Month: November 2012

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Hasbara and the Case for Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel

Israel uses all culture as propaganda and does so unashamedly. In 2005, Nissim Ben-Sheetrit of Israel’s Foreign Ministry emphasised:

“We see culture as a propaganda tool of the first rank, and I do not differentiate between propaganda and culture.”

Israeli universities are subverted in the mission to sell the apartheid state, with Haifa and Tel Aviv Universities offering courses “in hasbara for Israeli and International students respectively. Hasbara is the name Israelis give to propaganda and disinformation in defence of Israel and the Occupation.”

Further, Israel runs state-funded and organised campaigns to enlist volunteers to spread its noxious, prevaricative messages.

If they receive funding by the state, Israeli artists who play internationally are expected to be political ambassadors and must sign contracts which declare their cooperation with state marketing aims. The standard Israeli sponsorship contract states:

“The service provider [or in English, the artist] is aware that the purpose of ordering services from him is to promote the policy interests of the State of Israel via culture and art, including contributing to creating a positive image for Israel.

Yet some zionist Israeli performers are zealous supporters of the apartheid entity, and fervently offer themselves up as crude instruments of propaganda.

Idan Reichel joins ranks with the cultural boycott of Israel. English translation:

Naftaly Bennett: We love you, Idan Reichel
**
Here’s what Idan Reichel wrote in Shabat’s Yediot newspaper:
“I believe that our role as artists is to be recruited into Israeli Hasbara. This is a war on our home, and our country, and in times of war we must be recruited. Full stop.
I strengthen our soldiers hands, yes, the so-moral ones, and strengthen the IDF that no more moral army than that can be found around the world.”
**
At a time of artists and “intellectuals” who make an effort to understand “both sides” (Hamas and Israel), it is wonderful to hear the clear voice of Idan Reichel: I am in favor of Israel.
**
Dear Idan: You are not wrong. We are not from the UN. We are in favor of Israel.
We will carry on going to your shows and buying your albums (well, because you are such an amazing artist..).
Thank you.
Naftaly
**
PS – whoever wishes to may share and write “I love you Idan Reichel”, and we’ll flood facebook.

(source: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=497659216922418&set=a.396861670335507.89917.396697410351933)

Thanks, Ronnie Barkan, for the translation above from the original hebrew.

Since Israel deliberately employs its artists and academic institutions to market its apartheid and colonialism with duplicitous propaganda designed to paper over the war crimes and crimes against humanity of the state, the case for cultural and academic boycott is strengthened accordingly.

Related Links

Zionist propaganda site established to capitalise on and collect the quotations of artists who have played Israel.

The Case for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Against Israel

Israel 2012, The Question of a Nation: What Does Culture Have to Do with Politics?

PACBI-Letter from Alice Walker to Publishers at Yediot Books

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Israel Bombs and Lies, Again

Driven by its politicians’ malevolent rhetoric, Israel foams with fascist fervour. In the streets zionist fanatics scream for Palestinian genocide. Not one to demur from a frolic in a foreign blood bath, the saturnine imperial potentate Obama mouths the customary western obscenity about the racist zionist entity having a right to defend itself, rubberstamping its criminality in chorus with one hundred percent of the good old boys and girls in the US senate. Ashton is ‘deeply’ duplicitous as the EU turns away from Israel’s collective punishment of the people of Gaza, a deliberate, premeditated crime against humanity which, as in November 2008, the ziocolony has orchestrated bloody mayhem to spice the lead up to its apartheid faux elections. In Australia, bipartisan prevarication oozes from the shonky Australian political shills for empire and zionism.

Fascist states refresh themselves continuously through calibrated, manufactured spectacles, to reprime the illusionist themes of sanctioned violence amd self-righteous racism, all the better to support the state’s drive for power and expansionism. To retain its expansionary, militarist, oppressive and racist nature, the ziocolony indulges in regular orgiastic, violent frenzies. Yet this sadistic, cathartic behaviour is inherently unstable and unsustainable.

