Tutu, Barghouti, terror, peace and prizes - by Arnold Roth

...Without him and the many others like him, the devastation and misery of the Pal-Arabs could have ended decades ago. It hasn't ended, as we all know. And as Tutu's campaigning for a prize to be given to Barghouti demonstrates, his ill-informed hand-wringing and irrational urge to forgive remains unaffected by any knowledge he might have acquired - but clearly has not - in the intervening years.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate,
Bishop Desmond Tutu
[Image Source]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
25 July '16..

A Pakistani website today published an op ed lauding Marwan Barghouti, providing us (we're guessing this was not their intention) with an opportunity to share our feelings concerning the man and those who seek to aggrandize him.

The article is entitled simply "Marwan Barghouti". We had not heard of the author before; his name is Abbas Hasan and his self-description is sparse: "an engineer and a cricket fan who works in the Middle East".

Here's our comment.

It's helpful to see acolytes of Barghouti highlighting, as this piece does, the emphatically *anti-peace* stance of the convicted and imprisoned murderer. Our attention was drawn to this article because of our tracking the efforts of Bishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace laureate himself, in shilling for Barghouti to get the same prize. In his public statements, Mr Tutu repeatedly speaks of Barghouti as an agent for peace. But as this fine article makes clear, Barghouti totally rejects peace in the Arab vs Israel wars as this quote makes clear:-

“The role and mission of the Palestinian authority should be reassessed so that its main mission must be in supporting and assisting a comprehensive resistance, which necessitates the immediate termination of security coordination and cooperation with Israel as this only reinforces occupation and is a tremendous detriment to the Palestinian people. We must stop betting on the illusion of peace negotiations”.

It's a valuable service to the cause of peace (in which most Israelis, us among them, believe passionately) that Abbas Hasan has done. Sincere thanks to him.

In case you missed our recent commentary on the odious and fundamentally dishonest efforts by Bishop Desmond Tutu to have the murderer Barghouti awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, it's posted at "09-Jun-16: The convicted killer, the churchman, the prize".

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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The convicted killer, the churchman, the prize - by Arnold Roth

...Of all the many distortions, inaccuracies and open lies connected with that coverage, none is as galling as the way this vicious, violent man is routinely - and dishonestly - called a "political prisoner", and sometimes a "detainee". There is no justification to call him anything other than convicted murderer and terrorist.

The 2004 Barghouti trial in Tel Aviv District Court was public, 
transparent, and definitive: the accused was convicted on multiple 
charges of murder and sentenced to five terms of life
imprisonment [Image Source]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
09 June '16..

Twelve years ago, the career of an ambitious Palestinian Arab gang leader, a member of Arafat's inner circle, was convicted in Tel Aviv District Court in relation to the deaths of five innocent people.

On additional charges of attempted murder, membership of a terror organization and conspiracy to commit a crime, he was also convicted. He was acquitted on technical grounds in relation to 33 additional counts of murder. Our impression (we sat through part of the trial) was that the prosecution could have pressed those extra charges but was satisfied that he would be imprisoned for a long-enough term on those charges where the technical factors did not come into play.

At the time of the conviction, in May 2004, it was reported ["Barghouti Convicted in Deaths of Five People", Haaretz, May 20, 2004] that the prosecution sought a sentence of one life term for each murdered victim:

The court said in its verdict that "the defendant most of the time did not have direct contact with the field operatives who carried out the attacks. That connection was maintained through associates close to the defendant. Barghouti was responsible for providing the field units with money and arms via these associates..." The judges said Barghouti's orders for terror attacks were sometimes "based on instructions" from Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. "Arafat would never give explicit instructions for attacks but he let it be known when the timing was right," the judges said. "He made sure his subordinates understood very well when he was interested in a cease-fire and when he was interested in terror attacks against Israel," the verdict said.

Barghouti was one of those Arafat subordinates.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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S. Africa’s Rulers Line Up Behind BDS

ANC chairman Baleka Mbete

Ben Cohen..
Commentary/Contentions..
30 October '12..

