Showing posts with label Haaretz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Haaretz. Show all posts

Wednesday, 29 July 2020

Being fed a huge amount of lies

Did you know that all pro-Israel advocacy from the mouth of a non-Jew (Col Richard Kemp) is worth a million times more than the very same thing from a Jew? Obviously, the theory is that a Jew has skin in the game or a dog in the fight, whereas a non-Jew is trustworthy and less likely to lie. 

No sooner had I digested that sad-but-true observation (in the Stand With Us video) than I was invited to digest a proposal with a similar concept; inversely. And pretty indigestible it is too. 

The theory is, of course, that when an actual Jew defames Israel, his defamation is worth a thousand defamations by the usuals, and the Guardian and its ilk will hang on to every priceless word.

The ilk?

On the Elder of Ziyon site, I read this piece about a comedian named Seth Rogen who, “AsaJew” believes the scales have fallen from his eyes and that he has suddenly discovered the unvarnished truth about Israel. 

This is Rogan's revelation that got The Guardian going:
"And I also think that as a Jewish person, like I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life. You know, they never tell you, that oh by the way, there were people there. They make it seem like it was– just sitting there, oh the fucking door’s open!…Literally they forget to include the fact to every young Jewish person: Basically, oh yeah, there were people living there.

Unfortunately, he has yet to realise that those scales have been replaced by the much grimmer lens - the prism of Palestinian propaganda. According to Elder 'any fule (who attended a Jewish school), kno' - or should kno - the relevant history. He explains:
"It is literally impossible to teach Israel’s history without mentioning the Arabs who were the majority before 1948. The riots in 1920, 1921 and 1929; the mini-civil war of 1936-9, the reasons for the British White Paper limiting Jewish immigration, the partition plan, the fighting in 1947-8 and the refugee issue – these topics cannot be avoided if one is taught even a perfunctory history of Israel, no matter how Zionist that history is.
The 1950s book “The Story of modern Israel for young people” features this illustration;


The damage that this silly person will do through his own gullibility and that of others - and (if applicable) his celebrityhood - is of inverse proportion to the substance of his ‘revelation’. The fact that the Guardian 'leapt on it and ran' speaks volumes. 

Not only does the circularity of this brand of propagandising highlight the push-me-pull-you nature of the dissemination of disinformation like a snake eating its own tail, but it gives the Guardian a hook on which to hang further disinformation with its very own potted  “history lesson”.
"More than 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes or fled fighting in the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation. Today, those families and their descendants make up around 5.6 million refugees.
No! It was not the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation! Wrong! Wrong and back to front!
  1. End of British Mandate 14th May 1948. 
  2. State of Israel proclaimed 14th May 1948. 
  3. Israel invaded by five Arab states 15th May 1948
It was Israel’s creation that ‘led to’ the war - a war of intended annihilation - started by the Arabs, waged by the Arabs and lost by the Arabs, if you didn’t know, Oliver Holmes or whoever wrote that garbage.  You might ask yourself who’s been feeding you all those lies your entire life? And, Oh, by the way, there were lies everywhere; and you literally forget to mention The Inconvenient Truth About Jews From Arab Lands

In case you can't access content from Haaretz - I think they ask you to register - I'm giving you an excerpt from it below. Don't forget, this is from Israel's equivalent to The Guardian and the BBC's go-to source of news and views from Israel - so don't dismiss it as predictable nonsense from the book of 'they would say that wouldn't they'  Nathan Weinstock, the subject of the article and author of a study about Jews of Arab lands began as a member of the anti-Zionist left - until the scales fell from his eyes and he realised he'd been playing the part of the 'useful idiot'.
"What makes Weinstock’s decision to write about the Jews’ expulsion from the Arab world especially surprising is his own political biography: He was one of the leading figures in the anti-Zionist left in France during the 1960s and ‘70s. From viewing Israel and Zionism as a colonial project aimed at dispossessing the Palestinians, Weinstock underwent a dramatic conceptual upheaval that led him to address a painful and rarely discussed aspect of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
“This book is the story of a tragedy,” he writes in a special introduction to the Hebrew edition, “of the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Mizrahi Jews, who were torn cruelly from their homes and homelands. Whole communities of Jews, who had always resided in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, underwent expulsion, persecution and malicious liquidations Nevertheless, this drama remains unknown and it has been denied for a lengthy period.”
In retrospect, Weinstock explains, that event showed him the degree to which he played the part of the “useful idiot” at the time. “I was thrilled when I got up to speak to the Palestinian students,” he told me. “Very naively, I was convinced that the Palestinian students would be happy to hear my pacifist message. So I was astonished when not one of them showed the least interest in what I said. Instead, they listened ecstatically to Radio Cairo, delighting in every word and swallowing the boastful announcements that the Arab armies would soon throw all the Jews into the sea.” 

