A long and depressing YouTube slideshow of graffiti and vandalism against Jews, from the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism.
Via Modernity.
A long and depressing YouTube slideshow of graffiti and vandalism against Jews, from the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism.
Via Modernity.
This piece is from jta.org.
JERUSALEM (JTA) – An Iranian soccer federation official reportedly resigned after his office sent New Year’s greetings to Israel.
Mohammad-Manour Azimzadeh, who heads the Iran Football Federation’s foreign relations office, quit over the gaffe, and the federation’s president apologized, according to reports.
The foreign relations office had sent New Year’s greetings to all members of FIFA, soccer’s global federation, but forgot to omit Israel, which is called the “Zionist entity,” from its list.
Israel’s soccer federation replied positively to the message, according to reports.
Iranian athletes do not compete against Israeli athletes, including in the Olympics.
This piece is from jta.org.
Adi Schwartz reports the statement by Dorit Beinisch, President of the Supreme Court.
A synopsis of the ruling is available in English but the full ruling is available for now only in Hebrew. Schwartz’s translation of the paragraph Beinisch wrote about Apartheid is here.
The site supports. . .
►robust defense of the Holocaust Survivors defamed
►opposition to ‘Double Genocide’ & red-brown commissions
►bringing you media coverage (scroll down for most recent)
►citing the work of bold citizens who speak up proudly
►recording noble gestures of diplomats and organizations
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►providing background to the history and current debates
MISSION. SITE INFO. EDITOR’S EVENTS.
RECENT COMMENT (more media here)
►Dovid Katz in the Jewish Week (30 Dec 2009)
►David Hirsh in Haaretz (25 Dec 2009)
►Efraim Zuroff in the Jerusalem Post (23 Dec 2009)
►Toby Axelrod on JTA (20 Dec 2009)
►Benny Weinthal in the Jerusalem Post (17 Dec 2009)
►Izi Leibler in the Jerusalem Post (16 Dec 2009)
►Dovid Katz and Clemens Heni in the AJ (4 Dec 2009)
►Dovid Katz in the Jewish Chronicle (30 Nov 2009)
►Tim Whewell in the Guardian (30 Nov 2009)
►Daiva Repečkaitė on Wonderland (14 Nov 2009)
►Mehdi Hasan in New Statesman (1 Nov 2009)
►Dovid Katz in the Irish Times (31 Oct 2009)
►John Mann MP (UK) in the Jewish Chronicle (29 Oct 2009)
►Daiva Repečkaitė on Wonderland (28 Oct 2009)
►Clemens Heni on WPK (26 Oct 2009)
►Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian (20 Oct 2009)
►Shimon Samuels at OSCE (5 Oct 2009)
►Paul Hockenos in Newsweek (2 Oct 2009)
►Efraim Zuroff in the Guardian (28 Sept 2009)
►Seumas Milne in the Guardian (9 Sept 2009)
►Dovid Katz on Three Definitions (Sept 2009)
►Jonathan Steele in the Guardian (19 Aug 2009)
►Leonidas Donskis on Europeanvoice.com (24 July 2009)
Professor Michael Baum
This piece, by Leon Symons, is from the Jewish Chronicle
One of Britain’s leading cancer surgeons has told a conference how his support for the Israel Medical Association sparked a campaign to have him struck off by the General Medical Council (GMC).
Professor Michael Baum told a packed session at the annual Limmud conference at Warwick University that colleagues — including Jews — in the medical profession had turned on him after he challenged the accusation made by some that the Israel Medical Association (IMA) was complicit in the torture of Palestinian prisoners.
His session was called “The academic boycott of Israel: are the Jews among the worst antisemites?”
Professor Baum said he had first become involved “as an innocent” in June 2007 when the British Medical Journal invited him to write an article for an online poll arguing against an academic boycott of Israel. “You’re lucky if 2,000 get to vote on any issue. They had 23,000 votes online,” said Prof Baum, 72, who is emeritus professor of surgery and visiting professor of medical humanities at University College London.
“There were also rapid online responses. The views I got were extremely hurtful and extremely abusive, not to mention the hate mail I got both electronically and by post. It was also the first time I had experienced antisemitism in my life.”
Then Professor Baum encountered Dr Derek Summerfield, who led a lengthy campaign to unseat former IMA chair Dr Yoram Blachar after he was elected president of the World Medical Association in 2008.
Dr Summerfield set up a meeting at the Royal Society of Medicine attended by Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, which reiterated the accusations against the IMA, and against Dr Blachar personally.
Professor Baum said the personal attacks culminated in a letter sent to everyone on the BMJ website — invoking the name of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who carried out hideous experiments on Jews during the Holocaust — which accused him of covering for Israeli doctors.
It also said he should be ashamed of himself and that the GMC should revoke his licence to practice medicine. “This was written by a Jew,” he said.
“That’s when the campaign to get me struck off started — the worst ignominy any doctor can suffer. They collected signatures and tried to accuse me of complicity with IMA practices. Any attempt to defend myself provoked more anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric.”
