[Note by Tom Gross]

This dispatch is split into two for space reasons. The first part can be read here: Abbas says one thing to the Palestinians, another to Obama (& Spain’s gay problem).

I attach six articles below, with summaries first for those who don’t have time to read them in full. All are written by long-time subscribers to this email list.

May I remind readers that I don’t necessarily agree with all the points made in the articles that I send out, but I highlight them to add to the debate, since these views are not granted sufficient coverage in many major international newspapers and broadcast networks.

 

ARTICLE SUMMARIES

ISLAMIC RADICALS WORLDWIDE ARE WAITING EAGERLY TO SEE IF THE WEST SUCCUMBS TO HAMAS

Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh writes:

In recent weeks Hamas leaders are beginning to show signs of optimism. Since the late May incident involving the Turkish flotilla of aid ships, some Americans and Europeans have been campaigning in favor of engaging Hamas.

Al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood and jihadists around the world all have their eyes set on the Gaza Strip. They are waiting to see if Hamas manages to win recognition of the international community.

A victory for Hamas is a victory for Islamic fundamentalists not only in Gaza, but in many different places, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and Iraq.

EU foreign ministers who are planning to visit the Gaza Strip need to make sure that their tour is not used by Hamas to win recognition as a legitimate player in the Middle East.

… It does not seem that Hamas has any incentive to change its position amid increasing calls in the West to “break” the isolation of the radical Islamist movement. On the contrary, talk in the West about the need to launch dialogue with Hamas has only served to toughen their stance.

… Not only is Hamas unwilling to accept the three conditions imposed by the Quartet members, but it has now toughened its position on the issue of reconciliation with Fatah…

 

CAN ABBAS ALLAY EGYPTIAN AND JORDANIAN FEARS OF THE PALESTINIANS?

Former Israeli defense minister Moshe Arens writes in Ha’aretz:

Little noticed in the brouhaha that surrounded the Israeli interception of the “peace flotilla” that tried to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip were Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s remarks to the Egyptian parliament last week, as he tried to distance Egypt from the problem of allowing supplies to enter Gaza, even though Egypt shares a border with the Strip and could supply the population there with all its needs…

Egypt is afraid of the Palestinians on its border. The Egyptians will not allow Palestinian refugees to enter Egypt, nor do they want to assist the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip in any way. Continually voicing their concern for the plight of the Palestinians, Egyptian rulers over the years have done little to help the Palestinians in Gaza, out of fear that they may be reinforcing Hamas, which is an ally of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

… The Jordanian government’s policy, as well, seems to be based on the principle of keeping one’s distance from the Palestinians. Jordan, the majority of whose population is Palestinian, doesn’t want any more to do with them. King Abdullah II sounds pathetic alarm bells every few weeks that a war in the area is inevitable unless a Palestinian state is established, but will not entertain the thought that the areas in Judea and Samaria populated by Palestinians be incorporated into Jordan as part of a negotiated settlement with Israel.

It was many years before he was born – May 15, 1948 – that his great-grandfather King Abdullah sent his British-officered and British equipped Arab Legion across the Jordan aiming to gain as much territory as possible for his kingdom... He had no intention of establishing a Palestinian state in the areas that came under his control. Instead, he annexed the areas to Jordan, granting Jordanian citizenship to the Palestinian population living there.

… In 1974, King Hussein, Abdullah II’s father, effectively renounced Jordan’s claim to Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem …with the memory still fresh in his mind of Black September in 1970, when the PLO attempted to take over Jordan, Hussein decided that he already had enough Palestinians on his hands. Better that they become Israel’s problem…

… It remains to be seen whether Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, who advocates a policy that forswears violence, can establish sufficient authority among the Palestinians so as to allay Egyptian and Jordanian fears of the Palestinians.

 

WHEN WILL THE PALESTINIANS SHOW THEY’RE SERIOUS ABOUT PEACE?

