What Does BDS Threaten and Who Really Makes Threats?

HasbaraLast week, Salif Keita announced his decision to cancel his performance at the Jerusalem Festival of Sacred Music, held at the Tower of David in Occupied East Jerusalem, and funded by the American Zionist Shusterman Foundation. That the festival was held at such a location where Occupied people are routinely imprisoned, tortured, killed and their homes demolished for resisting Israel’s brutal Occupation, made a mockery of any pretense of “peace and reconciliation” through music.

Many BDS advocates and organisations, including BDS France and Professor Farid Esack from the University of Johannesburg and Chair of BDS South Africa, attempted to persuade Salif Keita to cancel his gig and respect the boycott. Other artists – Matt Schofield and his band, The Matt Schofield Trio, and Chris Daddy Dave – already had cancelled their Festival performances. The initial announcement of Salif Keita respecting the boycott was made on Ynet. The festival facebook page also recorded the cancellation, stating:

“Salif Keita canceled his participation in the Jerusalem Festival of Sacred Music. A few hours before his departure for Jerusalem the Malian musician Salif Keita decided to heed the demands of the cultural boycott of Israel and to cancel his participation in the closing concert of the festival.”

Several hours later, a statement withdrawing endorsement for the boycott call was released, blaming BDS for alleged “threats, blackmail attempts, intimidation, social media harrassment and slander”. Regardless of the statement in his name, Salif is thanked for his cancellation. One might speculate that such an announcement could act as cover for insurance purposes, or “a tactic that some artists resort to when they do not wish to violate the Palestinian call to boycott Israel, but do not have the courage to take a political stance”, or even to shield artists from real threats from angry Zionists in the future. The statement resembles a list of Israeli hasbara talking points. Is it coincidental that Adam Shay, program coordinator and researcher from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which participates in Israel’s hasbara strategy, recommended in May 2013 to

“focus on direct contact with the performers, their producers, agents, or anyone involved in the decision to play or not to play in a specific location. These efforts should not be carried out by the public at large, but rather by professional policy analysts familiar with BDS operations and methods, who can put BDS slander in perspective and present an unbiased picture of reality.”

The only concrete example given in the announcement is “slander stating that Mr Keita was to perform in Israel, not for peace, but for apartheid”. Yet this is not slander, but based firmly in fact. Since Israel deliberately and consistently uses all artist breaches of the boycott to spray whitewash over its very real apartheid and oppression, adding artists and quotes to the propaganda site Creative Community for Peace that shamelessly lobbies artists not to cancel, the example given is spurious.

As a former Israeli Attorney General stated:

‘Despite its best intentions, Israel has created a system of separation in the West Bank which fits the textbook definition of apartheid. According to Michael Ben-Yair, Attorney General of Israel throughout the nineties, “In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the Occupied Territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.” He is not alone in asserting this perspective. Many notable Israelis like Meron Benvenisti, Akiva Elder, and Shulamit Aloni, to mention a few, agree that Israeli style apartheid is a reality.’

In 2009, the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) study affirmed that Israel is practising both colonialism and apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, with these findings confirmed by the Russell Tribunal Cape Town session findings on Israeli apartheid.

Within Israel itself segregation is nearly absolute:

“For those of us who live here, it is something we take for granted. But visitors from abroad cannot believe their eyes: segregated education, segregated businesses, separate entertainment venues, different languages, separate political parties … and of course, segregated housing. In many senses, this is the way members of both groups want things to be, but such separation only contributes to the growing mutual alienation of Jews and Arabs.”

As Zazafl says:

Apartheid is wrong. This is not a threat.
Ethnic cleansing is wrong. This is not a threat.
War crimes are wrong. This is not a threat.
Asking you not to play in a state that does all the above to a people is not wrong. This is not a threat.
Asking you to listen to the Palestinian people and to simply not cross their picket line is not wrong. This is not a threat.
Asking you to set aside your privilege and activate your conscience is not wrong. This is not a threat. There are no threats. To you.

Whether or not artists insist they are playing for peace and not politics, the Israeli regime believes differently and uses all culture as a political instrument to conceal its oppression.

In 2005 Nissim Ben-Sheetrit of Israel’s Foreign Ministry stated:

“We see culture as a propaganda tool of the first rank, and I do not differentiate between propaganda and culture.” (Ha’aretz; 21/09/05)

As Brecht said: “Thus for art to be ‘unpolitical’ means only to ally itself with the ‘ruling’ group“. Gil Ron Shama, producer of the Jerusalem festival and Goodwill Ambassador for the Israeli Foreign Ministry (which ministry plays a major role in hasbara dissemination) to Muslim countries and with whom Salif Keita was to perform admittedHere everything is political, even art“. Artists cannot breach the Palestinian-led boycott, play in Israel and ignore the fact that by doing so, they assist the Zionist regime in its concerted efforts to obscure its crimes against humanity committed daily against Palestinians.

Previously, there have been reports about other artists – Eric Burdon, Arch Enemy, Joy Harjo and Joker – receiving threats yet no evidence has been ever produced. Significantly however, the use of mythical ‘threats’ by Zionists to attempt to smear BDS and price-tag activists has been documented.

Evidenced by Israel pumping another NIS3m investment into the use of paid ‘covert’ hasbara troops to spread its fictitious promotional material, BDS and its human rights advocates are regarded as a serious threat by the Zionist regime. The campaign to ‘delegitimize the delegitimizers’ was formulated by the propaganda strategy outfit, the Reut Institute. In January 2010, Reut Founder and President, Gidi Grinstein, saidTherefore, an extraordinary effort is required to respond to and isolate Israel’s delegitimizers. We must play offense and not just defense.

Propaganda and lawfare outfit NGO Monitor President, Gerald Steinberg, called in July 2013to respond to delegitimization “like we’re in a war. We need counterattacks.”

Commanded from the top by the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, the network of Israeli hasbara is immense, very well-funded and highly organised. In contrast, BDS is a broad-based, unfunded grassroots movement of conscientious individuals around the world who are in solidarity with the call of the oppressed Palestinian people for justice, freedom and rights denied to them by apartheid, settler colonial Israel. As with the global boycott called by the ANC against apartheid South Africa, BDS activists act spontaneously on an ethical basis, in accordance with guidelines affirmed by Palestinian civil society, solidly grounded in human rights and international law, with no formal hierachy of command.

It is the Zionist regime and its oppressive practices which are threatened by BDS, a movement which has snowballed since commencing in 2005, with strong support from prominent people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nigel Kennedy, Pete Seeger, Mira Nair, Cassandra Wilson, Ronnie Kasrils, Gil Scott Heron, Naomi Klein, Miriam Margolyes and many, many more.

Because the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is based in human rights and has firm anti-racist principles, the type of behaviour which the announcement in Keita’s name states is not commensurate with the moral grounds underpinning BDS. However, it is standard behaviour for Zionists who harass, slander and threaten daily. Therefore it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that if threats have been made, their source could be from Israel’s hasbara machine as part of a co-ordinated dirty tricks campaign.

A brief foray around the net reveals Zionist racism against the artist.

For example, on the original Hebrew Ynet cancellation story, the artist is excoriated by a racist Zionist: “let him go back to the trees he came down from – we don’t need him here”

On Salif Keita’s Facebook page wall, there’s more Zionist abuse against the artist:

Galit Levi: You speak about love and peace, but you act otherwise.

