Rowan Laxton, back in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

There is a great deal of relevance to Engage readers on Harry’s Place – too much to link to it all, but for a sample go and read Denry’s Freedom of Information request, and his discoveries about what happened to Rowan Laxton. Rowan Laxton became so angry about injustices against Palestinians that he started cussing about Jews as if one thing followed from the other.

You can question whether he should have been convicted for shouting about “fucking Jews” and blowing Israelis “off the face of the fucking Earth”, but after such an eruption of hateful bigotry – back in the FCO?

Yemen’s non-Zionist Jewish community driven out

This not so recent piece by Lyn Julius (who co-founded Harif, the association for Jews of the Middle East and North Africa) tells how the last Jews of Yemen have been harassed by jihadist gangs involved in a wider conflict.

The Yemeni government has ignored the vigorous campaigning of Yemeni human rights activists and has failed to protect its tiny Jewish community. Many of these Jews are descended from a community who declined to be airlifted by Israel in the 1950s because they were inclined toward the non-Zionist Satmar sect. Now most are packing their bags for the US and for Israel. Lyn Julius ends:

“The lesson one draws from the final exodus of the Jews of Yemen is that the Arab world does not even tolerate non-Zionist Jews. There can be no future for the pitiful remnant in Arab lands if their safety cannot be guaranteed.

In Morocco, where the Jewish community is largest, Jews traditionally repaid the king’s sympathy with tremendous loyalty. But the king of Morocco was unable or unwilling to prevent 260,000 Jews leaving in the face of rising antisemitism in the 1960s, media incitement and forced conversions.

Even benevolent rulers have been powerless to stem the rising tide of anti-Jewish hatred engulfing the Arab world. Few Arabs are now likely to meet a Jew in their lifetime, and the gullible believe the demonisation and conspiracy theories peddled by their media.

No wonder Jews have spurned official invitations for them to return to live in their countries of birth. Jews visit as tourists, but few see their future in these countries. In Tunisia and Morocco al-Qaida targeted Jews in 2002 and 2003. In April the murder of a Jew in Casablanca sent the community into a panic.In May, eight terrorists were arrested for planning attacks on Jewish sites.

If Morocco and Tunisia fail to keep a lid on jihadist terrorism and incitement, their last Jews, too, will soon be following the beleaguered Jews of Yemen into exile.”

That was June – last week Point of No Return directed readers to a Washington Post article indicating that the Yemeni security forces foiled an assassination attempt on a Jewish leader a fortnight ago.

Even where there are no Jews, antisemitism has its uses. In October Cairo hosted the 56th Congress of Liberal International, which includes delegations from the British Liberal Democrats, among many others. Two members of the Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth, Amr Bargisi and Samuel Tadros wrote, with examples, that “anti-Semitism remains the glue holding Egypt’s disparate political forces together”. The hosts, Egypts Al-Gabha, or Democratic Front Party (DFP), are implicated.

I came by these pieces via Middle East Pact, whose English-language site is sadly looking as neglected as the minority groups of the Middle East it is valiantly trying to help. I hope it manages to recover soon, because its cause is the cause of everyone who cares about peace in the Middle East.

JPR regains its senses.

Jonathan Boyd is acting director of JPR, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London.

Read Jonathan’s piece “Antisemitism and the reported world” on CIF.

This year’s Al Quds Day rally

Al Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem. Although Israeli attitudes to the settlements have hardened recently, many accept that East Jerusalem will one day become the capital of a Palestinian state. This idea, formerly taboo, has been mooted at the highest levels of Israeli politics, and will revive again. There is a corresponding idea of a shared Jerusalem among Palestinians.

In contrast, shortly after the Iranian revolution of 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini established an annual so-called Al Quds Day on the last Friday of Ramadan, with an associated rally which is still pulling crowds today. At Al Quds Day there is no perceptible difference between professed solidarity with Palestinians and visceral hostility to the existence of the state of Israel. Al Quds rallies are held round the world, each with a convenient hook. In Massachussetts Washington D.C., for example, they’ve contrived to fuse opposition to Israel with an anti-corporate message.

This year’s rally is on September 13th. Hopefully it’s clear that it has nothing to do with peace in the Middle East and nothing to do with human rights. Since its new facelift, you can’t search the site of one of its official supporters, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, by country and discover to your astonishment that Israel’s human rights abuses outnumber Iran’s several-fold – but the front page shows its priorities and these do not include the ongoing Iranian show trials.

You won’t hear calls for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, nor for an end to the occupation, nor the dismantlement of the settlements, nor equitable coexistence between Muslims, Jews and Christians. The reason for this, in the words of one of its official supporters, is that “Israel is the enemy of mankind”. So you’ll encounter intense vicarious nationalism on behalf of Muslim Palestinians coupled with even more intense denial of Jewish nationalism (i.e. Zionism), and you’ll probably read or hear the eliminationist message “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as well as the Holocaust-denying “Zionist Nazis are the same / Only difference is the name” and scapegoating “End of Zionism = End of World Terrorism”. The Hesbollah flag will be flown, photographs of Khomeini dandled. Stop the War (No! Not that one!) Coalition officially support this event.