Writing in The New York Post, Abby Wisse Schachter says:

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is still the guy who has to “prove” he’s serious about peace. Netanyahu’s the one who is asking for direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Yet it is the Palestinians who, instead of having to explain their reasons for refusing to meet with Israel, continue with their demands.

Whereas the list of actual concessions delivered by Israel to the Palestinians is long, the evidence that Palestinians are serious about peace with Israel is sparse to non-existent. Israel has ceded territory, Israel has ceded authority, Israel has trained and armed the Palestinians, Israel has allowed rejectionist terrorists to take control of territory that threatens Israel’s security. And what have the Palestinians done? Palestinians refuse to negotiate directly with Israel, Palestinians refuse to change their education curriculum to reflect an acceptance of Israel’s right to exist, Palestinians create children’s television programs that praise the holy war against the Jewish state.

President Obama may find it easy and convenient to pummel Netanyahu for concessions, but that won’t get him anywhere in regards a real settlement of the conflict…

 

THE FORGOTTEN PERSECUTION OF THE KURDS OF SYRIA

In the fourth article below, Jonathan Spyer writes in The Jerusalem Post:

On March 21, 2010, the Syrian security forces opened fire with live ammunition on a crowd of 5,000 in the northern Syrian town of al-Raqqah. The crowd had gathered to celebrate the Kurdish festival of Nowruz. Three people, including a 15-year-old girl, were killed. Over 50 were injured. Dozens of injured civilians were held incommunicado by the authorities following the events. Some remain incarcerated. This incident was just one example of the repression taking place of the largest national minority in Syria – namely, the Syrian Kurdish population.

Kurds constitute 9-10% of the population of Syria – that is, around 1.75 million in a total population of 22 million. Since the rise of militant Arab nationalism to power in Damascus, they have faced an ongoing campaign for their dissolution as a community.

All this is taking place far from the spotlight of world attention. The current US Administration pursues a general policy of considered silence on the issue of human rights in Middle East countries. The Syrian regime remains the elusive subject of energetic courting by the European Union and by Washington.

As a result, the Kurds of Syria are likely for the foreseeable future to remain the region’s forgotten minority.

The severe repression suffered by the Syrian Kurds has its roots in the early period of Ba’ath rule in Syria… In 1962, a census undertaken in the area of highest concentration of Kurdish population in Syria – the al-Hasaka province – resulted in 120,000-150,000 Syrian Kurds being arbitrarily stripped of their citizenship.

They and their descendants remain non-persons today. They are unable to travel outside the country, to own property, or to work in the public sector. People in this category today number about 200,000 – though no official statistics exist for them. They are known as ajanib (foreigners).

A large additional group of around 100,000 Kurds in Syria remain entirely undocumented and unregistered.

… In March 2004, following the recognition of Kurdish autonomous control of northern Iraq, something resembling an uprising began among the Kurds of Syria.

The spark that ignited the wave of protests that month was the shooting dead of seven Kurds by the security forces following a clash between Kurds and Arabs at a football match in Qamishli, a city of high Kurdish population close to the Turkish border. Further shootings took place at the funerals of the dead, and unrest spread across the Jazira, and as far as Aleppo and Damascus. The army moved into the Kurdish areas with heavy armor and air cover, and the protests were crushed [and many Kurds killed].

… In August, 2005, and again in October, 2008, and then again earlier this year, there were clashes between Kurdish citizens and the security forces in Qamishli, with some deaths and many arrests…

***

Tom Gross adds: I have drawn attention to the persecution of Syria’s Kurds many times on this email list in the past, for example, here in 2004.

I only wish the BBC and others would devote a fraction of the substantial resources they employ in the Middle East to not only scrutinize every little thing Israel does but to pay a little attention to the hundreds of millions of people living in the 22 dictatorships (and one partial democracy, Iraq) in the region around Israel.

