BILINGUES ? POSTS IN ENGLISH

Police discover children as young as seven being groomed for terrorism
Children in Britain as young as seven have been identified by police as being groomed for terrorism, with some already talking about become suicide bombers.


Nick Britten
Published: 12:57PM GMT 10 Jan 2010

Around 10 primary school pupils, aged between seven and 10, have been referred to a Government scheme to help combat the radicalisation of youngsters.

One child was referred to the Channel Project, a national programme run by the police and Government, after shocking his teachers by writing on a school book: “I want to be a suicide bomber.”

Related Articles

*
Two hundred British schoolchildren identified as potential terrorists
*
Police hero 'stole church funds to buy Bechstein Grand piano', court told
*
Terrorist Isa Ibrahim was a 'lone wolf' who radicalised himself
*
Jean Charles de Menezes inquest: How police missed countless chances to save him
*
Pakistan hotel blast: timeline of attacks this year

The Channel Project was set up in the wake of the 7th July terrorist attacks in London.

It is operated by the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers, and works with schools, Muslim communities, youth workers and social workers.

Teachers and parents are asked to look out for warning signs and police officers work alongside Muslim communities to identify impressionable children who are at risk of radicalisation or who have shown an interest in extremist material, either on the internet or in books.

In June 2008 the project had identified 10 children at risk of being turned to violence. By March last year that figure had increased to 200.

Currently around 230 young people, mostly men aged between 15-24, have been identified, many of them by their parents because they suddenly changed from wearing Western clothes to strict Islamic dress, or began expressing devout Islamic views.

The British Government has denied claims that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian charged with trying to set off a bomb on a US-bound plane on Christmas Day, was radicalised and recruited by al-Qaeda whilst a student in London.

Files found by detectives are alleged to have shown that Abdulmutallab, 23, had ties to known Islamic radicals while an undergraduate at University College London between 2005 and 2008, where he was president of the Islamic Society.

Craig Denholm, Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey police, who oversees the project, said: “For people to be identified there have to be distinct changes in behaviour and warning signs.

“We assess each one on its own merits.” He said there was a “very small” number of seven, eight, and nine-year-olds involved.

Tactics used to turn youngsters away from extremism and integrate them into mainstream society include football coaching and outdoor adventure courses.

to-be-free,

Avec tout le respect que je te dois, je pense que c'est toi l'automobiliste qui es au point mort. Il a fallut que je me concentre vraiment pour lire et comprendre le texte de Gil009. Tu devrais en faire de même.

Dishonest Reporter Award 2009
Our annual recognition of the most skewed and biased coverage of the Mideast conflict.


This year, a four-letter word dominated coverage of Israel on a near-daily basis.

Gaza.

The war -- which began at the end of December in response to increased Palestinian rocket fire -- ended on the 20th day of the year.

The media war was dizzying. A prominent Greek weekly called Jews "Christ killers." Hamas terror leaders got soapboxes in prominent US and British papers. BBC Arabic hosted a wonk who justified the death of Israeli kids. Canadian and Aussie reporters had close calls with Qassams; Israel restricted media access to Gaza in large part because of the Hamas "CNN strategy." Al-Aqsa TV writers killed off Assud the Rabbit. And when Hamas fired a rocket from a foreign press building, an Al-Arabiya journalist's delighted reaction was caught on camera for YouTube posterity.

Perhaps the most definitive example of the spin games Israel confronted in the mainstream media was from South African editor Mondli Makhanya and his pernicious portrayal of Israel:

Israel's response to the "provocation" amounted to a steroid-pumped heavyweight boxer arriving to fight an anaemic midget armed with steel-lined boxing gloves.

All that was just January.

The rest of the year dealt with war crimes allegations, the Strip's closure, Hamastan, Gilad Shalit, issues surrounding human rights organizations (most notably Human Rights Watch and its staffer Marc Garlasco), the Goldstone Report, and, last but not least, floundering Palestinian unity efforts – which were impacted by the war.

As the first anniversary of Operation Cast Lead approaches, Israel and the Palestinians continue fighting over the very facts of the war. Most news outlets report that more than 1,000 civilians died in the war, but Italian journalist Lorenzo Cremonesi was the first to indicate that the casualty count was far smaller than what Palestinian sources present. Later in the year, Simona Weinglass dug deeper, finding that Israelis and Palestinians even differ on the definition of a civilian casualty.

Lest we forget, there was more to Israel than Gaza. Israeli voters elected Benyamin Netanyahu to lead the country. Ben Gurion University Professor Neve Gordon's call for a boycott of his own country sparked outrage among academics inside and outside of Israel. Neither was sports sacred: Al-Jazeera tried to bury Israeli soccer success.

Meanwhile, the financial pressures of the journalism industry continued hitting the foreign press corps. In April, McClatchy News correspondent Dion Nissenbaum poignantly noted how Beit Agron, which once bustled with foreign news bureaus, has become a ghost town. Now, in a sign of the times, Nissenbaum himself leaves for Afghanistan. Other reporters will cover Israel for McClatchy, but it will no longer maintain a full-time bureau.

Such is the state of journalism in microcosm.

Citizen journalism – the idea that anyone capable of posting text, photos or video online is a news source – emerged in 2009 as a force to be reckoned with. In Iran, ordinary people managed to supplant traditional journalism when the government banned press coverage of massive post-election protests. According to Mashable, in a 24-hour period, a staggering 3,000 videos were uploaded to YouTube and 2,250,000 blog posts were published – just about the Iranian protests.

HonestReporting on Facebook stirred international controversy when we organized a special Facebook group calling on Facebook to allow Golan residents to identify themselves as Israeli. Facebook changed its settings, prompting a Syrian boycott. President Bashar Assad's overreaction attracted welcome media interest in HonestReporting.

We thank our readers for sharing their feedback on the year's worst Mideast coverage. On with the "awards."



Poison Pen Award: Pat Oliphant

For outright demonization of Israel, Pat Oliphant, one of the world's most widely-syndicated cartoonists, wins hands down. The headless, jackbooted, goose-stepping figure holding an outstretched sword pushing a Star of David -- baring its fangs at a Gaza mother and baby -- appeals to the worst Nazi stereotypes.





In a presentation to the Australian Cartoonists Association posted on YouTube, Oliphant replaced the Jewish star with a swastika to emphasize his intended Nazi comparison. Here's Oliphant in his own words:
My complaint was that Israel, the Israeli state, was behaving very much like their former tormentors were behaving back in the 30s and 40s, and insinuating that they were, they had a somewhat Nazi side to the way they were behaving. And I feel somebody should say it. And I did. And the s**t hit the fan. And I'm still hearing about it.

As Barry Rubin wrote in a widely quoted response to Oliphant:

This is, then, a loathsome cartoon. But to dismiss it by the single word "anti-Semitism" will foreclose thought as to why it is a loathsome cartoon. It will allow its defenders to avoid facing the real problems with this cartoon and the worldview it represents. And worst of all: that argument implies that the only problem was using the ambiguous Mogen David, that it would have been acceptable if he had just written the word "Israel" on the Nazi monster he created to represent the Jewish state.



Lousiest Journalist Wannabe: Ken Livingstone, The New Statesman

During the year, a few papers began inviting various personalities to be guest editors, overseeing content for a day. This growing trend included comedian Stephen Colbert getting top job at Newsweek, and Ha'aretz letting prominent Israeli poets and writers run the paper. Guest editors are even a Christmas tradition at BBC Radio 4's flagship Today program.

The New Statesman jumped on the bandwagon by inviting ex-London mayor Ken Livingstone to be guest editor for the magazine's Sept. 17 issue. Unfortunately, the edition included "Red Ken's" fawning interview with Hamas boss Khaled Mashaal. An open-mic opportunity would be a more apt description: the Q&A's length came in at exactly 4,000 words.

Livingstone's entitled to talk to whomever he wants. Had he posted the interview on a blog of his own, nobody would have cared.

But The New Statesman is a mainstream magazine; it has a responsibility to publish news, not propaganda, irrespective of citizen journalists, celebrity editors, or media veterans. Too bad they didn't solicit Colbert's take on Hamas.



Most Insane Moral Equivalence: Max Blumenthal, Huffington Post

Thanks to the power of bloggers and online video, Iranian protesters made Neda Soltan an international icon after a graphic video of her murder by government forces went viral on YouTube. Unfortunately, Huffington Post blogger Max Blumenthal drew a despicable moral equivalence between her killers and the Israeli army.