At Harry’s Place, Habibi introduces one of the main attractions and his associates. Given the tendency of Al Quds Day speakers to return year on year, it seems likely that this the same man who in 2003 addressed the assembly of avowed anti-Zionists with the falsehood:

“If you see terrorism today in the world (as you define it), if you see hatred going on everywhere in the world, it is because of the state of Israel.”

Hopefully it will rain on them again.

Read Peter Tatchell.

If you see terrorism today in the world (as you define it), if you see hatred going on everywhere in the world, it is because of the state of Israel.

Blood libel in mainstream Swedish newspapers

Top Swedish Newspaper Aftonbladet says IDF Kills Palestinians for their organs. The original article is here.

Below is a guest piece on EISCA by Arieh Kovler of the Fair Play Campaign Group. Since this piece was written, the editor of Aftonbladet has fallen back on the Livingstone Manoeuvre saying that anybody who criticizes Israel risks being accused of antisemitism.

Recycling Old Libels. By Arieh Kovler.

The Blood Libel is one of the oldest antisemitic charges against Jews: the accusation that Jewish people conspire to kill non-Jews for nefarious purposes. The most common formulation of this lie is that Jews kill a Christian boy in order to use their blood for a ritual of some kind. But many of the earliest recorded blood libels level a slightly different accusation.

In 1909, Prof Hermann Strack of Berlin University wrote The Jew and Human Sacrifice – the first serious scholarly work devoted to exposing the Blood Libel as a dangerous historical lie. It is, unfortunately, still relevant today. Talking about the earliest Blood Libels, he notes (p174):

“In several cases, always assuming the credibility of the tradition, it would be a matter of popular -medical belief … According to the Marbach annals, the Jews of Fulda (when tortured, of course), confess in December, 1235, that they had murdered the miller’s children, ut ex eis sanguinem ad suum remedium elicerent – in order to obtain their blood for medical use“

Strack also highlights the account of Thomas Cantipratanus, a monk writing in about 1270. Thomas claims that all Jews were inflicted with some sort of hidden medical condition as a punishment for killing Jesus:

“A very learned Jew, who in our day has been converted to the [Christian] faith, informs us that one enjoying the reputation of a prophet among them … made the following prediction: ‘Be assured that relief from this secret ailment, to which you are exposed, can be obtained through Christian blood alone’. This suggestion was followed by the ever-blind and impious Jews, who instituted the custom of annually shedding Christian blood in every province, in order that they might recover from their malady.”

In these early Blood Libels, the Jews were accused of killing non-Jewish children to use their bodies for medical reasons.

750 years later, this particular varient of the Blood Libel lives on. On the 17th of August, Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet published an article by Donald Boström under the title “Palestinians accuse the Israeli army of stealing body parts from its victims”. The article strongly suggested that Israel has been stealing organs from Palestinians and both using them to supply Israeli transplant patients and selling them internationally.

The piece presents lots of facts: Many sick people in Israel need organ transplants. In 1992, then-health Minister Ehud Olmert led a drive to encourage Israelis to become organ donors. Some New Jersey Jews are being investigated for their role in an organised crime syndicate, which allegedly includes the buying of human organs from voluntary donors. Palestinians who are killed by the IDF are often autopsied.

From these facts, Boström suggests a massive and macabre international conspiracy in which Israelis and Jews harvest organs from Palestinian victims for gain and profit.

This is an incredibly serious and sickening charge to make. Not only does it recall the blood libels of the past, but it is also a form of the Nazi Card. The dehumanization of Jews by the Nazis was one of the worst features of the Holocaust; The Nazis treated Jews as raw materials rather than people, to be worked, killed or experimented on. The accusation that Israel would use the Palestinian as living organ banks is an inversion of this aspect of the Holocaust thrown back at Jews.

So it’s surprising that David Boström – like the accusers in the Blood Libels 0f old – doesn’t even pretend to offer any real evidence for his claim. Speaking to Israel Radio, he said:

“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.”

Donald Boström is not the first to revive this contemporary twist on the old Blood Libel. He claims rumours of organ theft are common among Palestinians. Perhaps one reason for these rumours is the Iranian TV series Zahra’s Blue Eyes, broadcast in late 2004 and later dubbed for an Arabic audience. The plot involves the IDF conspiring to harvest Palestinians’ eyes for transplant into blind Israelis.

