You can now read the Israel chapter I wrote in Not In My Name here.
I hope you enjoy it.
Archive for April, 2009
British combat operations in Iraq end today, which brings to mind a great comment from John Stuart Mill.
‘War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth a war, is worse … A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.’
John Stuart Mill, The Contest in America
Respect and gratitude to the brave men and women of the UK forces for their exertions over the past six years. They stand head and shoulders above the miserable creatures who are their critics.
I had a great time last night at An Evening With Richard Bandler. Bandler is the co-creator of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and he’s the most charismatic, entertaining speaker I’ve ever witnessed. Embedded into his hilarious, gripping stories and thoughts are all manner of positive suggestions to change your life for the better.
There was even time for a bit of Jewish humour – Bandler is Jewish – Oy va goy!
I’ve seen Richard Bandler speak before in person and on DVDs but last night was the best I’ve ever seen him – he put on a great show. What a great way to spend an evening.
Happy birthday to the greatest nation and people on earth.
61? Wouldn’t think it to look at you, you beauty!
There is a fantastic comment from ‘Israeli Nurse’ over at Harry’s Place about Caryl Churchill’s racist play Seven Jewish Children.
What really annoys me about the Caryl Churchill play is this:
I’m an Israeli parent – which is who, in fact, the play is criticising. I have raised 5 children in Israel, which is no easy task, over and above the normal difficulties of parenting. Like the majority of Israeli parents I have wrestled with the dilemma of how to raise happy, balanced children in an environment with so many instances of violence and fear.
One has to cope with the fears of a child whose father and/or brother has gone to war. One has to cope with the anxieties of children forced to wear a gas mask for hours at a time for weeks on end and forbidden to leave the house. One has to cope with the nightmares resulting from seemingly unending terror attacks. One has to decide on a balance between the freedoms a teenager demands and the obvious dangers. One has to comfort teenagers who have buried friends.
But all the while, from their infancy one tries not to opt for the easiest route. So one buys children’s books promoting Arab-Israeli co-existance. One takes them to play with the children of Arab friends. One encourages them to study hard in Arabic lessons in school. One discusses current affairs and politics taking care to present the other point of view. When they go to the army one makes sure that they discuss their difficulties and moral dilemmas over a shabbat meal.
And then along comes Caryl Churchill and makes a complete stereotypical lie out of all those years of parenting and all those sleepless nights of dilemma.
Well said.
With Independence Day coming up, I thought I’d dig out this article I wrote for Jewish News, shortly after my first trip to Israel in 2006. I wonder whether I got across that I enjoyed my trip…
Meeting My Heroes
When I told friends I was going to visit Israel for the first time, most of them were very worried for me. Not so much because they thought I was going to be blown up, but because they feared that I would be let down.
A card-carrying Gentile philosemite, I have for many years been in awe of the Jewish people and fascinated by Jewish history and culture – particularly by the state of Israel. In the weeks before my trip I worked myself up into a frenzy of anticipation – I’ve always been skilled at this – and the general consensus was that the country I have cheered on and dreamt of for so long could never live up to my great expectations.
And it only went and exceeded them! I met my heroes and they were too busy fascinating me, enchanting me, welcoming me and sending me into paroxysms of joy to even begin to let me down. The people of Israel were everything I had hoped for. Just as the state itself has the most beautiful of contradictions (strong and well-armed yet an underdog in the region) so do the people (blunt and pushy yet bursting with hospitality and humanity).
The longer I was there, the more the tears of joy secretly flowed. They came as I floated on the Dead Sea at 6am alongside an elderly Holocaust survivor who taught me a Hebrew song; they came as I listened to the residents of the Ein Geddi Kibbutz in who I saw a pride more pure and intense than anything I’d witnessed before; they came at Masada at dawn; they came as I sat in the seat where David Ben-Gurion first declared the state of Israel.
So I did some of the out-and-out tourist stuff, for sure. But the biggest joys came more spontaneously: pulling into a petrol station full of Bedouin Arabs and one of them letting me ride his camel; asking my new friend Susi what those metal things over there were and her replying that they were tanks from the 1948 war of Independence; finding a mosque, a Christian church and a sadomasochistic restaurant standing within feet of each other in Jaffa; listening to people’s stories, each of which was the tale of Israel in microcosm.
Within hours of my return to England, I’d taken a call from a journalist acquaintance who described his horror that ‘anyone could be pro-Israel’. The following evening in a pub, I got more abuse for my opinions. That’s what a week among the beautiful people of Israel did to me: it lowered my guard and made me forget that people in this country do not appreciate having their anti-Israel prejudices questioned.
By visiting Israel, I was putting my own views on the country to the ultimate test and everything I saw there confirmed them. ‘Come back and see us soon,’ said almost everyone I met. You bet I will.
And I did, the following year! Hoping for a third visit in October.
