Analysing Trends in Mainstream Media Bias: RTE’s Coverage of the 2015 Quasi-Intifada – Part Two

This article provides an analysis of two RTE television news reports, during the Autumn 2015 period, when a sharp rise in Arab-Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians, and security personnel, occurred. Broad issues of normative journalistic practice are also discussed. The preceding part of this series analyses, more broadly, a relatively large number of other RTE reports broadcast during the same period. RTE Player links of the principle daily television news programmes (Lunchtime News, 6.1 (6 O’clock) News, and 9 O’clock News) are only made available by the broadcaster for a limited period of time.

Carole Coleman reports

An 14th October Lunchtime News report by Carole Coleman, appears to have partly or indirectly justified the Intifada-esque conditions in Israel and the disputed territories of the Judea and Samaria/West Bank, as well as the Gaza Strip, by laying undue blame with the authorities opposing the then-resurgent bout of violence. Appendix One features an excerpted transcript of the news-report.

RTE-Player screen-grab, revolving news text,
RTE News Now channel, 14-October-2015

Israel’s security measures are described prejudicially in the report. In the introduction, the news presenter claims the security measures will “seal off” Arab neighbourhoods, while Coleman describes the measures as “blockades”, which misleadingly evokes the actions applied to Gaza. The revolving screen-text on the RTE ‘News Now’ channel also stated: “Israeli police to seal off Arab parts of Jerusalem”. However, the security measures were not remotely as draconian. Roadblocks and ‘stop and search’ measures were put into place. Residents were not being prevented from travelling outside of their communities, nor were people being prevented from travelling into the relevant neighbourhoods.

Coleman’s report features quotes from two individuals: an Arab resident who was hostile to Israel, and a representative of an anti-Israel NGO. Coleman did not quote an alternate perspective for the report.

An Arab man, identified as ‘Khader Ishkirat’, a resident of Jabel Mukaber, provided his views on the new security restrictions. He described these measures as “collective punishment”, and presented the restrictions as somehow contravening the pursuit of a two-state peace solution. However, Coleman’s report failed to note that the Jabel Mukaber neighbourhood is an Arab-Palestinian village in the environs of Jerusalem, which has earned notoriety, both as a flashpoint of violence, and due to a number of its residents having engaged in particularly vicious acts of terrorism, which include what was the then-current violent upsurge. Jewish residents have experienced substantive violence, due to their proximity to the village.

RTE-Player screen-grab, RTE Lunchtime News, 14-October-2015, Carol Coleman
 report, featuring Sari Bashi, of the NGOs Gisha & Human Rights Watch

Sari Bashi, identified as a representative of Human Rights Watch, also offered highly critical views on the security measures. Bashi however is better known as the co-founder and Executive Director of anti-Israel NGO Gisha.

Bashi does not have a reputation for presenting balanced critiques on the Israeli-Jewish/Arab-Islamic conflict. She defended the reputation of notorious terrorist Shawan Jabarin. Moreover, Gisha’s critiques erased the context of Israeli military actions as constituting reactions to Hamas’ rocket bombardments from Gaza. The NGO also baselessly charged that Israel was violating the rights of students from Gaza.

Misrepresenting the root causes of the conflict

The most problematic aspect of Carole Coleman’s report is the overt attempt to lead its audience into a simplified understanding of a protracted conflict, which stands in contravention with basic established fact, when choosing to blame the current spate of violence principally on settlements and the failure of peace talks, whilst ignoring the most pernicious religious sectarianism that has pervaded this conflict, which existed long before Israel became a reality. The report finds Israel blameworthy, despite the attacks being aimed indiscriminately at Jewish civilians, as well as soldiers and the security services.

This quasi-Intifada erupted following Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’ intensive incitement, featuring false claims of an intent by the Israeli authorities to change the status-quo of the Temple Mount, and harm the al-Aqsa Mosque. The claims were echoed by the PA itself, for example, to quote a near-concurrent PA broadcast:

“The story of the Temple is nothing but a collection of legends and myths for political reasons. They [Jews] have set Palestine and Jerusalem as their goal, and have used the myths in the service of their declared goals of occupation and imperialism. In the spirit of the delusions and legends, they try to get rid of the Al-Aqsa [Mosque] and establish their so-called ‘Temple’ — the greatest crime and forgery in history.”

Mahmoud Abbas set the stage for the violence in his speeches, which were notably supportive of the increasing violence at the Mount. To cite a speech from the 16th of September:

‘His honor [Abbas] saluted the Murabitin (those carrying out Ribat, religious conflict/war to protect land claimed to be Islamic) and stated: ‘Every drop of blood that has been spilled in Jerusalem is holy blood as long as it was for Allah. Every Martyr (Shahid) will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded, Allah willing.’ … and stated: ‘The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours, and they have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.”’

Furthermore, the modus-operandi of stabbing terror attacks had been widely linked to several speeches by leading Muslim-Arabs.

Arab members of the Israeli Knesset also led incitement drives, claiming Jewish people have no right of worship on the Temple Mount.

Likewise, a survey of concurrent Arab-Palestinian opinion demonstrated that most oppose the two-state solution, based on the principle of two-states-for-two-peoples. Only 30% supported a one-state solution where Arabs and Israelis possess equal rights. No less than 58% were against the recognition of Israel as a nation for Jewish people, that carried a mutual recognition of Palestine as a nation for Arab-Palestinian people.

Palestinian leaders rejected a two-state solution, and peace with Israel, in 2000, 2001 and 2008, the latter of which afforded near 100% of all Palestinian Authority territorial demands with mutually agreed land-swaps. If Arab-Palestinians were truly despairing due to a lost quest for their independence, they would instead punish their own leaders for repeatedly undermining that process.

The report ignores a phenomenon that led to a century of anti-Jewish Arab-Palestinian incitement at all levels of society. It led to pogromic episodes that began circa 1920 in Jerusalem, some 47 years before the Six-Day war. Likewise, the Second Intifada erupted following PA incitement over false claims of Jewish designs on the al-Aqsa Mosque. At the time Arafat believed a bizarre conspiracy, where Israel would engineer an earthquake to destroy the Mosque.

RTE-Player screen-grab, RTE Lunchtime News, 14-October-2015, Carol Coleman report,
captioned: "Palestinians also cite increased encroachment on the al-Aqsa..."

Reiterating sectarian propaganda

Most surprisingly, Coleman appears to endorse the Arab-Palestinian conspiracy that Jews are somehow undermining the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, when she stated “Palestinians also cite increased encroachment on the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City…” She did not state that this is a disputed claim. Netanyahu has repeatedly asserted that there is no attempt to change the ‘status quo’, nor does there appear to have been any notable increase of visits to the Temple Mount. The prior year’s figures show only a marginal number of Jewish people being allowed access to the Temple Mount. Israel has done nothing to provoke such fears. The conspiracy is also supremely unlikely, since prior fears over the site were unfounded.

Coleman claims the al-Aqsa Mosque, and its environs on the Temple Mount, is holy to both Muslims and Jews. The Temple Mount is an extremely large site, which is of course holy to the Jewish faith, but the actual structure of the Mosque, and its environs (the al-Aqsa compound), is no more holy to the Jewish faith than that of any other holy structure to an unaffiliated religion. The al-Aqsa Mosque sits on the Mount to the far-south. It is of less relevance to the Jewish faith than the Dome of the Rock, (located in the middle of the Mount), since it was built in the area where the Jewish Temple once stood.

Orla Guerin, a former RTE journalist, also inaccurately claimed, at the BBC, that the Mosque itself is also holy to Jews. Such assertions may be borne of a lack of knowledge, but both journalists are noted for possessing strong anti-Israel viewpoints. This stance reinforces one aspect of the Arab-Palestinian conspiratorial narrative, namely that Jewish people supposedly desire to take over the al-Aqsa Mosque.

The Arab-Palestinian narrative on the issue is wholly implausible, with for example the BBC’s Nawal Assad fancifully asserting that the al-Aqsa Mosque effectively sits on the whole of the Temple Mount, and so the supposed desire to rebuild the Temple necessitates the destruction of the al-Aqsa Mosque.