As HonestReporting pointed out, there's a big difference between Basij militiamen firing live ammunition at peaceful protesters and IDF soldiers using rubber-coated bullets and tear gas at weekly fence protests.

Blumenthal is the same person who filmed drunken Jewish students talking about President Obama on the eve of his widely anticipated Cairo speech. Huffington Post, to its credit, removed the video from the web site, saying it "had no news value." (YouTube removed the video too.)



Worst Headline: The Evening Standard

Shortly before Israelis went to the polls in February to choose a Prime Minister, London's Evening Standard featured a headline so outrageous that no further comment is necessary.




Biggest Train Wreck of Mishandled Sources: Ha'aretz

In March, Ha'aretz broke a story of IDF soldiers' testimonies exposing war crimes and human rights violations. For Israel's critics, it was perfect: a sweeping indictment based on testimony from Israeli soldiers, first broken by a mainstream Israeli newspaper. The soldiers' testimonies spread like wildfire around the world with sensational headlines:

Israeli soldiers admit shooting dead civilians during Gaza war

But when the news cycle ran its course, it emerged that Ha'aretz's sources were based on nine soldiers describing incidents they heard about from others – hearsay. The head of the military academy where the discussions took place, Col. Danny Zamir, slammed the media's reaction to the affair. He wrote in the Jerusalem Post:

It was as if the media were altogether so eager to find reason to criticize the IDF that they pounced on one discussion by nine soldiers who met after returning from the battlefield to share their experiences and subjective feelings with each other, using that one episode to draw conclusions that felt more like an indictment.

And in a separate interview, Zamir singled out the NY Times:

Zamir said that what disturbed him the most was an article in The New York Times under the headline "A Religious War in Israel's Army," which left the impression that a veritable kulturkampf between religious and secular soldiers was under way.

Unfortunately, the hearsay element and Col. Zamir's response didn’t get equal billing to the sensational headlines Ha'aretz set in motion.



Biggest Train Wreck of Palestinian Sources: The Guardian

Shortly after Haaretz's bungled soldier’s testimonies, The Guardian published a package of news, video, commentary and a staff editorial about Israeli war crimes in Gaza it claimed to have uncovered. The so-called expose suffered from three primary problems, which HonestReporting elaborated on.

The Guardian's videos were presented as fact with out any supporting evidence.
The package lacked any verifiable information or any mention of the measures taken by the IDF to avoid civilian casualties while Hamas actively used human shields.
A reliance on dubious Palestinian sources. Palestinians aren't brave enough -- or stupid enough – to risk the wrath of Hamas by telling journalists (or human rights personnel or UN officials) about the homes used as cover for rocket fire, the mosques used as weapons dumps, or the hospitals and ambulances commandeered by Hamas leaders.
Furthermore, the Jerusalem Post discovered that The Guardian crossed the line into outright activism with a letter to bloggers and web site owners appealing for them to plug the package in order to

. . . add weight to calls this week for a full inquiry into the events surrounding Operation Cast Lead, which was aimed at Hamas, but which left over 1400 Palestinians dead - around 300 known to be children.



Biggest Train Wreck of Anonymous Sources: NY Times

When the White House sought to press Israel on settlements in June, anonymous "administration officials" told NY Times reporter Helene Cooper the US would take symbolic steps to show its protest.

It indicated a significant policy shift – a real scoop for Cooper. But Cooper and the Times were used to simply convey a threat to Israel and raise the stakes of a policy disagreement. The anonymous officials, whoever they were, chose the right paper. The threats, appearing in a paper as prominent as the Gray Lady, could neither be overlooked nor ignored, and were perfectly deniable.

For several weeks, the tension between the two countries made headlines and raised Arab expectations until Washington backed down.

If nothing else, the fallout was instructive. The dustup reminded everyone that Israel indeed had an understanding with the US allowing for some settlement activity in already-existing communities, and that Israel was indeed honoring that understanding. Elliott Abrams, who was involved in US-Israeli settlement discussions, wrote:

For the past five years, Israel's government has largely adhered to guidelines that were discussed with the United States but never formally adopted . . .

A look at an exchange of letters between President George Bush Jr. and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon shows that Israel might not have disengaged from Gaza without the understandings.

While the Obama administration ultimately took a hit, the NY Times was never called onto the carpet over how the way it was used.



Worst Conspiracy Mongering: Channel 4 Dispatches

In November, Channel 4's flagship investigative TV show, Dispatches, aired a look "Inside Britain's Israel Lobby." Hosted by Peter Oborne (watch parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) the show accused several UK-Jewish organizations of having divided loyalties to Israel, lacking transparency, and engaging in shady pressure tactics with the media, among other things.

No proof was ever offered that Jewish organizations lobbied the government or media differently than any other organized interest groups.

HonestReporting and managing editor Simon Plosker were targeted as well. Oborne's investigation of HonestReporting was shoddy enough (details here, here and here) that it calls into question the rest of his investigation.

If nothing else, the broadcast boosted Plosker's status in the Zionist media conspiracy.



Most Problematic Peer Review: British Medical Journal

Medical journals in South Africa and Canada unfairly took Israel to task over Operation Cast Lead. But when the British Medical Journal went even further, claiming HonestReporting stifled debate, Dr. Simon Fishman took a closer look and found the BMJ's interest in Israel, uh, disproportionate.

Does anyone remember when getting an article through the rigors of peer review to publishing in these medical journals was considered prestigious?



Most Senseless Talking Head: Michael White

Michael White, an associate editor at The Guardian, was a guest on BBC Radio London's Breakfast Show discussing an attack on Italian PM Sylvio Berlusconi when he made the following statement:

In Israel they murder each other a great deal. The Israeli Defense Forces murder people because they don't like their political style and what they've got to say and it only means that people more extreme come in and take their place.

A sharp interviewer with a little chutzpah could've stopped White in his tracks and followed up on his silly accusation. But it didn't occur to the Breakfast Show hosts to do that because White's language is now mainstream in the UK media. But even more troubling is the ease of White's lie coupled with his responsibilities as associate editor.

And how does The Guardian relate to this? Good question. The paper hasn't yet responded to HonestReporting's concerns or the hundreds of emails we were cc'd on.



Dumbest Question: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Independent

During the war, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown asked:

How many Palestinian Anne Franks did the Israelis murder, maim or turn mad?

The comparison only works if The Independent's columnist can prove Dutch Jews fired rockets at Germany for seven years . . .



Crummiest Quality Control: The Age

First, The Age of Melbourne published a nasty commentary by columnist Michael Backman, titled, Israelis Are Living High On US Expense Account in the paper's business section. The paper pulled the commentary and published an apology saying the column "was published in error." Backman apologized to the Australian Jewish community too.

How does a column that noxious get published in error? According to Crikey, both the editor of the paper and editor of the business section were on vacation, leaving behind sub-editors who had to handle a column that went beyond their expertise in business:

In this case, I hear that the subs on the business desk at The Age are still arguing that the Backman column was all right and the Age had no reason to apologise for running it.



And now for the winner . . .




Dishonest Reporter of the Year: Donald Bostrom, Aftonbladet

Despite all the issues surrounding the Gaza war, the unfounded claims of war crimes, the UN censure, lawfare efforts, and the contentious casualty count, readers selected a Swedish journalist who had never previously been on HonestReporting's radar. The article in question had absolutely nothing to do with the war, but the fallout it created was steady and ongoing – albeit less dramatic.

So we weren't surprised in the least to find that our winner, Aftonbladet's Donald Bostrom, touched a nerve in readers in ways that few journalists ever do.

It began in August when Aftonbladet, one of Sweden's largest dailies, published a double-page spread in its cultural section headlined: They Plunder the Organs of Our Sons. The story quoted Palestinian claims that Israeli soldiers seized young men from the West Bank and Gaza and later returned the bodies with missing organs. (Read the original article in Swedish here.) It stirred a hornet's nest of issues:

1) Independent verification: Bostrom failed to independently verify the claims of the family of Bilal Ahmed Ghanem, who died in 1992. Bostrom later backtracked, saying:

I was [present] during the interview that night, I was a witness. It concerns me to the extent that I want it to be investigated . . . But whether it's true or not - I have no idea, I have no clue.

Moreover, when Jerusalem Post reporter Khaled Abu Toameh tracked down the Ghanem family who said they never told Bostrom their son was missing organs:

The mother denied that she had told any foreign journalist that her son's organs had been stolen.

However, she said that now she does not rule out the possibility that Israel was harvesting organs of Palestinians . . . .

Bottom line: Bostrom's story is based on nothing more than unconfirmed testimonies, half-truths and speculation.

