A Very Clever Kind of Lie: Accusing Israel of Future Crimes - By Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld

One tool of verbal demonization that is extremely difficult for Israel to combat is accusations of crimes it supposedly will commit in the future. These are far more difficult to contest than outright lies about current events. An example of this kind of manipulative lie is a remark in an interview by the outgoing French ambassador to the US, Gérard Araud, in which he said that Israel will officially be an apartheid state in the future.

Gérard Araud is a long-time anti-Israel
basher and vocal antisemite

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,168..
09 May '19..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/accusing-israel-crimes/

Outgoing French ambassador to the US Gérard Araud is a long-time anti-Israel basher and vocal antisemite. In a parting interview with the Atlantic, he said that Israel will have to either make Palestinians totally stateless or turn them into its citizens. “They won’t make them citizens of Israel,” he said. “So they will have to make it official…which is an apartheid. There will be officially an apartheid state. They are in fact already.”

Peculiar semantics aside, Araud’s slander is smart. It levels an accusation about what may happen in the future, which is extremely difficult to refute. If someone tells an individual, “You are a rapist,” proof can be demanded. But if one says instead, “You will be a rapist someday,” nothing has to be proven. The falsehood of the hateful accusation is not made fully clear until the accused person dies. By placing his emphasis on Israel’s future ignominy as an apartheid state, Araud feels comfortable throwing in the aside that Israel is already such a state.

Of all people, a French ambassador should be among the last to slander Israel in this way.

After France’s defeat by the Germans in 1940, the elected parliament of the French Third Republic ended its existence by naming Philippe Pétain head of state, and subsequent governments turned France into a country that was far worse than an apartheid state. Vichy France, still autonomous, banned Jews from many professions, including the civil service. Eventually it confiscated Jewish businesses entirely. It held tens of thousands of Jewish refugees in concentration camps. The Vichy regime handed over many tens of thousands of Jews to the Germans, who then deported them to their deaths.

There was massive wartime collaboration between the French and the Germans. Post-war French governments did not want to assume responsibility for Vichy’s acts. This was the case even though Pétain had come to power legally. Socialist president François Mitterrand, who served from 1981 to 1995, was once a Vichy employee. He changed sides and joined the resistance in 1942. He was clearly well aware of Vichy’s crimes, yet refused to accept France’s responsibility for them.

It was only in 1995 under Jacque Chirac, the center-right successor to Mitterrand as president of the Fifth French Republic, that the country’s official policy finally changed. In July of that year, Chirac admitted France’s role in the murder of Jews, whom it had not protected and instead delivered to their executioners. In a memorial ceremony, he said France had given the Nazis assistance in arresting Jews as a step on the way to their murder. He said: “We maintain toward them an unforgivable debt.”

Israeli and Palestinian drivers celebrate game-changer new road, while critics (surprise) accuse Israel of ‘apartheid’ - by Josh Hasten

What critics of the project failed to mention is that the motorists themselves, both Jews and Arabs alike, are praising the new Eastern Ring road, Route 4370, as being a game-changer in alleviating the recurrent traffic jams in the area.

Josh Hasten..
JNS.org..
19 January '19..

Once again, Israel found itself under attack by international media, left-wing non-governmental organizations and the Palestinian Authority, but this time for a different reason—they simultaneously accused the Jewish state of carrying out a policy of apartheid against its Arab population.

The firestorm of allegations followed the opening of a new 5-kilometer (3.1 miles) stretch of highway to the east of Jerusalem, which contains separate lanes for Israeli citizen and non-citizen traffic divided by a concrete wall with a fence on top.

Motorists and Israeli officials, however, are praising the new Eastern Ring road, Route 4370, which bypasses an overtaxed entrance to Jerusalem, as a game-changer that is already alleviating the recurrent and maddening traffic jams in the area.

Jewish and Arab leaders participated in a ribbon-cutting ceremony earlier this month launching traffic on the new road.

In response to the rampant accusations that the segregated road represents a form of apartheid, Rachel Greenspan, senior advisor for foreign affairs and media to Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion, told JNS that “this road represents the exact opposite of apartheid, by easing congestion and movement for the city’s Arab residents, especially those in the Shuafat Camp and in Issawiyya.”

She added that “this road will allow Arab and Jewish residents alike to move throughout the city more efficiently, improving day-to-day life for all.”

(Continue to Full Post)

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 Absolutely Brain-Frying Insanity of the Demonisation of Israel - by Melanie Phillips

...The demonisation of Israel thus exhibits the signature motif of Soviet totalitarianism: a passage through the mirror into a nightmarish world where black is white and lies are truths and everything is the negation of reality, and those who state the facts are stamped upon as enemies of the people.

