I’ve just received an exciting book commission with a very tight deadline. So I might not be posting quite as regularly during July. In the meantime, I am on BBC Radio Berkshire this lunchtime discussing the aforementioned book.
Archive for June, 2009
The ghastly Alexei Sayle has announced that he used his vote at the recent elections to maintain Britain’s “noble tradition” of not allowing “extremist parties of the right get anything but a tiny toehold in our electoral system”.
Good on him. Hopefully he might also soon stop supporting demonstrations arranged by extremist parties that support terrorism and antisemitism.
I have the following column about Oy Va Goy in the new issue of Jewish News:
I’ve got a confession to make: I am responsible for the credit crunch. Apparently, it’s all because I’m being secretly funded by a global Zionist financial conspiracy. Or at least I am in the eyes of several visitors to my blog. No sooner did I start blogging as a non-Jewish supporter of Israel (at www.oyvagoy.com) than I was bombarded by all sorts of bizarre online comments from visiting antisemites, aghast that a non-Jew might dare to defend the Jewish state, and sure that there must be some sort of dark plot involved. One such frequent visitor asks me: “So how much are those Jews paying you, Chas?”
So – how much are “those Jews” paying me? Not a penny, not even a shekel, is the bitterly disappointing truth. But then I’m no more in the online Hasbara game for the money than I am for the friends it makes me among the Jew-haters of the worldwide web (“You’ve got blood on your hands, you filthy scumbag” etc). I’m in it because I really love Israel and am genuinely upset by the growing antisemitism British Jews are facing left, right and centre. It’s been eye-opening to discover what anonymous, online antisemites say when it’s a non-Jew they are venting their spleen on.
I’ve grown strangely fond of some of these kooky visitors, as they keep me endlessly entertained with their latest theories. One of my regulars likes to inform me that I only blog in support of Israel and the Jewish community because I suffer from an “enormous inferiority complex”. I suppose they call that projection, as it is the antisemites of the world who are all too often suffering from that complex in my experience. And according to one of my best friends, that isn’t the only inversion at work in their accusation. When I told him about it he burst out laughing and said: “Erm no, it’s an enormous superiority complex you suffer from.” Not true, I’m just much better than most people, is all.
Meanwhile, just where are all these predatory Rabbis that are supposedly “brain-washing” me? One Christian visitor from Nigeria is convinced that I’m being indoctrinated by missionary Jews (try reading some basic facts about Judaism, pal) and that if I fly to Nigeria, he can “save me” from a forced conversion and all the “terrible terrors” that it involves. Terrible terrors? Sounds fun, no? Think I’ll stay here and take my chances.
It is not just my website that such cranks descend upon to heckle me. Another site, which dared to positively review one of my books, had every discussion disrupted for months on end by hysterical flaming about my admiration of former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Well, at least they got that one factually correct. Israeli Prime Ministers seem to get the worldwide web ablaze. “You’re only doing this because you’ve got a crush on Benjamin Netanyahu,” said one commenter on my blog. That’s not factually correct, but I know just what he means. There’s just… something about Bibi, isn’t there?
Meanwhile, on the financial conspiracy front, I’m honestly not proud. I’ll gleefully pass on my paying-in details to any person (Jewish or otherwise) who wants to make me part of any sort of fiscal plot. So bring it on, all donations welcome – however large. Don’t let me down, I shall be checking my bank balance hourly.
Please pray/think/speak about Gilad Shalit and his family. You might also like to watch the video of people round the world reading a story he wrote as an 11-year-old.
I will be at the Tekes for Gilad in London on Thursday evening.
I’ve long admired Alan Dershowitz. I remember reading his superb book The Case For Israel, cover to cover, during a red-eye flight back to Britain from New York City. It was a key moment in turning me further away from the widespread default position of liberal British gentiles: a well-meant but ill-informed, lazily arrived-at, loosely pro-Palestinian position. It’s a fantastic book that has made Dershowitz a hero to the brilliant and a feared hate-figure to the bigoted.
