Kushner Charges McCarthyism

Playwright Tony Kushner has responded to questions about his many extreme comments regarding Israel with an outlandish claim in the New York Sun (April 25, 2006) that his “past statements have been taken out of context by groups using “˜McCarthyite’ tactics to portray him as an extremist.”

“McCarthyite” suggests misrepresenting the facts to smear by innuendo. In this instance, the facts are undeniable. The numerous Kushner quotes collected by CAMERA reiterate again and again the notion that Israel’s conduct is abhorrent and its very existence a “mistake,” and are not, of course, taken out of context at all. Each citation includes specific reference to the original text — should there be any doubt about the “context” and intent of the assertion.

An additional statement by Kushner about Israel from an interview in 1994 confirms how longstanding have been his attitudes. Tony Kushner in Conversation, an edited collection of interviews with the writer published by the University of Michigan Press (1998) includes an exchange with Bruce McLeod that appeared in the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. The following passages appear there:

Kushner: Yeah. I feel that I’m very much a product of what I consider the most important tradition – I’m not a religious Jew and I think the Diasporan Jewish culture has a magnificent history of progressive involvement with the cultures that Jews have found themselves in and interacting with. It’s very much a part of who I am. So yes.

It’s a very distressing thing to me that American Jews have lost contact with the traditions of socialism and humanism – I don’t consider myself a humanist but I probably am – but there are important progressive and radical European traditions that arrived with Jews in the U.S. from Germany to Russia that really informed American Jewish consciousness all the way up to the 1950’s, and Roy [Cohn’s] generation is really the generation that succeeded in beginning the severance of that. It still continued in a very lively way which manifested itself most obviously in Jewish support for the Civil Rights movement, but at the same time that that was happening there was this tremendous support for Israel and that’s been part of this calamity– it’s driven international Jewish culture from its progressive base. I don’t know what’s to be done about it, what recourse progressive Jews have to call…I’m sort of floundering for words because I don’t know what to call us at this point. I mean we’re not a religion, it makes everyone uneasy to think of us a race, including Jews, it’s very odd; we’ve wound up being the oddest phenomenon in modern history.”

…

Jerusalem is…it’s very, very hard. It’s hard every Passover. Jews all over the world for the last 2,000 years say: next year in Jerusalem, and that’s both literal and nonliteral. A lot of progressives get rid of it because of the obvious Zionist, imperialist implications of it. It’s tremendously complicated– I really believe that the Israel lobby has pulled American Jews into bed with some really awful people is undeniably the case. The biggest supporters of Israel are the most repulsive members of the Jewish community and Israel itself has got this disgraceful record … but anti-Semitism is alive and well and Jews do occupy a very precarious position in the world. For all the wealth and cultural clout that they have accumulated in this country I still believe that we are a definable target and as such … I don’t know what I’m trying to say except that I feel incapable of unambivalently rejecting a Jewish yearning for a homeland, although I can unambivalently say that I think that it’s a terrible historical problem that modern Israel came into existence.

When I was in Israel and you go to the Holocaust Museum – you were talking about public spaces earlier – the entire museum is very subtly on a ramp that leads you through the whole history of anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution, and it leads you up this ramp without you noticing that you are going uphill until you’ve gone up five stories and you are on this balcony overlooking modern Jerusalem: this is sort of the end point, the logical conclusion, this is what all that suffering was for, so that we could be – of course not looking toward East Jerusalem – the occupiers of this land again. And that’s appalling, and you can look at that and go, ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ and no matter how moved you are by some of the things in Yad Vashem you feel sort of sick at it. But then I went to the Wailing Wall and it is astonishing, you can’t not feel as a Jew tremendously moved by a Jewish presence at the Wall. And above the Wall on the Temple Square is a six-branch menorah, each light representing one of the six million that died in the Holocaust, and more than anything else that I saw, the presence of that menorah made it feel like — that was the refutation of the success of the European attempt at genocide. But that sounds horrible too! Most Palestinians would probably hate me for saying that. The progressive Israelis that I met would describe a vision of what Israel ought to be and it sounded exactly like the position the Jews occupied in the ghettoes in Europe in the Middle Ages – a kind of buffer zone, a sort of financial hub – we’ll handle the money between the Arab world and the West. Well, if that didn’t work in the Middle Ages it isn’t going to work here. And they don’t need that buffer zone now, nobody wants it, it’s all in computers and it will happen in nanoseconds– it’s a fantasy and it’s a fantasy of ultimate powerlessness because Israel is a creation of the U.S., bought and paid for. There are lots of beautiful little orange groves and olive groves which the Palestinians had before the Jews were there, and some very attractive European-looking cities, but there’s no real country there. I don’t know.

NPR Still Skews the News

Two extremely skewed segments of National Public Radio’s popular Talk of the Nation news and talk program suggest that, despite past studies documenting anti-Israel bias in the tax-supported network’s coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, NPR apparently has done little to improve ints coverage by ensuring fair and evenhanded reporting.

On Nov. 11, 2004, a Talk of the Nation segment dealt with the death of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. Slightly over a year later, on Jan. 5, 2006, another segment addressed the illness that unseated Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. One might think these segments, hosted by NPR’s Neal Conan, would feature both Israelis and Arabs discussing each of the two leaders. Or maybe Palestinians would be invited to speak about Arafat, and Israelis about Sharon. Or vice versa–Israelis could give their views on Arafat, and Palestinians on Sharon. But in fact, Talk of the Nation did none of the above. Instead, as is commonplace on NPR segments about the Middle East conflict, both segments relied heavily on Arab and pro-Arab speakers, to the exclusion of almost any pro-Israel voices.