 

BRITAIN’S SILENCE OVER THE ALLEGED RUSSIAN FORGERIES IS TELLING

The Wall Street Journal editors (many of whom subscribe to this email list) tell me that their lead editorial (titled “A Tale of Two Passports”) was inspired by the points I made in my recent dispatch pointing out the double standards and discrepancies by Britain concerning Russia’s misuse of British passports and the alleged misuse of them by Israel.

The paper writes:

Remember Britain’s outrage at Israel over the forged U.K. documents allegedly used in the Dubai assassination of Hamas big shot Mahmoud Mabhouh? Compare that uproar with the remarkable silence over the forged British passport that the FBI says was used by at least one of the Russian spies recently arrested in the U.S.

At this stage during the Dubai affair in mid-February, the Labour government had already summoned the Israeli ambassador and announced criminal investigations amid furious statements from all political parties. It expelled another Israeli diplomat a month later. The Guardian newspaper ran some 17 articles highlighting the passport accusations.

By contrast, a week into the Russian forgery story, there is not a hint of a diplomatic row between London and Moscow. The Guardian mentioned the fake passport allegations in two articles that lacked the breathless condemnation directed at Israel. The paper’s editorial on the Russian spy-ring ignores the passport angle altogether.

… It’s hard to escape the conclusion that what really infuriated the British was not so much the alleged offense but the identity of its perpetrators.

 

METHODIST CHURCH MORE INTERESTED IN PREVAILING FASHION, THAN JESUS

Robin Shepherd writes in The Jerusalem Post:

The decision last week by the Methodist Church of Britain to launch a boycott against goods emanating from settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem will send a shiver down the spine of anyone with a feel for where the rancid, global campaign against the Jewish state is currently heading.

… The fact that an institution professing allegiance to values of love, truth and justice should have succumbed to an agenda of hatred, hypocrisy and barbarism is sadly emblematic of the degraded spirit of our times, and of the moral inversions which blow through them.

… In watching the discussions at the Methodist Conference which approved the boycott, there was little in the way of the visceral hatred of Israel which we have become so accustomed to seeing in academic settings or in the trade unions. Here was a group of almost stereotypically ordinary, middle-class, English Christians calmly reciting every hackneyed anti-Israeli calumny in the book.

“What is happening in Palestine today is what was happening in South Africa in the recent past,” one delegate said. Another spoke of the “66 percent of 9- to 12-month-old babies [that] are anemic in Gaza.”

Yet another described a picture, which she held up in front of her, of a small boy “with large eyes” and “deep pain” in those eyes. “This little boy lives in Gaza,” she said ominously, adding (without irony) that the conference should “speak and act for those whose voices are not heard.”

Later, the point was repeated with one speaker lamenting the position of the Palestinians who have “no one to tell of what they’re going through.”

… I spoke to the Methodist Church’s head of media relations, Anna Drew… “Don’t you realize that you’re joining a massive global campaign against Israel?” I asked.

“There isn’t a campaign against Israel,” she replied firmly. “It’s not as simple as that.”

“You don’t accept that you’ve just jumped on a fashionable bandwagon?” I asked in amazement.

“We are the first church... to do this... so we are not being fashionable,” she replied.

[All summaries above by Tom Gross]

 

FULL ARTICLES

AL-QAEDA IS WATCHING

Legitimize Hamas?
By Khaled Abu Toameh
Hudson Institute
July 13, 2010

In recent weeks Hamas leaders are beginning to show signs of optimism. Since the late May incident involving the Turkish flotilla of aid ships, some Americans and Europeans have been campaigning in favor of engaging Hamas.

Al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood and jihadists around the world all have their eyes set on the Gaza Strip. They are waiting to see if Hamas manages to win recognition of the international community.

A victory for Hamas is a victory for Islamic fundamentalists not only in the Gaza Strip, but in many different places, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and Iraq.

EU foreign ministers who are planning to visit the Gaza Strip need to make sure that their tour is not used by Hamas to win recognition as a legitimate player in the Middle East.

