Tuesday, March 9, 2010
[The following, by Ben Cohen, is crossposted from Z Word. It also includes a guest contribution by habibi from Harry's Place.]
A group of friends in London alerted me to this grubby little piece by a British Labour Party Member of Parliament, Bob Marshall-Andrews, concerning his recent visit to Gaza. Upon reading it, I was struck by various thoughts, not least the degree to which Marshall-Andrews words will be welcomed by the Hamas cheerleaders who compose the Palestinian solidarity movement, in marked contrast to the fierce condemnation with which this blog, and others like it, will greet his compendium of antisemitism-laced falsehoods. Why bother to refute such lies, one might ask, when those of us who defend Israel are at irreconcilable odds with those who demonize her, when any charge of antisemitism we make is bound to be dismissed as another tired attempt to muzzle debate? The most satisfactory answer I can come up with is that some things - and Marshall-Andrews article is one of them - are so odious that they cannot pass without rebuke.
To work, then. Here's how Marshall-Andrews sets the scene:
"Bags of cement are slit open by grinning ringletted guards. Having destroyed they maintain the destruction."
The "ringlets" he refers to are known, in Hebrew, as pe'ot, the sidelocks worn by ultraorthodox Jews. Now, I've spent a great deal of time in Israel and I can tell you that most Israeli soldiers don't wear pe'ot. So what visual image is Marshall-Andrews trying to conjure up here? One of a people that rejoices in radical evil, their grinning faces framed by those unmistakeably Jewish ringlets. Something a little like this, perhaps:
But of course, he's not antisemitic. That's just a device to smear supporters of the Palestinians.
Then he goes on to talk about the devastation visited upon Gaza. He describes a scene of apocalypse, in which a population living in the shadows of bombed sewage plants, cowed by chronic shortages of basic foodstuffs, somehow survives. Still, Marshall-Andrews can't resist telling us that, amidst all this horror, his Hamas hosts provided him and his colleagues with a "generous lunch." Continuing on the gastronomic theme, he then tells us that breakfast the next day consisted of boiled eggs and cheese, "because of the blockade." Actually, that's pretty standard fare at most hotel buffet tables, and a much healthier start to the day than that enjoyed by large numbers of inner-city kids who don't live in war zones.
His stomach still rumbling from that unsatisfying repast, Marshall-Andrews steps up the hyperbole. "This ruthless, genocidal repression is the worst in today's world," he states. "It is worse than the Sudan, worse than the Congo, worse than Burma - a large claim but true, and that truth lies not in the identity and suffering of the victims but in the identity and nature of the perpetrators."
In fact, this is a shameful, bare-faced lie. Those tempted to believe it should question the credentials of a man who, a few paragraphs earlier, confesses that he has "little experience of extensive war damage in civilian areas." Then again, reality is incidental to all this: the Israel-hatred swamps Marshall-Andrews judgment, just as it did with London Times hack Janine di Giovanni, who ludicrously claimed, in the wake of the Battle of Jenin in 2002, "[R]arely, in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life." There was, by the way, no massacre in Jenin.
One fact which Marshall-Andrews does get right - though no doubt he'd inflate the figure if he could get away with it - is that 1,400 died during Operation Cast Lead (he omits to mention that at least 60 per cent of those were bearing arms on behalf of Hamas.) Worse than Sudan - or "the Sudan" as he calls it, with touching colonial nostalgia? In Darfur, 300,000 died, either through violence or diseases caused by the displacement which drove 2.7 million people from their homes. Worse than Congo? According to an International Rescue Committee report, that conflict may have claimed a staggering 5.4 million lives; there are other, more cautious estimates, but even these do not dip below 2 million. Worse than Burma? After Cyclone Nargis killed 140,000 people in 2008, the 3.4 million survivors were deliberately blocked from receiving aid by the Burmese junta, which went so far as to arrest ordinary Burmese civilians who attempted to bring relief to the stricken area.
On this last point, it's worth remembering that repressive regimes, whether prosecuting war or minimizing public scrutiny of their responses to humanitarian disasters, want to make their targets suffer more, not less. They want the victims to be hungry and scared, unable to predict when the next aid convoy might arrive. In their siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian Serb militias perfected this into a grotesque art form.
