McCarthyism!

For all the hysteria, no government is behind the "campaigns against groups and people on the Left."


Seth J. Frantzman
Terra Incognita/JPost
30 March '10

Hardly a week goes by here without the claim, usually by groups on the Left, that people are being silenced and censored by McCarthyism. In an October 2009 article, Benjamin Pogrund claimed that university groups such as Isracampus and Israel Academic Monitor were attacking leftist professors in “classic McCarthyite style.” David Newman of Ben-Gurion University has written that “the academic McCarthyism of the right endangers Israeli democracy and society. It threatens the very basis of freedom of speech.”

The hullabaloo over Naomi Chazan, former Knesset member, professor and chief of the New Israel Fund, in early 2010 resulted in a wave of claims of McCarthyism. An interview with her by Donald Macintyre in The Independent was titled “The new McCarthyism sweeping Israel.” Hagai El-ad of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel claimed “these are classic McCarthy techniques, portraying our organizations as enemies of the state.”


Then earlier this month, the Education Ministry ordered its logo removed from a Web site called Common Ground that is supported by the Abraham Fund, an organization that claims it supports “coexistence.” In response, a senior official at a non-governmental organization claimed that “this is a McCarthyist period we’re going through.” Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal and many others have, in recent years, joined the chorus claiming McCarthyism is growing in Israel.

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NIF and the Addiction to Power

Gerald Steinberg
NGO Monitor
24 February '10

Officials of the New Israel Fund (NIF) and of affiliated NGOs have been attacking critics following revelations regarding their contributions to the assault on Israel, particularly in the Goldstone Report. Rather than addressing the severe problems that have been exposed, NIF and its supporters have targeted NGO Monitor with hysterical attacks and irrational mudslinging.

Defenders of NIF, such as Gershon Baskin (“A dark day for democracy,” Feb. 8, 2010) and David Newman (“The politics of delegitimization,” Feb. 9, 2010), as well as NGO officials (Mitchell Plitnick of B’Tselem, Hagai El-ad of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Yossi Alpher of Peace Now, and others), have painted an image that puts NGO Monitor’s research at the center of a vast right-wing conspiracy and “witch hunt” intent on sabotaging democracy and blocking free speech through “McCarthyite” tactics.

While it is tempting throw some mud back, I will refrain. It is more constructive to provide an alternative to the hysteria used by both political fringes.
I have known Baskin, Newman, Alpher, and NIF President Naomi Chazan for many years, and while I believe their self-interests and narrow ideologies blind them to reality, they are committed Zionists who believe in the importance of Jewish national self-determination.

Why, then, are these Zionists contributing to the war against Israel, using the strategies adopted in the infamous NGO Forum of the 2001 Durban Conference and embodied in the Goldstone process? How can we explain their roles in “apartheid” propaganda and exploitation of the language of international law and human rights to demonize Israel?

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The New Israel Fund and Goldstone

Gerald Steinberg
Canadian JewishNews
18 February '10

Ma’ariv, one of Israel’s mass-circulation dailies, recently featured a scathing condemnation of the New Israel Fund (NIF) for leading the political war to demonize Israel.The journalist who wrote the piece, Ben Caspit, is a political centrist whose tolerance snapped when he realized that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by the NIF were responsible for most of the “war crimes” allegations in the UN’s Goldstone report on the Gaza war.

Caspit’s article amplified the Israeli debate on the role of the NIF – a Diaspora-based superpower with an annual budget of around $25 million. The accusations were publicized by Im Tirtzu, a student group promoting Zionist renewal, which also placed ads on websites and in newspapers ridiculing the organization and its leader, Naomi Chazan.

Like other politicians whose power is threatened, Chazan and the NIF leadership responded furiously, denying the evidence and threatening legal action. However, having themselves used personal and crude graphics against opponents, the threats from Chazan and the NIF lacked credibility. While claiming to defend free speech, the NIF’s fierce attacks on critics were themselves attempts to silence a much-needed public debate.

Israeli anger toward the NIF also reflects the discovery of a hidden agenda, in contrast to Im Tirtzu and other openly more right-wing organizations. In its advertising and fundraising, the NIF claims to provide broad support for different groups in Israel, but many of its actions promote a very narrow and radical agenda.