Despite often invoking the notion of the Temple Mount ‘status quo’, RTE has failed to explain to its audiences what the term meaningfully constitutes. The ‘status quo’ is the denial of religious rights for the Jewish faithful on their holiest site, whilst ceding control of the Mount to the Islamic Waqf. To explain the conflict as substantively constituting one religious groupings resistance to another religious grouping’s assertion of their most basic of religious freedoms, would greatly undermine the claims of Coleman, Guerin, and so many others in the mainstream media, that the upsurge in violence was stoked by a desire for independence. This choice can be understood as an intentional manoeuvre, because it neatly fits RTE’s complete failure to report that the upsurge coincided with wide-ranging Islamic conspiracism, stoked by Abbas and other leaders.

Opposition to basic rights infers that the violence is motivated by Israel’s existence as a predominately Jewish nation situated in the historic House of Islam (Dar al-Islam). Such violence was a feature of Israel’s existence before it took possession of Judea and Samaria, in a defensive war against Jordan and other neighbouring Arab-Islamic states. The violence that concurrently emanated from Gaza cannot justifiably be deemed to be a direct consequence of living under a claimed occupation.

Pro-Israel bias?

Raymond Deane, a leading founder-member of the Irish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, publicly stated on his Facebook page that he complained to RTÉ about the radio-equivalent of the same programme. He accuses Coleman of having a pro-Israel bias, and asserts that the report presented a racist attitude toward Arab-Palestinians:

“On today’s News at One on RTÉ Radio 1 (14th October), your reporter Carole Coleman asserted that while “7 Israelis have been brutally murdered,” 30 Palestinians merely “died in the ensuing violence.”

This is not merely an unprofessional formulation, but a formulation so outrageously biased as to border on racism. To begin with, it omits context: the ongoing, daily violence of the Israeli state against the illegally occupied, colonised and besieged Palestinian people. Secondly, it decontextualises “the ensuing violence”, as though it just happened out of the blue without anybody being responsible. Thirdly, it fails to itemise the acts of “ensuing violence”, most of which constituted “brutal murder” by the Israeli security forces and by armed colonial settlers, whose presence in the West Bank and occupied/annexed East Jerusalem is illegal under international humanitarian law.

It is clear that Carole Coleman views the deaths of Israelis (which I do not condone) as a matter of far greater significance than the deaths of those oppressed, persecuted, dispossessed and colonised by the Israeli state – hence my sense that her formulation is inherently racist.”

However, Coleman’s formulation was largely accurate. The Israelis murdered were civilians who were going peaceably about their business. They were murdered solely for having an identity that their attackers disapproved of. As Associated Press reported on the 16th of October:

“Over the past month, eight Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks, most of them stabbings. In that time, 31 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire, including 14 labeled by Israel as attackers, and the rest in clashes with Israeli troops.”

These clashes are often described in the mainstream media as ‘protests’. However, such events are in fact violent confrontations with troops and security personnel.

It would be prejudicial to conflate the unprovoked murder of one grouping, with the fatalities of another grouping that voluntarily chose to aggress, and by extension the associated deaths of the latter grouping, typically leading from protracted episodes of violent confrontation and riot. Interestingly, Coleman’s description strayed from the norm at RTE, for example, an October 20th Lunchtime News report features the sort of conflationist language that may meet with Deane’s approval:

“UN Secrteary General, Ban Ki-moon, is meeting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas today, in an effort to calm tensions which have seen at least 42 Palestinians and 8 Israelis killed.”

Deane charged that the description of Israeli and Arab-Palestinian deaths ‘decontextualises “the ensuing violence”’, before making the charge of occupation, whilst invalidly claiming that Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, contravene International Law. However, Deane takes the remarks on the death toll out of context. Coleman’s report does cite those very issues as causal factors, when she stated that the quasi-Intifada has been enacted: “…by Arabs upset by Israeli occupation”, adding that “The causes of the turmoil include settlements and the failure to achieve a Palestinian state.”

Deane claimed that he is not justifying the death of Jewish civilians, but his efforts to explain Arab-Palestinian violence as a result of the very worst of supposed Israeli actions, namely as reactions by the “oppressed, persecuted, dispossessed and colonised”, is a distinct apologia for terrorism, as might be expected given the extremism of many of his prior expressions of support for the Arab-Palestinian cause.

Deane’s criticism is without foundation. A significant amount of criticism of the media from anti-Israel voices, originates with a desire to see the Jewish State demonised to a greater intensity in the media, since such criticism is often directed at media sources that are explicitly pro-Palestinian, for example, the Guardian, and the New York Times, with activists creating fake bias apology editorials.

November’s peaks and troughs

RTE’s TV coverage of the conflict became more infrequent during the month of November. The rate of the ongoing attacks had declined significantly, but still occurred at an atypically elevated level, with 326 recorded attacks, of which 249 utilised firebombs. Reports were brief other than that of the 12th of November. Israeli undercover agents raided the Al Ahli Hospital Hebron, in the PA administered zone of the city, to retrieve Azzam Shalaldeh, a Hamas operative who had stabbed a Jewish resident two weeks earlier.

The event was the second featured story in morning bulletins. Revolving screen text for the ‘News Now’ channel stated: “Israeli agents shoot man in hospital”. The raid became the headlining story for the Lunchtime News show, and subsequent afternoon news bulletins, which featured a report by Brian O’Donovan. News-presenter Aengus McGreanna stated “Undercover Israeli soldiers raid a hospital in the West Bank and kill a Palestinian man” in the opening headline for the Lunchtime show. The 6.1 News also highlighted a very similar report.

The report included numerous comments, and fact-based claims, by Arab-Palestinian individuals, but did not feature speakers presenting an alternate Israeli position. Despite a detailed report of the event itself, O’Donovan merely stated “There’s been a wave of violence in Israel, Jerusalem, and the West Bank, since the start of last month” as context for the concurrent wave of terrorist attacks and rioting.

O’Donovan’s report features footage of the detained Arab-Palestinian man’s brother, claiming that his relative, Abdullah, was shot dead for merely looking at the Israeli agents, after having been told to stay in his part of Azzam Shalaldeh’s hospital room. This assertion diverges with the claim by the Israeli authorities, that the relative was shot dead for attacking the operatives. The viewer is presumably supposed to believe the former claim, since similar reports on the 9 o’clock News programme, and the 11 PM news bulletin, excluded all mention of the Israeli assertion, whilst affording the brother’s account absolute credibility. O’Donovan stated:

“During today’s operation, the suspect’s cousin was shot dead, and his brother witnessed it all.”

The late exclusion of one perspective was made despite available reports that the Shalaldeh family had partially retracted the claim that Abdullah had not attacked the Israeli agents.

The report featured the director of the hospital, Dr. Jihad Shawar, stating (by translation) “This is a clear breach of international laws and ethics. It is well known that hospitals are a safe place for everyone.” The claim that it is against international law to detain any individual while at a hospital is an unusual assertion, but the claim was not challenged. The Third Geneva Convention ‘relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War’, is the most widely cited international statute on the matter of the fair treatment of prisoner combatants. However, the Convention, does not apply to illegitimate combatants, principally defined as individuals who do not follow the normative rules of engagement. It does not apply to those who engage in terrorist attacks, such as the intentional targeting of civilians uninvolved in a conflict. Moreover, Azzam Shalaldeh was not being held in custody by the Israeli authorities while in hospital.

The story was newsworthy, but it is difficult to account for such intensive media focus on what was otherwise a busy day for domestic news stories, when the same news editors had largely ignored the insurgent Arab-Palestinian violence for several weeks. The video footage of disguised Israeli agents might be newsworthy, and indeed O’Donovan introduces the report with the words: “A dramatic armed raid captured on CCTV”. Yet visually dramatic Arab-Palestinian attacks on Israeli security personnel were also caught on video during the same period, but they did not garner attention at RTE. The broadcaster’s interest in the hospital-raid story was so significant that two suicide bombings in Beiruit, which at the time were known to have killed in excess of 37 people, and wounded hundreds more, played second-fiddle in the later news programmes.

The BAI ‘Code of Fairness, Objectivity and Impartiality in News and Current Affairs — Guidance Notes’, July 2013 (pages 8 – 9), note that news material should be accurate, unbiased, and lack prejudgement. Unfortunately, both RTE reports featured have breached these principles to a very substantive extent.

Appendix

An excerpted transcript of the 14th October Lunchtime News report by Carole Coleman:

Presenter Sharon Toban [RTE studio]: “Israel’s cabinet has authorised police to seal off Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem and soldiers have been deployed in response to a worsening spate of violence. Seven Israelis and thirty Palestinians have been killed in the past two weeks.”