Ever since it seized control of the Gaza Strip three years ago, Hamas has been desperately seeking recognition and legitimacy. Until now, Hamas’s efforts have been unsuccessful.

Since the January 2006 parliamentary election that resulted in its victory, Hamas has stubbornly refused to accept conditions set by the international community. These conditions include renouncing violence, recognizing Israel’s right to exist and honoring previous agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinians.

Hamas’s position today remains unchanged. And it does not seem that Hamas has any incentive to change its position amid increasing calls in the West to “break” the isolation of the radical Islamist movement.

On the contrary, talk in the West about the need to launch dialogue with Hamas has only to toughen their stance.

Not only is Hamas unwilling to accept the three conditions of the Quartet members, but it has also adopted a tougher policy on the issue of reconciliation with Fatah. Until recently, Hamas seemed to be more willing to make concessions.

The blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip by Israel and Egypt, as well as the boycott by most of the world, had finally begun to undermine its standing among Palestinians.

For the first time in several years, many disillusioned Palestinians were beginning to question Hamas’s strategy and policies. For a while, it even seemed as if Hamas were beginning to lose its grip on the Gaza Strip, especially after the Egyptian authorities launched a ruthless and massive campaign to destroy hundreds of underground tunnels being used by Hamas and its supporters to smuggle weapons, food and cash.

Today, however, Hamas has less reason to be worried as a growing number of voices in the West starts talking about ending the movement’s isolation. Hamas believes it is winning the battle for public opinion, particularly in the mainstream media and on university campuses in North America. Those who want to talk to Hamas today will soon find themselves facing calls to talk to Al-Qaeda, Taliban and Muslim Brotherhood.

Don’t all these groups, after all, share a common goal – namely, to spread and impose their dangerous version of Islam?

 

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE PALESTINIANS?

Who’s afraid of the Palestinians?
Egypt is afraid of the Palestinians on its border, and Jordan, the majority of whose population is Palestinian, desires no more of them.
By Moshe Arens
Ha’aretz
July 6, 2010

Little noticed in the brouhaha that surrounded the Israeli interception of the “peace flotilla” that tried to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip were Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s remarks to the Egyptian parliament last week. Trying to distance Egypt from the problem of allowing supplies to enter Gaza, even though Egypt shares a border with the Strip and could supply the population there with all its needs, he said: “Israel is trying to shirk its responsibility to Gaza and throw it at Egypt.” He studiously ignored the fact that if Egypt had been prepared to allow supplies for Gaza to enter through the Rafah crossing, there would have been no excuse for attempting to bring supplies in by sea.

But Egypt is afraid of the Palestinians on its border. The Egyptians will not allow Palestinian refugees to enter Egypt, nor do they want to assist the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip in any way. Continually voicing their concern for the plight of the Palestinians, Egyptian rulers over the years have done little to help the Palestinians in Gaza, out of fear that they may be reinforcing Hamas, which is an ally of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Putting the burden on Israel is Egyptian policy. Their attitude to the Palestinians is not that different from that of King Farouk 62 years ago when he sent his army, navy and air force to squash the newly born Jewish state. Trying to gain control of as much as possible of the territory that British forces had evacuated in Palestine, he had no intention of establishing a Palestinian state in these areas. Soundly beaten by the Israel Defense Forces under the command of Yigal Alon, his army saved from total destruction only by the pressure applied on the Ben-Gurion government by the United States and Britain, he was finally left with a toehold in the Gaza Strip. And it remained under Egyptian military control for 19 years, until the Six-Day War. Establishing a Palestinian state was not seen as a priority for Egyptian governments.

The Jordanian government’s policy, as well, seems to be based on the principle of keeping one’s distance from the Palestinians. Jordan, the majority of whose population is Palestinian, doesn’t want any more to do with them. King Abdullah II sounds pathetic alarm bells every few weeks that a war in the area is inevitable unless a Palestinian state is established, but will not entertain the thought that the areas in Judea and Samaria populated by Palestinians be incorporated into Jordan as part of a negotiated settlement with Israel.

