Tuesday, December 8, 2009
[The following is cross-posted with permission from Comment is Free Watch. Comments are running there. Feel free to comment in either place. -MS]
This is a guest post by AKUS
WellofSense's article Georgina and Matt; a reality check has really got me thinking about the inner workings at the Guardian.
The changes at CiF certainly are interesting, and may indeed be due to the economic situation and its impact on advertising revenue. That is not trivial, and around the world newspapers are struggling to exist.
However, it seems to me that the growing drumbeat of opposition to the Guardian's bias across the blogosphere, the Guardian's chosen battlefield for its attacks on Israel and British Jewry, the revelations about internal issues such as the BellaM affair, and the focus on collecting and exposing the antisemitism and fallacies (lies) about Israel and Jews that have been the meat and potatoes of the site, "Comment is Free", that CiF Watch in particular has focused on, have had a significant effect
The "hard news" crowd, worried about the sales of the print version, may have been less focused on what was appearing in the blog as long as ad revenues grew. If there has been a decline, it may have forced those on the more traditional side to take note of the activities of Henry, Seaton and Whitaker, who have been running a propaganda campaign for a Stalinst/Trotskyite/radical Islam alliance through their control of content on CiF. Advertisers may be taking note that this does not accord with the goals they have for their advertising, nor is the collection of antisemites, weirdos, conspiracy freaks, jihadists and would-be jihadis and assorted nutcases attracted to CiF likely to be their target market.
Serious commentators condemning CiF daily like Robin Shepherd or Yaakov Lozowick cannot be lightly dismissed, and the Guardian may hate and ridicule Melanie Phillips but she has a very large readership and her reporting has done much to undermine the Guardian's reputation. Just as an example of the difference in reach, her book "Londonistan" has been published world wide with considerably more success than other books put out by its stable of Theobald Jews and antisemites that the Guardian has relentlessly tried to promote to its readership. I have seen it in stores across America and Canada, and have yet to see one of the Guardian's favorite sons' "works" show up.
Like many others, I stumbled across the Guardian's website and its CiF Israeli obsession while looking for some of the old reporting we used to read with interest, even admiration, and could hardly believe what I was reading. It was like looking onto a topsy-turvey universe, where up is down, black is white, and a determined attempt was being made to describe Israelis in particular and Jews in general in terms that Goebbels would not have hesitated to use while every Moslem atrocity was ignored, brushed aside, or blamed on the victims.
Thus in terms of We can afford to be choosy by Douglas Murray, he hits the nail on the head with this paragraph:
I think we can do - indeed we have to do - better than this. Let me give an example. Those of us who are friendly towards the Israeli state often notice that in Britain at any rate there is a form of anti-Israeli-ism somewhat distinct from the more rabid recent varieties. It tends to be held by British people of the older generation who will tell you that the Israeli state was founded on terrorism. They cite the acts of such groups as the Irgun and Stern gangs.
Those who watched the video of the antisemitic sad sack screaming at the camera outside the caroling hate-fest in Bloomsbury the other night will recognise the reference. In the same vein, I stumbled across a recording of the vile Gerald Kaufman speaking in parliament, claiming to have been best buddies with Ben Gurion, Golda, Abba Eban - you name a significant Israeli or Jewish leader , he was their friend - and in his horrendous English pronunciation of Hebrew, mouthing the names of the Stern gang and the Irgun as if it happened yesterday, while invoking the death of his grandmother in the Holocaust to claim that Israelis are the same as Nazis. A trope picked up and endlessly repeated by Seth Freedman until finally, through this site, I was able to publish the collection of his puerile but vile Nazi analogies. The Guardian, never shy about publishing them in his articles, relentlessly deleted the list every time I published it on CiF.
The institutionalization of this kind of hatred - what I think of as the "brainwashing of Britain" - is, I think, unequalled even among the other EU countries. Its extraordinary effectiveness is how it has been accepted by many of the very people who will one day be its victims - the 300,000 or so Jews in Britain, with a few brave and notable exceptions such as Jonathan Hoffman. Never since WWII have so few been so attacked by so many for so little reason.
The Guardian has made it its business to be the standard bearer for this attack on Israel and British Jews, through its support of radical Islam, reports such as the Dispatches program, the Carol Churchill play, its disgusting antisemitic cartoons, and the protection it gives to those who relentlessly attack Israel and the defence of those who call for Israel's destruction in the columns it publishes and the comments it retains on its website - a destruction of the State of Israel which actually means the deaths of some 6 million Jews, once again.