I think that you, who suffered ostracism yourself, about your color, you should be the first to call against this BDS, especially when they tell lies about the policy in Israel against Arabs who call themselves “Palastinians”.

Alon Idelson: You weren’t forced to cancel, you could come, but, you got chicken legs and afraid. Unlike many many other artists who got similar threats but gave the third finger to these threats & came to spread their message of peace & love to the people of Israel, which, as known, include jews, christians and muslims living together. Shame on you.

And bigoted Zionist attacks against Jews who support BDS:

TAAZ – The Anti Anti Zionist Haha, read Yael the bigot, by condemning the boycott he “did not breach the boycott”. It’s like telling Jews who escaped from Germany in 1933 that by leaving because the Nazis persecuted them, they supported the Nazis’ wishes. Oh wait – BDS says that too! https://sites.google.com/site/jewsagainstracistzionism/brenner-lenni-exposing-zionist-collaboration-and-complicity-with-the-nazis

TAAZ – The Anti Anti Zionist It’s always funny when professional anti-Israeli bigots blame those who fight their hateful messages for “being funded” by someone. Tsipi ___ is a professional activist in EU-funded organizations such as “Zochrot”. She’s getting her paycheck directly from associations that are dedicated to spread hatred, and then when she doesn’t like the fact that someone is exposing her lies, she uses terms like “Hasbara troll” and asks “who pays you”. But Tsipi is a professional hater not only against Israel – she will hate any group, as long as she is paid for it. On her blog you can read about her hatred of Israeli men, Israeli gays, and more – http://feminainvicta.com/

TAAZ – The Anti Anti Zionist You racist bigot, look at the threat on the left, it’s because of your bullying and harassment that he canceled. He rejects your hateful movement, and expresses his love for the people of Israel. Shame on you! You are on the verge of becoming a terrorist.

And Zionist attacks and threats against BDS activists:

TAAZ – The Anti Anti Zionist Falula, wherever you go, you will meet the Zionists who will name and shame you. We already understand that you and your gang have a problem with freedom of speech and think that they are the only ones who are allowed to spread their message. So no, in the real world, you will always find us defending against your lies.

With vile, genocidal Zionist racism:

Franco and Pepe Kalle Classic Round The reality is that Palestinians are no angels. They are the same people who use their kids and moms and girls as products to use. They are the ones who wanted to take over the Israel. Palestine should have not even existed. It is ashame that these guys cannot leave Israel and go to another country. Do not get me wrong, Israel has done some wrong but tell me what good Palestinian has done. Please some tell me. I am glad America is standing with Israel.

Perhaps the most ridiculously lurid and desperate Zionist accusation against BDS, which is a non-violent movement, is this one:

Adi Berger BDS is just like ansar al dine and the Al Qaeda groups who intimated and silenced artists in Mali.

Elsewhere on a Boycott Protest event wall, Israel’s anti-BDS Zionist propagandists also hate Jews who do not support their rightwing views.

Harvey Garfield: THE PROPHET ISAIAH WARNED THE JEWS that those seeking their destruction would emerge out of their own midst (Chapter 49, verse 17).

Jewish Leftists today serve as Jews-for-hire for every anti-Semitic and Israel-hating organization, magazine and web site on earth. These Jews who hate their own people are a tiny minority. Perhaps a mere five percent.
But they get around!

On another event wall for Tom Jones’ concert in Tel Aviv, there are serious, disturbing threats against BDS activists, and obscene photographs desecrating the Koran with human excreta which are unpublishable here, posted by proud Zionists:

Tim Collard: Won’t do any good. I have a photographic memory for these people’s names, and will happily pursue them all around the web.

Benji Hoshabyahu Arazi : BDS bullies belong in jail.

Robert Whyte: LEBANON BEING BOMBED AS I TYPE,SYRIA CHEMICAL WEAPONS, EGYPT ETHNIC CLEANSING OF CHRISTIANS, GANG RAPES IN PAKISTAN, INDIA……ETC.ETC………………AND THE JEW HATERS ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THE NATURAL COURSE OF EVOLUTION IN A MOSTLY PEACEFUL ISRAEL. YOUR ALL NAZI’S AND IF I GET MY WAY……….BEFORE I DIE OF CANCER……..YOUR GOING PAY……………THAT WILL BE MY LAST ACT ON EARTH. HOW SWEET IT IS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Robert Whyte I SEE IN YOUR EYES……..YOU GOT ARAB BLOOD. NOW I GET IT. MAYBE YOUR GRANDMOTHER SUCKED DIRTY ARAB COCK………..ICH !!!!!!!!!!

Aviel Mesayev: Fuck Palestine …..nothing is apartheid here..i join IDF soon and you guys be very sad

Racist settler colonial ideologies really bring out the worst in people.

Adam Shay of the JCPA specializes in battling the cultural boycott and hyping BDS ‘threats’. He provides the ‘professional’ Zionist hasbara perspective on combating BDS efforts to persuade artists to embrace the boycott of apartheid Israel online:

The aim of such efforts needs to be avoiding cancellation of concerts. A cancelled concert is a BDS victory. Every concert cancelled endangers future concerts, as it puts the burden of proof on the band/artists and requires them to justify and explain why they choose to play where others have chosen not to. Along the same logic, every concert that goes ahead eases future pressure on the next scheduled concert and the next boycott battle.

Clearly, the Israeli regime is threatened by boycott, divestment and sanctions, its propagandists are on the back foot, and with yet another performer cancelling their date with apartheid, BDS is winning!

Related Links

USACBI Responds to Unsubstantiated Claims of Threats

Where All Arabs Are Terrorists

Campagne BDS France:

When we contact artists, we do so in order to convince them, and to touch their minds and hearts. It would be totally against our principles to threaten them in any way whatsoever, and to do so would in fact be completely counter-productive. If indeed any artists should ever receive “threats”, we urge them to file a legal complaint. No allegations of threats have so far ever been substantiated in any way.

We are aware of the extremely strong pressure tactics applied by the State of Israel and its allies upon these artists, and we are therefore all the more grateful when they decide to cancel their performances in that country. However, we are saddened that, under the influence of other parties, and no doubt also for financial reasons, any artists who have refused to play in Israel, in a show of solidarity with the Palestinian people, should subsequently issue false statements inconsistent with the brave stance they took by boycotting Israel.

Artists who wish to boycott Israel can do so by cancelling a scheduled show and clearly explaining why, or by simply cancelling without providing a reason, if they so prefer. But they should not dishonour their brave act of solidarity by making violent and untruthful statements about our philosophy, our aims and our methods. The BDS campaign has never threatened anyone and will never do so. Our campaign is a peaceful, people’s campaign striving for the respect of international law and human rights.

Israel boycott campaigners reject “threats” claim by Afropop star Salif Keita

Dear Israel: Kick Out the Negroes : Letters from the Israeli Government Archives

Video Overviews of Israeli Anti-African Racism

Joseph Massad’s “The last of the Semites”

UPDATE 22/5/13

Professor Joseph Massad’s article has now been resurrected by Al Jazeera, along with a nebulous apology, after a first apology with the full article was posted for ten minutes and then removed.

UPDATE 22/5/13 several minutes later

“The last of the Semites” is now moved to a new location. The nopology remains here.

UPDATE 22/5/13 a few hours later

Ali Abunimah exposes Al Jazeera’s political censorship of Professor Joseph Massad’s “The last of the Semites” article.