Melanie Phillips..
MelaniePhillips.com..
23 November '18..

Brendan O’Neill asks the obvious question. Denouncing the boycott by Airbnb of Israeli properties in the disputed territories, he wonders at the extraordinary double standard under which Airbnb doesn’t similarly boycott properties in Tibet or northern Cyprus or Crimea which are occupied by China, Turkey and Russia.

The same question can be asked of the British Quakers who have said they will no longer invest in any companies which profit from “the occupation of Palestine”, a move they offensively and misleadingly compare to their past protests against apartheid and the slave trade. Paul Parker, the Quakers’ recording clerk, said: “…our beliefs compel us to speak out about injustices wherever we see them in the world.” Yet the Quakers also admit they have no policies “relating to other occupations”.

As O’Neill writes: “Israel is always singled out. It is treated by right-on Westerners as being more wicked, more toxic, more evil and more destructive than any other state on Earth. That is why they boycott it, rage about it and take to the streets about it in a way they never do about Turkey, Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. They hate Israel more than any other place. The question is: why?”

Why indeed. Certainly antisemitism is there in the mix. So too is leftist ideology which ludicrously regards Israel as a colonialist oppressor.

The question remains, however, why the Palestinian cause rather than any other became the issue of issues for the western left.

(Continue to Full Post)

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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Fools on the Ground: Examining the World Council of Churches in Israel and Its EAPPI ...by Dexter Van Zile

In the heart of Jerusalem's Old City, France is providing diplomatic cover for undercover anti-Israel activists. Infiltrating the Jewish State under the auspices of the World Council of Churches' EAPPI program, 'Ecumenical Accompaniers' are helping a terrorist movement to demonize Israel.

Dexter Van Zile..
Jerusalem Jornal..
17 June '18..
Link: http://jerusalemjournal.net/news-and-views/fools-on-the-ground-the-world-council-of-churches-in-israel-and-its-eappi-by-dexter-van-zile

These days, France is not a particularly good place to be a Jew. The country that gave us the Dreyfus Trial in 1894 and the round up of Jews at the Vélodrome d'Hiver in 1942 has been the scene of some terrible acts of violence against Jews in the 21st Century. In 2006, the world witnessed the murder of Ilan Halimi, the Toulouse and Montaban killings in 2012, and anti-Jewish riots in 2014. In 2015, the world witnessed the Hypercacher massacre and in 2017 the murder of Sarah Halimi. All this violence bespeaks of a breakdown in French society, a breakdown that is causing many Jews to leave the country and immigrate to Israel.

Who can blame them? In 2016, the Catholic News Agency reported, “Jews only comprise one percent of France’s population, but over half of the reported hate crimes in France were anti-Semitic in 2014.”

Once French-born Jews make it to Israel, France’s fecklessness follows them. In particular, France provides diplomatic cover to anti-Israel activists affiliated with the World Council of Churches (WCC), an ecumenical Christian institution with a sad history of being soft on Communism and more recently, jihadism, going so far as to obstruct efforts to address antisemitism at the UN’s anti-racism conference in Durban in 2001.

In particular, the French government provides diplomatic cover to the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine/Israel (EAPPI) in the compound of St. Anne’s Church located in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. The property was given to France by the Ottoman Empire to the French government in 1856 in gratitude for assistance given during the Crimean War. The church is managed by The Missionaries of Africa, sometimes called “The White Fathers,” a Catholic missionary organization established in 1868 with the goal of converting Arabs to Christianity.

Behind a stone wall and a sign telling people to keep out is a parking lot and a group of office buildings that houses the EAPPI and another WCC-supported institution, the Jerusalem Interchurch Center (JICC). By virtue of its presence in the St. Anne’s compound, EAPPI enjoys diplomatic refuge from Israeli law enforcement. Because the church is the property of the French state, Israeli police cannot enter into the property without permission from the French government. To underscore French sovereignty over the site, a French flag flies over the property.

Propaganda dressed as scholarship - Welcome to BU

Richard L. Cravatts..
Times of Israel..
29 March '13..

Seeming to give credence to Orwell’s observation that “some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them,” in early April, Boston University will be hosting a Students for Justice in Palestine-run “Right of Return Conference,” yet another example of how purported scholarship about the Middle East is frequently biased and diluted by ideology.

