Marquadt-Bigman - Robert Fisk and the Palestinian billionaire’s grandson

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
14 June '12..



Almost exactly a year ago, in late May 2011, veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk devoted his column in The Independent to “A tale from the frontline of Palestinian protest.” The “Palestinian protest” mentioned in this headline was a “Nakba” rally in Lebanon supported by Hezbollah; the organizers of the event bused protesters to the border with Israel, and the plan was to have them march towards the border in an attempt to breach it.

Fisk’s tall tale about one of the protesters who was among those wounded when both Israeli and Lebanese soldiers opened fire to prevent infiltration attempts was a rather skillful piece of propaganda presenting Israel as just another illegitimate – and US-supported – Middle Eastern regime that should be swept away by the Arab Spring uprisings.

When I analyzed Fisk’s piece in a blog post, I couldn’t help wondering about the name of the young man Fisk placed at the center of his sad story of Israeli callousness and brutality: Munib Masri.

To be sure, Masri is a fairly common name among Palestinians – indeed, as a Hamas leader recently explained:

“More than 30 families in the Gaza Strip are called Al-Masri ["Egyptian"]. Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”

But there is one very famous Munib Masri: he is known as the richest Palestinian in the world, a billionaire who has built himself a replica of a 16th-century Italian palace surrounded by sumptuous gardens occupying some 70 acres of land on Mount Gerizim overlooking his hometown Nablus. Defending the extravagance of this estate, Masri has reportedly pointed out that he returned to his hometown even though he could live a life of luxury in “New York, Geneva or London.”

Surely Fisk wouldn’t keep it from his readers if the Munib Masri he was writing about with so much passion was a close relative of the billionaire known as the “Duke of Nablus?”

Harriet Sherwood’s ugly Israeli caricature

Adam Levick
CiF Watch
10 March '11


Harriet Sherwood’s latest offering on Israel, “The new Israeli barrier: a fence that splits a Jewish nursery in two“, brought to mind a penetrating quote from Jonathan Spyer’s new book, The Transforming Fire. Spyer, noted that a purely “mythical Israel” has gained traction beyond Islamist circles, a narrative which he characterized as one which simply has no resemblance to the country for those who actually live there.

He describes the mythical Israel as:

“a place of uninterrupted darkness and horror, in which every human interaction is ugly, crude, racist, brutal.”

This “mythical” Israel has indeed taken hold among the UK intelligentsia, and is a dynamic which informs much of the reporting, and commentary, about the Jewish state at the Guardian.

The story Sherwood reports on involves a dispute between secular and orthodox Jews at Jerusalem nursery school – specifically the objections by the orthodox parents regarding what they feel are immodestly dressed female non-orthodox staff, which the administrators solved by erecting a partition (Mechitza) in the building to separate the two communities.

While it of course would have been preferable if the partition wasn’t needed, Sherwood’s desire to frame the issue as another indication of Israeli intolerance, even characterizing the dispute in terms of “a new Israeli barrier” – meant to evoke the specter of the state’s anti-terrorist separation barrier - says more about Sherwood and the ugly caricature of Israel that she so uncritically accepts than it does about the nation she’s reporting on.

(Read full "Harriet Sherwood’s ugly Israeli caricature")

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CiF Watch interview with Jonathan Spyer, author of “The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict”

Adam Levick
CiF Watch
08 March '11

Jonathan Spyer is a Senior Fellow at the GLORIA Center, author and journalist specializing in the areas of Israel, Lebanon, Syria and broader issues of regional strategy. He agreed to answer some of my questions about his latest book, The Transforming Fire: the Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict, which Barry Rubin characterized as “probably the best book on Israel to be published in 30 years.

AL: I was struck by your passage about how the “mythical Israel” has gained traction beyond Islamist circles. You describe this mythical place as “a place of uninterrupted darkness and horror, in which every human interaction is ugly, crude, racist, brutal.” In our work at CiF Watch, we’ve also noted how such a caricature has taken root among the UK intelligentsia, a dynamic which informs much of the reporting, and commentary, about Israel at the Guardian. Do you have any insights as to how otherwise intelligent and sober minds can so easily accept such a facile and distorted picture of Israeli life – one which is unrecognizable to those who actually live here?

JS: Well, having just returned from a trip to the UK, I think one of the reasons for this is because of the sheer volume of copy and programming hostile to Israel which an average, intelligent consumer of media and TV in the UK would come across and be exposed to – compared to a near absence of anything much proposing an alternative view. In the week I was there, there was ‘The Promise’ – an extremely bizarre but very professionally made saga about the last years of the British Mandate, which managed to depict the 1947-8 period as a sort of attempt by hapless and nice Brits and Arabs to resist the onslaught of crazed Zionist immigrants damaged by the Holocaust. Then there was ‘War child’ about children in Gaza, and also a documentary about settler extremists. I’m not sure if this was an especially busy week! Now, in contrast to this, as a Middle East analyst, in the past I’ve also been struck by the near silence in the British discussion concerning the brutal nature of many regional regimes.