Carole Coleman [narration and associated video footage]: “Israeli border police erecting road blocks in Arab East Jerusalem. They are stopping Palestinians for inspection — checking cars for anything that might be used to cause mayhem. The blockades sanctioned by Israel’s cabinet have been prompted by a wave of violence, stabbings and car rammings carried out by Arabs upset by Israeli occupation.”

“Many residents disagree with sealing off Palestinian areas.”

Khader Ishkirat, a resident Jabel Mukaber: “The collective punishment will not achieve the goals of the Israeli government. The only way to achieve the goals of a peaceful way of living between the Israelis and the Palestinians is to establish the two-state solution.”

Coleman continues: “Human Rights Watch fears the blockade will make things worse.”

Sari Bashi, Human Rights Watch: “Given the history of abuse and neglect by Israeli authorities in East Jerusalem, it’s only going to exacerbate tensions between residents and police. It’s exactly what we don’t need.”

Coleman continues: “Seven Israelis have been brutally murdered in the past two weeks. Thirty Palestinians have died in the ensuing violence.”

“The causes of the turmoil include settlements and the failure to achieve a Palestinian state. But Palestinians also cite increased encroachment on the al Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, an area holy to both Muslims and Jews.” […]

Published at Crethi Plethi.

The Shapes of Casual Western Anti-Zionism

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, Chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin, Gen. Rehavam Zeevi (R), Gen. Narkis, in Old Jerusalem
(ILAN BRUNER 7/6/67, GPO; shared under the CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Those that criticise Israel particularly harshly over the Jewish State’s handling of the conflict, often argue that ‘Jews should know better’ or words to the same effect. This stance appeals to a protracted history of persecution and genocide in Europe, which reached a peak with the Holocaust.

This seemingly reflexive bias can find expression in some unexpected places. Godfrey Graham, a seasoned cameraman who worked in current-affairs programming at RTE, since the early period of the Broadcaster’s transmission service, described several filming engagements in Israel for his memoir ‘Forty Years Behind the Lens at RTE’, published by Ashfield Press (Dublin).

This relatively detailed article focuses on a number of paragraphs in Graham’s memoir — a book that was clearly not intended to be an exposition of the conflict. There does not appear to be a substantive animus held by the author toward Israel, for he describes his general experiences in quite positive terms. Yet the relevant paragraphs present a clear narrative, which forcefully asserts that the Jewish people of Israel are morally blameworthy, while the Arabs of the region are not. Thus, it represents a good example of the commonplace casually anti-Zionist views often expressed in the West today.

What Israeli-Jews ought to do

Of a visit to Israel in the early 1980s, Graham described (pages 142–144) a pleasant meeting with Chaim Herzog (President of Israel between 1983 and 1993), who was born in Belfast and had strong links with Dublin which were discussed in a convivial atmosphere. However, Graham’s tone darkened when it came to the matter of the conflict:

“We visited refugee camps, where Arabs had been moved to temporary camps in 1944. There is a picture of a very dignified gentleman living in appalling conditions, who made wooden farm instruments and had a philosophical approach to being in the camp but hoped that one day he would have his home and his land back.

The fact that Jerusalem has a strong Arab quarter and that all the great religions are represented there with some important shrines, seems to point to the fact that, ultimately, it must be a capital city that represents all the great religious traditions and not just the city for one dominant tradition. This would seem to me the only fair way forward. Just as the Jewish people longed for a homeland, they should be the first to see the need Palestinians have for a homeland, too.”

In what sense did Graham deem Judaism to be the “dominant” religious tradition of Jerusalem? Clearly he views Judaism’s apparent dominance to have been instituted illegitimately under Israeli rule, rather than being as a consequence of Judaism’s greater ties with the city than that of any other faith, where, for example, the Torah mentions Jerusalem hundreds of times, while it is not named at all in the Koran. Graham’s stance naturally leads to the conclusion that Israel is trying to “Judaise Jerusalem” as many anti-Israel activists allege.

The Jewish populace of East Jerusalem (including the famous Jewish Quarter of the old city) was ethnically cleansed in 1948 by Jordan. The Christian populace of East Jerusalem declined dramatically in the following decades, choosing to emigrate to other parts of Jordan and abroad. We can see that a “dominant” Islamic “tradition” can abuse its power, but, after the Six Day war the Arab populace of Jerusalem has grown at double the percentile rate of the Jewish populace (155% Jewish and 314% Arab) between the years 1967 and 2010. The Christian populace has only grown marginally, and in view of the rapid growth of the Arab-Islamic populace now just represents 2% of Jerusalem, but the dramatic decline under Jordanian rule has been reversed.

While Graham was active in the media, he would have surely been aware that Old (East) Jerusalem was off-limits to the regional Jewish populace because Jordan, which occupied the territory until 1967, prevented Jewish people accessing religious sites (including the Wailing Wall, which is one of the last structural remnants of the Temple Mount compound), in contravention with the Armistice Agreement of 1949 between the two nations. Under Jordanian rule, many Jewish religious sites were repeatedly desecrated and destroyed in violation of Article 8 the agreement, as repeatedly brought to the attention of the United Nations.

After East Jerusalem’s recapture, Levi Eshkol, the Israeli prime-minister of the time, promptly declared that the holy sites of all faiths in Jerusalem would be protected, as would their freedom to worship at such sites. Moshe Dayan famously ceded control of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif to the Islamic Wafq, and established the precedent of giving Muslims exclusive rights of worship on the Temple Mount Compound. This is a matter of the utmost sensitivity to the Islamic faith — hence the rioting when Ariel Sharon visited the site, a visit that was used as an excuse by Arafat for the commencement of the Second Intifada, which was still a major news story at the time of the publication of the memoir.

Therefore, under the rule of the Jewish State there is a seemingly unique situation where the leaders of the “dominant tradition” actually repress their own religious rights to placate another religious grouping, which has a longstanding hostility toward the “dominant tradition”. This Islamo-supremacist denial of the most basic of Jewish religious rights also extends to attempts to claim the Wailing Wall for the Muslim faith, an effort that began in the 1920s to the present. Historically, related Islamic conspiracism surrounding the Temple Mount has led to acts of genocide (1929), and the continued incitement thereof. Yet the accusations that Israel is an “apartheid” nation continue unabated with the anti-Israel movement.

It is difficult to see how Graham can suggest that the Jewish people of Israel have not attempted to facilitate an Arab-Palestinian homeland. This stance would necessitate ignoring such well-established facts as Arafat walking out of the Camp David talks (2000), the Taba talks of 2001, etc., which offered all of Gaza, almost all of Judea and Samaria, and a large swathe of East Jerusalem with substantive control over the Temple Mount. It should be noted that Jordan/Transjordan already constitutes more than three-quarters of what was originally envisaged to be the “Jewish National Home” and as such represents the established nation for the Arabs of the region. When speaking of a “homeland” for Arab-Palestinians, Yasser Arafat’s assertion, when he spoke to reporter Arianna Palazzi in 1970, is relevant:

‘From the Arab standpoint, we mustn’t talk about borders. Palestine is nothing but a drop in an enormous ocean. Our nation is the Arabic nation that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond it… The P.L.O. is fighting Israel in the name of Pan-Arabism. What you call “Jordan” is nothing more than Palestine.”’

Criticism of Jewish-Israeli morality

When visiting Israel to film a Gate Theatre production of iconic Irish play ‘Juno and the Paycock’, Graham decided to again focus on supposed Jewish-Israeli immorality in relation to the plight of the Arab-Palestinians (page 226):

“While in Israel, our team got an opportunity to visit the profoundly moving sculpture depicting the Holocaust. That image will remain with me forever. We visited a refugee camp where Arabs had been told way back in 1948 they were going for a temporary period. The tragedy of the displacement of the Arab people is something the Israelis should understand, given the Jewish experience and their long journey to find their homeland. We met one man (his picture is presented on previous page) who had spent most of his life in this ‘temporary’ refugee camp. He had tremendous dignity and lived in just two very small, bear rooms but, despite his horrible experience, retained a gentleness of spirit that inspired all of us who met him. I often wonder whether he is still alive.”

This paragraph begins with a rather detached image evoking the subject of the Holocaust, which is contrasted with another image of an Arab-Palestinian refugee, before expounding on the latter subject. Graham seems to be intentionally reinforcing his point with this juxtaposition — that there is a lacking in the substance in the national morality of the Jewish-Israeli populace, since they, of-all-people, should understand the suffering of another group, given the way in which Jewish people were persecuted.

