And Israelis aren’t paranoid, they’re as worried as you and I would be in the same situation.
In northern Europe, we may no longer feel we’re on the eve of destruction, but Israelis know that, should anyone launch a nuclear weapon, they are the most likely targets. Either an upgraded Shahab 3 or Shahab 4 missile could carry a heavy nuclear warhead as far as Tel Aviv. Iran’s nuclear programme is on course to develop such warheads over the next few years. Having completing the nuclear fuel cycle, it’s just a matter of time before the system delivers weapons, somewhere between 2007 and 2015.
The Iranian regime is unstable by nature. Pragmatists and hardliners rub shoulders at all levels. No-one imagines the pragmatists want to embroil the country in a nuclear mess. But for others, an attack on Israel is very tempting. It would serve to reinforce Iran’s credentials as the state wiling to fulfil Muslim dreams. It would solidify Iranian ambitions to be the regional superpower. That in turn could trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
Israelis cannot rely on the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine to feel safe from attack. Leave Iran’s nuclear installations alone, and they have to live with uncertainty every time the political wind shifts in Tehran. If they do go in, they will find themselves at war again, possibly without US support.
Since 1948, all the Israelis have wanted is security. It may be chic in some circles to wink at the claims of Holocaust deniers, but Jews know better. The Middle East is awash with Jew-hatred of a kind we in Europe haven’t seen since the Third Reich. Literally. Mainline newspapers praise Hitler and say it’s a pity he didn’t finish the job with the Jews. Former Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, put Israeli fears succinctly last year: ‘It’s 1938,’ he said, ‘and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs.’
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Arabic newspapers
One of the things that Brian Whitaker, one of the Guardian's Middle East editors, objected to about my Comment is Free piece was that he thought all the anti-Semitic stuff was to be found in little, minority-interest papers. I prepared the following list for him, showing how mainstream it is. He didn't reply. (gov. means 'government', of course).
Akhir Sa‘a, Egypt, gov. weekly
Akhbar al-Khalij, Bahrain, gov.
Akhbar al-Yawm, Egypt, gov. weekly
al-‘Ilm, Egypt, gov. science magazine
al-Ahram al-‘Arabi Egypt, gov.
al-Ahram, Egypt, gov.
al-Akhbar, Egypt, semi-official, 2nd.-largest
al-Ayyam, Bahrain, gov.
al-Ba‘th, Syria, Baath Party
al-Bayan, UAE, gov.
al-Dustur, Jordan, gov.
al-Ghad, Jordan, ind., one of biggest
al-Hayat al-Jadida, PA, semi-official
al-Ittihad, UAE gov.
al-Jazira, Saudi, gov.
al-Jumhuriyya, Egypt, gov.
al-Khabar, Algeria, the top-selling daily
al-Khalij, UAE, pro-gov.
al-Liwa’ al-Islami, Egypt, ruling party
Al-Madina, Saudi Arabia, pro-gov.
al-Mawqif al-‘Arabi, Egypt, Nationalist
al-Mustqbil, Lebanon, mouthpiece for late Rafiq al-Hariri
al-R’ay, Jordan, gov.
al-Rayah, Qatar, royal family
al-Riyadh, Saudi gov.
al-Sha‘b, Egypt. Labour Party
al-Sharq, Qatar, semi-official
al-Thawra, Syria, gov.
al-Thawra, Yemen, gov.
al-Wafd, Egypt, ‘opposition’
al-Watan, Oman, pro-gov.
al-Watan, Qatar, royal family
al-Watan, SA, semi-official
al-Watan, Saudi gov.
al-Wifaq, Iran
al-Yawm, Saudi Arabia, pro-gov.
‘Aqidati, Egypt, ruling party weekly
Arab News, internet
Arab News, Saudi Arabia, pro-gov.
Kayhan, main Iranian daily, gov.
Oktobir, Egypt, gov. weekly
Rawz al-Yusuf, Egypt, gov.
Riyadh Daily, Saudi Arabia, pro-gov.
Syrian Times, Syria, gov.
Tehran Times, Iran, Foreign Ministry
Tishrin, Syria, gov.
Akhir Sa‘a, Egypt, gov. weekly
Akhbar al-Khalij, Bahrain, gov.
Akhbar al-Yawm, Egypt, gov. weekly
al-‘Ilm, Egypt, gov. science magazine
al-Ahram al-‘Arabi Egypt, gov.
al-Ahram, Egypt, gov.
al-Akhbar, Egypt, semi-official, 2nd.-largest
al-Ayyam, Bahrain, gov.
al-Ba‘th, Syria, Baath Party
al-Bayan, UAE, gov.
al-Dustur, Jordan, gov.
al-Ghad, Jordan, ind., one of biggest
al-Hayat al-Jadida, PA, semi-official
al-Ittihad, UAE gov.
al-Jazira, Saudi, gov.
al-Jumhuriyya, Egypt, gov.
al-Khabar, Algeria, the top-selling daily
al-Khalij, UAE, pro-gov.
al-Liwa’ al-Islami, Egypt, ruling party
Al-Madina, Saudi Arabia, pro-gov.
al-Mawqif al-‘Arabi, Egypt, Nationalist
al-Mustqbil, Lebanon, mouthpiece for late Rafiq al-Hariri
al-R’ay, Jordan, gov.
al-Rayah, Qatar, royal family
al-Riyadh, Saudi gov.
al-Sha‘b, Egypt. Labour Party
al-Sharq, Qatar, semi-official
al-Thawra, Syria, gov.
al-Thawra, Yemen, gov.
al-Wafd, Egypt, ‘opposition’
al-Watan, Oman, pro-gov.
al-Watan, Qatar, royal family
al-Watan, SA, semi-official
al-Watan, Saudi gov.
al-Wifaq, Iran
al-Yawm, Saudi Arabia, pro-gov.
‘Aqidati, Egypt, ruling party weekly
Arab News, internet
Arab News, Saudi Arabia, pro-gov.
Kayhan, main Iranian daily, gov.
Oktobir, Egypt, gov. weekly
Rawz al-Yusuf, Egypt, gov.
Riyadh Daily, Saudi Arabia, pro-gov.
Syrian Times, Syria, gov.
Tehran Times, Iran, Foreign Ministry
Tishrin, Syria, gov.
Middle East Anti-Semitism
Here's a piece I tried to have placed as a Comment is Free article in the Guardian, wh dismissed it as exaggerated. What a surprise. I may start posting more such articles here: over the years I've built up quite a few.
‘First they came for the Jews…’
In front of me is a cartoon of a stereotypical Jew, black hat, long beard, hooked nose, glaring eyes. Grinning, he holds up a goblet filled with skulls and blood, labelled ‘the Lebanese people’. Forget the politics for a moment. This is the blood libel in modern garb. Is it from a neo-Nazi publication sold under the counter to die-hard anti-Semites? Far from it. This is in al-Watan, one of Qatar’s five mainstream daily papers. Al-Watan is jointly owned by a member of the royal family and the country’s foreign minister.
This Jew is only one of thousands who, over the years, have leered and still leer out of the pages of the mainstream Arab and Iranian press in a chilling reflection of the imagery of Der Stürmer. When I say ‘the mainstream press’, I mean prominent, state-controlled dailies and weeklies like Egypt’s al-Ahram and al-Jumhuriyya, Jordan’s al-Dustur, the Palestine Authority’s al-Hayat al-Jadida, Syria’s Tishrin, Lebanon’s al-Mustaqbal, Saudi Arabia’s al-Watan, and dozens more. Even Egypt’s state-sponsored science journal, al-‘Ilm, has featured articles claiming that Jews are spreading AIDS as part of a conspiracy. In October 2000, Ibrahim Nafi‘, editor of al-Ahram, the Egyptian equivalent of The Times, was subpoenaed by French legal authorities for the paper’s support for the blood libel.
There is no subtlety about it: Jews are horned demons, pigs, puppeteers, child killers, lechers, greed-driven financiers, snakes, cannibals, and, worst of all, Nazis. Not Israelis, mark you, but Jews, all Jews.
And it isn’t just the press. Arab and Iranian television air shows that make your hair stand on end. Egypt’s 41-part TV series, Horseman without a Horse, aired in 2002 to audiences on at least 17 channels throughout the Middle East; using the famous Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it convinced viewers that Jews were plotting to take over the world. Syria’s 2003 $5.1 million al-Shatat (The Diaspora), screened 30 episodes of vicious propaganda, portraying Jews as depraved killers in pursuit of Christian and Muslim blood. Just last year, Iran staged a Holocaust denial conference and an exhibition of cartoons mocking Jewish suffering in the non-Holocaust.