The surgeon went to the Community Security Trust for advice because he was worried about his and his family’s safety. He admitted to his audience that he broke down in tears during a private meeting with Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor.
He and a colleague, Professor David Katz, decided to try to find out why Israelis were fighting Israelis and set up a meeting between the IMA and Physicians for Human Rights Israel. During the meeting in Israel in December 2008, Dr Blachar pleaded with PHRI to cease its attacks through both the BMJ and The Lancet, the other leading medical journal.
The two Britons thought they had a deal that would have stopped the accusations against the IMA but only five days later, Professor Baum claimed, PHRI launched another attack.
Both the BMJ and The Lancet ran special editions critical of Israel during what was called “Israel apartheid week” last February.
Professor Baum said he had now taken himself out of the firing line and instead was helping both Palestinians and Israelis through a charitable trust set up in the name of his late brother David.
This piece, by Leon Symons, is from the Jewish Chronicle
From the Jewish Chronicle.
“The way Israel behaves is just not kosher. Jewish people should be totally ashamed of themselves that they are not doing more to stop them. It’s absolutely disgusting.” She claimed that the reason behind the weekend’s shootings in the West Bank was to “make provocations so Israel will have an excuse to go in again” and said that last month’s Channel 4 Dispatches programme on the “Israel lobby” may be the reason why Gordon Brown “isn’t doing something”.
John Mann
Gert Weisskirchen
John Mann is a British Labor MP who explains that there isn’t a single Jew among the industrial workers, farmers and retired coal miners in his constituency. He is one of the handful of MPs who came out of the recent parliamentary-expenses scandals cleaner than he went in. He was honored with an award at the Knesset during last week’s conference of the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism, for his work in Britain and internationally against anti-Jewish racism. Mann compared the Jews to a canary, like the ones his constituents used to take three miles down into the mines to make sure that the atmosphere was healthy for human beings. The process of the decay of all human values begins with anti-Semitism, said Gert Weisskirchen, who was honored in the same ceremony. Weisskirchen is a scholar as well as a long-time member of the Bundestag, a man imbued with the spirit of the gentle, civilized and worldly social democracy that built post-war West Germany out of the ashes of the Holocaust.
So what’s going on? The Jews are hawks, not canaries, aren’t they? The Global Forum is run by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, making Avigdor Lieberman its current host. He is a political figure who has broken new ground in Israel, mainstreaming the kind of racialized thinking of which anti-Semitism was a historic prototype, garnering votes by rhetorically threatening the status of the state’s Arab citizens. He is the deputy prime minister in a government that continues to fail to bring its army and its settlers home from Palestinian territory, where they perpetrate the daily violence and humiliation characteristic of all occupations.
In truth, it is only by denying whole facets of reality that one can fit Jews and Israelis into a simple worldview that defines everyone either as oppressed or as oppressor. Similarly, we would all like to believe that anti-Semitism is a thing of the past, but the ready-made ways of thinking that it offers are too deeply embedded in various cultural imaginations around the world for it to disappear easily. No matter how much serious consideration of anti-Semitism is ridiculed as a dishonest attempt to silence criticism of Israel; no matter how much Israelis would prefer to think of themselves as strong, and as being responsible for their own situation rather than perceiving themselves as victims of anti-Semitism – the old libels are still manifested in the ways in which people think about Israel and about Jews.
Sammy Eppel, a journalist from Venezuela, explained to the conference in Jerusalem how half the members of that country’s Jewish community have left, as the Chavez regime continues to whip up fervor against “Jewish Zionist imperialism” and to embrace the Jew-hating Iranian regime. Furthermore, a 747 fully loaded with who-knows-what flies from Caracas to Tehran weekly.
Dovid Katz, who teaches Yiddish in Vilnius, raised the alarm about current trends to normalize the Holocaust in the Baltic states by portraying Stalin and Hitler as perpetrators of twin genocides. This is a rhetoric that hides a preference for Hitler, and allows surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust to be honored as anti-communist partisans, and anti-fascists to be put on trial as Stalin’s collaborators. An additional worry is that this kind of “re-understanding” of the Holocaust fits in with other kinds of revisionism – like those that portray the Shoah as an invented justification for the State of Israel, or as a minor intra-European spat, dwarfed in importance and impact by the history of European colonialism – of which the oppression of the Palestinians is currently the key manifestation.
Patrick Desbois, a quiet but hugely charismatic French Catholic priest, was also present at the Global Forum gathering, explaining how he has been traveling Ukraine and Belarus encouraging perpetrators, witnesses and bystanders of the Nazi genocide to divulge their memories before they are lost. Many who refuse to talk to investigators, and who appear to be Jewish, happily chat with him when he is wearing his comforting priest’s collar.
Stories were also presented to the conference about intellectuals, trade unionists, anti-racists and other good people who seek to exclude Israelis, and only Israelis, from the global academic, cultural and economic community; who declare that anti-boycott lawyers are financed by stolen Lehman Brothers money from New York; who say that “Zionist” Jews are the new Nazis, the new racists, the new imperialists, the new supporters of apartheid; who teach that the “Israel lobby” is responsible for the Iraq war; who find excuses for anti-Semitic violence and terrorism; who act as apologists for “critics of Israel” who learn from far-right conspiracy theorists; and who seek to silence those who speak up against anti-Semitism by saying that they only do so to give Prime Minister Netanyahu an easy ride.