The first guest on the segment about Arafat (“Filling the void left by the death of Yasser Arafat”) was Loren Jenkins, NPR’s foreign editor who in the past has referred to Israel as a “colonizer” and has linked Israel to Nazis in his writing. Jenkins was followed by Palestinian columnist Daoud Kuttab, who in turn was followed by Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American professor at Columbia University and a frequent critic of Israel. Next to speak was Robert Malley, best known for advocating the viewpoint that Arafat should not be held primarily responsible for his rejection of compromise at the Camp David negotiations. And making an appearance after these four outspoken critics of Israel was David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who is Jewish and could possibly be described as a supporter of Israel. In all, Israel’s critics were allowed about 4,200 words, compared with about 1000 words granted to the last guest.

The segment prompted by Sharon’s illness (“Considering Middle East politics without Sharon”) might have been even less balanced. Kuttab and Malley were again invited to speak. They were joined by Hebrew University’s Yaron Ezrahi. Although Israeli, the professor circulated a petition in mid-2001, after scores of Israeli civilians had been murdered in ongoing Palestinian terror attacks, calling for an international force to “protect the Palestinians from the aggression of the Israeli government” while expressing “solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom” and describing the Palestinian “revolt against colonial occupation” as “legitimate.” Also joining the program was Rami Khouri, the Palestinian editor of Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper, another regular critic of Israel. In addition, the Washington Post‘s Scott Wilson made a brief appearance. Here, the critics of Israel—Kuttab, Malley, Ezrahi and Khouri—were allotted about 4,300 words. Pro-Israel speakers: zero.

This isn’t merely a study in numbers, though. The dearth of speakers who might be able to present Israel’s case leads to a situation where accusations against Israel are allowed to pass unchallenged and without context–or even without basis in fact.

Sharon was described both by Kuttab and Malley as having “blood on his hands.” Host Neal Conan and Kuttab associated him with the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla, as did a caller who also added that Sharon is a “butcher.” Khouri weighed in by talking about “all the terrible things he’s done in his life, which we will keep criticizing him for,” suggested (as he did in a later NPR appearance) that Sharon is responsible for global Islamism, while taking every opportunity to opine that the former Israeli Prime Minister was a “failed political leader.” Conan even suggested the word “devil” to describe Sharon.

There was no one on the program to mention that Sharon was cleared of direct responsibility for the massacres in Lebanon, which were actually carried out by a Christian Lebanese Phalangist militia. There wasn’t a word from the guests or the host about incessant anti-Israeli attacks and terrorism that—regardless of whether or not one thinks Sharon’s operations were heavy-handed—were indisputably the cause of Israel’s counter-terror operations.

Arafat, by contrast, was spared such criticism. Whereas in his introduction to the Sharon segment Neal Conan noted that Sharon was “denounced for the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and for his part in massacres … in West Beirut,” his introduction to the Arafat segment said not a word about Arafat’s many deadly attacks as head of Fatah and the PLO. When Conan finally did address the late-Palestinian leader’s violence, he implied that the terrorism was unavoidable, saying that Arafat “was willing to spill blood if that’s what it took.” Jenkins minimized Arafat’s responsibility for Palestinian violence after the Oslo Accords–he said that Arafat merely “tolerated” the violence. He claimed, in contradiction to numerous reports, that the Palestinian leader “wasn’t corrupt”—again, asserting that Arafat only “tolerated” corruption, and labeled the longtime terrorist as the “George Washington” of Palestinian nationalism.

The choice of guests on the shows assured that listeners were predominantly exposed to the Palestinian narrative on other issues as well. From Rashid Khalidi, they heard that Mahmoud Abbas “was never associated with armed struggle,” and that he was systematically sabotaged by Israel. Of course, there was no hint that Abbas indeed was “associated” with the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by none other than Mohammad Oudeh (aka Abu Daoud), who masterminded the Munich attack as leader of the Palestinian Black September terror group. This “association” was noted in various newspapers, as well as in Sports Illustrated, Slate and even the stridently anti-Israel magazine The Nation. It’s not surprising, though, that Khalidi, who as been described as “a Palestinian who wouldn’t harm the cause,” would obscure this point.

And when a listener phoned in to ask “what [Arafat] was really offered during the last Camp David,” Khalidi’s answer again was predictable: Ehud Barak was arrogant, the Palestinians had made a “historic compromise,” and “President Clinton understood that [Barak’s] offer wasn’t sufficient.” This Palestinian angle contradicts not only the Israeli view of Camp David, which of course listeners weren’t given the opportunity to hear, but also the view of Clinton himself. In the former president’s memoir, My Life, which details the Camp David negotiations, Clinton didn’t claim Barak’s offer “wasn’t sufficient.” What he did state, with a hint of frustration, was that Israel’s offer to give up “effective control over the Temple Mount and all East Jerusalem was not enough for Arafat …” (emphasis added). “Perhaps [Arafat’s] team really hadn’t worked through the hard compromises,” Clinton added. In addition, in a briefing after the negotiations, the President went out of his way to stress that Barak had gone the extra mile to try to reach an agreement, saying that Barak “came in knowing that he was going to have to take bold steps and he did it, and I think you should look at it more as a positive toward him than as a condemnation of the Palestinian side ….” (See more of Clinton’s comments here.)

In short, despite the obligation of recipients of tax dollars—such as NPR—to provide “objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature” listeners got a very one-sided view of both Arafat and Sharon. Judging by the program’s slate of guests, that seems to be just what the network wanted.

Novak’s Follow Up Column on Palestinian Christians as Flawed as the Original

Apparently syndicated columnist Robert Novak was stung by CAMERA’s point-by-point rebuttal of his February 16 column “Christian Victims of Israel’s Wall,” (Washington Post). But instead of correcting his mistakes, Novak added more bluster and blunders when he returned to the subject, this time offering an eye-witness rehash, in “Caught by Israel’s Wall” (Washington Post, April 17). Citing primarily sources who support his false premise—that Israeli policy is to drive Christian Arabs out of the Holy Land and steal their water in the process—Novak might just as well have stayed home. He added little to his February 16 effort except new errors.