Mosque sermons in many Middle Eastern cities feature the sort of anti-Jewish language you might have expected to hear at a Nuremberg rally. The world’s leading Sunni cleric, Shaykh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the rector of Cairo’s al-Azhar, has called Jews ‘the enemies of God, descendants of apes and pigs’. The imam of Islam’s holiest mosque, the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, has preached that Jews are ‘the scum of the human race, the rats of the world’. Ken Livingstone’s favourite radical preacher, Qatar-based Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, said in a Friday sermon in 2005 ‘Allah, [harm] your enemies, the enemies of Islam. Allah, [harm] the treacherous and aggressive Jews.’
Hitler is widely regarded as a hero (translations of Mein Kampf, like those of the Protocols, are best-sellers) whose only offence was not having finished the job of wiping out the Jews. Some of the worst anti-Semitic sentiments and images may be found on children’s TV and in textbooks. Both Hezbollah and Hamas use the Nazi salute as a matter of course. Welcome to the Fourth Reich.
It would be comforting to say that all of this is inspired by anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist sentiment. Much of it is, of course, though it’s hard to see how that makes it any better. But this new style anti-Semitism begins before the foundation of Israel and is clearly directed at Jews, not just Israelis. We should not forget that even Nazi propaganda against enemies of the Reich like Britain never reached depths like these. When the Nazis wanted to portray people as vermin, they did not use the English: they singled out the Jews. The same thing is happening in the Middle East.
Islam has never been anti-Semitic in the racist sense. The treatment of Jews in countries like Morocco, Egypt, or Yemen was generally more tolerant and less prone to outright violence than that of Christian Europe. Even as late as the 1920s, the condition of the Jewish communities of Cairo and Alexandria was well in advance of that found in Russia, Poland, or France.
In the 1930s and 40s, however, many Arabs were drawn to German fascism, hoping the Nazis would defeat the French and British and drive out the Jews. Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the infamous Mufti of Jerusalem, spent most of the war in Berlin, broadcasting to the Arab world and building the largest of the Reich’s SS divisions. Escaping arrest, he continued his propaganda work long after the war. In the 1960s, this imported style of anti-Semitism started to hold hands with a vicious strain of religious Judaeophobia coming from radical Islamic movements like the Muslim Brotherhood. Since then, this hybrid has entered the mainstream, where it has taken hold everywhere from universities to kindergartens.
But this is probably the first time most of you will have read about any of this. Despite its obvious newsworthiness, it’s a subject routinely ignored by reporters, journalists, and documentary makers in Europe and North America. This allows most Westerners to go on fantasizing that anti-Semitism is the strict preserve of the loony right.
Would that it were so. Anti-Semitism has always known how to mutate, moving from one culture to another with the greatest of ease. Just as the medieval European blood libel slipped into the Arab world in the 19th century and survives there today, so the new Middle Eastern anti-Semitism has moved back to Europe, where it has taken up residence among two groups, extremist Muslims and sectors of the Left.
Last year’s All-Party Parliamentary Report on Anti-Semitism showed that hatred of Jews in the UK is growing, just as an earlier European report showed the same phenomenon across the continent. The UK report said ‘We received evidence of an increase in antisemitism within certain fringe elements of the Muslim community. In many cases, these are the actions and words of a small yet radical minority whose views do not represent those of the mainstream majority. However, this cannot simply be dismissed as insignificant and the views of radical Islamists do seem to be entering mainstream discourse.’
Arabic translations of Mein Kampf and the Protocols can be found on sale on the Edgware Road. Foreign-language videos on sale at some mosques contain anti-Jewish incitement. Internet sites carry anti-Semitic material. But nothing much is done. A 2006 Pew poll found that 68% of British Muslims disliked Jews, compared with 29% in France. A Populus poll showed 46% of UK Muslims believe Jews are in league with Freemasons to control the media and politics, while 37% think Jews are ‘legitimate targets’.
Meanwhile, liberals like myself are betrayed by an increasingly disturbing rise of left-wing anti-Semitism. Having built up an unbalanced hatred for Israel (for many, it’s the only country in the world they condemn), many leftists have carelessly conflated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and pride themselves in doing so. Here’s a considered remark by University of Massachusetts professor Helen Cullen: ‘Judaism and the Jewish identity are offensive to most human beings and will always cause trouble between the Jews and the rest of the human race’.
Fair and honest criticism of Israel is one thing, but many on the left have left rationality behind to march alongside radical Muslims whose views on women, homosexuals, and Jews should send a chill down any liberal spine. It seems that the destruction of Israel, the very likely slaughter of its Jewish population, and the near-certain establishment of a deeply illiberal Islamic state have become goals for too many leftists who haven’t thought things through. Or simply haven’t thought. For too many, anti-Zionism acts as an excuse for anti-Semitism in a manner quite divorced from normal political argument.
This vicious circle, from the European right to the Middle East, back to European Muslims and the European left, to a leftist fascism and so back to radical Islam must be stopped now, before it corrupts liberals beyond hope. It’s time the silence was broken and a proper debate opened up. When liberals join forces with people who train their children to become suicide bombers and teach them to call Jews ‘apes and pigs’, something is wrong. It won’t be put right until the liberal left sorts itself out on this litmus test of a true liberal conscience.
‘First they came for the Jews…’
In front of me is a cartoon of a stereotypical Jew, black hat, long beard, hooked nose, glaring eyes. Grinning, he holds up a goblet filled with skulls and blood, labelled ‘the Lebanese people’. Forget the politics for a moment. This is the blood libel in modern garb. Is it from a neo-Nazi publication sold under the counter to die-hard anti-Semites? Far from it. This is in al-Watan, one of Qatar’s five mainstream daily papers. Al-Watan is jointly owned by a member of the royal family and the country’s foreign minister.
This Jew is only one of thousands who, over the years, have leered and still leer out of the pages of the mainstream Arab and Iranian press in a chilling reflection of the imagery of Der Stürmer. When I say ‘the mainstream press’, I mean prominent, state-controlled dailies and weeklies like Egypt’s al-Ahram and al-Jumhuriyya, Jordan’s al-Dustur, the Palestine Authority’s al-Hayat al-Jadida, Syria’s Tishrin, Lebanon’s al-Mustaqbal, Saudi Arabia’s al-Watan, and dozens more. Even Egypt’s state-sponsored science journal, al-‘Ilm, has featured articles claiming that Jews are spreading AIDS as part of a conspiracy. In October 2000, Ibrahim Nafi‘, editor of al-Ahram, the Egyptian equivalent of The Times, was subpoenaed by French legal authorities for the paper’s support for the blood libel.
There is no subtlety about it: Jews are horned demons, pigs, puppeteers, child killers, lechers, greed-driven financiers, snakes, cannibals, and, worst of all, Nazis. Not Israelis, mark you, but Jews, all Jews.
And it isn’t just the press. Arab and Iranian television air shows that make your hair stand on end. Egypt’s 41-part TV series, Horseman without a Horse, aired in 2002 to audiences on at least 17 channels throughout the Middle East; using the famous Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it convinced viewers that Jews were plotting to take over the world. Syria’s 2003 $5.1 million al-Shatat (The Diaspora), screened 30 episodes of vicious propaganda, portraying Jews as depraved killers in pursuit of Christian and Muslim blood. Just last year, Iran staged a Holocaust denial conference and an exhibition of cartoons mocking Jewish suffering in the non-Holocaust.
Mosque sermons in many Middle Eastern cities feature the sort of anti-Jewish language you might have expected to hear at a Nuremberg rally. The world’s leading Sunni cleric, Shaykh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the rector of Cairo’s al-Azhar, has called Jews ‘the enemies of God, descendants of apes and pigs’. The imam of Islam’s holiest mosque, the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, has preached that Jews are ‘the scum of the human race, the rats of the world’. Ken Livingstone’s favourite radical preacher, Qatar-based Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, said in a Friday sermon in 2005 ‘Allah, [harm] your enemies, the enemies of Islam. Allah, [harm] the treacherous and aggressive Jews.’
Hitler is widely regarded as a hero (translations of Mein Kampf, like those of the Protocols, are best-sellers) whose only offence was not having finished the job of wiping out the Jews. Some of the worst anti-Semitic sentiments and images may be found on children’s TV and in textbooks. Both Hezbollah and Hamas use the Nazi salute as a matter of course. Welcome to the Fourth Reich.
It would be comforting to say that all of this is inspired by anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist sentiment. Much of it is, of course, though it’s hard to see how that makes it any better. But this new style anti-Semitism begins before the foundation of Israel and is clearly directed at Jews, not just Israelis. We should not forget that even Nazi propaganda against enemies of the Reich like Britain never reached depths like these. When the Nazis wanted to portray people as vermin, they did not use the English: they singled out the Jews. The same thing is happening in the Middle East.