2) Using true facts to make a false conclusion: Bostrom "covered" Ghanem's death in 1992, so why revisit the issue? Because he places it in the context of the New Jersey organ trafficking scandal, an international conspiracy is strongly implied but never proven.

3) Burden of proof: Although the burden of proof for such a claim normally falls on the journalist, amazingly, Aftonbladet editor Jan Helin shifted it to Israel, when he told reporters:

The article poses a question – why has this body been autopsied when the cause of death is obvious? There I think Israeli authorities owe us an answer.

Not at all. It's up to Bostrom to convince doctors like Mazen Arafah and Andrea Meyerhoff, who point out that it's medically impossible to harvest organs from people who die of gunshots to the abdomen and chest—as Bostrom described of Ghanem.

4) Is the article anti-Semitic? The question cuts to the core of the ensuing diplomatic crisis when the Swedish government refused to condemn the article. Swedish officials maintained it was an issue of free speech, while Israeli officials argued that irresponsible journalism that incites against Israel and Jews everywhere.

For the record, Israel didn't ask Sweden to censor the article. For comparison, the UK government condemned the New Statesman for its interview with Khaled Mashaal.

5) News stories take on a life of their own: Since the article went to print, rumors of Israeli organ-harvesting surfaced in Ukrainian elections, were an excuse to ban Israeli doctors from an Egyptian medical conference, and brought at least one pseudo-journalist crawling out of the woodwork with copycat claims.

Moreover, as we prepared to publish these awards, Israel's Channel 2 aired a video of top pathologist, Dr. Yehuda Hiss, admitting that his staff harvested organs from Israelis and Palestinians during the 1990s without families' permission. The video offered no evidence that Palestinians were killed by the IDF (Israel's Institute of Forensic Medicine in Abu Kabir is a civilian facility operated by the Ministry of Health.) Not letting facts get in the way of a sensational headline, a headline in Sydney's Daily Telegraph stated:

Israeli Army Admits Stealing Organs

"This reprinting of old information must not be allowed to become the occasion for mischief, blasphemous lies or distortions," Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations Chairman Alan Solow and Executive Vice Chairman Malcolm Hoenlein said in a statement. Media interviews surrounding the reports "provided no evidence to indicate that any Palestinian was killed to 'harvest organs.' Such accusations can inflame the region, incite violence and undermine the chances of peace."

As nasty as the story is, there is actually no linkage to Bostrom's false allegations, which libeled the IDF. The Abu Kabir scandal did not target Palestinians. Israeli soldiers, civilians, Jews, non-Jews as well as Palestinians were the victims of a domestic scandal that was discovered and dealt with by the Israeli authorities to ensure that such ethical lapses would not be allowed to reoccur.

(More information can be found here.)

6) Bostrom's flippant attitude towards the truth: While attending a November media conference in Israel, Bostrom told Ha'aretz's Gideon Levy:

If I were writing it again, I would stress that the IDF liquidates so many youths without a trial and that they take bodies and conduct autopsies on them without the permission of the families. My article created confusion and was incorrectly interpreted.

Even more amazingly, he also told Israel Channel 2's Yair Lapid:

In response, Bostrom said that he understands why people are angry, saying that everyone lies while at war. He said that it is difficult for reporters to distinguish between what is correct and what is a lie.

That's Bostrom in his own words.

Donald Bostrom doesn't know the truth because he failed to put in the necessary long-term investigative work real journalism demands. Nor does he show any concern for the consequences of his words. And for those reasons, HonestReporting readers chose him as the Dishonest Reporter of 2009.

* * *

We covered a lot of ground in 2009.

And with help from our readers, we'll continue to monitor and hold the media to account in 2010.


HonestReporting. com
Talkback on this article (click here for Media Backspin).

Citation
rivou
to-be-free,

Avec tout le respect que je te dois, je pense que c'est toi l'automobiliste qui es au point mort. Il a fallut que je me concentre vraiment pour lire et comprendre le texte de Gil009. Tu devrais en faire de même.

Chere rivou

A ta demande, je me suis arrêté volontiers sur sa dissertation.
Mais la, je dois reprendre la route, et vite !

Le conducteur sans permis de conduire va apprécier cet article.

ALL EUROPEAN LIFE DIED IN AUSCHWITZ By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez

"I walked down the street in Barcelona , and suddenly discovered a terrible truth - Europe died in Auschwitz .. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world.
The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.
And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.
They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime.
Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts.
And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.
We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe ."

Le conducteur sans permis de conduire va apprécier cet article.

ALL EUROPEAN LIFE DIED IN AUSCHWITZ By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez

"I walked down the street in Barcelona , and suddenly discovered a terrible truth - Europe died in Auschwitz .. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world.
The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.
And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.
They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime.
Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts.
And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.
We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe ."

Dear Gill
the driver uses Google translator, I doubt if she'll understand the real meaning of all of it. It has already been posted, and some our habitués detractors have said that is is "terribly racist" what a shame.

Dear Lison
Who cares wether they understand or not ! Each time someone tells the truth about Islam,they start yelling it is racism.This poor minded t-b-f is probably wolf's offspring.

shabbat chalom.

bonjour,

Vu le point de depart, une consultation du guide de Michelin vous aurait epargne
de vous retrouver a ce point d’arrive, et surtout dans cet etat!
Ce guide fait partie de l’ethique.
En ce qui me concerne, je roule principlement en velo;
je l’apprecie surtout quand il ya de l’embouteillage; Je ne vais donc pas vous bousculer.

bye !

POUR LISON ET KORIN 15 ,

COMME PROMIS , VOICI UN ARTICLE ECLAIRANT SUR LES METHODES

EMPLOYEES PAR NOS ENNEMIS , DANS LA CONSTRUCTION DE LA

DIABOLISATION D'ISRAEL , ET MALHEUREUSEMENT , à CE JOUR, NOUS NE

VOYONS AUCUNE "ACTION" DE LA PART D'ISRAEL POUR NEUTRALISER

CETTE ABJECTE PROPAGANDE !!!!

" IM LO ANI LI , MI LI ???" ( SI PAS NOUS , POUR NOUS , QUI LE FERA ????)






THE BIG LIE AND THE MEDIA WAR AGAINST ISRAEL:

FROM INVERSION OF THE TRUTH TO INVERSION OF REALITY

Joel S. Fishman





Woe unto them that call evil good,
And good evil;

That change darkness into light,
And light into darkness;

That change bitter into sweet,
And sweet into bitter.

ISAIAH 5:20

From the 1960s, inversion of truth and reality has been one the most favored propaganda methods of Israel's adversaries. One of its most frequent expressions has been the accusation that the Jewish people, victims of the Nazis, have now become the new Nazis, aggressors and oppressors of the Palestinian Arabs. Contemporary observers have identified this method and described it as an "inversion of reality," an "intellectual confidence trick," "reversing moral responsibility," or "twisted logic." Because Israel's enemies have, for nearly half a century, repeated such libels without being challenged, they have gradually gained credence. Since inversion of reality constitutes the basic principle of current anti-Israeli propaganda, it is important to understand what it is and how it works. This propaganda method is a product of Nazi Germany. It is totalitarian both in its methods, particularly the use of the paranoiac myth, and in the absolute solution it advocates. It denies all of Israel's claims completely and leaves no room for introspection and compromise.

The Problem in Historical Perspective: Israel and the Media War

From the 1960s, inversion of truth and reality has been one the most favored propaganda methods of Israel's adversaries. One of its most frequent expressions has been the accusation that the Jewish people, victims of the Nazis, have now become the new Nazis, aggressors and oppressors of the Palestinian Arabs. Contemporary observers have identified this method and described it as an "inversion of reality," an "intellectual confidence trick," "reversing moral responsibility," or "twisted logic." Because Israel's enemies have, for nearly half a century, repeated such libels without being challenged, they have gradually gained credence. Since inversion of reality constitutes the basic principle of current anti-Israeli propaganda, it is important to understand what it is and how it works.

It should be noted that scholars of an earlier generation have researched different aspects of the problem,[1] but from the mid-1980s on, it has attracted much less attention. There are several explanations. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the East bloc (1989-1991), there was a feeling that the world was on the threshold of a new democratic era. And with the signing of the Oslo Accords (13 September 1993), many actually believed that anti-Israeli propaganda would cease. Denial may have played a part, because the persistence of intense anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic agitation represented "inconvenient information." Its study became politically incorrect and dangerous for those who wished to advance in the academic world.[2]

This essay represents an effort to add to the existing corpus of literature and to describe patterns of historical continuity.