It is a shocking story, and may yet result in people one day mentioning the Guardian and Der Sturmer in the same breath.
As far as I understood it, didn't the Hagannah fight the Irgun and Stern Gang precisely because it disapproved of their tactics? And didn't the Hagannah represent the mainstream of the Zionist movement?
Also, while I agree that the bombing of the King David Hotel was awful, I thought I had read that the Irgun put out warnings to people in the hotel so they could leave. Am I wrong in that? And if I'm not wrong, that's a unique action among terrorists.
Also, the selectivity is weird. Didn't the Arabs in Palestine also fight British forces tooth and nail? Didn't the British face such fighting almost everywhere in their former colonies?
Israel can't be said to have been "born of terrorism" because of the actions of some errant fanatics who were condemned as such by other Zionists even at the time. If a Palestinian state comes to pass (and I hope it does), will anyone say that the state was born of terrorism? No, many will say that it was born of Resistance.
The King David Hotel was a military target, and you're right, the Hagannah was the "mainstream," but let's not tsk tsk too harshly from our distance. The context was one of people trying to save a population from an actual Holocaust and the aftermath.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths2/Mandatoryper.html#b8
The Arabs did at times fight their British colonizers, but don't forget that when push came to shove, the British did the math and were firmly on the side of the Arabs in the period of the struggle for independence. I actually think the leftovers of this have a lot to do still with British behavior toward the Israelis. Like America, they too fought the British for independence, but in our case everyone's had a lot longer to get over it, and we've (the Americans and Brits) spilled a lot of blood together.
I believe that when the british retreated from Israel in 1948, the british expected the Jews of Israel, without "the protection" of the british, to be massacred as they were during the Holocaust.
I bet the british were beside themselves with disappointment that the Israelis, armed with weapons from Czechoslovakia defeated the arab attackers.
The victory for Israel was a NAKBA for islamofascists and british imperialism. Good.
Now britian, the uk, is going down the loo.
Remember Pan Am 103
http://www.boycottscotland.com
CiF is not about freedom, much to th contrary. It is basically a cheering section for Islam.
Negatives comments about Islam are not tolerated, at least the ones I left pointing out the hate, violence and discrimination that seems to follow Islam like a 3PM shadow on a sunny ay.
I have been banned from that site for years.
Kactuz
Joanne,
You are correct.
One should note also that such "terrorism" was applied against the British military and only came about rather late in the day after many British actions which permitted the Arabs to kill many Jews and go unpunished from the 1920s onward. The business of closing off Palestine to the Jews of Europe and their subsequent fate was I suppose the last straw for those involved.
Strange how the British ignore the involvement of some of their troops with Jordanians in the Ben Yehuda Street bombing where some 60 Jews men, women and children died.
The British officered Jordanian army and the British pilots flying Spitfires for Egypt in which those countries went to war against the newly declared independence of the Jewish state I suppose was in retribution for the actions of the Irgun and Stern gang by attributing collective guilt to the Israelis.
Also the Brits did nothing to help alleviate the siege of Jerusalem, where 100,000 people were in danger of starvation, not to mention their blockades and their treatment of Shoah refugees and survivors.
Not trying to justify terrorism, just add some context.
As to the Guardian - we have problems on blogs with antisemitism (also other forms of bigotry) but the Guardian is a major newspaper.
There's a huge difference. The Guardian is using its powerful and theoretically respectable position to promote racism and I think incite violence.
Joanne,
Here's an address to the Anglo Israel Association this week and posted by Melanie Phillips which will provide more insight on what went on vis a vis British / Jewish Palestinian relations:
An inconvenient truth
Sure enough, at the Versailles Conference and its ancillary meetings up to 1922, although Britain was given the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, the Jewish National Home was not established. During the Mandate period there was an observable tension between the CO, which was responsible for administering Palestine and wanted to do so within the terms of the (admittedly self-contradictory) Balfour Declaration, and the FO, which feared that allowing the de facto creation of a Jewish State would alienate Arabs.
This attitude continues till today as the Europeans do everything to seemingly grind the Jews into the dust while keeping their hands "clean".
And it grinds on further with the our country's still having its embassy in Tel Aviv instead of the Israel's capital city -- despite the 1995 law requiring the embassy move.