Islam has never been anti-Semitic in the racist sense. The treatment of Jews in countries like Morocco, Egypt, or Yemen was generally more tolerant and less prone to outright violence than that of Christian Europe. Even as late as the 1920s, the condition of the Jewish communities of Cairo and Alexandria was well in advance of that found in Russia, Poland, or France.
In the 1930s and 40s, however, many Arabs were drawn to German fascism, hoping the Nazis would defeat the French and British and drive out the Jews. Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the infamous Mufti of Jerusalem, spent most of the war in Berlin, broadcasting to the Arab world and building the largest of the Reich’s SS divisions. Escaping arrest, he continued his propaganda work long after the war. In the 1960s, this imported style of anti-Semitism started to hold hands with a vicious strain of religious Judaeophobia coming from radical Islamic movements like the Muslim Brotherhood. Since then, this hybrid has entered the mainstream, where it has taken hold everywhere from universities to kindergartens.
But this is probably the first time most of you will have read about any of this. Despite its obvious newsworthiness, it’s a subject routinely ignored by reporters, journalists, and documentary makers in Europe and North America. This allows most Westerners to go on fantasizing that anti-Semitism is the strict preserve of the loony right.
Would that it were so. Anti-Semitism has always known how to mutate, moving from one culture to another with the greatest of ease. Just as the medieval European blood libel slipped into the Arab world in the 19th century and survives there today, so the new Middle Eastern anti-Semitism has moved back to Europe, where it has taken up residence among two groups, extremist Muslims and sectors of the Left.
Last year’s All-Party Parliamentary Report on Anti-Semitism showed that hatred of Jews in the UK is growing, just as an earlier European report showed the same phenomenon across the continent. The UK report said ‘We received evidence of an increase in antisemitism within certain fringe elements of the Muslim community. In many cases, these are the actions and words of a small yet radical minority whose views do not represent those of the mainstream majority. However, this cannot simply be dismissed as insignificant and the views of radical Islamists do seem to be entering mainstream discourse.’
Arabic translations of Mein Kampf and the Protocols can be found on sale on the Edgware Road. Foreign-language videos on sale at some mosques contain anti-Jewish incitement. Internet sites carry anti-Semitic material. But nothing much is done. A 2006 Pew poll found that 68% of British Muslims disliked Jews, compared with 29% in France. A Populus poll showed 46% of UK Muslims believe Jews are in league with Freemasons to control the media and politics, while 37% think Jews are ‘legitimate targets’.
Meanwhile, liberals like myself are betrayed by an increasingly disturbing rise of left-wing anti-Semitism. Having built up an unbalanced hatred for Israel (for many, it’s the only country in the world they condemn), many leftists have carelessly conflated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and pride themselves in doing so. Here’s a considered remark by University of Massachusetts professor Helen Cullen: ‘Judaism and the Jewish identity are offensive to most human beings and will always cause trouble between the Jews and the rest of the human race’.
Fair and honest criticism of Israel is one thing, but many on the left have left rationality behind to march alongside radical Muslims whose views on women, homosexuals, and Jews should send a chill down any liberal spine. It seems that the destruction of Israel, the very likely slaughter of its Jewish population, and the near-certain establishment of a deeply illiberal Islamic state have become goals for too many leftists who haven’t thought things through. Or simply haven’t thought. For too many, anti-Zionism acts as an excuse for anti-Semitism in a manner quite divorced from normal political argument.
This vicious circle, from the European right to the Middle East, back to European Muslims and the European left, to a leftist fascism and so back to radical Islam must be stopped now, before it corrupts liberals beyond hope. It’s time the silence was broken and a proper debate opened up. When liberals join forces with people who train their children to become suicide bombers and teach them to call Jews ‘apes and pigs’, something is wrong. It won’t be put right until the liberal left sorts itself out on this litmus test of a true liberal conscience.
Monday, May 28, 2007
A Day in the Life of the Guardian
One day in the Guardian
Guardian readers (like myself) are curious folk. There's no doubt that they have decent liberal values: they sympathize with the poor, with the downtrodden, with the dispossessed. They hate bigotry. They hate racism. They are feminists of varying styles and persuasions. Their hearts are in all the right places. Except for three things: they hate complementary medicine with a loathing bordering on fanaticism. (I have my own prejudice here: I used to be President of the Natural Medicines Society, and my wife is a homeopath.) They hate Israel. And they can't find it in their hearts to call terrorists terrorists, unless they explode themselves on the British transport system. This won't come as a surprise to anyone likely to read this blog.
I don't want to take up your time analysing all this. I just want to draw your attention (especially if you are a Guardian reader) to today's (28 May 2007) edition.
On page 14, a report on the disgraceful neo-fascist attack on European MPs and others protesting a ban on a gay rights parade in Moscow. The mayor of Moscow dubbed gay rallies as 'satanic'.
Page 15 carries a full-page report on the coming Syrian referendum, in which Bashshar al-Asad is the only choice. This is dubbed in the headline: 'Democracy Damascus style'. 'There is no legal opposition. Tellingly, the event is described in Arabic as "renewing the pledge of allegiance" as if this young, British-educated ophthalmologist and computer buff were a medieval Calip'. I imagine the Arabic reads something like 'tajdid al-bay'a', which takes us back to the times of the Prophet and the very first caliphs. The seventh century, not the Middle Ages.
Page 17 heads witgh a piece on how 'Riot police on alert as anti-Chávez TV channel taken off air'. Ahmadinejad-loving Chávez is the darling of the Left and a hero to Guardian readers. As Radio Caracas Television prepared to be closed because of its opposition to Chávez, its director, Marcel Granier, said 'This marks a turn toward totalitarianism'.
Let's skip to page 21 (18-19 are taken up by a huge photograph of a ship amidst Arctic ice, 20 is an advert): 'Mugabe ready to seize foreign companies' — 'a move that economists warn would be as damaging as the widespread land seizures in the country'.
Now, it's fair to say that, even if they don't always occur in so concentrated a form, stories like this do feature in the Guardian on a more or less daily basis. So Guardian readers are well aware of some of the unpleasant things that happen in some foreign countries. And they know how some of these things impinge on their own most cherished beliefs (Peter Tatchell was among those beaten in Moscow). I don't doubt they feel outrage when they read such stories. But for some reason whatever indignation they feel doesn't, in Forster's words, 'connect'.
Here's a gay rights parade banned in Moscow (and dubbed 'satanic' by a politician), here's a group of European gay rights protesters badly beaten by neo-fascists. I expect there may be murmurs of protest (in fact, I hope there will be plenty). But over there in Tel Aviv (don't mention the bigots in Jerusalem) they openly hold gay rights parades. They offer sanctuary to gay men and women from Gaza and the West Bank. And Guardian readers proclaim loudly that Israel is an 'apartheid state'. Perhaps one group of gay Guardian readers might like to go to Moscow and another bunch to Tel Aviv, and write a piece for G2 six months later, telling us their experiences.
Here's a country run by yet another Arab dictatorship, a state under one-party rule. One-party rule is anathema to Guardian readers. This dictatorship gives aid to terrorist groups like Hizbullah, who threaten Israel, but clamps down on others (notably the Ikhwan al-Muslimun, the Muslim Brothers) who threaten the Baathist state. When did Guardian readers last march in the streets to protest Syrian clamp-downs on a free press, free elections, or, among others, gay rights? Never, I think. When did they take to the streets to condemn Syrian interfreence in Lebanon, or Syrian support for terrorism? Never. When did they last complain bitterly about Israel, the one democracy in the region, calling it a 'fascist' state? As far as I know, every day of the week.
Guardian readers refuse to say a word about censorship in the Middle East. Two years ago, Human Rights Watch published a report on the extensive clamp-downs in Egyptian universities. Guardian readers on the march? Not likely. An Israel-based agency publishes TV clips and press transcripts showing anti-Semitic material from Iran and the Arab woirld. The Guardian's Middle East editor takes exception to an agency based in Israel and set up by an Israeli, and dismisses all this material out of hand. Who are we dealing with here? Guardian readers? Or Goebbels? And I don't expect to see anyone on the streets protesting about censorship under the increasingly-autcratic Chávez. Though the anti-Israel lobby, many of them Guardian readers, does like to claim that Israel, a country that has no censorship beyond what we have here in the UK, covers up, hides, harasses journalists etc.
I don't suppose anyone will complain about Mugabe, bearing in mind that many of the foreign companies he will take over are multi-nationals, whom Guardian readers hate anyway. But they will be quite comfortable in calling for a boycott of Israeli products, putting at risk, among others, joint Jewish-Arab businesses, solo Arab businesses, socialist kibbutzim, and honest, hard-working Israelis of all backgrounds.
