MuzzleWatch

by Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

On the same day The New York Times–in a groundbreaking move for the grey lady–
published Ian Lustick’s op-ed on the impossibility of a two-state solution, the paper also revealed that it still has cold feet when it comes to news reporting on the U.S. relationship with Israel.

Days earlier, the Guardian newspaper in Great Britain reported that the “The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens.” I expected the story to make headlines in America’s newspaper of record. After all, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, the report, by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poltras and Ewen MacAskill, included a smoking gun, the actual “memorandum of understanding” between the NSA and Israel. And the story was promptly reported in The Washington Post , The Los Angeles Times and linked to in The Huffington Post. At The New York Times, however, silence reigned and now, thanks to the doggedness of a combination of NYT’s readers and its public editor, Margaret Sullivan, we now know why. It just wasn’t important enough:

I asked the managing editor, Dean Baquet, about it on Monday morning.

He told me that The Times had chosen not to follow the story because its level of significance did not demand it.

“I didn’t think it was a significant or surprising story,” he said. “I think the more energy we put into chasing the small ones, the less time we have to break our own. Not to mention cover the turmoil in Syria.”

So, I asked him, by e-mail, was this essentially a question of reporting resources? After all, The Times could have published an article written by a wire service, like Reuters or The Associated Press.

“I’d say resources and news judgment,” he responded.

In a world with many news outlets, he said: “We can spend all our time matching stories, and not actually covering the news. This one was modest and didn’t feel worth taking someone off greater enterprise.”

Sullivan correctly challenged Baquet’s reasoning: “I disagree, however, with Mr. Baquet’s conclusion on this one. I find it to be a significant development and something that Times readers should not have to chase around the Web to find out about. They should be able to read it in The Times.”

Even with Sullivan’s bold intervention, Baquet has, in a way, prevailed. The Times itself is now the subject of commentators’ attention instead of the substance of the revelation: the unseemly relationship between the U.S. and its putative ally and the scary fact that Israel, too, has its unrestrained hands on our phone calls

Get Muzzlewatch delivered fresh daily

Enter your Email


Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz

by Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

In a world with a surfeit of bad news, two recent victories for freedom of expression are worth celebrating. Both were cases in which apologists for the occupation sought — unsuccessfully! — to stifle criticism of Israeli policies.

The first ruling, which came down last month from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), threw out claims that three University of California campuses  — Berkeley, Irvine and Santa Cruz — violated TItle VI of the Civil Rights Act by fostering antisemitic climates by allowing protests against Israeli policies to take place. As part of the ongoing “lawfare” campaign to silence pro-Palestinian speech, some Jewish UC students contended that the political speech expressed in these demonstrations created a “hostile” atmosphere and amounted to illegal harassment and intimidation. But encountering views contrary to one’s own, hardly constitutes harassment, the OCR concluded. As their letter closing the Berkeley complaint aptly stated, “In the university environment, exposure to such robust and discordant expressions, even when personally offensive and hurtful, is a circumstance a reasonable student in higher education may experience.” That something so obvious would be contested through a series of formal complaints suggests that there is nothing “reasonable” about students cynically trying to silence political opponents.

Second, on September 8, a district court in Israel ruled that five left-wing activists who on Facebook described the right-wing group  Im Tirtzu as a fascist movement were not guilty of libel. (The court did find that an implication in the posting that Im Tirtzu concurs with Nazi race theory, was slander.)  No surprise that Im Tirtzu will appeal the ruling to the Israeli Supreme Court.

Muzzlewatch readers will recall that Im Tirtzu (meaning “if you will it,” a fragment of Herzl’s famous expression about the founding of Israel) has itself used classic antisemitic tropes against critics of Israeli government actions. (For example, a picture of an evil-looking Naomi Chazan, board president of the progressive NGO, the New Israel Fund, with a horn coming out of her head). We might not want to uncork the celebratory champagne until after the resolution of the appeal. But given than the judge in the first case criticized Im Tirtzu for bringing suit at all, we can definitely put it on ice.

Get Muzzlewatch delivered fresh daily

Enter your Email


Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz

by Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

In the unusual category of GOOD news for discourse around Israel and Palestine, Patrick B. Pexton, ombuds for the Washington Post until last March, gave new owner Jeff Bezos some excellent advice in an open letter he published in the Washington City Paper:  Fire Jennifer Rubin.