To the cheers of assembled delegates, the Third International Solidarity Conference of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, which met in Pretoria earlier this week, endorsed the call for a campaign of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) targeting the Israel. A lone German representative who stood up and challenged the prevailing wisdom that Israel is the reincarnation of South Africa’s apartheid regime was roundly dismissed by the chairman of the ANC, Baleka Mbete, who said that she herself had visited “Palestine,” where she’d discovered that the situation is “far worse than apartheid South Africa.”

This is not the first time that a senior member of South Africa’s leftist political establishment has made that exact point. In a particularly noxious speech delivered last May, the Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu asserted that the Palestinians were “being oppressed more than the apartheid ide­o­logues could ever dream about in South Africa.” Tutu’s co-thinker, the Reverend Allan Boesak ­– best known for his conviction for defrauding charitable donations from the singer Paul Simon and others — has also declared that Israel “is worse, not in the sense that apartheid was not an absolutely terrifying system in South Africa, but in the ways in which the Israelis have taken the apartheid system and perfected it.” And in an interview earlier this year, John Dugard, a South African law professor and former UN Rapporteur, approvingly referred to “black South Africans like Archbishop [Desmond] Tutu and others who have repeatedly stated that, in their opinion, the situation in the Palestinian territory is in many respects worse than it was under apartheid.”

At times, these thunderous denunciations from ANC figures have descended into open anti-Semitism. In 2009, Bongani Masuku, a mid-level ANC operative, was found guilty by South Africa’s Human Rights Commission of deploying “hate speech” after he announced that any South African Jew who did not support the Palestinian cause “must not just be encouraged but forced to leave.” In his defense, Masuku might have pointed out that he was merely echoing similar sentiments to those expressed by Fatima Hajaig, the former deputy minister of foreign affairs, who claimed that “the control of America, just like the control of most Western countries, is in the hands of Jewish money, and if Jewish money controls their country then you cannot expect anything else.”

Bishop Tutu Is No Saint When it Comes To Jews

Alan M. Dershowitz
Hudson New York
20 December '10

Among the world's most respected figures is South Africa's Bishop Desmond. His recognizable face—with its ever present grin—has become a symbol of reconciliation and goodness. But it masks a long history of ugly hatred toward the Jewish people, the Jewish religion and the Jewish state. Bishop Desmond Tutu is no mere anti-Zionist (though Martin Luther King long ago recognized that anti- Zionism often serves as a cover for deeper anti-Jewish bigotry). He has minimized the suffering of those killed in the Holocaust. He has attacked the "Jewish"--not Israeli--"lobby" as too "powerful" and "scar[y]." He has invoked classic anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes about Jewish "arrogance", "power" and money. He has characterized Jews a "peculiar people," and has accused "the Jews" of causing many of the world's problems. He once even accused the Jewish state of acting in an "unChristian" way.

Were he not a Nobel laureate, his long history of bigotry against the Jewish people would have landed him in the dustbin of history, along with a dishonor roll of otherwise successful people, whose reputations have been tainted by their anti-Semitism such as Henry Ford, Charles Lindberg, Patrick Buchanan and Mel Gibson. But his Nobel Prize should not shield him from accountability for his long history of anti-Jewish bigotry, any more than it should for Yassir Arafat, Jimmy Carter and Jose Saramago.

Let the record speak for itself, so that history may judge Tutu on the basis of his own words—words that he has often repeated and that others repeat, because Tutu is a role model for so many people around the world. Here are some of Tutu's hateful words, most of them carefully documented in a recent petition by prominent South Africans to terminate him as a "patron" of the two South African Holocaust Centers, because he uses his status with these fine institutions as legitimization for his anti-Jewish rhetoric.