“Clearly, the normal editorial controls had been circumvented in order for Massad’s article to be removed. The breakdown in accountability demonstrated by this incident has caused soul-searching among Al Jazeera staffers.

Several journalists on several continents spoke of a widespread sense that the blunder damaged the reputation of the whole network, especially in light of persistent criticism that Al Jazeera’s legendary independence, particularly of its Arabic channel, has been sacrificed to the interests of Qatar’s foreign policy.

Al Shihabi, an unaccountable senior manager, ordering the deletion of an article without telling either the author or the editors who commissioned it, seemed to confirm the worst expectations.”

Azmi Bishara identifies perfectly the chilling impact of Al Jazeera’s capitulation:

In a statement on his Facebook page hours before Massad’s article was restored, Bishara said that the deletion of Massad’s article followed false accusations of anti-Semitism by “Zionist” and “racist” individuals.

Relating the move to the planned launch of Al Jazeera America, Bishara added, “If the price of Al Jazeera’s entry into the United States means its submission to Zionist dictates, then this means that America will be moving into Al Jazeera and not the reverse.”

Given that even Massad’s university, Columbia, had eventually stood up to similar false and disproven accusations and campaigns, Bishara noted that Al Jazeera had been “even less vigilant than Columbia in defending the rights of an Arab professor to express his opinion. Shame on you.”

Professor Massad’s statement in response to the restoration of his article is published in the Electronic Intifada article:

“I am heartened to know that there has been a huge and widespread upheaval among Al Jazeera journalists and staffers against this arbitrary decision, which flew in the face of professional journalistic standards and the freedom of expression. Their opposition along with the reaction and outrage expressed by the general public internationally in the last two days clearly tipped the balance against the peremptory power of the profit-seeking executives and has put the latter on notice.

While the restoration of my article is a triumph against the political commissars of Al Jazeera, the statement that Al Jazeera issued, which contained no apology, falls short of being a triumph for all those who insist on maintaining Al Jazeera’s independence and critical edge from American media restrictions. I am saddened that their principled stance has yet to fully triumph in this important fight.

It seems to me that the attempt to censor my article is the price that Al Jazeera, or at least Ehab Al Shihabi and other upper management executives, are willing to pay in order to enter the US media market. This means that Al Shihabi and other executives at Al Jazeera see no problem in sacrificing Al Jazeera’s freedom of expression and subjecting it to the severe restrictions of the American mainstream media on the question of US foreign policy in the Middle East and on the question of Israel, thus eliminating in the process Al Jazeera’s critical coverage of both. Clearly, American Zionist pressure, placed on Al Shihabi and on Al Jazeera, is intended to impart to Al Jazeera the mediocre standards of mainstream American journalism and its commitment to severe censorship of views critical of US policy and of Israeli colonialism. When Oscar Wilde was asked in 1882 upon entering the US if he had anything to declare to the customs authorities of New York, he responded: “I have nothing to declare but my genius;” Not only is Al Jazeera having to declare its journalistic independence as a foreign taxable commodity, but it is also surrendering it at the US border altogether.

As for the line that someone made a mistake and removed my article because it resembled the one I had published last December, this line was tried on me on the phone when the new Head of Al Jazeera online Imad Musa called me yesterday evening to discuss the matter. Mr. Musa used that line as an opening bid but I quickly disabused him of it, explaining that while “The Last of the Semites” was related to the article I published last December titled “Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and Colonialism,” it was a different article altogether and had a different frame and a different set of arguments and facts. I also informed him that I had a very good idea how this decision had been taken and that Al Shihabi was the man behind the ban. He offered to arrange a meeting in New York between Al Shihabi and me, but I quickly told him that we could not ponder any such meetings until after Al Jazeera restored my article and issued a public apology. I also informed him that I do not meet with people who coordinate with the likes of Rahm Emanuel.

After making a few phone calls, Mr. Musa called me back to assure me that I would be pleased with what Al Jazeera would do tomorrow (i.e. today). I explained that since he was the new Head of Al Jazeera Online (he told me that he had been appointed in this new position ten days ago), he could restore the article and issue the apology immediately and not have to wait till the next day. He explained that the matter was “more complicated than that.” I retorted: “Are you or are you not the Head of Al Jazeera Online?” He murmured embarrassingly that the matter was not in his hands. I responded by reaffirming to him that indeed it was not and that the matter was not up to him but to the higher ups who made the decision for political reasons.

At any rate, Mr. Musa never called back today, though he issued a statement on the Al Jazeera website this afternoon which does not contain an apology to the readers or to me. There are no expressions of regret either, or any acknowledgment of the motivations for the censorship. Musa repeats the shameful excuse that the reason why the article was pulled was due to its alleged similarity with the December article. I find this to be a damage control move that refuses to take responsibility for Al Jazeera’s submission to American Zionist dictates.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Without any public explanation, Al Jazeera has censored Joseph Massad’s excellent article focussing on the relationship between zionism, antisemitism and white supremacism. As Ali Abunimah says in his article critiquing Al Jazeera’s disgraceful withdrawal of the article:

“Since its publication, the article generated intense criticism from Zionist extremists, including a columnist in the virulently anti-Palestinian Jerusalem Post, and condemnation on Twitter from President Barack Obama’s favorite Israel lobby gatekeeper and former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg.

The backlash has been so intense precisely because Massad goes to the core of Israel’s claim to represent Jews and to cast its critics as anti-Semites by showing that indeed it is Israel and Zionism that partake of the same anti-Semitism that targeted European Jews.

In doing so, Massad pulls the rug from under Zionists and Israel lobbyists by demonstrating that they are the anti-Semites and taking away the most formidable weapon they wield against critics of Israel: the accusation that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

By neutralizing this ideological weapon that Israel has used so effectively in the Western media to cover up its colonization of Palestine, Massad’s pro-Jewish position and strenuous attack on Zionist anti-Semitism is clearly understood by Israel lobby figures such as Goldberg as a complete obliteration of their ideological arsenal.”

Ironically, Al Jazeera’s act of censorship also demonstrates and confirms Massad’s thesis of collaboration between western and zionist elites.

Joseph Massad’s speech “The last of the Semites” was presented at the 2nd Stuttgart Conference 2013.

Watch the whole conference

Massad’s article is republished below in an act of solidarity to assist the knowledge within to reach as wide an audience as possible.

The last of the Semites

Jewish opponents of Zionism understood the movement since its early age as one that shared the precepts of anti-Semitism in its diagnosis of what gentile Europeans called the “Jewish Question”. What galled anti-Zionist Jews the most, however, was that Zionism also shared the “solution” to the Jewish Question that anti-Semites had always advocated, namely the expulsion of Jews from Europe.

It was the Protestant Reformation with its revival of the Hebrew Bible that would link the modern Jews of Europe to the ancient Hebrews of Palestine, a link that the philologists of the 18th century would solidify through their discovery of the family of “Semitic” languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. Whereas Millenarian Protestants insisted that contemporary Jews, as descendants of the ancient Hebrews, must leave Europe to Palestine to expedite the second coming of Christ, philological discoveries led to the labelling of contemporary Jews as “Semites”. The leap that the biological sciences of race and heredity would make in the 19th century of considering contemporary European Jews racial descendants of the ancient Hebrews would, as a result, not be a giant one.

