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Oliver Stone ---the Huge Anti-Semite
Home / Globe / Opinion / Op-ed Jeff Jacoby
Double standard
Why is it that Mel Gibson is ripped by the media for anti-Semitic statements, and Oliver Stone isn’t?
By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / August 4, 2010
E-mail this article To: Invalid E-mail address Add a personal message:(80 character limit) Your E-mail: Invalid E-mail address
Sending your articleYour article has been sent. E-mail| Print| Reprints| Comments (217)Text size – + LATE IN July, a Hollywood honcho uncorks a blast of anti-Semitic bile, the sort of malignant stereotype about Jews one might expect from David Duke or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Is that newsworthy?
Tweet 6 people Tweeted thisSubmit to DiggdiggYahoo! Buzz ShareThis It certainly was in 2006, when Mel Gibson, arrested in Malibu for drunken driving, demanded to know whether the arresting deputy was Jewish, and then launched into an anti-Semitic rant: “[Expletive] Jews,’’ he raged. “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.’’
What followed was a Category 4 media hurricane.
Within a week, according to the Nexis news database, the number of articles mentioning “Mel Gibson’’ and “Jews’’ had soared to 1,077. The New York Times reported the incident in a Page 1 story on July 30, and followed it up with much longer stories on Aug. 1 and 2. The coverage in the Los Angeles Times was even more extensive, with three front-page stories and another half-dozen inside. Numerous other papers gave heavy play to Gibson’s tirade and its aftermath. The network and cable news shows were all over the story, broadcasting scores of segments about it in that first week.
Pervading much of the media’s coverage and commentary was a tone of unforgiving revulsion.
“Let’s not cut Mel Gibson even the tiniest bit of slack,’’ began Eugene Robinson’s op-ed column in The Washington Post. Talent agent Ari Emanuel’s call for Gibson to be blacklisted was widely noted: “People in the entertainment business, whether Jew or gentile, need to demonstrate that they understand how much is at stake in this by professionally shunning Mel Gibson and refusing to work with him,’’ Emanuel wrote in an open letter on the Huffington Post.
On “The View,’’ Barbara Walters announced that she wouldn’t see any more of Gibson’s movies. Slate explained “How To Boycott Mel Gibson.’’ CNN’s Brooke Anderson, co-host of “Showbiz Tonight,’’ described “a sudden explosion of outrage with some of the most influential people in Hollywood now saying they will never work with Mel Gibson again.’’ As if to confirm the point, ABC cancelled a Holocaust-themed mini-series it had been developing with Gibson.
But when, almost exactly four years later, another Hollywood bigfoot uttered an anti-Semitic rant, the reaction couldn’t have been more different.
In a July 25 interview with the Times of London, filmmaker Oliver Stone complained that “Jewish domination of the media’’ focuses too much attention on the Holocaust, and prevents Americans from understanding Hitler (and Stalin) “in context’’ — a wrong he intends to right in a documentary he is making for Showtime. Stone described these media-controlling Jews as “the most powerful lobby in Washington’’ — “hard workers’’ who “stay on top of every comment,’’ and are responsible for the fact that “Israel has [expletive]-up United States foreign policy for years.’’
Like Gibson blaming Jews for the planet’s wars, Stone’s lament about Jewish control of the media is classic anti-Semitism, straight out of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’’ and Henry Ford’s “The International Jew.’’ Unlike Gibson, however, Stone gave vent to his bigotry while perfectly sober.
Yet far from triggering a media storm, Stone’s anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering barely stirred a breeze.
Seven days after his words first appeared, Nexis had logged fewer than 150 items mentioning Stone’s toxic rhetoric. On ABC, CBS, and NBC, the news shows completely ignored the story. The New York Times restricted its coverage to two short items in its “Arts, Briefly’’ section — and few other papers ran even that much.
Media mogul Haim Saban did urge Showtime to cancel Stone’s documentary, and posted an online message calling on Hollywood to give Stone “a vigorous shove into the land of forced retirement.’’ But few if any media voices seconded the motion — not a word from Slate, for example — and some went out of their way to pooh-pooh it: Los Angeles Times blogger Patrick Goldstein pronounced the idea “not so different’’ from “the infamous 1950s Hollywood blacklist.’’
Gibson and Stone are both guilty of indulging in rank anti-Semitism (for which both promptly “apologized’’), but only Gibson was buried under a newsroom avalanche of outrage and disgust. What explains that glaring difference? Surely the media don’t think Jew-baiting is intolerable only when it comes from a right-wing Christian like Gibson. Surely they wouldn’t overlook Stone’s noxious rant just because he is a pluperfect left-wing activist.
Surely that can’t be the explanation for so disgraceful a double standard.
Can it?
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
© Copyright 2010
Double standard
Why is it that Mel Gibson is ripped by the media for anti-Semitic statements, and Oliver Stone isn’t?
By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / August 4, 2010
E-mail this article To: Invalid E-mail address Add a personal message:(80 character limit) Your E-mail: Invalid E-mail address
Sending your articleYour article has been sent. E-mail| Print| Reprints| Comments (217)Text size – + LATE IN July, a Hollywood honcho uncorks a blast of anti-Semitic bile, the sort of malignant stereotype about Jews one might expect from David Duke or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Is that newsworthy?
Tweet 6 people Tweeted thisSubmit to DiggdiggYahoo! Buzz ShareThis It certainly was in 2006, when Mel Gibson, arrested in Malibu for drunken driving, demanded to know whether the arresting deputy was Jewish, and then launched into an anti-Semitic rant: “[Expletive] Jews,’’ he raged. “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.’’
What followed was a Category 4 media hurricane.
Within a week, according to the Nexis news database, the number of articles mentioning “Mel Gibson’’ and “Jews’’ had soared to 1,077. The New York Times reported the incident in a Page 1 story on July 30, and followed it up with much longer stories on Aug. 1 and 2. The coverage in the Los Angeles Times was even more extensive, with three front-page stories and another half-dozen inside. Numerous other papers gave heavy play to Gibson’s tirade and its aftermath. The network and cable news shows were all over the story, broadcasting scores of segments about it in that first week.
Pervading much of the media’s coverage and commentary was a tone of unforgiving revulsion.
“Let’s not cut Mel Gibson even the tiniest bit of slack,’’ began Eugene Robinson’s op-ed column in The Washington Post. Talent agent Ari Emanuel’s call for Gibson to be blacklisted was widely noted: “People in the entertainment business, whether Jew or gentile, need to demonstrate that they understand how much is at stake in this by professionally shunning Mel Gibson and refusing to work with him,’’ Emanuel wrote in an open letter on the Huffington Post.
On “The View,’’ Barbara Walters announced that she wouldn’t see any more of Gibson’s movies. Slate explained “How To Boycott Mel Gibson.’’ CNN’s Brooke Anderson, co-host of “Showbiz Tonight,’’ described “a sudden explosion of outrage with some of the most influential people in Hollywood now saying they will never work with Mel Gibson again.’’ As if to confirm the point, ABC cancelled a Holocaust-themed mini-series it had been developing with Gibson.
But when, almost exactly four years later, another Hollywood bigfoot uttered an anti-Semitic rant, the reaction couldn’t have been more different.
In a July 25 interview with the Times of London, filmmaker Oliver Stone complained that “Jewish domination of the media’’ focuses too much attention on the Holocaust, and prevents Americans from understanding Hitler (and Stalin) “in context’’ — a wrong he intends to right in a documentary he is making for Showtime. Stone described these media-controlling Jews as “the most powerful lobby in Washington’’ — “hard workers’’ who “stay on top of every comment,’’ and are responsible for the fact that “Israel has [expletive]-up United States foreign policy for years.’’
Like Gibson blaming Jews for the planet’s wars, Stone’s lament about Jewish control of the media is classic anti-Semitism, straight out of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’’ and Henry Ford’s “The International Jew.’’ Unlike Gibson, however, Stone gave vent to his bigotry while perfectly sober.
Yet far from triggering a media storm, Stone’s anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering barely stirred a breeze.
Seven days after his words first appeared, Nexis had logged fewer than 150 items mentioning Stone’s toxic rhetoric. On ABC, CBS, and NBC, the news shows completely ignored the story. The New York Times restricted its coverage to two short items in its “Arts, Briefly’’ section — and few other papers ran even that much.
Media mogul Haim Saban did urge Showtime to cancel Stone’s documentary, and posted an online message calling on Hollywood to give Stone “a vigorous shove into the land of forced retirement.’’ But few if any media voices seconded the motion — not a word from Slate, for example — and some went out of their way to pooh-pooh it: Los Angeles Times blogger Patrick Goldstein pronounced the idea “not so different’’ from “the infamous 1950s Hollywood blacklist.’’
Gibson and Stone are both guilty of indulging in rank anti-Semitism (for which both promptly “apologized’’), but only Gibson was buried under a newsroom avalanche of outrage and disgust. What explains that glaring difference? Surely the media don’t think Jew-baiting is intolerable only when it comes from a right-wing Christian like Gibson. Surely they wouldn’t overlook Stone’s noxious rant just because he is a pluperfect left-wing activist.
Surely that can’t be the explanation for so disgraceful a double standard.
Can it?
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
© Copyright 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
Caroline Glick on the anti-semitic Oliver Stone
Jewish World Jewish Society See No Evil
Oliver Stone joins Thomas, Gibson in ranks of out-of-closet Jew-haters.
by Caroline Glick It’s springtime for Jew-haters. This week Oscar winning conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone joined Helen Thomas and Mel Gibson in the swelling ranks of out-of-the-closet celebrity Jew-haters. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Stone said that Adolf Hitler had been given a bum rap and that through “Jewish domination of the media,” the Jews have inflated the importance of the Holocaust and wrecked US foreign policy.