But Aftonbladet is a mainstream left-wing newspaper, not an Iranian propaganda outlet. It has the largest daily circulation of any paper in the Nordic Countries. Nearly one in six of the Swedish population reads it. It is majority-owned by the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, which has input into its editorial line. The paper’s editorial staff read this article, and felt that it was appropriate to run it anyway. Asa Linderborg, an editor on the relevant section of Aftonblade, told Ha’aretz that the newspaper “stands behind the demand for an international inquiry” of Boström’s claims. She also said:

“We had many discussions on whether to publish the article or not, and to the best of my knowledge, there are no facts there that are incorrect.”

And so a major European national newspaper ran a story that is extremely similar in both form and content to a medieval antisemitic slander.

Four-year-old is abused by school racists

This piece, by Leon Symons, is from the Jewish Chronicle.

A four-year-old girl has been withdrawn from a West London infants’ school after being subjected to repeated antisemitic remarks by other pupils.

Her father, journalist Nick Johnstone, has accused the head teacher, Philip Eaton, of failing to deal with his complaints. He has since complained to the local education authority about Mr Eaton and has also reported the matter to police and his MP, Mark Field.

In an email to Mr Johnstone, the head admitted that both he and the school “have let your family down”.

Mr Johnstone’s daughter, whom he asked not to be named, joined Hallfield Infants’ School in Paddington, a multi-faith but predominantly Muslim school, in January.h

Physical and verbal bullying of the girl started some time ago and escalated last week to religious abuse.

He said: “A girl told her that ‘Jewishes are yuck’, ‘Jewishes don’t care about people’, ‘you can’t trust Jewishes’ and ‘you can’t throw a ball to Jewishes because they kick it in your face’. Another girl told her ‘Jewishes are not nice people’.” She was told that “Allah would burn her in the fire” because she was not Muslim.

“My wife and I had never heard, let alone used, the word ‘Jewishes’ before. We were absolutely shocked and appalled that this had happened in a state primary school. We felt that it was a disgrace that a four-year-old should have suffered such racist episodes while under the school’s care.”

Mr Johnstone reported the incidents to Mr Eaton as they happened. “At first, he seemed to take it seriously and said he would speak to the children. But he didn’t. Then he told me he doubted that all of this had happened. He seemed more concerned about not upsetting the other parents than us,” said Mr Johnstone.

Mr Eaton said he had wanted time to work out a strategy for dealing with the problem “because children of this age have very short memories of what they are saying. There is a bigger issue of where they are getting this from and it must be somewhere outside.”

He added that he planned to speak to the children and their parents, and that staff would be encouraged to work more closely to try to eliminate racist comments.

This piece, by Leon Symons, is from the Jewish Chronicle.

York University, Ontario – mob ringleaders reprimanded

The President of Ontario’s York University, Mamdouh Shoukri, has taken an unambiguous stand for academic freedom. He has opposed the academic boycott of Israel, and is resolute against calls to intervene in the content of an upcoming conference, Israel/Palestine – Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace, an event which sounded promising but however has reportedly been commandeered to promote above all the idea of a single state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

After nearly three months, Shoukri has also reprimanded the ringleaders – one of whom was the popular York Federation of Students (YFS) incoming President Krisna Saravanamuttu – who mobbed their political opponents on February 11th. Jewlicious has background. Although the political differences here were ostensibly over YFS’ support for prolonged industrial action by contract teaching staff, some key ‘Drop YFS’ (opposition) members were also active in Israeli and Jewish student groups, and similar fault-lines had been observed over YFS’ response to Operation Cast Lead. This was exploited:

“A familiar political pattern  is repeating itself at York. Student groups associated with Israel and hostile towards anyone expressing concern for Palestinian human rights are anchoring a campaign against the undergraduate student union, the York Federation of Students (YFS) and the clubs and social justice organizations associated with it. The public positions put forward by this campaign cannot be taken at face value.

…

Critics of Israeli crimes face the baseless charge of “anti-Semitism” from those happy to have their voices go hoarse crying wolf. But those who back off in the face of such  intimidation merely pave the way for continued Western culpability in these crimes.”

Where there’s the opportunity, Israel is often invoked by anti-Zionist activists as a political wedge regardless of the discriminatory implications; read Ignoblus’ piece on anti-Zionism as an article of faith. It looks to have been like this at York. ‘Drop YFS’ supporters met to discuss the enthusiastic response to their petition to impeach the student executive for failure to represent the student body, and yet were subjected to calls of “Israelis off campus”, “racist Zionists”, “Die, bitch, go back to Israel”, “Die, Jew, get the hell off campus”, “Fucking Jew” and similar. Jewish students took refuge in Hillel House where they remained under siege until the police arrived. Saravanamuttu blamed Jewish campus groups (Jews comprise 10% of the student population) for the aggression of which Jews were the victims:

Shoukri’s reprimand came late and Saravanamuttu is – as you might expect – insisting he’s an impeccable anti-racist and seeking donations to pay his fine.