Rubin, as Muzzlewatch readers may recall, occupies a place in the crowded precinct of rabid Islamaphobes on the Zionist right.  Here’s how Pexton puts it:

“Have Fred Hiatt, your editorial page editor—who I like, admire, and respect—fire opinion blogger Jennifer Rubin. Not because she’s conservative, but because she’s just plain bad. She doesn’t travel within a hundred miles of Post standards. She parrots and peddles every silly right-wing theory to come down the pike in transparent attempts to get Web hits. Her analysis of the conservative movement, which is a worthwhile and important beat that the Post should treat more seriously on its national pages, is shallow and predictable. Her columns, at best, are political pornography; they get a quick but sure rise out of the right, but you feel bad afterward.

And she is often wrong, and rarely acknowledges it. She was oh-so-wrong about Mitt Romney, week after week writing embarrassing flattery about his 2012 campaign, calling almost every move he made brilliant, and guaranteeing that he would trounce Barack Obama. When he lost, the next day she savaged him and his campaign with treachery, saying he was the worst candidate with the worst staff, ever. She was wrong about the Norway shootings being acts of al-Qaida. She was wrong about Chuck Hagel being an anti-Semite. And does she apologize? Nope.

Rubin was the No. 1 source of complaint mail about any single Post staffer while I was ombudsman, and I’m leaving out the organized email campaigns against her by leftie groups like Media Matters. Thinking conservatives didn’t like her, thinking moderates didn’t like her, government workers who knew her arguments to be unfair didn’t like her. Dump her like a dull tome on the Amazon Bargain Books page.”

Here’s hoping Bezos follows this advice.

Get Muzzlewatch delivered fresh daily

Enter your Email


Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz

by Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

Just mention the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and, as readers of Muzzlewatch well know, certain folks who declare themselves Israel’s greatest supporters try to shut down the discussion. And nothing makes them more apoplectic than the piece of BDS that is sticky even for many who embrace the tactic generally: the academic and cultural boycott. To impede the free exchange of ideas among scholars and artists, the argument goes, violates a core value.

So how will Israel’s self-appointed defenders respond to a recent threat by some Israeli scientists to remove themselves from international scientific bodies, scholarly journals and conferences, and even opportunities for research grants? No, not a new lab-coat brigade joining the BDS campaign. These scientists propose withdrawing from $106 million of potential funding in the name of defending their state against European “scorn for Israel.” They mean to punish the European Union by refusing to cooperate with them.

So advocates Eli Pollak, Professor in the Chemical Physics Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in a recent article in Israel Hayom. He was responding to an announcement from the European Commission in July: that it would no longer fund any Israeli entity based in or connected to the West Bank, East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights. Professor Pollak is calling on Israel’s scientific community to retaliate. As he sees it, taking part in European scientific programs and exchanges is to “lend a hand to Christian Europe” as it discriminates against Jews in the occupied territories and violates “the fundamental principle of equality between its citizens”  (by whom, of course, he means only Jews).

And so, in order to hold fast to this core value  Israel should refuse to cooperate. Never mind the consequences for Israeli scientists who will not be receiving funding; Europe will suffer more, says Prof. Pollak, because as “Europe knows. . . Israel leads the world in science.”

The proposal has sparked heated debate in Israel.  The government’s science minister rejects it, but the Economy Minster Naftali Bennett, would go even further than Pollak’s proposal: He urges Israel to end all cooperation with the EU.

A case, as Max Blumenthal tweeted out, of “auto BDS”.

Get Muzzlewatch delivered fresh daily

Enter your Email


Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz

By Donna Nevel

The Players in the Defamation Suit

Steven Emerson, an anti-Muslim ideologue, is currently suing Cyrus McGoldrick, an American Muslim community organizer and human rights activist, over a tweet that McGoldrick sent to two friends.

First, there is Cyrus McGoldrick, who is an effective and respected advocate, writer, and public spokesperson on behalf of the rights of Muslims and all those facing discriminatory treatment or being targeted (by the state or by individual Islamophobes). When he sent the tweet, McGoldrick was employed at the New York chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a highly-regarded Muslim advocacy organization whose mission, as stated on its website, is “to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.”