Defining the Problem in Historical Perspective

Since many members of the country's political elite consider that Israel's problem is one of public relations, they have been unable to come to terms with the fact that the state is confronted with a media war. It follows, therefore, that there is a need for a modern definition of propaganda, which is one of its main components. According to Prof. Philip M. Taylor, director of the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds,

One of the tactical tools of ideological warfare is propaganda, which has been defined simply "as an attempt to influence the attitudes of a specific audience through the use of facts, fiction, argument or suggestion-often supported by the suppression of inconsistent material-with the calculated purpose of instilling in the recipient a certain belief, values or convictions which will serve the interests of the source, by producing a desired line of action."[3]

To this definition one may add the statement of Dr. Joseph Goebbels that "propaganda as such is neither good nor evil. Its moral value is determined by the goals it seeks."[4] Here is the classical argument that the ends justify the means. One may ask, however, if in certain cases the very means can be morally defective.

In the twentieth century, propaganda served primarily as a weapon of war, and its effects could be devastating. Indeed, certain totalitarian ideologies, when brought to their logical conclusion, have been genocidal. Historian Jeffrey Herf describes the function and logic of propaganda in Nazi Germany's war against the Jews:

If sheer repetition, in public and private contexts, can be taken as proof of belief, then it appears that Hitler, Goebbels, Dietrich [Director of the Reich Press Office], their staffs, and an undetermined percentage of German listeners and readers believed that an international Jewish conspiracy was the driving force behind the anti-Hitler coalition in World War II…. They certainly acted as if the Final Solution was Nazi Germany's punishment of the Jews, whom the Nazis found guilty of starting and prolonging World War II.[5]

In his text Herf gave a chilling example of the link between propaganda and genocide, namely, Hitler's annual speech to the Reichstag of 30 January1939 which presented "what became the core Nazi narrative of the coming conflict": "I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"[6]

In addition, Herf referred to Hitler's New Year's address to the nation on 1 January 1940, which contained the "imputation of genocidal war aims to Nazi Germany's enemies, especially the Jews": "'The Jewish-capitalist world enemy that confronts us has only one goal: to exterminate Germany and the German people.…"[7]

Interpreting this language, Ernst H. Gombrich explained that the ultimate aim of Nazi propaganda was "the imposition of a paranoiac pattern on world events" in the form of a "paranoiac myth."[8] According to Gombrich, this procedure represented the "core of the technique":

This is the final horror of the myth. It becomes self-confirming. Once you are entrapped in this illusionary universe, it will become reality for you, for if you fight everybody, everybody will fight you, and the less mercy you show, the more you commit your side to a fight to the finish. When you have been caught in this truly vicious circle there is really no escape. Compared with this effect, the principle of advertising and mass suggestion in war propaganda may almost be called marginal.[9]

Inversion of reality as a tool of media war, with its paranoiac state of mind, has persisted to the present. Although contemporary observers have been able to describe its manifestations with considerable accuracy, many have not placed it in historical context. It was in this sense, for example, that the French researcher and philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff applied the term "absolute anti-Semitism"[10] to describe the post-1967 outlook of the Palestinians. He wrote that for them, "Zionism, then, is a new 'Nazism' threatening to dominate and destroy the whole human species…. Thus, in a context where Western elites never tire of calling for the avoidance of 'Islamophobic' utterances, the head of the Islamic Center in Geneva, Hani Ramadan, coolly denounced 'the genocide being organized against the Muslims.'"[11]

It is noteworthy that Ramadan's story line is nearly identical to that of Nazi propagandists. Both presented themselves as targets of a Jewish conspiracy, and the potential outcome of their "logical process"-to use Hannah Arendt's expression-was genocide. Although both have inverted the truth, their assertions contain an additional feature which is disturbing and dangerous: an inversion of morality which leads to criminal behavior and violence without constraint.

More recently, Melanie Phillips, an outspoken British journalist and blogger, cited an article by Leo McKinstry, a Belfast-born author and journalist who writes regularly for the Daily Mail, Daily Express, and Sunday Telegraph.[12] McKinstry identified the inversion of reality in British public discourse with regard to Israel and called it by its real name:

In a remarkable inversion of reality, Israel has become a pariah state because of its determination to defend itself. A grotesque double standard now operates, where murderous Arab terrorists are hailed as "freedom fighters" yet Israeli security forces are treated as fascistic thugs. No nation has been more demonized than Israel. One recent survey across Europe revealed that Israel is now regarded as "the greatest threat" to world peace, an utter absurdity given that Israel is actually the only democratic, free society in the Middle East. But such a finding reflects the strength of the hysterical anti-Israeli propaganda that fills the airwaves of Europe. No matter how much this anti-Israeli feeling is dressed up as support for Palestine, it is in fact profoundly antisemitic….[13]

Inversion of reality as a tool of political warfare may also be used against non-Jews. For example, its use in December 2006 resulted in a sharp diplomatic clash between the governments of Poland and Germany when "a group representing Germans expelled from present-day Poland after World War II filed suit at the European Court of Human Rights, seeking restitution of their property." In a statement on 11 December 2006, Polish foreign minister Anna Fotyga condemned the German claims as "an attempt at reversing moral responsibility for the effects of World War II, which began with the German attack on Poland and caused irreparable losses and sufferings to the Polish state and nation."[14]

Inversion of Reality as a Propaganda Method: Historical Roots

If one studies the history of inversion of reality as a propaganda method, it is clear that Nazi ideologues perfected this weapon. They openly took pride in their accomplishment but credited the British for showing them the way. During the Great War, British propaganda successfully encouraged the desertion of Central Powers troops from the frontlines and demoralized the public at home. Hitler, for his part, emphasized the British use of atrocity propaganda and complained that Imperial Germany never understood the importance of propaganda and those who dealt with it were incompetent.

Under the leadership of Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of The Times, the British were the first to exploit the advances of mass media and advertising, targeting public opinion rather than the elite.[15] Their strategic objective was to "reveal to the enemy the futility of their cause and the certainty of allied victory."[16] For this purpose, they devised a number of original propaganda stratagems such as targeting messages to the civilian population so as to undermine its support for the government.[17] They also endeavored to break up the Habsburg Empire by fomenting sedition among its various peoples. In their efforts, British propagandists first coined the term "national self-determination," a weapon of political warfare.[18]

One tool which the British employed was atrocity propaganda. Their most remarkable accusation was that Imperial Germany created a "cadaver exploitation establishment," the so-called Kadaververwerkungsanstalt, for the production of soap. British atrocity propaganda demonized the enemy, but after the war, the public felt duped. It left a residue of skepticism, betrayal, and a mood of postwar nihilism. Although this approach worked in the short term, it opened a Pandora's Box.

On the eve of World War II, the memory of atrocity propaganda provided a compelling argument against American intervention on the side of Britain and contributed to the denial of compassion to the Jews in their moment of dire need. In the United States, where isolationist sentiment ran strong, influential politicians accused the British of having "tricked America into war." Furthermore, when, in the 1930s, Nazi Germany began to perpetrate major atrocities, many refused to believe the reports.

In The Case for Auschwitz, historian Robert Jan van Pelt reported that:

The American magazine the Christian Century, which in 1944 had still chided American newspapers for giving much attention to the discoveries made by the Soviets in Maidanek-claiming at the time that the "parallel between this story and the 'corpse factory' atrocity tale was too striking to be overlooked"-had to (hesitantly) admit in 1945 that it had been wrong, and that the parallel with "the cadaver factory story of the last war" did not hold. "The evidence is too conclusive…. The thing is well-nigh incredible. But it happened."[19]

After the liberation of the concentration camps, General Dwight D. Eisenhower arranged for visits of American delegations to bear witness to the greatest atrocity of all time.[20]

The Big Jump: Some Principles of Nazi Propaganda Theory

During the Great War, the British disseminated propaganda over a finite period but stopped with the conclusion of hostilities. Fearing that Britain's wartime propaganda machinery would be turned against him, Lloyd George quickly dismantled it.[21] Nevertheless, World War I paved the way to the rise of totalitarian dictatorship. It not only undermined the traditional order in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy but also "hastened the development of the industrial arts, weapons, communications, and management which facilitated the totalitarian thrust."[22]

According to Hitler and Goebbels, British propaganda produced the original "Big Lie," but they exploited this breakthrough for their own ends. For example, they adopted an interpretation of history which embodied the paranoiac myth that represented Imperial Germany as the innocent victim of British mendacity. A few citations from Vol. 1, Ch. 6, "War Propaganda," of Mein Kampf, published in1925 and 1926, clearly reveal Hitler's grasp of the methods of war propaganda. According to his account, the British spread certain lies, namely, the accusation of atrocities and that "the German enemy" was "the sole guilty party for the outbreak of war." Later in the same chapter, he analyzed their methods and commented on cost effectiveness:

All advertising, whether in the field of business or politics, achieves success through the continuity and sustained uniformity of its application.