It was many years before he was born – May 15, 1948 – that his great-grandfather King Abdullah sent his British-officered and British equipped Arab Legion across the Jordan aiming to gain as much territory as possible for his kingdom. After months of fighting, his army on the verge of defeat by the IDF, he managed to retain control of Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in the 1949 armistice agreement with Israel. He had no intention of establishing a Palestinian state in the areas that came under his control. Instead, he annexed the areas to Jordan, granting Jordanian citizenship to the Palestinian population living there.

That was the situation until the Six-Day War. Seven years later, in 1974, King Hussein, Abdullah II’s father, effectively renounced Jordan’s claim to Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem by recognizing Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. At that point, with the memory still fresh in his mind of Black September in 1970, when the PLO attempted to take over Jordan, Hussein decided that he already had enough Palestinians on his hands. Better that they become Israel’s problem.

There are many reasons why Egypt and Jordan have come to fear the Palestinians. Part of the responsibility rests on the Palestinian leadership, which on almost all occasions chose the path of violence – first the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who during World War II allied himself with Hitler, and later Yasser Arafat, who headed an international campaign of terror to be followed by a wave of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel’s cities. And more recently, the Hamas leadership in Gaza that has made rocket terror attacks against Israeli civilians its specialty.

It remains to be seen whether Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, who advocates a policy that forswears violence, can establish sufficient authority among the Palestinians so as to allay Egyptian and Jordanian fears of the Palestinians.

 

“WORDS, NOT DEEDS”

Palestinians always on offense
By Abby Wisse Schachter
The New York Post
July 8, 2010

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a successful meeting with President Obama this week but it doesn’t look like it’s going to gain him much ground or goodwill. Netanyahu is still the guy who has to “prove” he’s serious about peace. Netanyahu’s the one who is asking for direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and yet, it is the Palestinians who instead of playing defense, instead of having to explain their reasons for refusing to meet with Israel, are the ones who remain on offense and continue with their demands.

“Words, not deeds,” was the assessment of chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, who dismissed Netanyahu’s lip service to the peace process in an interview Tuesday with The New York Times. “We need to see deeds.”

As ever, the most effective weapon the Palestinians posses is rhetorical reversal. Whereas the list of actual concessions delivered by Israel to the Palestinians is long, the evidence that Palestinians are serious about peace with Israel is sparse to non-existent. Israel has ceded territory, Israel has ceded authority, Israel has trained and armed the Palestinians, Israel has allowed rejectionist terrorists to take control of territory that threatens Israel’s security. And what have the Palestinians done? Palestinians refuse to negotiate directly with Israel, Palestinians refuse to change their education curriculum to reflect an acceptance of Israel’s right to exist, Palestinians create children’s television programs that praise the holy war against the Jewish State.

President Obama may find it easy and convenient to pummel Netanyahu for concessions, but that won’t get him anywhere in regards a real settlement of the conflict. And Netanyahu is going to be called “hard-line” and suspicion will always be cast on his true motives regarding the Palestinians, so he might as well just argue the best position for his country that he can.

 

THE POOR FORGOTTEN KURDS OF SYRIA

The Forgotten Minority
By Jonathan Spyer
The Jerusalem Post
July 3, 2010

On March 21, 2010, the Syrian security forces opened fire with live ammunition on a crowd of 5,000 in the northern Syrian town of al-Raqqah. The crowd had gathered to celebrate the Kurdish festival of Nowruz. Three people, including a 15-year-old girl, were killed. Over 50 were injured. Dozens of injured civilians were held incommunicado by the authorities following the events. Some remain incarcerated. This incident was just one example of the repression taking place of the largest national minority in Syria – namely, the Syrian Kurdish population.