Thicker than Netanyahu’s Amerikkkan accent, the putrid zionist hasbara flows through the western media, to obscure the deaths and maiming of Palestinian civilians who unlike cossetted, privileged Israelis, have no air raid shelters or early warning sirens, no Iron Dome defence system supplied by the world’s super-maniacal power. Children in Gaza are crying in fear and hurt, dying again in the arms of their parents, parents slaughtered before their children’s eyes, buildings new-built since Israel’s 2009 Cast Lead frenzy pulverised by torrents of bombs which in the urban density of Gaza take a bloody toll of innocent civilians. Israel’s vile oppression must end, with its war criminals and their western accomplices brought to justice at The Hague.

While awaiting the moral arc of governments to grind far too slowly toward justice, individuals can act = boycott apartheid Israel – conscientious attention costs nothing and adds to the growing weight of grassroots action to transform the racist, oppressive behaviour of the brutal apartheid entity. On no account buy your beloved diamonds for Christmas – you don’t know where they’ve been. Israeli diamonds are blood diamonds.

Revolución está al alcance de todos – resistir a la Bestia. Tierra y libertad!

Bombs and Lies

through shrouded sky
to a Gaza reprise
fascist drones fly
remotely contrived
for justice’s demise
at maimed childrens’ cries
chorused liberal sighs
can’t obscure genocide
in apartheid eyes
truth dies
as empire’s disguise
Israel lies
lies and lies
a Pillar of Lies

Related Links

Ali Abunimah on CBC radio
Protestors in front of the Scottish Parliament
Egyptian PM Hesham Kandil: “What I am witnessing in Gaza is a disaster and I can’t keep quiet. The Israeli aggression must stop. Egypt supports the Palestinians, Israel’s actions will not go unnoticed”.
Solidarity for Gaza in Toronto

Understanding why the brutal Israeli entity is not the victim it portrays itself to be, and why its crimes against humanity perpetrated on the people of Gaza since 1948 should end.
Expel all Israeli ambassadors back to the apartheid criminal entity.

Forget the Australian Greens, overrun with white supremacism, zionism and equivocation between oppressor and oppressed. A good sign of their western colonialist infection perhaps is their use of the ‘deeply’ word, so beloved of Cashton and Rice.

The Malaysian government condemns Israel’s murderous attack on the civilian population of Gaza while “Viva Palestina Malaysia (VPM) chairman Datuk Dr Musa Mohd Nordin said the airstrike on Gaza that killed 10 Palestinians yesterday was yet another display of Israel’s contempt for international laws and its ruthless defiance of accepted norms of co-existence.”

No wonder Israel executed Jabari – he would have removed Israel’s chances for a pre-election murder spree against Indigenous Palestinians who suffer its hideous Occupation.

Israel’s sociopathic cruelty
Organise for Gaza

Sell out of all Israeli shares. BDS the Israeli stock market!

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A Spell to Decontaminate White Supremacism

Zigging and Zogging

torah or talmud, who needs books,
you just have to take a look
at all the media run by da jooos
holed up in hollywood
with their sneaky moves

and in the big banks
plotting 9/11
when they’re not sellin crack
to the poor black bums

payola to pollies
so they run the whole show
it’s a global conspiracy
don’t yah know

reptilian illuminati
and protocols malign
freemasons and aliens
blame it on zion!

it ain’t my fault
my daddy was rich
my ma was good lookin,
and you’re from the ditch,

it wasn’t my choice
that i was born white
must have been somethin’
da jooos did, right?

Sylvia Posadas August 2012

Written for my dear friend, poet and critic Emma Rosenthal, on the occasion of yet another act of cowardice by a white supremacist.

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Classic Apologist Dodges for Racists, Zionists and Bigots

Have you come across any of these fallacious excuses? Ubiquitous themes employed by apologists in attempts to defend, conceal and prevent racist or bigoted behaviour being exposed publicly include :

