* This is an update to several previous dispatches on this list, including France to ban “revolting” anti-Semitic TV broadcasts, and other reports (February 2, 2004) and The Problem with France (September 4, 2003)
[Note by Tom Gross]
It is encouraging to see some action on the part of the French authorities in taking steps to clamp down on anti-Semitic articles in the French media. In the article “Israel-Palestine: The Cancer,” the state of Israel and the Jewish people are implicitly compared to Nazi Germany and Tsarist Russia.
Le Monde is one of the most respected newspapers in Europe. Like the New York Times, it is held in high esteem by the liberal establishment. So this judgment, even three years after the article appeared, is significant.
NO SUCH COURT JUDGEMENTS IN BRITAIN
The part of the article for which Le Monde has been fined is reminiscent of articles published on an almost daily basis in the Arab press and in countries such as Spain and in newspapers in Britain such as the Guardian and the Independent.
Yet, perhaps because Jewish community leaders in Britain are so much more timid than those in France, there have been no similar legal steps taken to make the media more accountable in Britain in order to prevent their reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spilling over into anti-Semitism.
A LONG WAY FROM 9/11
Incidentally, one of the directors of Le Monde who has been fined, Jean-Marie Colombani, was the editor of Le Monde, who the day after 9/11, ran the famous “We Are All Americans” editorial.
-- Tom Gross
[I would again kindly request those journalists who are frequently using extracts from my commentary and notes in their published articles (sometimes without changing a word), without attributing them to me, to kindly do so.]
French journalists defame Israel
Jewish Telegraph Agency
May 29, 2005
Two reporters and the directors of the Le Monde newspaper were found guilty of racist defamation for an article about Israel.
The Versailles court of appeals ruled on an article that ran June 4, 2002, called “Israel-Palestine: The Cancer.” The court ordered the directors, Edgar Morin and Jean-Marie Colombani, as well as the two authors, to pay a symbolic one Euro in damages to a human-rights alliance and to Lawyers Without Borders, and ordered Le Monde to publish a condemnation of the article.
Two particular passages were cited for their racist character. The first reads, “One has trouble imagining that a nation of refugees, descendants of the people who have suffered the longest period of persecution in the history of humanity, who have suffered the worst possible scorn and humiliation, would be capable of transforming themselves, in two generations, into a dominating people, sure of themselves, and, with the exception of an admirable minority, into a scornful people finding satisfaction in humiliating others.”
The second incriminating citation reads, “The Jews, once subject to an unmerciful rule, now impose their unmerciful rule on the Palestinians.”
This is an update to two previous dispatches on the AUT (British academic) boycott of Haifa and Bar Ilan Universities in Israel.
CONTENTS
1. “Battle of the academics” (Letters to The Guardian, May 24, 2005)
2. “Israeli Druze Student: Haifa University a hotbed of peace and dialogue” (Amir Kniefiss, LSE)
3. “Palestinian union wants academic fired” (Al Jazeera, May 23, 2005)
[Note by Tom Gross]
As a further indication to subscribers on this list in the US and elsewhere of how fierce the debate over the academic boycott of Israel has grown, I attach letters from dozens of people printed in today’s Guardian newspaper.
The first letter, from 21 Nobel Laureates calling for an end to the boycott, includes the signatures of some of the most distinguished scientists alive today.
JEWS AGAINST ISRAEL
The second letter is signed by dozens of anti-Israel activists. About half of these are people of Jewish origin, and some of them have long been known for their hatred of and contempt for the existence of a Jewish state. In their letter they rely on the “revisionist” Israeli historian Tom Segev without explaining how selective and unbalanced Segev often is in his writings.
The third letter published by The Guardian today (by Andy North of the British National Union of teachers) implicitly compares Israel with Nazi Germany.
The fourth letter is signed by many South African-born anti-apartheid activists. They write that Israel bears no “comparison with the authoritarian and racist structures of apartheid South Africa.”
A number of signatories to these letters are subscribers to this email list.
A DRUZE IN LONDON SPEAKS OUT AGAINST THE BRITISH BOYCOTT ACADEMICS
I also attach a public letter from Amir Kneifiss, an Israeli-Druze presently studying at LSE (the London School of Economics, a leading British University). He is a former student at The University of Haifa, which is now undergoing the boycott.
Bar Ilan University has confirmed that 15% of their undergraduate students are Christian, Muslim, Bedouin or Druze. This contradicts the absolute lies being told by pro-boycott campaigners in Britain and elsewhere about Bar Ilan University.
The final article attached below (from Al Jazeera) details how the Palestinian Teachers Union have called for the dismissal of Dr. Sari Nusseibeh of Al-Quds University (a Palestinian university in east Jerusalem) for his criticism of the boycott of Israel.
-- Tom Gross
ISRAEL ISSUES STAMP HONORING POPE JOHN PAUL II
[This is an Update to the dispatches sent in April on the late Pope.]
Israel has issued a postage stamp honoring the late Pope John Paul II. The Jewish state will also dedicate a park in the Galilee (in northern Israel) to his memory, at the location where John Paul celebrated a mass during his visit to Israel in 2000.
-- Tom Gross
(The headlines added to the letters in block capitals below, are mine, not The Guardian’s -- TG)
21 NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS SPEAK OUT
Letters (first letter)
The Guardian
May 24, 2005
www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1490692,00.html
There is nothing more intrinsic to the academic spirit than the free exchange of ideas. Academic freedom has never been the property of a few and must not be manipulated by them. Therefore, mixing science with politics, and limiting academic freedom by boycotts, is wrong.
We, scholars from various disciplines who have devoted our academic lives to the advancement of humankind, express our unequivocal support for the separation of science from politics. The Nobel prizes we were honoured to receive were granted without the slightest consideration of nationality, ethnicity, religion or gender. Any deviation from this principle should not be allowed.
Supporting a boycott will undermine these principles. It is our hope that academic reasoning will overcome political rhetoric.
Shimon Peres
Nobel peace prize, 1994
Prof Ellie Wiesel
Nobel peace prize, 1986
Betty Williams
Nobel peace prize, 1976
Professor Richard Axel
Nobel Prize in Physiology, 2004
Professor Gunter Blobel
Nobel Prize in Physiology, 1999
Professor Aaron Ciechanover
Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2004
Professor Johann Diesenhofer
Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1988
Professor David Gross
Nobel Prize in Physics, 2004
Dr. Tim Hunt
Nobel Prize in Medicine, 2001
Professor Dudley Herschbach
Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1986
Professor Avram Hershko
Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2004
Professor Gerarad’t Hooft
Nobel Prize in Physics, 1999
Professor Daniel Kahneman
Nobel Prize in Economics, 2002
Professor Ewric Kandel
Nobel Prize in Physiology, 2000
Professor Aaron Klug
Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1982
Professor Walter Kohn
Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1998
Professor Jean-Marie Lehn
Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1987
Professor Erwin Neher
Nobel Prize in Physiology, 1991
Professor Stanley Prusiner
Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1997
Professor Steven Weinberg
Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979
Professor Frank Wilczek
Nobel Prize in Physics, 2004
IF TOM SEGEV SAYS IT, IT MUST BE TRUE
Letters (second letter)
The Guardian
May 24, 2005
One fact omitted from the anti-boycott advert in the Guardian (May 20) is that the boycott by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) of Bar-Ilan University is based on its support for Ariel College, an exclusively Jewish settlement constructed on illegally seized land in the occupied West Bank. Bar-Ilan supervises degree programmes at Ariel. The AUT resolution, which we hope is upheld this week, states that a boycott of Bar-Ilan should persist “until it severs all academic links” with Ariel. As the Israeli commentator Tom Segev pointed out in Ha’aretz, the boycott hurts only “those Israelis who support the perpetuation of the Israeli presence in the occupied territories”.
We call on the British government and the EU to fall in line with the principled stance of the AUT. States must ensure that no Israeli institution that contributes to the violations of international law inherent in the land seizures and construction of illegal settlements in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories should qualify for any government or EU-sponsored assistance.
Daniel Machover
Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights
Nomi Erteschik-Shir
Ben-Gurion University
Ian Macdonald QC
Penny Maddrell
Piers Mostyn (Tooks Chambers)
Hannah Rought-Brooks (Tooks Chambers)
Hugh Southey (Tooks Chambers)
Nitza Aminov
Talma Bar-din
Nomi Erteschik-Shir, Ben-GurionUniversity
Racheli Gai
Angela Godfrey-Goldstein
Oded Goldreich, Professor of Computer Science, Weizmann Institute of Science
Yehudith Harel, Israeli citizen
Annelien Kisch Kroon
Ramona Kuster Prof (emeritus) Moshé Machover
Oren Medicks
Gil Medovoy
Racheli Merhav
Dr Martha Mundy
Jonathan Rosenhead, Emeritus Professor of Operational Research, London School of Economics
Sergeiy Sandler
Roman Vater
Gaenor Bruce (Tooks Chambers)
Stephen Cragg, (Doughty StreetChambers)
Khaleel Desai, solicitor
Purvis Ghani, solicitor
Leon Hill, solicitor
Claire Holland, solicitor
Kate Maynard, solicitor
Pauline McMillan, solicitor
Sadat Sayeed, (Two Garden CourtChambers)
Nina Tavakoli, solicitor
Paul Troop, (Tooks Chambers)
Amir Amirani
Mike Cushman
Tansy Feltis
Tony Greenstein
Abe Hayeem
Liane Jones
Dr Nina Mayorek
Ron Mendel
Charlie Pottins
Lynne Reid Banks
Ben Rogaly
Prof Hilary Rose
Prof Steven Rose
Dr Esther Saraga
ISRAEL AND NAZI GERMANY
Letters (third letter)
The Guardian
May 24, 2005
It is not AUT members supporting the boycott that remind me of the foe that the “people of Britain” triumphed over 60 years ago (to quote the anti-boycott ad) but the Israeli state with its repeated armed incursions into occupied land, destruction of houses and construction of a wall to exclude those of the wrong race or religion. The AUT should stand firm.
Andy North
Birmingham NUT executive
SOUTH AFRICANS SPEAK OUT: ISRAEL IS NOT AN APARTHEID STATE
Letters (fourth letter)
The Guardian
May 24, 2005
Sue Blackwell, of Birmingham University, asserts that: “Israel is an apartheid state. It has many parallels with South Africa and the (academic) boycott campaign models itself on the campaign against South Africa.”
As expat South Africans, some of us intimately involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, we reject this parallel. Israel may adopt policies with which we disagree, but the institutions of social democratic Israel do not bear comparison with the authoritarian and racist structures of apartheid South Africa. To equate this with Israel distorts the historical record.
We would wish to support those in Palestine and Israel who are seeking to forge dialogue, and we cannot see that an academic boycott would enhance that process.
Leonard and Frances Weinreich
William Frankel
Prof Lewis Wolpert
Prof Sir Bob Hepple
Lord Joffee
Rabbi Sholomo Levin
Prof Lewis Wolpert FRS
Brian Berelowitz
Selwyn Bloch
Prof Geoffrey Dusheiko
Prof Leon Fine
Prof Siamon Gordon
Prof David Katz
Dr Jeanne Samon Katz
Dr Colin Lawrence
Larry Levine
Brian Plen
Lawrence Stolzenberg
Prof Anthony W Segal FRS
Prof David Simon
HAIFA UNIVERSITY A HOTBED OF PEACE AND DIALOGUE
An open letter from an Israeli Moslem Druze student in London (As not published by The Guardian)
Dear Friend,
My name is Amir Kneifiss and I am an Israeli Druze currently studying towards an MSc. in Governance at the LSE. I am writing as a former student at Haifa University, the institute you decided to boycott a few weeks ago and the place where I spent the best years of my life studying history and politics.
Haifa is a university in which one of every five students is Arab; in which loud but civilised political debates take place regularly; and one in which nobody was ever denied his/her freedom of expression. In my opinion, it is a hotbed of peace and dialogue that should be studied as a model for coexistence and not the opposite. Nevertheless, misled by a frustrated lecturer, you decided to boycott this amazing and diverse institute.
Israel is much more complicated than a newspaper headline. As with many ethnic or national minorities around the world, there are difficulties in integrating Israeli-Arabs and other minorities into the mainstream society. Much more needs to be done in these aspects. Yet, I am a firm believer that change can be made through engagement in the many facets of Israeli democracy and I reject the false allegations portraying Israel as an apartheid and racist state. Not only it is wrong and deceptive, but it will do little to help us in the Middle East confront the real problems and promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
The misleading arguments about Haifa University are only one example. More disturbing is the one-sided depiction of Israel, portrayed by some extremists who have never really intended to understand the complexities. Nobody, for instance, mentioned that in Ariel College there are currently 300 Arab students and that only last week, three Israeli-Arab Mayors publicly supported the College for its contribution to reducing inequalities. Yes, the occupied territories should be used to establish a viable Palestinian State. Nevertheless, instead of boycotting Israeli institutions, it is much more helpful to explore the various mechanisms capable of satisfying the interests of both sides (e.g. land swap).
An end to the occupation will not come from a blunt boycott, but from pragmatic solutions accommodating both sides’ desires. Only political negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians - and not the imposition of sanctions from the outside - will help to create a better future for us all. Therefore, although I am only in my twenties, I believe spreading hatred is the most ineffective way of promoting these goals. We need to bridge the gap, not extend it.
If you oppose discrimination and believe in peace, open dialogue and constructive debate, you should see why this boycott must be overturned. It helps none of us and shows one-sided hostility to Israel more than a love of peace.
Please do write to me if you are interested in hearing more about my point of view, and please defend dialogue, for the benefit of all of us.