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‘Goldstone Report was our smoking gun’

How did Im Tirtzu go from organizing campus demonstrations to compiling a major report that has reverberated into a major scandal?


Abe Selig
JPost
18 February '10

How did Im Tirtzu-The Second Zionist Revolution, which was created less than four years ago as a small student organization to voice support for IDF reservists, go from organizing campus demonstrations during the Second Lebanon War to compiling a major report that has reverberated into a major scandal?

One of the reasons, The Jerusalem Post learned this week, was that the document the group released last month, now known as the “Im Tirtzu Report,” which listed the New Israel Fund as a main financier of more than a dozen Israeli NGOs – including: The Association for Civil Rights in Israel; Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel; Bimkom-Planners for Planning Rights; Gisha-Legal Center for Freedom of Movement; HaMoked-Center for the Defense of the Individual; Physicians for Human Rights-Israel; the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel; and Yesh Din-Volunteers for Human Rights – that provided testimony used in the UN’s Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead, was the result of efforts modeled after military intelligence operations that trace and pinpoint money trails leading to terrorist organizations.

Im Tirtzu head Ronen Shoval, told the Post this week that the detailed report, which has continued to make waves both in civil society and government circles, was “modeled after the way intelligence agencies look into the financing of terror groups.”

“We invested great efforts to understand the funding strategy and ideology behind the NIF, and what we found out is just the tip of the iceberg,” Shoval said, although he declined to elaborate.

(Read full article)

Related: (Video) Im Tirtzu: Bringing about the 2nd Zionist revolution
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The New Israel Fund for Deepening the Jewish-Arab Rift

Israel Harel
Haaretz
11 February '10

The Im Tirtzu organization accuses the New Israel Fund of financing Israeli organizations which Judge Richard Goldstone used for information to accuse the Israel Defense Forces of "war crimes."

The fund's response, as is the wont of radical leftist organizations under fire, was to smear its critics as "fascists".Granted, the NIF's president, Naomi Chazan, signed a petition that defined the IDF's operations in Gaza as "terror against civilians" and demanded that Israel abide by "all UN resolutions relating to the conflict" (including 194, which Palestinians interpret as granting them a "right of return"). Nevertheless, the personal campaign against her is a mistake.

The NIF's many supporters in the media and among political organizations (which benefit from the fund, both directly and indirectly) have used this personal campaign to divert the debate from the fund's subversive goal (a "new Israel," not Jewish or Zionist), which it has furthered by donating more than $200 million thus far to hundreds of anti-Zionist organizations (I have a list, if anyone is interested).

Adalah - The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel - has used its NIF funding to submit dozens of petitions to the High Court of Justice that seek to reduce and even abolish Israel's identity as a Jewish state. "Israel must recognize the [Palestinian] refugees' right of return, on the basis of UN Resolution 194," declares the introduction to a proposed constitution that Adalah authored. And this proposal would also abolish the Law of Return for Jews.

The NIF also finances Jewish-led groups that seek to undermine Israel's Jewish identity, such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

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Who's demonizing who?

Ben-Dror Yemini
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost
07 February '10

The New Israel Fund is angry. It thinks that it is okay to cooperate with the Goldstone commission, even though it was formed by an automatic majority of the benighted countries that control the UN Human Rights Council. The NIF thinks it is okay that Israel cooperate with the commission, even though there is no country in the free world that supported its formation. It thinks it is ok to disseminate unsubstantial accusations against Israel. It thinks it is okay to take part in the demonization campaign being staged by certain NGOs. And it is absolutely legitimate, in a democratic country, to do all these things.

But there is something else that is also legitimate: To reveal the truth about the fund and the groups that falsely claim to be “human rights” organizations. If some of the political organizations supported by the fund do not recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state – don’t cry human rights.

Tell the truth: the denial of rights is to Jews only. The Palestinians have a right to a state of their own, as do the Croats, the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Slovaks and other nations – but not the Jews.