Graham fails to explain why “Arabs had been told way back in 1948 they were going for a temporary period” to a refugee camp, He appears to refer to the many Arab-Egyptian and Arab-Palestinian people who left a newly independent Israel at the instruction of Arab invaders so the Jewish State could be more easily destroyed, with the promise that they could soon return (within a few weeks) once the deed was done. Others left out of fear of reprisals once the Arab forces began to fail in their objective. This is a crucial point that goes to the very heart of pan-Arab aggression and existential rejectionism. Graham’s assertion may be indicative of perceptive bias, where vital facts are disposed because they do not comply with a certain narrative, or the omission may be more intentional, because it would greatly undermine attempts to hold Israeli-Jews responsible.

Graham described an Arab-Palestinian refugee in understandably sympathetic terms but this man, and his contemporaries, suffered because the Arab-Islamic world refused to accept Israel’s existence, and instead chose to wage a war of aggression. It is their misfortunate that the sole Jewish State in existence was not destroyed, and that the Jewish people did not face genocide — a very real threat made by Azzam Pasha in 1947. The so-called “Nabka” (Catastrophe), where between 472,000 and 650,000 Arab-Palestinians were displaced, could have been avoided if the Arab world recognised the right of Jewish independence with UN Resolution 181, in what constituted just a small portion their ancient ancestral homeland, in a rather small fraction of the original British Palestine Mandate, instead of waging an unofficial sectarian war from 1947 to 1948, and invading one day after Israel declared its independence in 1948, with a coalition of seven armies.

The Arab states refused Arab/Arab-Palestinian refugees citizenship, and curbed their basic rights. Israel feared they would become a fifth column in the absence of peace, but still offered to take back 100,000 at the Lausanne talks of 1949, to which the Arab nations refused. Nevertheless, 50,000 refugees did return under a family reunification programme, as well as a further 75,000 displaced by the Six Day War. Israel also absorbed vast numbers of Jewish people fleeing persecution in Arab lands. Thus, if Graham wants Jewish people to accept the notion of an Arab-Palestinian homeland (which they have), then that request must be justly conditional upon Arab-Palestinian society accepting Jewish self-determination in Israel. Otherwise, strife is merely continued, albeit at a higher intensity a la the defacto nation of Gaza.

Graham only mentions Arab-Palestinian terrorism in passing, when relating Chaim Herzog’s humorous remark that the SAM rockets fired by “Palestinian factions” (pages 143 – 144) were in range of his Tel Aviv home: “He said that a SAM could make a huge mess of your fruit trees if you were not careful.”

Paradoxically, Graham criticises the now-independent Jewish-Israelis who have a homeland, for not understanding the displacement of the Arab-Palestinians from the 1948-49 War of Independence. Yet it has long been a key demand of Yasser Arafat’s PLO to push for a so-called “right of return” to nullify Israel’s existence as a principally Jewish State. The two conditions are mutually exclusive so it seems Graham is indirectly criticising Israeli-Jews for not seeking a loss of their own homeland, their own self-determination, and religious freedom, free of the persecution visited upon them by the Islamic world for over a millennia, which peaked with their oppression, genocide and expulsion from the Arab-Islamic world between the 1920s and 1970.

An authentic homeland?

Graham appears to doubt the strength of the historic links between Israel and the Jewish People, since he describes the re-establishment of Israel as their “long journey to find their homeland”. In an earlier paragraph Graham talks of “the Jewish people” having “longed for a homeland” [emphasis added].

Graham may have in mind Theodore Herzl’s early flirtation with the idea of establishing a Jewish safe-haven in South America, because it was further away from the locus of the imperialist ambitions of the Western powers, which saw opportunities to carve up the territories of the ailing Ottoman Empire, and also avoided Palestine’s geographical proximity to the Russian Empire which had brutally oppressed its quite large Jewish populace. However, the defacto Zionist movement’s return to Palestine preceded Herzl. It seems the secular-minded Herzl may not have fully appreciated the scale of the importance of Palestine to the Jewish people — an importance that led to migration back to the homeland hundreds of years earlier, long before the Zionism movement was devised, and so Herzl’s idea was abandoned.

A passing knowledge of Jewish culture and history demonstrates that the Israeli State is located on part of the ancient homeland of the Jews. They constitute an indigenous people, which numerousobjective genetic studies have demonstrated. It explains the fact that Jerusalem features so strongly in the Torah, in prayer and in sayings, and, as such, are morally entitled to live in a region from which their ancestors were displaced, by successive pagan, Christian and Islamic empires. This is rather more than merely “a” homeland, that the Jewish people journeyed to “find” after fleeing the Christian West.




Published at Crethi Plethi.

He Said-They Said: Mahmoud Abbas October 14th speech, and the Mainstream Media

Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas (AP)

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority’s president, delivered an important televised speech to Arab-Palestinian society on October the 14th last year, during the height of a newly resurgent period of violence, which some commentators thought to be the opening salvo of a new Arab-Palestinian intifada or uprising. AFP (Agence-France Presse) described the speech in an article entitled “Abbas says he backs 'peaceful' struggle against Israeli occupation”:

"Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said Wednesday he favours "peaceful, popular resistance" against Israeli occupation, amid a two-week wave of violence that has killed more than 30 people on both sides.

In a speech broadcast on official Palestinian television, his first since the outbreak of the violence, Abbas spoke of the Palestinian people's 'right to defend ourselves' and 'pursue our national struggle'."

The ‘Abbas favours “peaceful, popular resistance” against Israeli occupation’ sentiment was echoed in other mainstream syndicated news services. Aron Heller, of the Associated Press, wrote:

“In a brief speech Wednesday, Abbas called for a peaceful "national struggle." He also threatened to submit a case to the International Criminal Court against what he called Israel's "extrajudicial killings" of Palestinians.”

That same day RTE’s 9 PM news programme featured a report by Carol Coleman (“Two Palestinians shot dead in latest spate of attacks in Israel”) which presented the speech thusly:

“This evening Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas held firm, saying that Palestinians would continue to struggle for the project of nation or state-hood. He spoke of the right to self defence but called for non-violent resistance.”

Al Jazeera America stated:

"Addressing Palestinians for the first time since the violence began, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said in a recorded televised speech he supported 'peaceful and popular' struggle against Israel."

The Xinhua News Agency similarly emphasised Abbas’ supposed desire for a meaningful peace, while in an article carrying the headline “Palestinians still extend hand for real peace process: Abbas”, the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) also described the speech in peaceful terms.

What Abbas really said

The reader would rightly understand such descriptions of the speech as the first seeds of a de-escalation of violence. However, the speech was received very differently in Israel.

Most sectors of Israeli society, including some segments of the more “dovish” left, condemned Abbas’ speech. Indeed, the leader of the liberal secular Yesh Atid party lambasted the speech in the strongest possible terms.

Which perspective on the speech is correct? A full English translation provided by the Jerusalem Post (much of which is reproduced below) amply validates the criticism that emanated from Israel.

In the paragraph below, Abbas does indeed speak of “non-violent popular resistance” but he simultaneously endorses the past violence of the PLO, to which he repeatedly refers:

“We will continue our legitimate national struggle, which is based on our right to defend ourselves and on non-violent popular resistance and political and legal struggle. We will work with needed patience, wisdom and courage to protect our people and our political and national achievements, which we have achieved after decades of hard work and persistence through a long path of martyrs, injured people and prisoners.”

He continues, describing this violence or terrorism as the “price of our freedom” which will soon come:

“It’s true that we paid a big price through the blood of our martyrs, the injured, the tears of our mothers and the pain of our prisoners. However, it’s the price of our freedom, which is around the corner…”

Abbas speaks of tearing up the Oslo Accords, the foundational agreement between the PLO and Israel allowing for Yasser Arafat’s return to Ramallah in 1993 from exile in Tunisia, which facilitates shared security measures (Article II), the transfer of taxes, water resources etc., to the new Palestinian Authority:

“We will together continue with you our national, political and legal struggle. We will not remain hostage to the agreements that are not respected by Israel, and we will continue to join the international organizations and treaties”

Abbas claims that Israel did not respect the Oslo Interim Accord, a view that he has often asserted. However, grave and longstanding breaches by the PLO undermine the notion that the terror group was ever serious about peace. An upsurge in terrorist attacks during the 90s undermined the possibility of final status negotiations. The newly established PA police force did not fulfil their security obligations under Oslo II, the PLO charter was not changed to recognise Israel (Article XXXI, section 9), nor were the undertakings to stop using paramilitary forces (Article XIV, section 3) and incitement to violence (Article XXII) upheld. Abbas also continues to breach the agreement with unilateral moves to achieve statehood without negotiation.