Yours sincerely,
Amir Kniefiss
Government Department
London School of Economics
A.Kneifiss@lse.ac.uk
PALESTINIAN UNION WANTS ACADEMIC FIRED
Palestinian union wants academic fired
By Khalid Amayreh
Al Jazeera
May 23, 2005
english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/9F814CDC-79C0-4230-AF03-EAC3A5461DD8.htm
A Palestinian teachers union has called for the dismissal of Al-Quds University President Sari Nusseibah for “normalising ties with Israel” and “serving Israeli propaganda interests”.
A statement by the Palestinian Union of University Teachers and Employees (PUUTE), published on the front page of the Ram Allah-based daily Al-Ayyam, on Monday accused Nusseibah of “normalising relations with the Sharon government” despite the Israeli prime minister’s policy of “bullying the Palestinians and stealing their land”.
“This constitutes a strong blow to the Palestinian national consensus against normalisation with Israel,” said the statement.
“We call on all concerned parties within the Palestinian Authority, including President Mahmoud Abbas and the Higher Education Council, to take the necessary measures to put an end to this behaviour, which doesn’t represent the position of the Palestinian university teachers and employees, and dismiss the president of the Al-Quds University.”
The statement also accused Nusseibah of acting against a recent decision by Britain’s Association of University Teachers to boycott Israel’s Haifa and Bar Ilan universities.
British union boycott
The British union last month voted by a large majority to boycott Haifa University, for violating academic freedom by harassing Professor Ilan Pappe for criticising the Israeli occupation, and Bar Ilan University, for embracing a Jewish settler college in the occupied West Bank.
Last week, Nusseibah, who signed a cooperation agreement with Hebrew University, reportedly criticised the British boycott, describing it as “wrong and unjustified”.
He was quoted as saying that “problems should be resolved through dialogue not through sanctions”.
His remarks have been used by the Israelis in an effort to get the British union to reverse its decision.
Nusseibah’s remarks angered the Palestinian academic community, which accused Nusseibah of “allowing himself to be used by the powerful Israeli lobby for the purpose of perpetuating Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank”.
Speaking to Aljazeera.net, a number of Palestinian academics denounced Nusseibah for what they said was “acting against Palestinian interests”.
Hebron University professor
Awni Khatib, professor of chemistry at Hebron University, said: “He (Nusseibah) criticised the British union boycott of two Israeli universities, but he didn’t utter a word against the routine Israeli policy of closing Palestinian colleges and universities and of erecting roadblocks that prevent professors, employees and students from reaching Palestinian campuses.”
Khatib said Palestinian academics were not against scientific cooperation with their Israeli colleagues.
“What we are against is the manipulation by Israel of this cooperation to perpetuate inherently racist and discriminatory policies against our people.”
Nusseibah was not available for comment.
However, Al-Quds University official Imad Abu Kishk defended Nusseibah’s “overtures toward the Israeli society”.
“We must open bridges between us and the Israeli society. Sharon is hermetically closing Jerusalem and cutting it off from the West Bank; he is stealing our land and building more colonies. Hence, we must communicate with the Israeli society and tell Israeli Jews that what Sharon is doing is wrong,” Abu Kishk told Aljazeera.net.
He added that cooperation with Hebrew University was necessary for the survival of Al-Quds University.
Abu Kishk declined to elaborate on Nusseibah’s criticisms of the British union’s boycott decision.
Teachers union leader
“I have not read his statements in this regard, but I can tell you that we will never have any dealings with the settler college in Ariel,” Abu Kishk said.
However, Muhammed Abu Zeid, head of the Beir Zeit University Union of Teachers and Employees, dismissed Kishk’s arguments as “spurious and inconsistent”.
“The world must understand that there is no symmetry between the occupied and the occupier. When we achieve freedom and independence, we can then cooperate with the Israelis as free men and women, not as subjects and slaves with no civil, political or even human rights.
“And, yes, we are willing to cooperate with any Israeli academic and institution that denounces the occupation of our land and persecution of our people.”
Abu Zeid appealed to the British union not to change its decision.
Controversial figure
Nusseibah, son of the Jordanian minister of defence during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Anwar Nusseibah, has been a controversial figure.
Two years ago, he and a former head of the domestic Israeli intelligence service, the Shin Bet, signed in Switzerland the so-called Geneva initiative, which stipulated that Israel had the right to be an exclusive Jewish state.
Nusseibah was accused of giving attention to Israeli needs while ignoring Palestinian rights.
TEACHERS’ TRAINING MANUAL IN BARCELONA COMPARES HOLOCAUST TO ISRAEL’S SECURITY BARRIER
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach the latest example of Holocaust revisionism from mainstream Europe.
The authorities in the Spanish city of Barcelona last week published a high school teachers’ training manual comparing “the wall of shame Israel is building in Palestine” to Nazi concentration camps.
The manual is designed to serve as a guide for teachers so that they can explain the Holocaust to Spanish pupils. It says Hitler’s “concentration camps can be compared to two other historical events: The wall of shame Israel is building in Palestine and the [American] detention camp in Guantanamo.”
Israeli ambassador to Spain Victor Harel wrote a strongly-worded letter to Barcelona’s mayor, Joan Clos, over the weekend, demanding that the “training manual” be withdrawn.
ARE SOME IN SPAIN MISSING THE INQUISITION?
I have previously detailed on this list several comparisons by mainstream Spanish newspapers (of left, right and center), and by Spanish politicians, of Israel and Nazi Germany, and of Ariel Sharon and Adolf Hitler.
For example, last November, the municipal information board in the northern Spanish town of Oleiros put up a huge slogan on a bright-red illuminated sign at the entrance to the town, next to the town’s weather forecast and traffic report, which read:
“Let’s stop the animal, Sharon the assassin, stop the neo-Nazis.”
In addition to the sign, the Oleiros municipality started selling T-shirts with anti-Sharon slogans on its town website.
RALLY IN LONDON: “NO MORE ISRAEL”
In London on Saturday, a combination of leftists and Islamists – including George Galloway, the British MP who addressed the US Senate last week – called for the destruction of Israel. There was no more pretence that the issue is the “occupation’ of the West Bank and Gaza,” or the security barrier.
Among the speakers, Andrew Birgin a leader of the “Stop the War (in Iraq) Coalition” called for “no more Israel.”
Galloway declared: “It’s about time that the British government made some reparations for the [1917] Balfour declaration.”
Tony Benn, a senior politician in Tony Blair’s ruling Labour Party, called George Bush and Ariel Sharon the “two most dangerous men in the world.”
Sue Blackwell, the Birmingham university lecturer who has led the academic boycott campaign against Israel, and has publicly said Israel should not exist, told the crowd: “Palestinian refugee camps are like open air prisons.”
I attach an article below from Ynet, the web edition of Yediot Ahronoth, Israel’s best-selling newspaper.
-- Tom Gross
Is all barbed wire the same?
Teachers’ training manual in Barcelona compares Holocaust to Israel’s security barrier in West Bank; Israel demands manual be removed from shelves
By Diana Bahur-Nir
Ynetnews
May 21, 2005
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3088444,00.html
Officials expressed outrage over the weekend that the City of Barcelona would publish a teachers’ training manual comparing “the wall of shame Israel is building in Palestine” to concentration camps.
The manual was published last week and serves as a guide for high school teachers talking about the Holocaust. The specific comparison is found in the chapter dealing the imprisonment of Spanish Republicans.
“The concentration camps can be compared to two other historical events: The wall of shame Israel is building in Palestine and the (American) detention camp in Guantanamo,” the manual goes.
According to Israeli diplomatic officials in Spain, the murder of six million Jews is only mentioned in passing.
Israeli ambassador Victor Harel wrote a scathing letter to Barcelona Mayor Joan Clos demanding that these distortions be cleaned up and that current copies of the manual be removed from the shelves.
“We’re talking about statements that border on the anti-Semitic and that completely distort the very term ‘training manual’,” Israeli embassy spokesman Jackie Eldan said.
In the coming days, the president of Catalonia, the region of Spain whose capital is Barcelona, is visiting Israel. Pasqual Maragall will meet with President Moshe Katsav, who expected to raise the issue.
CONTENTS
1. “If the Israeli contestant wins we would have to show the celebrations”
2. “Nul points as Lebanon quits contest” (The Scotsman, March 20, 2005)
3. “Lebanon officially withdraws from Eurovision” (Al Bawaba, March 29, 2005)
4. “‘World needs to help Lebanon’” (Ynetnews, Tel Aviv, March 21, 2005)
5. “Israel’s Maimon gets through to Eurovision Song final” (Ha’aretz, May 20, 2005)
[Note by Tom Gross]
EUROVISION: THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR SONG CONTEST
Lebanon will not participate in this evening’s final of the Eurovision Song Contest – the light-hearted, popular event that is supposed to bring countries and peoples together, and has a television and radio audience of hundreds of millions.
For recipients of this email list who live outside Europe and the near east and who don’t follow Eurovision, it is the world’s most popular song contest. Twenty-four countries, including Israel, made it through to tonight’s final – the 50th year of the competition. The contest is broadcast on television and radio in dozens of countries in Europe and beyond.
Israel, Lebanon and Morocco are among the non-European countries allowed to take part, and Israel has won the competition three times.
This year the final is taking place in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, and will mark both biggest final in the history of Eurovision, and the largest international event ever held in Ukraine, according to the BBC.
The popularity of the contest stems from its talent show format. Viewers in each country phone in or vote over the Internet for the song they like the most.
“IF THE ISRAELI CONTESTANT WINS WE WOULD HAVE TO SHOW THE CELEBRATIONS”
Lebanon has withdrawn from the 2005 Eurovision Song Contest, after announcing it will refuse to show the Israeli entry on the Lebanese TV channel Tele-Liban. The channel told the European Broadcasting Union (which organizes Eurovision) that Lebanon’s legislation made it “all but impossible” to broadcast an Israeli singer. This puts Lebanon in breach of contest rules, which state all countries taking part must show the entire event. The Lebanese authorities said they could not air the Israeli song, or show the Israeli website on which viewers could vote for the Israeli participant, and they could not show Israeli celebrations if the Israelis won.
Israel has won the competition three times in 1978 (“A-ba-ni-bi,” by Izhar Cohen & Alphabeta), 1979 (“Hallelujah,” by Gali Atari & Milk and Honey) and 1998 (“Diva,” by Dana International, the first transsexual to take part in or win the contest).
ISRAEL REPLACED BY BELGIUM AS WINNER BY JORDANIAN TV
When Israel won the competition in 1978, Jordanian television showed pictures of flowers when the Israeli participants took to the stage, refused to mention that Israel had won the competition and instead declared second-place Belgium as the winner.
This year would have been Lebanon’s first ever entry into the competition and the country would have been represented by talented singer Aline Lahoud. Israel will be represented by Shiri Maimon who will sing a track called “The Quiet that Remains.” Maimon progressed to the final after a strong performance in last Thursday’s semi-final.
NO MISS UNIVERSE FOR LEBANON
This is not the first time Lebanon has withdrawn from an international competition because Israel was allowed to compete. A Miss Lebanon once dropped out of a Miss Universe pageant after she refused to be photographed with Miss Israel.
I attach four articles with summaries first.
--Tom Gross
SUMMARIES
NUL POINTS AS LEBANON QUITS CONTEST
“Nul points as Lebanon quits contest” (By Nicholas Christian, The Scotsman, March 20, 2005)
Lebanon has pulled out of this year’s Eurovision song contest because an Israeli is competing, organisers said. The country withdrew because it would have had to broadcast the Israeli portions of the contest, to be held on May 19 and 21 in Kiev, Ukraine.
A statement on the Eurovision website said: “According to Lebanese legislation, Tele Liban is not permitted to broadcast the performance of the Israeli participant, thereby breaching the rules of the Eurovision Song Contest 2005...”
LEBANON OFFICIALLY WITHDRAWS FROM EUROVISION
“Lebanon officially withdraws from Eurovision” (Al Bawaba, March 29, 2005)
... Lebanon was expected to take part for the first time in the contest this year... Lebanon would have been represented by talented singer Aline Lahoud representing it in the semi-final in Kiev on May 19...
Tele-Liban will still have to pay the participation fee for the contest and faces a further fine for withdrawing. The channel had originally said it would take part in December 2004, meeting a deadline by which all countries had to confirm their participation.
Lebanon would have been one of three newcomers to this year’s contest, the other two being Bulgaria and Moldova... Lebanon’s withdrawal of its Eurovision entry is not the first time that Israel has affected Arab countries’ entries into various global contests...
“THE WORLD NEEDS TO HELP LEBANON”
“‘World needs to help Lebanon’” (By Merav Yudilovitch, Ynetnews, Israel, March 21, 2005)
Help us show the world our other side - people want peace, quiet and culture, well-known Lebanese musician and composer Elias Rahbani told Ynet in an exclusive interview Sunday...
The reason Lebanon canceled its participation in the contest was the local broadcasting station’s fear radical Islamic groups may blow the station up should it air the contest, Rahbani said.
“I find it strange, as it’s not the first time we are participating in an international contest along side Israel,” he said. “But this year you can feel the fear.”
ISRAEL’S MAIMON GETS THROUGH TO EUROVISION SONG CONTEST FINAL
[This is the full article]
Israel’s Maimon gets through to Eurovision Song Contest final
By Ha’aretz Staff, Ha’aretz, May 20, 2005
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/578265.html
Israeli singer Shiri Maimon on Thursday evening got through to the finals of the 50th Eurovision Song Contest after an exhilarating performance with her song ‘Hasheket Shenishar’, at the semi-final stage.
Maimon was one of 10 artists who were distilled among 25 semi-final contestants at the semi-final in a packed Sports Palace in Ukrainian capital of Kiev.
The final will be held in Kiev on Saturday night. Maimon will appear eleventh in the running order of 24 countries.
Maimon grew up in Kiryat Haim and entered the entertainment business as a young child. After completing her military service in the Air Force’s entertainment troupe, Maimon achieved fame when she came in second in the first season of the television blockbuster “A Star Is Born.” She handily took first place in the national competition in March to select Israel’s song for Eurovision.