Life in Gaza, to the contrary, has - by comparison to these other situations - an enviable predictability. No, I'm not denying that Gaza needs humanitarian aid. I am saying that Gazans can be sure that the aid will arrive, just as it did over this last week, when 13,919 tons of aid rolled in. Close to 1.4 million liters diesel fuel and 832 tons of cooking oil crossed in as well, courtesy of the same state which Bob Marshall-Andrews obscenely accuses of carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
True, those figures come from the IDF. If they are massaged numbers or outright fabrications, then those who believe so should say so - and come up with credible evidence to counter them. I am confident - given the parallel universe inhabited by people like Bob Marshall-Andrews, in which the degree to which a statement is true depends on how intensely the person issuing it hates Israel - that they will not be able to do so.
habibi adds:
Bob Marshall-Andrews is Labour MP for Medway.
Last week he attended a meeting of the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC) and the self-styled Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East at Westminster
The PRC are the Hamas supporters who invited Hungarian neo-fascist Krisztina Morvai to one of their London meetings last year. Sameh Habeeb, the hate publisher who runs the Palestine Telegraph, was one of the organisers of that meeting and this Westminster event too.
The Labour group lists the Palestine Telegraph under a "The best coverage of Palestine and the Middle East" heading on its website. Habeeb's blog is also "recommended".
In what appeared to be a sneaky move as criticism of the meeting grew, the Labour Friends removed Jenny Tonge from the list of speakers before the meeting. They also dropped Habeeb's name from the organiser contacts. The PRC is nowhere near so shy. Here is Tonge, pictured on their website, next to Marshall-Andrews at the meeting.
Other Labour politicians who spoke at the meeting included Lord Ahmed, Jeremy Corbyn, Gerald Kaufman and Martin Linton.
This background helps to explain a putrid piece by Marshall-Andrews about a visit to Gaza that has appeared on Labourlist.
It dives deep into the mire almost straight away:
Construction materials cannot cross the Israeli blockade. Bags of cement are slit open by grinning ringletted guards. Having destroyed they maintain the destruction.
Did Mr Marshall-Andrews actually see those nasty swarthy types at it? He doesn't say.
On to allegations of cold-blooded murder, which just must be true:
The quiet testimony of children telling of their families being removed from their homes and shot in cold blood by Israeli soldiers. None of us doubted the veracity of what was said.
Some admiration for the wonderful people of Hamas:
We spoke to the elected leaders of the Hamas Government. If these are terrorists they are the best educated terrorists in the world. Middle-aged, clever men and women who welcomed us into the wreckage of their Palestinian parliament.
"Oh, but not the rockets!" - they are only fired by "factions" anyway - weasel words from a Hamas helper and the sneering, facile and misleading invocation of Northern Ireland come next:
Of course there are terrorist factions in Hamas. Of course rocket attacks on Israel are indefensible and we said so, repeatedly. But equally indefensible were IRA bombings of London and Birmingham which killed far more people. Had we responded by laying waste large areas of Belfast and Derry, slaughtering hundreds of civilians and systematically starving the rest we would have anticipated and received international condemnation and certain trial.
Never mind the Hamas charter:
Of course they still retain an unsustainable and futile charter calling for the end of the Israeli state. It is a position they will undoubtedly relinquish, but overtures to negotiation with Israel or America are met with the silence of stone.
"Undoubtedly relinquish"? It's been over 20 years. And it calls for rather more than "the end of the Israeli state":
With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.
You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.
...
Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
Oh, but they are "middle-aged, clever men and women", and this stinking Jew hatred, echoed to this day in Hamas media, just doesn't matter, because Mr Marshall-Andrews says so.
I mean, who would give any credence to Hamas leader Mahmoud al Zahar?
After voting in the Gaza Strip, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar said the group "will not change a single word in its covenant" calling for the destruction of Israel. He said Hamas would continue its path of "resistance" against Israeli occupation in the West Bank even as it serves in the Palestinian parliament.
Israel, on the other hand, is a "pariah state" committing genocide, worse than the mass murderers of the Congo and the dictatorships of Sudan and Burma:
The actions of Israel towards Gaza are indefensible at any level. This is now a pariah state. This ruthless, genocidal repression is the worst in today's world. It is worse than the Sudan, worse than the Congo, worse than Burma - a large claim but true, and that truth lies not in the identity and suffering of the victims but in the identity and nature of the perpetrators. This deliberate policy of mass starvation, intimidation, destruction and casual slaughter is not perpetrated by warlords or Juntas. It is not the work of the Lords Army or the Ton Ton Macoute. This is the deliberate systematic, lawless cruelty of an apparently democratic state allied to the most powerful nation on earth, a nation which daily colludes in its atrocities and provides impunity for its swaggering extra judicial murder.
Labour is a party that claims to oppose antisemitism.