Dershowitz has since published other works, including The Case For Peace and The Case Against Israel’s Enemies. Both are excellent, as is his older book Why Terrorism Works. This brilliant man has now made a film called The Case For Israel – Democracy’s Outpost. I encourage you to watch it, either in cinemas if you have the opportunity or otherwise on DVD. During its 77 minutes you will be treated to a clear-eyed, straightforward but heroic defence of this brilliant nation.
The film is a combination of footage of Dershowitz’s contributions to lectures and debates, archive news footage and interviews with numerous politicians, military men and other experts. He puts Israel’s case powerfully, reminding viewers that the Palestinians were offered – and rejected – a state in 1937, 1948, 1967 and 2000. (They have done so again since the film was made.) He shows how the Arab states and not Israel created the Palestinian refugee problem. He demonstrates how the security fence spectacularly reduced the rate of suicide bombings.
He is concise, eloquent and right. “Israel should not compromise at all on checkpoints,” he says. “Checkpoints have been extraordinarily effective: 10,000 terrorist acts have been prevented by checkpoints. Given a choice between waiting an hour and uncomfortableness, and having people go into downtown Tel Aviv to blow up buses, I have to tell you if I was an Israeli, a Palestinian or someone from Mars, I would much prefer the checkpoints. The checkpoints will disappear when terrorism disappears.”
He has always been a formidable destroyer of the hypocrisy and dishonesty of Israel’s worst critics. High on this list is, of course, former US President Jimmy “I’m going to f**k the Jews” Carter. Despite Carter’s boast that he wrote his lie-ridden book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid to “start a debate”, he outright refused to debate it with Dershowitz and insisted they appear separately at a university event.
It’s funny watching Carter lord it on stage at the event, while Dershowitz is forced to twiddle his thumbs backstage thanks to Carter’s cowardice. No wonder the former President is so scared: he has consistently refused to respond to Dershowitz’s allegation that he advised Yasser Arafat to turn down Ehud Barak’s extraordinary Camp David offer and therefore has the “blood on his hands” of 4,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis.
As the film shows, both Dennis Ross (Middle East negotiator) and Kenneth Stein (former fellow of the Carter Center) fundamentally dispute the record of key meetings Carter produced in his book. Indeed, Stein even resigned from the Carter Center, so at odds were Carter’s claims about meetings which Stein not only attended but took notes from. (The book The Case Against Israel’s Critics offers a fulsome demolition of Carter’s lies.)
Back on screen, Dershowitz is superb. “There is apartheid in the Middle East,” he says in response to the apartheid allegation made by Carter and others. “In Saudi Arabia there is gender apartheid, religious apartheid, all kinds of apartheid. But in Israel? Where Arabs serve in the Knesset, on the Supreme Court and at universities, where affirmative action is part of government policy?” He’s right and it is the ultimate irony that so many liberal/left Westerners attack the state that reflects their key values and tacitly support those regimes that promote the opposite.
Dershowitz’s interviewees are just as impressive. One points out that Jerusalem is mentioned 667 times in the Bible but not once by name in the Koran. But most powerful is the Commander in Chief of the Israeli Air Force, who quietly shows the extraordinary morality shown by the Israeli military in the face of the unimaginable dilemma that its enemies sickening human shield tactic creates. As Dershowitz comments: Hamas attacks in this way to take advantage of Israel’s higher sense of morality.
Turning to the UN, he reveals that there have been more resolutions against Israel than the rest of the world combined. “If a space alien landed in Turtle Bay and took a look at the UN, it would say: ‘What a wonderful world this is! There’s this great place called Syria which heads the Security Council, and this marvelous place called Libya that heads the Human Rights Council. Then there is this dark, pariah state called Israel that commits all the human rights violations in the world.’”