So let me say it clearly. I am a Guardian reader. I love Israel. I am a contradiction in terms. Or maybe not. Maybe I just read what's in there and draw unusual conclusions. Unlike so many of my fellow readers, I am, I believe, consistent.
Guardian readers (like myself) are curious folk. There's no doubt that they have decent liberal values: they sympathize with the poor, with the downtrodden, with the dispossessed. They hate bigotry. They hate racism. They are feminists of varying styles and persuasions. Their hearts are in all the right places. Except for three things: they hate complementary medicine with a loathing bordering on fanaticism. (I have my own prejudice here: I used to be President of the Natural Medicines Society, and my wife is a homeopath.) They hate Israel. And they can't find it in their hearts to call terrorists terrorists, unless they explode themselves on the British transport system. This won't come as a surprise to anyone likely to read this blog.
I don't want to take up your time analysing all this. I just want to draw your attention (especially if you are a Guardian reader) to today's (28 May 2007) edition.
On page 14, a report on the disgraceful neo-fascist attack on European MPs and others protesting a ban on a gay rights parade in Moscow. The mayor of Moscow dubbed gay rallies as 'satanic'.
Page 15 carries a full-page report on the coming Syrian referendum, in which Bashshar al-Asad is the only choice. This is dubbed in the headline: 'Democracy Damascus style'. 'There is no legal opposition. Tellingly, the event is described in Arabic as "renewing the pledge of allegiance" as if this young, British-educated ophthalmologist and computer buff were a medieval Calip'. I imagine the Arabic reads something like 'tajdid al-bay'a', which takes us back to the times of the Prophet and the very first caliphs. The seventh century, not the Middle Ages.
Page 17 heads witgh a piece on how 'Riot police on alert as anti-Chávez TV channel taken off air'. Ahmadinejad-loving Chávez is the darling of the Left and a hero to Guardian readers. As Radio Caracas Television prepared to be closed because of its opposition to Chávez, its director, Marcel Granier, said 'This marks a turn toward totalitarianism'.
Let's skip to page 21 (18-19 are taken up by a huge photograph of a ship amidst Arctic ice, 20 is an advert): 'Mugabe ready to seize foreign companies' — 'a move that economists warn would be as damaging as the widespread land seizures in the country'.
Now, it's fair to say that, even if they don't always occur in so concentrated a form, stories like this do feature in the Guardian on a more or less daily basis. So Guardian readers are well aware of some of the unpleasant things that happen in some foreign countries. And they know how some of these things impinge on their own most cherished beliefs (Peter Tatchell was among those beaten in Moscow). I don't doubt they feel outrage when they read such stories. But for some reason whatever indignation they feel doesn't, in Forster's words, 'connect'.
Here's a gay rights parade banned in Moscow (and dubbed 'satanic' by a politician), here's a group of European gay rights protesters badly beaten by neo-fascists. I expect there may be murmurs of protest (in fact, I hope there will be plenty). But over there in Tel Aviv (don't mention the bigots in Jerusalem) they openly hold gay rights parades. They offer sanctuary to gay men and women from Gaza and the West Bank. And Guardian readers proclaim loudly that Israel is an 'apartheid state'. Perhaps one group of gay Guardian readers might like to go to Moscow and another bunch to Tel Aviv, and write a piece for G2 six months later, telling us their experiences.
Here's a country run by yet another Arab dictatorship, a state under one-party rule. One-party rule is anathema to Guardian readers. This dictatorship gives aid to terrorist groups like Hizbullah, who threaten Israel, but clamps down on others (notably the Ikhwan al-Muslimun, the Muslim Brothers) who threaten the Baathist state. When did Guardian readers last march in the streets to protest Syrian clamp-downs on a free press, free elections, or, among others, gay rights? Never, I think. When did they take to the streets to condemn Syrian interfreence in Lebanon, or Syrian support for terrorism? Never. When did they last complain bitterly about Israel, the one democracy in the region, calling it a 'fascist' state? As far as I know, every day of the week.
Guardian readers refuse to say a word about censorship in the Middle East. Two years ago, Human Rights Watch published a report on the extensive clamp-downs in Egyptian universities. Guardian readers on the march? Not likely. An Israel-based agency publishes TV clips and press transcripts showing anti-Semitic material from Iran and the Arab woirld. The Guardian's Middle East editor takes exception to an agency based in Israel and set up by an Israeli, and dismisses all this material out of hand. Who are we dealing with here? Guardian readers? Or Goebbels? And I don't expect to see anyone on the streets protesting about censorship under the increasingly-autcratic Chávez. Though the anti-Israel lobby, many of them Guardian readers, does like to claim that Israel, a country that has no censorship beyond what we have here in the UK, covers up, hides, harasses journalists etc.
I don't suppose anyone will complain about Mugabe, bearing in mind that many of the foreign companies he will take over are multi-nationals, whom Guardian readers hate anyway. But they will be quite comfortable in calling for a boycott of Israeli products, putting at risk, among others, joint Jewish-Arab businesses, solo Arab businesses, socialist kibbutzim, and honest, hard-working Israelis of all backgrounds.
So let me say it clearly. I am a Guardian reader. I love Israel. I am a contradiction in terms. Or maybe not. Maybe I just read what's in there and draw unusual conclusions. Unlike so many of my fellow readers, I am, I believe, consistent.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Barriers
Few things have damaged Israel's international reputation more than the security barrier it has been constructing to prevent Palestinian terrorist crossing into its territory and commiting outrages against innocent civilians. Invariably — and inaccurately — portrayed as a wall ('The Apartheid Wall'), the barrier has been pillored in the media almost everywhere. I've written at some length about this issue on an earlier blog, so I won't repeat myself here. One of the points I made in that blog was that, although the Israeli barrier is portrayed as egregious, even unique, it is, in fact, just one of many similar barriers around the world. Human rights activists protest about the Israeli barrier, however, yet remain silent about fences and walls that are longer, higher, and, in some cases, deadly. We need to protest this for its imbalance. By a great irony, the Guardian recently published a map of security fences round the world. It won't reproduce easily, so I have tabulated the basic data, which I reproduce below as a resource for anyone who has to talk about this issue.
Security fences or barriers to peace?
Information taken from a map published in The Guardian 24 April 2007
(Reformulated Denis MacEoin 4 May 2007)
US/Mexico Proposed. 3,360km. Several barriers already exist with Mexico (California, Texas, Arizona). This would cover the entire border. Anti-immigration.
Belfast, N. Ireland. Built early 1970s. Average 500m. Number around 40. Anti-terror.
Padua, Italy 2006. 85m. 3m-high, round mainly African Anelli estate. Internal.
Ceuta, Morocco 2001. 8km. €30m. EU-funded. Anti-immigration.
Mellila, Morocco 1998. 11km. Anti-immigration
Morocco/Western Sahara 1987. 2,700km. To keep out W. Saharan (Polisario) insurgents
Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt 2005. 20km. Anti-terror
Botswana/Zimbabwe 2003. 500km. Anti-immigration.
South Africa/Mozambique 1975. 120km. Anti-immigration. Carries 3,300 volts. Has killed more people than Berlin Wall
Israel/West Bank Under construction. 703km. Anti-terror.
Adhamiyya, Iraq 2007. 5km. Anti-terror.
Cyprus 1974. 300km. Conflict zone barrier.
Kuwait/Iraq 1991. 193km. Conflict zone barrier.
Saudi Arabia/Yemen 2004. 75km. Anti-terror.
United Arab Emirates/Oman 2007. 410km. Anti-immigration.
Russia/Chechnya Proposed. 700 km. Anti-terror
Kashmir 2004. 550km. Anti-terror (India).
Pakistan/Afghanistan Proposed. 2,400km. Anti-terror (Pakistan).
Uzbekistan/Kyrgyzstan 1999. 870km. Conflict zone.
China/North Korea 2006. 1,416km. Conflict zone.
Korea Demilitarized Zone 1953. 248km. Av. 4 km wide. Patrolled by 2 million soldiers. Most heavily border in world. Conflict zone.
China/Hong Kong 1999. 32km. Internal barrier.
China/Macau 1999. 340km. Internal barrier.
Brunei/Limbang 2005. 20km. Anti-immigration.
Thailand/Malaysia Proposed. 650km. Anti-immigration.
India/Bangladesh Under construction. 3,268km. Conflict zone.
Security fences or barriers to peace?
Information taken from a map published in The Guardian 24 April 2007
(Reformulated Denis MacEoin 4 May 2007)
US/Mexico Proposed. 3,360km. Several barriers already exist with Mexico (California, Texas, Arizona). This would cover the entire border. Anti-immigration.