Kurds constitute 9 percent-10% of the population of Syria – that is, around 1.75 million in a total population of 22 million. Since the rise of militant Arab nationalism to power in Damascus, they have faced an ongoing campaign for their dissolution as a community.

All this is taking place far from the spotlight of world attention. The current US Administration pursues a general policy of considered silence on the issue of human rights in Middle East countries. The Syrian regime remains the elusive subject of energetic courting by the European Union and by Washington.

As a result, the Kurds of Syria are likely for the foreseeable future to remain the region’s forgotten minority.

The severe repression suffered by the Syrian Kurds has its roots in the early period of Ba’ath rule in Syria. The Arab nationalist Ba’athis felt threatened by the presence of a large non-Arab national majority, and set about trying to remove it using the methods usually associated with them.

In 1962, a census undertaken in the area of highest concentration of Kurdish population in Syria – the al-Hasaka province – resulted in 120,000-150,000 Syrian Kurds being arbitrarily stripped of their citizenship.

They and their descendants remain non-persons today.

They are unable to travel outside the country, to own property, or to work in the public sector. People in this category today number about 200,000 – though no official statistics exist for them. They are known as ajanib (foreigners).

A large additional group of around 100,000 Kurds in Syria remain entirely undocumented and unregistered.

This group, known as maktoumeen (muted), similarly live without citizenship or travel and employment rights.

The bureaucratic struggle of the Syrian regime to wish away its non-Arab population has been accompanied by practical measures on the ground to alter the demographic balance of the country.

In the 1970s, a campaign of “Arabization” of Kurdish areas commenced, on the order of president Hafez Assad. The intention was to create a “belt” of Arab population along the northern and northeastern borders of Syria with Turkey and Iraq, where most of the country’s Kurds live. The purpose of this was to prevent Kurdish territorial contiguity. Kurdish place names were changed to Arab ones, Kurds were deprived of their land and instructed to re-settle in the interior. Kurdish language, music, publications and political organization were banned. It was forbidden for parents to register their children with Kurdish names.

The vigorous policy of Arabization later largely faded into bureaucratic torpor. But for a while it produced the desired result – of a divided, demoralized, repressed and largely silent population.

This situation no longer pertains. In March 2004, following the recognition of Kurdish autonomous control of northern Iraq, something resembling an uprising began among the Kurds of Syria.

The spark that ignited the wave of protests that month was the shooting dead of seven Kurds by the security forces following a clash between Kurds and Arabs at a football match in Qamishli, a city of high Kurdish population close to the Turkish border. Further shootings took place at the funerals of the dead, and unrest spread across the Jazira, and as far as Aleppo and Damascus. The army moved into the Kurdish areas with heavy armor and air cover, and the protests were crushed.

Despite conciliatory noises made by President Bashar Assad following the 2004 unrest, nothing of substance has been done to change the conditions endured by Kurds in Syria. As a result, the situation since 2004 has been one of simmering tension between the Syrian regime and its Kurdish subjects, with occasional flareups.

In August, 2005, and again in October, 2008, and then again earlier this year, there were clashes between Kurdish citizens and the security forces in Qamishli, with some deaths and many arrests.

Syrian oppositionists speak of the emergence of a young, increasingly nationalistic younger generation, estranged from the Arab opposition in Syria as well as from the regime. As yet, no single movement has emerged to reflect this sentiment. Twelve different political parties exist among the Kurds of Syria, a reflection of the peculiar divisiveness to which regional opposition movements in general, and Kurdish ones in particular, remain prone.

For a variety of reasons, the Kurds have difficulty making their voices heard on the international stage. Their oppressors are fellow Muslims, rather than Christians or Jews, so the powerful alliance of Muslim states on the international stage is not interested. Arab states are by definition indifferent or hostile to their concerns.

And with their regular lucklessness, they now face a situation where the rising powers in the region – Turkey and Iran – and their enthusiastic smaller partner Syria all have sizable Kurdish populations and a shared interest in keeping them suppressed.