Basing themselves on the connections made by anti-Jewish Protestant Millenarians, secular European figures saw the political potential of “restoring” Jews to Palestine abounded in the 19th century. Less interested in expediting the second coming of Christ as were the Millenarians, these secular politicians, from Napoleon Bonaparte to British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston (1785-1865) to Ernest Laharanne, the private secretary of Napoleon III in the 1860s, sought to expel the Jews of Europe to Palestine in order to set them up as agents of European imperialism in Asia. Their call would be espoused by many “anti-Semites”, a new label chosen by European anti-Jewish racists after its invention in 1879 by a minor Viennese journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr, who issued a political programme titled The Victory of Judaism over Germanism. Marr was careful to decouple anti-Semitism from the history of Christian hatred of Jews on the basis of religion, emphasising, in line with Semitic philology and racial theories of the 19th century, that the distinction to be made between Jews and Aryans was strictly racial.

Assimilating Jews into European culture

Scientific anti-Semitism insisted that the Jews were different from Christian Europeans. Indeed that the Jews were not European at all and that their very presence in Europe is what causes anti-Semitism. The reason why Jews caused so many problems for European Christians had to do with their alleged rootlessness, that they lacked a country, and hence country-based loyalty. In the Romantic age of European nationalisms, anti-Semites argued that Jews did not fit in the new national configurations, and disrupted national and racial purity essential to most European nationalisms. This is why if the Jews remained in Europe, the anti-Semites argued, they could only cause hostility among Christian Europeans. The only solution was for the Jews to exit from Europe and have their own country. Needless to say, religious and secular Jews opposed this horrific anti-Semitic line of thinking. Orthodox and Reform Jews, Socialist and Communist Jews, cosmopolitan and Yiddishkeit cultural Jews, all agreed that this was a dangerous ideology of hostility that sought the expulsion of Jews from their European homelands.

The Jewish Haskalah, or Enlightenment, which emerged also in the 19th century, sought to assimilate Jews into European secular gentile culture and have them shed their Jewish culture. It was the Haskalah that sought to break the hegemony of Orthodox Jewish rabbis on the “Ostjuden” of the East European shtetl and to shed what it perceived as a “medieval” Jewish culture in favour of the modern secular culture of European Christians. Reform Judaism, as a Christian- and Protestant-like variant of Judaism, would emerge from the bosom of the Haskalah. This assimilationist programme, however, sought to integrate Jews in European modernity, not to expel them outside Europe’s geography.

When Zionism started a decade and a half after Marr’s anti-Semitic programme was published, it would espouse all these anti-Jewish ideas, including scientific anti-Semitism as valid. For Zionism, Jews were “Semites”, who were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. In his foundational pamphlet Der Judenstaat, Herzl explained that it was Jews, not their Christian enemies, who “cause” anti-Semitism and that “where it does not exist, [anti-Semitism] is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations”, indeed that “the unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America”; that Jews were a “nation” that should leave Europe to restore their “nationhood” in Palestine or Argentina; that Jews must emulate European Christians culturally and abandon their living languages and traditions in favour of modern European languages or a restored ancient national language. Herzl preferred that all Jews adopt German, while the East European Zionists wanted Hebrew. Zionists after Herzl even agreed and affirmed that Jews were separate racially from Aryans. As for Yiddish, the living language of most European Jews, all Zionists agreed that it should be abandoned.

The majority of Jews continued to resist Zionism and understood its precepts as those of anti-Semitism and as a continuation of the Haskalah quest to shed Jewish culture and assimilate Jews into European secular gentile culture, except that Zionism sought the latter not inside Europe but at a geographical remove following the expulsion of Jews from Europe. The Bund, or the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, which was founded in Vilna in early October 1897, a few weeks after the convening of the first Zionist Congress in Basel in late August 1897, would become Zionism’s fiercest enemy. The Bund joined the existing anti-Zionist Jewish coalition of Orthodox and Reform rabbis who had combined forces a few months earlier to prevent Herzl from convening the first Zionist Congress in Munich, which forced him to move it to Basel. Jewish anti-Zionism across Europe and in the United States had the support of the majority of Jews who continued to view Zionism as an anti-Jewish movement well into the 1940s.

Anti-Semitic chain of pro-Zionist enthusiasts

Realising that its plan for the future of European Jews was in line with those of anti-Semites, Herzl strategised early on an alliance with the latter. He declared in Der Judenstaat that:

“The Governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain [the] sovereignty we want.”

He added that “not only poor Jews” would contribute to an immigration fund for European Jews, “but also Christians who wanted to get rid of them”. Herzl unapologetically confided in his Diaries that:

“The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

Thus when Herzl began to meet in 1903 with infamous anti-Semites like the Russian minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve, who oversaw anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, it was an alliance that he sought by design. That it would be the anti-Semitic Lord Balfour, who as Prime Minister of Britain in 1905 oversaw his government’s Aliens Act, which prevented East European Jews fleeing Russian pogroms from entering Britain in order, as he put it, to save the country from the “undoubted evils” of “an immigration which was largely Jewish”, was hardy coincidental. Balfour’s infamous Declaration of 1917 to create in Palestine a “national home” for the “Jewish people”, was designed, among other things, to curb Jewish support for the Russian Revolution and to stem the tide of further unwanted Jewish immigrants into Britain.

The Nazis would not be an exception in this anti-Semitic chain of pro-Zionist enthusiasts. Indeed, the Zionists would strike a deal with the Nazis very early in their history. It was in 1933 that the infamous Transfer (Ha’avara) Agreement was signed between the Zionists and the Nazi government to facilitate the transfer of German Jews and their property to Palestine and which broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany started by American Jews. It was in this spirit that Zionist envoys were dispatched to Palestine to report on the successes of Jewish colonization of the country. Adolf Eichmann returned from his 1937 trip to Palestine full of fantastic stories about the achievements of the racially-separatist Ashkenazi Kibbutz, one of which he visited on Mount Carmel as a guest of the Zionists.

Despite the overwhelming opposition of most German Jews, it was the Zionist Federation of Germany that was the only Jewish group that supported the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, as they agreed with the Nazis that Jews and Aryans were separate and separable races. This was not a tactical support but one based on ideological similitude. The Nazis’ Final Solution initially meant the expulsion of Germany’s Jews to Madagascar. It is this shared goal of expelling Jews from Europe as a separate unassimilable race that created the affinity between Nazis and Zionists all along.

While the majority of Jews continued to resist the anti-Semitic basis of Zionism and its alliances with anti-Semites, the Nazi genocide not only killed 90 percent of European Jews, but in the process also killed the majority of Jewish enemies of Zionism who died precisely because they refused to heed the Zionist call of abandoning their countries and homes.

After the War, the horror at the Jewish holocaust did not stop European countries from supporting the anti-Semitic programme of Zionism. On the contrary, these countries shared with the Nazis a predilection for Zionism. They only opposed Nazism’s genocidal programme. European countries, along with the United States, refused to take in hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors of the holocaust. In fact, these countries voted against a UN resolution introduced by the Arab states in 1947 calling on them to take in the Jewish survivors, yet these same countries would be the ones who would support the United Nations Partition Plan of November 1947 to create a Jewish State in Palestine to which these unwanted Jewish refugees could be expelled.