Sunday, 10 December 2017

Direct messaging



Haaretz, Israel's equivalent to the Guardian, featured a column on Thursday by Allison Kaplan Sommer wherein Ms. Sommer considered the possibility (in her view) that Donald Trump is succumbing to Jerusalem Syndrome ("that disorder in which a recent visitor to the Holy City begins to take on the personality of a biblical figure") and starting to see himself as The Messiah. ("It just could be a logical next step on Trump's path of auto-hagiography.")

That was evidently more than enough for the team at Radio 4's Sunday. On the same day that the article was published, they tweeted Allison: 


The result? She was present-and-correct on Sunday this morning talking about the reasons behind the US President's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel - mainly "to placate evangelical fundamentalists" in US elections - and the theology behind it. 

Explaining the theology behind it was the reason Sunday gave for why she was on. She, however, rather gave the game away by declaring herself to be no expert on the theology - "far from it!". She said she was just passing on what she'd learned (and it sounded like it too). She added, "It sounds absurd to many of us".

All very Sunday!

Saturday, 5 October 2013

Schama and the BBC





Further to my observations about Simon Schama’s final episode of The Story of the Jews, I would just like to add a couple of excerpts from Haaretz, the left-leaning Israeli newspaper the BBC prefers to go to for their negative Israel-related news and stories.

“Schama relishes the thought that his high-profile series, which has received a huge deal of attention and healthy viewing ratings, has done something to improve the BBC’s image among his fellow-Jews. “They have been very good to me,” he says of the network that made him a household name in Britain, beginning in 1995, when it broadcast its first series based on a Schama book, “Landscape and Memory,” “and besides, this was their idea. They came to me with it and I realized it was really the time to do it. I hadn’t worked on Jewish history for decades, since my book on the Rothschilds [published in 1978]. I had that sense that I’m an old geezer and I had to give it a go. Jewish history is just so out there in front of the world and full of anxieties of anti-Semitism and the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict.”

This says to me that Schama sees himself as a BBC insider, and as such he wishes his fellow Jews to be more sympathetic to the BBC. “Look,” he’s saying, “It was their idea!”  

“You speak with American Jews and they all think it’s 1930s Berlin here, but it’s not true at all,” says Schama who lives and lectures most of the year in New York, but shares the view that British Jews have rarely, if ever, had it better. “Sure, there are sometimes raw sparks when it comes to Palestinian issues. You still have the old Arabists in the Foreign Office, and the ultra-left, but the default mode in the big center of Britain is not Judeophobic at all. In fact it’s quite Jew-friendly.”

That says to me that he may be a BBC insider, but he’s not really a UK insider. He’s forgotten what the BBC is really like vis-à-vis Israel and the Jews, he doesn’t really know what impression the BBC has been giving the UK audience over recent years; he’s missed all those slanted news stories and is unaware of the way the BBC has been desperately appeasing the ever growing demands of the Israel-bashers, anti-Zionists and Jew-haters.

I have met a number of individuals who have visited Israel on work related missions. A potter who had been on a course there said he disliked Israel as it was “too militarised.” He was not familiar with the politics and had been ‘educated and informed’ by the BBC. I thought that was a bit like saying they didn’t like seeing the lions at the zoo because they were too caged. He didn’t realise that if it wasn’t for said ‘militarisation’ he wouldn’t have been able to go about his course in relative safely.
Simon Schama did acknowledge the ‘needs must’ aspect of Israel’s security measures, but he seemed to play down the reasons behind them. It’s as if his idealism had blinkered him, willfully.