Novak acknowledged but did not rebut CAMERA’s earlier criticism, writing that “defenders of Israeli policy claimed my facts were wrong Feb. 16 when I wrote that the wall threatens Israel’s tiny Christian minority and particularly Aboud’s Christian roots, which go back two millennia.”

CAMERA is not “defending Israeli policy.” It is holding Novak to basic journalistic standards of accuracy, fairness, comprehensiveness, and truthfulness as advocated by the Society for Professional Journalists Code of Ethics—standards which Novak fell far short of meeting.

Errors in April 17 Column Include:

1) Repeating his February 16 allegation that “the wall threatens Israel’s tiny Christian minority and particularly Aboud’s Christian roots, which go back two millennia.” Aboud is in the West Bank, not Israel; its Christians are Palestinian Arabs, not Israeli Arabs. Israel’s Christian Arab population has grown from 34,000 at the country’s founding in 1948 to nearly 130,000 (two percent of Israel’s population) today. That’s a 282% increase in Israel’s Christian population. Meanwhile, the Christian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, about 20 percent of the total population after World War II, is now less than 1.7 percent (under 50,000). The decline has accelerated sharply since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1993. (See “Human Rights of Christians in Palestinian Society.”)

2) Lamenting that he could find only one “Catholic layman or prelate who complained of anti-Christian bias of Muslims.” Novak doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that Christians are afraid to complain about the Muslim intimidation and abuse. London’s Daily Telegraph (Sept. 9, 2005) reported, under the headline ” ‘Islamic mafia’ accused of persecuting Holy Land Christians,” that “Christians in the Holy Land have handed a dossier detailing [hundreds] of incidents of violence and intimidation by Muslim extremists to Church leaders in Jerusalem.” A leader of Greek Orthodox Christians told this writer last August that “Bethlehem was 80 percent Christian” before the PA took over in 1993, but now “it’s 20 percent Christian. The Christians are leaving, and the Muslims are moving in. But then, Christians have been leaving the area since about 1900” (“Friday in Jerusalem, Hospitality and Denial,” by Eric Rozenman, AMIT Magazine, Winter, 2006).

3) Claiming that the Gaza Strip is “one of the world’s most densely populated places.” At roughly 9,000 people per square mile, population density in the Gaza Strip is comparable to that of Washington, D.C., a jurisdiction rarely if ever cited as “one of the world’s most densely populated.” San Francisco, New York City, London and Monaco, not to mention Cairo and Manilla, are all much more densely populated;

4) Alleging that the security barrier is “cutting to pieces the promised Palestinian state.” The barrier as planned and being constructed encompasses no more than eight percent of the West Bank. Remaining territorial contiguity is as great or greater than that of pre-1967 Israel, which Novak has not described as “cut to pieces.” And a state was not promised; although Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly been offered an opportunity to build one, their leaders have consistantly rejected these offers;

5) Referring to “deadly daily artillery barrages” by Israel in response to rockets “ineffectively fired” by “undisciplined Palestinian militants.”

There have been no “deadly daily artillery barrages” by Israel. In response to nearly daily Palestinian rocket fire, Israeli strikes—mostly targeted helicopter or aircraft missiles, not artillery fire—have killed more than a dozen terrorists. Israeli artillery barrages have been aimed at open launch areas used by terrorists to suppress further rocket firings. There have been fewer than a handful of Palestinian non-combatant deaths. Meanwhile, one terrorist rocket narrowly missed the crowded dining hall at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai just two days before Novak’s column appeared. Since 2000, such rockets have killed a number of Israeli civilians and wounded many more;

6) Referring repeatedly and exclusively to Israel’s West Bank security barrier as a “wall” when 95 percent of the counter-terrorist line is made up of fences, ditches, electronic sensors or combinations of them, and numerous gates allow peaceful cross-barrier transit.

Tony Judt, the New York Times, and the anti-Israel bandwagon

Whom did the New York Times choose to write an op-ed about the controversy over claims by two academics that the “Israel Lobby” distorts U.S. foreign policy to the detriment of U.S. interests? None other than Tony Judt, who has called Israel an “anachronism” which should be done away with since it is allegedly “bad for the Jews,” not least because “the behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews.”

With publication today of Judt’s op-ed A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy, and an earlier news article, Essay Stirs Debate About Influence of a Jewish Lobby, the New York Times has published almost 2600 words on the Walt/Mearsheimer controversy, without even once hinting at its own conflict of interest – that the Times itself was accused by the authors of a pro-Israel “editorial bias.” How can the Times write about a controversy which it is a part of, without disclosing this to its readers? Just as inexcusable is that the Times has so far failed to report that the Walt/Mearsheimer paper has been shown to be littered with false allegations, phony quotations, and bogus references. It strains the imagination to understand how the Times could have decided it was not newsworthy that the article at the center of the controversy has had its credibility shredded.

Not surprisingly, Judt’s take on the matter is of a piece with his own anti-Israel fulminations. He mischaracterizes the substantive refutations of the Walt/Mearsheimer paper, including criticism from their Harvard and Chicago colleagues, as a “somewhat hysterical response.” He claims that the paper “draws on a wide variety of standard sources and is mostly uncontentious” – the “wide variety” in fact being mostly cherry-picked newspaper articles containing anything portraying Israel in a bad light, along with multiple citations to extremists like Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and the holocaust- denying, Saudi-friendly Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

As for the Walt/Mearsheimer paper being “uncontentious,” well, perhaps to the likes of Tony Judt, but not to most fair-minded observers. It’s remarkable also that a history professor apparently sees nothing wrong with the paper’s made up quotations and bogus references.