The pro-Zionist policies of the Nazis

The United States and European countries, including Germany, would continue the pro-Zionist policies of the Nazis. Post-War West German governments that presented themselves as opening a new page in their relationship with Jews in reality did no such thing. Since the establishment of the country after WWII, every West German government (and every German government since unification in1990) has continued the pro-Zionist Nazi policies unabated. There was never a break with Nazi pro-Zionism. The only break was with the genocidal and racial hatred of Jews that Nazism consecrated, but not with the desire to see Jews set up in a country in Asia, away from Europe. Indeed, the Germans would explain that much of the money they were sending to Israel was to help offset the costs of resettling European Jewish refugees in the country.

After World War II, a new consensus emerged in the United States and Europe that Jews had to be integrated posthumously into white Europeanness, and that the horror of the Jewish holocaust was essentially a horror at the murder of white Europeans. Since the 1960s, Hollywood films about the holocaust began to depict Jewish victims of Nazism as white Christian-looking, middle class, educated and talented people not unlike contemporary European and American Christians who should and would identify with them. Presumably if the films were to depict the poor religious Jews of Eastern Europe (and most East European Jews who were killed by the Nazis were poor and many were religious), contemporary white Christians would not find commonality with them. Hence, the post-holocaust European Christian horror at the genocide of European Jews was not based on the horror of slaughtering people in the millions who were different from European Christians, but rather a horror at the murder of millions of people who were the same as European Christians. This explains why in a country like the United States, which had nothing to do with the slaughter of European Jews, there exists upwards of 40 holocaust memorials and a major museum for the murdered Jews of Europe, but not one for the holocaust of Native Americans or African Americans for which the US is responsible.

Aimé Césaire understood this process very well. In his famous speech on colonialism, he affirmed that the retrospective view of European Christians about Nazism is that

it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before [Europeans] were its victims, they were its accomplices; and they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimised it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilisation in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

That for Césaire the Nazi wars and holocaust were European colonialism turned inwards is true enough. But since the rehabilitation of Nazism’s victims as white people, Europe and its American accomplice would continue their Nazi policy of visiting horrors on non-white people around the world, on Korea, on Vietnam and Indochina, on Algeria, on Indonesia, on Central and South America, on Central and Southern Africa, on Palestine, on Iran, and on Iraq and Afghanistan.

The rehabilitation of European Jews after WWII was a crucial part of US Cold War propaganda. As American social scientists and ideologues developed the theory of “totalitarianism”, which posited Soviet Communism and Nazism as essentially the same type of regime, European Jews, as victims of one totalitarian regime, became part of the atrocity exhibition that American and West European propaganda claimed was like the atrocities that the Soviet regime was allegedly committing in the pre- and post-War periods. That Israel would jump on the bandwagon by accusing the Soviets of anti-Semitism for their refusal to allow Soviet Jewish citizens to self-expel and leave to Israel was part of the propaganda.

Commitment to white supremacy

It was thus that the European and US commitment to white supremacy was preserved, except that it now included Jews as part of “white” people, and what came to be called “Judeo-Christian” civilisation. European and American policies after World War II, which continued to be inspired and dictated by racism against Native Americans, Africans, Asians, Arabs and Muslims, and continued to support Zionism’s anti-Semitic programme of assimilating Jews into whiteness in a colonial settler state away from Europe, were a direct continuation of anti-Semitic policies prevalent before the War. It was just that much of the anti-Semitic racialist venom would now be directed at Arabs and Muslims (both, those who are immigrants and citizens in Europe and the United States and those who live in Asia and Africa) while the erstwhile anti-Semitic support for Zionism would continue unhindered.

West Germany’s alliance with Zionism and Israel after WWII, of supplying Israel with huge economic aid in the 1950s and of economic and military aid since the early 1960s, including tanks, which it used to kill Palestinians and other Arabs, is a continuation of the alliance that the Nazi government concluded with the Zionists in the 1930s. In the 1960s, West Germany even provided military training to Israeli soldiers and since the 1970s has provided Israel with nuclear-ready German-made submarines with which Israel hopes to kill more Arabs and Muslims. Israel has in recent years armed the most recent German-supplied submarines with nuclear tipped cruise missiles, a fact that is well known to the current German government. Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Der SPIEGEL in 2012 that Germans should be “proud” that they have secured the existence of the state of Israel “for many years”. Berlin financed one-third of the cost of the submarines, around 135 million euros ($168 million) per submarine, and has allowed Israel to defer its payment until 2015. That this makes Germany an accomplice in the dispossession of the Palestinians is of no more concern to current German governments than it was in the 1960s to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer who affirmed that “the Federal Republic has neither the right nor the responsibility to take a position on the Palestinian refugees”.

This is to be added to the massive billions that Germany has paid to the Israeli government as compensation for the holocaust, as if Israel and Zionism were the victims of Nazism, when in reality it was anti-Zionist Jews who were killed by the Nazis. The current German government does not care about the fact that even those German Jews who fled the Nazis and ended up in Palestine hated Zionism and its project and were hated in turn by Zionist colonists in Palestine. As German refugees in 1930s and 1940s Palestine refused to learn Hebrew and published half a dozen German newspapers in the country, they were attacked by the Hebrew press, including by Haaretz, which called for the closure of their newspapers in 1939 and again in 1941. Zionist colonists attacked a German-owned café in Tel Aviv because its Jewish owners refused to speak Hebrew, and the Tel Aviv municipality threatened in June 1944 some of its German Jewish residents for holding in their home on 21 Allenby street “parties and balls entirely in the German language, including programmes that are foreign to the spirit of our city” and that this would “not be tolerated in Tel Aviv”. German Jews, or Yekkes as they were known in the Yishuv, would even organise a celebration of the Kaiser’s birthday in 1941 (for these and more details about German Jewish refugees in Palestine, read Tom Segev’s book The Seventh Million).

Add to that Germany’s support for Israeli policies against Palestinians at the United Nations, and the picture becomes complete. Even the new holocaust memorial built in Berlin that opened in 2005 maintains Nazi racial apartheid, as this “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” is only for Jewish victims of the Nazis who must still today be set apart, as Hitler mandated, from the other millions of non-Jews who also fell victim to Nazism. That a subsidiary of the German company Degussa, which collaborated with the Nazis and which produced the Zyklon B gas that was used to kill people in the gas chambers, was contracted to build the memorial was anything but surprising, as it simply confirms that those who killed Jews in Germany in the late 1930s and in the 1940s now regret what they had done because they now understand Jews to be white Europeans who must be commemorated and who should not have been killed in the first place on account of their whiteness. The German policy of abetting the killing of Arabs by Israel, however, is hardly unrelated to this commitment to anti-Semitism, which continues through the predominant contemporary anti-Muslim German racism that targets Muslim immigrants.

Euro-American anti-Jewish tradition

The Jewish holocaust killed off the majority of Jews who fought and struggled against European anti-Semitism, including Zionism. With their death, the only remaining “Semites” who are fighting against Zionism and its anti-Semitism today are the Palestinian people. Whereas Israel insists that European Jews do not belong in Europe and must come to Palestine, the Palestinians have always insisted that the homelands of European Jews were their European countries and not Palestine, and that Zionist colonialism springs from its very anti-Semitism. Whereas Zionism insists that Jews are a race separate from European Christians, the Palestinians insist that European Jews are nothing if not European and have nothing to do with Palestine, its people, or its culture. What Israel and its American and European allies have sought to do in the last six and a half decades is to convince Palestinians that they too must become anti-Semites and believe as the Nazis, Israel, and its Western anti-Semitic allies do, that Jews are a race that is different from European races, that Palestine is their country, and that Israel speaks for all Jews. That the two largest American pro-Israel voting blocks today are Millenarian Protestants and secular imperialists continues the very same Euro-American anti-Jewish tradition that extends back to the Protestant Reformation and 19th century imperialism. But the Palestinians have remained unconvinced and steadfast in their resistance to anti-Semitism.