NUL POINTS AS LEBANON QUITS CONTEST
Nul points as Lebanon quits contest
By Nicholas Christian
The Scotsman
March 20, 2005
news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=299182005
Lebanon has pulled out of this year’s Eurovision song contest because an Israeli is competing, organisers said.
The country withdrew because it would have had to broadcast the Israeli portions of the contest, to be held on May 19 and 21 in Kiev, Ukraine.
A statement on the Eurovision website said: “According to Lebanese legislation, Tele Liban is not permitted to broadcast the performance of the Israeli participant, thereby breaching the rules of the Eurovision Song Contest 2005.”
All national broadcasters of participating countries must televise the entire event, comprising a semi-final and a final.
Tele Liban’s head, Ibrahim Khoury, confirmed the decision to pull out, saying that the broadcaster was unaware of the presence of an Israeli participant when it confirmed its entry in December.
“Lebanon is in a state of war with Israel. If the Israeli contestant wins, we would have to show the celebrations,” Khoury said.
He would also be obliged to allow viewers to vote for the Israeli entry. “I cannot do this,” he said.
LEBANON OFFICIALLY WITHDRAWS FROM EUROVISION
Lebanon officially withdraws from Eurovision
Al Bawaba
March 29, 2005
www.albawaba.com/en/news/181808
As international attention has been focused on the pull out of Syrian military troops from Lebanon, another type of “withdrawal” has dramatically taken place involving a beautiful Lebanese rising star, politics and music…
Lebanon has withdrawn from the 2005 Eurovision Song Contest, after refusing to show the Israeli entry on Lebanese TV channel Tele-Liban. The channel told the European Broadcasting Union that Lebanon’s legislation made it nearly impossible to broadcast the Israeli performance. This puts in breach of contest rules, which state all countries taking part must show the entire event.
Lebanon was expected to take part for the first time in the contest this year.
According to the Eurovision’s official website, “Tele-Liban has confirmed to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) the withdrawal of Lebanon from the Eurovision Song Contest 2005 (ESC 2005) to be hosted in Kiev by NTU, the national Ukrainian broadcaster, on 19 and 21 May”.
Lebanon would have been represented by talented singer Aline Lahoud representing it in the semi-final in Kiev on May 19.
Eurovision’s executive supervisor Svante Stockselius told Eurovision website ESC, “When we told them (Lebanon) they had to broadcast the entire program, they decided to withdraw from the contest.”
“I feel particularly sorry for Aline Lahoud.”
Aline Lahoud was born in 1981. She grew up in an artistic family. Her mother Salwa Katrib is a famous singer and her father Nahi Lahoud is a well-known producer. Her uncle Roméo Lahoud is one of the most famous musical directors and composers in the Arab world.
Tele-Liban will still have to pay the participation fee for the contest and faces a further fine for withdrawing. The channel had originally said it would take part in December 2004, meeting a deadline by which all countries had to confirm their participation.
Lebanon would have been one of three newcomers to this year’s contest, the other two being Bulgaria and Moldova. The final will be held on May 21, with a record 39 countries taking part overall.
The affair actually began several weeks ago after the official Lebanese website set up for the competition avoided any mention of Israel. Eventually, Lebanese broadcaster Tele-Liban found a creative solution by removing the names of all participating countries from the site. However, the EBU sought assurances that the upcoming contest would be broadcast in full, including the Israeli song.
Shiri Maimon, 24, will be representing Israel in the upcoming Eurovision, singing a song called “The Quiet that Remains”.
Tele-Liban was apparently unable to provide the assurances requested by the EBU and Lebanon subsequently withdrew from the popular music competition. According to the ESC rules, all national broadcasters of the countries taking part in the Contest must broadcast the entire event, comprising two live televised shows – a Semi Final and a Final.
Lebanon’s withdrawal of its Eurovision entry is not the first time that Israel has affected Arab countries’ entries into various global contests.
A Miss Lebanon once dropped out of a Miss Universe pageant after she refused to be photographed with Miss Israel. In 1978, the Jordanian broadcaster showed pictures of flowers when the Israeli participants took to the stage, avoided any mention of Israel’s win in the competition and announced second-place Belgium as the winner.
Tele-Liban’s head, Ibrahim Khoury, confirmed the decision to pull out, telling The AP that Lebanon was unaware of the presence of an Israeli participant when it confirmed its entry in December.
“Lebanon is in a state of war with Israel. If the Israeli contestant wins, we would have to show the celebrations,” Khoury said. He added that Lebanon would also be obliged to air the Israeli website on which viewers could vote for the Israeli participant. “I cannot do this,” he said.
Khoury said the decision to withdraw was “painful,” particularly as Lebanon was participating with a talented contestant.
Jad Rahbani, a Lebanese musician who composed the song Lahoud was to sing, said the withdrawal from Eurovision was “another blow” for Lebanon. Aline was to perform the song “Quand tout s’enfuit” (When everything escapes) for the upcoming contest.
“I’m very disappointed,” Rahbani said.
In the late 1990s, Aline began her professional career as a singer and actress. Under the supervision of Mrs. Hélou and Mrs. Haddad, Aline studied singing and dramatic art. After graduating from school, she enrolled in St. Joseph University IESAV (Institut des Etudes Scéniques et Audio Visuelles). In 2002, she obtained a BA degree in Communication Arts with a major in Screenplay and Directing Studies.
Aline had participated in several plays as well. She was awarded the Special Award Trophy of the FIDOF (Fédération Internationale de l’Organisation des Festivals) during the Megahit Festival in Turkey in September 2004 as well as the ‘Murex d’Or’ trophy. Apart from singing, Aline Lahoud has directed several short films and studied modern ballet and jazz dance.
‘WORLD NEEDS TO HELP LEBANON’
‘World needs to help Lebanon’
Well-known Lebanese musician and composer speaks to Ynet in exclusive interview; wants Lebanese culture exposed to help change country’s image
By Merav Yudilovitch
Ynetnews
March 21, 2005
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3061319,00.html
Help us show the world our other side - people want peace, quiet and culture, well-known Lebanese musician and composer Elias Rahbani told Ynet in an exclusive interview Sunday.
Rahbani is the father of Jad Rahbani, who composed and wrote the song “Quand Tout S’enfuit” (When Everything Fades), chosen to represent Lebanon in the 2005 Eurovision song contest.
The song was supposed to be the first Lebanes song ever to take part in the show, but Lebanese Télé-Liban television station aired an announcement last week stating that Lebanon had decided to withdraw from the contest in order to avoid airing the Israeli song on local television.
Rahbani said he is disappointed at the decision to withdraw from the contest.
“It’s bad luck; the whole story, and of course the withdrawal, is connected to the current situation in Lebanon,” he said.
The reason Lebanon canceled its participation in the contest was the local broadcasting station’s fear radical Islamic groups may blow the station up should it air the contest, Rahbani said.
“I find it strange, as it’s not the first time we are participating in an international contest along side Israel,” he said. “But this year you can feel the fear.”
‘Ground burning beneath our feet’
It has been reported by the news agencies that the withdrawal from the competition is due to a Lebanese law prohibiting the media to air any content that focuses attention on Israel.
Rahbani said he does not understand why people are making such a big deal about Lebanon’s latest decision.
He said last September representatives participated in a cultural festival in Turkey that was sponsored by the Fidof organization, which merges international festivals.
About 15 countries participated in the festival, and his son won a prize alongside Israeli musicians, Rahbani said.
“What’s the problem? I understand this year the situation is a little sensitive because the ground is burning beneath our feet,”he said. “I remind you that until recently it was not like this.”
‘We need to help Lebanon’
Rahbani said he believes the Lebanese song chosen for the contest should be heard on the night of the competition.
“Due to the problems, I’d like to believe it would be possible to hear it as a guest song, if not as a contender,” he said. “We need to help Lebanon. It’s is a cultured country, as it gave the world the first alphabet and the rule of geometry.”
According to Rahbani, the European Broadcasting Union’s contest coordinator Svante Stockselius told news agencies sources he had requested that Lebanese singer Aline Lahoud perform the song at the show as an artist and not as a participant in the contest.
However, her request was denied.
Over the past years, Rahbani said he has listened to the news on all of the all satellite stations.
“People always speak about Lebanon in a negative context, the time has come to help us,” he said. “Let us play the song; I’m convinced exposure to our culture will help.”
[A reminder about “Media news”: Because there are a large number of journalists on this list, and the list concerns not only Middle East and related politics, but the way the media works, I am running an occasional series of dispatches dealing with developments in the news media that don’t necessarily pertain directly to Mideast issues, but may have background repercussions for it. Reporters, producers, columnists and opinion and news editors on this list come from over 35 countries -- Tom Gross]
1. Newsweek Update
2. “A Battle Over Programming at National Public Radio” (New York Times, May 16, 2005)
3. “Gaining Confidence: N.Y. Times Releases Key Internal Report” (Editor and Publisher, May 9, 2005)
4. “NYTimes.com to Offer Subscription Service” (New York Times, May 17, 2005)
5. “The Wall Street Journal turns tabloid” (Guardian, May 9, 2005)
[Note by Tom Gross]
NEWSWEEK UPDATE
Since the dispatch titled Irresponsible Journalism Costs Lives (Newsweek and America) was sent (May 16, 2005), Newsweek have now fully retracted their report that suggested a U.S interrogator at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker said in a statement: “Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay.”
THE GORILLA IN THE LIVING ROOM… IS MAD
This story has generated enormous media coverage throughout the world during the last few days (the US, Pakistani and Afghan governments are among those calling on Newsweek to go further and issue a thorough apology). But some commentators say that criticism should not be directed at Newsweek, but elsewhere.
Robert Spencer, writing in FrontPage Magazine (regarding the deaths of 17 people and wounding of hundreds more in riots by Muslims in reaction to the Newsweek story), says:
“The gorilla in the living room that no one wants to notice regarding this story is that flushing a Koran down the toilet should not be grounds to commit murder. No one says anything whatsoever about a culture that condones – celebrates – wanton murder of innocent people, mayhem, and destruction in response to the alleged and unproven destruction of a book...
To kill people thousands of miles away who had nothing to do with the act, and to fulminate with threats and murder against the entire Western world, all because of this alleged act, is not just disproportionate. It is not just excessive. It is mad. And every decent person in the world ought to have the courage to stand up and say that it is mad.”
RIPPING UP A PHOTOGRAPH OF POPE JOHN PAUL II
Jeff Jacoby wrote yesterday in The Boston Globe that: “Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don’t lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted.” Dozens of people were not killed, he points out, after photographer Andres Serrano revealed his “Piss Christ” in 1989 – a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine – that was included in an exhibition subsidized by the American National Endowment for the Arts. Or in 1992 when singer Sinead O’Connor, appearing on “Saturday Night Live,” ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II.
BURNING DOWN ANCIENT JEWISH AND BUDDHIST SHRINES
Or after Palestinian Arabs demolished the Jewish holy site of Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus in 2003, torching the ancient shrine and murdering a young rabbi who tried to save a Torah from the flames. Or when two priceless, 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha were destroyed by the Muslim Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001.
Yet from the White House down, “the chorus of condemnation was directed not at the killers and the fanatics who incited them, but at Newsweek,” notes Jacoby.
TWO OMBUDSMEN TO MONITOR NPR’S COVERAGE
The New York Times reports (see article below) that top officials at NPR are upset about the corporation’s decision to appoint two ombudsmen to judge the content of their Mideast programs for balance. About a dozen different “media monitoring” groups have for years vociferously criticized American National Public Radio for its apparent bias against Israel and support for Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority.
I have drawn attention to that criticism several times over the years on this email list. For example, the dispatch of March 20, 2004 titled (1) NPR: “Poisoning American Minds” (2) UK magazine: Israel as al Qaeda, included a thorough critique of NPR for “repeatedly promoting the Arab propaganda line by distorting or ignoring facts,” published in The Jerusalem Post by Daniel Doron, president of a pro-market Israeli policy think tank.
ALMOST HALF OF AMERICANS DON’T BELIVE THE MAINSTREAM PRESS
A recent study by the independent Pew Research Center found 45% of Americans believe little or nothing of what they read in their paper.
The New York Times is also responding to a 16-page report produced by an internal committee. It noted that the paper printed 3,200 corrections last year, but suggested this was only the tip of the iceberg. (As I have pointed out before, one would expect a newspaper’s mistakes to be roughly equally distributed. Yet a search of New York Times corrections during the Intifada discloses that the paper has consistently erred against, not for, Israel - see www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross031403.asp)
The New York Times has also been rocked by the Jayson Blair scandal, and on May 26, 2004 the paper said its coverage in the run up to the Iraq war was “not as rigorous as it should have been.”
(As I have mentioned several times before, the New York Times has not been rocked by, and has yet to clearly apologize for, its gross failure to report properly on the Holocaust or on the crimes of Communism.)
NEW YORK TIMES: LETS RESPOND TO THE BLOGS
The fourth recommendation from the internal committee was to “Consider creating a Times blog that promotes interaction with readers.” A dispatch on this list earlier this month (Weblogs make a run for the mainstream as newspaper circulation falls, May 5, 2005) examined how weblogs are seeking to take readership away from the often impartial, usually left-leaning, mainstream press. In response, it seems that in future, the regular mainstream press may look for ways to fight back by introducing their own blogs. The British paper, the Guardian, for example, has been running a Newsblog since summer 2001.
Also attached below are articles concerning a new subscription service for the New York Times online, to be introduced in September, and the new tabloid format for the Wall Street Journal in Europe and Asia.
I attach four articles, with summaries first for those who don’t have time to read them in full.
-- Tom Gross
SUMMARIES
TWO OMBUDSMEN TO MONITOR NPR’S MIDEAST COVERAGE
“A Battle Over Programming at National Public Radio” (By Stephen Labaton, The New York Times, May 16, 2005)
... In one of several points of conflict in recent months, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which allocates federal funds for public radio and television, is considering a plan to monitor Middle East coverage on NPR news programs for evidence of bias, a corporation spokesman said on Friday.