The misfortune of the Syrian Kurds is compounded by the fact that contrary to the accepted cliché, the enemy of their enemy is not their friend. This is because the enemy of the Syrian Kurds’ enemy is the west and the United States. These are today led by a philosophy which believes in accommodating, rather than confronting rivals. As a result, the systematic, half-century old campaign of the Syrian Arab Republic to nullify the existence of its Kurdish minority looks set to continue apace.

 

A TALE OF TWO PASSPORTS

A Tale of Two Passports
Britain’s silence over the alleged Russian forgeries is telling.
Editorial
The Wall Street Journal
July 6, 2010

Remember Britain’s outrage at Israel over the forged U.K. documents allegedly used in the Dubai assassination of Hamas big shot Mahmoud Mabhouh? Compare that uproar with the remarkable silence over the forged British passport that the FBI says was used by at least one of the Russian spies recently arrested in the U.S.

At this stage during the Dubai affair in mid-February, the Labour government had already summoned the Israeli ambassador and announced criminal investigations amid furious statements from all political parties. It expelled another Israeli diplomat a month later. The Guardian newspaper ran some 17 articles highlighting the passport accusations.

By contrast, a week into the Russian forgery story, there is not a hint of a diplomatic row between London and Moscow. The Guardian mentioned the fake passport allegations in two articles that lacked the breathless condemnation directed at Israel. The paper’s editorial on the Russian spy-ring ignores the passport angle altogether.

Why the double standard? One possible explanation is that Israel is a friend and ally of Britain, and friends aren’t supposed to behave that way. Then again, Downing Street also claims good relations with the Kremlin. Or perhaps the difference has to do with the recent change of government. Yet Britain’s new chief diplomat, William Hague, when still shadow foreign secretary, encouraged Labour’s diplomatic arm-twisting of Israel, a point he was eager to repeat in an interview last month with Al Jazeera, no less.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that what really infuriated the British was not so much the alleged offense but the identity of its perpetrators.

 

THE BANALITY OF METHODIST EVIL

The banality of Methodist evil
By Robin Shepherd
Jerusalem Post
July 4, 2010

Boycott against goods emanating from settlements shows where the rancid, global campaign against the Jewish state is heading.

The decision last week by the Methodist Church of Britain to launch a boycott against goods emanating from settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem will send a shiver down the spine of anyone with a feel for where the rancid, global campaign against the Jewish state is currently heading.

The boycott will involve transactions of the church itself, and extends to encouraging all affiliated Methodists to follow suit. The Methodists boycott no other country.

The fact that an institution professing allegiance to values of love, truth and justice should have succumbed to an agenda of hatred, hypocrisy and barbarism is sadly emblematic of the degraded spirit of our times, and of the moral inversions which blow through them.

But who, these days, can really be surprised about such happenings in modern Europe? It is only the banality, to appropriate Hannah Arendt, of this particular evil that still has the power to shock us. For, in watching the discussions at the Methodist Conference which approved the boycott, there was little in the way of the visceral hatred of Israel which we have become so accustomed to seeing in academic settings or in the trade unions. Here was a group of almost stereotypically ordinary, middle-class, English Christians calmly reciting every hackneyed anti-Israeli calumny in the book.

“What is happening in Palestine today is what was happening in South Africa in the recent past,” one delegate said. Another spoke of the “66 percent of 9- to 12-month-old babies [that] are anemic in Gaza.”

Yet another described a picture, which she held up in front of her, of a small boy “with large eyes” and “deep pain” in those eyes. “This little boy lives in Gaza,” she said ominously, adding (without irony) that the conference should “speak and act for those whose voices are not heard.”

Later, the point was repeated with one speaker lamenting the position of the Palestinians who have “no one to tell of what they’re going through.”