In the wake of criticism in Jewish circles, on Wednesday Stone’s publicist issued a mealy-mouthed clarification.
Stone failed to retract or amend his statement that “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has ----- up United States foreign policy for years.”
He also did not retract his view that Jews use the Holocaust to control American foreign policy.
Stone simply referred to his claim that Jews make too much of the Holocaust because the Germans killed more Russians than Jews as “clumsy.”
He then broadened his initial allegation that Jews make too much of the Holocaust by allowing that we are joined in our efforts by non-Jews.
And since non-Jews are involved also, he was wrong to criticize us.
As Stone put it, “The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity.”
Stone still believes that the rounding up and exterminating of three-quarters of Europe’s Jews is really not as notable or morally troubling as high Russian wartime casualties, but it’s not solely Jews’ fault that people don’t share Stone’s views.
Even more despicable than Stone’s display of Jew-hatred was the thunderous silence of the media and the insistent attempts to justify his statements.Arguably even more despicable than Stone’s display of Jew-hatred was the manner in which it was received. On the one hand, there was the thunderous silence of the media. And on the other hand there were the insistent, repeated attempts to justify his statements.
Readers’ talkbacks to write-ups of his remarks were rife with assertions that Stone’s statements were not bigoted. Many agreed that Jews dominate the media, and since they believe this is true, they argued that saying so is not a bigoted act. Others claimed that while Stone’s statements were inaccurate, there is no evidence that he hates Jews and therefore, his statements weren’t bigoted. At any rate, Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times and many others have argued, it would be wrong for Stone to be discredited for his attacks against Jews.
It is difficult to imagine that if someone trafficked in ethnic stereotypes about groups like blacks, and claimed that they wreck US foreign policy to serve their own nefarious aims, Goldstein and the talk-backers would defend him.
But then anti-Jewish bigotry has different rules than other hatreds.
Stone and his defenders are not alone in either their attitude towards Jews or their denial of their attitude towards Jews. Indeed, they are part of a worldwide trend.
Take the situation in Malmo, Sweden. Last Friday, Jew-haters set off firecrackers outside a synagogue in Malmo. The blasts came a day after Jew-haters posted a bomb threat on the wall of the synagogue for the second time in two weeks.
Malmo is a hotbed of anti-Jewish violence and the Jews of the city are fleeing in droves.
Yet in the face of all this, Malmo’s non-Jews cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that there is a problem with anti-Semitism in their city.
Even those who are supposed to be responsible for combating anti-Semitism refuse to acknowledge that Jews in Malmo are being attacked because they are Jews.
Bjorn Lagerback is the man in Malmo who is supposed to care about anti-Semitic violence.
Lagerback serves as the coordinator of the local forum in the city charged with combating hate crimes. In an interview with Malmo’s The Local cited by the World Jewish Congress, Lagerback tried to impress on the world that the bombing was serious. Not because it was violence aimed at Jews, of course.
No, according to Lagerback, this bombing is serious because it might hurt non-Jews. He said.
“We condemn this completely. Such an event is not just directed against the synagogue, but also at other targets that could be described as ethnic or religious.”
The acceptance of anti-Semitism has reached epidemic proportions.Forget about the fact that only Malmo’s synagogues, and not its churches and mosques, require around the clock security. If no other ethnic or religious groups were targeted, would bombing synagogues no longer warrant condemnation? The acceptance of anti-Semitism has reached epidemic proportions.
In Amsterdam, anti-Semites are making the mundane act of walking around outside in broad daylight a dangerous prospect for Jews.
Jews are regularly attacked verbally and physically by anti-Semites as they walk on the streets of the Dutch capital.
In an attempt to catch and punish anti-Semitic thugs, the Amsterdam police force has dispatched policemen dressed as Jews to pound the pavement. The hope is that these decoys will be able to draw out the offenders and arrest them.
Apparently, some Dutch have a problem with punishing anti-Semitic attackers. As Paul Belien reported in the Brussels Journal, “Evelien van Roemburg, an Amsterdam counselor of the Green Left Party, says that using a decoy by the police amounts to [entrapment], which is itself a criminal offence under Dutch law.”
In other words, Van Roemburg thinks that people who walk around while appearing to be Jewish are asking for it.
Van Roemburg no doubt also believes that women in mini-skirts deserve to be raped.
All of this brings us to a discussion of the most endemic form of contemporary anti-Semitism: Anti-Zionism. There is no reason for anyone to be surprised that anti-Semites deny that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. After all, they deny that every other form of anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism. Why should anti-Zionism receive special treatment? It is self-evident that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
Zionism after all is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. To say that Jews – uniquely among all the nations – have no right to freedom and self-determination is obviously anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semites give a variety of excuses to justify their rejection of the Jewish people’s right to freedom and sovereignty in our homeland. Sometimes they say they have no problem with Jewish nationalism per se. They are simply anti-nationalist generally. But remarkably, these anti-nationalist anti-Zionists invariably just happen to be outspoken supporters of Palestinian nationalism.
Moreover, it is curious that universalist anti-nationalists only have a special term to describe their opposition to Jewish nationalism. No one ever mentions being anti-Irishist, for instance.
When someone says they oppose Irish nationalism, the obvious conclusion is that they don’t like Irish people. Just so, people who are anti-French tend not to like French people. And yet, the anti-Zionists would have us believe that their opposition to the Jewish state has nothing to do with their feelings about Jews.
Beyond their nonsensical attempts to deny the fact that anti-Zionism is a specific rejection of a specific – that is Jewish – type of nationalism, there is the fact that anti-Zionists tend inevitably to drink from other anti-Jewish sewers as well.
Take former British parliamentarian Clare Short for example.
During her just ended career in the British Parliament, Short became known as an outspoken anti-Zionist. Short rejected Israel’s right to exist and castigated it for its “bloody, brutal and systematic annexation of land, destruction of homes and the deliberate creation of an apartheid system.”
But Short’s Israel kick didn’t end with her frequent condemnations of imaginary but lurid Israeli crimes. As time went by, Short began channeling centuries of British Jew-hatred. Like her forefathers who blamed Jews for rain, drought, plague and fire, Shore blamed Israel for global warming.
As she put it in a speech at the European Parliament three years ago, Israel “undermines the international community’s reaction to global warming.”
As Short saw it, European leaders are properly obsessed with attacking the Jewish state. But because Israel insists on existing and so requires Europeans to condemn it, Israel prevents the Europeans from attending to the threat of carbon that, if left unregulated, will “end the human race.”
So if the world boils over, the cauldron will be made in Israel.
One of the most prominent anti-Zionists today is Prof. Juan Cole from the University of Michigan.
Part of being a successful anti-Zionist involves claiming that Jews have no right to the land of Israel. So to be a good anti-Zionist, one needs to deny Jewish history.
To this end, in March Cole published a piece of historical fiction in the Salon online magazine.
Titled “Ten reasons why East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel,” Cole mixed half truths with flagrant lies to justify his denial of Jewish history and belittlement of the Jewish rights.
Cole wrote, “Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent ‘Jewish people’ in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history. Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon.”
This assertion is so mendacious that it takes your breath away. As anyone who has actually been in Jerusalem can attest, it is all but impossible to be physically present in the oldest areas of the city and not bump into relics dating from between 1000 and 900 BCE.
Cole’s allegation is the academic equivalent of Louis Farakhan’s claim that white people are devils planted on earth by aliens. As an anti-Zionist anti-Semite, it was just a matter of time until Cole traveled into the fetid swamp of denying the historical record to facilitate his false claim that Jews are not a people and therefore are bereft of rights as a nation to our national homeland.
Anti-Semites have been wildly successful in whitewashing their bigotry.And why shouldn’t he cover himself in anti-Semitic muck? So far, the stench has brought him great success. The very fact that I felt compelled to write an essay explaining why anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism and why anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism is depressing proof that anti-Semites have been wildly successful in whitewashing their bigotry.
What makes contemporary anti-Semitism unique is its purveyors’ great efforts to hide its very existence. Their motivation is clear. Outside the openly genocidal anti-Semitic Muslim world, most anti-Semites are self-described liberals who claim to oppose bigotry. For these people, pretending away their prejudice is the key to their continued claim to enlightenment.
And so the likes of Oliver Stone publish clarifications.
And Cole invents history. And the Europeans blame Jews and Israel and Zionism when Jews inside and outside Israel are assaulted and killed.
And I am sorry I wrote this column.
Because an audience that demands an explanation of why evil is evil is an audience that has already sided with evil.
This article originally appeared on the Jerusalem Post.
Published: Saturday, July 31, 2010
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Visitor Comments: 23
(23) Doron, August 2, 2010
Evil is Showing its Ugly Face
When we step back, it is plain to see that evil in the world is becoming bolder and bolder. Why? Because, we let it...
(22) compugraphd, August 2, 2010
As Usual, Caroline Glick hits the nail on the head
As usual, Caroline Glick hits the nail on the head. Thanks for continuing to write, Caroline. I also write about Israel on my blog at http://israelanditsplaceintheworld.blogspot.com/
(21) yehudit levy, August 2, 2010
I am also sorry....
I am also sorry you had to write this article, brilliant as it is. I often wonder to mysef what would happen if we ourselves remained "thunderously silent" in the press after a vicious slander? Would the outspoken offender be forced to put tail between legs and miss out on a much needed publicity boost? perhaps. As we often tell children, "He/she just does it to get a reaction. If you ignore it, he will get bored and stop" I guess dreaming that anti-semitic outbursts are like a mutant form of sibling rivalry is perhaps a little too much wishful thinking....