The corporation’s board has told its staff that it should consider redirecting money away from national newscasts and toward music programs produced by NPR stations.
Top officials at NPR and member stations are upset as well about the corporation’s decision to appoint two ombudsmen to judge the content of programs for balance. And managers of public radio stations criticized the corporation in a resolution offered at their annual meeting two weeks ago urging it not to interfere in NPR editorial decisions...
Late last year, without notifying board members or NPR, Mr. Tomlinson contacted S. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a research group, about conducting a study on whether NPR’s Middle East coverage was more favorable to Arabs than to Israelis, Mr. Lichter said. He added that although there were follow-up conversations as recently as February, officials at the corporation had not moved ahead with the project.
A spokesman for the corporation, Eben Peck, said it had not decided how it would monitor coverage of the Middle East on NPR. “We’re still assessing and looking at various methodologies that would allow an assessment of NPR’s Middle East coverage,” Mr. Peck said...
GAINING CONFIDENCE: NY TIMES RELEASES KEY INTERNAL REPORT
“Gaining Confidence: ‘N.Y. Times’ Releases Key Internal Report” (By E&P Staff, The Editor and Publisher, May 9, 2005)
An internal committee at The New York Times has recommended steps to increase readers’ confidence in the newspaper, including reducing errors, increasing coverage of religion, “rural areas” and “middle America,” making reporters and editors more accessible, and possibly starting a blog...
As for accessibility: “The Times makes it harder than any other major American newspaper for readers to reach a responsible human being,” the committee’s 16-page report said. It also noted that the paper printed 3,200 corrections last year.
The committee was made up of 11 editors, 6 reporters, a copy editor and a photographer...
NYTIMES.COM TO OFFER SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE
“NYTimes.com to Offer Subscription Service” (By Timothy Williams, The New York Times, May 17, 2005)
The New York Times announced yesterday that it would offer a new subscription-based service on its Web site, charging users an annual fee to read its Op-Ed and news columnists, as the newspaper seeks ways to capitalize on the site’s popularity.
Most material on the Web site, NYTimes.com, will remain free to users, The Times said, but columnists from The Times and The International Herald Tribune will be available only to users who sign up for TimesSelect, which will cost $49.95 a year. The service will also include access to The Times’s online archives, as well as other features.
The service, which is scheduled to start in September, will be provided free to home-delivery subscribers of the newspaper...
In April, The Times’s Web site had 1.7 million unique daily visitors. Its daily newspaper circulation in March 2005, the most recent month available, was 1,136,433...
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ASIA AND EUROPE TURNS TABLOID
“WSJ turns tabloid” (By Jason Deans, The Guardian, May 9, 2005)
The Wall Street Journal Europe is following in the footsteps of the (London) Independent and the (London) Times, switching from broadsheet to tabloid format from October.
WSJ Europe and its Asian counterpart will both change to tabloid from October 17 in a move that will also see the two titles more closely aligned with WSJ.com... The company said it expected the tabloid move, and related cost reductions, to produce a saving around £9m ($17m) a year from 2006...
A BATTLE OVER PROGRAMMING AT NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
A Battle Over Programming at National Public Radio
By Stephen Labaton
The New York Times
May 16, 2005
www.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/business/media/16radio.html
Executives at National Public Radio are increasingly at odds with the Bush appointees who lead the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
In one of several points of conflict in recent months, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which allocates federal funds for public radio and television, is considering a plan to monitor Middle East coverage on NPR news programs for evidence of bias, a corporation spokesman said on Friday.
The corporation’s board has told its staff that it should consider redirecting money away from national newscasts and toward music programs produced by NPR stations.
Top officials at NPR and member stations are upset as well about the corporation’s decision to appoint two ombudsmen to judge the content of programs for balance. And managers of public radio stations criticized the corporation in a resolution offered at their annual meeting two weeks ago urging it not to interfere in NPR editorial decisions.
The corporation’s chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, has also blocked NPR from broadcasting its programs on a station in Berlin owned by the United States government.
Mr. Tomlinson denied several requests last week to discuss the relationship between the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR, but he issued a one-sentence statement saying that he looked forward to “working through any differences that may exist between our institutions.” In a column last week in The Washington Times and in an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s talk show on PBS, he repeated his belief that public broadcasting’s reputation of being left-leaning was a problem.
Mr. Tomlinson has been waging a campaign to correct what he and other conservatives see as a liberal bias in public television programming. That effort has been criticized by leaders of public television who say it poses a threat to their editorial independence. At the request of two senior Democratic members of Congress, the inspector general at the corporation is examining whether Mr. Tomlinson’s decision to monitor only one television program, “Now,” with Bill Moyers, and his decision to retain a White House official who helped create guidelines for the two ombudsmen may have violated a law that is supposed to insulate public broadcasting from politics.
But the law also assigns the corporation the responsibility of ensuring balance and objectivity in programming, a function that Mr. Tomlinson says is of paramount importance for the sustained viability and political support of public broadcasting.
About a quarter of the corporation’s $400 million budget goes to radio, with most of the rest to television. NPR recently received a huge bequest from the estate of Joan B. Kroc, the widow of the founder of McDonald’s, and it gets only about 1 percent of its overall funds directly from the corporation. But its member stations are far more reliant on the corporation’s money, and they use a significant part of that to buy programs produced by NPR and others.
Last month, the corporation’s board, which is dominated by Republicans named by President Bush, told the staff at a meeting that it should prepare to redirect the relatively modest number of grants available for radio programs away from national news, officials at the corporation and NPR said.
“We heard sentiments from the board that they are interested in support of more music,” said Vincent Curran, a senior vice president in charge of the radio division. He said that the board had made no final decisions on funds.
Participants in that meeting said there was a brief discussion by board members in which one of them, Gay Hart Gaines, talked about the need to change programming in light of a conversation she had had with a taxi driver about his listening habits. Ms. Gaines, a Republican fund-raiser and the head of the political action committee of Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, did not return a call to her office seeking comment.
In recent years, the corporation has provided funds for NPR programs like “The Tavis Smiley Show” and “Day to Day.” A third NPR program, “News and Notes,” recently applied for money. Mr. Tomlinson has told some board members that the corporation would no longer provide funds for “Weekend America,” a public affairs program produced by Minnesota Public Radio, people briefed on those discussions said.
Over the objections of senior NPR executives, the corporation decided in April to appoint the two ombudsmen to monitor radio and television content. At a meeting in February, Kevin Klose, NPR’s president, was told by Mr. Tomlinson that the corporation would have a liberal ombudsman and a conservative one, participants in the meeting said. They said Mr. Klose told Mr. Tomlinson that this idea showed a fundamental misunderstanding of both journalism and the role of an ombudsman.
NPR has had its own ombudsman for the last five years, and executives there say they are concerned that having two at the agency that provides funds for programs could lead to editorial interference.
The resolution from representatives of public radio stations that was presented at the recent meeting in Washington denounced the move, and called on the corporation to “refrain from interfering in constitutionally protected content decisions” and to act as a firewall to insulate public broadcasting from politics. The lack of a quorum prevented a vote on the resolution, but a poll of the more than 80 people there showed unanimous support for it.
Late last year, without notifying board members or NPR, Mr. Tomlinson contacted S. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a research group, about conducting a study on whether NPR’s Middle East coverage was more favorable to Arabs than to Israelis, Mr. Lichter said. He added that although there were follow-up conversations as recently as February, officials at the corporation had not moved ahead with the project.
A spokesman for the corporation, Eben Peck, said it had not decided how it would monitor coverage of the Middle East on NPR.
“We’re still assessing and looking at various methodologies that would allow an assessment of NPR’s Middle East coverage,” Mr. Peck said.
Other officials said Mr. Tomlinson had heard complaints about the coverage from a board member, Cheryl Halpern, a former chairwoman of the Republican Jewish Coalition and leading party fund-raiser whose family has business interests in Israel. The corporation has also heard complaints from Representative Brad Sherman, Democrat of California.
Besides his role at the corporation, Mr. Tomlinson heads the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which supervises most United States government broadcasts overseas, including those of the Voice of America. He has continued the policy of his predecessors on that board of blocking NPR from putting its programs on a Berlin station that the German government gave to the United States in the early 1990’s after reunification. NPR, which has a significant presence overseas, has long sought to enter Berlin, the largest radio market in Western Europe.
Mr. Tomlinson has instead favored programming offered by a European business executive that includes newscasts produced by the Voice of America, which is restricted by law from broadcasting in English in most European countries. German regulators are considering the two options.
In a 2003 letter to Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Tomlinson suggested that it would further the national interest to use the station to broadcast programs by Voice of America rather than NPR.
Some NPR officials suggest that Mr. Tomlinson has a conflict of interest as the head of both the Broadcasting Board of Governors and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
“It certainly calls into question where his allegiance lies,” said Tim Eby, chairman of NPR and manager of the public radio stations run by Ohio State University in Columbus.
Mr. Peck, the corporation spokesman, said Mr. Tomlinson “does not think there is a conflict of interest.”
In an interview last week, Mr. Eby said NPR executives had been particularly worried because they were not getting full information about what had been happening at the corporation.
“Everybody has been concerned in a lot of ways because there’s been a real lack of transparency about what’s been going on there,” he said.
GAINING CONFIDENCE: ‘NY TIMES’ RELEASES KEY INTERNAL REPORT
Gaining Confidence: ‘N.Y. Times’ Releases Key Internal Report
By E&P Staff
The Editor and Publisher
May 9, 2005
www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000912502
An internal committee at The New York Times has recommended steps to increase readers’ confidence in the newspaper, including reducing errors, increasing coverage of religion, “rural areas” and “middle America,” making reporters and editors more accessible, and possibly starting a blog.
Executive editor Bill Keller, who had asked the panel to study questions of journalistic credibility, endorsed the recommendations in Monday’s editions, calling the report “a sound blueprint for the next stage of our campaign to secure our accuracy, fairness and accountability.”
The committee proposed taking steps including encouraging high-ranking editors to write a regular column dealing with the internal workings of the Times -- this is in addition to the fairly new public editor’s column. Other suggestions include using the Internet to provide documents used for stories and transcripts of interviews, and further curtailing the use of anonymous sources. It saw no point in boycotting background briefings.
Recommendation #4 reads: “Consider creating a Times blog that promotes interaction with readers.”
As for accessibility: “The Times makes it harder than any other major American newspaper for readers to reach a responsible human being,” the committee’s 16-page report said. It also noted that the paper printed 3,200 corrections last year.
The committee was made up of 11 editors, 6 reporters, a copy editor and a photographer.
The committee also recommended that the paper “increase our coverage of religion in America” and “cover the country in a fuller way,” with more reporting from rural areas and of a broader array of cultural and lifestyle issues. The report will be available today on the Times company’s Web site, www.nytco.com.
The “credibiity” committee also declared that The Times should respond to its critics, nothing “there are those who love to hate The Times.” The report urged The Times to explain itself “actively and earnestly” to critics and to readers often confused when charges go unanswered. “We strongly believe it is no longer sufficient to argue reflexively that our work speaks for itself,” the report stated. “In today’s media environment, such a minimal response damages our credibility,” it added.
The Times this morning quoted early reaction to the report from Orville Schell, dean of the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, who said The Times had to strike a balance between “smart public relations” and “letting your work speak for itself ....
“I would be loath to see a paper like The Times begin to spin its image too ardently through public relations techniques,” he said. “But I do firmly believe that the paper has to defend itself.”
NYTIMES.COM TO OFFER SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE
NYTimes.com to Offer Subscription Service
By Timothy Williams
The New York Times
May 17, 2005
www.nytimes.com/2005/05/17/business/media/17times.html?ex=1118894400&en=46be4207b87babb5&ei=5087
The New York Times announced yesterday that it would offer a new subscription-based service on its Web site, charging users an annual fee to read its Op-Ed and news columnists, as the newspaper seeks ways to capitalize on the site’s popularity.
Most material on the Web site, NYTimes.com, will remain free to users, The Times said, but columnists from The Times and The International Herald Tribune will be available only to users who sign up for TimesSelect, which will cost $49.95 a year. The service will also include access to The Times’s online archives, as well as other features.
The service, which is scheduled to start in September, will be provided free to home-delivery subscribers of the newspaper.
A decision by The Times about charging users for portions of its Web site had been expected for months in the media industry. While some efforts by other newspapers to charge for content online have worked, others have been withdrawn, including most recently one by The Los Angeles Times, which decided last week to stop charging users a fee for its online entertainment listings, reviews and criticism.
Though advertising on Web sites accounts for only 2 to 3 percent of the revenues of most newspapers, it is the fastest-growing source of revenue. Still, many newspaper Web sites fear that charging money for Internet content may send readers to free sites, with advertisers following close behind.
The New York Times’s decision to charge a fee came after about a year of study, said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the Times Company and publisher of the newspaper.
Mr. Sulzberger said that while some Internet users accustomed to free content might not be willing to pay, many others would be attracted by the online package of columnists, archives and other material.
“The advertising growth on the Web has been just spectacular the last few years,” he said. “But like any business, it’s going to mature over time, and when that happens, it will flatten and then you’ll get into the normal cycles just like we do it on print. And at that point you’re really going to need to have another revenue model.”
He added, “This is going to help sustain the quality of the information that we make available.”
Alexia S. Quadrani, a senior managing director at Bear, Stearns who follows the publishing and advertising industries, said The Times’s plan made sense as a business model.
“All newspapers are looking for new advertising revenue and The New York Times realizes they have high-quality content and are looking at other ways to capitalize on it,” she said. “The key is to that you want to maximize the dollars you get on the Internet without alienating the people.”