Then there is Steven Emerson, a member of what the Center for American Progress has called “an Islamophobia network in America.” [1] Emerson has been notorious for opposing efforts to build mosques (Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Boston, and Park51 in lower Manhattan) and for putting forth false and distorted information. Respected journalists have widely discredited Emerson, describing him as a “self-styled anti-terrorism expert,” “poison,” and “disgraced.” [2] The Muslim Public Affairs Council has identified Emerson as one of “America’s Top 25 Pseudo Experts on Islam.” [3]

Without any evidence, Emerson claimed on network television in 1995 that “Muslim/Middle East extremists” (not Timothy McVeigh) were responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing-since, he claimed, “This was done with the attempt to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait.” [4] He has provided “misleading statistics” on various occasions, including Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) March 2011 hearing on the alleged radicalization of Muslim American communities. [5] Most recently, Emerson claimed erroneously on C-SPAN, based on “‘certain classified information that he was ‘privy to,'” that a Saudi man was responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings. [6]

The Tweet

The defamation suit arose out of a November 2012 exchange of tweets between McGoldrick and his friend and colleague, Muslim activist and community leader Linda Sarsour. In her tweet, Sarsour quoted Emerson as making the slanderous remark-yet again-that CAIR was an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the nation’s largest terrorism financing trial. McGoldrick knew well, as did Emerson, that a federal appeals court had criticized the federal government labeling of CAIR and 244 other organizations as “unindicted co-conspirators” and that the government subsequently abandoned this “unconstitutional and improper” [7] claim.  But, as McGoldrick’s lawyers argue, Emerson has repeatedly made the false charge in his ongoing campaign targeting Muslim organizations and individuals, including CAIR and McGoldrick, in an effort to “smear and damage them.” [8]

After getting Sarsour’s tweet, McGoldrick, responding to his friend, sent a tongue-in-cheek tweet back to her (and to one other person, Hussam Ayloush executive director of CAIR-Los Angeles, whom Sarsour had tweeted) that described Emerson as an “unindicted co-conspirator in the nation’s largest child pornography case.”  The two people the tweet was sent to-and anyone who might have followed it-couldn’t have possibly missed McGoldrick’s joke: that is, using “unindicted conspirator” to mock Emerson’s repeated and fraudulent use of the words in relation to CAIR.  But after someone sent the tweet to Emerson, he brought a defamation suit against McGoldrick.

The Legal and Political Response

McGoldrick’s legal team has responded to Emerson’s charges by bringing a motion to dismiss the complaint against him. In their response, McGoldrick’s lawyers make perfectly clear how McGoldrick intended the tweet.  It was, they wrote, “a response to a sardonic tweet he received from two Muslim activist colleagues . . .[and] an obvious private in-joke that mocked a rabid critic of his and that in context could not be and was not taken literally.”  They further argue that McGoldrick’s tweet was “not a statement of fact, but was an ironic statement of opinion criticizing the government’s treatment of Muslim organizations in a terrorism funding trial and was, therefore, protected speech.” They also assert that Emerson brought this libel case, as he has done before, “in a bad-faith attempt to silence those who dare to tell the truth about him and his anti-Islam crusade.”  No “reasonable person,” McGoldrick’s lawyers maintain, “could have understood that joke as stating an actual fact about Emerson,” which is fundamental to a “viable libel claim.” Given that even a loyal supporter of Emerson publicly acknowledged that the tweet was a joke, and not an assertion of fact, the lawyers argue that the case should be dismissed.

Steven Emerson is part of a network of Islamophobes that is well-funded, connected to right-wing Israeli politics, and an integral part of the U.S. “war on terror.” [9] This frivolous and destructive lawsuit is yet another unsuccessful attempt by the Islamophobes to silence and intimidate those who oppose Islamophobia and stand for justice.

Representing McGoldrick are Alan Levine, civil rights and constitutional attorney; Beena Ahmad, of the National Lawyers Guild’s Muslim Defense Project; Steven Downs, of Project SALAM and the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms; and Hassan Ahmad, of Ahmad, Naqvi & Rodriguez. The legal papers can be seen on the CAIR New York website (http://www.cair-ny.org/).