(20) DINA.HOROVITZ, August 2, 2010
wake up world
wake up world,.hope there are no more there kind of creatures,Mell Gobson andOliver Stone.Mell is a christian church man I can't beleave how antesimt he is and Oliver Stone has to be ashamed even to think about what he said.These people have a mjor problem ,unfortunately no body can help them'DROGS AND DRINK.I fell sorry for them
(19) Linda Bellamy, August 2, 2010
Choosen
Oliver Stone is crazy to say those thing's about the Jewish people I will never watch another of his movies. If his grandmother or sister, father or brother had been in one of those gas camber's I'm sure he would have a very differant view of our history.
(
Oliver Stone joins Thomas, Gibson in ranks of out-of-closet Jew-haters.
by Caroline Glick It’s springtime for Jew-haters. This week Oscar winning conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone joined Helen Thomas and Mel Gibson in the swelling ranks of out-of-the-closet celebrity Jew-haters. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Stone said that Adolf Hitler had been given a bum rap and that through “Jewish domination of the media,” the Jews have inflated the importance of the Holocaust and wrecked US foreign policy.
In the wake of criticism in Jewish circles, on Wednesday Stone’s publicist issued a mealy-mouthed clarification.
Stone failed to retract or amend his statement that “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has ----- up United States foreign policy for years.”
He also did not retract his view that Jews use the Holocaust to control American foreign policy.
Stone simply referred to his claim that Jews make too much of the Holocaust because the Germans killed more Russians than Jews as “clumsy.”
He then broadened his initial allegation that Jews make too much of the Holocaust by allowing that we are joined in our efforts by non-Jews.
And since non-Jews are involved also, he was wrong to criticize us.
As Stone put it, “The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity.”
Stone still believes that the rounding up and exterminating of three-quarters of Europe’s Jews is really not as notable or morally troubling as high Russian wartime casualties, but it’s not solely Jews’ fault that people don’t share Stone’s views.
Even more despicable than Stone’s display of Jew-hatred was the thunderous silence of the media and the insistent attempts to justify his statements.Arguably even more despicable than Stone’s display of Jew-hatred was the manner in which it was received. On the one hand, there was the thunderous silence of the media. And on the other hand there were the insistent, repeated attempts to justify his statements.
Readers’ talkbacks to write-ups of his remarks were rife with assertions that Stone’s statements were not bigoted. Many agreed that Jews dominate the media, and since they believe this is true, they argued that saying so is not a bigoted act. Others claimed that while Stone’s statements were inaccurate, there is no evidence that he hates Jews and therefore, his statements weren’t bigoted. At any rate, Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times and many others have argued, it would be wrong for Stone to be discredited for his attacks against Jews.
It is difficult to imagine that if someone trafficked in ethnic stereotypes about groups like blacks, and claimed that they wreck US foreign policy to serve their own nefarious aims, Goldstein and the talk-backers would defend him.
But then anti-Jewish bigotry has different rules than other hatreds.
Stone and his defenders are not alone in either their attitude towards Jews or their denial of their attitude towards Jews. Indeed, they are part of a worldwide trend.
Take the situation in Malmo, Sweden. Last Friday, Jew-haters set off firecrackers outside a synagogue in Malmo. The blasts came a day after Jew-haters posted a bomb threat on the wall of the synagogue for the second time in two weeks.
Malmo is a hotbed of anti-Jewish violence and the Jews of the city are fleeing in droves.
Yet in the face of all this, Malmo’s non-Jews cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that there is a problem with anti-Semitism in their city.
Even those who are supposed to be responsible for combating anti-Semitism refuse to acknowledge that Jews in Malmo are being attacked because they are Jews.
Bjorn Lagerback is the man in Malmo who is supposed to care about anti-Semitic violence.
Lagerback serves as the coordinator of the local forum in the city charged with combating hate crimes. In an interview with Malmo’s The Local cited by the World Jewish Congress, Lagerback tried to impress on the world that the bombing was serious. Not because it was violence aimed at Jews, of course.
No, according to Lagerback, this bombing is serious because it might hurt non-Jews. He said.
“We condemn this completely. Such an event is not just directed against the synagogue, but also at other targets that could be described as ethnic or religious.”
The acceptance of anti-Semitism has reached epidemic proportions.Forget about the fact that only Malmo’s synagogues, and not its churches and mosques, require around the clock security. If no other ethnic or religious groups were targeted, would bombing synagogues no longer warrant condemnation? The acceptance of anti-Semitism has reached epidemic proportions.
In Amsterdam, anti-Semites are making the mundane act of walking around outside in broad daylight a dangerous prospect for Jews.
Jews are regularly attacked verbally and physically by anti-Semites as they walk on the streets of the Dutch capital.
In an attempt to catch and punish anti-Semitic thugs, the Amsterdam police force has dispatched policemen dressed as Jews to pound the pavement. The hope is that these decoys will be able to draw out the offenders and arrest them.
Apparently, some Dutch have a problem with punishing anti-Semitic attackers. As Paul Belien reported in the Brussels Journal, “Evelien van Roemburg, an Amsterdam counselor of the Green Left Party, says that using a decoy by the police amounts to [entrapment], which is itself a criminal offence under Dutch law.”
In other words, Van Roemburg thinks that people who walk around while appearing to be Jewish are asking for it.
Van Roemburg no doubt also believes that women in mini-skirts deserve to be raped.
All of this brings us to a discussion of the most endemic form of contemporary anti-Semitism: Anti-Zionism. There is no reason for anyone to be surprised that anti-Semites deny that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. After all, they deny that every other form of anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism. Why should anti-Zionism receive special treatment? It is self-evident that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
Zionism after all is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. To say that Jews – uniquely among all the nations – have no right to freedom and self-determination is obviously anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semites give a variety of excuses to justify their rejection of the Jewish people’s right to freedom and sovereignty in our homeland. Sometimes they say they have no problem with Jewish nationalism per se. They are simply anti-nationalist generally. But remarkably, these anti-nationalist anti-Zionists invariably just happen to be outspoken supporters of Palestinian nationalism.
Moreover, it is curious that universalist anti-nationalists only have a special term to describe their opposition to Jewish nationalism. No one ever mentions being anti-Irishist, for instance.
When someone says they oppose Irish nationalism, the obvious conclusion is that they don’t like Irish people. Just so, people who are anti-French tend not to like French people. And yet, the anti-Zionists would have us believe that their opposition to the Jewish state has nothing to do with their feelings about Jews.
Beyond their nonsensical attempts to deny the fact that anti-Zionism is a specific rejection of a specific – that is Jewish – type of nationalism, there is the fact that anti-Zionists tend inevitably to drink from other anti-Jewish sewers as well.
Take former British parliamentarian Clare Short for example.
During her just ended career in the British Parliament, Short became known as an outspoken anti-Zionist. Short rejected Israel’s right to exist and castigated it for its “bloody, brutal and systematic annexation of land, destruction of homes and the deliberate creation of an apartheid system.”
But Short’s Israel kick didn’t end with her frequent condemnations of imaginary but lurid Israeli crimes. As time went by, Short began channeling centuries of British Jew-hatred. Like her forefathers who blamed Jews for rain, drought, plague and fire, Shore blamed Israel for global warming.
As she put it in a speech at the European Parliament three years ago, Israel “undermines the international community’s reaction to global warming.”
As Short saw it, European leaders are properly obsessed with attacking the Jewish state. But because Israel insists on existing and so requires Europeans to condemn it, Israel prevents the Europeans from attending to the threat of carbon that, if left unregulated, will “end the human race.”
So if the world boils over, the cauldron will be made in Israel.
One of the most prominent anti-Zionists today is Prof. Juan Cole from the University of Michigan.
Part of being a successful anti-Zionist involves claiming that Jews have no right to the land of Israel. So to be a good anti-Zionist, one needs to deny Jewish history.
To this end, in March Cole published a piece of historical fiction in the Salon online magazine.
Titled “Ten reasons why East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel,” Cole mixed half truths with flagrant lies to justify his denial of Jewish history and belittlement of the Jewish rights.
Cole wrote, “Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent ‘Jewish people’ in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history. Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon.”
This assertion is so mendacious that it takes your breath away. As anyone who has actually been in Jerusalem can attest, it is all but impossible to be physically present in the oldest areas of the city and not bump into relics dating from between 1000 and 900 BCE.
Cole’s allegation is the academic equivalent of Louis Farakhan’s claim that white people are devils planted on earth by aliens. As an anti-Zionist anti-Semite, it was just a matter of time until Cole traveled into the fetid swamp of denying the historical record to facilitate his false claim that Jews are not a people and therefore are bereft of rights as a nation to our national homeland.
Anti-Semites have been wildly successful in whitewashing their bigotry.And why shouldn’t he cover himself in anti-Semitic muck? So far, the stench has brought him great success. The very fact that I felt compelled to write an essay explaining why anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism and why anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism is depressing proof that anti-Semites have been wildly successful in whitewashing their bigotry.
What makes contemporary anti-Semitism unique is its purveyors’ great efforts to hide its very existence. Their motivation is clear. Outside the openly genocidal anti-Semitic Muslim world, most anti-Semites are self-described liberals who claim to oppose bigotry. For these people, pretending away their prejudice is the key to their continued claim to enlightenment.
And so the likes of Oliver Stone publish clarifications.
And Cole invents history. And the Europeans blame Jews and Israel and Zionism when Jews inside and outside Israel are assaulted and killed.
And I am sorry I wrote this column.