Befitting this cavalier disregard for accuracy, Judt also uncritically parrots some of Walt/Mearsheimer’s more ridiculous claims, as well as making up a few of his own. As an example of the former, consider Judt’s claim that “prominent Israeli leaders and their American supporters pressed very hard for the invasion of Iraq …”

Really? Who are these prominent Israeli leaders, and what exactly did they say or do? Does Judt have any proof for this claim? Is he unaware that Israeli leaders, including then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon, publicly identified Iran, rather than Iraq, as the main threat to Israel? There’s much more to be said on this topic, as Professor Martin Kramer shows in his posting Israel and the Iraq War, which demolishes in great detail the claim that Israel pushed the U.S. to attack Iraq. Too bad for Judt that apparently he missed it.

Judt also mischaracterizes Walt and Mearsheimer as disinterested scholars, going where their unbiased, scientific explorations take them: “political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians.” Certainly with regard to Mearsheimer, this is demonstrably and blatantly false. Before the Iraq War, Mearsheimer signed onto an absurd and embarrassing Letter Against Expulsion of the Palestinians, which charged that Israel was quite likely planning to use the distraction of the Iraq war to expel Palestinians and possibly Israeli Arabs as well. According to the letter, signed also by such luminaries as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, the “fog of war” could be :

… exploited by the Israeli government to commit further crimes against the Palestinian people, up to full-fledged ethnic cleansing… Escalating racist demagoguery concerning the Palestinian citizens of Israel may indicate the scope of the crimes that are possibly being contemplated.

In an interview about the petition in the Chicago student paper, Mearsheimer went even further:

“The precedent is there [to forcibly expel Palestinians], and it behooves us to make sure it does not happen again,” said John Mearsheimer, co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University and one of the letter’s signatories.

Mearsheimer endorsed the letter because he sees significant evidence that Israel might use force to expel the three million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and perhaps also the 1.2 million Palestinians living inside the borders of pre-1967 Israel.(Chicago Maroon, Jan 10, 2003)

Is this what Judt understands as “having no interest in the Palestinians?”

Judt also falsely claims that overseas the Walt/Mearsheimer paper has been “prominently dissected and discussed,” while in “America … it’s been another story: virtual silence in the mainstream media” and “self-censorship … [that is] bad for the United States …”

Virtual silence? Self-censorship? Really? What about the articles by the AP on April 5, and by the UPI on April 3, and by the Boston Globe on April 6, March 31, March 29, and March 26, and by the Chicago Tribune on April 6, and by the Chicago Sun Times on March 27, and by the Baltimore Sun on April 18, and by the Los Angeles Times on March 26 and March 29, and by the Washington Post on April 15, April 11, April 5, April 3, and March 26, and by Newsday on April 7, and by the Philadelphia Inquirer on April 3, and by the New York Times on April 12, … etc.

In other words, what Judt calls “virtual silence” and “self-cens
orship” in the “mainstream media” amounts to more than 65 articles, op-eds and editorials. And this is not counting the hundreds of newspapers which likely picked up the AP and UPI coverage.

False assertions aside, no article by Judt would be complete without wild leaps of illogic, and this article is no exception. Consider his citing the “impeccably conservative Jerusalem Post” describing Paul Wolfowitz as “devoutly pro-Israel.” Well it’s true, there is one article in the Jerusalem Post, presumably not a paper that Judt would usually rely upon, that does describe Wolfowitz in such terms. Of course, maybe the article – which offers no proof – is wrong about this, maybe Wolfowitz is not “devoutly pro-Israel,” or pro-Israel at all. But say he is – does the existence of one pro-Israel deputy secretary in the U.S. government prove anything at all? Does it prove that the “Israel lobby” is manipulating foreign policy? Since not even Judt makes such a claim, what exactly is the point of bringing it up?

And does Judt dispute that many administrations, including perhaps the present one, harbor important officials who are “devoutly anti-Israel” (like Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Caspar Weinberger, Bobby Ray Inman, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, to name a few). Using his own logic, would Judt say that the presence of such officials in high places proves that there is an anti-Israel cabal at work?

Judt also employs a common artifice of anti-Israel propagandists – claiming that the thing he is decrying about Israel, in this case the “Israel lobby,” is actually bad for Israel and the United States, putting him in the position of supposedly looking out for the best interests of both countries. (Why he would do so, since he thinks Israel should not exist, is not clear.) And naturally, he quotes some Israelis to support this position – again, so what? One can come up with quotes from Israelis, or Americans, for that matter, supporting pretty much any position, thereby proving nothing.

Why, Judt concludes, has “America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue?” Why he asks, speaking for “Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans [and] Asians,” has the United States bucked the anti-Israel bandwagon? Judt’s implication, of course, is that if Mugabe, or the Chinese dictators, or Chirac, differ with America, then they are right and America is wrong.

Of course, as Judt must know, America differs with these countries on many other issues besides Israel. Americans, for example, are a very religious people, which Europeans in particular (except for Muslim Europeans) have left behind. Does that difference mean that Americans are wrong to be so religious? Would Judt propose that the government enact anti-religious legislation so that we can be more like the Europeans? Maybe so, especially since evangelical Christians are often such strong supporters of Israel.

But what the esteemed historian fails utterly to understand is American exceptionalism, to use Alexis de Tocqueville’s phrase. America is different, and proudly so. This country was founded by people who fled Europe, who didn’t want to be like Europe, who were happy to leave behind Europe’s hatreds and intolerance.

In that, perhaps we Americans see a similarity to the Israelis, who, while not founding a new nation, re-founded an ancient one, that, like America, was conceived in liberty.

Washington Times Publishes CAMERA Letters

The Washington Times recently published two CAMERA letters, one correcting two factual errors in a Times news story, and another addressing an inaccurate description of Hamas in a Times Op-Ed.

The letters follow:

April 7, 2006

Semantics and Mideast peace

Your article “Talks stalled on road to peace” (World, Tuesday) contained two key factual errors:

First, the U.S.-sponsored diplomatic “road map” does not require that Palestinian Arabs disarm their “militants”; rather it requires that they end “violence and terrorism.” If the road map refers to terrorism and not to militants in this context, shouldn’t The Washington Times do likewise?