In April, The Times’s Web site had 1.7 million unique daily visitors. Its daily newspaper circulation in March 2005, the most recent month available, was 1,136,433.
The Times already charges for some content, including its crossword puzzle, news alerts and online archive. Articles are free for seven days after publication; a fee is charged once they are archived.
TimesSelect will also provide subscribers access to TimesPast, the paper’s archives; exclusive multimedia, including audio and photo essays and video; TimesFile, a tool that will help users organize articles; and Ahead of The Times, which will allow subscribers to take an early look at articles that will appear in The New York Times Magazine, and the newspaper’s Travel, Sunday Arts and Real Estate sections.
Martha Goldstein, a spokeswoman for The Los Angeles Times, said the paper still might charge for certain portions of its site.
Caroline Little, publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, the online media subsidiary of the Washington Post Company, said a fee is “something we’re looking at very carefully,” but added, “there haven’t really been a lot of successful ventures.”
The Wall Street Journal, which is the only national paper to charge for all of its online content, requires a $79 annual fee - $39 a year to those who have a newspaper subscription.
Todd Larsen, president of consumer electronic publishing at Dow Jones & Company, which publishes The Wall Street Journal, said he believed that his paper’s approach could be sustainable for a general-interest newspaper like The Times.
“We’re happy to see The New York Times acknowledging the importance of subscription-based revenue that we have long seen as a key element,” he said.
John Tierney, an Op-Ed columnist in The Times, said he had mixed feelings about the change.
“The capitalist in me applauds any effort to make money from these columns,” he said. “The columnist in me would rather not lose any readers.”
Clyde Haberman, a columnist for The Metro Section, said that he thought the experiment would work, but “I hope that if it does fail, they don’t decide the reason was us.”
WSJ TURNS TABLOID
WSJ turns tabloid
By Jason Deans
The Guardian
May 9, 2005
media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,1479726,00.html
The Wall Street Journal Europe is following in the footsteps of the Independent and the Times, switching from broadsheet to tabloid format from October.
WSJ Europe and its Asian counterpart will both change to tabloid from October 17 in a move that will also see the two titles more closely aligned with WSJ.com.
The switch will allow the papers to offer more pages of colour advertising, including colour ads on the front page for the first time.
Dow Jones, the publisher of the WSJ, is also promising more regionally specific content, more stories in the European and Asian editions and fewer pieces that run over from one page to another.
The company said it expected the tabloid move, and related cost reductions, to produce a saving around £9m a year from 2006.
As part of the tabloid switch, a number of WSJ news posts at its European HQ in Brussels and Asian base in Hong Kong will be relocated to the US, where the paper is expanding its staff in preparation for the launch of a weekend edition in September.
Among journalists moving to the US will be the WSJ Europe editor and associate publisher, Frederick Kempe, who will return to New York on August 1 to become assistant managing editor, international.
The managing editor of the WSJ Europe, Raju Narisetti, will replace Kempe as editor.
WSJ Europe has a circulation of just over 86,000, while the Asian edition of the title sells nearly 81,000 daily.
* Britain’s Middle East minister, Kim Howells, issues a carefully worded “neutral” statement calling for a resolution of the dispute over the decision to boycott Israeli universities. (This is the first time the British government has made a public statement on the issue.)
* AUT special council meeting to be held on May 26 - could overturn the boycott
[This is an update to the dispatch titled Al-Quds University in east Jerusalem criticizes UK academic boycott of Israel (April 27, 2005).
Many of the items were collated over the last few weeks but I didn’t have time to send them until now. The dispatch also includes fresh developments from yesterday.]
CONTENTS
1. Resistance to the Boycott Broadens
2. “British middle east minister calls for resolution of AUT boycott” (Ha’aretz, May 18, 2005)
3. “The academic ban - Nazi connection” (Jerusalem Post, May 1, 2005)
4. “British AUT getting ‘down wiv the kidz’” (by Julie Burchill, Ha’aretz, May 1, 2005)
5. “Britain’s professors against peace” (by Alan Dershowitz, Jerusalem Post, April 27, 2005)
6. “Please include me!” (Letter from Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi to Sally Hunt, General Secretary of the AUT)
7. “Israel to upgrade West Bank college after UK boycott” (Financial Times, May 3, 2005)
[* Please Note that all the above mentioned writers – Julie Burchill, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, and Oxford academic Emanuele Ottolenghi – are long-time subscribers to this email list.]
[All notes by Tom Gross]
OPPOSITION TO THE BOYCOTT BROADENS
Since the British academic boycott of Bar Ilan and Haifa Universities was announced on April 22, 2005 by the AUT (the Association of University Teachers union, representing over 48,700 UK higher education professionals), opposition to it has grown among academics and others, Jews and non-Jews, in the UK, US, Israel and elsewhere.
A special “emergency” council meeting of the AUT has now been called for May 26, next week, where a debate will take place on the boycott. This follows the collection of the requisite 25 signatures by AUT local association members who submitted a motion calling for the repeal of the boycott. The motion was headed by John Pike of the Open University.
NAZI LINKS
As mentioned in the previous dispatch, Sue Blackwell, of Birmingham University in England, was one of the leaders of the boycott campaign. She attended the vote to call for a boycott in a Palestinian flag trouser suit. Since the boycott decision, she has come under increased scrutiny. Her website contains a picture of a wreath laid for the anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie as well as links to a Nazi website which is detailed in the Jerusalem Post article below.
Her website is also under a British parliamentary committee investigation for a previous link to a website blaming the Jews for the 9/11 attacks.
ACADEMICS AGAINST THE BOYCOTT: “A BADGE OF HONOUR”
Anger at the boycott has spread to academics that are not part of the AUT and are not affected by the boycott. Attached below is one example of many – by Emanuele Ottolenghi, a subscriber to this email list at Oxford University, who has asked to be put on the boycott list.
Michael Baum, one of the world’s leading oncologists, has also written a letter to Sally Hunt, the General Secretary of the AUT, asking to be added to the black list: “As someone who co-operates with the University in Haifa, I would consider this a badge of honour,” he says.
The New York Academy of Sciences has sent a letter to the AUT in which they say that “by selecting individuals and universities for boycott, is a very clear reminder of ‘McCarthy-like’ tactics of accusation. We call upon the AUT to take immediate steps to rescind their regressive vote and join forward-looking academics the world over in voting for cooperation and not boycott.”
ACADEMICS FOR THE BOYCOTT: STOPPING THOSE ISRAELI “CHILD MURDERERS”
Hilary and Steven Rose (both of whom are part of a small band of extremist Jewish academics who have made a specialty out of campaigning against fellow Jews) and who brought the original boycott proposal in April 2002, continue to be vocal in their support. In an article in the Times (of London) Higher Education Supplement on May 13, 2005, they argued that the AUT boycott is part of a tradition of non-violent protest. Among their many false claims they wrote: “The Israeli Government... sanctions murders and the shooting of civilians, not least children, with impunity.”
ILAN PAPPE: ON RECORD AS A FABRICATOR
Dr Ilan Pappe, a political science lecturer from Haifa University who urged the AUT to boycott his own university and himself, continues to receive wide coverage. There have been a number of articles delving into Pappe’s history, especially his defense of Teddy Katz a graduate whose MA thesis was rejected.
Fania Oz-Salzberger, a senior lecturer in the School of History and the Faculty of Law at the University of Haifa wrote an editorial piece in the Wall Street Journal on May 8, 2005, saying that the decision to boycott Haifa University was based on a “libel”. The Jerusalem Post also questioned Dr Pappe’s academic integrity when he lied to the newspaper over the name of a conference to be held on Haifa University Campus. He claimed the conference was titled: “The Arabs as a Demographic Problem in Israel.” Whilst it is in fact: “The Demographic Problem and Israel’s Demographic Policy.”
ONLINE PETITIONS
There have also been a number of petitions on the internet against the boycott. One of them calls the boycott “counterproductive, racist, and bigoted,” saying it “singles out the only Jewish state in the world for punishment, yet ignores the numerous despotic, oppressive, tyrannical, fundamentalist, and repressive regimes in the world.”
Organizations such as StandWithUs (of California), Academics for Israel, Scholars for Peace MediaActionGroup (of Canada) and a co-ordinating group set up in the UK, as well as many other organizations and individuals, had by the end of last week received nearly 23,000 signatures.
PA UNIVERSITIES CONTINUE TO PROMOTE TERRORISM AND HATRED
The boycott against Haifa and Bar Ilan Universities persists whilst Palestinian universities continue to spew anti-Israel hatred on campuses. In just one example Hamas (who made significant gains in the local elections last week), and which intends to run candidates in the upcoming PA general election this summer, has won control of the student councils at Hebron University and the Polytechnic University of Hebron by significant margins.
A leaflet distributed by the Islamic Bloc, Hamas’ student wing on the Hebron University campus, called for students to become shahid “martyrs” (terrorists who are killed in homicide attacks against Israeli civilians), claiming that becoming one would be an “honor” for students.
No British lecturers have called for a boycott in response to this Hebron University leaflet, or for example to the exhibition glorifying bus bombings of Israeli civilians held on the Nablus university campus (with the university’s permission).
I attach six articles below, with summaries first. For space reasons, three of the articles (“British middle east minister calls for resolution,” “Israel to upgrade” and “Please include me”) are in the summary section only.
-- Tom Gross (with thanks to Ben Green for his help in preparing this dispatch)
SUMMARIES
BRITISH MIDDLE EAST MINISTER CALLS FOR RESOLUTION OF AUT BOYCOTT
“British middle east minister calls for resolution of AUT boycott” (Ha’aretz, May 17, 2005)
Britain’s middle east minister, Kim Howells, on Tuesday called for a resolution of the dispute over the Association of University Teacher’s decision to boycott Haifa and Bar-Ilan universities, The Guardian reported.
“I welcome the fact that the Association of University Teachers is to reconsider, on 26 May, its decision to boycott Bar Ilan and Haifa universities,” said Howells in a carefully worded statement. “I hope that the AUT will ensure the issue is fully-debated and will invite the two universities to express their views.”
... The AUT has also been told its members may face prosecution for breaking race relation laws should they carry out the boycott, and one of the universities is threatening legal action.
Howells’ comments mark the first time the British government has made a public statement on the issue.
“The British government fully supports academic freedom and appreciates the independence of the AUT,” said Howells. “But as a friend of both Israel and the Palestinians, we believe that we can best encourage both sides to take the steps needed for progress through close engagement to achieve a peaceful resolution.”
... Sue Blackwell, the Birmingham academic who has championed the boycott within the AUT, accused Howells of being “naive” in his comments. She rejected the appeal to have representatives from the two universities present next week, saying: “If we’re proposing a motion to boycott a British university we wouldn’t invite the management to come and put their side to us. We’d listen to what the trade unionists have to say.
“Bar Ilan asked to come and they were told quite rightly that we do not allow external people to come and speak and that is quite right and proper.”
THE ACADEMIC BAN – NAZI CONNECTION
“The academic ban - Nazi connection” (By Yaakov Lappin, Jerusalem Post, May 1, 2005)
The Web site of Sue Blackwell, the Birmingham lecturer who presented motions calling for boycotts of Israeli universities, contains a recommended link to a Web site owned by an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi activist…
Blackwell, who was described by [liberal Guardian and Observer] columnist David Aaronovitch as a “former Christian fundamentalist,” has said on her Web page that “I do not include links to sites which promote either racism or terrorism. This has always been my policy and applies to all my 200+ Web pages, not just this one.”
BRITISH AUT GETTING ‘DOWN WIV THE KIDZ’
“British AUT getting ‘down wiv the kidz’” (By Julie Burchill, Ha’aretz, May 1, 2005)
... Britain IS currently playing host to the biggest ever annual number of violent anti-Semitic attacks, both on people and on property, since the 1930s. Who can blame the teachers, so conscious of their uncoolness, for wanting to get ‘down wiv the kidz’? They’re too respectable to daub swastikas on a synagogue - but it sure feels good to band together and bully them Israeli academics!
... I’ve always loved being English - but more and more these days, living through this latest, almost post-modern plague of anti-Semitism with a ‘caring’ face, I wish it was a club that I could resign from, as opposed to a flag I carry in my blood. Trust me, with all your trials and tribulations, you lot don’t know how lucky you are. Because you will never, ever be ashamed of and embarrassed by your country the way I am increasingly ashamed of and embarrassed by mine.
[TG adds: Julie Burchill is a well-known, non-Jewish, English newspaper commentator, as well as being a longtime subscriber to this email list, and more recently has been writing a column for Ha’aretz in Tel Aviv.]
BRITAIN’S PROFESSORS AGAINST PEACE
“Britain’s professors against peace” (By Prof. Alan Dershowitz, The Jerusalem Post, April 27, 2005)
The British Association of University Teachers has now created a blacklist against Jewish Israeli academics – really a blue-and-white list – reminiscent of the worst abuses of McCarthyism. And just as McCarthyism was a barrier to peace between the US and the Soviet Union – by contributing to a dangerous atmosphere in which each side vilified and threatened the other – so too does the British lecturers’ boycott endanger the progress now being made toward peace between the Israelis and Palestinians…
British university teachers will collectively punish Israeli academics in a manner that leading Palestinian academics do not support. They’ve become more Palestinian than the Palestinians, and at precisely the time when Israel is taking more risks and making more sacrifices for peace than it has since Camp David in 2000…
It’s a good thing Israel has only to make peace with its Palestinian neighbors and not European university professors…
PLEASE INCLUDE ME!
To: Sally Hunt, General Secretary,
The Association of University Teachers,
Dear Sally Hunt,
Regarding the AUT recent decision to boycott Haifa University and Bar Ilan University in Israel, I am shocked to learn that, in addition to a call for boycott, the AUT is ready to offer a waiver to scholars on condition that they publicly state their willingness to conform to the political orthodoxy espoused by the academics who sponsored your motion.