Eminent Israeli scholars Yehuda Bauer and Emmanuel Sivan skewered the worldview of those who ignorantly and innocently embrace anti-Semitic notions when all they think they are doing is speaking up for Palestinians. Yet they both warned the Global Forum that the fight against anti-Semitism is only part of the general fight against bigotry. Both found it necessary to spell out what ought to have been obvious to the delegates: that the struggles against Islamophobia and other types of racism are intimately related to the fight against anti-Jewish racism.
David Hirsh
David Hirsh is a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.
By Saul.
The writings of the Israeli left have finally come of age; and is to be welcomed as a sign of Israel’s maturity. Yet, at the same time, they express a continuation of Israel’s well-known parochialism and of a failure to adequately grasp the world outside its borders.
In this category we have a range of interesting and scholarly works that sets out to debunk many of Israel’s founding national myths. One of those founding myths that is currently under critique is that Israel is a bastion against what is presented as an all-pervasive global antisemitism. This was the theme of an award-winning documentary, Defamation, shown at the recent Jewish Film Week. The antisemitism it presented was anachronistic and, to a large extent, now spent. It focused mainly, but not exclusively, on a few comments by one or two aging Central European antisemites and one or two aging Jews (including the director’s aging grandmother and an equally aged Holocaust survivor), the aftermath of the “Crown Heights” conflict of over 15 years ago and one or two incidents in the US that, at worse, could only be evaluated as causing minor offence. Apart from a brief interview with one of the authors of ”The Israel Lobby” the sites and narratives of contemporary antisemitism did not figure at all, not even in passing.
In Israel itself, the question of antisemitism has now become part of the battleground of the progressive left and the reactionary right and so has become part of the politics of how to move forward on the question of the Settlements and the Occupation of Palestinian lands. It is in this context that it is the right that is leading the charge against what it sees as antisemitism.
Much as the Israeli right’s understanding of what is and what is not “antisemitism” is seriously flawed. Reading the literature on the “new” antisemitism, one is immediately confronted with the paradoxical finding that what is “new” about this antisemitism is precisely just how “old” it is.
Yet, as much as the Israeli right’s reading of antisemitism is crude and unhelpful, the Israeli left falls into the same trap. This left mirroring of the right is evidenced in the belief to the effect that there is little (or in the opinion of Uri Averny in the film Defamation that there is no) antisemitism outside of Israel.
If, for the Israeli right, antisemitism is everywhere, then for the Israeli left, it is virtually non-existent. Both left and right are, of course, empirically wrong.
In the increasingly bitter fight between the left and right in Israel, the issue of antisemitism has become a central signifier of where one belongs in this political divide. In Israel, this is fully understandable and, indeed, in the context of Israel’s maturity, is to be welcomed.
However, whilst this conflict is a sign of Israel’s political maturity, it also signifies its parochialism.
Neither the left nor the right appear to consider for a moment just how their viewpoints play out in the world beyond Israel. They appear not to think for a moment how the arguments that make sense in the context of Israeli internal politics are exploited elsewhere.
One need only think of Walt and Mearsheimer’s exploitation and distortion of Haaretz’s story about right-wing pro-Israel lobbying groups that a poster discussed on Engage recently. One need only think of the idea that is common in the UK and elsewhere that “Zionists” and “Jews” “cry wolf/antisemitism” every time someone “dare criticize” Israel, even where, or rather especially where, such “criticism” takes the form of the myth that Jews/Zionists “control the world’s media” or the BBC or the Liberal Democratic party, to name but a few.
As between the Israeli left and Israeli right, I stand with the left. I welcome the debunking of the founding national myths in Israel as I would and do for any other country. I remain critical, though, with the left’s corresponding lack of understanding and lack of awareness, not of the “new” antisemitism, but of contemporary antisemitism, of the blurring between antizionism and antisemitism, of what some people believe is “mere” “criticism of Israel” and antisemitism.
Eye to eye with their right-wing domestic opponents and unable to see beyond them, the Israeli left’s vision on the question of antisemitism, cannot but be severely limited. Parochialism has always appeared as an Israeli trait, it is pity that, for all its maturity, this is one trait the Israeli left has yet to grow out of.
From Tulip.
Clayola Brown, the national president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute — a leading organization for Black trade unionists in the United States — has sent this email message to “Labor for Palestine”:
It is with disgust and dismay that I find my name listed as a signer of “Boycott Apartheid Israel: Open Letter from US Trade Unionists.” I demand that my name be removed immediately!
Prior to seeing the letter on the Palestine Chronicle website, I had never seen such a letter or engaged in discussions about its content. I find it disrespectful that someone would attach my name to a document and circulate such a document without contact with me, or consent from me.
Please make every effort to convey my demand to and any other publications that you have used or are likely to use your letter with.