  1. You are being *divisive*, we need non-partisanship, a unified movement (yet to include racists and bigots discredits and divides any ethical human rights movement) AKA “Don’t deprive the movement of important activists!” (despite their racist/bigoted behaviour). This point includes protecting divisive people who have attacked entire segments of the movement with their racist rationale, even going so far as to call an entire population within the movement, by mere identification with their ethnicity, an enemy of the movement;
  2. You are smearing [insert racist here] by identifying their racist behaviour;
  3. You are bullying us by identifying racist behaviour. (Or eg. Why are you ‘singling out’ Israel? as if the bully/Israel doesn’t single themselves out with their behaviour.);
  4. You are witchhunting those poor racists and in public too (as if their behaviour was only expressed privately);
  5. By criticising this racist behaviour, you are being racist. (Doublethink – eg. ‘criticism of [racist] Israel is anti-semitic’);
  6. You will alienate people “on the fence” by identifying racist behaviour; eg. ‘Don’t call Israel “apartheid”, it will turn off potential supporters of peace’.
  7. Our support of [insert racist behaviour here] is just a ‘difference of opinion’ AKA “We have a right to be racist”;
  8. You are ‘gatekeeping the discourse’ by identifying racist behaviour; (new variant is “you’re censoring. what about free speech?”)
  9. We need “education” and/or “dialogue” not “confrontation” with racists and racist behaviour (variation on 1.). (Yes, we do need education about racism and bigotry and why they aren’t acceptable within human rights movements, so we can confront the behaviour when it occurs. Why would one engage in normalising *dialogue* with zionists or any other racists? Resistance, not normalisation!);
  10. What gives you the right to determine what is racist behaviour? (As Raoul Wallender said, ‘every individual has a responsibility to fight against racism and other human rights violations’) AND corollaries “Racism is whatever I say it to be” or “‘Racism’ has no fixed meaning therefore we cannot identify racism” (in order to derail discussion away from racism)”;
  11. Your attitude is aggressive and counter-productive. (The “tone” non-argument) – variation on 3.;
  12. Why are you bringing up racism over and over and over again? we heard you the first time! (but still didn’t confront the racist behaviour);
  13. “I don’t see race. By seeing race you are being racist.” (Variation of 5.);
  14. “[Insert group] isn’t a race so nothing we say or do about this group is racist.” (ignoring the social construct of racism and reiterating the biological determinism inherent to racist ideology;
  15. “Please move on” AKA “Give peace a chance” AKA “We have these wonderful anti-racist principles and declarations, so now we can bury further discussion about racism and racist behaviour and get on with our ‘activism’.” AKA “Look over there, at Gaza/Syria!” AKA “The situation is complicated!” AKA “Yes, they may be a racist, but they raise good points”;
  16. “Race is culturally determined”. Now that biologically constructed racism has been debunked, racists are constructing race via culture. eg. ‘you come from a non-western culture and your race is suspect.’ This is really just a variant on biologically determined racism, since the target/s have been born into a culture/ethnicity.

To help end racism and bigotry, which are both tools used by ruling elites to divide and rule all the better to disempower any opposition, it is logical and essential to deal with these behaviours as they arise. Movements for freedom, equality and justice are strengthened when there’s zero tolerance within and without for the racism and bigotry they are attempting to end. Racism and bigotry belong on the zionist, colonialist and imperialist side.

Related Links

Helpful Hints for Zionists: How to Advocate for Israel without Being Antisemitic

Racism in Australia

The Zionist Handbook: A guide to defending Israel against Mean People

Israel’s Exceptionalism: Normalizing the Abnormal

How to make the case for Israel and win

“It is helpful to think of normalization as a “colonization of the mind,” whereby the oppressed subject comes to believe that the oppressor’s reality is the only “normal” reality that must be subscribed to, and that the oppression is a fact of life that must be coped with. Those who engage in normalization either ignore this oppression, or accept it as the status quo that can be lived with.”

The struggle for Palestinian rights is incompatible with any form of racism or bigotry: a statement by Palestinians

Granting No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon

A new hasbara campaign: Countering the ‘Arab Narrative’

“Irrespective of its sources, racism is racism. Ignorance is no excuse. Insecurity is not justification…racism in all its forms should be uncompromisingly condemned.”

Michael Dodson, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, quoted in Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Fourth Report, 1996

Race : Its Socially Constructed Origins

Racism No Way

Top 10 Settler Excuses for Colonialism

Derailing for Dummies

How to argue like a white racist

Eight things racists say to try and convince people they’re not being racist