The speech ends with the threat of continued violence and an exhortation of those Arab-Palestinians involved in the violence and terrorist acts:

“Here, I invite you my great people, wherever you are, to, unite and be wary of the occupation schemes designed to abort and terminate our national project. We will never hesitate to defend our people and to protect them this is our right.

A tribute to the martyr’s… greetings to the wounded, greetings to the prisoners.”

In an earlier part of the speech, Abbas describes the conflict in apocalyptic terms, and blames Israel solely for the violence:

“The Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people, land and holy places continues to escalate. The racist barbarism exacerbates the ugliness of the occupation, in a way that threatens peace and stability and the igniting of a religious conflict that would burn everything, not only in the region but perhaps the whole world. […]

We are clearly saying that we will not accept a change in the status quo of al-Aksa Mosque compound, as we will not allow any Israeli schemes aimed at compromising its holiness and Islamic identity to pass. It’s our exclusive right: for the Palestinians and Muslims everywhere in the world.

We are asking for our rights, justice and peace, we do not commit aggression on anyone and we do not accept aggression against our people, our nation and our holy places”

Abbas describes the clashes on the Temple Mount in purely defensive terms. When speaking of self-defence, Abbas is justifying such violence which, paradoxically, is seen in defensive fashion by many of the faithful within the Islamic world. Muslims have claimed that the Jewish people of Israel are attempting to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque. This trend began in 1929 when the then-Mufti of Jerusalem incited genocide, leading to the mutilation and slaughter of many Jewish civilians, especially in Hebron – the second holiest city within the Jewish faith. Abbas’ audience would not be deaf to the power of his words, which he often reiterated, as for example in an October 8th statement:

"Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas says the Palestinians will not be 'dragged' into more violence with Israel, but says his people stand with those 'protecting Al-Aqsa mosque.'

Speaking to business leaders on Thursday in Ramallah Abbas says he is committed to 'peaceful popular resistance,' though he backs rioters who recently barricaded themselves inside Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque and clashed with Israeli police on the Temple Mount."

Whilst describing the clashes on the Temple Mount/Haram al Sharif in defensive terms, he nonetheless reiterated in the October 14th speech that Muslims had sole rights over the contested religious site, asserting that “it’s our exclusive right: for the Palestinians and Muslims everywhere in the world.”

Abbas not only repeated the patently false charge that the Israeli State wished to change the status quo of the Temple Mount, a claim originating in the 1920s, which evolved after Israel retook East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War, an assertion that initiated the Autumn 2015 spate of violence (as well as the Second Intifada), he heightened the political temperature by falsely claiming that Israel was the aggressor of this violence, and that Israel is destroying homes - an action against the financial rewards provided by the Palestinian Authority for encouraging terrorism by providing substantial financial incentives.

Ahmed Manasra’s martyrdom

And yet the baleful quality of such sentiments was nothing new for Abbas – the section of his speech that caused real controversy was the claim that Israel murdered a youth called Ahmed Manasra:

“We will not give up to the logic of brute force, policies of occupation and aggression practiced by the Israeli government and the herd of settlers who are engaged in terrorism against our people, our holy places, our homes, our trees and the execution of our children in cold blood as they did with the child Ahmed Manasra and other children from Jerusalem.”

Ahmed Manasra is a thirteen-year-old Arab-Palestinian, who engaged in an indiscriminate stabbing spree with his fifteen-year-old brother in a Jewish neighbourhood of East Jerusalem called Pisgat Ze'ev, as vividly caught on CCTV footage. Manasrah stabbed a thirteen-year-old Israeli boy multiple times, rendering him clinically dead upon arrival at hospital. Abbas’ claim was easily refuted with the publication of an image of Manasrah recovering in an Israeli hospital after he was injured when struck by a car. Yet Abbas attempted to present the Arab-Palestinian teen who engaged in a particularly savage stabbing attack as a martyr akin to the falsified Mohammad al-Dura case, a hoax that has been used as a widespread source of incitement in the Arab-Islamic world.

A day before Abbas’ television speech, one of Abbas’ spokesmen also claimed Manasrah was executed and compared the youth with al-Dura:

“Presidential Spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina stated that the execution of child Hassan Manasrah in front of the media, as child Muhammad Al-Dura was executed in the year 2000, is an abominable crime, and the legal, humanitarian and political responsibility for it is on the Israeli government.”

The fabrication seemed to work. Micah Halpern, of the New York Observer, noted the effect caused by this lie:

‘Mr. Abbas used expressions like “Israeli aggression” against the Palestinian people, their holy places and their homes. He spoke of the “executions of children like Ahmed Manasra.” He actually calls terrorists victims and heroes. And the Arabic press backs him up.

Here are two Arabic press news headlines. The first one reads: “Palestinian Child Bleeds to Death While Israeli Police and Civilians Watch, Shouting Insults.” The second reads: “Teen Shot by Israelis Stomped On, Left to Bleed to Death.”’

US news channel MSNBC reinforced Abbas’ account of Ahmed Manasra’s falsified martyrdom whilst Vice News minimised what was a particularly savage stabbing attack, by claiming that it was merely an attempted stabbing. However, controversy over Manasra’s would lead the PA to amend their translation of Abbas’ speech, which was changed to say that Manasra and other children were “shot at in cold blood.”

Words of defence as words of aggression

The very considerable divergence between the international media’s presentation of the October 14th speech, and its interpretation in both Israel and the Arab world, related to basic descriptions of the content of the speech and how Abbas’ claims ought to be understood in view of the ongoing conflict.

Abbas’ speech did not subtly suggest a de-escalation of violence, or express a favouring for non-violent methods. His call to action was starkly framed by images of Israeli aggression and murder, supposedly designed to prevent the basic rights of Arab-Palestinian people to live in their homes, to worship freely, and to achieve political freedom. How could the media justify describing the speech as endorsing non-violent methods to gain statehood? Perhaps because Abbas’ speeches use language that conjures up superficial notions of humanism. To analyse the first of two sentences most indicative peaceful intent:

“We are asking for our rights, justice and peace, we do not commit aggression on anyone and we do not accept aggression against our people, our nation and our holy places”

This sentence uses the noble words “peace” and “justice” but Abbas does not voice any criticism (however feeble) of the then-recent spate of Arab-Palestinian terror attacks against Jewish civilians. Instead Abbas claims that the Arab-Palestinian collective does not “commit aggression,” but rather that Israeli authorities and Jewish people living in Judea and Samaria (AKA the West Bank) are aggressing against them in the renewed violence. By contrast, when a reprisal attack occurred, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “strongly condemned the harming of innocent Arabs” and warned those resorting to violence would be brought to justice. The Western ideal of justice, with the iconic image of the scales of balance representing fairness, has no real meaning in Abbas’ world.

Abbas’ notion of “rights” is also problematic because it is politically loaded by decades of conflict-propaganda. The primary longstanding Arab-Palestinian demand is for the so-called “Right of Return”, which is couched in the language of human rights, even though it has no legal basis or moral justification – rather it is an effort to nullify Israel’s existence as a principally Jewish State through demographic means, despite being wholly incompatible with the longstanding "two states for two peoples" approach to the peace process.

The supposedly peaceful stance of sentence two reinforces the difficulties in the first quoted sentence:

“We will continue our legitimate national struggle, which is based on our right to defend ourselves and on non-violent popular resistance and political and legal struggle.”

This sentence talks of “non-violent popular resistance,” which likely refers to the wide-scale riotous violence which is typically described as “protest” by the media. Furthermore, the statement distinguishes between this form of action and the “right to defend ourselves.” Thus, AFP’s claim that Abbas "favours "peaceful, popular resistance" is clearly incorrect. He actually legitimised ongoing sectarian violence, which often targeted Jewish-Israeli civilians, as an inherent right of self-defence.

In a November 16th broadcast on PA television, Abbas explained his intent. He described the attacks as part of a “peaceful uprising” (seemingly because some of the attacks did not use military hardware), and admitted to calling for terror attacks:

“We said to everyone that we want peaceful popular uprising, and that’s what this is. That’s what this is. However, the aggression of firing bullets has come from the Israelis.”

A poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research also found that a majority of Arab-Palestinians believe that Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority, supported the terror attacks.

