I have written here before about anti-Zionist propaganda. A recent article by Johann Hari, an award-winning, celebrity journalist for the Independent in the UK, goes beyond propaganda to pornography (click
here for article). This piece caters for the obsessive anti-Zionist anti-Semitism which has become a feature of the so-called progressive press.
Despite denials, this campaign - which closely resembles the vicious European anti-Semitism of the pre-Nazi era - caters for the semi-psychotic addicted crazies which infect every strata of society and need only some form of legitimation to give expression to their fantasies. The following quote from comments in response to the article(one example amongst many on the 'net) gives some idea of the thought processes underlying these obsessions:
“The next Anti-Christ will be jew..... Take a LOOK at a youtube video called The Esoteric Agenda....a real eye opener Explains how these jew bastards like Rockefellers, Rothchilds, Morgans etc. need to rule the planet by famine and disease....”
Hari knows about this trend. Previously he wrote “And, yes, the debate about Israel is being infected with anti-Semitism. I passionately support the creation of a Palestinian state…But why the constant rhetorical inflation of Israel's crimes to put them on a par with Nazi Germany?” He went on to say, “more people died in one afternoon in Bergen-Belsen than have been killed in twenty years of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.” He could equally have said “or killed in one night’s British bombing of German cities”.
But that did not stop Hari from writing his latest vicious piece of pornography. We must answer this campaign of defamation but we must also seek ways of carrying the fight to our enemies. I was told that Hari's article has been or is going to be published in The Star. I am unable to locate it on the Internet and have not been sent a hard copy, but was asked by Bev Goldman, Media Team leader for the SAJBOD, to write an op-ed piece in response.
Despite this uncertainty, I drafted a reply published below in full. It may yet appear in The Star, but you have it here in unexpurgated and unedited form. (Has Hari's original piece been blocked by objections to its publication of the Internet??)
I will be away for 3 weeks so don't expect anything from me for the next month. All the best and lets keep the responses coming.
Political PornographyEveryone knows it is easier to throw mud than to wipe it off, and Johann Hari in the Star (…) comes armed with something much more smelly than mud. He builds his article, to use his words, around Jewish filth being flung at a “cowering Palestinian population”.
Now Mr Hari is himself a shit-thrower of considerable note; he is the 2008 winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism amongst other awards. His descriptions are thus suitably vivid: “long stinking rivers of waste” and “…one of them burst drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste”. Being a celebrity journalist, apparently excuses Hari from the boring stuff like verifying the accuracy of his claims or contextualising them.
It seems almost petty to ask whether the Intifada launched in 2000, when Palestinian economic and population growth were at a peak and Arafat had been offered 95% of the West Bank and the opportunity to build a Palestinian state, may have dented the rehabilitation of the sewerage system in the West Bank and Gaza. Or whether the sewer pipes are blocked because they are used for Quassam rockets or because Hamas is targeting the Israel-Gaza crossings to prevent material getting through so as to increase political pressure on Israel.
Perhaps Hari could have mentioned that significant Israeli-Palestinian cooperation is on-going to address the complex, emotive and longterm issues around water and waste as evidenced by a recent publication entitled “Water Resources in the Middle East: Israel-Palestinian Water Issues From Conflict to Cooperation” edited by Hillel Shuval and Hassan Dweik. But none of this is pertinent to Hari’s true mission which is not to critique Israel’s attitude towards Palestinian welfare but to delegitimise the Israeli state. Excrement is really just the hors d’oevres.
Using Ilan Pappe as his historical witness, Hari quotes Ben Gurion as saying “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war”. (Ben Gurion was that dumb?) This was accomplished by Plan Dalit. “In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded,…some 800 000 people were ethnically cleansed and Israel was built on the ruins”.
All this, along with the “cowering Palestinians” is simply propaganda. The cowering Palestinians, aided by Iran and Syria, have launched thousands of rockets and mortars at southern Israel, have murdered and kidnapped Israeli soldiers and civilians and openly declare their intention to “liberate” the whole of Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean with the help of arms smuggled through Egypt.
Pappe, Hari’s source and apparent inspiration and a member of the Israeli Communist Party before emigrating in 2007, regards facts as irrelevant. A few direct quotes provides the flavour: “My bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the "truth" when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous”. “Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are?”
So it is hardly surprising that the “facts” used by Hari to support his case against Israel are nothing but fiction. The quote attributed to Ben Gurion has been dismissed by genuine historians (that is, those who believe that facts matter) as “pure invention”. Similarly, rather than Jews driving out helpless Palestinians, local Arab attacks starting in 1947 killed over 1000 Jews by March 1948 before the invasion of six Arab armies.
Now Hari is more than a crusading celebrity journalist: for instance he obtained a double first at Cambridge. So when he compares Israel in the Middle East with 30 million Kurds taking over most of Britain, he knows its bullshit. In case some of our readers have to be be told why, here goes:
Because Jews became a nation for the first time in “Palestine” about 3000 years ago and have had a presence there ever since. Because a pitiful couple of hundred thousand not 30 million Jews “invaded” the Middle East, many the remnants of slaughtered European communities. Because there was no Palestinian state for the Jews to invade, only a relatively minor province of the huge and failing Ottoman Empire occupied by about 30 000 Jews and 600 000 Arabs, many scattered as impoverished tenant farmers subject to the depredations of Bedouin raiders, plus a much smaller Arab middle and wealthy class. Jerusalem was already mainly Jewish. And, finally, because Israel does not occupy most of Arab land but less than one five hundredth. Palestinian Arabs share ethnicity, history, language and religion with around 300 million near neighbours.
It is easy enough to discredit Hari’s accusations since he hardly gets a single fact right. But that doesn’t get to the root of the issue. After all, no-one is claiming that Israel is a country of saints or that its creation was a kind of immaculate conception. For yardsticks of comparison just look at the history of the USA, Mexico, Britain, and so on down the list.
In reality Hari’s article goes beyond ordinary propaganda, it is anti-Zionist pornography; the kosher version of Holocaust denial. It arises from and caters to obsessive anti-Zionist, anti-Semitism, the bastard offspring of pre-Nazi anti-Semitism which has been resurrected globally by a sytematic media campaign over decades.
I exaggerate? Well here’s one comment following on Hari’s original article in the UK Independent from Laurie Smith: “The next Anti-Christ will be jew..... Take a LOOK at a youtube video called The Esoteric Agenda....a real eye opener Explains how these jew bastards like Rockefellers, Rothchilds, Morgans etc. need to rule the planet by famine and disease....” There are many more like that in the crevices of the Internet.
Hari knows of this psychotic underworld. In 2006 he wrote “And, yes, the debate about Israel is being infected with anti-Semitism. I passionately support the creation of a Palestinian state…But why the constant rhetorical inflation of Israel's crimes to put them on a par with Nazi Germany?” He went on to say, “more people died in one afternoon in Bergen-Belsen than have been killed in twenty years of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.” He could equally have said “or killed in one night’s British bombing of German cities”.
We have laws against gross sexual pornography in our media. Perhaps we need to apply some of the same standards to political pornography. It seems a much greater threat to a sane and decent society than the former kind.
Mike Berger