(Read full "Bishop Tutu Is No Saint When it Comes To Jews")

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Time to call this man on his bigotry: Desmond Tutu says Israel’s claim to be a “civilised democracy” is “fallacious”

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
27 October '10

Desmond Tutu may have retired earlier this month as an Anglican Archbishop, but he has not given up on his obsession with demonising the Jewish state. Yesterday he was at it again with an appeal to the Cape Town Opera to cancel a planned trip next month to Israel and thus join the international boycott movement.

He said the decision to go would advance “Israel’s fallacious claim to being a ‘civilized democracy.’” He added that, like apartheid South Africa, Israel was “a society founded on discriminatory laws and racial exclusivity.”

Ok. Enough is enough from this man. He’s got away with extreme bigotry against the Jewish state for one reason and one reason alone: because he was a brave and principled opponent of South Africa’s inhuman system of apartheid. But this is ludicrous and it’s time he was called on it.

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Tutu’s Crusade Against Israel

John Perazzo
frontpagemag.com
19 May '10

At first blush, the suggestion that a Nobel Peace Prize winner would have anything in common with a pack of unabashed, poison-tongued Jew-haters seems preposterous. But Desmond Tutu, the former archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, who in 1984 won the coveted Nobel award for his campaign against apartheid in that country, is today one of the most celebrated supporters of the “Divest from Israel” movement. Particularly widespread on university campuses across America, this movement routinely offers a high-visibility propaganda forum for some of the most rabid, combative anti-Semites of our time.

At its heart, the campus divestment movement aims to cripple Israel’s economy by compelling universities to withdraw whatever funds they may have invested in Israeli-based or -affiliated corporations. These efforts are founded on the premise that Israel is guilty of practicing apartheid and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. According to the divestment movement’s leaders, the human rights violations perpetrated by Israel are on par with those of the former apartheid regime in Desmond Tutu’s South Africa; many critics go so far as to liken modern Israel to Nazi Germany. When the Associated Students of UC Berkeley recently expressed their wish to have the university divest its money from Israel, Tutu praised their “principled stand” against the “injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and violation of Palestinian human rights.” “[I]t is always an inspiration when young people lead the way and speak truth to power,” said Tutu.

The philosophy underlying the divestment movement has been displayed in stark relief recently at a number of University of California campuses, where Muslim student groups sponsored events under the banner of “Israeli Apartheid Week: A Call to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Israel.” At a Muslim Students Association (MSA) event at UC San Diego, for instance, one MSA member explicitly affirmed that she supported Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s assertion that “if Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us [jihadists] the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

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The Importance of Being Desmond Tutu

Avi Davis
The Intermediate Zone
18 April "10

Being an ex-Apartheid activist must surely exist one of the best jobs in the world. What could be better than being invited to prestigious university campuses to deliver highly paid lectures on the evils of Western imperialism and then be fêted as a hero?; Or being able to make the most hateful pronouncements about white Anglo- Saxons and watch while everyone smiles in quiet acknowledgment? Or then again having carte blanche to unleash your vitriol against other unsuspecting nations whom you deem to have inflicted apartheid regimes on their own minorities, and have no one challenge you?

Yes Desmond Tutu, one of his country’s most famous anti-Apartheid activist, has made it. The former South African Archbishop, who built a reputation manning the barricades in the South Africa’s long struggle against apartheid, collecting a Nobel Peace Prize along the way, is universally hailed as a fair minded advocate of peace, love and freedom.

Everywhere, that is, except Israel. In Tutu’s mind, Israel is the equivalent of the South African Apartheid regime, for its discrimination against Palestinian Arabs. Since 2002, he has called strenuously and aggressively for universities around the world to conduct campaigns of divestment from companies doing business with Israel, an obvious replication of the same boycott that contributed to the collapse of his homeland’s former Apartheid regime.

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The Palestinians Already Have Two States: The Truth According to Khaled Abu Toameh

The Real War is Palestinian vs. Palestinian


Phyllis Chesler
Pajamasmedia.com
15 April '10

The world has gone mad—or at least, the American leadership has now formally joined the Islamist and international madness about “peace in the Middle East.”