It’s powerful stuff and – however well-informed you are on the conflict – I urge you to watch it. More than that, please encourage others to. I don’t particularly approve of films like Fahrenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth, nor am I directly comparing The Case For Israel with them. But we’ve seen the massive influence they have had on the public. To convince a friend to read a book about the conflict is difficult, but to get them to watch a relatively short film is an easier prospect. We’re facing a wall of ignorance and misconceptions: Dershowitz’s brilliant, award-winning film can begin to knock it down. But only if we do our bit and encourage as many as possible to watch it.
You can order it from the Zionist Federation.
The reaction of the UK blogging community to the rigged Iranian election has been fascinating in some cases. Many on the ‘left’ who usually frequently post about Iran have remained strangely silent about the scandal. Others have actually come out in sympathy or even support for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calling him a “hero” and the like.
Some questions for them:
1) Ahmadinejad has for years brutally clamped down on Iranian bloggers. Why do you think you should be able to blog freely but that Iranian people should be denied the same privilege?
2) What first attracted you to the Jew-hating, Shoah-denying, second holocaust-planning, woman-stoning, dissenter-torturing, gay-executing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
3) With friends like you do the Iranian people really need enemies?
Today I am expecting delivery of Don’t Tread On Me: Anti-Americanism Abroad by the great Carol Gould. I’ll be interviewing Carol about the book for Oy Va Goy in the coming weeks.
Tonight I am off for Friday night dinner at the home of the brilliant Jonathan Hoffman of the Zionist Federation.
And this Sunday it’s my birthday. Good times.
This is Senator Robert Menendez on the Jewish rights to Israel.
This is a video that must be watched.
The Guardian Readers’ Editor has responded to complaints from readers for the newspaper’s production of Seven Jewish Children.
Speaking of the widespread belief that the play is antisemitic, Siobhan Butterworth writes: “It is not for me to challenge this analysis and I accept that it is one possible interpretation. What I don’t accept is the complainant’s suggestion that it is the only possible reading.”
Imagine for a moment that a play was written called Seven Black Children. For several months, the play drew anguished protests from across the black community, with numerous organisations, community leaders, respected writers and newspapers all declaring the play to be offensive and racist. Seeing all of this, would The Guardian then broadcast its own production of that play? It seems – thankfully – less than likely. I wonder if it did, though, whether Butterworth would so disinterestedly brush off the offence the issue had caused?
The Guardian’s head of multimedia Tom Happold – whose department oversaw the newspaper’s production – says: “It was an innovative thing for the multimedia department to do.”
Trust me, Tom, there is nothing about the promotion of racism that is innovative. People have been doing it since time immemorial – and shame on you for joining that dark tradition.
He has also said: “People will have different views but they should at least base their views on having seen it.”
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 innovative enough to publish them on the Guardian website so people are at least basing their views having seem/read them? Do we think that Butterworth would be so quick to defend him if he did?
What a cowardly and hypocritical pair: they’ll go far!
* For the record, I dislike Wilders and his film.
Three posts elsewhere that might be of interest to you:
1) “As a TV producer I am aware of how programmes like this are normally put together. What made observing the techniques of the people behind this particular show so interesting, was seeing how they veered from the normal practice of keeping every element as balanced as possible so as to encourage an interesting and respectful debate.”
Jonathan Sacerdoti’s superb dissection of the ridiculous Alan Hart Press TV ‘debate’ which I wrote about on Friday.
2) “Which brings us to the Haredi community, who feel that their values, hundreds of years old, are being marginalised and subjected to mockery. The Haredi element of Israeli society is perceived as becoming increasingly extremist in reaction to safeguard themeslves from the rest of Israeli society. Rioting against the gay pride parade is merely one example; now it is not unheard of to hear of women being verbally and/or physically assaulted for unwittingly taking a seat in the male section of a (de-facto) gender segregated bus. Similarly, women have been beaten up and had rocks thrown at them because their dress sense is deemed immodest by Haredi vigilantes.”