Belfast, N. Ireland. Built early 1970s. Average 500m. Number around 40. Anti-terror.
Padua, Italy 2006. 85m. 3m-high, round mainly African Anelli estate. Internal.
Ceuta, Morocco 2001. 8km. €30m. EU-funded. Anti-immigration.
Mellila, Morocco 1998. 11km. Anti-immigration
Morocco/Western Sahara 1987. 2,700km. To keep out W. Saharan (Polisario) insurgents
Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt 2005. 20km. Anti-terror
Botswana/Zimbabwe 2003. 500km. Anti-immigration.
South Africa/Mozambique 1975. 120km. Anti-immigration. Carries 3,300 volts. Has killed more people than Berlin Wall
Israel/West Bank Under construction. 703km. Anti-terror.
Adhamiyya, Iraq 2007. 5km. Anti-terror.
Cyprus 1974. 300km. Conflict zone barrier.
Kuwait/Iraq 1991. 193km. Conflict zone barrier.
Saudi Arabia/Yemen 2004. 75km. Anti-terror.
United Arab Emirates/Oman 2007. 410km. Anti-immigration.
Russia/Chechnya Proposed. 700 km. Anti-terror
Kashmir 2004. 550km. Anti-terror (India).
Pakistan/Afghanistan Proposed. 2,400km. Anti-terror (Pakistan).
Uzbekistan/Kyrgyzstan 1999. 870km. Conflict zone.
China/North Korea 2006. 1,416km. Conflict zone.
Korea Demilitarized Zone 1953. 248km. Av. 4 km wide. Patrolled by 2 million soldiers. Most heavily border in world. Conflict zone.
China/Hong Kong 1999. 32km. Internal barrier.
China/Macau 1999. 340km. Internal barrier.
Brunei/Limbang 2005. 20km. Anti-immigration.
Thailand/Malaysia Proposed. 650km. Anti-immigration.
India/Bangladesh Under construction. 3,268km. Conflict zone.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Israeli despair
In a recent article in The Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick argued that Israelis have started to feel despair for their future and the future of Israel. The Zionist dream is fading, she says, in a desperate dawn of stark reality. Despite a soaring economy, a world-class educational system, a high standard of living, and the glories of the land itself, Israelis are losing their patriotism. The Zionist hope of bringing an end to the persecutions of the Diaspora centuries through the creation of an autonomous homeland in which Jews would be able to defend themselves from aggression rings hollow in the aftermath of wars, terrorist attacks, and last summer's rain of Hizbullah rockets. In the greatest irony of two thousand years, the most dangerous place on earth for Jews is the Jewish state of Israel.
One can hardly blame Israelis for experiencing despair under such circumstances. In Northern Ireland, where I'm from, the violent phase of the Troubles went on for about 30 years, and people despaired then of it ever ending; even now, with the violence largely under control, it's still proving hard to negotiate a political solution. Israelis have been coping with much greater levels of violence for about 60 years, or longer if you go back to the 1920s. Even at their height, the Irish Troubles never threatened the existence either of Northern Ireland (the worst thing that would have happened would have been integration in the increasingly properous Republic) or the UK mainland. What Israelis are experiencing is an existential threat, to themselves, their families, their townships, their houses, the places they walk in, the city and country views they admire, the cafés they frequent, the secluded places they go with their lovers, the graveyards that hold their dead, the sense of place brought home by long memory and reading the Bible. You can't just pick that all up and take it somewhere else, not when you have a bitter memory of having done it before, and of the suffering that came with the state of being in a diaspora.
More and more people are saying 'it's a pity Israel was ever established' — most recently London's obnoxious mayor, Ken Livingstone. The argument goes that, if there had been no Israel in the first place, and if the Palestinians had been given a state instead, there would be no unrest in the Middle East, no radical Islamic violence anywhere else, no war in Iraq or Afghanistan, no war on terror, and—who knows—even universal peace.
Of course, that's unbelievably naïve. Without Israel, things would have been and would now be different. But that's a bit like my saying, 'if I hadn't married my wife, things would have worked out differently'. Some writers use this concept effectively, developing a theory of the 'shadow self', the 'me' who would be a totally different person if this or that hadn't happened. For myself, I know with considerable accuracy the one tiny decision, a last-minute thing, that influenced the rest of my life totally and irrevocably. Most of us can do this, especially as we get older. The idea was very well expressed some years ago in a film called Sliding Doors. We may sometimes regret this or that choice, but we know that a different choice might have worked out even worse. (My wife worked out as an excellent choice, by the way!)
If Israel hadn't existed, the Middle East would have fallen into disarray anyway, thanks to the collapse of centralized Ottoman rule and the existence of numerous mainly religious divisions across the region. When empires collapse, their constituent parts inevitably fragment and turn on each other. The tensions the Ottomans kept in check have become vicious since 1918, and they would have been so Israel or not.
Of course putting a Jewish state down in the Arab world may not have been the most judicious thing. With hindsight, it can seem to have been unwise. But if we think about it, might it not also have been a very positive thing? After all, there were Jewish communities throughout North Africa and the Middle East in those days, and these communities often played major roles in the lives of the countries they lived in (Egypt, especially Alexandria, being perhaps the best example). When we look at somewhere like Alexandria around the turn of the century and for many decades later, not only was there a thriving Jewish community, but there were Greeks, Armenians, Iranians, Lebanese, Turks, and British. Nowadays, all that cosmopolitan vigour has gone. Was that the fault of Israel? What would someone like Nasser have done without Israel to focus on? What would the Muslim Brotherhood and other Salafi religious groups have done without Israel? In the case of Nasser, he might have taken his pan-Arabist ambitions and gone on to conquer or try to conquer other Arab countries. The Brotherhood might have concentrated on cleansing the Muslim world of its heresies and decadence. Who knows?
A positive Arab response to Israel, based on an understanding of the contributions made by the region's Jews (remember how hard the Moroccans tried to get their Jews to stay?) might have led to the creation of two viable, mutually reinforcing states with alliances across the region and beyond. Without al-Husayni, without the Muslim Brotherhood, without the German thrust for Palestine, how different it all might have been.
Is this reason to despair? Yes and no. To feel threatened, to feel afraid, to feel despondent because nobody seems to love you — all these are valid emotions. But if we give in to negative emotions, they can destroy us more effectively than our enemies. And if Israelis capitulate to their enemies, if Hamas et al one day establish a Palestinian theocracy, can anyone believe it will be the end of the story? For Jews, it will spell the end, exposing them to international obloquoy and the threats that will stem from it. For the rest of us, it will be a triumph for intolerance, for the rule of violence, and for hardline fundamentalism. Doctors tell patients suffering from depression that they have to do hard things, from forcing themselves out of bed in the morning, to going to work, to eating properly. It's tough, but the alternative is tougher. Israel's daily struggle isn't helped by the mood of despair. Now, I firmly believe, the only thing that will raise Israeli spirits will be a total victory over Hizbullah, whether that's this summer or the next.
One can hardly blame Israelis for experiencing despair under such circumstances. In Northern Ireland, where I'm from, the violent phase of the Troubles went on for about 30 years, and people despaired then of it ever ending; even now, with the violence largely under control, it's still proving hard to negotiate a political solution. Israelis have been coping with much greater levels of violence for about 60 years, or longer if you go back to the 1920s. Even at their height, the Irish Troubles never threatened the existence either of Northern Ireland (the worst thing that would have happened would have been integration in the increasingly properous Republic) or the UK mainland. What Israelis are experiencing is an existential threat, to themselves, their families, their townships, their houses, the places they walk in, the city and country views they admire, the cafés they frequent, the secluded places they go with their lovers, the graveyards that hold their dead, the sense of place brought home by long memory and reading the Bible. You can't just pick that all up and take it somewhere else, not when you have a bitter memory of having done it before, and of the suffering that came with the state of being in a diaspora.
More and more people are saying 'it's a pity Israel was ever established' — most recently London's obnoxious mayor, Ken Livingstone. The argument goes that, if there had been no Israel in the first place, and if the Palestinians had been given a state instead, there would be no unrest in the Middle East, no radical Islamic violence anywhere else, no war in Iraq or Afghanistan, no war on terror, and—who knows—even universal peace.
Of course, that's unbelievably naïve. Without Israel, things would have been and would now be different. But that's a bit like my saying, 'if I hadn't married my wife, things would have worked out differently'. Some writers use this concept effectively, developing a theory of the 'shadow self', the 'me' who would be a totally different person if this or that hadn't happened. For myself, I know with considerable accuracy the one tiny decision, a last-minute thing, that influenced the rest of my life totally and irrevocably. Most of us can do this, especially as we get older. The idea was very well expressed some years ago in a film called Sliding Doors. We may sometimes regret this or that choice, but we know that a different choice might have worked out even worse. (My wife worked out as an excellent choice, by the way!)