When leaders express such obvious counterfactuals as the claim that the Arab-Palestinian collective “do not commit aggression on anyone,” then their statements must be treated with scepticism and be duly scrutinised. This ought to be deemed a significant ethical issue, particularly during a period of substantive conflict. Where there is a parallel endorsement of ongoing and prior acts of terrorism, it necessarily follows that the use of words like “peace,” “peaceful struggle,” and “defence” can only be legitimately viewed in propagandistic terms.

Lethal results

In keeping with Abbas’ description of Arab-Palestinian violence as defensive, whilst Israel and segments of the regional Jewish populace commit acts of aggression, an incendiary August 1st 2015 speechasserted that “the story of the [Jewish] Temple is… the greatest crime and forgery in history,” and as a means to allow the Jewish People to conquer historic Palestine and “get rid of the al-Aqsa [mosque].” In September Abbas spoke on a PA television channel, heaping blessings on the Murabitin/Murabitat (defenders or guardians of the faith), which the PA and Islamic Movement in Israel hired to harass non-Muslim visitors at the Temple Mount. He added these now-infamous words:

“we bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every Martyr (Shahid) will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah. The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is ours, and they (the Jews) have no right to defile them with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem.”

These words were followed all too predictably by an intensified period of violence, with numerous Arab-Palestinian terrorists citing these very reasons for attempting to kill Israeli civilians or security personnel, for example, Muhannad Halabi, a nineteen-year-old university student, who murdered two Israelis and injured a further two, including a two-year-old. He wrote on a Facebook page:

“What is happening to al-Aqsa [mosque] is what is happening to our holy sites, and what is happening to the women of al-Aqsa [the Murabitat] is what is happening to our mothers and women. I don’t believe that our people will succumb to humiliation.”

Halabi decided to kill because he was outraged at the arrest of murabitat for abusing Temple Mount visitors, an act by the Israeli authorities that he characterised as aggressive, and as a “humiliation”. His parents would also praise their “martyred son” for “avenging” those of the Muslim faith on Temple Mount “against the impure enemies.”

Besides constituting one of many examples of the Islamist supremacism so defining this conflict, as forcefully reinforced by the tone of incitement during the period, the terrorist views his act as defensive, which the Arab-Palestinian authorities reinforce in conceptually bizarre ways. Thus, terrorists who attack, injure and/or kill are commonly described as defenceless when they themselves are killed in acts of self-defence, which is used to fuel further violent intent to attack Israeli civilians and/or security personnel.

This peculiar form of reasoning is founded on a century of Arab-Islamic rejectionism, based on the notion that the Jewish people have no right of self-determination in the region, regardless of how small the territory might be that they may possess. For example, the 1964 PLO Charter rejects UN Resolution 181 (Article 17: “The Partitioning of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of Israel are illegal and false…”). In effect any violent response to Israel is an act of self-defence, while Abbas still refuses to accept the existence of Israel, especially as a Jewish state. This longstanding Arab-Palestinian perspective explains why so many perceive acts of aggression to be acts of defence. Article 15 of the PLO Charter (or ‘Palestinian National Charter’) makes it clear that war, violence and even terrorism against Israel is viewed in purely defensive terms:

“The liberation of Palestine, from an Arab viewpoint, is a national (qawmi) duty and it attempts to repel the Zionist and imperialist aggression against the Arab homeland, and aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine. Absolute responsibility for this falls upon the Arab nation––peoples and governments…”

It is quite clear that much of the lexicon of terms utilised by Arab-Palestinian leaders have been highly distorted by conflict-propaganda, and so these terms should be understood differently to that of their commonly understood usage. This fact would not come as a surprise to seasoned journalists familiar with the effects of incitement. However, after the major upsurge in violence, with various Fatah leaders and spokesmen celebrating and endorsing such acts of terror, the regional mainstream media bureaux did not read Abbas’ 14th October speech with any level of scepticism. The PA president is rarely presented as anything other than a moderate politician by the media, a peacemaker who doesn’t have a partner for peace with a supposedly-intransigent Israel.

Over a period of months, the mainstream media would continue to present the surge in Arab-Palestinian violence as a despairing response to failed peace efforts, rather than as a consequence of Islamist supremacism and/or extreme nationalism. Some media experts even believe that religious sectarianism etc. is irrelevant when attempting to explain this violence, contenting themselves by reiterating Arab-Palestinian talking points.

And yet surveys demonstrate that Arab-Palestinian society continues to believe that the al-Aqsa compound is in grave danger, despite the fact that the site has been in Israel’s possession for nearly half a century, and continue to favour the elimination of Israel, which would be replaced by a nation where Jewish people would not share equal rights with Arabs.





Published at the New English Review.

Anti-Zionism’s links with anti-Semitism - RTE subscribes to Livingstone Formulation in Labour Party controversy

Ken Livingstone facing camera crews at Westminster (source: Youtube/C4News)

RTE, the public service broadcaster of the Irish Republic, has the capacity to immensely influence the views and moral stances of the Irish nation as seasoned commentator (and one-time senior RTE insider) Eoghan Harris has often pointed out. Due to a virtual broadcasting monopoly, the way in which RTE treats contentious issues of major social concern, such as terrorism, migrant waves, the resurgence of European anti-Semitism, etc., arguably has a greater impact on the thinking of the Irish Nation than equivalent broadcasting institutions in other countries, such as the United Kingdom’s BBC, that compete with a strong private sector.

RTE’s audience reach extends beyond the Irish Republic, with media saturation in Northern Ireland, and its radio and television channels are viewed quite widely abroad, particularly in the UK mainland.

King Newt strikes Jerusalem

The controversy over Ken ‘Newt’ Livingstone’s suspension from the British Labour Party, for defending Naz Shah, an MP accused of anti-Semitism, raged in the UK last month. Livingstone was suspended for an odd apologia of Shah’s actions – he claimed that Hitler supported the Zionist movement until he “went mad” and instituted the programme of mass Jewish extermination. Livingstone has since doubled-down in his attack on the Jewish State by claiming Israel’s creation was a “catastrophe”.

Livingstone’s comments were without any historical basis but he would attempt to back-up his claims with the use of bigoted ahistoric sources cited by neo-NAZI types in the shadier side of the Internet. His assertion that Israel should not have been created “because there had been a Palestinian community there for 2,000 years,” was similarly ahistorical, fitting the PLO’s old propaganda-narrative that Jesus Christ was the first Arab-Palestinian shahid (martyr). He also holds Israel responsible for the military aggression of the Arab-Islamic world, and the creation of ISIS, whilst conflating the risk of a nuclear-Iran with Israel’s arsenal.

Patchy coverage

The fracas has been given little attention to-date on RTE. Their sole article on the topic (‘Livingstone defends Hitler comments in Labour row’, 30th April 2016) was peculiar because it only featured Livingstone’s perspective and that of his defenders. The article also included Livingstone’s obviously fallacious strawman of Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments concerning Haij Amin al Husseini’s role in the Holocaust — the Israeli prime-minister never suggested that Hitler supported Zionism.

Broadcast coverage was similar. The story only featured passing mention on television, in an afternoon ‘RTE News Now’ bulletin on the April 28th, when the news of Livingstone’s suspension first emerged but was not featured in RTE’s lengthier prime news programmes later that same day. By contrast, the election of Labourite Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London, received substantive coverage on radio and television throughout the May 6th/7th period, and featured more strongly in online content.

The lack of coverage on RTE is rather peculiar. British political events tend to feature quite prolifically in RTE news schedules due to the close connections between the two States. Moreover, Livingstone is a politician of some renown in Ireland. He was the first senior British political figure to openly engage in talks with Sein Fein-IRA, and one of the very few to have advocated loudly for the Republican group’s cause. While head of the Greater London Council, he talked prolifically with the terror group during an intensive period of its London bombing campaign, for which he earned a considerable degree of notoriority — principally hatred.

Livingstone also earned a lot of affection within the London-Irish community of yore by pandering to an exaggerated and unworthy victimhood. Indeed, Livingstone once charged that “What Britain did in Ireland was worse than what Hitler did to the Jews.” It is worth noting that Livingstone’s views would have also been percieved as extreme in Ireland! While many sympathesised with the very poor treatment of the Catholic populace in Ulster, few would have agreed with his expressions of support for the IRA. Sein Fein only found electoral pre-eminance in Ulster after the Good-Friday Agreement, and only obtained electoral success in the Republic in more recent years.

Labour’s electoral woes matter more?