President Obama has just claimed that American “vital national security” is linked to finding—or even imposing—peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. South Africa’s revered Archbishop Emeritus, Desmond Tutu, has just praised the recent Berkeley student vote (which the university’s president later vetoed) to divest university money from companies that “profit from the injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land in violation of Palestinian human rights.” Tutu writes that what he witnessed in occupied Palestinian territory reminds him of the conditions he “experienced in South Africa under the racist system of apartheid.”

Tutu—this is really too much! Who exactly gave you a tour of the territories? The usual diabolically skilled propagandists? Did you, perchance, bother to visit Israel? If not, why not?

I strongly recommend that both President Obama and Archbishop Tutu consult with Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli Arab Muslim/Palestinian journalist whom I was privileged to hear speak the other night in Manhattan. Abu Toameh lives in Jerusalem and he really “gets it.” He is a charming, urbane man, who speaks English perfectly; I assume he speaks Arabic and Hebrew just as well.

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Four Left Wing Myths About Israel

Sultan Knish
10 September 09

Myth 1: "Israel was created because Europe felt guilty about the Holocaust."

This left wing myth has been widely repeated, most recently by Desmond Tutu. While blatantly false on a level that even the most serious anti-Israel historian can recognize, it persists because its function is to delegitimize as the product of post-war colonial guilt, rather than longstanding Israeli national aspirations.

Israel was not created in 1947. By 1947, Israel already was a functioning country with a language, culture, agriculture, universities, newspapers and military forces which proved capable of defending against the armies of several Arab nations. The only thing that happened after the Holocaust was a UN vote in 1947 was for a partition plan that was never implemented because the Arab world instead chose to try and destroy Israel. Israel however would have declared independence and fought for its own survival, with the same exact outcome, regardless of UN Resolution 181. This vote is often described as creating Israel, but it was more accurately an attempt to settle the borders of Israel that failed because of Arab genocidal hostility that expressed itself not only toward Israel, but toward the Jews living in Arab lands.

Nor did post-war European colonialism create Israel. Britain, which was the colonial power in the region, was against Israel's independence and abstained in the UN vote. The majority of votes for Resolution 181 came from non-European countries, primarily in Latin America and Eastern Europe, such as Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Peru and Poland, Ukraine and the Soviet Union. 7 European countries voted Yes, most of them Northern European states such as Sweden and Denmark, which experienced only a limited impact of the Holocaust. 12 Latin American countries voted Yes. Twice the number. And all of them countries that had their own national aspirations and had fought against colonialism.

Post-Holocaust guilt was not the reason Resolution 181 passed. Less than a third of the 33 votes came from countries where the Holocaust had taken place. The reasons were varied and different. Some Latin American countries identified with Israel's national aspirations and some sought economic ties. Truman was influenced by the desire for Jewish votes in an upcoming election. The Soviet Union wanted to sabotage Britain's colonial program. The motives of different countries were varied and complex. Iran for example voted against the resolution and yet became the second country to recognize the new State of Israel.

Left wing activists may insist that Resolution 181 was a racist act, but in fact half the countries who voted for it were non-white, and most of the countries who voted for it were non-European. Therefore the myth that Israel was created after the Holocaust by guilty Europeans, a myth that has been bandied about by everyone from Desmond Tutu to Wallace Shawn to Barack Obama is just that, a myth. Israel would have existed regardless of the Holocaust or UN Resolution 181, which was voted for primarily by non-European countries in any case. Those who repeat the myth are therefore demonstrating either extreme ignorance or extreme deceptiveness.

Myth 2: "European Nations Gave the Jews a Land Already Inhabited by a People."

This is one of the more common myths that seeks to strike at the legitimacy of the creation of the modern state of Israel, and treats the Jews as a foreign body within the land. This is a continuation of the anti-semitic stereotypes of the Jews as eternal wanderers and eternal foreigners.