Second, there never were “original West Bank borders.” The 1949 armistice line originally separated Israel from Jordan. It always was and still is a temporary boundary, not an internationally recognized border.

Borders remain to be established under the terms of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and subsequent documents, such as the “road map,” in a final Arab-Israeli agreement regarding allocation of the territories.

ERIC ROZENMAN

Washington director

Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America

March 16, 2006

Don’t Defend Hamas

Op-Ed columnist Michael Scheuer (“How Bush helps jihadists,” Monday) says President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, members of Congress and others “rejected dealing with the democratically elected Hamas government unless it abandons its pledge to defend Palestine against Israel, presumably a chief reason Palestinians voted for it.”

Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) is not “pledged to defend Palestine against Israel.” Rather, as its charter makes clear, it is pledged to destroy the Jewish state and establish an Islamic theocracy in all of what was the British Mandate of Palestine west of the Jordan River – Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. For example, Hamas’ charter claims that “the land of Palestine has been an Islamic [trust] throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection. No one can renounce it or part of it …”

Further, Hamas is not even “defending” the West Bank and Gaza Strip against Israel. Palestinians rejected Israel’s offer of a state on virtually all the West Bank and Gaza Strip in exchange for peace in 2000 and 2001. That was fine with Hamas because, as its charter makes clear, “the so-called peaceful solutions and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement.” Again quoting the charter, “our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave …” and is part of “the Chain of Jihad” that goes back to “Holy War” in 1936 (an intifada before the establishment of Israel).

Mr. Scheuer manipulatively substitutes “abandon its pledge to defend Palestine against Israel” for the actual requirement facing a Hamas-led government for U.S. and international aid: a permanent end to terrorist attacks, recognition of Israel’s legitimacy and acceptance of previously negotiated Israeli-Palestinian agreements.

A better headline might have been “How Scheuer helps jihadists.”

ERIC ROZENMAN
Washington director
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America

AP Rewrites History of Moroccan Jews

American media outlets—including the influential Associated Press (AP) wire service—rarely discuss the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who fled under duress from Arab and Muslim countries. By contrast, news reports certainly don’t shy away from discussing Palestinian refugees and relaying their narrative.

Take, for instance, AP’s May 15, 2005 story, “Palestinians hold rallies to lament Israel’s founding 57 years ago.” That article repeatedly quotes Palestinians lamenting the anniversary of Israel’s independence and emotively describing the flight of the Palestinian refugees from Israel, implying that this exodus was the result of an Israeli “crime”:

… Palestinians on Sunday mournfully commemorated the anniversary of what they call “Al Nakba,” or “the catastrophe” – the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of their people with the 1948 creation of the state of Israel. …

“Our people will never forget and the generations will never forget,” Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said in a speech aired on Palestine TV. “On that day, a crime was committed against a people, who were uprooted from their land and whose existence was destroyed and who were forced to flee to all areas of the world.” …

“The Nakba is still a black day in the history of the Palestinian people and we’ve been suffering since that day,” said 61-year-old Gaza resident Suleiman Arabeed. …

“The Nakba and the disaster forced upon our people a life in refugee camps without an identity, in the midst of oppression, despair, poverty, and disease,” Abbas said. “The Palestinians have a homeland and it is called Palestine.”

Critics are provided no opportunity to respond to the allegations that Israel committed a “crime” and “uproot[ed] hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians. Consequently, readers are not informed that most of the Arab refugees were not at all “uprooted” by Israelis. Many fled at the prompting of Arab leaders, and in some cases Jews implored that the local Arabs remain. According to scholar Ephraim Karsh, for example, “the Haifa Jewish leadership … went to great lengths to convince the Arabs [in that city] to stay” (Commentary, July-August, 2000). (See here for more details.)

Associated Press finally did discuss Jewish refugees (although the journalists refrained from using the word “refugee” even once) in a March 22, 2006 story about Moroccan-born Israeli politician Amir Peretz. While this was an excellent opportunity for the wire service to finally look at the often harsh and injust treatment of Jews in Arab and Muslim countries, the report instead whitewashed the situation, ignoring anti-Jewish prejudice and even massacres. 

Although Jews in Morocco fared better than their co-religionists in other North African and Middle Eastern countries, almost the entire Moroccan Jewish community, which once numbered over 250,000, were driven to permanently leave their homes. AP’s story, entitled “In Morocco, an Israeli’s political climb stirs memories of gentler times,” acknowledges this dramatic exile, but gives no indication what caused the flight.  It would not be a surprise, in fact, if after reading the story one were confused as to why the Jewish community virtually disappeared. Reporters Scheherezade Faramarzi and Laurie Copans describe a harmonious relationship between Jews and Muslims:

The warm ties between Arabs and Jews in the town decades ago could have been a model for a different Middle East, untroubled by religious barriers and animosity, living and trading with each other and baby-sitting each other’s kids.
    
“˜We treated the Jews well,’ said Mohammed Aloumi, 68, who owns a hardware store in Boujad, and hoped [Israeli politician Amir] Peretz would reciprocate in his treatment of the Palestinians. …
    
“We were one big house, the Jews and the Arabs in our neighborhood. We had great relations. We didn’t care who was Arab and who was Jewish,” said Peretz’s uncle, Moshe Elbaz, who now lives in Israel.

When the Arabs heard that Israel had been established, “there were some street protests. But there wasn’t much violence, only at the end and never by our neighbors,” he said.
    
Aloumi, the hardware merchant, recalled the day the Peretz family left town.
    
“One day, they came over and said ‘salama, salama’ (goodbye) and left. We were sad. We wanted them to stay,” said Aloumi. “David was crying.”

According to this report, then, “some street protests” were the extent of the difficulties faced by Moroccan Jews after Israel gained its independence. But the story’s rosy depiction of historical ties between Jews and Arabs in Morocco is incomplete, at best.