Perhaps RTE’s most notable input on Livingstone anti-Semitism controversy came when Marian Finucane, a veteran RTE journalist and presenter of repute in Ireland, discussed the issue in the second hour of RTE Radio One’s ‘Marian Finucane Show’ on Sunday the 1st May 2016. Enda Brady, an Irish correspondent with UK broadcaster ‘Sky News’, was invited onto the show to provide some insights into the on-going row. However, the discussion was rather more revealing for its misleading and oddly slanted appraisal of the controversy.

The contributions to the radio slot focused far more on the impact that the controversy would have on the British Labour Party’s electoral ability, than on the actual anti-Semitic content of the remarks that led to the very controversy. This peculiar focus may have led some listeners to wonder if there was any real substance to the criticism of Livingstone’s remarks, beyond that of mere historical inaccuracy.

In a brief commentary to introduce the issue, Brady stated:

“Basically a row over comments Ken Livingstone had made earlier in the week defending a Yorkshire MP called Naz Shah. She had shared something on Facebook. She had shared a post calling for Israel to be relocated to the United States… Ken Livingstone waded in and attempted to defend her, and in doing so kept digging, making the situation just awful for Labour.”

Finucane: “Just coming up to elections?”

Brady: “Yes, local elections here on Thursday, and you know the focus should be on, you would imagine from a Labour perspective, the focus should have been on fighting a Conservative Government, and austerity, and cuts, and what have you to public spending, and yes Labour riven by internal strife and division, and a rather unpleasant nasty row over allegations of anti-Semitism. […]

But yes it’s a mess, and you just think the Conservative Party, David Cameron, everyone else, they must just be watching this with their mouths open”

Finucane: “Manna from heaven.”

Brady: “Yes precisely…”

Finucane and Brady would go on to discuss how the controversy could undermine Sadiq Khan’s prospects in the London mayoral election, with Brady adding:

“Again he’s [Khan] being embroiled in this as well, and just by association, questions being put, you know ‘are you anti-Semitic as well?’ It just looks terrible for Labour. It really, really does, with day after day of headlines, and of course I guess its been a comparatively quiet news cycle, this has just been leading every single bulletin for five six days.”

The questions surrounding Khan related to his own personal associations with extremists, rather than merely his being a member of the Labour Party. Senator Kevin Humphrys, a member of the Irish Labour Party, described the remarks as “wrong”, but similarly focused on the damage it would cause to the British Labour Party vote.

There was a vague reference to a broader concern about anti-Semitism within the Labour Party but there was no mention of the many egregious comments by other Labour members, which would have assisted in framing a discussion to which Irish audiences have limited media exposure.

To cite a few examples of the scale of this problematic behaviour: Gerry Downing’s suggestion that Marxists address what he termed “the Jewish Question”, descriptions of Hitler as the “Zionist God”, charges that Israel uses the Holocaust as “a financial racket in the West”, media reports that Labour secretly suspended fifty Labour members for issues connected with anti-Semitism, and the resignation of a Oxford University Labour Club chairman spurred by the endemic anti-Semitism of its members. To Brady’s credit, he did however note that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s critics point out his poor performance in dealing with the issue.

It should be noted both Brady and Finucane briefly mentioned the hatred exhibited toward Jewish people in France, with Brady describing it as a “massive issue”. Finucane also noted that anti-Semitism is an unacknowledged problem, and disagreed with Livingstone’s view that Hitler supported Zionism. Ultimately however, it was a missed opportunity to discuss an issue that the Western mainstream media often seeks to avoid.

Naz Shah’s unfortunate ‘Facebookery’

Finucane’s radio segment reported that Naz Shah posted a Facebook entry stating that the conflict would be solved if Israel was moved to the US. Later the discussion strayed into flippant territory:

Finucane: “There’s a lot to be said for keeping away from Facebook.”

Sinead O’Carroll (News Editor with Journal.ie): “Absolutely, this started with a politician making a very flippant point on Facebook.”

Such opining infers that Shah did not really mean anything of substance when writing the post. Neither Finucane, nor the other contributors, explained why this particular post is thought by many to be offensive. Shah’s ‘transportation’ Facebook post was not intended to be a constructive idea (however bizarre) — another contributor later suggested that anti-Zionism is not necessarily anti-Semitic. Shah posted a kind of mocking info-graphic that suggested Israel was to blame for all of the troubles of the Middle East (presumably including Islamist terrorism spreading Westward), and that the existence of the Jewish State somehow made the world unhappy. By inference, the post recommends ethnically cleansing the Middle East of its Jewish people, much of whom were forced, by persecution, to flee to Israel from other regions of the Middle East in the first instance.

Finucane and O’Carroll present the post as little more than a ‘blonde moment’ but Shah added a comment that reinforced the message of the infographic, and the contributors also failed to note that she has a record for making other problematic comments in the past.

Shah has also posted critical content about “Jews”, compared Israel’s policies to those of Hitler, and promoted an article that likened Zionism to al Qaeda, which charged that the movement had caused Jews to act in negative ways, akin to neo-Nazi claims of normative Jewish behaviour, with respect to control of politics, the media etc. in European societies, and offered a solution to the “Jewish Question in Europe”. Shah was a relatively senior politician. She is an MP, was private secretary to the Shadow Chancellor, and more remarkably, a member of a committee combating anti-Semitism in Britain, so critics, both within and outside the Labour party, were fully entitled to raise concerns about bigotry.

By the time of the discussion on the Finucane Show, news had also emerged that Shah’s aide, Mohammed Shabbir, had engaged in overtly anti-Semitic messages, inferring that Orthodox Jewish people were engaged in child abuse, prostitution, used the neo-Nazi term “Zio”, suggested Israel created ISIS to serve as a pretext to invade Syria, compared Israel to NAZI Germany, etc. These views echoed some of Shah’s comments, thus raising further questions about her beliefs.

RTE’s Livingstone, I presume

At the end of the discussion, Finucane stated that she had been suprised when she found out that Livingstone was involved in a row over anti-Semitism

“I have to say I was very surprised — I certainly wouldn’t have anticipated that Ken Livingstone would be in any way anti-Semitic.”

Livingstone, who has been a guest on Finucane’s show previously, has intermittently caused a quite substantive level of controversy over many expressions that displayed a strong disregard and dislike of Jewish people. And has expressed strong support for the likes of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an individual who not only supports Arab-Palestinian terrorism, but has openly expressed genocidal sentiments toward the Jewish people.

After the odd focus on Labour’s election worries, and some expressions of generalised concern about anti-Semitism in Europe today, the discussion strayed into contentious territory when Finucane stated:

“The tricky bit is that just because somebody says that they disagree with Israeli policy in Gaza, it does not mean they are anti-Semitic, and those lines have to be clarified. And they’ve kind of got blurred I think in this debate as well.”

Brady: “Yes I think that’s a fair point but I think in modern politics the speed the reaction of labour to clamp down on all of this, a lot of people here will feel very sore.”

Shah posted the offending infographic during the Gaza war so Finucane appears to be arguing that the comment was not in itself anti-Semitic. However, Shah did not merely criticise Israeli policy in Gaza. Shah took issue with Israel’s very existence. Another guest, Gerard Howlin, a former Fianna Fail Party advisor, agreed but also drew attention to the fact that anti-Zionism often coincides with anti-Semitism:

“There is this thing between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. And of course they aren’t always the same. You can be perfectly anti-Zionist without being in any way anti-Semitic, and that should be very much acknowledged. You can be critical of Israel in particular without being in any way anti-Semitic. But of course Zionism is a response to anti-Semitism originally.”

Livingstone reformulated

Finucane advanced the argument that criticism of Israel is not necessarily anti-Semitic, and that the debate confused or conflated anti-Zionism (as inferred by her defence of Shah’s existentially anti-Zionist views) with anti-Semitism, as further indicated by Howlin’s response. By inference, such a position would suggest that the views of the two main players in the controversy — both Shah’s and Livingstone’s — were not necessarily anti-Semitic. Therefore, it seems that Livingstone was quite entitled to defend Naz Shah since the MP did not express views that were inherently anti-Semitic. Such argumentation would lead to the conclusion that if her views are not inherently or necessarily anti-Semitic then, in effect, they should ultimately not to be regarded as anti-Semitic because such accusations are no longer deemed to be fair (in view of the supposed power of the accusation that may be reputationally damaging) or morally legitimate, and so the charge is presented as a vicious ploy.