If Israel hadn't existed, the Middle East would have fallen into disarray anyway, thanks to the collapse of centralized Ottoman rule and the existence of numerous mainly religious divisions across the region. When empires collapse, their constituent parts inevitably fragment and turn on each other. The tensions the Ottomans kept in check have become vicious since 1918, and they would have been so Israel or not.
Of course putting a Jewish state down in the Arab world may not have been the most judicious thing. With hindsight, it can seem to have been unwise. But if we think about it, might it not also have been a very positive thing? After all, there were Jewish communities throughout North Africa and the Middle East in those days, and these communities often played major roles in the lives of the countries they lived in (Egypt, especially Alexandria, being perhaps the best example). When we look at somewhere like Alexandria around the turn of the century and for many decades later, not only was there a thriving Jewish community, but there were Greeks, Armenians, Iranians, Lebanese, Turks, and British. Nowadays, all that cosmopolitan vigour has gone. Was that the fault of Israel? What would someone like Nasser have done without Israel to focus on? What would the Muslim Brotherhood and other Salafi religious groups have done without Israel? In the case of Nasser, he might have taken his pan-Arabist ambitions and gone on to conquer or try to conquer other Arab countries. The Brotherhood might have concentrated on cleansing the Muslim world of its heresies and decadence. Who knows?
A positive Arab response to Israel, based on an understanding of the contributions made by the region's Jews (remember how hard the Moroccans tried to get their Jews to stay?) might have led to the creation of two viable, mutually reinforcing states with alliances across the region and beyond. Without al-Husayni, without the Muslim Brotherhood, without the German thrust for Palestine, how different it all might have been.
Is this reason to despair? Yes and no. To feel threatened, to feel afraid, to feel despondent because nobody seems to love you — all these are valid emotions. But if we give in to negative emotions, they can destroy us more effectively than our enemies. And if Israelis capitulate to their enemies, if Hamas et al one day establish a Palestinian theocracy, can anyone believe it will be the end of the story? For Jews, it will spell the end, exposing them to international obloquoy and the threats that will stem from it. For the rest of us, it will be a triumph for intolerance, for the rule of violence, and for hardline fundamentalism. Doctors tell patients suffering from depression that they have to do hard things, from forcing themselves out of bed in the morning, to going to work, to eating properly. It's tough, but the alternative is tougher. Israel's daily struggle isn't helped by the mood of despair. Now, I firmly believe, the only thing that will raise Israeli spirits will be a total victory over Hizbullah, whether that's this summer or the next.
A poor showing by Leeds university
Further to my post about the Matthias Küntzel affair, here are two letters, one from the university, giving rather weak excuses for their action, and my response to that.
On 19 Mar 2007, at 19:03, Roger Gair wrote:
Dear Dr MacEoin,
As the responsible officer, I write in response to your messages to the Chancellor and the Vice-Chancellor.
Dr Kuentzel's proposed public lecture last Wednesday evening was cancelled neither for any reason of censorship nor because of pressure from any interest group. It was cancelled because the organisers did not give us enough notice to provide the normal level of portering, stewarding and security (around twenty people in total) for such an event.
It is simply not true that we somehow capitulated to threats or complaints. As a matter of fact, we received no threats, and only a handful of complaints – fewer indeed than for a talk delivered on our campus the previous evening by an Israeli diplomat. The talk by the Israeli diplomat went ahead; the difference was that the organisers (the University’s Jewish Society) told us about that talk the week before and worked with us to make the necessary arrangements.
Assuming that we are given enough notice, and appropriate logistical information, I know of no reason why Dr Kuentzel should not deliver his lecture in Leeds at a future date.
For the record, and despite press reports to the contrary, the University did not in any way seek to prevent two other talks by Dr Kuentzel on (I believe) the same theme: as internal academic seminars, they did not require the same level of support as a large public meeting.
Yours sincerely,
Roger Gair
MY REPLY
Dear Mr Gair,
I have had now had a chance to garner further information about the cancellation of Dr. Küntzel's lecture and seminars, and I have to say that I do not find your explanation of the university's action at all convincing. Nothing you write adds up. You speak of security matters, yet deny any threats or menaces that might make such measures necessary. You suggest that the need for such security came up entirely at the last minute, on the day Dr. Küntzel arrived in Leeds to give his lecture, yet it is patently clear that the university had known of this event for four months and had advertised it for three weeks. That can only mean that something fresh must have intervened some very short time before the 14th. Since I know that e-mails from Muslim students had been received by the university administration during that time gap, and that these messages might easily have been interpreted as indicators of possible protest or worse, I find it remarkably easy to connect the two things as cause and effect.
If those messages (and perhaps other communications to which I am not privy) did not serve as prompts to suggest a need for a very high level of security, I would like to know what other factor or factors did in fact prompt you. I have studied and worked in universities for forty years, teaching, among other things, Islamic Studies, yet I have never once known a situation in which a university has felt it necessary to provide other than the most regular level of security for an event — a porter usually, or notification of the university police. Dr. Küntzel's lecture was to have been on a valid academic subject, one on which I have myself written and talked, and to whose validity and urgency I can testify. The subject matter of Islamic anti-Semitism is neither unacademic nor, frankly, particularly controversial except to some (and by no means all) Muslims. Why should this one lecture out of a series have been singled out at the last minute for such draconian attention? It really isn't good enough to say that the department had not arranged for proper security soon enough, since I have to imagine that the same problem would then have applied to all lectures in the series. Or did the department only forget to do so for this one lecture?
I think the university did something disgraceful in cancelling this important lecture. I think veiled threats were made, or an assumption of threat was deduced (it would be naïve in the extreme to believe that a university based in Leeds of all places would not be sensitive to the potential results of Muslim grievance), and that the result was a denial of academic freedom. That it should be more important to give in to someone wishing to censor the dissemination of information than to grant a responsible academic the freedom to pass on the fruits of his research is to act in direct contravention of all standards of academic responsibility and, I am sure, the charter of your university itself.
Although I am not a member of staff at Leeds, I concern myself with this issue because I have known other examples of such pressure and am seriously frightened of the consequences of letting extreme Muslim opinion dictate what happens in academia wherever something seems to touch on radicalized sensibilities.
In conclusion, may I ask if it might not be appropriate for the university to hold or allow to be held an enquiry into the circumstances that led to this sorry business? You have a responsibility to everyone involved to provide better explanations than you have done so far and, should my interpretation or an approximation of it turn out to be correct, you owe an apology to all concerned. Such an apology must, without question, include a formal invitation to Dr. Küntzel to deliver his lecture and hold his seminars at a later date, the event to be given full and appropriate publicity.
I hope action can be taken to restore the university's integrity and to make it clear that censorship, threats, and bans form no part of Western academic norms.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin
On 19 Mar 2007, at 19:03, Roger Gair wrote:
Dear Dr MacEoin,
As the responsible officer, I write in response to your messages to the Chancellor and the Vice-Chancellor.
Dr Kuentzel's proposed public lecture last Wednesday evening was cancelled neither for any reason of censorship nor because of pressure from any interest group. It was cancelled because the organisers did not give us enough notice to provide the normal level of portering, stewarding and security (around twenty people in total) for such an event.
It is simply not true that we somehow capitulated to threats or complaints. As a matter of fact, we received no threats, and only a handful of complaints – fewer indeed than for a talk delivered on our campus the previous evening by an Israeli diplomat. The talk by the Israeli diplomat went ahead; the difference was that the organisers (the University’s Jewish Society) told us about that talk the week before and worked with us to make the necessary arrangements.
Assuming that we are given enough notice, and appropriate logistical information, I know of no reason why Dr Kuentzel should not deliver his lecture in Leeds at a future date.
For the record, and despite press reports to the contrary, the University did not in any way seek to prevent two other talks by Dr Kuentzel on (I believe) the same theme: as internal academic seminars, they did not require the same level of support as a large public meeting.
Yours sincerely,
Roger Gair
MY REPLY
Dear Mr Gair,
I have had now had a chance to garner further information about the cancellation of Dr. Küntzel's lecture and seminars, and I have to say that I do not find your explanation of the university's action at all convincing. Nothing you write adds up. You speak of security matters, yet deny any threats or menaces that might make such measures necessary. You suggest that the need for such security came up entirely at the last minute, on the day Dr. Küntzel arrived in Leeds to give his lecture, yet it is patently clear that the university had known of this event for four months and had advertised it for three weeks. That can only mean that something fresh must have intervened some very short time before the 14th. Since I know that e-mails from Muslim students had been received by the university administration during that time gap, and that these messages might easily have been interpreted as indicators of possible protest or worse, I find it remarkably easy to connect the two things as cause and effect.