Because an audience that demands an explanation of why evil is evil is an audience that has already sided with evil.
This article originally appeared on the Jerusalem Post.
Published: Saturday, July 31, 2010
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Visitor Comments: 23
(23) Doron, August 2, 2010
Evil is Showing its Ugly Face
When we step back, it is plain to see that evil in the world is becoming bolder and bolder. Why? Because, we let it...
(22) compugraphd, August 2, 2010
As Usual, Caroline Glick hits the nail on the head
As usual, Caroline Glick hits the nail on the head. Thanks for continuing to write, Caroline. I also write about Israel on my blog at http://israelanditsplaceintheworld.blogspot.com/
(21) yehudit levy, August 2, 2010
I am also sorry....
I am also sorry you had to write this article, brilliant as it is. I often wonder to mysef what would happen if we ourselves remained "thunderously silent" in the press after a vicious slander? Would the outspoken offender be forced to put tail between legs and miss out on a much needed publicity boost? perhaps. As we often tell children, "He/she just does it to get a reaction. If you ignore it, he will get bored and stop" I guess dreaming that anti-semitic outbursts are like a mutant form of sibling rivalry is perhaps a little too much wishful thinking....
(20) DINA.HOROVITZ, August 2, 2010
wake up world
wake up world,.hope there are no more there kind of creatures,Mell Gobson andOliver Stone.Mell is a christian church man I can't beleave how antesimt he is and Oliver Stone has to be ashamed even to think about what he said.These people have a mjor problem ,unfortunately no body can help them'DROGS AND DRINK.I fell sorry for them
(19) Linda Bellamy, August 2, 2010
Choosen
Oliver Stone is crazy to say those thing's about the Jewish people I will never watch another of his movies. If his grandmother or sister, father or brother had been in one of those gas camber's I'm sure he would have a very differant view of our history.
(
Thursday, July 22, 2010
www.tomgrossmedia.com
Mideast Dispatch Archive
A nice new shopping mall opened today in Gaza: Will the media report on it?
July 17, 2010
Will the Western media show these images?
All notes below by Tom Gross
Please scroll down below for photos of the new shopping mall that opened today in Gaza. I have also attached new photos and film of Gaza’s hotels, beauty spas, swimming pools, beaches and street markets -- images the BBC, New York Times and others refuse to show you.
Meanwhile, Hamas are deliberately leaving some Gazans in plastic tents, in order to fool gullible Western journalists and politicians who are brought to Gaza to witness a staged “humanitarian crisis.”
(Photo of a new mall that opened today, July 17, 2010. If there “are no building materials allowed into Gaza” how did they build this shopping center, or the new Olympic-size swimming pool pictured below?)
Two days ago the EU pledged tens of millions of EU taxpayers’ euros to add to the hundreds of millions already donated to Gaza this year, much of which has been misused to procure arms.
UPDATE, Sunday July 18, 2010:
Some journalists who subscribe to this list have asked me for a quote. You are welcome to use the following.
Political and media commentator Tom Gross said:
“On a day when (because EU Foreign Policy Chief Baroness Ashton is in Gaza) the BBC and other media have featured extensive reports all day long on what they term the dire economic situation in Gaza, why are they not mentioning the new shopping mall that opened there yesterday?
“When leading news outlets mention the so-called humanitarian flotillas from Turkey, why do they omit the fact that life expectancy and literacy rates are higher, and infant mortality rates are lower in Gaza than corresponding rates in Turkey? Have they considered that perhaps the humanitarian flotillas ought to be going in the other direction, towards Turkey?”
WHAT HUMANITARIAN CATASTROPHE?
Last year, this website revealed to a Western audience pictures of the bustling, crowded food markets of Gaza that the Western media refuse to show you. Earlier this year, I reported the new Olympic-size swimming pool of Gaza (no shortage of building materials or water here) and the luxury restaurants, where you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu”. (Over 300,000 people have viewed photos on that webpage since May, according to my website monitor.)
Now I want to draw attention to the fact that this morning, on the day that the EU again criticized Israel (but not Egypt) for supposedly oppressing Gazans, on a day when the BBC TV world news headlines again lead with a report about how “devastated the economy in Gaza is,” an impressive new shopping mall opened in Gaza (photos below, followed by a selection of other photos from Gaza).
Will those Western journalists who write stories about “starvation” in Gaza and compare it to a “concentration camp” report this?
Instead of reporting on the mall opening, the British-based international satellite broadcaster Sky News reported today “The humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dire.”
NEW GAZA SHOPPING MALL
Photos from Saturday, July 17, 2010:
More photos here.
Here is a news report in Arabic on the opening of the mall from today’s Palestine Times. (Click on each of these thumbnails to view the full photos.)
This is the official website of the Gaza mall.
UPDATE, July 20, 2010
More pictures of the mall here, here, and here from The Palestine Times.
And this video of the mall has today gone up on YouTube. (The captions that have been added to this video are not mine, nor do I approve of all of them.)
The mall is being widely featured in media throughout the Arab world, for example here, (courtesy of AP) but why the continuing silence from Western media who subscribe to AP and who continue to cover “the situation in Gaza” day after day without mentioning the economic progress there?
UPDATE, July 21, 2010
Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest newspaper, whose editors subscribe to this email list, has now covered the mall.
UPDATE, July 21, 2010
The National Post, one of Canada’s largest newspapers, almost alone among Western media has run a comment piece about the Gaza mall and also referring to this (Tom Gross media) webpage.
UPDATE, July 21, 2010
Glen Beck today showed the mall on his show on Fox. He said that the media will gladly show you a “Palestinian with a bloody face but won’t show you the Gaza shopping mall.”
It is fine that Fox hyave featured the mall, but why aren’t the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS and others interested in a balance, rounded approach to covering Palestinian issues?
BIAS IN A LEAGUE OF ITS OWN
Before I draw attention to other photos below, please let me restate again my overall position since several other commentators have misrepresented it recently:
I have consistently supported the creation of an independent Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel since I first became interested in politics. But there is no point in creating a new Palestinian state if it will primarily be used as a launching ground for armed attacks on Israel, which would only in turn likely lead to a much bloodier war between Israelis and Palestinians than anything we have witnessed in the past.
In order to make sure any Palestinian state is peaceful, and respects human rights for both its own citizens and its neighbors, it is crucial for Western policy-makers not be misled into making bad policy (as they have so often done in the past) in part, at least, as a result of believing the utter distortions of Western journalists, who greatly exaggerate the suffering of Palestinians and consistently cover up for the misdeeds of Hamas and Fatah.
Of course, one should not forget that the media is full of stereotypes and mistakes about other issues. Yet when every allowance has been made, the sustained bias against Israel is in a league of its own.
I am not for one moment suggesting that Israeli misdeeds should not be fully and unsparingly reported on (and indeed Israel being a vigorous democracy, such misdeeds are widely reported on in the Israeli media itself, and debated in the Israeli Knesset). But propagating the falsehoods of Fatah and Hamas propagandists has done nothing to further the legitimate aspirations of ordinary Palestinians, any more than parroting the lies of Stalin helped ordinary Russians.
Such bias, I believed, is not only wrong in itself but seriously detrimental to international efforts to bring about peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
MALNOURISHMENT?
These are some of the photos previously carried on the dispatch “Fancy restaurants and Olympic-size swim pools: what the media won’t report about Gaza” (May 25, 2010).
Above: the courtyard of the Roots restaurant in Gaza.
Above: A part of the restaurant’s 12-page menu, which includes a wide range of meat, poultry and seafood dishes. The restaurant is popular with Gazans holding weddings and other celebrations, UN and NGO workers, and foreign journalists.
Here are more pictures of the restaurant. (Also see more pictures of Roots further down this dispatch.)
***
Whereas the restaurant above is one of those popular with wealthier Gazans, the pictures below show life for ordinary people in Gaza.
Above: Recent photos show one of Gaza’s fruit and vegetable markets, a cake shop, and a children’s toy store in Gaza city. Hardly the “World War II-era concentration camp” that some Western journalists have claimed Gaza resembles.
Tom Gross adds: As I have written before, of course there is poverty in parts of Gaza. There is poverty in parts of Israel too. But when was the last time a foreign journalist based in Israel left the pampered lounge bars and restaurants of the King David and American Colony hotels in Jerusalem and went to check out the slum-like areas of southern Tel Aviv? Or the hard-hit Negev towns of Netivot or Rahat?
Playing the manipulative game of the BBC is easy. If we had their vast taxpayer-funded resources, we too could produce reports about parts of London, Manchester and Glasgow and make it look as though there is a humanitarian catastrophe throughout the U.K. We could produce the same effect by selectively filming seedy parts of Paris and Rome and New York and Los Angeles too.
MAYBE THE TURKISH FLOTILLAS ARE GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION?
In Turkey, life expectancy is 72.23 and infant mortality is 24.84 per 1,000 births.
In Gaza, life expectancy is 73.68 and infant mortality is 17.71 per 1,000 births.
Turkey has a literacy rate of 88.7% while in Gaza it is 91.9%. (It is much lower in Egypt and other Arab countries where Israel did not establish colleges and universities in the 1970s and 1980s.)
Gaza’s GDP is almost as high as Turkey’s and much, much higher than most of Africa that gets 1,000th of the aid per capita that Gaza gets from the West.
(Source for above info: CIA World Factbook)
World hunger organizations report that 10-15 million children below the age of 5 die each year, and 50,000 people die daily. One-third of all deaths in the world are due to poverty.
While famine kills millions of children in Africa, India, and elsewhere, life expectancy for Gaza Arabs, at 72 years, is nearly five years higher than the world average. In Swaziland, for example, life expectancy is less than 40 years, and it is 42 years in Zambia.
Meanwhile Western governments, misled by Western media, continue to pour more and more money into Gaza for people that don’t need it, while allowing black Africans to starve to death.
As the correspondent for one of Japan’s biggest newspapers said to me last week, “Gaza and the West Bank are the only places in the world where I have seen refugees drive Mercedes.”
Photo above: India, where hundreds of millions live in poverty.
Photo above: A beach in Gaza.
STEAK AU POIVRE AND CHICKEN CORDON BLEU
(Repeat item from May 2010 dispatch.)
If you drop by the Roots Club in Gaza, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook for Gaza and the West Bank, you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu”.
The restaurant’s website in Arabic gives a window into middle class dining and the lifestyle of Hamas officials in Gaza.
And here it is in English, for all the journalists, UN types and NGO staff who regularly frequent this and other nice Gaza restaurants (but don’t tell their readers about them).
Please take a look at the pictures on the above website. They are not the kind of things you see in The New York Times or CNN or in Newsweek, whose international edition last week had one of the most disgracefully misleading stories about Gaza I have ever seen, portraying it in terms which were virtually reminiscent of Hiroshima after a nuclear blast.
And here is a promotional video of the club restaurant:
In case anyone doubts the authenticity of this video (which is up on the club’s own website), I just called the club in Gaza City and had a nice chat with the manager who proudly confirmed business is booming and many Palestinians and international guests are dining there.
The front of the Roots Club flyer reads:
Ambiance galore.
Beautifully designed buffets.
Every detail handled for you.
GAZA’S OLYMPIC-SIZED SWIMMING POOL
Above: A Palestinian newspaper photo (May 18, 2010) shows Gazan children in the newly built Olympic-sized swimming pool which opened earlier in May 2010, despite continuing claims by some Western journalists and NGOs that there are no building materials and a severe shortage of water in Gaza.
***
Repeat item from May 26, 2010 dispatch:
While Western media, misled by corrupt and biased NGOs, continue to report on a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, the Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports on the Olympic-size swimming pool that opened in Gaza in mid-May 2010 (i.e. before all the recent kerfuffle about humanitarian flotillas sailing to Gaza).
“Gaza, (May 18, 2010): – Ma’an – Gaza’s first Olympic-standard swimming pool was inaugurated at the As-Sadaka club during a ceremony on Tuesday held by the Islamic Society.
“Gaza government ministers, members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, leaders of Islamic and national governing bodies, as well as club members and athletes were among those at the opening ceremony, where Secretary-General of the Islamic Society Nasim Yaseen thanked the donors who helped realize the project.
“Yaseen praised the As-Sadaka club for a number of wins in international and regional football, volleyball and table tennis matches.
“As-Sadaka athletes performed a number of swimming exercises in the new pool to mark its opening.”
STARVED OF WATER AND BUILDING MATERIALS?
Most Israeli towns do not have an Olympic-sized municipal swimming pool. Cities like Netanya – which have been hit by repeated Palestinian suicide attacks, car bombings, and terrorist gunmen that have left over fifty Israeli residents of the town dead and more than three hundred injured – do not have such a pool.
Nor, for example, do the Israeli towns of Sderot or Ashkelon which have been hit by thousands of Hamas rockets fired from Gaza in recent years, have an Olympic-sized municipal swimming pool.
BLAIR’S SISTER-IN-LAW: GAZA IS “WORLD’S LARGEST CONCENTRATION CAMP”
(This is a repeat item from the dispatch of September 14, 2008.)
In an appalling insult to Holocaust survivors everywhere, British journalist Lauren Booth said last week that the situation in Gaza was just like a “concentration camp,” and added that the “humanitarian crisis in Gaza is on the scale of Darfur.”
Booth’s brother-in-law, Quartet envoy to the Middle East Tony Blair, does not share her views. Her sister, Tony Blair’s wife Cherie Blair, once made comments appearing to justify Palestinian suicide bombs against Israeli school buses, but later apologized for the remarks.
Lauren Booth was recently issued a Palestinian passport by Hamas. Here is a photo from AFP (Agence France Presse) of Lauren Booth shopping in a grocery store in Gaza a few days before she made her Israeli “concentration camp” comments. Does it look like Auschwitz, or Darfur?
Here she is again in Gaza last week (i.e. Sept. 2008).
And here she is meeting Hamas terrorist leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who presents her with a special Palestinian “diplomatic passport”.
Booth writes for several British newspapers, including the Daily Mail, New Statesman, Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times, and is often a guest on the BBC.
HOTELS IN GAZA
(Photos, June 2010)
AL-DEIRA HOTEL
This is just one of several such hotels in “concentration camp” Gaza:
GETTING A FACIAL BEFORE YOUR MASSAGE
A facial runs from $20 to $75, a one-hour massage is around $40 and a monthly gym membership is around $35 at the “Rosy spa” (above) in Gaza.
ANOTHER SIDE OF GAZA
(Film shot, June 2010)
More images of the horrendous situation in Gaza you won’t see on the BBC.
for photos check the website www.tomgrossmedia.com
MORE AID, ANYBODY?
Never mind the economic crisis in Spain, Greece and elsewhere in the EU.
On July 14, 2010, the EU announced increased financial support for the Palestinians.
The Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports:
The European Commission has agreed an additional financial package worth € 71 million for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, topping up the € 224 million already allocated by the EU in the 2010 European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument, as well as a reinforcement of humanitarian aid for Palestinian refugees.
***
Note: Also pioneering the way into exposing the hypocrisy of the mainstream media in not informing the public about economic development in Gaza has been this Middle East specialist site.
[All notes above by Tom Gross.]
All notes and summaries copyright © Tom Gross. All rights reserved.
A nice new shopping mall opened today in Gaza: Will the media report on it?
July 17, 2010
Will the Western media show these images?
All notes below by Tom Gross
Please scroll down below for photos of the new shopping mall that opened today in Gaza. I have also attached new photos and film of Gaza’s hotels, beauty spas, swimming pools, beaches and street markets -- images the BBC, New York Times and others refuse to show you.
Meanwhile, Hamas are deliberately leaving some Gazans in plastic tents, in order to fool gullible Western journalists and politicians who are brought to Gaza to witness a staged “humanitarian crisis.”
(Photo of a new mall that opened today, July 17, 2010. If there “are no building materials allowed into Gaza” how did they build this shopping center, or the new Olympic-size swimming pool pictured below?)
Two days ago the EU pledged tens of millions of EU taxpayers’ euros to add to the hundreds of millions already donated to Gaza this year, much of which has been misused to procure arms.
UPDATE, Sunday July 18, 2010:
Some journalists who subscribe to this list have asked me for a quote. You are welcome to use the following.
Political and media commentator Tom Gross said:
“On a day when (because EU Foreign Policy Chief Baroness Ashton is in Gaza) the BBC and other media have featured extensive reports all day long on what they term the dire economic situation in Gaza, why are they not mentioning the new shopping mall that opened there yesterday?
“When leading news outlets mention the so-called humanitarian flotillas from Turkey, why do they omit the fact that life expectancy and literacy rates are higher, and infant mortality rates are lower in Gaza than corresponding rates in Turkey? Have they considered that perhaps the humanitarian flotillas ought to be going in the other direction, towards Turkey?”
WHAT HUMANITARIAN CATASTROPHE?
Last year, this website revealed to a Western audience pictures of the bustling, crowded food markets of Gaza that the Western media refuse to show you. Earlier this year, I reported the new Olympic-size swimming pool of Gaza (no shortage of building materials or water here) and the luxury restaurants, where you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu”. (Over 300,000 people have viewed photos on that webpage since May, according to my website monitor.)
Now I want to draw attention to the fact that this morning, on the day that the EU again criticized Israel (but not Egypt) for supposedly oppressing Gazans, on a day when the BBC TV world news headlines again lead with a report about how “devastated the economy in Gaza is,” an impressive new shopping mall opened in Gaza (photos below, followed by a selection of other photos from Gaza).
Will those Western journalists who write stories about “starvation” in Gaza and compare it to a “concentration camp” report this?
Instead of reporting on the mall opening, the British-based international satellite broadcaster Sky News reported today “The humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dire.”
NEW GAZA SHOPPING MALL
Photos from Saturday, July 17, 2010:
More photos here.
Here is a news report in Arabic on the opening of the mall from today’s Palestine Times. (Click on each of these thumbnails to view the full photos.)
This is the official website of the Gaza mall.
UPDATE, July 20, 2010
More pictures of the mall here, here, and here from The Palestine Times.
And this video of the mall has today gone up on YouTube. (The captions that have been added to this video are not mine, nor do I approve of all of them.)
The mall is being widely featured in media throughout the Arab world, for example here, (courtesy of AP) but why the continuing silence from Western media who subscribe to AP and who continue to cover “the situation in Gaza” day after day without mentioning the economic progress there?
UPDATE, July 21, 2010
Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest newspaper, whose editors subscribe to this email list, has now covered the mall.
UPDATE, July 21, 2010
The National Post, one of Canada’s largest newspapers, almost alone among Western media has run a comment piece about the Gaza mall and also referring to this (Tom Gross media) webpage.
UPDATE, July 21, 2010
Glen Beck today showed the mall on his show on Fox. He said that the media will gladly show you a “Palestinian with a bloody face but won’t show you the Gaza shopping mall.”
It is fine that Fox hyave featured the mall, but why aren’t the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS and others interested in a balance, rounded approach to covering Palestinian issues?
BIAS IN A LEAGUE OF ITS OWN
Before I draw attention to other photos below, please let me restate again my overall position since several other commentators have misrepresented it recently:
I have consistently supported the creation of an independent Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel since I first became interested in politics. But there is no point in creating a new Palestinian state if it will primarily be used as a launching ground for armed attacks on Israel, which would only in turn likely lead to a much bloodier war between Israelis and Palestinians than anything we have witnessed in the past.
In order to make sure any Palestinian state is peaceful, and respects human rights for both its own citizens and its neighbors, it is crucial for Western policy-makers not be misled into making bad policy (as they have so often done in the past) in part, at least, as a result of believing the utter distortions of Western journalists, who greatly exaggerate the suffering of Palestinians and consistently cover up for the misdeeds of Hamas and Fatah.
Of course, one should not forget that the media is full of stereotypes and mistakes about other issues. Yet when every allowance has been made, the sustained bias against Israel is in a league of its own.
I am not for one moment suggesting that Israeli misdeeds should not be fully and unsparingly reported on (and indeed Israel being a vigorous democracy, such misdeeds are widely reported on in the Israeli media itself, and debated in the Israeli Knesset). But propagating the falsehoods of Fatah and Hamas propagandists has done nothing to further the legitimate aspirations of ordinary Palestinians, any more than parroting the lies of Stalin helped ordinary Russians.
Such bias, I believed, is not only wrong in itself but seriously detrimental to international efforts to bring about peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
MALNOURISHMENT?
These are some of the photos previously carried on the dispatch “Fancy restaurants and Olympic-size swim pools: what the media won’t report about Gaza” (May 25, 2010).
Above: the courtyard of the Roots restaurant in Gaza.
Above: A part of the restaurant’s 12-page menu, which includes a wide range of meat, poultry and seafood dishes. The restaurant is popular with Gazans holding weddings and other celebrations, UN and NGO workers, and foreign journalists.
Here are more pictures of the restaurant. (Also see more pictures of Roots further down this dispatch.)
***
Whereas the restaurant above is one of those popular with wealthier Gazans, the pictures below show life for ordinary people in Gaza.
Above: Recent photos show one of Gaza’s fruit and vegetable markets, a cake shop, and a children’s toy store in Gaza city. Hardly the “World War II-era concentration camp” that some Western journalists have claimed Gaza resembles.
Tom Gross adds: As I have written before, of course there is poverty in parts of Gaza. There is poverty in parts of Israel too. But when was the last time a foreign journalist based in Israel left the pampered lounge bars and restaurants of the King David and American Colony hotels in Jerusalem and went to check out the slum-like areas of southern Tel Aviv? Or the hard-hit Negev towns of Netivot or Rahat?
Playing the manipulative game of the BBC is easy. If we had their vast taxpayer-funded resources, we too could produce reports about parts of London, Manchester and Glasgow and make it look as though there is a humanitarian catastrophe throughout the U.K. We could produce the same effect by selectively filming seedy parts of Paris and Rome and New York and Los Angeles too.
MAYBE THE TURKISH FLOTILLAS ARE GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION?
In Turkey, life expectancy is 72.23 and infant mortality is 24.84 per 1,000 births.
In Gaza, life expectancy is 73.68 and infant mortality is 17.71 per 1,000 births.
Turkey has a literacy rate of 88.7% while in Gaza it is 91.9%. (It is much lower in Egypt and other Arab countries where Israel did not establish colleges and universities in the 1970s and 1980s.)
Gaza’s GDP is almost as high as Turkey’s and much, much higher than most of Africa that gets 1,000th of the aid per capita that Gaza gets from the West.
(Source for above info: CIA World Factbook)
World hunger organizations report that 10-15 million children below the age of 5 die each year, and 50,000 people die daily. One-third of all deaths in the world are due to poverty.
While famine kills millions of children in Africa, India, and elsewhere, life expectancy for Gaza Arabs, at 72 years, is nearly five years higher than the world average. In Swaziland, for example, life expectancy is less than 40 years, and it is 42 years in Zambia.
Meanwhile Western governments, misled by Western media, continue to pour more and more money into Gaza for people that don’t need it, while allowing black Africans to starve to death.
As the correspondent for one of Japan’s biggest newspapers said to me last week, “Gaza and the West Bank are the only places in the world where I have seen refugees drive Mercedes.”
Photo above: India, where hundreds of millions live in poverty.
Photo above: A beach in Gaza.
STEAK AU POIVRE AND CHICKEN CORDON BLEU
(Repeat item from May 2010 dispatch.)
If you drop by the Roots Club in Gaza, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook for Gaza and the West Bank, you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu”.
The restaurant’s website in Arabic gives a window into middle class dining and the lifestyle of Hamas officials in Gaza.
And here it is in English, for all the journalists, UN types and NGO staff who regularly frequent this and other nice Gaza restaurants (but don’t tell their readers about them).
Please take a look at the pictures on the above website. They are not the kind of things you see in The New York Times or CNN or in Newsweek, whose international edition last week had one of the most disgracefully misleading stories about Gaza I have ever seen, portraying it in terms which were virtually reminiscent of Hiroshima after a nuclear blast.
And here is a promotional video of the club restaurant:
In case anyone doubts the authenticity of this video (which is up on the club’s own website), I just called the club in Gaza City and had a nice chat with the manager who proudly confirmed business is booming and many Palestinians and international guests are dining there.
The front of the Roots Club flyer reads:
Ambiance galore.
Beautifully designed buffets.
Every detail handled for you.
GAZA’S OLYMPIC-SIZED SWIMMING POOL
Above: A Palestinian newspaper photo (May 18, 2010) shows Gazan children in the newly built Olympic-sized swimming pool which opened earlier in May 2010, despite continuing claims by some Western journalists and NGOs that there are no building materials and a severe shortage of water in Gaza.
***
Repeat item from May 26, 2010 dispatch:
While Western media, misled by corrupt and biased NGOs, continue to report on a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, the Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports on the Olympic-size swimming pool that opened in Gaza in mid-May 2010 (i.e. before all the recent kerfuffle about humanitarian flotillas sailing to Gaza).
“Gaza, (May 18, 2010): – Ma’an – Gaza’s first Olympic-standard swimming pool was inaugurated at the As-Sadaka club during a ceremony on Tuesday held by the Islamic Society.
“Gaza government ministers, members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, leaders of Islamic and national governing bodies, as well as club members and athletes were among those at the opening ceremony, where Secretary-General of the Islamic Society Nasim Yaseen thanked the donors who helped realize the project.
“Yaseen praised the As-Sadaka club for a number of wins in international and regional football, volleyball and table tennis matches.
“As-Sadaka athletes performed a number of swimming exercises in the new pool to mark its opening.”
STARVED OF WATER AND BUILDING MATERIALS?
Most Israeli towns do not have an Olympic-sized municipal swimming pool. Cities like Netanya – which have been hit by repeated Palestinian suicide attacks, car bombings, and terrorist gunmen that have left over fifty Israeli residents of the town dead and more than three hundred injured – do not have such a pool.
Nor, for example, do the Israeli towns of Sderot or Ashkelon which have been hit by thousands of Hamas rockets fired from Gaza in recent years, have an Olympic-sized municipal swimming pool.
BLAIR’S SISTER-IN-LAW: GAZA IS “WORLD’S LARGEST CONCENTRATION CAMP”
(This is a repeat item from the dispatch of September 14, 2008.)
In an appalling insult to Holocaust survivors everywhere, British journalist Lauren Booth said last week that the situation in Gaza was just like a “concentration camp,” and added that the “humanitarian crisis in Gaza is on the scale of Darfur.”
Booth’s brother-in-law, Quartet envoy to the Middle East Tony Blair, does not share her views. Her sister, Tony Blair’s wife Cherie Blair, once made comments appearing to justify Palestinian suicide bombs against Israeli school buses, but later apologized for the remarks.
Lauren Booth was recently issued a Palestinian passport by Hamas. Here is a photo from AFP (Agence France Presse) of Lauren Booth shopping in a grocery store in Gaza a few days before she made her Israeli “concentration camp” comments. Does it look like Auschwitz, or Darfur?
Here she is again in Gaza last week (i.e. Sept. 2008).
And here she is meeting Hamas terrorist leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who presents her with a special Palestinian “diplomatic passport”.
Booth writes for several British newspapers, including the Daily Mail, New Statesman, Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times, and is often a guest on the BBC.
HOTELS IN GAZA
(Photos, June 2010)
AL-DEIRA HOTEL
This is just one of several such hotels in “concentration camp” Gaza:
GETTING A FACIAL BEFORE YOUR MASSAGE
A facial runs from $20 to $75, a one-hour massage is around $40 and a monthly gym membership is around $35 at the “Rosy spa” (above) in Gaza.
ANOTHER SIDE OF GAZA
(Film shot, June 2010)
More images of the horrendous situation in Gaza you won’t see on the BBC.
for photos check the website www.tomgrossmedia.com
MORE AID, ANYBODY?
Never mind the economic crisis in Spain, Greece and elsewhere in the EU.
On July 14, 2010, the EU announced increased financial support for the Palestinians.
The Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports:
The European Commission has agreed an additional financial package worth € 71 million for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, topping up the € 224 million already allocated by the EU in the 2010 European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument, as well as a reinforcement of humanitarian aid for Palestinian refugees.
***
Note: Also pioneering the way into exposing the hypocrisy of the mainstream media in not informing the public about economic development in Gaza has been this Middle East specialist site.
[All notes above by Tom Gross.]
All notes and summaries copyright © Tom Gross. All rights reserved.
Great Blog on Charles Jacobs and the Roxbury Mosque
World News| US News| Money| Science & Technology| Lifestyle| Conservatism 2.0Rabbis Gone Wild: Boston Edition
Seventy progressive rabbis, strutting like peacocks showing off their moral finery, versus one lonely truth-teller? I like the odds.
July 21, 2010 - by Stella Paul Page 1 of 2 Next -> View as Single PageShare |
Boston is famous for Harvard, Paul Revere, and now for 70 loony liberal rabbis, each blessed with an ego bigger than the Green Monster at Fenway Park, and wisdom smaller than a baked bean.
Already, their noxious stunt of June 10 is legend, astounding Jews from Boston to San Francisco, Israel and beyond. For on that day, the rabbis finally managed to bestir themselves about the notorious, Saudi-funded mega-mosque in Roxbury. Its founder, MIT graduate Abdurahman Alamoudi, is currently serving a 23-year sentence for al-Qaeda-linked terrorist pranks. Its trust president, Osama Kandil, is the director of an Islamic charity designated as terrorist by the U.S. government. Its trustee, Jamal Badawi, is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial.
So what did these genius rabbis do? Did they demand an investigation into why Mayor Thomas Menino gave away $2 million of precious public land to the Islamic Society of Boston on which to build the mosque? Did they launch a public awareness campaign of the mosque’s terrifying link with Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the wart-faced “spiritual leader” of the Muslim Brotherhood who’s banned from the U.S. but served as the mosque’s trustee? Did they picket outside the home of Governor Deval Patrick, singing rousing protest songs and demanding he give back a $50,000 check he publicly accepted from a jihad-spouting imam for the purpose of training Massachusetts police in “Muslim cultural sensitivities”?
Of course not! These are far-left Reform and Reconstructionist rabbis we’re talking about and they worship only the progressive creed: putting barbarians first.
Instead, what these wise and wonderful rabbis chose to do was issue a public “Jewish fatwa” against Dr. Charles Jacobs, Boston’s heroic one-man truth squad about the mosque’s radical leadership. Yes, the Saintly Seventy all loudly signed their names to “An Open Letter to the Jewish Community,” published in the Jewish Advocate, in which they demanded that “Mr. Jacobs discontinue his destructive campaign against Boston’s Muslim community, which is based on innuendo, half-truths and unproven conspiracy theories. We call upon members of our community to reject the dangerous politics of division that Mr. Jacobs fosters.”
The rabbis then applauded their own “commitment to interfaith dialogue and cooperation. We stand together in our commitment to a community in which neighbors seek to know one another and join together for the common good.”
Finally, they closed with a reference to the Torah portion in which Israelite scouts are struck by fear: “Because they succumbed to their fears, God condemned this generation to die in the wilderness. We refuse to allow Mr. Jacobs to spread his calumnies and paralyze our community in fear.”
I’ll pause a moment to let the fumes of the rabbis’ galloping smug-itis clear the room.
Dr. Charles Jacobs is a morally serious man. We’re talking about a man who was given the Boston Freedom Award by Coretta Scott King for helping to emancipate enslaved black Africans in Sudan, in his work as founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group.
In 2007, Jacobs was named by The Forward as one of America’s top 50 Jewish leaders. He not only co-founded Boston’s branch of CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), to expose media bias against Israel, he also founded The David Project in 2002. This powerhouse organization trains college students to advocate for Israel and fight back against the demonization of Israel on campus.
Today, Dr. Jacobs heads Americans for Peace and Tolerance, an interfaith group he started in 2008 to safeguard American values from attack by radical Islamists and to support moderate Muslims.
This is the fine, brave man that 70 Boston rabbis defamed and tossed in the trash — and even potentially endangered by targeting him and his family for attack by vengeful Islamists.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the trashcan. It turns out Boston’s Jews did not relish the discovery that their spiritual leaders are preening ignoramuses.
Seventy progressive rabbis, strutting like peacocks showing off their moral finery, versus one lonely truth-teller? I like the odds.
July 21, 2010 - by Stella Paul Page 1 of 2 Next -> View as Single PageShare |
Boston is famous for Harvard, Paul Revere, and now for 70 loony liberal rabbis, each blessed with an ego bigger than the Green Monster at Fenway Park, and wisdom smaller than a baked bean.
Already, their noxious stunt of June 10 is legend, astounding Jews from Boston to San Francisco, Israel and beyond. For on that day, the rabbis finally managed to bestir themselves about the notorious, Saudi-funded mega-mosque in Roxbury. Its founder, MIT graduate Abdurahman Alamoudi, is currently serving a 23-year sentence for al-Qaeda-linked terrorist pranks. Its trust president, Osama Kandil, is the director of an Islamic charity designated as terrorist by the U.S. government. Its trustee, Jamal Badawi, is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial.
So what did these genius rabbis do? Did they demand an investigation into why Mayor Thomas Menino gave away $2 million of precious public land to the Islamic Society of Boston on which to build the mosque? Did they launch a public awareness campaign of the mosque’s terrifying link with Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the wart-faced “spiritual leader” of the Muslim Brotherhood who’s banned from the U.S. but served as the mosque’s trustee? Did they picket outside the home of Governor Deval Patrick, singing rousing protest songs and demanding he give back a $50,000 check he publicly accepted from a jihad-spouting imam for the purpose of training Massachusetts police in “Muslim cultural sensitivities”?
Of course not! These are far-left Reform and Reconstructionist rabbis we’re talking about and they worship only the progressive creed: putting barbarians first.
Instead, what these wise and wonderful rabbis chose to do was issue a public “Jewish fatwa” against Dr. Charles Jacobs, Boston’s heroic one-man truth squad about the mosque’s radical leadership. Yes, the Saintly Seventy all loudly signed their names to “An Open Letter to the Jewish Community,” published in the Jewish Advocate, in which they demanded that “Mr. Jacobs discontinue his destructive campaign against Boston’s Muslim community, which is based on innuendo, half-truths and unproven conspiracy theories. We call upon members of our community to reject the dangerous politics of division that Mr. Jacobs fosters.”
The rabbis then applauded their own “commitment to interfaith dialogue and cooperation. We stand together in our commitment to a community in which neighbors seek to know one another and join together for the common good.”
Finally, they closed with a reference to the Torah portion in which Israelite scouts are struck by fear: “Because they succumbed to their fears, God condemned this generation to die in the wilderness. We refuse to allow Mr. Jacobs to spread his calumnies and paralyze our community in fear.”
I’ll pause a moment to let the fumes of the rabbis’ galloping smug-itis clear the room.
Dr. Charles Jacobs is a morally serious man. We’re talking about a man who was given the Boston Freedom Award by Coretta Scott King for helping to emancipate enslaved black Africans in Sudan, in his work as founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group.
In 2007, Jacobs was named by The Forward as one of America’s top 50 Jewish leaders. He not only co-founded Boston’s branch of CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), to expose media bias against Israel, he also founded The David Project in 2002. This powerhouse organization trains college students to advocate for Israel and fight back against the demonization of Israel on campus.
Today, Dr. Jacobs heads Americans for Peace and Tolerance, an interfaith group he started in 2008 to safeguard American values from attack by radical Islamists and to support moderate Muslims.
This is the fine, brave man that 70 Boston rabbis defamed and tossed in the trash — and even potentially endangered by targeting him and his family for attack by vengeful Islamists.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the trashcan. It turns out Boston’s Jews did not relish the discovery that their spiritual leaders are preening ignoramuses.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
this will make you proud
Listen to what biggest business companies in the world have to say about Israel
THIS IS MAGNIFICENT, I WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH IT, IT WILL TAKE YOU LESS THEN 5 MINUTES -- I KNOW THAT'S SOMETIMES A LONGER VIEW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHStBGk_D8Y
THIS IS MAGNIFICENT, I WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH IT, IT WILL TAKE YOU LESS THEN 5 MINUTES -- I KNOW THAT'S SOMETIMES A LONGER VIEW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHStBGk_D8Y
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Piece by Tom Gross,
I cried when I read this, not for Rachel Corrie, but for the truly innocent Isralis Rachels who died from suicide bombings- they are the tragedy for whom a play should have been written-- NOT FOR RACHEL CORRIE!!
Sunday, 6th June 2010
The other Rachel
Fraser Nelson 9:25am
The boat the Israelis peacefully intercepted was called Rachel Corrie - named after a young American protester accidentally killed when offering herself as a human shield in Gaza. Her name became immortalised, some 30 songs have been written for her, a London play named after her and a film last year. But another Rachel, completely forgotten, is Rachel Thaler - a 16-year-old British citizen murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber in 2002. Only one British publication has ever mentioned her: The Spectator. Here, below, is Tom Gross' article from 22 October 2005:
'Dead Jews aren't news: British newspapers care greatly about some victims of the Israel army, says Tom Gross, but not the Jewish victims of Palestinian terror - even if they are British
Rachel Thaler, aged 16, was blown up at a pizzeria in an Israeli shopping mall. She died after an 11-day struggle for life following a suicide bomb attack on a crowd of teenagers on 16 February 2002. Even though Thaler was a British citizen, born in London, where her grandparents still live, her death has never been mentioned in a British newspaper.
Rachel Corrie, on the other hand, an American radical who died in 2003 while acting as a human shield during an Israeli anti-terror operation in Gaza, has been widely featured in the British press. According to the Guardian website, she has been written about or referred to on 57 separate occasions in the Guardian alone, including three articles the Saturday before last.
The cult of Rachel Corrie doesn’t stop there. Last week the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, reopened at the larger downstairs auditorium at the Royal Court Theatre (a venue which the New York Times recently described as “the most important theatre in Europe”). It previously played to sold-out audiences at the upstairs theatre when it opened in April. (It is very rare to revive a play so quickly.)
On 1 November the “Cantata concert for Rachel Corrie” – co-sponsored by the Arts Council – has its world premiere at the Hackney Empire.
But Rachel Thaler, unlike Rachel Corrie, was Jewish. And unlike Corrie, Jewish victims of Middle East violence have not become a cause célèbre in Britain. This lack of response is all the more disturbing at a time when an increasing number of British Jews feel that there has been a sharp rise in anti-Semitism.
Thaler is by no means the only Jewish Rachel whose violent death has been entirely ignored by the British media. Other victims of the Intifada include Rachel Levy (aged 17, blown up in a grocery store), Rachel Levi (19, shot while waiting for the bus), Rachel Gavish (killed with her husband, son and father while at home celebrating a Passover meal), Rachel Charhi (blown up while sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe, leaving three young children), Rachel Shabo (murdered with her three sons aged 5, 13 and 16 while at home), Rachel Ben Abu (16, blown up outside the entrance of a Netanya shopping mall) and Rachel Kol, 53, who worked at a Jerusalem hospital and was killed with her husband in a Palestinian terrorist attack in July a few days after the London bombs.
Corrie’s death was undoubtedly tragic but, unlike the death of these other Rachels, it was almost certainly an accident. She was killed when she was hit by an Israeli army bulldozer she was trying to stop from demolishing a structure suspected of concealing tunnels used for smuggling weapons.
Unfortunately for those who have sought to portray Corrie as a peaceful protester, photos of her burning a mock American flag and stirring up crowds in Gaza at a pro-Hamas rally were published by the Associated Press and on Yahoo News on 15 February 2003, a month before she died. (Those photos were not used in the British press.)
While Thaler’s parents, after donating their murdered daughter’s organs for transplant surgery, grieved quietly, Corrie’s parents embarked on a major publicity campaign with strong political overtones. They travelled to Ramallah to accept a plaque from Yasser Arafat on behalf of their daughter. They circulated her emails and diary entries to a world media eager to publicise them. They have written op-ed pieces, including a recent one in the Guardian.
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the group with which Corrie was affiliated, is routinely described as a “peace group” in the media. Few make any mention of the ISM’s meeting with the British suicide bombers Omar Khan Sharif and Asif Muhammad Hanif who, a few days later, blew up Mike’s Place, a Tel Aviv pub, killing three and injuring dozens, including British citizens. Or of the ISM’s sheltering in its office of Shadi Sukiya, a leading member of Islamic Jihad. Or of the fact that in its mission statement the ISM said “armed struggle” is a Palestinian “right”.
According to the “media co-ordinator” of the ISM, Flo Rosovski, “‘Israel’ is an illegal entity that should not exist” – which at any rate clarifies the ISM’s idea of peace.
Indeed, partly because of the efforts of Corrie’s fellow activists in the ISM, the Israeli army was unable to stop the flow of weapons through the tunnels near where she was demonstrating. Those weapons were later used to kill Israeli children in the town of Sderot in southern Israel, and elsewhere.
However, in many hundreds of articles on Corrie published in the last two years, most papers have been careful to omit such details. So have actor Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner, co-creators of My Name is Rachel Corrie, leaving almost all the critics who reviewed the play completely ignorant about the background to the events with which it deals.
So in April, when reviewers first wrote about the play, they tended to take it completely at face value. “Corrie was murdered after joining a non-violent Palestinian resistance organisation,” wrote Emma Gosnell in the Sunday Telegraph. The Evening Standard, for example, described it as a “true-life tragedy” in which Corrie’s “unselfish goodness shines through”.
Only one critic (Clive Davis in the Times) saw the play for the propaganda it is. At one point Corrie declares, “The vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance.” As Davis notes, “Even the late Yasser Arafat might have blushed at that one.” But ultimately the play, and many of the articles about Corrie that have appeared, are not really about the young American activist who died in such tragic circumstances. They are about promoting a hate-filled and glaringly one-sided view of Israel.'
(Tom Gross is a former Jerusalem correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph.)
Sunday, 6th June 2010
The other Rachel
Fraser Nelson 9:25am
The boat the Israelis peacefully intercepted was called Rachel Corrie - named after a young American protester accidentally killed when offering herself as a human shield in Gaza. Her name became immortalised, some 30 songs have been written for her, a London play named after her and a film last year. But another Rachel, completely forgotten, is Rachel Thaler - a 16-year-old British citizen murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber in 2002. Only one British publication has ever mentioned her: The Spectator. Here, below, is Tom Gross' article from 22 October 2005:
'Dead Jews aren't news: British newspapers care greatly about some victims of the Israel army, says Tom Gross, but not the Jewish victims of Palestinian terror - even if they are British
Rachel Thaler, aged 16, was blown up at a pizzeria in an Israeli shopping mall. She died after an 11-day struggle for life following a suicide bomb attack on a crowd of teenagers on 16 February 2002. Even though Thaler was a British citizen, born in London, where her grandparents still live, her death has never been mentioned in a British newspaper.
Rachel Corrie, on the other hand, an American radical who died in 2003 while acting as a human shield during an Israeli anti-terror operation in Gaza, has been widely featured in the British press. According to the Guardian website, she has been written about or referred to on 57 separate occasions in the Guardian alone, including three articles the Saturday before last.
The cult of Rachel Corrie doesn’t stop there. Last week the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, reopened at the larger downstairs auditorium at the Royal Court Theatre (a venue which the New York Times recently described as “the most important theatre in Europe”). It previously played to sold-out audiences at the upstairs theatre when it opened in April. (It is very rare to revive a play so quickly.)
On 1 November the “Cantata concert for Rachel Corrie” – co-sponsored by the Arts Council – has its world premiere at the Hackney Empire.
But Rachel Thaler, unlike Rachel Corrie, was Jewish. And unlike Corrie, Jewish victims of Middle East violence have not become a cause célèbre in Britain. This lack of response is all the more disturbing at a time when an increasing number of British Jews feel that there has been a sharp rise in anti-Semitism.
Thaler is by no means the only Jewish Rachel whose violent death has been entirely ignored by the British media. Other victims of the Intifada include Rachel Levy (aged 17, blown up in a grocery store), Rachel Levi (19, shot while waiting for the bus), Rachel Gavish (killed with her husband, son and father while at home celebrating a Passover meal), Rachel Charhi (blown up while sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe, leaving three young children), Rachel Shabo (murdered with her three sons aged 5, 13 and 16 while at home), Rachel Ben Abu (16, blown up outside the entrance of a Netanya shopping mall) and Rachel Kol, 53, who worked at a Jerusalem hospital and was killed with her husband in a Palestinian terrorist attack in July a few days after the London bombs.
Corrie’s death was undoubtedly tragic but, unlike the death of these other Rachels, it was almost certainly an accident. She was killed when she was hit by an Israeli army bulldozer she was trying to stop from demolishing a structure suspected of concealing tunnels used for smuggling weapons.
Unfortunately for those who have sought to portray Corrie as a peaceful protester, photos of her burning a mock American flag and stirring up crowds in Gaza at a pro-Hamas rally were published by the Associated Press and on Yahoo News on 15 February 2003, a month before she died. (Those photos were not used in the British press.)
While Thaler’s parents, after donating their murdered daughter’s organs for transplant surgery, grieved quietly, Corrie’s parents embarked on a major publicity campaign with strong political overtones. They travelled to Ramallah to accept a plaque from Yasser Arafat on behalf of their daughter. They circulated her emails and diary entries to a world media eager to publicise them. They have written op-ed pieces, including a recent one in the Guardian.
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the group with which Corrie was affiliated, is routinely described as a “peace group” in the media. Few make any mention of the ISM’s meeting with the British suicide bombers Omar Khan Sharif and Asif Muhammad Hanif who, a few days later, blew up Mike’s Place, a Tel Aviv pub, killing three and injuring dozens, including British citizens. Or of the ISM’s sheltering in its office of Shadi Sukiya, a leading member of Islamic Jihad. Or of the fact that in its mission statement the ISM said “armed struggle” is a Palestinian “right”.
According to the “media co-ordinator” of the ISM, Flo Rosovski, “‘Israel’ is an illegal entity that should not exist” – which at any rate clarifies the ISM’s idea of peace.
Indeed, partly because of the efforts of Corrie’s fellow activists in the ISM, the Israeli army was unable to stop the flow of weapons through the tunnels near where she was demonstrating. Those weapons were later used to kill Israeli children in the town of Sderot in southern Israel, and elsewhere.
However, in many hundreds of articles on Corrie published in the last two years, most papers have been careful to omit such details. So have actor Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner, co-creators of My Name is Rachel Corrie, leaving almost all the critics who reviewed the play completely ignorant about the background to the events with which it deals.
So in April, when reviewers first wrote about the play, they tended to take it completely at face value. “Corrie was murdered after joining a non-violent Palestinian resistance organisation,” wrote Emma Gosnell in the Sunday Telegraph. The Evening Standard, for example, described it as a “true-life tragedy” in which Corrie’s “unselfish goodness shines through”.
Only one critic (Clive Davis in the Times) saw the play for the propaganda it is. At one point Corrie declares, “The vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance.” As Davis notes, “Even the late Yasser Arafat might have blushed at that one.” But ultimately the play, and many of the articles about Corrie that have appeared, are not really about the young American activist who died in such tragic circumstances. They are about promoting a hate-filled and glaringly one-sided view of Israel.'
(Tom Gross is a former Jerusalem correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph.)
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