The situation is summed up well by this passage from a May 19, 2003 JTA article:

Moroccan government officials like to boast of what they call the country’s “2,000 years of peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence.”

The historical record is more complex and includes anti-Jewish pogroms. But Jews generally fared better in Morocco than in many other parts of North Africa or Europe.

But the Jewish experience in Morocco was cyclical, with favorable times followed by periods of anti-Semitism. During World War II, for example, King Mohammed V refused a request by the pro-Nazi Vichy France regime to round up the country’s Jews for deportation.

Several years later, Moroccan Jews, like others in the Arab world, were attacked by the local population during the period surrounding the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

Maurice M. Roumani’s book, “The Case of the Jews from Arab Countries: a Neglected Issue,” elaborates, describing the massacre of dozens of Moroccan Jews:

… bloody riots broke out in June 1948 against the Jews in Oujda and Djerada in Morocco. In Oujda, within three hours, five Jews had been killed, 30 seriously injured, shops and homes sacked. In Djerada, the Jewish population of 100 suffered 39 deaths and 30 severely wounded, the remainder less seriously.

And Heskel M. Haddad’s “Jews of Arab and Islamic Countries: History, Problems, Solutions” notes:

The attack on the Jews of Casablanca in 1945 may have been an additional consideration in their decision to immigrate. However, after 1948, a combination of factors led to an increased rate of immigration. With the establishment of the Jewish state, more Jews felt free to immigrate. The arrival of some Israeli emissaries helped to inform Jews of the opportunities in Israel and encouraged their immigration. The major cause of the Jewish exocus from Morocco is the two pogroms that occurred in 1948 and 1953. Within a few years, several thousand Moroccan Jews immigrated to Israel. But mass immigration of Jews from Morocco occurred in 1954 when it became clear that France intended to grant Morocco full independence. Tens of thousands of Jews left Morocco, thereby betraying the typical anxiety of Jews in an independent Arab country.

A September 1954 article in Commentary magazine also describes problems faced by Moroccan Jews, noting that

In disputes with Moslems, or on civil commercial, and criminal issues among themselves, Jews are almost entirely subject to Islamic courts. … [E]ven under the best of circumstances [the courts] regard Jewish litigants as unclean, inferior beings.

Why is it that when AP covers Palestinian refugees, the stories often uncritically present Palestinian grievances about purported Israeli “crimes,” but when when the wire service (however infrequently) discusses Jewish refugees from Morocco, only glowing accounts of the Arab-Jewish relationship are cited, while discrimination and pogroms are overlooked completely?

BBC’s Hardtalk Host Harangues Halevy with Hostile Questions

An April 3rd interview with former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy by BBC’s “Hardtalk” host David Jessel is emblematic of the BBC’s infamous anti-Israel bent. The host’s questions are breathtaking in their hostility toward Israel and their one-sided, prejudicial nature.

Within the first 30 seconds, he informs the audience that his Israeli guest is not to be trusted:

But be careful when weighing the truth of what he says about peace. Mossad’s motto is after all “by way of deception, thou shalt do war.”

One wonders if Jessel would similarly cast doubt on the guest’s integrity if the guest were a Palestinian, such as Saeb Erekat or Hanan Ashrawi, who have repeatedly spread inaccuracies and distortions.

Jessel labels Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, as the “world’s most fearsome and ruthless,” and repeatedly mentions Israel’s “humiliation of Arafat,” without any context or mention of Arafat’s corrupt or terrorist deeds.

Jessel asks about the targeted killing of Hamas leader Sheik Yassin, the man who helped inspire Palestinians to murder hundreds of Jews, the man who made Palestinians believe that murdering Jewish women and children was a religious duty and honor. Notice how Jessel frames his question to exclude any key context about Yassin’s terrorism, while playing up sympathy for this malignant leader:

How did the killing of a 68 year old blind man in a wheelchair , Hamas’s spiritual leader, how did that fit into seeking peaceful solutions?…I wonder how many suicide bombers you recruited on the day that SheikYassin was killed.

About Arafat, Jessel has this to say:

You didn’t want him [Arafat] to be up to the task really did you? You were quite delighted in having a man you couldn’t do any deals with, weren’t you?

So twisted is Jessel’s worldview, that he clearly believes that Israel preferred having hundreds of its citizens blown to bits rather than reach a negotiated agreement with Arafat and live in peace. He apparently thinks that Israelis were “quite delighted” that Arafat wasn’t sincere in wanting to attain a peace agreement, that Israelis prefer being in a state of war.

Jessel expresses outrage over what he repeatedly calls “the wall,” compares it to the Berlin Wall, and implies that it is this security barrier that will cause “centuries of conflict.” Arab religious extremism and ongoing rejection of Israel’s legitimacy apparently aren’t on Jessel’s radar screen.

Jessel inverts cause and effect and justifies Hamas’ terror by opining that a security barrier created in RESPONSE to terrorism is actually the CAUSE of terrorism. “They [Hamas] are in a very difficult position. If they are not being spoken to, and if, with Ehud Olmert’s success, a “solution” is being imposed on them, i.e. barriers, frontiers are going to be put down against them willy nilly, what do you expect them to do? Just sit back and say yes, that’s fine, we’ll stick behind the wall wherever you choose to put the wall?”

Jessel brings up the subject of what motivates suicide bombers. When Halevy replies with information about how Palestinians are indoctrinated with extremist religious fervor, Jessel ignores this important topic to interject:

You don’t find frustration there? Anger, hopelessness, despair?

Palestinians, in Jessel’s world, are only responding to Israeli oppression and do not act due to extremist beliefs or their own agenda. Anti-Semitic incitement in Palestinian schools, mosques and the media apparently doesn’t register with Jessel.

Knowing no bounds, Jessel then blames global terrorism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he apparently believes is all Israel’s fault.

Hasn’t the world a right to impose a solution on something that you people have not been able to resolve in the last 60 years and which affects the whole of the world, whether in New York, London, Madrid, everywhere.