If those messages (and perhaps other communications to which I am not privy) did not serve as prompts to suggest a need for a very high level of security, I would like to know what other factor or factors did in fact prompt you. I have studied and worked in universities for forty years, teaching, among other things, Islamic Studies, yet I have never once known a situation in which a university has felt it necessary to provide other than the most regular level of security for an event — a porter usually, or notification of the university police. Dr. Küntzel's lecture was to have been on a valid academic subject, one on which I have myself written and talked, and to whose validity and urgency I can testify. The subject matter of Islamic anti-Semitism is neither unacademic nor, frankly, particularly controversial except to some (and by no means all) Muslims. Why should this one lecture out of a series have been singled out at the last minute for such draconian attention? It really isn't good enough to say that the department had not arranged for proper security soon enough, since I have to imagine that the same problem would then have applied to all lectures in the series. Or did the department only forget to do so for this one lecture?
I think the university did something disgraceful in cancelling this important lecture. I think veiled threats were made, or an assumption of threat was deduced (it would be naïve in the extreme to believe that a university based in Leeds of all places would not be sensitive to the potential results of Muslim grievance), and that the result was a denial of academic freedom. That it should be more important to give in to someone wishing to censor the dissemination of information than to grant a responsible academic the freedom to pass on the fruits of his research is to act in direct contravention of all standards of academic responsibility and, I am sure, the charter of your university itself.
Although I am not a member of staff at Leeds, I concern myself with this issue because I have known other examples of such pressure and am seriously frightened of the consequences of letting extreme Muslim opinion dictate what happens in academia wherever something seems to touch on radicalized sensibilities.
In conclusion, may I ask if it might not be appropriate for the university to hold or allow to be held an enquiry into the circumstances that led to this sorry business? You have a responsibility to everyone involved to provide better explanations than you have done so far and, should my interpretation or an approximation of it turn out to be correct, you owe an apology to all concerned. Such an apology must, without question, include a formal invitation to Dr. Küntzel to deliver his lecture and hold his seminars at a later date, the event to be given full and appropriate publicity.
I hope action can be taken to restore the university's integrity and to make it clear that censorship, threats, and bans form no part of Western academic norms.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin
Saturday, March 17, 2007
The censorship of the study of anti-Semitism
I will reproduce here two letters I've written this week, one to Lord Melvyn Bragg, cultural icon and Chancellor of Leeds University, and an earlier one to Professor Michael Arthur, the Leeds Vice-Chancellor. As many of you will know by now, a lecture and workshop that were due to have been given in Leeds last week by Dr. Matthias Küntzel of the Hebrew University's Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, were cancelled by the university on the grounds of 'security'. The subject was to have been Islamic Anti-Semitism, a keen research interest of my own, and tghe event would have taken place over three days in the university's German department. Some Muslims (possibly students, it isn't clear), perhaps a couple, perhaps many more, had objected to the sessions being given, and it looks fairly certain that the university administration, fearful of a protest and perhaps violence, caved in without even so much as a consultation. It is hard to understand what these Muslims thought they were protesting about in the first place. That a university should dare fulfil its obligation to provide a safe environment in which ideas can be explored? That someone in a university was going to say, heaven forbid, that many Muslims in the Middle East are flagrant anti-Semites? That this might somehow impinge on the dignity of Islam? That Dr. Küntzel might in passing refer to Qur'anic verses and hadiths of a less-than-friendly disposition towards Jews?
My own experience in researching and teaching in the field of religious studies has given me many memories of how easy it is to offend some religious people. My job as a teacher of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle was terminated when my sponsors, the Saudi Ministry of Higher Education, decided they didn't like me teaching two 'heretical' subjects, Shi'ism and Sufsim (as well as half of a course on the sociology of religion, which I devoted to my own 'expert' subject of Baha'ism). I've had flak from the other side as well. That's because the academic study of religion must, by definition, pass the limits of what believers may feel to be proper.
But Dr. Küntzel's seminar wasn't even about Islam as such. It was about a genuine evil, namely the ubiquitous presence of anti-Semitic tropes and images in parts of the Muslim world, especially Egypt, the Palesinian Territories, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and, of course, Iran. That is exactly the sort of subject any respectable university should wish to encourage. It is topical, it involves detailed analysis of history (links between Islamism and the Third Reich), it offers possibilities for serious textual analysis and theory-based commentary on film, television, and cartoon imagery (why, for example, do Arabs, who are Semites and share Semitic features with many Jews, choose to depict Jews with hooked noses, a trope taken directly from the Third Reich, where the hooked nose was an exaggerated emblem of non-Aryan status?), it leads into a discussion of the differences and similarities between anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Israelism. It is a valid academic subject, but, without warning, a university chooses to remove it from its campus.
Does any of this relate to Israel? You bet it does. Understanding this legacy involves a study of the way the Muslim Brotherhood and some of the Palestinian leadership (above all Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jersualem) chose to ally themselves with the Nazis and how, after World War II this support for fascism mutated into bitter anti-Zionism and imitation of fascist methods. Today, members of Hamas and Hizbullah use the Hitlergrüss salute, something only neo-Nazi groups do in Europe or North America. Knowing this helps us place a different interpretation on anti-Israel rhetoric and behaviour. To say it's a pity Hitler didn't finish the job and kill all Jews in the world, and then to claim 'I'm only anti-Israel, not anti-Semitism' is to stretch credulity. Yet Western journalists and politicians seem to fall for this line every time. Unless and until we learn to see through this smokescreen of 'anti-Israelism' to the underlying Judaeophobia, we will go on praising some of our very worst enemies. Because these people aren't just anti-Semitic. They are fascists, who hate democracy, freedom, and the rule of law in sovereign states. They are as much enemies of Western civilization as Hitler and his mafia were in the 1930s and 40s. When a British university thinks it better to avoid controversy than to open up debate about a reality that threatens its core freedoms, then it's time to ask just where we are all headed.
Here are the two letters, for what they are worth:
FAO
Lord Bragg of Wigton,
Chancellor,
The University of Leeds.
Dear Lord Bragg,
I am copying here a letter (via e-mail) that I sent some days ago to Professor Michael Arthur, the Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University, on what is now becoming a notorious instance of capitulation to outside pressure to cancel a legitimate and (many may say) crucial academic venture. As my letter to Professor Arthur points out, I had myself given a lecture under almost exactly the same title last Saturday, and have researched in this area myself, so I feel qualified to argue the appropriateness of Dr Küntzel's research and lecturing.
I fully understand your non-administrative position within the university, but I'm convinced that the implications of this ban for the wider world of academe and culture are so great that the incident threatens to bring the university into disrepute (and, indeed, has already done so in some circles). Hence my writing to you in the hope that some form of intervention on your part may lead to a fresh invitation being extended to Dr. Küntzel and, should he accept, a three-day workshop being held on the Leeds campus, followed perhaps by a public lecture on this vital subject. Should this be done with appropriate publicity within the university, and if both the workshop and the lecture (or lectures) should be attended by larger numbers, it would serve both an academic and educational purpose, by alerting audiences to the existence throughout the Middle East of a virulent form of anti-Semitism that is ubiquitous, mainstream, popular, and derived in its largest part from the tropes and images of the Third Reich. It is inconceivable to me that any university should seek to favour objections to such information and to put a gag on the bearer of what may be an unwelcome message, yet a hugely relevant one for modern society. Forms of Islamic anti-Semitism have already moved to Europe and North America, making all the greater the relevance of this message to a British university in a city that has bred Islamist terrorists.
I hope you will at least speak to the university authorities on this matter.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin
Royal Literary Fund Fellow
Newcastle University
LETTER TO PROFESSOR ARTHUR
Dear Vice-Chancellor,
May I begin by introducing myself as a former lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University, where I am currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow.
I have just received news of a decision made by Leeds University to cancel a talk and 2-day workshop series by Dr. Matthias Kuentzel of Hebrew University, both under the title 'Hitler's Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East'. Having myself given a lecture on Islamic Antisemitism a few days ago, I am horrified and outraged by this decision. As an academic who has struggled with religious pressures to censor and exercise control within my field, I place a high value on academic freedom within Western universities. I appreciate those freedoms the more for having studied at Shiraz University in Iran and taught at Mohammed V University in Fez, Morocco, where such freedoms are absent. An academic book of my own has recently been blocked from publication due to pressure brought on the publishers by a religious group. That is how keenly I feel about censorship contaminating the realm of academia, and why, in part, I am spurred to write to you in these terms. Academic freedom is the very foundation of all work carried in universities and colleges, and without it, as I know you must be very well aware, the entire project of unbiased, free, and honest academic teaching and research slips into degradation and abuse.