Oaths of political loyalty do not belong to academia. They belong to illiberal minds and repressive regimes. Based on this, the AUT’s definition of academic freedom is the freedom to agree with its views only. Given the circumstances, I wish to express in no uncertain terms my unconditional and undivided solidarity with both universities and their faculties. I know many people, both at Haifa University and at Bar Ilan University, of different political persuasion and from different walks of life. The diversity of those faculties reflects the authentic spirit of academia. The AUT invitation to boycott them betrays that spirit because it advocates a uniformity of views, under pain of boycott.
In solidarity with my colleagues and as a symbolic gesture to defend the spirit of a free academia, I wish to be added to the boycott blacklist. Please include me. I hope that other colleagues of all political persuasions will join me.
Sincerely,
Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi
The Middle East Centre
St Antony’s College
Oxford University.
ISRAEL TO UPGRADE WEST BANK COLLEGE AFTER UK BOYCOTT
Israel to upgrade West Bank College after UK boycott
By Harvey Morris
Financial Times
May 3, 2005
news.ft.com/cms/s/30432a44-bb73-11d9-911a-00000e2511c8.html
The Israeli government yesterday voted to confer university status on a college in the occupied West Bank that is a target of a controversial UK academic boycott of Israel.
The decision to upgrade the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel, one of the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank, followed a vote last month by UK university teachers to sever links with Israel’s Haifa and Bar Ilan universities.
A motion adopted by the Association of University Teachers at its annual conference said Bar Ilan was “directly involved with the occupation of Palestinian territories” through its supervision of degree courses at the Ariel college.
Ariel Sharon, prime minister, told the cabinet yesterday that conferring university status on the 7,000-student college was in line with the government policy of strengthening the settlement blocs.
The upgrading of the college, which includes a number of Palestinian students, had been expected for some time. The timing of the decision, however, appeared to be a response to the UK boycott. It also coincided with renewed international attention on Israel’s settlement plans in the West Bank as it prepares to evacuate settlers from Gaza.
THE ACADEMIC BAN – NAZI CONNECTION
The academic ban - Nazi connection
By Yaakov Lappin
The Jerusalem Post
May 1, 2005
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1114913918708
The Web site of Sue Blackwell, the Birmingham lecturer who presented motions calling for boycotts of Israeli universities, contains a recommended link to a Web site owned by an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi activist. Wendy Campbell, who owns the MarWen Media Web site, has promoted Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories discussing “unrivaled Jewish power,” and maintains an additional Web site entitled “Exposing Israeli Apartheid,” which is also linked by Blackwell.
MarWen Media, which is linked directly from Blackwell’s Web site, advocates the views of Kevin Macdonald, an anti-Semitic pro-Nazi author, who has claimed Jews are responsible for a “breeding program” to conquer other “races.”
Under the heading “Sue Blackwell’s links on Israel and Palestine,” Blackwell provides a link to the MarWen site, along with the following description: “MarWen Media offers the latest in groundbreaking documentaries, breaking through barriers and taboos that mainstream media – and even most alternative media do not venture.” Blackwell writes that “the documentaries, mostly about Israel, Zionism, and Palestine, are by Wendy Campbell; see her other site, Exposing Israeli Apartheid.”
Combining anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial and vilification of Israel, Campbell writes: “It is no accident that Israeli ‘security’ is now the centerpiece of US foreign policy. How are the highly placed “friends of Israel” able to bamboozle so much of the world?”
She peddles Holocaust denial, saying, “It’s a staggering fact that in numerous ‘free, Western democracies’ (such as Germany, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and others) it’s a crime to question the official Jewish death toll figures or the gas chamber story in the events now called The Holocaust. Penalties include fines and actual imprisonment! Holocaust heretic Ernst Zundel was deported from the US to Canada where he spent two years in solitary confinement. Now he sits in a German prison. Who’s next?”
MarWen Media offers a videotaped interview with Kevin MacDonald, accompanied by the following description: “Prof. Kevin MacDonald is the author of three groundbreaking books on Judaism, the most recent being The Culture of Critique. In it, MacDonald concludes that Jewish intellectual movements including Freudian psychology, Marxism (including other radical, Leftist politics), the Frankfurt School of Social Research, the New York intellectuals and others, including right-wing NeoConservatism, have all been designed to advance specifically Jewish interests – often at the expense of non-Jewish interests. MacDonald’s incisive analyses offer an alternative view of western history and has the potential to change the course of major events still unfolding.”
MacDonald is a pseudo-intellectual white supremacist,who claims that Jews have been practicing a “breeding” program “masked” as a Jewish religious code, in a sinister bid to subjugate the world, and holds that Jews are responsible for an impending “race war” in the US.
Blackwell, who was described by columnist David Aaronovitch as a “former Christian fundamentalist,” has said on her Web page that “I do not include links to sites which promote either racism or terrorism. This has always been my policy and applies to all my 200+ Web pages, not just this one.”
Her Web site is reported to be under a House of Commons Committee investigation for a previous link to a Web site blaming Jews for the 9/11 attacks.
Ronnie Fraser, chairman of the Academic Friends of Israel group, told The Jerusalem Post that he was “shocked but not surprised.”
“Sue Blackwell denies being an anti-Semite, but her denial of being anti-Semitic cannot be taken seriously in light of the links she has put on her personal Web site,” said Fraser.
“With this revelation, I call upon the executive of the AUT to take a stand and bring the boycott motions to an end,” he added.
BRITISH AUT GETTING ‘DOWN WIV THE KIDZ’
British AUT getting ‘down wiv the kidz’
By Julie Burchill
Ha’aretz
May 1, 2005
www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=570880&contrassID=2&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0
Prejudice is one of those things - like white shoes or Germans - for which there are very few excuses made. If someone is stingy (stinginess being the halitosis of the soul, as I always say) there’s always some do-gooding bystander who’ll stand up for them and say ‘Oh, but they’re just scared of being poor/they used to be poor!’
If someone’s a child abuser, even, some jerk will pop up and pipe ‘Ooo, it’s not their fault - it probably happened to them, too, when they were children! The abused abuse!’ Which is patently untrue to anyone with even the flimsiest grasp on mathematics in general and fractions in particular; around three quarters of child abuse victims are girls, but three quarters of child abusers aren’t women, are they? D’oh!
But you won’t find many people trying to explain why a person is prejudiced. ‘Oh, they’re just ignorant!’ is the best you’ll get. And it may well be true. Which is why the sight of ‘clever’ people showing prejudice seems singularly grotesque. What’s THEIR excuse?
I’m asking this right now because a couple of weeks ago, on April 22nd, Britain’s Association of University Teachers - an organization representing over 48,000 professional swots - voted to ban all contact with two Israeli universities, and asked its executive committee to consider a boycott against a third, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Israel was accused of being ‘a colonial apartheid state’ worse than South Africa, a ‘regime’ worthy of ‘removal’, and its universities of repressing academic freedom. Needless to say, this show of spite received rapturous applause; well, Britain IS currently playing host to the biggest ever annual number of violent anti-Semitic attacks, both on people and on property, since the 1930s. Who can blame the teachers, so conscious of their uncoolness, for wanting to get ‘down wiv the kidz’? They’re too respectable to daub swastikas on a synagogue - but it sure feels good to band together and bully them Israeli academics!
Just imagine; for once, the swots aren’t having their books ripped up in front of them by a gang of thugs - THEY’RE the ones doing the ripping. But if we learnt nothing else from the Shoah, you’d think we’d have learned that the seductive power of herd-mentality cruelty can suck in the most unlikely people; it sucked in the Germans, for instance, almost all of them, a nation thought by many to be the most cultured and civilized in Northern Europe. And now, sixty years after the rough-necked Brits showed the cultured Krauts the true meaning of civilization, we are going through our own dark night of the anti-Semitic soul.
In one way this turn of events is as unexpected as it is cruel - after all, in this country it tends to be academics who react to anything from mild censorship to book-burning with ‘That’s how Hitler started!’ That they are now doing something Hitler would thoroughly approve of, and did - barring contact with Jews - seems to have escaped them. But in another way, it makes logical, horrible sense. It’s not so long since English academia saw nothing wrong with having Jewish quotients as a matter of course, lest the ‘best’ universities be over-run by those unnaturally smart Heebs. Far from flying in the face of English academic freedom, maybe the latest haters are simply reverting to type.
I’ve always loved being English - but more and more these days, living through this latest, almost post-modern plague of anti-Semitism with a ‘caring’ face, I wish it was a club that I could resign from, as opposed to a flag I carry in my blood. Trust me, with all your trials and tribulations, you lot don’t know how lucky you are. Because you will never, ever be ashamed of and embarrassed by your country the way I am increasingly ashamed of and embarrassed by mine.
You’re too damn good-looking for your own good, you’re humourless and you don’t know the meaning of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ - but you’re not bullies, and you never will be. It makes me sad to think that just a few years ago, I thought that last thing about my people, too. I don’t anymore.
(Julie Burchill is a columnist for The Times of London.)
BRITAIN’S PROFESSORS AGAINST PEACE
Britain’s professors against peace
By Alan M. Dershowitz
The Jerusalem Post
April 27, 2005
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1114568597620&p=1006953079865
The British Association of University Teachers has now created a blacklist against Jewish Israeli academics – really a blue-and-white list – reminiscent of the worst abuses of McCarthyism. And just as McCarthyism was a barrier to peace between the US and the Soviet Union – by contributing to a dangerous atmosphere in which each side vilified and threatened the other – so too does the British lecturers’ boycott endanger the progress now being made toward peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.
It is not surprising therefore that even the Palestinian Al-Quds University in Jerusalem headed by Sari Nusseibeh released a statement against the British association blacklist, saying, “We are informed by the principle that we should seek to win Israelis over to our side, not to win against them... Therefore, informed by this national duty, we believe it is in our interest to build bridges, not walls; to reach out to the Israeli academic institutions, not to impose another restriction or dialogue-block on ourselves.”
But instead of heeding the moderate words of those they claim to support, British university teachers will collectively punish Israeli academics in a manner that leading Palestinian academics do not support. They’ve become more Palestinian than the Palestinians, and at precisely the time when Israel is taking more risks and making more sacrifices for peace than it has since Camp David in 2000.
A spokesman for the Union of Jewish Students got it exactly right when he said, “Things in the Middle East are moving forward while in the UK they are moving backwards. These boycotts have struck a blow at talks between Israel and Palestine.”
As Israel’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s Zvi Hefetz noted, “The last time that Jews were boycotted in universities was in 1930s Germany.”
Not only is the academic blacklist harmful and wrong; it may also be illegal. According to Jocelyn Prudence, head of the Universities and Colleges Employers Association, “This would appear to run contrary to contractual law, race and religious discrimination law, and academic freedom obligations...”
It’s a good thing Israel has only to make peace with its Palestinian neighbors and not European university professors.
The terrible message being sent by this anti-Semitic action – anti-Semitic because it will apply only to Israeli Jews, not Arabs or Christians – is that the Jewish state will not be rewarded for taking steps toward peace and ending the occupation. Instead it will be punished.
This isn’t the first time the AUT has targeted Israeli professors and universities. Back in May 2003, in response to Israeli re-occupation of several West Bank towns, the union considered but voted down a proposed boycott of Israeli academics. The ban would have directed members to “sever academic links with Israeli institutions and funding agencies, boycott conferences in Israel, and refuse to participate as referees in hiring or promotions by the country’s universities.”
The resolution failed by a ratio of two to one, because the members feared that a boycott would “harm progressive Israeli academics campaigning against the Sharon government.”
Why did the boycott resolution succeed this time around? What’s changed in the last two years? From the Palestinian perspective, the political and social climate is objectively improved over what it was two years ago. In just this year, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have signed a cease-fire agreement, Israel agreed to release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, and Israel is about to withdraw from all of the Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements.
The “second intifada” has effectively ended, and Palestinians are preparing to police their own streets after the Israelis disengage. By any reasonable standard, things are better for Palestinians today than they were in 2003.
Instead of applauding Israel for taking courageous actions toward ending the occupation, British lecturers choose to attack Israel by blacklisting the nation’s Jewish academics. From now on, professors in the UK are not only permitted, indeed, they’re instructed, to discriminate based on nationality and ethnicity. As The Jerusalem Post wondered, “Why is it that just as the Palestinians are about to receive the greatest unilateral concession ever from Israel they urge a boycott? It is hardly the manifestation of goodwill that would encourage Israelis to support yet greater existential risks.”
The Guardian concurred, pointing out a troubling double standard: “Singling out Israel raises other questions. AUT members are not proposing, after all, to boycott universities in North Korea, Zimbabwe or Sudan, where the government has been accused of perpetrating genocide against its own people.”
“I used to think that it didn’t matter what we did,” an Israeli moderate once told me. “They will hate us just as much even if we give back the whole West Bank as well as Gaza.”
He paused and then continued: “I was wrong. It does make a difference. They hate us even more when we give more, because it confuses their image of us as totally evil. And our enemies see it as a sign of our weakness and their strength.”
My friend was right. This academic boycott makes clear that when Israel does precisely what its detractors demand that it do, even then – especially then! – extreme left-wing academics will only despise Israel more for putting the lie to the professors’ hate-filled views.
By targeting Israeli Jews, Britain’s “Professors Against Peace” – that’s what they really should be called – have displayed bigotry against Jews, done violence to academic freedom and anti-discrimination laws, and are fast closing a window of opportunity for reconciliation in the Middle East.
(The writer is a professor of law at Harvard. His latest book is Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights.)