The New Israel Fund provides support (though not funding – editor, JPost), for example, the Zochrot organization. This is a nonprofit organization that openly strives to destroy Israel by means of the “right of return.” Not that there is any such right, and not that there ever was another precedent for a mass “return” after a population swap in the wake of war – but this does not bother the New Israel Fund. It will always jump in under the slogan of “human rights.”

All this doesn’t mean Israel is exempt from criticism. After all, out of the hundreds of allegations, there are a few of substance. But if many sane people loathe the human rights organizations, it’s not because they loathe human rights. Just the opposite. It’s because the sane majority is fed up with ‘human rights’ becoming the weapon of benighted forces.

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Why the Truth Constitutes “Incitement”

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
08 February '10

As Noah noted, the New Israel Fund controversy is laying bare just how warped the “human rights” community’s definition of human rights is. But it has also showcased two particularly Israeli variants of this disease: that freedom of information constitutes “incitement,” and that freedom of speech requires financing speech you oppose. The NIF’s Israeli president, former Meretz MK Naomi Chazan, demonstrated both in response to the Im Tirtzu organization’s report that 92 percent of the anti-Israel information in the Goldstone Report came from Israeli groups funded by the NIF.

Neither Chazan nor her American parent organization has disputed Im Tirtzu’s findings: they do not deny that the NIF grantees supplied the material in question to a UN inquiry into last year’s war in Gaza, nor do they deny the Goldstone Commission’s use of it. On the contrary, Chazan said she was “ever so proud to be a symbol of Israeli democracy,” while the NIF’s American CEO, Daniel Sokatch, told the Forward that the grantees bolstered “Israel’s moral fiber and its values” by “tell[ing] the truth.”

If so, why was Chazan so upset over the revelation of the NIF’s contribution to this achievement that when the Knesset announced it wanted more information on the subject — a Knesset committee said it would establish a subcommittee to examine foreign funding of Israeli nonprofits, and one MK even advocated a parliamentary inquiry commission — she responded by accusing the Knesset of trying to “fan incitement”? Since when has the search for, and dissemination of, truthful information constituted incitement?

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An assault of illogic

Fresnozionism.org
06 February '10

The flap over Im Tirtzu’s exposé of the New Israel Fund’s (NIF) support of left-wing Israeli organizations that contributed to the slanderous Goldstone report gets bigger every day.

Naomi Chazan, the fund’s president, was dis-invited from a speaking tour of Australia.

After Chazan threatened to sue the Jerusalem Post, the Post dropped her as a regular columnist.

There are calls in the Knesset to set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the NIF and foreign funding of Israeli non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

A group of high-ranking reserve officers signed a petition supporting Im Tirtzu against the NIF.

It’s hard to exaggerate the feelings of most Israelis about the Goldstone report, which many see as a modern-day blood libel. Even many members of the so-called ‘peace camp’ feel that the report goes too far in crediting Palestinian accusations against Israel for alleged ‘war crimes’ in Gaza, while downplaying and ignoring real crimes perpetrated by Hamas. So when Im Tirtzu pointed out that the 16 Israeli groups that produced a large majority of the anti-IDF ‘documentation’ — most of which is clearly false — were all grantees of the NIF, there was immediate outrage against the US-based fund.

Supporters of the fund in Israel and the US struck back with an assault of illogic, red herrings, ad hominem arguments and manufactured outrage at Im Tirtzu’s advertisments, but did little to refute the content of its criticism.

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'Post' stops Chazan column after threat

Jerusalem Post Staff
07 February '10

(Even though New Israel Fund continues to fund numerous organizations who conduct lawfare against Israel, it's elected officials, it's soldiers and citizens, this week it failed in it's efforts to intimidate at least, one newspaper.)

The Jerusalem Post has canceled Naomi Chazan’s biweekly column, after she and the New Israel Fund of which she is president threatened legal action against the paper over a recent advertisement.

The decision was taken by Jerusalem Post management after a legal threat was received at the paper from the NIF and Chazan’s lawyers.

Along with other publications, the Post last Sunday carried an advertisement criticizing Chazan and the New Israel Fund in the context of the Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead.

In Friday’s paper, the Post carried an advertisement defending the NIF and Chazan against their critics.
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