The stance endorsed on the ‘Marian Finucane show’ constitutes a category error, because it forms a fallacious conflation of two divergent categories of argumentation. There is of course an area where the two categories coincide because anti-Zionism must by definition be critical of the existence of the State of Israel, and efforts to defend its existence. Yet there are circumstances where criticism of Israel does not originate from anti-Zionist positions. Anti-Zionism is a different category of argumentation that is advanced by those possessing trenchant anti-Israel positions. Anti-Zionism is necessarily extremist because anti-Zionists advocate for the dissolution of the sole principally-Jewish State in existence, regardless of its borders and compromises it has attempted to make with Arab-Palestinian society.

Perhaps unwittingly, Finucane may have advanced a strawman’ argument created by anti-Israel advocates, not least by Livingstone himself (for whom David Hirsh coined the term ‘Livingstone Formulation’), who wish to attack those defending Israel in debate. Such advocates present opponents defending Israel (from what is seen as unjustified criticism) as being disingenuous and attempting to silence all criticism of the Jewish State by using the “anti-Semitism card” to trump legitimate debate.

However, it does not appear that anyone has ever argued that all substantive criticism of Israel is inherently anti-Semitic. This cannot be a normative pro-Israel position because it is not uncommon to find criticism of the Jewish State emanating from those who do support Israel in a substantive and meaningful way (in contrast to Peter Beinart, J-Street, et al, who only claim to support Israel but adopt staunchly anti-Israel positions). Rightly or wrongly, many who genuinely support Israel express reservations about Israeli government policy.

Anti-Zionism is necessarily anti-Semitic

There is a strong material link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, both in more traditional and the newer forms, the latter of which manifests most overtly as an intensive and aggressive demonisation of Israel, which is notably singular in its treatment. This reality leads to another question: ‘Is anti-Zionism necessarily anti-Semitic or is it possible to be anti-Zionist without holding anti-Semitic beliefs or being discriminatory by holding the Jewish collective to a different standard to that of other peoples?’

Anti-Zionism is notable for white-washing anti-Semitism. It disregards the oppression that Jewish people experienced in the Christian and Islamic worlds for over a Millennia, which arose with hatreds that continue to exist, albeit in a modified form in the Western World which normatively adopt the language of humanitarianism. It often re-writes the oppression Jews experienced in the Islamic world.

Anti-Zionism disregards the ancient cultural link between Israel and the Jewish People, which may only continue with Jewish self-determination, given the continued rejection of Jewish religious rights within Arab-Islamic societies throughout the Middle East, and the likelihood that a Jewish presence in the region would cease to exist in a would-be Palestinian Nation, as it has ceased throughout almost all of the rest of the Middle East. Trenchant anti-Semitism is normative at all levels in Arab-Palestinian society, of a form that incites violence, terrorism and genocidal sentiment. Rather, anti-Zionists portray wholly improbable results to their advocacy, claiming (in contravention to all available evidence) that peaceful democratic and pluralistic scenarios would result, rather than a further purging of the Middle East.

Anti-Zionists do not accept the two-state solution. They unjustly blame Israel for Arab-Palestinian rejectionism. Ultimately, peace cannot be made with Israel — rather this nation must be compelled to surrender all and effectively abandon the aim of Jewish autonomy, or be cleansed ethnically — the Jewish people should all “go back to Europe”, even if they are Mizrahi purged from Arab nations.

While people can hate a nation for a variety of reasons, hatred that motivates criticism of Israel is typically anti-Semitic, because it directly or indirectly focuses on the Jewish character of the State, which can often be seen in those people who form negative obsessions about a distant nation, which they problematize, often by holding it to absurdist double-standards. They do so while wholly ignoring (or sometimes defending) the manifest wrongdoing of Israel’s regional opponents. Such posturing effectively denies the Jewish State’s right to defend its own citizens.

Indeed, if Israel’s existence is a fundamental wrong visited on another people, then it must necessarily follow that the military defence of Israel’s physical integrity, particularly from attacks by its enemies seeking to remedy supposed wrongs that resulted in the Jewish State’s creation, must also be wrong.

As a consequence, it is difficult not to conclude that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism that singles out one particular ethnicity of the world’s diverse tapestry, as not deserving of autonomy in its homeland, whilst simultaneously denying the dangers of anti-Semitism that gave rise to Zionism.
These advocates often engage in hysterical demonising language, and sometimes classically anti-Semitic imagery. They project insidious forms of wrongdoing on their opponents, such as arguing that those who disagree are part of a ‘Zionist cabal’ engaging in ‘hasabara’. Anger of an unusual intensity toward other perspectives is common in those advancing anti-Israel stances, whether it be in discussions in the media or on marches, and indeed it is common to see anti-Israel activists disrupting or preventing pro-Israel speakers from expressing themselves, whilst commonly claiming that supporters of Israel silence their own arguments at various levels in political, media and academic domains.

True to form

RTE’s treatment of the Livingstone controversy provides an illustrative example of their failings when dealing with issues that do not sit very easily with the normative political culture found at the Broadcaster. Unlike most of her colleagues at RTE, Marian Finucane does deserve some credit for having the presence of mind to allow space for other perspectives on the Israeli-Jewish/Arab-Islamic conflict, besides the common anti-Israeli stances that pervade the media. Similarly, Brady and her guests were largely sympathetic to the difficulties Jewish society faces in Europe today. However, there are limitations, arguably due to RTE’s staunch political culture, where those on the left always have to be the good guys. Red Ken, and so many others in the anti-Israel movement, professes to care about racism and deny being anti-Semitic so it must be thus! Such a level of trust and faith is not displayed toward the political right.

This bias, a kind of cognitive schtoma, thoroughly taints RTE’s political coverage, where opponents of the recently defeated Fein Gael-Labour government were never meaningfully scrutinised, so leading to an unprecedented degree of political instability, and the grave consequences of the leftistcause celeb of abolishing the new water-charges regime was rarely analysed by the media as a whole despite the longstanding failure to adequately fund Ireland’s ancient water infrastructure, which has led to grave economic and public health issues, and etc., etc.

While it is fair to say that most people in Ireland do not particularly care all that much about the Jewish-Israeli/Islamic-Arab conflict, there is still an unthinking insistence that those loudly lambasting Israel possess only the very best of motives. Such people tend to insist their activism is motivated by humanitarianism but their activism in relation to other conflicts, such as the Assad slaughter in neighbouring Syria, is conspicuously absent, as one well known critic of the movement has noted. Supposed Jewish wrongs matter a lot more.

For a long time RTE has played no small role in advancing and reinforcing such perceptions, which neatly fit the Broadcaster’s reflexively anti-US/pro-Islam posturing. Thus, the recent migrant waves are typically described as “refugees”, and the spate of Islamist attacks on European soil are borne of economic disadvantage and Western Islamophobia and/or racism rather than anything remotely associated with intolerance borne of religious ideology. The absolutist uniformity of RTE’s narratives can be startling — the same on-message NGOs are trotted out for interviews and sound-bites, with nary a murmur of dissent ever afforded the briefest of airtime.

This blindness extends to the levels of coverage afforded to a given topic. RTE audiences are much more likely to hear about the enthusiasm British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has for Motown’s style of music, than last year’s concerns that he held anti-Semitic views after defending an anti-Semite of some notoriety, giving support to an anti-Israel Holocaust denier, etc., etc.

And when such unfortunate matters come to a head, and so demand to be addressed, we may expect just one perspective. Therefore, we only hear voices in defence of Livingstone’s actions. But even when the ‘right’ or ‘good’ team wins out, it is difficult to find balanced coverage. For example, RTE presented several unopposed voices defending Labour’s newly elected London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, with inferred charges of Islamophobia against competitor Zac Goldsmith and the wider Tory Party, even though it is widely known that Khan repeatedly shared a platform with an ISIS supporter, has assisted other unsavoury characters, and has described moderate Muslims as… “Uncle Toms”!

RTE, like the UK’s BBC, the US’ NPR/PBS programming, Norway’s NRK, et al., are more than conventional media sources. They are institutions constructed to serve the public of a given nation, funded in an enforced manner by the self-same public, with licence fees or a portion of the national tax spend. Thus there is every right to expect the highest of journalistic standards, which in turn can foster fair and informed debate, particularly as such institutions often have an especially powerful role in broadcasting. However, public service broadcasting has almost become a by-word for slanted unduly politicised commentary of a form typically reinforcing left-wing narratives.

If there is truth to the old saying, that “being on the left means never having to say you’re sorry,” then it may be presumed that public service media advocacy of certain political narratives play a significant role in the notable deficits of public scrutiny across their associated segments of the political spectrum.






Published at Crethi Plethi.