As if Islamist extremists wouldn’t still have a problem with the religious freedom of the modern world even if Israel didn’t exist?

Below is a transcript of Jessel’s questions. You will notice Halevy’s responses are not included. That’s because they didn’t make a difference to the host’s questions. There was hardly any give and take at all. The time Halevy used to reply was mainly an opportunity for Jessel to catch his breath before he asked Halevy another hostile, insulting question. And while Halevy’s ability to remain calm and dignified under such an assault is admirable, he unfortunately chose to ignore many of the distorted charges — which undoubtedly left many viewers believing those charges could not be refuted. And the ones he did address, he did not refute in a very clear or effective manner. The interview was an object lesson in how to conduct a biased interview, but also a sharp reminder of how essential it is for a spokesperson to counter serious falsehoods directly and clearly.

Watch the entire 23 minute interview by clicking here.

Transcript of BBC’s “Hardtalk” TV program, April 3, 2006

Hello and welcome to Hardtalk. I’m David Jessel. My guest today worked for five years, head of the world’s most fearsome and ruthless spy agencies, Israel’s Mossad. During that time, Mossad planned the assassination of Hamas leaders and the humiliation of Yasser Arafat. Who better to assess the future of the Israeli Palestinian conflict in the aftermath of the Israeli elections?

But be careful when weighing the truth of what he says about peace. Mossad’s motto is after all ‘by way of deception, thou shalt do war.’

Efraim Halevy, Welcome to Hardtalk. Talk about Mossad being a ruthless organization…you said in a recent interview intelligence agencies spend just as much time seeking peaceful solutions as anything else.

How did the killing of a 68 year old blind man in a wheelchair , Hamas’s spiritual leader, how did that fit into seeking peaceful solutions?…

[Halevy replies]

You said it was a feather in the cap of Mossad…

[Halevy replies]

Was it a feather in the cap? What purpose did it serve?

[Halevy replies]

I suppose the question is…By crushing violence, you don’t crush the roots of violence, you feed the roots of violence. I wonder how many suicide bombers you recruited on the day that SheikYassin was killed.

[Halevy replies]

This is a difficult calculaton, the amount of suppression you bring into being in order to control the situation and what that creates. Some people might say that Israel actually created the Hamas government by what it did, by the humiliation of Arafat, by its collective punishment…. Do you agree with that in any sense?

[Halevy replies]

You didn’t want him [Arafat] to be up to the task really did you? You were quite delighted in having a man you couldn’t do any deals with, weren’t you?

[Halevy replies]

Going back to Sheik Yassin, in what you did, did you not make him a martyr, this was a 68 year old blind man, did you not make him a martyr, did you not make Hamas more popular, didn’t that therefore lead, to some extent, to a Hamas government that now you will not do business with?

[Halevy replies]

…How many more killings do we need?

[Halevy replies]

…I want to ask to what extent murder is a legitimate form of political action. I read in a recent interview you gave, I think to the Sunday Telegraph, you said if Hamas fails to agree to a permanent ceasefire, we’ll have to create another leadership, just as we did with Sheik Yassin. Going around bumping off members of the Hamas government?

[Halevy replies]

So that’s inaccurate? You were misquoted?

[Halevy replies]

Couldn’t you apply that definition to all the current Hamas leadership? Their hands are not all completely clean are they?

[Halevy replies]

If suicide bombings continue, would it be legitimate for the state of Israel to go into Hamas leadership…go and eliminate them. Would that be legitimate?

[Halevy replies]

Do you think Israel really can’t do business with Hamas? Do you think it can or is Hamas just a bunch of thugs?

[Halevy replies]

Are they capable of using that power in a sane, restrained, creative manner?

They are in a very difficult position. If they are not being spoken to, and if, with Ehud Olmert’s success, a “solution” is being imposed on them, i.e. barriers, frontiers are going to be put down against them willy nilly, what do you expect them to do? Just sit back and say yes, that’s fine, we’ll stick behind the wall wherever you choose to put the wall?

[Halevy replies]

…Is the wall to maintain security or is it a land grab or is it quite possibly both?

[Halevy replies, using the word “fence”]

The wall. Some of it is a wall, it’s a very big wall…in part it’s a fence, in some parts it’s a wall. This is rather like the East Germans used to call the Berlin Wall the “anti-fascist protection barrier.” It’s a wall!!

[Halevy replies]

But I asked you if it was a land grab. The UN reporter said that 10 percent of Palestinian land now lies on the Israeli side of that wall. In places like Qalqilya, the wells are cut off. 500,000 Palestinians live in the shadow of this fence/wall. You have Ma’ale Adumin, this great city sprawling eastwards blocking off access to Jerusalem. If you impose that, isn’t that the absolute recipe for decades,centuries of conflict?

[Halevy replies]

You’re never going to tear down the walls of Maale Adumin are you?

[Halevy replies]

All right, suppose they [Hamas] gave up their dream of destroying the state of Israel. Because this is a dream. As far as I know, Hamas hasn’t got an airport, hasn’t got an airplane, they haven’t got an airport. So it’s a fiction that it ever could destroy the state of Israel. That’s an easy dream to give up, isn’t it? So what do they get in return for giving up this dream?

[Halevy discusses incitement taught in Palestinian schools]

You would agree wouldn’t you that good intelligence, like a good general, has to get inside the minds of his opponents. Have you ever tried to get inside the mind of a suicide bomber to think what makes him do what he does. What do you find there?

[Halevy replies and talks about the religious fervor mindset]

You don’t find frustration there? Anger, hopelessness, despair?

[Halevy replies]

Let’s go back to Arafat. Because I was interested in your book how you thought of him. You didn’t think very highly of him. This was not just political but personal. You loathed that man, didn’t you.

[Halevy replies]

Your words are, “he was a compulsive liar, a person who would never honor a commitment, who rarely would have anything but contempt for his peers.” You said that other Arab leaders felt this as well.