CONTENTS
1. “IDF ‘recruits’ Harley-Davidsons” (Ynetnews, May 10, 2005)
2. “50,000 Germans to sing for Israel” (Jerusalem Post, May 11, 2005)
3. “Jews angry over memorial plan for death camp tooth” (Sunday Telegraph, May 13, 2005)
4. “Vandal scrawls swastika on Berlin Holocaust memorial on its first day open” (AP, May 13, 2005)
[Note by Tom Gross]
In line with my aim to send “lighter” items on this list, when possible, I attach two such articles, on (1) the purchase by the Israeli army of 60 new Harley-Davidson Sportster motorcycles which will be reserved for use by “exemplary soldiers”; and (2) 50,000 Germans serenaded Israel with the Stevie Wonder version of “Happy Birthday” last Thursday, Israel’s Independence day.
Leo Sucharewicz, who founded the “I Like Israel” movement two years ago, organized a mass singing celebration of Israel’s Independence in 20 cities throughout Germany, involving Jews and non-Jews alike.
SHOWING THE MEDIA THAT “THEY FAILED”
“We wanted to show the media that all their nasty anti-Israel headlines have failed, and that if you want to do something to support Israel, you don’t have to be afraid,” said Sucharewicz, a communication psychologist and political scientist who lives in Munich, and is Jewish and used to live in Israel.
His group has been in touch with Turkish and Kurdish groups in Germany, as well as a group called Arabs and Muslims for Israel, according to a Jerusalem Post report.
Ironically, he said, the main obstacles have been “cowardly Jews afraid of being identified with Israel” and Israeli bureaucracy. “We asked El Al to send brochures, and only after three months of negotiations did they say they’d send a measly 200 brochures,” Sucharewicz complained. “The Israeli Embassy sent only 30 brochures per city. It’s ridiculous.”
A TOOTH FROM BELZEC
I also attach two much more serious items connected to the new Berlin “Holocaust Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.”
The Sunday Telegraph reported yesterday that the memorial has become embroiled in an emotional dispute just two days after its opening over a plan to fix the tooth of a murdered Jew into a concrete pillar at the site.
Germany’s Jewish community has strongly objected to the planting of the tooth, found at Belzec concentration camp in Poland, in one of the concrete pillars, along with a yellow Star of David. They say that burying body parts anywhere other than a Jewish cemetery was “blasphemous” and contravened Jewish law.
In a separate development, anti-Semitic vandals have – predictably – scrawled a swastika on the Berlin Holocaust memorial only one day after its opening last week.
NEWS OUTLETS CONTINUE TO BE INSPIRED BY THIS LIST
Items sent out on this email list continue to be appear later in other news publications.
For example, page 1 of today’s Financial Times has a story about Al-Jazeera’s plans to launch an English language channel next year, headlined “Al-Jazeera to go English.” That news was carried on this email list in the dispatch Al-Jazeera to be launched in English in America on March 23, 2005 (which was based on original research carried out by this list in the Arab media).
Another example among many is The Jerusalem Post story of May 9, 2005, titled “Corrie compared to Anne Frank” detailing comparisons of Rachel Corrie with Anne Frank and with Primo Levi. The Jerusalem Post story is almost a direct copy, word for word, of the introductory note and original research in the dispatch of May 5, 2005 titled “Theater critics compare Rachel Corrie to Primo Levi and Anne Frank,” even including my item about David Irving nominating Rachel Corrie for the Nobel Peace Prize on his website.
There are several Financial Times and Jerusalem Post journalists and editors on this list.
-- Tom Gross
IDF ‘RECRUITS’ HARLEY-DAVIDSONS
IDF ‘recruits’ Harley-Davidsons
Military Police purchase 60 legendary motorcycles using American aid money
By Hanan Greenberg
Ynetnews
May 10, 2005
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3083694,00.html
The IDF’s Military Police have purchased 60 new Harley-Davidson motorcycles using American aid money. The legendary motorcycles will gradually replace older models over the next two years.
The first six Harleys were showcased Monday at a prize-giving ceremony for exemplary soldiers at an IDF instruction base north of Tel Aviv.
Military Police Head Brigadier General Miki Barel said his unit plans to replace all its motorcycles over the next two years with new Harley-Davidson Sportsters, at a cose of USD 10,000 a piece.
“We are indeed talking about a prestigious bike, but in practice it did not cost that much, because it was partly paid for with money from the U.S.,” Barel told Ynet. “This is no doubt a step up from the motorcycles we have in the corps today.”
Older is better?
However, despite the enthusiasm, Corporal Moran Benisti remains loyal to her old Honda, despite having an opportunity to take the new Harley out for a test drive.
“It’s obvious this motorcycle is better,” she said. “But I still prefer the old Honda...it’s the right size for a small person like myself. It’s more comfortable than the new motorcycle, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.”
Benisti is one of 45 IDF soldiers enlisted in the army’s traffic police unit who use motorcycles for both law enforcement and deterrence.
The IDF is expected to receive more motorcycles over the next few months to gradually replace the outdated Hondas and BMWs
50,000 GERMANS TO SING FOR ISRAEL
50,000 Germans to sing for Israel
By Sam Ser
The Jerusalem Post
May 11, 2005
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1115705340470
Fifty thousand Germans have never before serenaded Israel with the Stevie Wonder version of “Happy Birthday” – but they will on Thursday.
Leo Sucharewicz, who founded the “I Like Israel” movement two years ago, has organized a mass celebration of Israel’s Independence Day in 20 cities throughout Germany, and in 10 more around the world. There will be stages set up in public parks, with Israeli songs, dancing and speeches about Israel.
At each place, Sucharewicz told The Jerusalem Post, 10 people – Jews and non-Jews – will get on the stage and tell the crowd what they like about Israel.
Professional soccer players and local politicians will also take part, with some cities’ ceremonies to be opened by their mayor.
“Why do we do it?” asked Sucharewicz. “To bring legions of people to Israel, to promote Israel as a Jewish country, to stop Israel bashing, to show the media that all their nasty anti-Israel headlines have failed. Also, to show that if you want to do something to support Israel, you don’t have to be afraid.”
A communication psychologist and political scientist who lives in Munich and works on the marketing strategies of the top 50 companies in the country, Sucharewicz spent two years living in Israel in the late 1960s, serving in the Golani Brigade, and his two daughters now live here.
Two years ago, wanting to promote Israel’s hasbara (PR) efforts in Germany, he and a team of Jewish professionals in marketing and project management (together with some volunteers) developed a “strategic concept” with Israel Day ceremonies at its core. Ceremonies were held in three cities in 2003, and have expanded since.
ILI believes there is great potential for a pro-Israel “market” in Germany.
ILI has even been in touch with Turkish and Kurdish groups in Germany, as well as a group there called Arabs and Muslims for Israel, he said.
“I want to see 1 million Germans in the streets [for Israel Day] by 2010,” he said, “and I want to see this go all the way to Kuwait City.”
So far, German authorities have been very cooperative, and ILI has met with little resistance otherwise, Sucharewicz said. “We have gotten the usual e-mails from Muslims,” he said, “and we expect some counterdemonstrations from neo-Nazis – but to hell with them.”
Ironically, he said, the main obstacles have been “hyper-religious or cowardly Jews afraid of being identified with Israel” and an obtuse Israeli bureaucracy.
“We asked El Al to send brochures, and only after three months of negotiations did they say they’d send a measly 200 brochures,” Sucharewicz complained. “The Israeli Embassy sent only 30 brochures per city. It’s ridiculous.”
JEWS ANGRY OVER MEMORIAL PLAN FOR DEATH CAMP TOOTH
Jews angry over memorial plan for death camp tooth
By Kate Connolly in Berlin
Sunday Telegraph
May 13, 2005
Berlin’s new Holocaust memorial was embroiled in an emotional dispute just two days after its opening over a plan to fix the tooth of a murdered Jew into a concrete pillar at the site.
Germany’s Jewish community has said it may be forced to boycott the vast monument if Lea Rosh, who led the 17-year campaign to build the memorial, goes ahead with her proposal. Its leaders have accused her of “blasphemy” and “irreverence”.
In front of a thousand guests at Tuesday’s inauguration ceremony, including Holocaust survivors and rabbis, Mrs Rosh held up a molar which she found during a visit to the Belzec concentration camp in Poland 17 years ago.
It was sticking out of the sand among other teeth from Holocaust victims, she said, adding that it had given her the impetus to start campaigning for the memorial and that she had carried it around with her ever since.
Mrs Rosh, 68, is a television presenter who changed her name to its current form at the age of 18 and is the granddaughter of a Jew. She explained that the tooth would be embedded in one of the concrete pillars, along with a yellow Star of David that Jews were required to wear under the Third Reich. It had been given to her by a Dutch Jewish woman whose mother was killed in a camp.
Mrs Rosh added that the memorial’s architect, Peter Eisenman, had agreed to oversee the task.
“The dead have no grave, but this memorial should stand for one,” she said.
Yesterday leaders of the Jewish community expressed outrage at the gesture. “I am not surprised, but furious,” said Paul Spiegel, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. “I find Lea Rosh’s behaviour impious.”
He said burying body parts anywhere other than a Jewish cemetery was “blasphemous” and contravened Jewish law.
Albert Meyer, the chairman of Berlin’s Jewish community, said he was furious. “If this happens, we Jews have to consider whether or not we can set foot on this site. Mrs Rosh responded by saying she had checked with Jewish scholars before making the announcement.
“My wish is in compliance with Jewish law. I did my research,” she said.
One rabbi, Yitzhak Ehrenberg, did defend her yesterday. He wrote in a statement that while bodies or large body parts had to be buried in a Jewish cemetery, there would be no problem “about burying a tooth in a stone” as long as it was not used for any specific purpose.
But Rabbi Chaim Rozwaski, also from Berlin, disagreed. “If the tooth is buried in a pillar, it is an exhibition piece and therefore it has a use.”
The memorial has been subject to controversy since its conception, with several disputes almost leading to the demise of the project.
The most serious followed the discovery that Degussa, the company providing an anti-graffiti spray, was linked to the makers of Zyklon B, the poison gas used in the concentration camps.
Mr Eisenman also provoked outrage when he made a joke about his New York dentist and fillings which some thought anti-Semitic.
He later apologised, calling the row a “cultural misunderstanding”.
VANDAL SCRAWLS SWASTIKA ON BERLIN HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL ON ITS FIRST DAY OPEN
Vandal scrawls swastika on Berlin Holocaust memorial on its first day open
The Associated Press (as used by Ha’aretz)
May 13, 2005
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/575797.html
Within hours of the opening of Germany’s new national Holocaust memorial to the public, a vandal scratched a Nazi swastika into one of the 2,711 gray slabs, a spokesman for the memorial said Friday.
The small swastika was spotted by security guards and quickly removed, though the vandal was not caught, said spokesman Uwe Neumaerker.
“What else can we do?” he said. “There are some security forces and they walk through and if they find something they remove it, but with 19,000 square meters (204,500 square feet) and 2,711 stele, what can we do? You can’t be everywhere at once.”
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was officially inaugurated Tuesday after years of debate and delay.
The underground information center had 2,700 visitors but many more wandered among the haunting field of slabs, and Neumaerker said he could not even speculate who may have defaced the slab.
“There were thousands from all over the world,” he said. “We don’t know who it was or whether it was a political background. It is an open memorial and anybody can go in, if such things happen it’s not good, but what shall we do?”
Designed by U.S. architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial in the former no man’s land of the Berlin Wall is a labyrinth of narrow rising and falling pathways between the upright slabs in the ground.
It took 17 years of wrangling among German politicians over its design and message before it was finally completed.
Ahead of its opening, Eisenman said he recognized the memorial could not please everyone, and that he wouldn’t mind skateboarders, children playing hide and seek or even graffiti on the slabs.
Asked Monday if the project would be demeaned if someone scratched Nazi symbols on it, he was noncommittal. “Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn’t,” Eisenman said. “Maybe it would add to it.”
* Pentagon Spokesman Lawrence DiRita rages :“People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. They are burning American flags. Our forces are in danger...”
[Note by Tom Gross]
Below is another example, albeit an extreme one, of how irresponsible journalism (which so often takes the form of misreporting on America or Israel) can be a contributing factor in innocent people dying and others being threatened with death.
In this case, US troops and civilians have been threatened, and at least 17 Moslems have died in rioting. In past cases, such as when a number of western journalists and news outlets told lies and engaged in incendiary reporting about the incidents in Jenin in April 2002, several Israelis were killed in Israel and abroad as a result in “revenge attacks” for a massacre that never took place, and non-Israeli Jews were also assaulted in France and elsewhere, in part as a consequence of this misreporting.
NEWSWEEK: DOWN THE TOILET
Newsweek’s error last week (in its May 9 issue) was irresponsible in the extreme: The left-leaning news magazine with a wide international readership claimed that a copy of the Koran had been flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay by US interrogators The magazine’s apology yesterday does not even start to account for the damage caused, damage which the magazine’s editors could and should have predicted. (At least Newsweek did make some attempt at apology, however, in contrast to the lack of apology forthcoming after the untruths and inaccuracies that many western publications have so often told about Israel.)
“WE REGRET THAT WE GOT ANY PART OF OUR STORY WRONG...”
“We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst,” Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine’s May 23 issue (which was released yesterday).
Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, Dan Klaidman, added that the apparent error was “terribly unfortunate,” and he offered the magazine’s sympathies to the victims.
IMRAN KAHN, PLAYBOY, SOCIALITE, MOSLEM POLITICIAN
Following Newsweek’s article on May 9, angry protests have raged across the Moslem world from Gaza to Indonesia. The protests seemed to have been sparked after the former Pakistan cricket star Imran Kahn held up a copy of the article at a press conference last week. (Khan is a former playboy on the London social circuit known for his many lovers, who subsequently turned Islamic politician in Pakistan. He was formerly married to Jemima Goldsmith, socialite daughter of the late British-Jewish business tycoon Sir James Goldsmith, and has children by her.)
FROM GAZA TO INDONESIA: CALLS FOR HOLY WAR AGAINST AMERICA
Yesterday a group of Afghan Muslim clerics called for a holy war against the United States if the US military interrogator who reportedly desecrated the Koran is not handed over to them. During the anti-US protests in Afghanistan last week at least 17 people were killed and more than 100 were hurt.