(Donna Nevel and Alan Levine, one of the lawyers in the case, are married and are founding members of Jews Against Islamophobia)

Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matt Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, & Faiz Shakir, Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, August 2011, Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/report/2011/08/26/10165/fear-inc/.

from the Memorandum of Law in Support of Defendant’s Motion for Judgment: See, e.g., Ali Gharib, Disgraced Terror Expert Says Boston Bombs Bear ‘Hallmark; of Muslim Radicals, The Daily Beast (Apr. 16, 2013); Robert Steinbeck, Steven Emerson, Backing King Hearings, Pushes Misleading Statistic on Muslim Terrorism, Hatewatch, Southern Poverty Law Center (Mar. 23, 2011); Eric Boelhert, Terrorists Under the Bed, Salon.com, (Mar. 5, 2002); John Mintz, The Man Who Gives Terrorism A Name, The Washington Post (Nov. 14, 2001); John Sugg, Steve Emerson’s Crusade, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) (Jan. 1, 1999).)

MPAC, Not Qualified: Exposing America’s Top 25 Pseudo Experts on Islam, 2012, http://www.mpac.org/assets/docs/publications/MPAC-25-Pseudo-Experts-On-Islam.pdf.

Ali et al, Fear Inc.

Ali et al, Fear Inc.

Alex Seitz-Wald, “The Right’s New Boston Conspiracy Theory,” Salon, April 18, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/04/18/the_rights_new_boston_conspiracy_theory/ (accessed May 6, 2013). See also David Iaconangelo, “Boston Marathon Explosions: Story False, Police Have No Suspect,” Latin Times, April 15, 2013, http://www.latintimes.com/articles/2804/20130415/boston-marathon-explosion-saudi-national-story-false.htm; and Amy Davidson, “The Saudi Marathon Man,” New Yorker, April 17, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/the-saudi-marathon-man.html (both accessed May 6, 2013).  Also Caitlin Dewey, “Saudi Man Investigated after Boston Marathon Speaks Out,” Washington Post, May 24, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/24/saudi-man-investigated-after-boston-marathon-speaks-out/?print=1 (accessed June 3, 2013). Counterterrorism & Security Education and Research Foundation, “About CTSERF,” http://www.ctserf.org/about.html; Thomas Cincotta, Manufacturing the Muslim Menace: Private Firms, Public Servants, & the Threat to Rights and Security, Political Research Associates, 2011, 44, http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/training/Muslim_Menace_Complete.pdf; Robert I. Friedman, “One Man’s Jihad,” 657. Photocopied article from Muslim Public Affairs Council, Counterproductive Counterterrorism: How Anti-Islamic Rhetoric Is Impeding America’s Homeland Security, December 2004, 18-19, http://www.civilfreedoms.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Counterproductive-Counterterrorism.pdf (all accessed December 13, 2011).

From the Answer to the Complaint.

From the Answer to the Complaint.

Elly Bulkin & Donna Nevel, “Follow the Money: From Islamophobia to Israel Right or Wrong,” October 2012, Alternet.

Get Muzzlewatch delivered fresh daily

Enter your Email


Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz

By Marilyn Neimark

When the usual suspects– David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine and Debbie Schlussel’s blog –went ballistic over the NFL’s NY Jets draft of Brooklyn born, Palestinian American Oday Aboushi, it looked poised to go viral as more mainstream venues, such as yahoo sports and Major League Baseball’s new media coordinator Jonathan Mael joined in the attack. It was no surprise that The Nation’s David Zirin, The Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah, and Youssef Mounayer in The Daily Beast rushed to Aboushi’s defense. But the expected left-right shout-down didn’t materialize. The Yahoo story: “Could Oday Aboushi Jeopardize His NFL Career with Anti Israel….”, was taken down almost as quickly as it went up and Jonathan Mael’s mea culpa for his “beyond inappropriate” tweets attacking Abashi was reported in and endorsed by the NY Daily News. Even the ADL weighed in, pointing out in their press release that “Being pro-Palestinian does not mean you’re an anti-Semite or an extremist. The record simply does not show that Aboushi has crossed that line.”

So what at first appeared to be grist for the Muzzlewatch mill, turned out to be something else entirely. Apparently talking about the nakba and empathizing with the Palestinians displaced by Israel is no longer beyond the pale, at least within professional sports, and at least for a Palestinian American. Signs like this of a shift in the range of acceptable discourse are exciting, to be sure. But to the extent they’re happening it’s because we’ve been pushing back against the sowers of hate. This is no time to slacken our efforts.

Get Muzzlewatch delivered fresh daily

Enter your Email


Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz

by Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

Unlike hamburgers, which are either kosher or not, some boycotts are apparently more kosher than others.