[Halevy replies]

…the worst mistake he made was to humiliate the president of the United States of America. You don’t do that do you? He walked away from Camp David. Why on earth did he do that?

[Halevy replies]

…You were always against [the roadmap]. The roadmap is dead isn’t it?

[Halevy replies]

The UN, the EU, the US and Russia are involved in this roadmap. And you say we can’t have this because it imposes a solution on us. Hasn’t the world a right to impose a solution on something that you people have not been able to resolve in the last 60 years and which affects the whole of the world, whether in New York, London, Madrid, everywhere. Haven’t we the right to impose a solution?

[Halevy replies]

But if Ehud Olmert has to impose a solution, that won’t stick either, will it?

[Halevy replies]

The border is never going to be final, though ultimately negotiable, because a wall has a way of sticking around…

…Obviously the Americans are present in Iraq. You were saying, quoting neoconservatives in Washington, that there was a good chance that the Americans might be a presence in the region for a very long time to come, that the Saudi might turn into an Al Qaeda state, so you have American troops patrolling the oil fields, there’s even a mention that American troops might be patrolling the fence or wall or border or call it what you like. Madness that, isn’t it? Who is thinking that? Is that what neoconservatives in Washington are thinking?

[Halevy replies]

You say very interestingly in your book that… the reason why the first George Bush didn’t march on Baghdad was that the ruler of the Saudis said that if the Americans occupy an Arab capital, the place will be in flames, and yet you’re talking about American troops, coalition troops, western troops occupying the whole of the Arab peninsula, as far as I can see.

[Halevy replies]

Doing something about it sounds like Armageddon to me. Let us look at the record of intelligence in this field. Even in your own book, you admit it’s not a glittering one. You failed to foresee the impact of Muslim radicalism. That’s quite a big thing to fail to see. You didn’t register 9/11 on your screen at all. Osama Bin Laden is still at large. How well is intelligence looking out for us?

[Halevy replies]

But where you have spotted something, and you were prescient enough in 2003 to spot it, was the danger of Iran. Is that briefly the biggest nightmare in the region?

[Halevy replies]

Violent solution?

[Halevy replies about his worry of the unknown dangers that they haven’t yet uncovered.]

The unknown unknowns.

Efraim Halevy, thank you very much.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Publishes CAMERA Op-Ed

Tuesday, April 4, 2006

 

Idealist Rachel Corrie was misled

By GILEAD INI
GUEST COLUMNIST

All can agree that the death of a young woman is tragic. Like the hundreds of young lives lost as the target of Palestinian suicide bombers, and like those unintentionally killed during Israeli counterterror operations, the loss of Rachel Corrie undoubtedly has affected many in a painful way.

It is understandable, then, that her friends and family want to keep her memory alive, and they have done so successfully. But whether Corrie’s message deserves to be propagated and celebrated by audiences in theater productions such as “My Name is Rachel Corrie” and “Daughter Courage” is a different story. Corrie was an idealist; but as fate had it, her idealism ended up channeled through the radical International Solidarity Movement, an organization that not only puts at risk the lives of Israeli civilians but also the lives of its members.

ISM tells its young followers that Palestinians have the right to armed attacks against Israelis, while at the same time making clear through its activities that Israel has no right to protect its citizens. While the two positions seem mutually contradictory, the organization apparently reconciles them by summing up the complex Israeli-Arab conflict as singularly caused by a sadistic Israel seeking arbitrarily to oppress Palestinians.

In ISM’s world, legitimate Israeli security concerns don’t exist. The group’s narrative obscures the fact that Palestinian terrorism began even before Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, that Israel acquired those territories in a war precipitated by neighboring countries openly threatening to destroy the Jewish state and that Israel repeatedly offered to turn over land to the Palestinians. Hamas, whose charter makes clear that the group’s violence against Israeli civilians is rooted in racist ideology and is aimed at destroying Israel, and other groups seeking Israel’s annihilation, are invisible in the Middle East portrayed by ISM.

Why are those and other important realities about the conflict excised from ISM’s depictions? Is it because creating a false dichotomy of blameless Palestinians and faceless Israeli oppressors makes it easier for the group to persuade naí¯ve idealists to risk their lives? Perhaps ISM’s activists would be less likely to throw themselves before Israeli bulldozers if they were told that the bulldozers are used to search for very real smuggling tunnels that bring weapons and explosives used against Israeli children. Whatever the reasons, ISM’s activists are misled.

But theatergoers should not be misled. They should know that any play based on the ISM’s dogmas might possibly provide audiences with a better understanding of the organization’s propaganda, but certainly will not offer viewers an accurate, complete or nuanced understanding of the difficult situation in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. ISM’s partial and simplistic views are more geared toward building hatred against Israel than toward forwarding peace, human rights or justice.

Gilead Ini is a senior research analyst with the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

The newspaper regrettably cut from the column a passage noting that among the the lives taken by Palestinian suicide bombers were “a number of American youths whose names have been forgotten by the media.” To see a flyer (published by StandWithUs) capturing this point, click here. CAMERA’s column in the Post-Intelligencer followed the newspaper’s publication of a March 13 editorial and a March 16 piece by P-I columninst Robert L. Jamieson Jr. lauding the play “Daughter Courage.” The play was reviewed by the newspaper’s art critic on March 10.

 

CAMERA Prompts LA Times Correction on West Bank Palestinians

A March 11 news article in the Los Angeles Times had grossly inflated the number of Palestinians living in the West Bank. CAMERA staff prompted the following correction:

Error (Los Angeles Times, Laura King, 3/11/06): An estimated 3.2 million Palestinians live in the West Bank.

Correction (3/27/06): West Bank: An article in the March 11 Section A incorrectly reported the Palestinian population of the West Bank as 3.2 million. The population numbers are heavily disputed, but the most generally accepted estimate is 2.3 million.