The current “Israel Apartheid Week” on universities around the world, by focusing only on the imperfections of the Middle East’s sole democracy, is carefully designed to cover up far more serious problems of real apartheid in Arab and Muslim nations. The question is why do so many students identify with regimes that denigrate women, gays, non-Muslims, dissenters, environmentalists and human rights advocates, while demonizing a democratic regime that grants equal rights to women (the chief justice and speaker of the Parliament of Israel are women), gays (there are openly gay generals in the Israeli Army), non-Jews (Muslims and Christians serve in high positions in Israel) and dissenters, (virtually all Israelis dissent about something). Israel has the best environmental record in the Middle East, it exports more life saving medical technology than any country in the region and it has sacrificed more for peace than any country in the Middle East. Yet on many college campuses democratic, egalitarian Israel is a pariah, while sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, terrorist Hamas is a champion. There is something very wrong with this picture. And in the Jerusalem Post Danny Seaman, head of the Israel government press office, writes powerfully of the moral blindness and blatant double standards of the western media: Why are headlines of war crimes and editorials on UN resolutions run-of the-mill during Israel’s military operations to defend its citizens, yet when other countries’ forces unintentionally kill civilians it is a case of “apology accepted”? The reality of war is brutal anywhere – so why does the media adopt such vastly different approaches? Sadly, the issue runs much deeper. Israel today faces an onslaught of propaganda aimed at delegitimizing it. This week is bring “celebrated” as Israeli Apartheid Week on campuses worldwide, spreading lies and slander, promoting incitement and hatred. The media is a key tool – if not a willing accomplice – to this strategy. The manipulation of the rhetoric by human rights groups is all too often typeset in the media, and thus chiseled into history. Massacres are proclaimed where there have been none; terrorists hidden behind civilians remain hidden from the public eye. These myths become widespread on the blogosphere, with groups on Facebook, threads on Twitter and countless videos on YouTube forming the basis of a digital pogrom against the Jewish narrative, whereby social media and on-line networking are employed to make the demonization of Israel part and parcel of mainstream discourse. ... Even the most senior journalists are now attacked for being part of Israel’s daily existence or even for simply being Jewish; the harassment of New York Times bureau chief in Israel Ethan Bronner being the most notable, yet not the only, such incident. This isolation and demonization of Israel as a pariah state or an international outlaw reflects a concerted effort to cast it as being beyond the pale. As the echoes of the past color the dark shadows of the future, we see an attempt to cast the Jewish people into a “virtual” ghetto, ethnically cleansing the Jewish narrative from the legitimate international debate on the Middle East. This process of delegitimization is an affront to freedom of speech and freedom of the press – fundamental rights in a democracy. Read them both.The verbal pogrom
Sunday, 7 March 2010
A propos ‘lawfare’ and Anti-Israel Pogrom week, here are two excellent articles. Alan Dershowitzcalls for a real ‘apartheid week’, protesting at the exclusion and oppression of Jews, women, gays and others in Muslim lands:
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