Here, too, the example of enemy war propaganda was typical; limited to a few points, devised exclusively for the masses, carried on with indefatigable persistence. Once the basic ideas and methods of execution were recognized as correct, they were applied throughout the whole War without the slightest change. At first the claims of the propaganda were so impudent that people thought it insane; later, it got on people's nerves; and in the end, it was believed. After four and a half years, a revolution broke out in Germany; and its slogans originated in the enemy's war propaganda.

And in England they understood one more thing: that this spiritual weapon can succeed only if it is applied on a tremendous scale, but that success amply covers all costs.[23]

Hitler went further. He explained in Mein Kampf that it really was more worthwhile to tell big lies rather than small ones:

in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously….[24]

The Big Lie would characterize Nazi propaganda, and although the Soviet Union would later adopt this method after World War II, their own techniques of misrepresenting reality, based on dialectical thinking, were essentially different. Doublespeak was not to be found in the Nazi lexicon.

A Totalitarian Tool

Having the means of controlling the total environment, blocking competing information through the use of terror and coercion, and projecting their messages both domestically and abroad, the new totalitarian regimes could bend the truth as long as their power held out. Thus, they transformed what had originally been a defined moment of untruth into a sustained fictional reality. The difference between the mass propaganda of World War I and the fictional reality of the totalitarian state was one of degree and intensity.

Political scientist Carl J. Friedrich explained that:

the totalitarian breakthrough occurred in 1926-27 when the first Five-Year Plan was adopted. It was this plan that undertook to force the pace and to bring about almost immediately a radical transformation of the economy. Thus, the masters of the Soviet Union were the true originators, the innovators who invented and perfected, in its various details, totalitarian dictatorship-the secret police techniques, the mass communication controls, and more especially, the centrally planned and directed economy.[25]

Indeed, the Bolsheviks were the first to adopt the practice of propaganda in peacetime.[26] Shortly thereafter, Hitler emulated them.

In retrospect, Hannah Arendt explained how totalitarian propaganda constructs a sustained, competing fictional world of untruth, possessing its own internal logic. Herein lies the big jump from the inversion of the truth to the inversion of reality. Nazi propagandists took the idea of the Big Lie and prolonged its duration to create a new reality based on the paranoiac myth which Gombrich described:

Their art [of the totalitarian leaders] consists in using, and at the same time transcending, the elements of reality, of verifiable experiences, in the chosen fiction, and in generalizing them into regions which then are definitely removed from all possible control by individual experience. With such generalizations, totalitarian propaganda establishes a world fit to compete with the real one, whose main handicap is that it is not logical, consistent, and organized. The consistency of the fiction and the strictness of the organization make it possible for the generalization eventually to survive the explosion of more specific lies-the power of the Jews after their helpless slaughter, the sinister global conspiracy of Trotskyites after their liquidation in Soviet Russia and the murder of Trotsky.[27]

Historian Omer Bartov, in his study Hitler's Army, demonstrated the deep penetration of the paranoiac myth in German consciousness. He explained that the Wehrmacht was really an integral part of German society. During the invasion of Russia, when it became clear that Germany could not win the war, propaganda gained almost a religious dimension as a binding force for the soldiers. Under the harsh conditions in mid-July 1941, a Wehrmacht noncommissioned officer wrote home, producing a document which reveals the absolute and genocidal effects of Nazi propaganda:

The German people owes a great debt to our Fuehrer, for had these beasts, who are our enemies here, come to Germany, such murders would have taken place that the world has never seen before…. What we have seen no newspaper can describe. It borders on the unbelievable, even the Middle Ages do not compare with what has occurred here. And when one reads the "Stuermer" and looks at the pictures, that is only a weak illustration of what we see here and the crimes committed here by the Jews. Believe me, even the most sensational newspaper reports are only a fraction of what is happening here.[28]

Bartov explained that this soldier's perception was a

striking inversion of reality, which ascribed the unprecedented brutality of the Wehrmacht and the SS to their victims, [and] was the most characteristic feature of the German soldier's "coming to terms" with his actions in the Soviet Union…. It is precisely this distorted perception of reality which gives us the measure of success of Nazi propaganda and indoctrination.[29]

Bartov's remarkable study demonstrated how the paranoiac myth of Nazi propaganda was so powerful that its logical consequence was an inversion of morality. Even after Germany's defeat, its appeal was so persistent that some Nazi veterans continued to mouth these fictions in order to justify their own criminal deeds.[30]

Using the Inversion-of-Reality Method against Israel and Jews from the 1960s to the Present

After the defeat of Germany, the propaganda methods of inversion of reality and the Big Lie fell into temporary disuse. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union and its allies in the Arab world reintroduced them during the 1960s, particularly after the Israeli victory in the Six Day War in 1967. That outcome represented a humiliation and posed an internal danger because it shook the foundations of authority. It heartened the minorities in the Soviet Union, not least the Jews.

Having suffered a major reverse, the Soviet Union and the Arab countries decided to use political anti-Semitism to shift world attention from their own failures. They sought to delegitimize Israel, bringing about its isolation and destruction. Some elements of the new propaganda campaign were:

The accusation that Israel was the aggressor in the Six Day War and denial of its right to self-defense.
The passing of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, "Zionism is racism," on 10 November 1975 which conferred the standing of international law on a proposition totally based on the inversion of reality. This resolution transformed Zionism, the Jewish national movement, into the embodiment of evil by equating it with the depravity of Nazi Germany.
The drafting of the PLO Covenant in its various versions of 1964, 1968, and 1974. This document claimed that justice was totally on the Palestinian side and that Israel had no standing at all.
The Hamas Charter of 1988.
The unprecedented assault on Israel which took place at the UN Conference in Durban at the end of August and beginning of September 2001.
Both the Arab world and the Soviet Union used inversion of reality as a method and drew on the idiom of Nazi propaganda. The transfer of this expertise cannot be traced in detail because the information is incomplete. It is known, however, that many Nazis found refuge in the Arab world. From 1953, Egypt absorbed some two thousand of them. Some worked in Nasser's secret service. Some administered concentration camps. Others were involved in the design and construction of rockets.[31]

Among this population were specialists in anti-Semitic propaganda. From Egypt, they disseminated anti-Semitism in the Arab world as well as the doctrine of Holocaust denial. Matthias Küntzel described their activities:

A number of Nazis were put to work on anti-Jewish propaganda. Louis Heiden of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt [RSHA, Reich Security Main Office] belonged to this group. Under the name of Louis Al Hadj, he translated Hitler's Mein Kampf into Arabic and oversaw the distribution of this book among the Egyptian officers and in Arab countries. Hans Appler was active in the Islamic Congress, and Nazi journalist Franz Buensche continued his career through numerous anti-Jewish publications in Egypt and other Arab countries.

This penetration of the Egyptian postwar institutions by a band of national-socialistically oriented opinion makers could only contribute… to the fact that, even to the present, [knowledge of] German crimes against the Jews hardly entered the Egyptian public consciousness. For nearly fifty years the delusion has been dominant in the Egyptian media that the Holocaust at no time in the Twentieth Century was anything more than a pretext, which might constantly be put forward to justify Israel's existence….[32]

The Case of Johann von Leers

Since the transfer of ideas and issues of historical continuity are a matter of importance, special mention should be made of Prof. Dr. Johann von Leers (1902- 1965). He was one of the most important ideologues of the Third Reich and later served in the Egyptian Information Department.

In April 1938 von Leers was named professor at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, and his area of expertise was "Legal, Economic, and Political History on a Racial Basis" (Rechts-, Wirtschafts- und politische Geschichte auf rassischer Grundlage). He mastered five languages: English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Japanese.[33] As a young man he participated in the nationalistic youth movement Adler u. Falken (Eagles and Hawks), where he formed a lifelong association with Heinrich Himmler. He was one of the early members of the Nazi Party, and in 1929 Goebbels made him his protégé. [34]

Von Leers was an active member of the German Movement of Faith, a project under Himmler's patronage whose purpose was to "free Germany from the imperialism of Jewish-Christianity" by creating a new pagan religion to take its place.[35] He was also one of the initiators of a plan to increase the Aryan race through breeding, and with a certain Friedrich Lamberty-Muck[36] who advocated polygamy, gave the inspiration for the Lebensborn project which Himmler enthusiastically implemented.

Von Leers was the expert in Jewish affairs. An open advocate of genocide, he was one of the most radical anti-Semitic publicists of the Third Reich. The Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim explained that von Leers took the position that "states harboring Jews were harboring the plague, and that the Reich had the moral duty and by the principle of hot pursuit, the legal right to conquer such countries, if only to wipe the plague out." [37]

In a personal communication to Fackenheim, historian Erich Goldhagen explained "that whereas of course the bacilli idea was common among Nazis, von Leers had the unusual distinction of not bothering to veil his call for mass murder in euphemistic language." After his death, "his widow [Gesina Fischer née Schmaltz] (who shared his views) returned to Germany, where she embarrassed Neo-Nazis by defending Hitler's 'extermination' of the Jews openly, instead of classifying it among his 'mistakes.'"[38]

Von Leers possessed undeniable talent and applied it to construct an ideological foundation for National Socialism and Islam based on their shared hatred of the Jews. [39] He continued this endeavor in Egypt after the war, and his efforts were welcomed and reciprocated.

Herf reports that in December 1942, von Leers published an article in Die Judenfrage, a journal which belonged to the anti-Semitic intellectual world, called "Judaism and Islam as Opposites." As the title indicates, the author's perspective is Hegelian, presenting Judaism and Islam in terms of thesis and antithesis. This essay also reveals the ingratiating National Socialist perspective which von Leers projected on the Islamic past as well as the intensity of his hatred for Judaism and Jewry. The following passage is part of the original text. The author thanks Prof. Herf for sharing this remarkable document, parts of which he first published in paraphrase with direct citations:

Mohammed's hostility to the Jews had one result: Oriental Jewry was completely paralyzed. Its backbone was broken. Oriental Jewry effectively did not participate in [European] Jewry's tremendous rise to power in the last two centuries. Despised in the filthy lanes of the mellah [the walled Jewish quarter of a Moroccan city, analogous to the European ghetto],[40] the Jews vegetated there. They lived under a special law [that of a protected minority], which in contrast to Europe did not permit usury or even traffic in stolen goods, but kept them in a state of oppression and anxiety. If the rest of the world had adopted a similar policy, we would not have a Jewish Question [Judenfrage]…. As a religion, Islam indeed performed an eternal service [to the world]: it prevented the threatened conquest of Arabia by the Jews and vanquished the horrible teaching of Jehovah by a pure religion, which at that time opened the way for numerous peoples to reach a higher culture….[41]

For his part, the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini in his conversation with Hitler of 21 November 1941 and his radio broadcasts contended that Jews were the common enemy of Islam and Nazi Germany.[42] The ex-Mufti frequently went on tour to encourage the Balkan SS Muslim units, and the Axis radio stations faithfully covered these visits. During his broadcast of 21 January 1944, he proclaimed:

The Reich is fighting against the same enemies who robbed the Moslems of their countries and suppressed their faith in Asia, Africa and Europe…. National Socialist Germany is fighting against world Jewry. The Koran says, "You will find that the Jews are the worst enemies of the Moslems." There are considerable similarities between Islamic principles and those of National Socialism, namely in the affirmation of struggle and fellowship, in the stress of the leadership idea, in the ideal of order. All this brings our ideologies close together and facilitates cooperation. I am happy to see in this division a visible and practical expression of both ideologies.[43]

After the war, von Leers lived incognito in Italy until 1950 when he fled to Argentina, where he served as editor of the Nazi monthly Der Weg and entered into close contact with Adolf Eichmann. After the fall of Peron in 1955, he moved to Cairo where he served in the Egyptian Information Department. Encouraged by the ex-Mufti who was also living in Egypt, he converted to Islam and assumed the names Mustafa Ben Ali and Omer Amin Johann von Leers.[44]

Von Leers sponsored the publication of an Arabic edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, revived the blood libel, organized anti-Semitic broadcasts in numerous languages, cultivated neo-Nazis throughout the world, and maintained a warm correspondence encouraging the first generation of Holocaust deniers, one of whom was Paul Rassinier.[45] One source reported that von Leers was the first to create the idea of a separate Palestinian nationality as part of the wider war against Israel.[46]

In addition to the professional obligations of his day job, Johann von Leers was "active as the contact man for the organization of former members of the SS (ODESSA) in Arab territory."[47] Not surprisingly, it was his old friend, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who secured a post for him as political adviser in the Egyptian Information Department.[48] When the ex-Mufti publicly welcomed von Leers in Cairo, he declared: "We thank you for venturing to take up the battle with the powers of darkness that have become incarnate in world Jewry."[49]

If today's Arab anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda strongly resembles that of the Third Reich, there is a good reason.

East-Bloc Anti-Semitism

An immediate consequence of Israel's victory in the Six Day War was the unleashing of a virulent campaign of state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the East bloc.[50] According to Stefan Possony, an American strategist and specialist in East European affairs, Komsomolskaya Pravda published the real message of this propaganda on 4 October 1967: "Zionism is dedicated to 'genocide, racism, treachery, aggression, and annexation...all characteristic attributes of fascists.'"[51] Leon Poliakov also identified information in the text of this article which its Soviet author took from a 1957 pamphlet published at the time Johann van Leers was in charge of anti-Semitic propaganda in Egypt.[52] Indeed, Nazi propaganda which originated in Nasser's Egypt influenced the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Soviet Union, but there was another channel.

On September 6, 1968, Dr. Simon Wiesenthal held a press conference in Vienna where he accused the German Democratic Republic for its use of language identical to the Nazi era in its condemnation of Israel. The title of the publication which he distributed on this occasion was, The Same Language: first for Hitler - now for Ulbricht. In this well documented publication Wiesenthal and his staff identified thirty-nine Nazis with excellent credentials in the Third Reich who found their way into the service of the G.D.R.[53] Some were extremely well placed. Not surprisingly, one of the tools of propaganda which they used was inversion of reality, accusing Israel of being the aggressor. This information may explain how the East Bloc co-opted Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda themes. J. H. Brinks, in his essay "Political Anti-Fascism in the German Democratic Republic," explained that there was no ideological impediment to prevent the cooperation between Communist party members and National Socialists, as they had once been allies. [54] That is, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

The real statement of the party line took the form of a short book titled Beware Zionism! Essays on the Ideology, Organization, and Practice of Zionism. Its author was Yuri Ivanov, a party Central Committee specialist on Zionism, and at the beginning of 1969 the Moscow Political Literature Publishing House (Krasny Proletary) distributed this pedantic book of some 173 pages in an edition of seventy-five thousand copies.[55] (It was priced at a modest 27 kopeks.)

William Korey wrote, "The voice of the official Soviet Authority was not disguised. It spoke clearly through Pravda: 'From the pages of Yuri Ivanov's book emerges the true evil image of Zionism and this constitutes the undoubted importance of the book.'"[56] Its publication signaled the party line. The book, however, was formulated in the dull idiom of the class struggle. The language of Komsomolskaya Pravda, in contrast, represented a change of direction toward a major inversion of reality compressed into slogans, such as "Zionism is racism."[57]

Bernard Lewis described the use of these new slogans at the World Conference of the International Women's Year held in Mexico City in late June and early July 1975. He noted that: "the 'Declaration on the Equality of Women' issued on that occasion repeatedly stresses the share of women in the struggle against neocolonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, racism, racial discrimination and apartheid."[58]

It should be added that with France's change in diplomatic orientation in favor of the Arab cause, and as a consequence of its great influence in Europe, anti-Israeli information steadily gained currency on the Continent. Historian Bat Ye'or remarked that the Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples, held in Cairo in 1969, was a turning point for Europe. Its chief objective was to "demonstrate hostility to Zionism and solidarity with the Arab population of Palestine." The British historian Arnold Toynbee and French Arabist Jacques Berque participated in this event.[59]

It did not take long for the cold winds to blow. At the end of 1968, Bertrand Russell published an open letter to Wladyslaw Gomulka, first secretary of the Polish Communist Party, protesting the outbreak of state-sponsored anti-Semitism in Poland. Russell bluntly likened this new anti-Semitism to that of Nazi Germany. He used the term "twisted logic" to describe the method of inverting reality:

Over the past eighteen months in Poland, the Press, the secret police and the Government have instigated anti-Semitism quite deliberately. By some twisted logic, all Jews are now Zionists, Zionists are fascists, fascists are Nazis, and Jews, therefore, are to be identified with the very criminals who only recently sought to eliminate Polish Jewry….[60]

The Soviet Union spread several other fictions in its new propaganda war against Israel. One of these was the accusation that Israel was the aggressor in the Six Day War. Probably the very first observer to identify and describe this distorted logic was Prof. Richard Pipes of Harvard University. He called it a "successful technique employed by Moscow to turn the tables on the opponent by confusing the real issues at stake." Pipes explained that, normally, when a state is aggressed and succeeds in defending itself, it sets its terms in the negotiations which follow. Redress indeed may include taking possession of some of the aggressor's territory:

In the peace settlement which results, the defeated party usually has to make concessions to the victor, possibly, territorial ones…. The peculiar feature of this conflict is that whereas the real issue at stake is negotiation between the belligerents, Soviet propaganda has managed to make the main issue appear Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in the course of the war. Thus, a matter which should be part of the final settlement of the conflict becomes a precondition of negotiations leading to a settlement. Whatever one's feelings about the substance of the Israeli-Egyptian dispute, one cannot but admire the adroit use of an intellectual confidence trick to turn the tables on an opponent and shift the burden of recalcitrance from oneself to the other party.[61]

The Covenants of the PLO and Hamas

When discussing the developments of this era, one must include the PLO Covenant in its different versions from 1964 onward. It provided a codified ideological statement which embodied Palestinian myths and claims. At first it did not have much impact, but later, particularly after 1973, it became the PLO credo. It is noteworthy that Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former chief of the Romanian secret service who came over to the West, disclosed that:

in 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charter-a document which had been drafted in Moscow. The Palestinian National Covenant and the Palestinian Constitution were also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed Shuqairy, a KGB influence agent who became the first PLO chairman.[62]

Prof. Yehoshafat Harkabi was probably the first to recognize the importance of this document and carefully analyzed its content and language. In the introduction to his publication of the text of the Palestinian Covenant with his commentary, Harkabi stated that the absoluteness of the Palestinian inversion of reality was inherently totalitarian:

The Palestinian movement claims absoluteness and "totality"-there is absolute justice in the Palestinian stand in contrast to the absolute injustice of Israel;…right is on the Palestinian side only; only they are worthy of self-determination; the Israelis are barely human creatures who at most may be tolerated in the Palestinian state as individuals or as a religious community…; the historical link of the Jews with the land of Israel is deceit; the spiritual link as expressed in the centrality of the land of Israel in Judaism is a fraud; international decisions such as the Mandate granted by the League of Nations and the United Nations Partition Resolution are all consigned to nothingness in a cavalier manner.[63]

The PLO Covenant is central to our understanding of today's Palestinian Authority. The fact that Yasser Arafat refused to amend this document, even though he pretended to do so in the presence of President Clinton on 14 December 1998, is the best indication of his real intentions.[64] Of related interest is the Hamas Charter of 1988, the text of which may be found on the Internet.[65] Küntzel traced its distinctive inversion of reality to Nazi sources:

The renewed impact of Nazi-style conspiracy theories becomes particularly obvious if we take a look at the Charter of the Muslim Brotherhood of Palestine, otherwise known as Hamas. Created in 1988, the Charter pointedly makes use of the antisemitic rhetoric of the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem which he had adopted from the Nazis. According to this Charter, "the Jews were behind the French Revolution as well as the Communist revolutions." They were "behind World War I so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate…and also behind World War II, where they collected immense benefits from trading in war materials and prepared for the establishment of their state." They "inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council…in order to rule the world through their intermediaries. There was no war anywhere without their [the Jews'] fingerprints on them." The original text of the Charter is clearly stated in Article 32, in which it states that the intentions of the Zionists "[have] been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what is said there."[66]

The importance of these charters has not been sufficiently appreciated. Nevertheless, the myths which they embody have become part of the fictional and paranoiac worldview which Palestinian propaganda has imposed on reality.

"Zionism Is Racism"

On 10 November 1975, the Soviet Union and its supporters passed UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, "Zionism is racism," which transformed an anti-Semitic slogan into an internationally accepted "truth."[67] Rabbis Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman explained that "the term 'racism' was coined in 1936 to rally scientific and political opinion against Nazi doctrines of 'Aryan superiority' over Jews and other alleged untermenschen."[68] According to the original meaning of the term, then, "racism" denotes one of the great abuses of Nazism. Thus, to equate Zionism with racism represents a serious accusation and inversion of reality.

Although Resolution 3379 was finally rescinded on 16 December 1991, and the Soviet Union passed into history shortly thereafter (26 December 1991), the damage to Israel's cause was considerable. By reducing a complicated issue to a slogan, this libel, which inverted reality, prevented rational discussion of the real problems of the Middle East. In an era of mass media when the study of the past has gone out of fashion, slogans such as "Zionism is racism" have taken the place of facts. They have penetrated the popular mainstream idiom and the consciousness of uncritical mass audiences.

Israel's enemies made many accusations during the years after Resolution 3379, but for a time they spared Israel another massive assault on its legitimacy. That changed with the UN World Conference against Racism which took place in Durban, South Africa, from 28 August-8 September 2001. Durban was the scene of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli speeches and agitation of an intensity unknown since the 1930s.

Some of the main players who joined this effort were the UN high commissioner for human rights and secretary-general of the conference, Mary Robinson;[69] Arafat, Hanan Ashrawi, and Farouk Kaddoumi for the Palestinian Authority; Ahmed Maher and the Arab Lawyers' Union for Egypt; Farouk al-Shara for Syria; and the Iranian delegate. Others included the representatives of the NGOs, the European Union, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Cuba, China, Sudan, Iraq, Chile, Jamaica, Finland, and South Africa.

Squarely in the tradition of "Zionism is racism," the Durban Conference made ample use of the inversion of reality. Indeed, the NGOs called "for the reinstatement of the UN resolution equating Zionism with Racism" and "the complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state," and condemned "Israeli crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide."[70]

This message was essentially the same as those of the 1960s and 1970s cited above. It fit in well with the statement of Komsomolskaya Pravda of 4 October 1967 and the "Declaration on the Equality of Women" of the 1975 World Conference of the International Women's Year.[71] Repetition of the same message, even over decades, remains one of the known characteristics of modern mass propaganda.

The significance of Durban is yet to be fully appreciated, particularly because the malicious intentions of its sponsors-Egypt, which is supposedly at peace with Israel, while those of the Palestinian Authority and Iran-have not been fully acknowledged. Their excesses surpassed Resolution 3379. At one time, those who advocated the original "Zionism is racism" resolution argued that opposing Zionism was not anti-Semitic. Now, after Durban, all pretenses vanished. Anti-Semitism in the name of Palestinian justice now became acceptable. A condition of "convergence," to use Jeffrey Herf's term, had been reached. That is, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism merged, probably for the first time since the Nazi era.[72]

According to Anne Bayefsky and Rabbis Cooper and Brackman, some of the propositions which found expression at Durban were:

Denial of anti-Semitism as a human rights issue of our time.
Acceptance of anti-Semitism in the name of fighting racism.
"Antisemitism is not a manifestation of contemporary racism."
Recognition of the Palestinian people as victims of Israeli racism.
Expropriation of the term Holocaust.
Approval of terrorism-or "armed struggle"-as a means to combat racism.
Exclusion and isolation of the Jewish state in the name of multiculturalism.[73]
Method, Content, and Intent

Shortly before his death, French statesman Georges Clemenceau met with a friendly representative of the Weimar Republic who raised the question of guilt for the outbreak of World War I. He asked Clemenceau, "What, in your opinion will future historians think of this troublesome and controversial issue?" He replied, "This I don't know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany."[74] In his time, "the Tiger" enjoyed a sense of certainty which has since disappeared.

How many people still remember that in June 1967, Israel, in an act of self-defense, foiled the plans of the real aggressors: Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt who built an alliance with King Hussein of Jordan and Hafez al-Assad of Syria for the purpose of annihilating the Jewish state? And how many know that the Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran in May 1967 was an act of war?

For more than half a century, inversion of reality has been the essential characteristic of a media war against Israel and has caused considerable harm. This propaganda method is a product of Nazi Germany. It is totalitarian both in it methods, particularly the use of the paranoiac myth, and in the total solution it advocates. It denies all of Israel's claims completely and leaves no room for introspection and compromise. Following the same strategy which the international community applied against South Africa, the long-term strategic objective of Israel's enemies is to destroy the Jewish state, even if it takes years. Its use proclaims the true intent of those who resort to it.

For its part, Israel has a strategic need to defend itself on the battlefield, but in order to exercise this sovereign right, it must effectively defend its legitimacy in the forum of public opinion. Accordingly, Israel must first recognize the type of war in which it is engaged and then formulate an appropriate strategy based on solid information.[75]

It would be a mistake to overlook the moral dimension of this problem. As noted, Goebbels asserted that: "propaganda as such is neither good nor evil. Its moral value is determined by the goals it seeks."[76] Because the basic principle of inversion of reality entails the violation the truth-which leads to an inversion of morality and moral responsibility, this method is inherently flawed. One cannot use lies in the service of a "Greater Truth" without becoming a liar. In most cases, when one lies in the cause of some "Greater Truth," that so-called "Truth" may well turn out to be another lie. Inherently, inversion of truth and reality cannot serve a morally positive purpose.

What merits can any cause have if it can be advanced only by means of untruth? Beyond the specific circumstances, inversion of truth constitutes an assault on the foundations of modern culture which is based on empirical and rational thought. If this assault succeeds, there is a danger that language will be debased and society will regress to a condition of anomie. There is, therefore, an urgent need to expose the lies which have become part of the media war and to discredit those who spread them.

DR. JOEL FISHMAN is a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Chairman of the Foundation for the Research of Dutch Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is author of "Ten Years Since Oslo: The PLO's 'People's War' Strategy and Israel's Inadequate Response," Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Jerusalem Viewpoints No. 503, 1 September 2003 and coauthor (with Efraim Karsh) of La Guerre d'Oslo (The Oslo War) (Paris: Editions de Passy, 2005). Dr. Fishman is carrying out research on political warfare, particularly media warfare and propaganda.

* * *

Great paper, well written, how many will read it ? only little old ' retired jewish people "

the dumb, the ignorant the non-involved; the antisemite swim in their caca and the lies..

IT IS VERY TIRING I'll keep my faith in the truth and mankind.

E

This morning News !!
try being informed instead of just opiniated !

<img style="visibility:hidden;width:0px;height:0px;" border=0 width=0 height=0 src="[counters.gigya.com]; /><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="[download.macromedia.com]; width="394" height="396" id="vid_prog" align="middle"> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="false" /><param name="movie" value="[www.jerusalemonline.com]; /><param name="menu" value="false" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /> <embed src="[www.jerusalemonline.com]; menu="false" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="394" height="396" name="vid_prog" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" allowFullScreen="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="[www.macromedia.com]; /> </object>

WE CAN BE PROUD OF ISRAEL .



To date, the Israeli search and rescue units have rescued 70 people from beneath the earthquake rubble.

The IDF field hospital is up and running being the first well-equipped hospital to be operational in Haiti now. The IDF field hospital includes 40 physicians, 24 nurses, medics, paramedics; X-ray equipment; two surgery rooms, a pharmacy; an emergency room; an incubation ward; a children's ward; and a maternity ward. The field hospital is capable of treating up to 500 victims a day.


THREE VIDEOS MUST BE SEEN !!!

(1) -Baby Israel delivered in IDF field hospital in Haiti: named ISRAEL


[israelinsider.ning.com]


(2) - CNN video on IDF field hospital: [www.cnn.com]


(3) -IDF video: [www.youtube.com]

Juan Miguel Strauss Vorstandsvorsitzender
Jüdische Gemeinde Düsseldorf

Great for Israel

ISRAEL'S DISPROPORTIONATE RESPONSE
Many countries and world leaders have accused Israel of responding disproportionately to aggression from Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

However, it is time that the world press and media speak of another disproportionate response fromIsrael.

The terrible disastrous earthquake in Haiti has generated responses from many nations. The US has sent supplies and personnel, Britain sent 64 firemen and 8 volunteers, France sent troops for Search and Rescue. Many large and wealthy nations of the world sent money. The Arab and Moslem world nothing.
Israel, a nation of 7.5 million people has sent a team of 220 people that include Medical personnel and will establish the largest field hospital in Haiti, treating up to 5000 people a day, an experienced Search and Rescue team and medical supplies. As in previous earthquake disasters, such as in Gujarat India in 2001 and in Turkey, in the bombings in Kenya, Israel has been one of the most generous givers of aid and assistance.

Turkey seems to have forgotten this help as its extreme Moslem Government is cozying up to Iran.

Judge Goldstone, where are you now? Eating your heart out and hanging your head down in shame I hope.
The favorite occupation in the UN is Israel bashing. More resolutions have been passed condemningIsrael than all the so called democratic nations such as Sudan, China, Russia and others for their crimes against their minorities.
I think it is time that the world should know about Israel's disproportionate response.

THIS IS OUR RESPONSE !!!!!




Objet : Amazing version of Hatikva



[www.hatikva.fr]

je reçois ce matin,un cartoon de BONES

tres ironique.
Pièces jointes:

this following post, is aimed to boost our moral this morning,

"It's Your Story" - National Museum of American Jewish History
Here is a lovely intro video:






E

I never thought the subject would be renewable !!! very pleased,

A wonderful new video

I am Israel !

Six minute video:

When Ike was president, I couldn't ever imagine why he was so popular. Maybe this has something to do with it:

General Eisenhower Warned Us

It is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury
the dead.

He did this because he said in words to this effect:

'Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that
this never happened'

This week, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it 'offends' the Muslim population which claims it never occurred. It is not removed as yet.. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.

It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended.. This is being sent in memory of the 6 million
Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests who were 'murdered, raped, burned, starved, beat, experimented on and humiliated' while the German people looked the other way !Now, more than ever, with Iran , among others, claiming the Holocaust to be
'a myth',it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.?

How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center 'NEVER HAPPENED', because it offends some Muslim in the U.S. ???

New York Times

January 12, 2010

The Tel Aviv Cluster
By DAVID BROOKS OP-ED COLUMNIST



Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.

Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.

In his book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” Steven L. Pease lists some of the explanations people have given for this record of achievement. The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based.

Most Jews gave up or were forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages; their descendants have been living off of their wits ever since. They have often migrated, with a migrant’s ambition and drive. They have congregated around global crossroads and have benefited from the creative tension endemic in such places.

No single explanation can account for the record of Jewish achievement. The odd thing is that Israel has not traditionally been strongest where the Jews in the Diaspora were strongest. Instead of research and commerce, Israelis were forced to devote their energies to fighting and politics.

Milton Friedman used to joke that Israel disproved every Jewish stereotype. People used to think Jews were good cooks, good economic managers and bad soldiers; Israel proved them wrong.

But that has changed. Benjamin Netanyahu’s economic reforms, the arrival of a million Russian immigrants and the stagnation of the peace process have produced a historic shift. The most resourceful Israelis are going into technology and commerce, not politics. This has had a desultory effect on the nation’s public life, but an invigorating one on its economy.

Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the U.S. in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany combined.

As Dan Senor and Saul Singer write in “Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,” Israel now has a classic innovation cluster, a place where tech obsessives work in close proximity and feed off each other’s ideas.

Because of the strength of the economy, Israel has weathered the global recession reasonably well. The government did not have to bail out its banks or set off an explosion in short-term spending. Instead, it used the crisis to solidify the economy’s long-term future by investing in research and development and infrastructure, raising some consumption taxes, promising to cut other taxes in the medium to long term. Analysts at Barclays write that Israel is “the strongest recovery story” in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world.

This shift in the Israeli identity has long-term implications. Netanyahu preaches the optimistic view: that Israel will become the Hong Kong of the Middle East, with economic benefits spilling over into the Arab world. And, in fact, there are strands of evidence to support that view in places like the West Bank and Jordan.

But it’s more likely that Israel’s economic leap forward will widen the gap between it and its neighbors. All the countries in the region talk about encouraging innovation. Some oil-rich states spend billions trying to build science centers. But places like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv are created by a confluence of cultural forces, not money. The surrounding nations do not have the tradition of free intellectual exchange and technical creativity.

For example, between 1980 and 2000, Egyptians registered 77 patents in the U.S. Saudis registered 171. Israelis registered 7,652.

The tech boom also creates a new vulnerability. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic has argued, these innovators are the most mobile people on earth. To destroy Israel’s economy, Iran doesn’t actually have to lob a nuclear weapon into the country. It just has to foment enough instability so the entrepreneurs decide they had better move to Palo Alto, where many of them already have contacts and homes. American Jews used to keep a foothold in Israel in case things got bad here. Now Israelis keep a foothold in the U.S.

During a decade of grim foreboding, Israel has become an astonishing success story, but also a highly mobile one