The fact of the matter is that Jews had an ongoing presence in the land going back thousands of years, that was only interrupted by massacres and expulsions, after which the Jews population would once again attempt to reestablish itself. Greek, Roman, Arab and Ottoman colonialism expelled Jewish populations and attempted to replace them with their own populations in order to gain a foothold in the land. Unlike them however the Jews remained the land's indigenous population.

Throughout history Jews struggled to achieve independence with armed revolts from Roman and Byzantine rule. The last such revolt took place somewhat more than a thousand years before the creation of the modern State of Israel, rather than two thousand as most people believe. Jewish attempts to revive the State of Israel were repeatedly and brutally suppressed, in at least one case by outright genocide. Nor was that the only genocide that Jews in Israel experienced.

Nevertheless attempts at a fledgling Jewish state continued even after the Crusader genocide of the Jewish population in the 1500's with an attempt to create a Jewish autonomous territory under Selim I by Don Yosef Nassi, as Lord of Tiberias. Further negotiations for the creation of a Jewish state continued in the 18th and 19th centuries. After Ottoman obstinacy made it clear that statehood was hopeless, Jewish freedom fighters in the form of the NILI group and the Jewish Legion aided in the British conquest of the region hoping to receive their own state.

While indeed much of the population of Israel came from outside the land, that was because thousands of years of massacres and warfare had depopulated the area. When Western observers visited Israel in the 19th century, they found that the land was barren and had a low population, both Jewish and Arab. In fact Israel was so sparsely populated, that its entire population in 1850, a mere 350,000 people, could fit into modern day Tel Aviv with room to spare. This is all the more striking when you consider that we are talking about a territory several times the size of modern day Israel.

Alphonse de Lamartine visited Israel in 1835 and wrote; "Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw indeed no living object, heard no living sound, we found the same void, the same silence ... as we should have expected before the entombed gates of Pompeii or Herculaneam a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, on the highways, in the country ... the tomb of a whole people". 30 years Mark Twain wrote, "There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent – not for thirty miles in either direction. ...One may ride ten miles (16 km) hereabouts and not see ten human beings."

In 1857 the British Consul James Finn wrote a book called Byeways in Palestine that chronicled his journeys across the region. In his introduction he wrote rather prophetically, "These notices will show that the land is one of remarkable fertility wherever cultivated, even in a slight degree—witness the vast wheat-plains of the south; and is one of extreme beauty—witness the green hill-country of the north; although such qualities are by no means confined to those districts... Thus it is not necessary, it is not just, that believers in the Bible, in order to hold fast their confidence in its predictions for the future, should rush into the extreme of pronouncing the Holy Land to be cursed in its present capabilities. It is verily and indeed cursed in its government and in its want of population; but still the soil is that of “a land which the Lord thy God careth for.” There is a deep meaning in the words, “The earth is the Lord’s,” when applied to that peculiar country; for it is a reserved property, an estate in abeyance, and not even in a subordinate sense can it be the fief of the men whom it eats up. (Numb. xiii. 32, and Ezek. xxxvi. 13, 14.) I have seen enough to convince me that astonishing will be the amount p. viiiof its produce, and the rapidity also, when the obstacles now existing are removed."

Finn repeated this theme when writing to the Earl of Clarendon, "the country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population." That population would and did have to come from abroad.

Two generations later in 1920, after the British conquest, the Arab population had hardly doubled. Yet in only a generation after that it had reached 1.3 million, primarily from Arab immigrants to Israel from Egypt attracted by growing Jewish industry. Those immigrants would in turn make up the bulk of the "Palestinian cause" with prominent Palestinian Arabs such as Yasser Arafat and Edward Said stemming from Cairo. Then there was the Lebanon born original chief of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Ahmed Shukairy.

Cairo, unlike Jerusalem, had been a booming center under the Ottoman Empire, with a bulging population. From the 1880's to the 1930's, Cairo's population tripled. The resulting stresses vastly overpopulated the area leading to the extreme slum conditions that European visitors would often describe. And part of that excess population came Israel's way.