Shoukri and York University in general will have their work cut out. The situation is that York students who opposed the YFS leadership’s stance on their lecturer’s industrial action and who also are, or are associated with, students who opposed their YFS leadership’s stance on Israel, have been targeted as Jews, as supporters of the existence of a state for Jews and – as if one thing automatically followed from the other – as racists. Saravanamuttu’s comments amount to the sentiment that if Jews hadn’t been involved in the action then there wouldn’t have been an antisemitic response. In a climate like this the worry is that students who want to express themselves politically will be at a deficit if they are identified as Jews or with Jews. This smearing is type of identity politics often deployed by players who hope to create diversion and division.

This is another clear example where having “many Jews in our group” or even being Jewish, as was the other student who was reprimanded, is completely irrelevant. As Shalom Lappin a visiting professor at York University, an alumnus, pointed out:

“When I was an undergraduate at York in the late 1960s the University was home to lively political activity on a variety of issues. The Israeli-Palestininan conflict was one of these, and discussion was intense, occasionally heated. However, at no time did this discussion degenerate into systematic bullying, initimidation, or expressions of bigotry. Nor would the administration of that period have allowed it to do so. It is a source of great sadness to me that the current administration is either incapable or unwilling to insure the existence of a basic culture of decency, civility, and free speech on its campus.

This culture is a necessary feature of any serious institution of higher learning.”

In the absence of serious contemplation about why it is that the Israel/Palestine conflict, including its virulent racism, is being played out in a Canadian institution, fining the ringleaders will not get to the root of what is currently festering at York and what is threatening other campuses in other countries, including my own.

“Antiracists” think Ahmadinejad was right

“…Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s UN speech on 21 April struck many as obnoxious, but in terms of understanding the 1948 roots of the Middle East conflict he was spot on. Vilifying him may feel good, but it is a diversion form the real issue.”

Ghada Karmi, Author, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine

“However we may deplore the tone of President Ahmadinejad’s speech at the UN conference on racism, it is difficult to deny the principal facts that he presented…”

Geoff Simons, Author, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Karmi thinks Ahmadinejad was “spot on” in his understanding of the roots of the Middle East conflict.

Simons agrees with the “principal facts” that he presented.

Neither stops to wonder why it is they agree with a genocidal anti-Jewish racist on the central question concerning Jews in the contemporary world.  Perhaps it is just a coincidence?  A stopped clock is right twice a day?

But perhaps there are other lessons to be learnt from the fact that they agree with Ahmadinejad.

And why is the Guardian printing this support for the understanding and analysis of the world’s most powerful antisemite on its letters page?

If people don’t understand what is racist about holocaust denial then they should make use of Deborah Lipstadt’s magnificent website, which is an excellent resource, Holocaust Denial On Trial.  http://www.hdot.org/

Holocaust denial is antisemitic firstly because denial was part of the crime itself.  Those who were murdered were told that nobody would ever believe that this happened and that nobody would ever know that they even existed.  Denial is not a response to the Holocaust but it is part of the Holocaust.

Secondly because Holocaust denial necessarily assumes that the Jews are sufficiently powerful and sufficiently evil to have invented such a horrible lie and to have made believing it a precondition for acceptability in public life.  It is antisemitic conspiracy theory.

John Strawson

UPDATE – John Strawson adds:

Karmi and Simons rely on ignorance of history  in order to make their case: a case that Ahmadnejad is able to trade on.

“Their” history is that Western guilt for the Holocaust meant that the Jews were given Palestine in order to make amends.  Nothing could be further from the truth. Reading the United Nations documents that led to the partition plan – debate in the General Assembly May through November 1947 and the report of United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) – there are no Western expression of guilt whatsoever. The only speeches that linked the creation of a Jewish State to the Holocaust were from the Soviet Union and Poland.

Indeed what is striking is that despite many anti-Semitic remarks, not one Western country rises to object. The partition plan itself explicitly stated that it was plan for the future of government of Palestine and not a solution to the “Jewish question” – the latter formulation being a reference to the survivors of the Holocaust in displaced peoples’ camps.  Far from guilt there is indifference bordering on callousness.  The Jewish population of between 600,00-650,000 (and 18,000 in detention in in Cyprus) [UN figures]) were of course in Palestine in 1947.

They constituted a clearly constituted a national community.  It is this national identity that the Karmi et al wish to deny. Modern anti-Semitism mainly takes the form of discrimination against Jews as national community – something that the Durban II statement reinforces when it places anti-Semitism between “Islamaphobia” and “Christianophobia.” (draft article 10)

John Strawson

Paxman allows antisemite Ahmadinejad to set the Newsnight agenda

David T on HP.

Holocaust denier Ahmadinejad speaks at UN antiracist conference on Holocaust Rememberance Day