The state of Israel and its supporters in the US have launched a full court press against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) — even though they’ve often dismissed the campaign as inconsequential and ineffective. Go figure. Such fruitless efforts have inspired legislation in the Knesset, passed in the spring, that allows targets of BDS to sue its advocates without having to prove that they sustained any harm. And here in the U.S., Malcolm Hoenlein head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, recently announced plans for a major offensive against the BDS movement on college campuses. This drive will be joining a multi-million dollar anti-BDS effort from the Israel Action Network.

But at the end of June, when McDonald’s Israel franchise turned down an invitation to open a branch at a mall under construction in the West Bank’s sprawling Jewish settlement, Ariel, settlers immediately called for a boycott of the chain.

Given that this franchise has, as a matter of policy, long refused to operate beyond Israel’s internationally recognized 1967 borders, one has to ask these new-fangled boycotters: Where is the beef? The franchise owner, Dr. Omri Padan, a founding member of Peace Now, has, like some Israelis for many years, simply declined to do business beyond the Green Line. Only recently — as Israel ever more vigorously seeks to erase that line — have settlement supporters fulminated against that stance. Just as they denounced the Israeli artists who stated they would not perform in Ariel when the settlement was added as a stop on standard national theater tours in 2010, they are vilifying McDonald’s as having — in the words of settler movement leader Yigal Delmonti — an “anti-Israeli political agenda.”

And that is the point of this whole froth, as fake as a pareve milkshake: to reassert that the settlements (but not the Palestinians living around them) are part of Israel and that for an Israeli to hold faith with international law is tantamount to treason.

Obviously, Dr. Padan is under no obligation to open a store in any particular location, but aligning him with BDS serves a rhetorical agenda, one that seeks to silence dissent and the nonviolent action that supports it.

Get Muzzlewatch delivered fresh daily

Enter your Email


Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz

By Marilyn Neimark and Donna Nevel

JVP joins with people and communities across the globe in expressing our admiration, love, and gratitude for Nelson Mandela, a giant in the struggle for justice and an inspiration to us all.

Had Muzzlewatch existed 23 years ago when Mandela, newly released from prison, made a thrilling visit to New York, the shameful response of the “official” Jewish community would have been the lead story here for days. While 750,000 New Yorkers of all sorts poured into the streets to cheer this courageous hero, the Jewish establishment sat out the festivities. Why? Muzzlewatch readers need no hints: This world leader who sat in jail for 27 years for fighting apartheid was not an acceptable Zionist.

His visit coincided with the moment we were co-founding the NY-based organization, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), and we were disgusted that the Jewish establishment announced that they were withholding their welcome of him to our city unless he satisfied them on his support for Israel. It was a stark demonstration of the way rightleaning Israel politics were skewing Jewish participation in progressive causes here — which is part of why we formed JFREJ. We decided that our inaugural event should be a symbolic welcome of Mandela from the substantial wing of the Jewish community that was happy and grateful to embrace him.

More than 1,000 people from across the city attended the Shabbat service and celebration of his achievement. Among the speakers: Harry Belafonte, Henry Schwarzschild, Grace Paley, and the ANC representative, Susan Mnumzama, with a closing song by Bernice Johnson Reagon. The service was led by Rabbis Marshall Meyer, Rolando Matalon, and Balfour Brickner.

We raised $30,000 to present to the ANC that evening, along with a statement applauding Mandela “as a moral voice for peace, justice, and self-determination for all peoples.”

We managed to get word out in other ways, too. JFREJ founding board member Alisa Solomon landed an op-ed in the New York Times (despite the NYT editors’ cautious hands, what was a radical critique in the mainstream media at the time could today have been penned by J Street).

We share her text and the rousing remarks of Harry Belafonte below.

AlisaSolomonNYTop Ed

Belafonte's Remarks on Mandela

Get Muzzlewatch delivered fresh daily

Enter your Email


Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz

by Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

The rush to denounce the renowned British physicist, Stephen Hawking, for withdrawing from the fifth annual Israeli Presidential Conference in order to protest Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, should have run its course in early May, flaring up as these things do, and then simmering down until Israel’s purported defenders stir up the next flap. But a cartoon in the Forward by Eli Valley reignited the frenzy.

Valley was responding to the hypocrisy he observed in right-wing Zionist charges that Hawking was a hypocrite. Their criticisms followed the usual script familiar to readers of Muzzlewatch (accusations of smug self-righteousness, the usual fulminations of Alan Dershowitz).