While Jewish immigration to Israel was visible, Arab immigration was invisible, requiring only that a Syrian or Egyptian get on a donkey and ride in the right direction. But the rising role of Israel produced both Arab and Jewish immigration to the land, for economic and political reasons.

Those same critics of Israel did not and do not object to Arab immigration, even though it was part of a colonizing process that displaced the native Jewish population. Instead they show their double standard by objecting only to Jewish immigration. Ironically enough today it is the Arab migration to Europe that occupies the countries of many of those same critics as the newfound populations begin taking over countries that "already have a people."

In Australia and elsewhere, Muslim immigrants has already begun laying out a new history, claiming that the land belonged to them all along. In France, the riots have been described as a French Intifada. Both processes demonstrate how ethnic and national groups can create a mythology of ownership from square one in countries where they never had much of a presence. That same mythology is behind the claim that the Palestine territory administered by the Romans was actually some sort of unique Arab nationality whose rights have been denied.

Europeans did not "give" Israel a land already inhabited by the Arabs. The Arabs were simply one of the regional populations, and were in the majority because they had conquered and displaced local populations. And while there are numerous oppressed indigenous populations in the Middle East, including the Assyrians, the Kurds, the Copts, the Gypsies of the Middle East (the Dom), the Azeri and the Zoroastrians. Arab Muslims are not on that list except in the minds of Western liberals. Instead Arab Muslims rule all but two countries in the Middle East and 99 percent of the region. 11 million square kilometers to Israel's 20,000.

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Despair, Indeed

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
05 September 09

Jimmy Carter brings us his report, fresh from his Middle East visit with his fellow ”Elders,” including the Medal of Freedom prize-winning duo of Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson. Carter and crew go to the Middle East and see “despair.”

Not the despair of Jews in Israel who would like to live in peace with their neighbors and have tried repeatedly to give the Palestinians their own state. Not the despair of victims of Hamas violence or of honor killings. Not the despair of the Palestinian people who would like a government free from corruption. Not the despair of Jews who find it incomprehensible that teaching the Holocaust is considered to be a human-rights violation by Hamas. Not the despair of Israel and its neighbors who are contemplating a nuclear-armed Iran and a timid U.S. response. And certainly not the despair that Israelis must feel as a U.S. administration renounces past obligations and delights in picking a fight with its ally.

No, all Carter sees and all he writes about (I know, you’ll be shocked) is the “despair that settlement expansion is continuing apace.” And he divines that Israel is bent on a one-state solution, aiming to “colonize” East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Using unmistakable Holocaust terminology, he terms Gaza a “ghetto.” How perfectly Carter-esque. And Robinson-esque. (Anyone in the White House still think that Medal of Freedom thing was a grand idea?)

In his account, the terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians from Gaza get no mention, so readers are left to wonder why it is that traffic doesn’t flow freely between Gaza and Israel. And in Carter’s view, one supposes, the Israelis must be awfully clever to mask their plot to dominate the Palestinians with repeated offers of statehood. How sneaky of the Jews to have repeatedly given up land for “peace” and dismantled their own settlements when all they really want is to “colonize.”

Well this is pretty much par for the Carter course. But really, how different is this from the administration’s Middle East outlook? The same obsession with settlements that animates Carter seems to dictate all that Obama and George Mitchell say and do these days with regard to the Middle East. The same Carter-esque refusal to recount accurately the history of the Middle East, let alone America’s own agreements, permeates Obama’s rhetoric. The same muteness grips the Obama administration when it comes to Palestinian rhetoric. It’s almost enough to fill one with despair.