AL: You mention the strength of radical Islam in the UK, and recounted your experiences as a student there in the 90s interacting with adherents to this movement. Why, in your view, has the UK shown to be so much more fertile ground for Islamism, as opposed to, other European countries or the United States?

JS: I don’t know the answer to this, as I’m less familiar with the US situation, but I would counsel against any nation feeling satisfied with its performance in this regard. Off the top of my head, the US produced Anwar al-Awlaki, and Nidal Hassan, so I don’t think this represents a shining success. If one is to adopt a strictly empirical approach, the nation with the most ‘success’ in this regard is France, which has yet to suffer a major Islamist terror attack on its soil committed by home-grown terrorists. As I said, I don’t think anyone should feel smug. But its maybe worth noting that the French system combines an absolute, ruthless lack of tolerance toward foreign Islamist preachers and their activities on french soil (in marked contrast to the UK), with a very sophisticated intelligence community, which has for a long time included lots of people with regional languages and knowledge. I think everyone can see why both these things are good assets to have.

(Read full "CiF Watch interview with Jonathan Spyer ...)

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Gaza “Freedom Flotilla” activist compares Israel to Nazis, rationalises terrorism

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
26 May '10

As the nine-ship “Freedom Flotilla” approaches Gaza with thousands of tonnes of aid for the Hamas ruled territory, the extremist views of some of its participants have been revealed by an Israeli newspaper. Ynet (the English language version of Yediot Aharonot) carries an interview today with Greek university professor Vangelis Pissias, a prominent activist aboard one of the ships.

Pissias is quoted by the newspaper as saying the following: “We’re helping the Palestinians, just like the Greeks helped during World War II against the Nazis.” Turning to the question of Palestinian terrorism, he added: “These people are doing what reality causes them to do.”

Frankly, that some members of this group hold such appalling views is not really a suprise. But it is useful to have this on the record as the flotilla’s journey draws to what its organisers hope will be a very public finale.

On another matter, the Israel/Apartheid nuclear story continues to linger in the air. Cif Watch has another extensive posting about it today which readers should find interesting.

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Demopaths and Dupes

CiF Watch
12 January '10

This is a cross-post from Augean Stables which provides a fascinating insight into the mindset of many of the anti-Israel commenters on CiF that engage in demopathic discourse

DEMOPATHS:
Demopaths are people who use democratic language and invoke human rights only when it serves their interests, and not when it calls for self-criticism or self-restraint. Demopaths demand stringent levels of human “rights” but do not apply these basic standards for the “other” to their own behavior. The most lethal demopaths use democratic rights to destroy democracy.

Demopaths differ from civil-society free-riders; the latter enjoy more rights than they grant to others simply out of selfishness or laziness. Demopaths are fundamentally hostile to granting others’ rights, and secretly despise the values of civil society (which demands that they tolerate and respect others). Instead of coming along for the ride, they want to sink the boat.

Demopaths use the jargon of civil society and human rights to convince their targets. Through this progressive discourse, demopaths exploit on people eager to believe that civic values can resolve the problem. Sometimes demopaths are completely hostile to the cultures in which they live, and manipulate human rights as a Trojan horse to enter the city and sack it.

Demopathy is a zero-sum to negative-sum game. It pursues the destruction of the system (demopaths win and reestablish plunder-or-be-plundered aristocracy); in the process, it destroys the system’s very capacity to produce what made it attractive to plunder in the first place. Demopaths do not view opponents as members of a positive-sum collective, but as enemies to be destroyed. In its most virulent stages, demopathy is violently paranoid.

CHARACTERISTICS:

- Radical imbalance between their insistence on asserting their own rights, and their lack of interest in defending the rights of others.
- Moral rhetoric expressing great indignation when appealing for personal rights.
- Tendency to tell demonizing tales of the enemies (of “human rights”)
- Tendency to think in conspiratorial terms (they are conspirators themselves), and to project ill will onto opponents/enemies.
- Do minimal (required) work protecting the rights of others, especially opponents/enemies.

A demopathic organization would protest the media portraying its ethnic/religious affiliates as “terrorists” (inadmissible negative stereotyping), but would not protest the terrorist acts perpetrated by members of their ethnic/religious group (permissible wanton murder of civilians).

(Read full post)
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Guardian website contributor says that recalcitrant Israeli settlers should be “slaughtered” in latest example of a new phenomenon in Great Britain

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
12 January '10

One of the new realities of the internet age for the mainstream media is that the distinction between an opinion piece and the readers’ comments which come below it is increasingly blurred. This is all the more so for interactive sites such as the Guardian’s immensely popular Comment is free (Cif) site where regular “below the line” contributors are now as much a part of the overall experience as the commentary to which they are responding. Such contributors help create the kind of interactive community which has become the new holy grail of online news and comment services.