Shame on Tom Happold, network editor of The Guardian website, for putting Caryl Churchill’s racist play Seven Jewish Children on Guardian Unlimited over the weekend. In recent months the play has caused enormous offence to the Jewish community. It has rightly been described as “the old stuff – Jew-hating pure and simple” (Howard Jacobson); “a blood libel” (Melanie Phillips) and “antisemitic” (the Jewish Chronicle’s theatre critic John Nathan).
Happold personally approached Churchill and offered to broadcast it for her on The Guardian website. So, Mr Happold, what was it that first attracted you to the antisemitic, jew-hating blood-libel play?
His feeble justification for broadcasting Seven Jewish Children is: “People will have different views but they should at least base their views on having seen it.” Well, people also have “different views” about the Geert Wilders film Fitna, and the Danish Muhammed cartoons and The Jewel Of The Medina novel that Islamists firebombed a publisher’s home over.
Do we think that Happold will also be publishing all of them on the Guardian website so people are at least basing their views having seem/read them?
Good luck to all today’s marathon runners, especially the first-timers. I have run two marathons (finishing times: 4hrs 3mins and 4hrs 20 mins) and there’s nothing like the first time!
Eagle-eyed viewers will spot me in this video of me finishing my second marathon. I am in a light blue t-shirt, punching the air as I cross the line (at 47 seconds and repeated from a different angle at 55 seconds).
Note how sprightly I look after 26 miles and be impressed.
This is a guest post from Alex Dwek who was at the Durban Review conference.
Now the Durban Review Conference has come to a close, I thought I would provide a quick review of the key events that happened during the last three days.
On Wednesday countries were invited to make general statements to the conference. France, Sweden, Spain, Ukraine and the UK were amongst a host of nations who used this opportunity to criticise Ahmadinejad’s speech. The UK Ambassador’s statement was particularly strong saying: “My delegation left the hall not only in protest, but in solidarity with those targeted by [Ahmadinejad’s] hateful, antisemitic words.”
The Palestinian delegation announced that they were among those who walked out of the President of Iran’s speech. This was not to do with the content of the speech but rather in objection to Iran’s funding of Hamas.
One of the more interesting speeches of the day was by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay. In it, she declared that she couldn’t understand why countries had walked out of Ahmadinejad’s speech. Maybe Ms Pillay was listening to a different interpretation than the rest of the world? Or does she deem statements about Zionists controlling the monetary systems as acceptable?
At the end of the day it emerged that Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel had been called a “Zio-Nazi” by an observer from one of the NGO’s, believed to be Iranian. This was an example of some of the less than savoury characters who managed to gain entry to the conference.
During all the nation’s speeches there was not one mention of the human rights abuses occurring in Darfur or the Congo.
Thursday consisted mostly of side events, hosted by numerous NGO’s. One of the more controversial ones taking place was an event by the Islamic Human Rights Commission [IHRC] entitled ‘Old & New forms of Racism – The Case for Islamophobia’.
I had mentioned the IHRC in an earlier post as they had been the organisation that Neturei Carta were accredited with. The panel included Dr Daud Abdullah of the Muslim Council of Britain, Imam Achmad Cassiem (former prisoner on Robben Island) and Michel Warschawski, a prominent French anti-Zionist.
Of the six panelists, five were convinced that the root of all problems of Islamophobia rested in the Israel/Palestine issue. Only one, Ms. Asma Jahangir, spoke openly about stopping the politicization of human rights. She called for the audience to look at the principles of human rights and apply them everywhere
It was the end of Warschawski’s speech which I thought proved to sum up the atmosphere amongst the anti-zionist movement at the conference. “Durban II is an occasion for us to evaluate where we are in this state,” he argued. “I would say we are not in a good shape. Everything that has been going on in this conference, we are far away from Durban I, we have to admit we are on the defensive. At Durban I we were setting the agenda, here we are reacting to it.”
I think this statement really epitomizes the tone of the conference. Durban II was not the Israel ‘hate fest’ that took place in 2001. However, the assembled countries refused to talk about the genuine human rights abuses taking place all over the world. They continued to allow countries with some of the world’s worst human rights records to set the agenda. When the entire conference is chaired by Libya and co-chaired by Iran, you know that something isn’t right.
So, what next? I shall revert back to another quote from Warshawski’s speech:
“For us the challenge is Durban +10 [another anti-racism conference planned for some time after 2010]. We have two years to recollect ourselves to re-fix and improve some sort of joint agenda, for a conference which will be more like Durban I than Durban II. This will not impede on the work of the NGOs. To make this radical shift to make a new offensive Durban, it will be down to the people of this world to take the initiative to unite against injustice.”
So it seems that at Durban +10, the voices who were so prominent at Durban I will be preparing a response. Whilst I don’t jump up and down with excitement at the prospect of facing another racism conference dominated by racists, it is a fight that I don’t think any of us should back down from.
Whether you are Israel’s biggest supporter or fiercest critic, one should never accept the vile and racist rhetoric of Ahmadinejad and others. No one can justify singling out Israel as the worst committer of human rights abuses taking place any where in the world. To do this is giving free reign to the likes of President Al-Bashir of Sudan to fund the murder of 500,000 people in Darfur, and Joseph Kony of the Lords Resistance Army to abduct thousands of children and force them to take part in armed combat.