Since it is a research interest of my own, I can testify that the subject on which Dr. Kuentzel was due to speak is one of considerable importance, both academically and as a topic for public and governmental interest. Not to study it and not to debate it opens up a glaring gap in our knowledge of the Middle East, our understanding of Islam, and our analysis of Muslim relations with the West and with the Jewish community in particular. Anti-Semitism is in itself a subject studied internationally in numerous centres, and one about which innumerable books and articles have been written. Much of that latter work has originated in the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, at which Dr. Kuentzel works. It is beyond my comprehension that a scholar with his credentials, affiliated to such a centre and such a university, speaking on a topic of vital academic and general interest should be barred from speaking simply because a pressure group with blatantly vested interests has complained. What will be next? No lectures on Iranian nuclear strategy because someone in the Iranian embassy made a phone call to someone in your office? A lecture on animal research in your faculty of biological sciences cancelled because an animal rights group threatens to stage a protest?
I cannot believe that you yourself would for one moment consider letting outside interests exercise the least influence over the content of academic courses or guest lectures in any other context. Yet it has happened at your university, and I for one feel betrayed by that. If someone invites me to lecture at Leeds on this or a related topic, will I now be automatically persona non grata? Will I have to submit the text of my lecture to a censorship committee beforehand?
I wish to be reassured as to what action you and the university propose to take to remedy this serious breach of academic principle. I intend to forward details to the Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards, of which I am a long-standing member. They may in due course contact you as well. I do hope you can find a way to put this matter right, regardless of pressure from within or without your institution. I place my trust in you to do so.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin
Supporter, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
Patron, Friends of Israel Academic Study Group on the Middle East
My own experience in researching and teaching in the field of religious studies has given me many memories of how easy it is to offend some religious people. My job as a teacher of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle was terminated when my sponsors, the Saudi Ministry of Higher Education, decided they didn't like me teaching two 'heretical' subjects, Shi'ism and Sufsim (as well as half of a course on the sociology of religion, which I devoted to my own 'expert' subject of Baha'ism). I've had flak from the other side as well. That's because the academic study of religion must, by definition, pass the limits of what believers may feel to be proper.
But Dr. Küntzel's seminar wasn't even about Islam as such. It was about a genuine evil, namely the ubiquitous presence of anti-Semitic tropes and images in parts of the Muslim world, especially Egypt, the Palesinian Territories, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and, of course, Iran. That is exactly the sort of subject any respectable university should wish to encourage. It is topical, it involves detailed analysis of history (links between Islamism and the Third Reich), it offers possibilities for serious textual analysis and theory-based commentary on film, television, and cartoon imagery (why, for example, do Arabs, who are Semites and share Semitic features with many Jews, choose to depict Jews with hooked noses, a trope taken directly from the Third Reich, where the hooked nose was an exaggerated emblem of non-Aryan status?), it leads into a discussion of the differences and similarities between anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Israelism. It is a valid academic subject, but, without warning, a university chooses to remove it from its campus.
Does any of this relate to Israel? You bet it does. Understanding this legacy involves a study of the way the Muslim Brotherhood and some of the Palestinian leadership (above all Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jersualem) chose to ally themselves with the Nazis and how, after World War II this support for fascism mutated into bitter anti-Zionism and imitation of fascist methods. Today, members of Hamas and Hizbullah use the Hitlergrüss salute, something only neo-Nazi groups do in Europe or North America. Knowing this helps us place a different interpretation on anti-Israel rhetoric and behaviour. To say it's a pity Hitler didn't finish the job and kill all Jews in the world, and then to claim 'I'm only anti-Israel, not anti-Semitism' is to stretch credulity. Yet Western journalists and politicians seem to fall for this line every time. Unless and until we learn to see through this smokescreen of 'anti-Israelism' to the underlying Judaeophobia, we will go on praising some of our very worst enemies. Because these people aren't just anti-Semitic. They are fascists, who hate democracy, freedom, and the rule of law in sovereign states. They are as much enemies of Western civilization as Hitler and his mafia were in the 1930s and 40s. When a British university thinks it better to avoid controversy than to open up debate about a reality that threatens its core freedoms, then it's time to ask just where we are all headed.
Here are the two letters, for what they are worth:
FAO
Lord Bragg of Wigton,
Chancellor,
The University of Leeds.
Dear Lord Bragg,
I am copying here a letter (via e-mail) that I sent some days ago to Professor Michael Arthur, the Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University, on what is now becoming a notorious instance of capitulation to outside pressure to cancel a legitimate and (many may say) crucial academic venture. As my letter to Professor Arthur points out, I had myself given a lecture under almost exactly the same title last Saturday, and have researched in this area myself, so I feel qualified to argue the appropriateness of Dr Küntzel's research and lecturing.
I fully understand your non-administrative position within the university, but I'm convinced that the implications of this ban for the wider world of academe and culture are so great that the incident threatens to bring the university into disrepute (and, indeed, has already done so in some circles). Hence my writing to you in the hope that some form of intervention on your part may lead to a fresh invitation being extended to Dr. Küntzel and, should he accept, a three-day workshop being held on the Leeds campus, followed perhaps by a public lecture on this vital subject. Should this be done with appropriate publicity within the university, and if both the workshop and the lecture (or lectures) should be attended by larger numbers, it would serve both an academic and educational purpose, by alerting audiences to the existence throughout the Middle East of a virulent form of anti-Semitism that is ubiquitous, mainstream, popular, and derived in its largest part from the tropes and images of the Third Reich. It is inconceivable to me that any university should seek to favour objections to such information and to put a gag on the bearer of what may be an unwelcome message, yet a hugely relevant one for modern society. Forms of Islamic anti-Semitism have already moved to Europe and North America, making all the greater the relevance of this message to a British university in a city that has bred Islamist terrorists.
I hope you will at least speak to the university authorities on this matter.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin
Royal Literary Fund Fellow
Newcastle University
LETTER TO PROFESSOR ARTHUR
Dear Vice-Chancellor,
May I begin by introducing myself as a former lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University, where I am currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow.
I have just received news of a decision made by Leeds University to cancel a talk and 2-day workshop series by Dr. Matthias Kuentzel of Hebrew University, both under the title 'Hitler's Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East'. Having myself given a lecture on Islamic Antisemitism a few days ago, I am horrified and outraged by this decision. As an academic who has struggled with religious pressures to censor and exercise control within my field, I place a high value on academic freedom within Western universities. I appreciate those freedoms the more for having studied at Shiraz University in Iran and taught at Mohammed V University in Fez, Morocco, where such freedoms are absent. An academic book of my own has recently been blocked from publication due to pressure brought on the publishers by a religious group. That is how keenly I feel about censorship contaminating the realm of academia, and why, in part, I am spurred to write to you in these terms. Academic freedom is the very foundation of all work carried in universities and colleges, and without it, as I know you must be very well aware, the entire project of unbiased, free, and honest academic teaching and research slips into degradation and abuse.
Since it is a research interest of my own, I can testify that the subject on which Dr. Kuentzel was due to speak is one of considerable importance, both academically and as a topic for public and governmental interest. Not to study it and not to debate it opens up a glaring gap in our knowledge of the Middle East, our understanding of Islam, and our analysis of Muslim relations with the West and with the Jewish community in particular. Anti-Semitism is in itself a subject studied internationally in numerous centres, and one about which innumerable books and articles have been written. Much of that latter work has originated in the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, at which Dr. Kuentzel works. It is beyond my comprehension that a scholar with his credentials, affiliated to such a centre and such a university, speaking on a topic of vital academic and general interest should be barred from speaking simply because a pressure group with blatantly vested interests has complained. What will be next? No lectures on Iranian nuclear strategy because someone in the Iranian embassy made a phone call to someone in your office? A lecture on animal research in your faculty of biological sciences cancelled because an animal rights group threatens to stage a protest?
I cannot believe that you yourself would for one moment consider letting outside interests exercise the least influence over the content of academic courses or guest lectures in any other context. Yet it has happened at your university, and I for one feel betrayed by that. If someone invites me to lecture at Leeds on this or a related topic, will I now be automatically persona non grata? Will I have to submit the text of my lecture to a censorship committee beforehand?
I wish to be reassured as to what action you and the university propose to take to remedy this serious breach of academic principle. I intend to forward details to the Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards, of which I am a long-standing member. They may in due course contact you as well. I do hope you can find a way to put this matter right, regardless of pressure from within or without your institution. I place my trust in you to do so.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin
Supporter, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
Patron, Friends of Israel Academic Study Group on the Middle East
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