There was a lecture on the Old Testament, the Jews as “the chosen people,” the children of Abraham, and the revelations of Jesus: “Jesus... never speaks of the land or owning it; he speaks of the kingdom and joining it,” said the delegate joyfully. “...He teaches us God is not a racist God [her emphasis] who has favorites. God loves all his children [her emphasis] and blesses them.”

A student of archeology from the University of Manchester protested against accusations of one-sidedness in a report on the conflict which underpinned the boycott resolution: “No conflict is ever one-sided, “he said before concluding, literally seconds later, that “perhaps it is not the report that is one-sided, but simply the conflict.”

If total illogicality, intimations about the dangers of Jews worshiping a racist God, preposterous assertions about the Palestinian cause not getting an airing in the outside world and depraved and asinine comparisons with apartheid South Africa were the stock in trade of the ordinary delegates, the church’s sophisticates were not to be outdone.

Here is the Rev. Graham Carter, the chairman of the working group that produced the initial report. He is speaking at the end of the first debate, just after having made his (pro forma?) Reference to upholding the right of Israel to exist: “We didn’t go through the list of criticizing other governments, because there was no place to stop,” he said. “We could have criticized the United States for its past unquestioning support of the government of Israel. We could have questioned our own government for the equivocality of its approach. Where would we stop? So we concentrated simply on the situation in Palestine itself.”

In referring to criticism of governments around the world other than Israel, one might have expected that this was his cue to explain why Israel had been singled out. Not a bit of it. It never appeared to occur to him that the question of gross hypocrisy might be an issue. His only thoughts about other governments concerned the sense in which they might have been criticized for complicity in Israeli behavior! But it is when he comes to the question of anti-Semitism that he meets his undoing. “I want to state quite clearly and categorically that there is no hint of anti-Semitism in what we have said or in what we intend,” he stated boldly. “If other people want to do things like that, that is their problem. It is not our problem as a Methodist church. We need to be honest about where stand and what we feel. And if we are concerned about anti-Semitism, why don’t we talk about the anti-Islam approach?” I leave it to others to judge whether there is a “hint of anti-Semitism” in what they have said or intended.

But, in so far as his comments make any sense at all, one way of summarizing the rest could be as follows: “If this campaign against Israel results in more anti-Semitism, we in the Methodist Church wash our hands of it. We’ll act, and the Jews can take the consequences.

And what’s the big deal about anti-Semitism anyway? Can’t we talk about Islamophobia.”

I did not have the pleasure of talking to the Rev. Carter, who would certainly reject any suggestion of wrongdoing, let alone that he had taken his church down the road to bigotry. But I did speak to the Methodist Church’s head of media relations, Anna Drew, whose well prepared brief offered a lesson in where things have gone so badly wrong.

“Do you have any boycotts of other countries in the world, Saudi Arabia for example, where Christianity is banned?” I asked.

“Almost certainly not,” she said.

“So why have you singled out the Jewish state?” I asked.

“We have not singled out the Jewish state,” she replied, saying that the boycott was not against Israel, merely against the occupied territories.

And so the conversation went on, going round and round in circles as Drew summoned up every ounce of conceivable pedantry to argue that singling out the policy of a particular country was substantially different from singling out the country itself, even though such a boycott applied to no other country or its policies.

“Don’t you realize that you’re joining a massive global campaign against Israel?” I asked.

“There isn’t a campaign against Israel,” she replied firmly. “It’s not as simple as that.”

“You don’t accept that you’ve just jumped on a fashionable bandwagon?” I asked in amazement.

“We are the first church... to do this... so we are not being fashionable,” she replied.

At which point, what can you really say? Overall, a church that behaves in the manner of the Methodists has buried its credibility under a gigantic dunghill of intransigence, pedantry, lies and distortions.

But let us not allow this matter to rest with a mere recognition of whom and what they have chosen to become.

If the Methodist Church is to launch a boycott of Israel, let Israel respond in kind: Ban their officials from entering; deport their missionaries; block their funds; close down their offices; and tax their churches.

If it’s war, it’s war. The aggressor must pay a price.