Elan Miller’s thoughts on my article about Jerusalem Pride.
3) “Mahmoud Abbas admitted that the previous Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, offered him 97% of the West Bank, a recognition of the right of return and the actual resettlement of thousands of Palestinian refugees inside Israel, yet he still turned the proposal down.”
Hold the front page: a good response to Bibi’s speech and the hopes for peace, on Comment Is Free. (Don’t worry, the assembled Jew-bashers and terror-groupies give Jeremy Sharon’s reasonable post short shrift.)
Hold onto your hats – there’s a new Alexei Sayle video on the web!
His anti-Israel tirades have always veered from the embarrassing to the narcisstic and the plain confused and ill-informed. Not that the antisemites and supporters of terrorism that he regularly protests alongside care – they’re just happy he cannot see how horribly they are using him.
Sayle’s latest effort sees him sink to a new low in what is little more than a two minute, 39 second nervous breakdown in which he begs Leonard Cohen not to play a concert in Tel Aviv. Watching the video, one suspects that Sayle’s agent’s phone isn’t ringing quite as much as it used to.
It’s a toe-curling performance. Reprising a theme from when we last heard from him, he claims that his call for a boycott of Israel is actually for Israel’s benefit. This is the classic justification of the sick abuser - I might mistreat you but it’s for your own good. He also calls for Israel to “show some kindness to the people they are grinding under their heel”. This man seems to have no idea of all the great things Israel does for the Palestinians, including treating their sick in Israeli hospitals. In fact, it’s safe to say that Israel helps the Palestinians more than Sayle ever will.
And listen, pal, when I pitched the Britain’s Got Bigots reality show idea I wanted you as a judge not a contestant. Damn it you ghastly man, do you have to misunderstand everything? Or do you assume the show will be run on Iranian election-style rules: it’s okay to be both contestant and judge?
Enjoy/endure the video, readers.
So, I had a ‘Shabbos goy’ moment whilst Shabbat lunching with the lovely Schogger family yesterday. Regular readers will know how exciting that was for me.
Thank you to Lauren, Damian, Ilan (Ilaaaaaaarrrrn) and Michal for a lovely afternoon.
Anne Frank would have been 80 tomorrow. You might have seen the image that the Anne Frank Trust have generated to show what she would look like if she had lived to today. I found it strangely unsettling. That said, the Trust’s work is magnificent and I strongly recommend you visit Anne Frank House in Amsterdam if you have the chance.
Yesterday the hate that prompted the Shoah paid a brutal visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial (USHM) in Washington DC. This is not the first time that the USHM has faced haters on its doorstep. In 1993, people demonstrated outside with placards reading: ‘Stop the big lie — the gas chamber hoax!’ In 2002 white supremacists plotted to blow it up with a fertiliser bomb.
The USHM is a very powerful memorial. No other Shoah memorial will ever have the intensity of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, but Washington comes the closest. When I visited last autumn I was taken aback by so much of the experience. For instance, several sections of the exhibition are very harsh on America’s response to the Holocaust. If only the attitude of more Europeans could be so honest and self-searching.
It’s eerie, because I also vividly remember being struck by how brave and warm the security guards were. Their warmth managed to take the edge off an otherwise harrowing visit. My thoughts go out to the family of Stephen T Jones, who was killed by the gunman there yesterday. An effective way of countering the hate that took his life – and those of the six million - is to keep visiting and supporting institutions such as Anne Frank House and USHM. Visit your nearest equivalent soon, even if you’ve been before.
“This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms,” said Barack Obama. We must, Mr President, we must. Please keep a good eye on Iran.
Welcome to the blogosphere, CST.
These are busy times for me (not least putting the finishing touches to this little baby) but I will be back very soon with a proper post. I’m attending an event on Friday which I am expecting to be fertile ground for an Oy Va Goy special. So watch this space.
Meanwhile, Facebook users might like to join my ever-growing group I’m British And I Love Israel. See you there.