Bilin Journal

In Village, Palestinians See Model for Their Cause

Ethan Bronner
New York Times
30 August 09

(As Ethan Bronner seems to be captive to his own mind's narrative, in conjunction with the "Elders" arrival on location, a closer look may be in order. Perhaps a simple Youtube on location could provide a more accurate picture of the weekly setting. Ni'ilin is a neighboring village just down the road)

BILIN, West Bank — Every Friday for the past four and a half years, several hundred demonstrators — Palestinian villagers, foreign volunteers and Israeli activists — have walked in unison to the Israeli barrier separating this tiny village from the burgeoning settlement of Modiin Illit, part of which is built on the village’s land. One hundred feet away, Israeli soldiers watch and wait.

The protesters chant and shout and, inevitably, a few throw stones. Then just as inevitably, the soldiers open fire with tear gas and water jets, lately including a putrid oil-based liquid that makes the entire area stink.

It is one of the longest-running and best organized protest operations in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it has turned this once anonymous farming village into a symbol of Palestinian civil disobedience, a model that many supporters of the Palestinian cause would like to see spread and prosper.

For that reason, a group of famous left-leaning elder statesmen, including former President Jimmy Carter — who caused controversy by suggesting that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank amounted to apartheid — came to Bilin on Thursday and told the local organizers how much they admired their work and why it was vital to keep it going.

The retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, also on the visit, said, “Just as a simple man named Gandhi led the successful nonviolent struggle in India and simple people such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King led the struggle for civil rights in the United States, simple people here in Bilin are leading a nonviolent struggle that will bring them their freedom.”
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Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Virgin boss Richard Branson play on the Holocaust to advance case against Israel

Richard Shepherd
Think Tank Blog
28 August 09

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Virgin boss Richard Branson play on the Holocaust to advance case against IsraelIt is a sign of the corrosiveness of the anti-Zionist agenda that even some of the most admirable and well-regarded of international luminaries feel no compunction these days about using the greatest crime against the Jewish people as a convenient weapon against the Jewish state. Holocaust inversion has now entered the mainstream. No-one, it seems, is immune from its temptations.

Enter former anti-apartheid campaigner, Nobel laureate, and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu who has used an interview with the liberal-Left Israeli newspaper Haaretz today to make some typically ill considered remarks of his own:

“The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns,” he was quoted by the paper as saying. “…in South Africa, they tried to get security from the barrel of a gun. They never got it. They got security when the human rights of all were recognized and respected.”

This is crass even by Tutu’s standards when talking about Israel. But it was nothing compared to the truly disturbing comments made earlier this week by Virgin Atlantic boss and international NGO financier Richard Branson.

Asked to draw on his business and public relations skills to advise Israel on how to improve its image, he said:

“I think it’s something similar to what happened after 9/11. You know after 9/11 the world had enormous sympathy for America, and you know that sympathy was somehow lost. And obviously after the Second World War, the world had enormous sympathy for the Jewish people. Over a number of decades, that sympathy has been lost …. You’ve got a great country, but you’ve just got to hold the hands of your neighbors, and then you’ll get back on top again.”

I have remarked on a number of occasions on how submersion in the anti-Zionist agenda leads otherwise reasonable and sane individuals to say things which make them look ridiculous. But “you’ve just got to hold the hands of your neighbours, and then you’ll get back on top again.”? Don’t these people ever think about what they are saying? The mind boggles.

That aside, the first thing to note about Branson and Tutu is that it is obvious that neither of them has any idea of what they are talking about. They seek to pronounce on a matter of great complexity while demonstrating that the history and basic facts of the conflict are simply lost on them. All we are left with is the standard UN/NGO narrative in which a belligerent and colonialist Israel is juxtaposed with oppressed third-world freedom fighters struggling against all odds for justice and recognition.

Tutu in particular has form in this regard. As an attentive reader reminded me earlier today, he made some particularly vicious remarks in a commentary in the Guardian along such lines in April 2002. In an article tellingly entitled Apartheid in the Holy Land he said of the struggle against Israel:

“For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.”

Well, I’m glad that Desmond Tutu thinks we are living in a “moral universe”. And one trusts he is confident that, when confronted with the higher authority he invokes, his Faustian pact with the forces of anti-Zionist bigotry is not held against him.