Israel and its anti-Semitic allies affirm that Israel is “the Jewish people”, that its policies are “Jewish” policies, that its achievements are “Jewish” achievements, that its crimes are “Jewish” crimes, and that therefore anyone who dares to criticise Israel is criticising Jews and must be an anti-Semite. The Palestinian people have mounted a major struggle against this anti-Semitic incitement. They continue to affirm instead that the Israeli government does not speak for all Jews, that it does not represent all Jews, and that its colonial crimes against the Palestinian people are its own crimes and not the crimes of “the Jewish people”, and that therefore it must be criticised, condemned and prosecuted for its ongoing war crimes against the Palestinian people. This is not a new Palestinian position, but one that was adopted since the turn of the 20th century and continued throughout the pre-WWII Palestinian struggle against Zionism. Yasser Arafat’s speech at the United Nations in 1974 stressed all these points vehemently:

Just as colonialism heedlessly used the wretched, the poor, the exploited as mere inert matter with which to build and to carry out settler colonialism, so too were destitute, oppressed European Jews employed on behalf of world imperialism and of the Zionist leadership. European Jews were transformed into the instruments of aggression; they became the elements of settler colonialism intimately allied to racial discrimination…Zionist theology was utilised against our Palestinian people: the purpose was not only the establishment of Western-style settler colonialism but also the severing of Jews from their various homelands and subsequently their estrangement from their nations. Zionism… is united with anti-Semitism in its retrograde tenets and is, when all is said and done, another side of the same base coin. For when what is proposed is that adherents of the Jewish faith, regardless of their national residence, should neither owe allegiance to their national residence nor live on equal footing with its other, non-Jewish citizens -when that is proposed we hear anti-Semitism being proposed. When it is proposed that the only solution for the Jewish problem is that Jews must alienate themselves from communities or nations of which they have been a historical part, when it is proposed that Jews solve the Jewish problem by immigrating to and forcibly settling the land of another people – when this occurs, exactly the same position is being advocated as the one urged by anti-Semites against Jews.

Israel’s claim that its critics must be anti-Semites presupposes that its critics believe its claims that it represents “the Jewish people”. But it is Israel’s claims that it represents and speaks for all Jews that are the most anti-Semitic claims of all.

Today, Israel and the Western powers want to elevate anti-Semitism to an international principle around which they seek to establish full consensus. They insist that for there to be peace in the Middle East, Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims must become, like the West, anti-Semites by espousing Zionism and recognising Israel’s anti-Semitic claims. Except for dictatorial Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority and its cronies, on this 65th anniversary of the anti-Semitic conquest of Palestine by the Zionists, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, the Palestinian people and the few surviving anti-Zionist Jews continue to refuse to heed this international call and incitement to anti-Semitism. They affirm that they are, as the last of the Semites, the heirs of the pre-WWII Jewish and Palestinian struggles against anti-Semitism and its Zionist colonial manifestation. It is their resistance that stands in the way of a complete victory for European anti-Semitism in the Middle East and the world at large.

Joseph Massad teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians.

Related Links

ZIONISM AND ANTISEMITISM: RACIST POLITICAL TWINS – A J-BIG BRIEFING

A similar conflation was also promoted by the now-defunct EU Monitoring Centre (EUMC) on Racism and Xenophobia.29 According to its so-called ‘working definition of antisemitism’, it could be antisemitic to deny ‘the Jewish people their right to self-determination, for example by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour’.30 Since this definition was rejected by the UK’s Universities and Colleges Union (UCU), Zionists have campaigned for universities to de-recognise the union. This demonstrates once again that it is Zionists, not their critics, who continue to equate their colonial-settler project with all Jews. By claiming to be ‘the State of the Jews’, Israel implicates all Jews in Israel’s wars, occupation, land thefts, expulsions and other crimes.

Mirroring that equation, some misguided supporters of the Palestinians have attributed their oppression to an international Jewish conspiracy, to ‘Jewish power’, to ‘a Jewish spirit’, etc. The extreme-Right journalist Israel Shamir promotes those elements of traditional European antisemitism, ostensibly to support the Palestinians. These explanations obscure the source of Palestinian oppression. They perversely accept Zionist claims to represent all Jews and ‘Jewish values’.

Leading Palestinian commentators and activists reject such “support” as damaging the Palestinian cause. Ali Abunimah, Joseph Massad, Omar Barghouti and Rafeef Ziadeh were among dozens who denounced those who blame ‘Jewish’ characteristics for the oppression of Palestinians.31 As the Palestinian BDS National Committee has argued, ‘equating Israel and world Jewry… is itself antisemitic’. 32

The equation stereotypes Jews, threatens their civil rights and undermines their national identity in countries where they live. It originated from antisemites who saw Jews as an alien people not belonging in Europe and needing their own homeland. This equation is contradicted by the many people of Jewish origin who actively support Palestinian national rights and play central roles in the BDS campaign.

How Ben Gurion cooked up the lie that Palestinians left their lands of their own accord.

‘ Ben-Gurion was convinced that the refugee problem was primarily one of public image (hasbara). Israel, he believed, would be able to persuade the international community that the refugees had not been expelled, but had fled. ‘

More political censorship with the Church of Scotland paper “The Inheritance of Abraham”:

The Church of Scotland waters down its paper after predictable zionist pressure. New para on BDS reads:

‘Church leaders from South Africa, following a visit to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory in the autumn of 2012, observed similarities to the concluding years of the apartheid regime in South Africa. 13 There are many members of the Jewish community in Israel and abroad concerned with injustice in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory who would fundamentally disagree with that description 14 but it is challenging that those who remember the reality of apartheid first hand and the consequences of international campaigns on their own nation
concur with proposals to consider economic and political measures involving boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions against the state of Israel focused on illegal settlements, as the best way of convincing Israeli politicians and voters that what is happening is wrong. They argue that Christians around the world should not contribute in any way to the viability of illegal settlements. This raises particular questions for the Church of Scotland as we seek to respond to the question: “What does the Lord require of you…?”’

The original para on BDS read:

‘Church leaders from South Africa, following a visit to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the autumn of 2012, observed similarities to the concluding years of the apartheid regime in South Africa.16 They concur with proposals to consider economic and political measures involving boycotts, disinvestmentand sanctions against the state of Israel focused on illegal settlements, as the best way of convincing Israelipoliticians and voters that what is happening is wrong, and that Christians around the world should notcontribute in any way to the viability of illegal settlements. This raises particular questions for the Church of Scotland as we seek to respond to the question: “What does the Lord require of you…?”’

Church of Scotland’s revised ‘Promised Land’ report has softer edges but thrust is unchanged

Sol Salbe translates a response to Akiva Bigman’s deceptive figures. Read about the intentions of the Israeli regime to limit Palestinian development from 1968.

Australia’s racist, colonialist, neoliberal and imperialist political elements swarm to sign the London Declaration, an ironic document which singles out and fetishises Israel even as Israel fetishises itself, whilst both Australian and Israeli elites continue their vile genocide of Indigenous people in stark contravention of the document’s clauses.