So, when it comes to the Guardian’s notoriously vicious stance against the state of Israel it is hardly suprising that the community that has been created draws from among the foulest and most bigoted of the Jewish state’s numerous opponents. As an example, consider the following comment by regular below-the-line contributor William Bapthorpe which was brought to my attention by the invaluable media watchdog service CiF Watch. Referring to the settlers, in a thread following an article by Nicholas Blincoe, he said:

“Sadly, there’s only one way to deal with these religiously motivated maniacs who think their superstitious beliefs trump international law. 1. We ask them to leave their squats, kindly. 2. If they don’t, we force them to [leave] at gunpoint. 3. If they still refuse, they must be slaughtered, every last man woman and child.” (My italics)

If this were simply an isolated incident it would not be worth remarking on. Every website attracts its share of oddballs. But CiF Watch, which was set up last year to monitor a Guardian online community that attracts more than 30 million visits a month, provides reams of this sort of thing suggesting that at the intersection between the technological innovations of the new media and an ideological edifice which makes a fetish of demonising the most important Jewish project of our time an entirely new phenomenon has now emerged in Great Britain.

(Read full article)
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Gordon’s Jinn

Israelinurse
CiF Watch
06 January '10

I have long suspected that Neve Gordon lives in some sort of parallel universe where as if by magic, he manages to turn good into bad, wrong into right, true into false. After reading his CiF article of December 23rd, I’m even more dismayed by the man’s attempts to distort reality into something which serves his purpose.

This is the same Neve Gordon who recently called for boycotts against Israel as well as hosting a convicted Fatah organiser in his own home. Famous for holing himself up with Yasser Arafat in the Mukkata in Ramallah during the Second Intifada whilst the rest of his countrymen were under attack from suicide bombers, Gordon now tries to persuade us that there exists a Palestinian pro-peace movement which Israel is deliberately sabotaging.

“The objective is to put an end to the pro-peace popular resistance in the villages and to crush, once and for all, the Palestinian peace movement.”

Just in case you are now wondering how you managed to overlook this peace movement, Gordon even provides examples: “But over the past five years, Palestinians from scores of villages and towns such as Bil’in and Jayyous have developed new forms of pro-peace resistance that have attracted the attention of the international community.”

In Bil’in this ‘peaceful resistance’ has managed to injure some 170 IDF and police personnel. The weekly demonstrations are orchestrated together with the ISM – a Palestinian founded and led organisation with the following mission statement: “As enshrined in international law and UN resolutions, we recognize the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle”.

(Read full post)

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CiF Watch Exposes the Tooth Fairy of the Naqab

Tamar Sternthal
Snapshots/CAMERA
06 December 09

Google map showing 15 minute drive from Qasr al-Sir to Dimona, courtesy of CiF Watch

CiF Watch blog (which monitors the Comment Is Free section of the Guardian) has ripped apart Ben White's Dec. 3 article about Israel's allegedly racist, discriminatory policy of shuttering mother-baby clinics in unrecognized Bedouin villages.

In addition to pointing out that White ignores his own source (Ynet) which show that closures have also hit Jewish communities in the south, CiF Watch's blogger concludes:

Imagine my surprise (I joke) when I found that once again, trading on the ignorance of the average CiF reader, and their laziness when it comes to actually researching the facts instead of uncritically accepting the fairy-stories the stable of Israel-hating regulars (and this tooth-fairy in particular) feed them, it turns out that the “unrecognized village” is, as I demonstrated above, but a 15 minute trip on a paved highway (#25) to the center of Dimona. . . .

Ok – so it looks like despite the tooth fairy’s article, the mother in the “Arab Bedouin unrecognized village of Qasr el-Ser in the Naqab (Negev)” could quite easily get the same medical care as the non-Bedouin

(You must read the CiF Watch post for an explanation of the Tooth Fairy reference.)

New media monitoring group goes to town on the Guardian over anti-Israeli bigotry

Robin Shepherd
Think Tank Blog
21 October 09

Readers outside the UK will be well aware of the Guardian newspaper and its well earned reputation as the prime repository of anti-Israeli bigotry in western Europe. Some, however, may not yet be aware of a new monitoring group which analyses and dissects anti-Zionist bigotry on the paper’s flagship, online comment service, Comment is Free (Cif).

The group is called Cif Watch (see link below) and it provides a methodical, indeed forensic, breakdown of articles and the comment threads which follow them. I draw attention to Cif Watch in this entry in part because such a worthwhile endeavour deserves our support, but also because its latest posting provides a particularly revealing insight into the kind of people who are attracted to the anti-Israeli agenda.

The Cif Watch analysis focused on the comment threads following a rare instance in which the Guardian allowed an Israel-supportive commentary on to its site. It does this from time to time in order to present the facade of balance. In reality at least 95 percent of all commentary on the subject on the Guardian’s website is anti-Israeli, and much of that is extremely vitriolic.

After the commentary (by former Times editor Harold Evans) was published all hell broke loose.

But rather than take my word for it, click through to the Cif Watch site and read about it in all its gory details:

http://cifwatch.com/2009/10/21/shit-the-guardian-is-burning/

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