As for Richard Branson, one really has to marvel at his audacity. I am not Jewish myself, but I would venture to say that “sympathy” is not quite what the Jewish people were looking for in establishing their state after the Holocaust.

Even so, if defending that state against extremism is all it has taken for all that “sympathy” to evaporate I am not convinced that it was all that deeply rooted in the first place.
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Deconstructing Jimmy Carter: Former president visits Israel with the “Elders”, and gets a drubbing

Robin Shepherd

Think Tank Blog

26 August 09

“Could it be,” asks columnist and writer Michael D. Evans in today’s Jerusalem Post, “that Jimmy Carter’s ideals are formulated by the number of zeros before the decimal on the contributions to the Carter Center by oil-rich Gulf States?”

That’s right. This is not going to be a hagiography of the former president, and his supporters would be advised to read no further. But just what has Jimmy Carter been playing at? I don’t just mean in the last couple of days where he has turned up in Israel with Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson to tell “apartheid” Israel to start behaving itself. He is visiting as part of a delegation of “The Elders”, a designation which is either ludicrously pompous or, in the Israeli context, just plain crass (Elders? Protocols? Zion?), according to your taste. Set up with funding from Virgin Atlantic boss Richard Branson, the Elders say that they “amplify the voices of those who work hard to be heard, challenge injustice, stimulate dialogue and debate and help others to work for positive change in their societies.”

In other words, it’s a UN talk-fest gone freelance. We know what to expect then. But back to Jimmy Carter and his record in the Middle East. Evans has a few gems to offer.

His piece takes the form of a review of Carter’s latest book, We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan that Will Work. In it, Evans tells us, Carter comes up with the startling innovation that all sides should embrace the Road Map advanced by the so called Quartet: The US, the EU, the UN and Russia. But that Hamas, Hizbolloah, Iran and Syria should also be involved.

Quoting the British, Menachem Begin is described as the “most notorious terrorist in the region”. It is also alleged that at one point Begin agreed to divide Jerusalem, a point which Evans ridicules:

‘I found that to be astonishing, especially since Begin had given me a copy of the letter he penned to Jimmy Carter on September 17, 1978, in which he wrote, “Dear Mr. President, on the basis of this law, the government of Israel decreed in July 1967 that Jerusalem is one city indivisible, the capital of the State of Israel.” According to Begin, Carter informed him that the US government did not recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

‘Begin told me he responded, “Excuse me sir, but the State of Israel does not recognize your non-recognition.”‘

There is plenty more of this sort of thing (see article below). But Jimmy Carter’s ability to be taken in any way seriously in the Middle East peace process died the day he published, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid thus legitimising a form of hate-speech against the Jewish state which has now entered the mainstream and in no small part due to the former American president’s own efforts.

Carter has tried to wriggle and squirm his way out of this. But to no avail. In an online interview with Amazon.com in January 2007 he gave the following absurd response to a question as to whether he had been surprised by the reaction his wording elicited:

“Forced segregation in the West Bank and terrible oppression of the Palestinians create a situation accurately described by the word,” said Carter. “I made it plain in the text that this abuse is not based on racism, but on the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land. This violates the basic humanitarian premises on which the nation of Israel was founded. My surprise is that most critics of the book have ignored the facts about Palestinian persecution and its proposals for future peace and resorted to personal attacks on the author. No one could visit the occupied territories and deny that the book is accurate.” (My Italics)

So if it is “not about racism” why did Carter use the term which more than any other in the post-Holocaust era is synonymous with brute racism and white supremacy? There is no rational come-back to that question. His use of the word “apartheid” was a term of abuse: nothing more and nothing less.

As for his latest foray into peace-making in the Middle East, Evans has a simple piece of advice:
“The best thing President Obama could do is completely ignore Jimmy Carter and his plan.”

Enough said, I think.

To read the piece from the Jerusalem Post, click here:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251145115888&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
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