But the railing took on a particularly cruel cast, given Hawking’s physical condition:

“Hawking’s decision to join the boycott of Israel is quite hypocritical for an individual who prides himself on his whole intellectual accomplishment. His whole computer-based communications system runs on a chip designed by Israel’s Intel team. I suggest if he truly wants to pull out of Israel he should also pull out his Intel Core i7 from his tablet,” said Nitsana Darshan-Leitner of Shurat HaDin. (This from a news story in the Guardian.)

Along with this, among other examples collected by Mondoweiss, we have, from the settler news service Arutz Sheva:

Professor Hawking certainly knows that researchers at Tel Aviv University have launched clinical trials on a revolutionary new technology intended to protect the human brain from neurodegenerative disorders such as the one from which the famous scientist suffers and that at Ben Gurion University, they have found an enzyme that so far delays Lou Gehrig’s disease in mice.
Would Professor Hawking boycott a possible Israeli breakthrough in treating the disease?
Or more to the point –
Would Professor Hawking ever survive in any Arab country or under the Palestinian autocracy he shamefully defends?
While in the Arab world disabled people have been called “the invisibles,” because they are segregated and hidden from the public eye, Israel’s work with illness and disabilities would merit a book in itself.

That was apparently too much for Eli Valley, who weighed in on May 14:

No attempt at satire goes unpunished by Israel’s defenders. In an op-ed with the heading “What’s a Pro-Boycott Cartoon of Stephen Hawking Doing in a Jewish Paper? The Forward Should Defend Israel, Not Hypocritical Attackers,” columnist Hillel Halkin writes:

A cartoon that ignores this fact — one implying that Hawking’s disinclination to commit suicide is the main argument against him — is a cartoon that seeks to portray Hawking’s critics as foolish and malicious. And since what Hawking is being criticized for is boycotting Israel, it is a cartoon that portrays opposition to the boycott as foolish and malicious, as well. It is a pro-boycott cartoon.
And in the Forward!
Is it really necessary to make the case in the pages of a Jewish newspaper that no Jewish newspaper, let alone the Forward, should allow the slightest expression of sympathy for the Israel boycott movement to appear in it? Is it necessary to insist on the inherently anti-Semitic nature of this movement? Is it necessary to observe that anti-Semitism should not be condoned, let alone promoted, by the Jewish press?
Apparently, it is.

And so, here we have it again: For the discourse police, any expression of sympathy for BDS is anti-Semitic. Full stop. Well, not quite. In an op-ed “Defending My Stephen Hawking Cartoon,” Vallley, expresses surprise that:

“. . . Halkin is such a vociferous opponent of boycotts. He himself is proposing a boycott of views deemed, by his own criteria, to be inappropriate for Jews to see, read and hear.

Halkin’s jeremiad does not appear in a vacuum. It comes at a time when many of America’s major Jewish institutions debate the limits of free expression about Israel. It is an unfortunate paradox of Zionism that a movement created to safeguard Jewish sovereignty has led to so much fear and anxiety about Jewish thought.
Now Halkin appears eager to apply these rules to yet another pillar of communal vitality: the exchange of ideas in the media. He claims that a Jewish newspaper should only be permitted to talk about certain things. This proposal is a far greater threat to Jewish life than any movement of political protest. It’s time to stop losing our patience with open thought and discussion. It’s time to start losing our patience with those who try to define, invariably through a political lens, what constitutes legitimate Jewish discourse. Enough with attempted boycotts of Jewish views, divestments from Jewish thought and sanctions of Jewish opinion. In the Jewish community and culture that I treasure, there is a word to describe the movement to police and suppress Jewish expression. The word is shanda, and it means disgrace.”

Hooray for the artists.

Get Muzzlewatch delivered fresh daily

Enter your Email


Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz

American Muslims for Palestine launched an ad campaign this week on San Francisco buses condemning Israeli apartheid. (See below.) Predictably, local branches of the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, as well as the Jewish Community Relations Council, immediately issued a statement in effect calling the ad hate speech for using the word ‘apartheid’. They have called on “all civic, ethnic and religious leaders who oppose bigoted lies and demonization to exercise their constitutional rights by condemning these inflammatory advertisements.”

Below is a line by line reading of their media statement.

First, it’s hard to know if the people who wrote this press release actually believe what they wrote. The points they make against the ad are so off the mark, and often offensive, it’s hard to believe anyone could write them sincerely. (I’m deleting the names on the release because I don’t think it’s fair to blame them. I think people at the top should be held accountable for such nonsense.)