Other Links

Omar Barghouti: “Given his unparalleled standing among world academics, Stephen Hawking’s recent decision to support the boycott propelled the BDS once again to the centre of public opinion. It is one of the starkest indicators yet that the tide is changing, even in the western mainstream, against Israel’s occupation, colonisation and apartheid and that BDS is fast reaching its South Africa moment of maturity and impact.”

Secret files reveal Anti-Defamation League spied on Noam Chomsky

Israel thumbs its dirty nose at peace and prepares to authorise four illegal outposts as recognised land theft settlement projects.

Amira Hass:

‘While the Palestinian Liberation Organization held a small procession in Ramallah to mark the Nakba on Wednesday, some 20 men and two women congregated in a hall in the El Bireh municipality to sign the document called “the popular movement project for one democratic state in historic Palestine.”

It states that “the racist Israeli policy of separation and segregation” has made the two-state solution (based on pre-1967 borders) unrealistic. Therefore, the most desirable option left for the Palestinian people and the one which will allow the right of return is: “a democratic state for all its citizens, which will be based on a democratic constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and will guarantee freedom and equal rights, without discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender, skin color, language, nationality, political opinion, social origin and place of birth.” ‘

Latest hasbara strategy plans. Hasbaroids to lay off online debate against BDS activists? they haven’t got the message yet, judging on the plethora of attacks on some of the recent pages.

‘Also, the more talkbacks a comment receives online, the higher the rating that the site/webpage will have and therefore the greater the number of people who see it. Arguing with BDS operatives online merely generates more exposure for their cause and arguments. ‘

Zionists plan to colonise Palestine in 1899:

“An article about a Conference of Zionists published on July 20, 1899 in the New York Times expresses that the Zionists “will colonize Palestine.”
The article explains that the conference discussed a paper from the English Zionist Federation “proposing the re-establishment of Judea as an independent State, suggesting the purchase of the Maccabean sites in Palestine, and the beginning of the work by the establishment of a Jewish colony and a Jewish Agricultural College there.”

The Hasbaroid Song

When your argument’s been lost, just give it one more toss
reach into the hasbara stash for Khhhhammass, Khhhhammasss, Khhhhammas.

If the ‘terrorists’ produce inconvenient facts and you’re feeling that familiar lack
reach into the hasbara stash for Khhhhammass, Khhhhammasss, Khhhhammas.

So your logic’s in a knot and lies are all you’ve got
reach into the hasbara stash for Khhhhammass, Khhhhammasss, Khhhhammas.

Nothing thrills like raw hate, you can never underrate
The benefits of the hasbara stash and Khhhhammmmass, Khhhhammasss, Khammmasss.

The problem is all theirs, so please remember in your prayers
The goddamn, nasty, convenient stash of Khhaammmmass, Khhhhammmass, Khhammmass.

by Jinjirrie 2011-12

Arch Enemy, Freedom of Speech and BDS

The metal band Arch Enemy is scheduled to play apartheid Israel on 24th January, following their Khaos Over Europe Tour in conjunction with Amnesty International’s freedom of expression campaign.

Amnesty International: Freedom of expression

Whilst Palestine is not one of the 9 cases on which Amnesty is focusing, those who do speak out in non-violent protest are targeted by Israel for example: Israel urged to lift Al-Haq director’s travel ban and also political prisoners of conscience detained in military prisons without trial or charge.

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) group Don’t Play Apartheid Israel (DPAI) created a Facebook page to support the Palestinian call for BDS and to try to persuade Arch Enemy to cancel the gig in support of the oppressed Palestinian people.

Arch Enemy: Resist Playing for Apartheid Israel

PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) issued a very strong plea for Arch Enemy not to play apartheid Israel.

“Today, Palestinian civil society groups are calling on artists to shun Tel Aviv in the same way that South African activists called on artists to boycott Sun City. All we are asking is for you to refrain from crossing a picket line called by Palestinian society, endorsed by international organizations, and increasingly supported by progressive-Israelis [17]. Palestinian civil society is asking this of you as the most essential contribution to their struggle to achieve peace and justice. They are calling for nothing short of revolution, rebellion, and freedom, as echoed in the slogan of the BDS movement for Freedom, Equality and Justice.”

Arch Enemy: Stand with Revolution not Apartheid

While espousing freedom of speech, Arch Enemy engaged in censorship and deleted all posts which asked them to refrain from playing in Israel and urged them to listen to and really hear the Palestinian people from their official FB page.

On Saturday 3rd December, Angela Gossow from Arch Enemy posted this on the BDS Facebook page, as well as the USACBI page:

Arch Angela: if the constant threat, bullying and slander of arch enemy via email and online does not stop immediately, we will publish some of the threats we have recceived from your supporters, where they claim they will come to some of our shows and threaten to attack us, both verbally and physically.

i am making amnesty international aware of your criminal methods and your breach of freedom of choice, freedom of expression and freedom of art. it is up to us (and only us!) to chose in which countries we perform and bring our message to. it is NOT yours to tell us what to do and to force your will upon us. you are hurting our rights of freedom and you make us fear for our safety. SHAME ON YOU! Music should transcend all races, political issues and borders – we will not be instrumentalised, neither by you or any other organization or government. who are you to tell us what to do?! Yesterday at 17:23

There were absolutely no threats made against Arch Enemy by BDS campaigners, rather attempts to highlight the terrible injustices that Israel subjects the Palestinians to and efforts to get the band to live up to its talk of freedom and equality and not to endorse a state which occupies, dispossesses and imprisons a people.

Arch Angela from Arch Enemy on FacebookZaza comment to Arch Enemy censored

Today, further posts were removed from the Arch Enemy page, giving the lie to their claims of: “End repression. Allow expression!”

So, if Arch Enemy believes in freedom of expression, why do they engage in censorship? If they think there is nothing wrong in ignoring the Palestinians and playing in apartheid Israel, why not engage in discussion?

SOURCE

UPDATE

Another post in support of freedom of expression in Israel and BDS has been removed from Arch Enemy’s facebook page wall.

Related Links

Israel rights group attacks government for curbing freedom of speech
Israel restricts freedom of expression and the right to demonstrate, a report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel says.

Administrative Detention in the Occupied Palestinian Territory – Between Law and Practice [.pdf]

The detention of Palestinians by the IOF is carried out on the basis of article
78 (a-d) of Military Order No. 378 of 1970 on “Security regulations” (Judea
and Samaria), as well as subsequent military orders amending that order.
Based on these orders, any Palestinian can be held for eight days without
being informed of the reason for his or her arrest and without being
brought before a judge on the basis of secret information that neither
the detainees nor their lawyers have access to. The detainee can also be
prevented from meeting with his or her lawyer for two days and the IOF is
not required to notify the family of the detainee of the reasons for, or the
location of, his or her detention. Thus, it can be concluded that the IOF
violate the right of Palestinian detainees to be informed of the reasons for
their detention, as provided for in international humanitarian and human
rights law.

Addameer testifies at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine

Israel’s policies of large-scale and arbitrary arrest and detention of Palestinians are made possible by a discriminatory regime of law and institutions working in three main concurrent ways to maintain domination over Palestinians: first by applying a more advantageous legal regime to Jewish Israelis, whether residing in the oPt or in Israel; second by effectively criminalizing any opposition to the occupation; and finally by applying differing legal systems to different parts of the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), thereby fragmenting and segregating the Palestinian territory and people.