It will be interesting to see if UN calls for a Durban III in the future. If they do, I only hope that they learn from their mistakes and host a conference that does stand up to racism and seeks to address the vast amount of human rights abuses taking place worldwide.
I’m not going to hold my breath.
Alex is an Economics and Politics student at the University of Manchester. He represents the University of Manchester at the National Union of Jewish students. He was in Geneva as part of a world Jewish student task force and reported for Oy Va Goy throughout the week.
On September 4, 2003, in a large ceremony, the Israeli Air Force flew three f-15 jets over the Auschwitz concentration camp in a show of the Jewish people’s continued strength and triumph over past adversities.
This visit was a testament to the world that the saying “never again” is not just a slogan. Many of the participants were the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.
Some readers might recall the post I wrote about George Galloway’s ridiculous Comment programme on the vile Press TV (and the hilarious angry response to it posted by one reader.) The format of the show is simple: people phone, email or text in to slag off Israel and the Jews and to defend Hamas and the Iranian regime, which funds the channel.
When Galloway is too busy spreading hate or handing money to Hamas to appear on Comment, he is stood in for by arch hypocrite Jeremy Corbyn MP.
Say what you like about Galloway and his hideous politics (though be careful, the poor little dear is very touchy and trigger-happy with the old writs!) but at least he makes the Comment show entertaining. So it’s a clever move of his to get Corbyn to cover for him, because as well as being a hypocrite Corbyn is also a completely incompetent broadcaster.
Witness the opening call on last night’s show…
Caller: “Hello?”
Corbyn: “Where are you calling from?”
Caller: [Indecipherable.]
Corbyn: “Yes, can you….give us your message?”
Caller: “Hello?”
Corbyn: “Hello?”
Caller: “Hello?”
Corbyn: “Hello caller, you’re….through to Comment.”
Caller: “I can’t hear…”
Corbyn: “You’re through to……camera….”
Caller: “Hello?”
Corbyn: “You’re through to me now.”
Caller: “Hello?”
Corbyn: “Give me a…call…please….”
Caller: “Hello, can you hear me?”
Corbyn: “Yes, I can hear you!”
Caller: “Hello?”
[Long pause, Corbyn sweating and not knowing what to do.]
Corbyn: “Erm, can you turn the television down in background because I’m not sure you can hear me?”
[Long pause, Corbyn worrying that Ahmadinejad will have his guts for garters if he doesn't sort this out soon.]
Corbyn: “Okay, we’ll have to leave that one.”
Caller: “Hello?”
It was the most intelligent exchange I have ever heard on Comment!
The Israel Defence Force has released a video explaining the background to Operation Cast Lead.
I think we’re all enjoying the guest posts from Alex Dwek at Durban this week. Indeed, one Daily Telegraph blogger is enjoying them so much that they have restored her faith in the worldwide web.
Kol HaKovod, Alex!
This is a guest post from Alex Dwek who is at the Durban Review conference.
9 am – We discovered that our passes had been taken away from us, due to the actions of certain students the previous day. So whilst we were trying to regain our accreditation we decided to do some media work and see what the coverage of the conference had been like.
In the build up to Durban II, the only press giving the conference substantial coverage were the Israeli newspapers and the Jewish Chronicle. Well now every paper worldwide was talking about the UN anti-racism conference. Every paper from the Times (where it made front page), to the Sydney Herald, South African Times, Washington Post, Le monde and Le Figaro. Every paper was talking about the three Jewish students dressed up as clowns who stood up to Ahmadinejad.
The three French Students who had been involved in ‘Clowngate’ had been released without charge and were given a hero’s welcome. They even eventually received full accreditation back into the UN. Even though it was the following day they were still wearing their wigs!
News had got back that the British mission weren’t planning on leaving, so we decided it was time to pile up the pressure, launching a Facebook campaign demanding that they withdraw, along with many phone calls to local MPs and the FCO. It got to the point where the Commons switchboard was refusing to transfer people to their MPs if it was about Durban.
We have 600 people already signed up today but we need to get as many as possible to put pressure on the British delegation. So please join the group.
By the afternoon we successfully managed to convince UN security to reaccredit us.
At 5pm the day finished with a large protest for Darfur in the Palais des Nations outside the UN. This was widely attended by students and community members from all over the world, along with a group of Darfuri refugees. The rally was a huge success with buses and cars honking their horns in support as they drove past. The genocide in Darfur, where more than 300,000 people have killed, is a wake-up call – this is the sort of issue the UN should be talking about at Durban II. The fact is that Darfur has not been mentioned even once.
Overall, a very different atmosphere to the previous day, but exciting nonetheless.
Alex is an Economics and Politics student at the University of Manchester. He represents the University of Manchester at the National Union of Jewish students. He is in Geneva as part of a world Jewish student task force and will report for Oy Va Goy throughout the week.