The release header:

Saying something over and over again doesn’t make it true. The Bay Area JCRC, and local offices of the ADL and the AJC, are not synonymous with the “Bay Area Jewish Community.” In fact, while the Jewish Community Relations Council claims to represent Bay Area Jews, they won’t release the number or names of groups they represent. That certainly makes one wonder if the number is embarrassingly small. And it’s likely shrinking. There is no shortage of Jews around here, from a wide political spectrum, who would be appalled to be associated with an attack on a Muslim group for using a word that Israeli officials use regularly. (More on that later.)

First we see the predictable talking point about initiatives that seek to pressure Israel to abide by international law seeking to “divide the community.” The irony of course, is that actually the community is pretty united, certainly increasingly so. On campuses, for example, over and over again you have a veritable rainbow of organizations backing these initiatives –including Christian, Jewish, Muslim, secular, Southeast Asian, Latino, African American and so forth, all united-increasingly opposed to “coalitions” of a handful of similar and non-diverse groups. (Kind of like those UN votes for Palestinian rights where nearly every country in the world stands on one side, and Israel, the US, Palau and Micronesia stand on the other.)

This is the gist—the JCRC and ADL claim the ad is essentially a hate crime designed to delegitimze Israel’s existence. This is the de facto talking point these days; it is intimidating language, used for lack of a good argument. It goes like this:

It doesn’t really matter what you say or do, the answer always is, “you REALLY want to destroy Israel” (or delegitimize it, which is supposed to be a roundabout way to destroy Israel). Dig a little deeper, and according to the 6 million dollar Israel Action Network, which openly spies on groups like Jewish Voice for Peace* and provides talking points and strategy to defenders of Israeli government policy, the aim of delegitimization is to “isolate Israel as a pariah state and reject the notion of a two-state solution.” If that were at all true, you’d think they’d go after the original two-state solution killers– the settlers, the Israeli government and Bibi Netanyahu whose party openly opposes a two-state solution. But nary a peep. Their harsh condemnations are reserved only for those trying to end Israel’s ongoing violations of international law.

The ad’s false claims diminish the suffering of the millions of people who were truly subjected to apartheid. The term “apartheid” describes the systematic oppression of the racial majority population by South Africa’s minority through comprehensive racial discrimination.  In sharp contrast to Apartheid South Africa, Israel is a diverse democratic country that affords equal political and civil rights to all its citizens.

Israeli human rights groups have much to say about the very unequal apportioning of rights to Israel’s non-Jewish citizens, but why bother to argue the obvious? Instead, let’s just take one of the organizations behind this press release that defines apartheid for South Africans (because really, how dare Archbishop Tutu do so). Michelle Goldberg wrote in The Daily Beast about the ADL’s moral standing on defining South Africa, describing the NYT’s Sasha Polakow Suransky’s (no relation) writing on the issue:

In the 1980s, at a time when Israel maintained close ties with South Africa, the ADL went on the attack against Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. As Sasha Polakow-Suransky reported in his recent book The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, ADL National Director Nathan Perlmutter co-authored an article implying that the ANC was “totalitarian, anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel and anti-American.” The ADL sent spies into the American anti-apartheid movement, as well as other movements critical of right-wing American foreign policy. Eventually, the organization was surveilling much of the American left. In 1993, a California police raid on the offices of the ADL and one of its investigators yielded files on Greenpeace, the NAACP, Act Up, New Jewish Agenda, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and several Democratic politicians, among hundreds of others. The ADL eventually settled a class-action lawsuit brought by several of its targets.

The ADL apparently had no problem with Apartheid South Africa when it existed, but now they claim authority to dispute the many South Africans, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who decry the many similarities between that regime and Israel’s occupation.

The release, again:

Finally, and here’s the heart of the matter: if calling AMP’s use of the term “apartheid” is, as the release describes it, “misleading, inflammatory, divisive, offensive and bigoted,” where is the AJC’s, ADL’s and JCRC’s outrage about these Israelis who have used the same term to describe the decades-long and ever-expanding Israeli occupation? Surely they didn’t miss these statements, as attuned as they are to the “A” word. But once again—it’s perfectly alright for high ranking Israelis to regularly use the word apartheid, but it’s not OK for Muslims to do so? What kind of message about bigotry does that send?

Get Muzzlewatch delivered fresh daily

Enter your Email


Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz