ANTIFA IS COMING TO ISRAEL

https://www.israelunwired.com/the-washington-post-gets-by-with-a-little-help-from-its-antisemitic-friends/
THE WASHINGTON POST GETS BY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM ITS ANTISEMITIC FRIENDS
written by Sean Durns January 26, 2023 689 views
Depicting Jews as willful murderers of children is a staple of antisemitism that stretches back centuries. Filmmaker Darin Sallam is keen to promote this antisemitic canard. And The Washington Post, in turn, is keen to promote Sallam.

(JNS / CAMERA) Farha, a film now available on Netflix, purports to tell the story of the Palestinian “nakba,” that is, the “catastrophe” that resulted from the failed attempt to prevent the Jews from establishing a state of their own. The film is fiction masquerading as fact. Naturally, The Washington Post loves it.

In a 1,200-word review, the Post—like the film itself—misleads about the recreation of the Jewish state. Worse still, the newspaper relies on a motley crew of antisemites, apologists for terrorist groups, and discredited academics to buttress the review. Unsurprisingly, they all hail the film.

Farha, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) has noted, is “ahistorical fiction passing for fact.” At times, filmmaker Darin Sallam has purported that the film depicts real events. Yet as CAMERA’s Karen Bekker has pointed out, Sallam has also said otherwise.

During a Q&A at the Toronto Palestine Film Festival in September 2022, Sallam admitted that the film is in a “fiction format.” Sallam also makes clear that the only thing that, according to her, is true about the story in Farha is that decades ago, her mother, as a child, met another girl who told her that she had been locked in a room during the 1948 war. As Bekker observes, this claim is unverifiable.

What is clear, however, is Sallam’s intent. The Jordanian director told the audience at the Toronto Palestine Film Festival that she intentionally depicted Israeli soldiers in a negative light. The film features a 15-minute scene of Israeli soldiers massacring an entire Palestinian family, including a one-year-old baby. Sallam told the audience that she chose to show the soldier abandoning the baby to die a slow death because it was “an uglier way of dying … [and] I’m sure that in the next house, right after, he must have killed another baby.”

Depicting Jews as willful murderers of children is a staple of antisemitism that stretches back centuries. Sallam is keen to promote this antisemitic canard. And The Washington Post, in turn, is keen to promote Sallam.

The film, like the history, might be fiction. But the truth isn’t the point. Slandering the Jewish state is. And the Post knows just who to turn to for the task.

Hamid Dabashi tells the newspaper that Farha is making the “Palestinian narrative” part of “the American mainstream.” Dabashi, who is identified as merely a “professor at Columbia University” calls this aspect “exciting.”

It’s unsurprising that Dabashi would appreciate Farha. He too has a penchant for antisemitic tropes. Dabashi has called Israel a “key actor” in “every dirty, treacherous, ugly and pernicious act in the world.” He has also railed against “diehard fifth column Zionists working against the best interests of Americans.”

In a 2004 article for Al Ahram, an Egyptian newspaper, Dabashi claimed that Israeli Jews have a “vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of [their] culture.” Sarah Stern of the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) submitted that article to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in her testimony about antisemitism on campus. Although Dabashi has denied that he was talking about Israeli Jews, even the far left publication The Nation concluded that Dabashi’s article “could easily be construed as antisemitic.”

A long list of groups, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Alums for Campus Fairness and CAMERA on Campus, among others, have highlighted and chronicled Dabashi’s problematic history. Indeed, Dabashi’s comments—like elements of Farha itself—are antisemitic, meeting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism that has been adopted by dozens of countries and governments, spanning the political spectrum.

Nor is Dabashi the only questionable source that Post reviewer Claire Healy utilizes.

Illan Pappé, a discredited Israeli academic is also cited extensively. In a lengthy 2011 article for The New Republic, historian Benny Morris called Pappé “one of the world’s sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest.” Morris noted Pappé’s penchant for mistranslations, basic errors, outright falsifications, and omitting crucial context in a 2006 review of Pappé’s book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Morris suggested that Pappé perverted history “for one purpose only: to blacken the image of Israel and its leaders in 1948.”

Indeed, Pappé has discredited himself. He publicly supported the master’s thesis of University of Haifa graduate student Teddy Katz, who claimed that a brigade of Israeli forces committed a massacre of Palestinians in 1948 at Tantura, near Haifa. A university committee subsequently disqualified Katz’s thesis after concluding that quotes in Katz’s written text didn’t match the taped interviews he had conducted and that the text was “grossly distorted.” Although Katz later recanted his claims, Pappé continues to defend both Katz and his thesis. The Post, however, omits this relevant and well documented history, preferring to treat Pappé as a credible historian—even echoing his claims about massacres.

But the Post isn’t finished. The newspaper next turns to Rashid Khalidi for his thoughts on the film. Khalidi is merely identified as a “professor.”

Yet, as the historian Martin Kramer has documented, a 1978 New York Times report from Beirut noted that Khalidi “works for the PLO”—the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Similarly, a 1976 Los Angeles Times report refers to Khalidi as a “PLO spokesperson.” The year 1976 was a mere four years after the PLO carried out the Olympic Games massacre in Munich and murdered an American diplomat in Khartoum.

A sympathetic 1979 documentary about the PLO, The Gun and the Olive Branch, even featured interviews with Khalidi—who was identified as a “PLO spokesperson.” During this time period, the PLO was still a U.S.-designated terror group and actively waging a war against Israel in Lebanon.

Khalidi’s appreciation for Farha is unsurprising when one considers that the PLO never revised its charter, which calls Israel’s very existence “illegal.”

Relying on questionable sources isn’t the review’s only problem. The Post tells readers that “leaders” of the United States have “long treated political and financial support for Israel as ‘sacrosanct.’” Further, “mainstream media,” the Post suggests, is biased in favor of Israel. Both claims are easily disproved.

The idea that criticizing Israel is rare or difficult is remarkably stupid. Actors and celebrities routinely do so. So do members of Congress. Ditto for the United Nations, which routinely passes more resolutions condemning the Jewish state than China, Syria, Russia, North Korea and other gangster states combined.

As for the media, The Washington Post itself has run op-eds by Rashid Khalidi and others of his ilk. And as CAMERA has documented, on the eve of the COVID-19 crisis, Post World Views columnist Ishaan Tharoor devoted comparatively more column space to criticizing Israel than to China, a superpower and nation of billions.

Far from being a disqualifier, targeting and singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium seems to help get one on the pages of The Washington Post or The New York Times or The Associated Press, which once shared office space with Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

As for U.S. leaders treating political and financial support for Israel as “sacrosanct,” this too is easily disproven. One just has to read a history book—albeit not one authored by a discredited academic or a former spokesperson for a terrorist group—to learn otherwise.

As CAMERA has noted, the U.S. initiated an arms embargo aimed at Israel while the Jewish state was fighting for its very existence. The Eisenhower administration withheld aid and used the CIA to back an organization called the American Friends of the Middle East, which “sought to weaken support for the Jewish state in the U.S.,” according to historian Michael Doran. Eisenhower would later threaten Israel during the 1956 Suez Crisis. And numerous successor administrations would threaten to curtail support and aid to Israel, among them the Carter and Bush Sr administrations. Indeed, as CAMERA detailed in The Jerusalem Post, the CIA even opened a back channel with the PLO, taking one of its arch terrorists to Disneyland for his honeymoon.

What Farha doesn’t tell viewers—and what the Post doesn’t tell readers—is the truth about the so-called “nakba.” Arab forces, many of them armed with weapons, and sometimes training, gifted to them from the Nazis, tried to destroy the Jewish state at its birth. As Morris noted in his book, 1948, former Nazi operatives were even on the ground, advising them. And a former Nazi collaborator and wanted war criminal, Amin al-Husseini, led one of those armies. Less than three years after the Holocaust, they attempted to perpetrate another genocide of Jews. They failed. For some, that is still a “catastrophe.”

https://www.israelunwired.com/antifa-is-coming-to-israel/?
ANTIFA IS COMING TO ISRAEL
written by Douglas Altabef January 26, 2023 779 views
Opposition to proposed judicial reform is being reduced to senseless calls for “disruption” instead of debate.

(JNS) In the summer of 2020 Israelis, along with most of the world, watched with shock and horror as riots erupted across the United States following the death of George Floyd. Masked protesters burned shops, destroyed government buildings and, most chillingly, destroyed manifestations of national memory and history by pulling down statues of “dead white men.”