In the West Bank, Israeli authorities carry out arrests and detentions of Palestinians by virtue of a system of military regulations in place since the beginning of the occupation. According to international humanitarian law, any new legislation enacted by the Occupying Power should be limited to regulations protecting the rights of protected persons or the security of the Occupying Power. The military orders issued by Israel, however, extend much beyond these limits and further criminalize any form of opposition to the occupation, legally cementing the oppression of the Palestinian people. Despite living in the same territory, Jewish settlers residing in the West Bank are not subjected to this legislation, but rather to Israeli civil law, applied extra-territorially. Under this separate and unequal legal regime, Palestinians are subjected to more severe detention and sentencing provisions than Jewish settlers, with little or no effective judicial oversight, most notably with regard to administrative detention. In addition, the military courts, through which these military orders are enforced, do not conform to international fair trial and due process standards, further contributing to the arbitrary nature of this regime.

Before Israel’s unilateral “withdrawal” from Gaza in 2005, a similar system of military orders governed the arrest of Palestinians in the Strip. Since then, however, Gazans have been subjected to a different legal regime than Palestinians in the West Bank and are instead mainly arrested on the basis of Israeli criminal law, under which they are automatically classified as “security” prisoners and suffer from harsher standards of detention and sentencing than their “criminal” counterparts.

In East Jerusalem, although Israel imposed Israeli civil law upon its illegal annexation of the city in 1967, Palestinian residents continue to be subjected to a dual system of law: Israeli civil law and Israeli military regulations. In that framework, Israeli authorities often detain and interrogate Palestinians from East Jerusalem under military orders, a system that permits longer periods of detention, before transferring them to the Israeli civil system for trial, where prosecutors can seek higher sentences based on the principle that security offenses are less common than in the military system in the oPt. The arrest and detention of Jewish settlers residing in East Jerusalem, however, is governed solely by Israeli civil law, which affords them greater protection and due process rights.

Finally, within the domestic criminal justice system itself, Israeli authorities discriminate between incarcerated Jewish and Palestinian citizens by defining them either as “security” or as criminal prisoners, with the overwhelming majority of the former being Palestinians. Classification as a security prisoner carries with it fewer legal guarantees and rights, with privileges such as receiving family visits without a glass divider, access to books or other items, and occasional visits outside the prison available only to criminal prisoners.

Furthermore, security prisoners are interrogated by the Israeli Security Agency, which often uses methods that amount to ill-treatment and torture. Criminal prisoners, on the other hand, are interrogated by the Israeli police, whose methods of operation are governed by a different set of rules. This has created two distinct regimes of interrogation, with the one affording less protection and rife with abuse used almost exclusively against Palestinians, whether from theoPt or Israel.

It therefore appears that Israel’s arrest and detention of Palestinians in the oPt and within Israel proper is governed by a regime of laws and institutions almost completely separate from the one administering the arrest of Jewish Israelis. Because this system enables the large-scale arbitrary arrest of Palestinians while generally affording them lower protections and guarantees than Jewish Israelis, it should be understood as a discriminatory institutional tool of domination and oppression against them.

Interview: Hunger strikes created “new sense of solidarity”
A Palestinian political prisoner’s take on Israel’s protest movement
PCHR Weekly Report: 2 Palestinians wounded, 23 abducted by Israeli troops this week
Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire on Palestine, Political Prisoners and Nuclear Weapons
Abraham Foxman in the Huffington Post: Israel’s democracy is eroding
Richard Falk on the Russell Tribunal : The importance of the RToP session is to strengthen the civil society case against the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people. As such, it adds a certain quality of gravitas to such international initiatives as the Freedom Flotilla and the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign.

Dealing to Zionist Smears of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

In contrast to a hedge fund-bankrolled Emergency Committee For Israel scraping the bottom of the barrel to smear Occupy Wall Street as antisemitic, Jewish people are joining the protests in an indication that policies beloved of zionist and neoliberal elites are not for them.

#OccupyWallStreet: Yom Kippur Celebration in Support of Occupy Wall Street

Kol Nidre @ Occupy Wall St.

Related Links

On Charges of “antisemitism” at Occupy Wall Street

“But then I see one Daniel Sieradski, whose primary purpose in life seems to be com­modi­tiz­ing his dissent, sug­gest­ing that a sign which reads, “End financial aid to Israel, end occu­pa­tion of Gaza,” is going to scare off the “7 million” [sic] Jewish New Yorkers who support murdering Pales­tin­ian children. According to this line of thinking, if the Occupy Wall Street Protests are going to attract a broader base – like the mostly middle class or working class Arab com­mu­ni­ties in Bay Ridge, the Iraqi cab drivers, the Yemeni and Egyptian deli operators and the Moroccan kebab-stand pro­pri­etors of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the mostly poor or working Afghan, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi com­mu­ni­ties on Coney Island Avenue and Queens, all of whom hate the occu­pa­tion, let alone the broader white, black, and Puerto Rican working classes whose tax dollars go, in yearly three billion dollar chunks, to Israeli Aircraft Indus­tries in the holy land or straight to Raytheon and Boeing in America, in the process chopping up some Lebanese and Pales­tin­ian children into pieces – they have to drop issues like the occu­pa­tion and military aid to Israel.”

‘Commentary’ smear of Occupy Wall St. doesn’t bother to get basic facts right
Palestinian BDS National Committee supports Wall Street protests
Occupy Brisbane begins | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM
RT @billybragg: The time has come. Midday Saturday, St Pauls. Occupy the London Stock Exchange bit.ly/qCNF6s #OccupyLSX I’ll be there
Silencing Occupy Wall Street and criticism of Israel through demonization
Israel plans expulsion of some 60,000 Bedouin Palestinians
Israel Blackmails Palestinian Patients

‘Besides the blackmail, Hamad further pointed out that patients were always insulted and sometimes, are forced to take their clothes off under the pretext of Israeli security.

“Israeli intelligence told me, ‘If you do not agree to cooperate with us, you will never recover and you will die in Gaza’.

“They also asked me to provide them with information about Palestinian militants,”‘

Palestine / Israel Links

EU ‘regrets’ Israel mosque demolition : While Israel ethnically cleanses 60,000 Bedouins and builds more illegal settlements, 95% of Palestinian building permits are rejected.
Report: Turkish prosecutor seeks Interpol notice for flotilla attackers ‘The ?stanbul Prosecutor’s Office … said the list of Israelis — reportedly prepared as a result of a Facebook search — was drawn up by the Humanitarian Aid Foundation (?HH), the Turkish charity that owned the raided ship.’
Some Palestinian prisoners to be released to Turkey
‘Breaking News! University of London Union has passed a motion of support for the campaign against KCL’s involvement in a research project with Ahava!’
Justice eludes activist, father of Palestinian child killed by IDF
Engelbert Humperdinck : Please Don’t Play for Apartheid Israel
Why isn’t UNESCO doing something about this? “In a statement on Tuesday, the Israeli military said it had destroyed the structure “because it was built without permission in an area that is used for army training.” On Palestinian land.

Other Links

Australian FM Kevvie Rudd on Australia’s direction in a dual super-power world.Rudd starts at 19.00. This ‘Labor leader’ applauds corporate leaders as ‘the wheels that keep our Australian economy turning’. #classtraitor ?”China & Australia are experiencing a fantastic mutual orgasm” @KRuddMP enthuses at 25.00 Rudd has said this before!
Norway killer says 80 anti-Islamic militant cells in Europe
No-one is above the law. Geoffrey Robertson | SlowTV | The Monthly