Most sentient observers of the Palestinian issue know that the “right of return” issue is a core tactic in rendering real peace, any viable Arab/Israeli solution, effectively impossible, that the prospect of some 5-7 million Palestinian refugees flooding into what is now Israel would, as University of Haifa professor Steven Plaut put it, “derail Israel demographically and turn it into the Rwanda of the Levant.” That is exactly why every one of the participants of the BU conference are part of a retinue of the hate-Israel crowd, a traveling road-show of politicized scholars, propagandists, and pseudo- and non-academic activists with only a thinly-veiled animus towards Israel, Zionism, and Jews in general. What this conference clearly is not is a true academic or scholarly exercise designed to reveal some rational and reasonable solutions in the Middle East; instead, it is yet another opportunity for ideologues with an anti-Israel, anti-Western agenda to trumpet their perverse views under a cloak of academic respectability, and here even with Boston University’s imprimatur.

The demand for a right of return, a notion referred to by Palestinians and their supporters as “sacred” and an “enshrined” universal human right granted by UN resolutions and international law, in fact, has no legal or diplomatic standing at all, and is part of the propaganda campaign that is based on the thinking that if Israel cannot be eradicated by the Arabs through a military war, it can be effectively destroyed by forcing it to accept demographic subversion.

In the first place, it uses the fraud as its core notion that the Palestinians were “victimized” by the creation of Israel, and that they were expelled from a land of “Palestine” where they were the indigenous people “from time immemorial,” as historian Joan Peters put it in her book of the same name.

More importantly, far from being either a “sacred” or, for that matter, legal right, the right of return is a one-sided concoction that deliberately misreads United Nations resolutions for political advantage, and conveniently embraces only those portions that fit the intent of Arabs to make good on their intent to “drive Israel into the sea.” In continually repeating the lie that they are victims of the “Zionist regime” and that they were expelled from a country of their own and condemned to unending refugee status, the Palestinians ‒ and their Arab enablers ‒ have prolonged the myth of victimhood.

The Lesson Of The Anti-Israel Seattle Bus Ads

Daled Amos
24 December '10

It all started with ads about "Israeli War Crimes" going on buses in Seattle:

"Israeli War Crimes," the enormous advertisement reads. "Your tax dollars at work."

To the right of the image is a group of children -- one little boy stares out at the viewer, the others gawk at a demolished building, all rebar and crumbled concrete.

It's an ad you'll be seeing soon on a handful of Metro buses in downtown Seattle.

A group calling itself the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign has paid King County $1,794 so that 12 buses will carry that message around town, starting two days after Christmas. That's December 27: the two-year anniversary of Israeli attacks on Gaza, aimed at stopping rocket attacks and weapons smuggling.

Ed Mast, a Seattle man who is a spokesperson for the group, says it’s not meant to be an anti-Israel message, but a message designed to generate discussion and awareness.

That's right--all they want to do is to sit down and talk reasonably: about Israeli war crimes.

The fact is that this is not the start of a discussion; it is a campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel.

(Read full "The Lesson Of The Anti-Israel Seattle Bus Ads")

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The Privileged Slander: Why the Media Laps Up The Anti-Israel Lying Campaign

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
27 June '10

Israel is subject daily to scores of false claims and slanders that receive a remarkable amount of credibility in Western media, academic, and intellectual circles even when no proof is offered.

Palestinian groups (including the Gaza and Palestinian Authority regimes), associated local and allied foreign non-government organizations, Western radical and anti-Israel groups, and politically committed journalists are eager to act as propaganda agents making up false stories or transmitting them without serious thought or checking.

Others have simply defined the Palestinians as the “victims” and “underdogs” while Israel is the “villain” and “oppressor.” Yet truth remains truth; academic and journalist standards are supposed to apply.

While regular journalists may ask for an official Israeli reaction to such stories the undermanned government agencies are deluged by hundreds of these stories, and committed to checking out seriously each one. Thus, the Israeli government cannot keep up with the flow of lies.

So the key question is to understand the deliberateness of this anti-Israel propaganda and evaluating the credibility of the sources.

An important aspect of this is to understand that Israel is a decent, democratic country with a free media that is energetic about exploring any alleged wrongdoing and a fair court system that does the same. To demonize Israel into a monstrous, murderous state—which is often done—makes people believe any negative story.

Some of these are big false stories—the alleged killing of Muhammad al-Dura and the supposed Jenin massacre—others are tiny. Some—like the claim Israel was murdering Palestinians to steal their organs-- get into the main Western newspapers while others only make it into smaller and non-English ones.

(Read full article)

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