The sense of anarchy running amok was chilling, as was the unwillingness to confront it. These were scenes of entitlement and a complete disdain for the rule of law.

Fast forward two-and-a-half years, and there are increasing signs that something like that kind of “rules be damned” violence could be coming to Israel.

If it’s up to the likes of former Meretz MK and one-time IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan, that is what we are likely to face.

Golan, who infamously likened Israel’s behavior to the Nazis in a Holocaust Remembrance Day address, has thrown down the gauntlet before the reality that there is a new government in Israel.

A month ago, Golan advocated protests in a manner that implicitly contained the threat of violence: “The people should express their protest and if we need to create a significant disruption in lifestyles to explain that things are not going our way, we will do it. There are enough good and dedicated citizens here who want rule of law.”

This is an Orwellian statement. The claim that a “significant disruption in lifestyles” reflects an aspiration for the “rule of law” is classic doublespeak.

Golan has since doubled down on his call for protests by specifying how “lifestyles” should be disrupted: “We need to change the way we think. No more polite demonstrations on motzash [Saturday night], no more runaway posts in the evening, and no more lamentation and crying. Only actions. Only results. Businesses will be shut down, services will be shut down, roads will be blocked and those who pretend to rule through corrupt, hedonistic, extremist and dark people will discover that the people are the sovereign.”

If we are to maintain our civic sanity, we need to understand this mindset, confront it and exercise the kind of care and judgment that the would-be protesters believe only they possess.

The rationale for disruptions—and one would be hard-pressed not to read “disruptions” as “violence”—is that “the people are sovereign.” According to Golan, the sovereignty of the people justifies any and all behavior designed to thwart the plans of the “dark people.”

As Jerry Seinfeld used to say, “Who are these people?” If we stipulate that the people are sovereign, then why, when they elected the new government with a clear majority, should that sovereignty be disregarded or worse, dismissed?

Golan’s “sovereignty” is “sovereignty for me but not for thee.” How can someone who has served at the top of Israel’s army and then in the Knesset be so obtuse as to apply the concept of sovereignty only to those who, in his opinion, deserve it—i.e., those who happen to subscribe to his political point of view?

Golan is right to be afraid of the degradation of the people’s sovereignty. But he does not realize that he is advocating precisely that. Importing such self-righteous political narcissism, which marked America’s 2020 riots and still marks much progressive thinking, would be terrible for Israel.

It would be even more terrible for the Israeli left because it would conclusively demonstrate the left’s contempt for the popular sovereignty they claim to advocate.

One need not demand “disruption of lifestyles” to add fuel to the fire of social division. The violent condemnation of all the government’s proposed judicial reforms in itself foments further division.

Why does the idea of judicial reforms, any judicial reforms, cause such hysterical cries that the democratic sky is falling?

The reason is loss of power. Yair Golan understands that since his party could not even cross the electoral threshold in the last election, the only way the left can continue to exercise power is through the Supreme Court and the cadre of unaccountable legal advisors attached to every government ministry.

Ironically, if the hegemony of these forces is disrupted, the sovereignty of the people might be better reflected in less constrained decision-making by their elected representatives. But these are definitely not the people whose sovereignty Golan wants to protect.

The proof that this is all a power play is that no one in the opposition has offered to debate the particulars of the proposed reforms. There has been no reasoned analysis of the proposals, let alone the idea that some of them might actually have merit.

We can see something like this in the United States. The American left’s view of their Supreme Court has undergone a historic change. Once seen as the bastion of all things good when it was under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1960s and ‘70s, the left now sees the Court as America’s biggest problem. So, they say, the right thing to do is pack the Court—at least when a Democrat is president—and harass the sitting justices in hopes of intimidating them into submission.

Is it too fanciful to suspect that, if Israel’s Supreme Court had the same strict constructionist tendency that its American counterpart exhibits, the left would be storming the barricades to disembowel it?

What Yair Golan and even Supreme Court President Esther Hayut owe the Israeli people is a willingness to engage with the particulars and merits, or lack thereof, of the proposed reforms.

To react with petulant condemnation just because you hate who your enemies are is the stuff of Antifa, nihilists and progressive narcissists. We do not need that in Israel.

Come, let us reason together.