In Gaza, several thousand Palestinians marched through a refugee camp in a protest organized by the Islamic extremist group Hamas. Several hundred Palestinians also marched in the West Bank city of Hebron. Lebanon’s top cleric yesterday called for an international inquiry into Newsweek’s allegations.
I attach below an item today from CNN.
-- Tom Gross
NEWSWEEK BACKS OFF QURAN DESECRATION STORY
Newsweek backs off Quran desecration story
Account blamed for violent riots in Afghanistan
CNN
May 16, 2005
www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/05/15/newsweek.quran
Newsweek magazine backed away Sunday from a report that U.S. interrogators desecrated copies of the Quran while questioning prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay naval base – an account blamed for sparking violent riots in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
At least 15 people were killed and dozens injured last week when thousands of demonstrators marched in Afghanistan and other parts of the Muslim world, officials and eyewitnesses said.
“We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst,” newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine’s May 23 issue, out Sunday.
In an article assessing its coverage, the magazine wrote, “How did Newsweek get its facts wrong? And how did the story feed into serious international unrest?”
The Pentagon said last week it was unable to corroborate any case in which interrogators at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, defiled the Muslim holy book, as Newsweek reported in its May 9 issue.
“Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges, and so will we,” Whitaker said.
Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita blamed Newsweek’s report for the violent protests that broke out in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Muslim countries.
“People are dying. They are burning American flags. Our forces are in danger,” he told CNN.
Newsweek said anger over the story spread after it was cited at a May 6 press conference in Islamabad, Pakistan, by Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricket legend and a critic of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.
In the story, the magazine cited sources as saying investigators looking into abuses at the military prison found interrogators “had placed Qurans on toilets, and in at least one case flushed a holy book down the toilet.”
“Desecrating the Quran is a death-penalty offense” in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, said Peter Bergen, a CNN terrorism analyst.
“There is clearly a lot of anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, less so in Afghanistan, but I think that this will feed into it,” Bergen said.
Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, Dan Klaidman, said the apparent error was “terribly unfortunate,” and he offered the magazine’s sympathies to the victims.
But he said “different forces” were at work that helped spark the riots.
“It’s clear that people seized on the Newsweek report to advance their own agendas, and that that was part of it,” he said.
“But I also think that there’s an enormous amount of pent-up and not-so-pent-up anti-American rage and sentiment in that region.”
“There are a lot of people who think that our war on terror and our war in Iraq is a much wider war against Islam,” he said.
At a Pentagon press conference Thursday, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cited U.S. commanders as saying the protests in Jalalabad, at least, were more about local politics than anti-American sentiment stirred by the Newsweek report.
THE STORY’S ORIGINS
Newsweek said Michael Isikoff, who reported the item with John Barry, became interested in the story after FBI e-mails that revealed an uglier side of life in Guantanamo were released late last year.
“Isikoff knew that military investigators at Southern Command [which runs the Guantanamo prison] were looking into the allegations,” the article said.
“So he called a longtime reliable source, a senior U.S. government official who was knowledgeable about the matter.
“The source told Isikoff that the [investigators’] report would include new details that were not in the FBI e-mails, including mention of flushing the Quran down a toilet.”
Whitaker wrote that before publishing the account the magazine approached two Pentagon officials for comment. One declined and the other challenged a different aspect of the report, Whitaker wrote.
Myers said at the Pentagon briefing Thursday the military was looking into the allegations.
He said investigators had so far been unable to confirm a “toilet incident, except for one case, a log entry, which they still have to confirm, where a detainee was reported by a guard to be ripping pages out of a Quran and putting [them] in the toilet to stop it up as a protest. But not where the U.S. did it.”
On Friday, Newsweek said, DiRita phoned the magazine and said that investigators found no incidents involving Quran desecration.
A day later, Isikoff reached his source again, who said that although he remembered reading investigative reports about desecration of the Quran, including a toilet incident, “he could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the [Southern Command] report.”
DiRita “exploded” when Newsweek informed him that one of the original sources behind the report had partially backed off the story, the magazine said.
“People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said,” DiRita told Newsweek, according to the magazine’s report. “How could he be credible now?”
DiRita confirmed the quote to CNN.
He said investigators have found nothing to support allegations that U.S. troops had desecrated copies of the Quran, but turned up one case he said has now led to stricter procedures at the prison camp.
In that case, a Quran fell to the floor during a routine search, he said. The book was encased in surgical mask, which prisoners at the facility are given to protect the book.
Camp commanders have since established stronger procedures when searching near a Quran, DiRita said – including a rule that allows only Muslim troops, interrogators or chaplains to touch a copy.
But Newsweek said Isikoff has uncovered more allegations of Quran desecration.
One, from an attorney representing some of the detainees, provided some declassified notes indicating 23 detainees had tried to commit suicide in August 2003 when a guard dropped a Quran and stomped on it.
Isikoff found two other references to Qurans being tossed into toilets or latrines, the magazine reported.
U.S. military officials said such claims are standard terrorist tactics.
“If you read the al Qaeda training manual, they are trained to make allegations against the infidels,” Army Col. Brad Blackner told Newsweek.
(CNN’s Barbara Starr contributed to this report.)
* 60 years later, German tennis club says "play not affected" by loss of Jews
* Egyptian refuses to play Israeli rival in table tennis world championship
* World's greatest soccer player, Ronaldo of Brazil and Real Madrid, on his way to Israel
Several recipients of this list expressed keen interest in recent dispatches on sporting matters. This dispatch concerns soccer, basketball, tennis, table tennis (ping-pong), and taekwondo. Some items also update previous dispatches, including:
* World's top soccer coach Jose Mourinho to visit Israel (March 17, 2005)
* Scoring goals against the "Israeli apartheid" myth (March 31, 2005)
* Israeli Arab wins quiz on Zionism (+ soccer update) (April 7, 2005)
CONTENTS
1. "Egyptian loses to Israeli rival" (Ynetnews, May 3, 2005)
2. "Iran's Mehdizadeh avoids Israel test ahead of world taekwondo semi" (Islamic Republic News Agency, April 17, 2005)
3. "No Goal" (The Sun, UK, May 5, 2005)
4. "Tennis club double faults" (The Age, Australia, May 9, 2005)
5. "Mac TA beats Tau for 2nd Euroleague title in 2 years" (Ha'aretz, May 9, 2005)
6. "Arab soccer star to promote gambling" (Ynetnews, April 8, 2005)
7. "Chelsea soccer coach accepts unofficial role as Israeli-Palestinian peace envoy" (AP, April 11, 2005)
8. "Soccer phenomenon Ronaldo on peace mission" (Ynetnews, April 14, 2005)
BERLIN TENNIS CLUB PRINTS PICTURE OF HERMANN GOERING
In the same week that the world commemorated the allied victory in Europe over the Nazis 60 years ago, Germany's snootiest tennis club issued a leaflet with strikingly insensitive language. A new brochure for the Red-White Tennis Club in Berlin (the equivalent of Wimbledon in England) claimed that the "quality of play was not affected" when the Nazi race laws prevented Jews from playing tennis. (The club had had many Jewish members.)
The brochure also included a picture of Hermann Goering visiting the club in the 1930's. Goering was one of the architects of the Holocaust and the founder of the Gestapo, responsible for numerous atrocities. The leaflet, which said that once Jews were expelled, the club enjoyed "golden years," sparked a walk-out from several players at the tournament. (The club has since apologized for the leaflet.)
Also this week, Maccabi Tel Aviv (the most popular Israeli basketball team) retained the European title for the second year in a row – triumphing over, among others, the German team Opel Skyliners.
ISRAELI ATHLETES SNUBBED AGAIN, IN CHINA AND IN SPAIN
Whilst Jews were not allowed to compete in German tennis clubs under Nazi rule, some athletes in the Middle East are continuing the spirit of Hitler's race laws. Ayatollah Ashraf, an Egyptian, refused to play against her Israeli opponent Marina Kravechenko in the 48th World Table Tennis Championships in Shanghai.
This is the second time in the past month that Israeli athletes have been snubbed by Moslem participants in a world sporting championship.
In a Taekwando world semi-final in Madrid, Iranian Mohammad-Reza Mehdizadeh avoided appearing against his Israeli rival. This follows the 2004 Athens Olympics where Arash Miresmaeili, an Iranian Judo two-time world champion, disqualified himself from a judo match against an Israeli opponent. On that occasion the Iranian athlete received a $115,000 cash prize from the Teheran regime, the same amount he would have received had he won a gold medal.
ISRAELI MISSILE TECHNOLOGY PROVES SOCCER BALL DID NOT CROSS LINE
Rivaling the British election for media coverage over the last few days, British newspapers have been obsessed with the crucial European Football (soccer) Champions League semi-final game between Chelsea and Liverpool last week. Following a controversial goal that won the tie for Liverpool, a system based on Israeli missile technology has proved that the ball did not cross the line, meaning that the goal should not have been allowed. The technology creates a virtual pitch through the given camera angle and allows a view of incidents from an unlimited number of positions. All pitch measurements, including all of the markings and the width of the goal, are built into the program, apparently leaving no margin for error.
UPDATES ON ABBAS SUWAN, JOSE MOURINHO AND RONALDO
The Israeli-Arab goal scorer for the Israeli national team against Ireland in a crucial World Cup soccer qualifying game in March has been chosen as the face of the Israeli national lottery. Abbas Suwan and the role of Israeli-Arabs received extensive media coverage around the world following his last minute equalizing goal for Israel.
The leading soccer coach Jose Mourinho (of Portugal), who said he felt "humbled" when he visited Jerusalem's Western Wall at the end of March, has agreed to sponsor two schools so that they can participate in a program that uses soccer to promote peace. He will also act as special envoy for the (Shimon) Peres Center for Peace, which also announced that Ronaldo, arguably the best soccer player in the world, will visit Israel and the Palestinian Authority this month. Ronaldo is a Brazilian striker who currently plays for Real Madrid and is famous for scoring two goals in the World Cup Final of 2002, helping Brazil win the trophy.
I attach eight articles (without summaries, because most of them are short).
-- Tom Gross
EGYPTIAN REFUSES TO PLAY ISRAELI RIVAL IN TABLE TENNIS
Egyptian loses to Israeli rival: After refusing to play against Israeli component, Egyptian Muslim player lost on a technicality at world championship
Ynetnews
May 3, 2005
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3080336,00.html
Ayatollah Ashraf, an Egyptian religious Muslim who routinely shows up for games in a traditional attire, pulled a no-show on her Israeli opponent at the first round ping-pong games of the world championship in Shanghai, China.
Marina Kravechenko the Israeli table tennis player technically won and moved up to the second round of games. However, although luck took the Israeli player up to the next level, it seemed to run out when she lost to Austrian player, Jia Lio in a 5-set game (1-4).
IRANIAN REFUSES TO PLAY ISRAELI IN WORLD TAEKWONDO SEMI; DONATES MEDAL TO JENIN "MARTYRS"
Iran's Mehdizadeh avoids Israel test ahead of world taekwondo semi
Islamic Republic News Agency
April 17, 2005
www.irna.ir/irnewtest/en/news/view/menu-234/0504170462130445.htm
Iran's 62 kg taekwondo player, Mohammad-Reza Mehdizadeh, avoided appearing on tatami against his Israeli rival before the semifinal stage of the 17th world event here Saturday.
Mehdizadeh, who made the decision as a gesture of defending Palestinian people, was eliminated as Ian Goldsmith advanced to the semifinals.
The Iranian donated his 2002 Asian silver medal to Jenin to pay tribute to Palestinian martyrs. Iran has won five medals, one gold, three silvers, and one bronze, in Madrid.
ISRAELI TECHNOLOGY PROVES BALL DID NOT CROSS LINE
No Goal
By Shaun Custis
The Sun (UK)
May 5, 2005
www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2002390000-2005202076,00.html
Liverpool’s winning goal to beat Chelsea did NOT cross the line, computer technology has shown.
Slovakian linesman Roman Slysko ruled Luis Garcia's strike went in on Tuesday as the Kop booked a place in the Champions League final.
The official insisted it was a goal yesterday although Sky's hi-tech image revealed William Gallas cleared the ball in time and the goal should not have stood.
Sky commentator Andy Gray insisted the computer programme, developed from Israeli missile technology, proved Slysko got it wrong.
Gray said: "If the linesman is on the line then the ball would have needed to be a foot or two beyond the post for him to see it. But our computer pictures show the ball isn't and the linesman has taken a flier on it. It wasn't a goal."
But Slysko said: "I believe my decision was correct. My first feeling, which I remain convinced of, is that it was a goal."
GERMAN TENNIS CLUB SAYS NAZI RACE LAWS DID NOT AFFECT LEVEL OF PLAY
Tennis club double faults
By Allan Hall
Age Correspondent, Berlin
The Age (Australia)
May 9, 2005
www.theage.com.au/news/World/Tennis-club-double-faults/2005/05/08/1115491043001.html
Germany's snootiest tennis club has sparked a walk-out from a top tournament after an anniversary brochure called the wartime exit of its Jewish members a "reduction" that didn't affect the quality of play.
The brochure for the Red-White Tennis Club in Berlin - the equivalent of Wimbledon in Britain - also printed a picture of Hermann Goering, Nazi Germany's wartime air force chief who founded the Gestapo secret police, visiting the club in the 1930s.
The article about "the club with a great tradition" stated that due to the Nazi race laws "around half the membership of the so-called Jewish club was reduced, opening the club up to new members. The quality of play was not affected at the premier German tennis club - quite the contrary".
It also went on to say that, following the Jewish expulsions, "golden years" followed for the club and German tennis.
Goering's photo on the VIP stand above the text particularly incensed millionaire Jewish film producer Atze Brauner who was at the club for the first week's Ladies Day tournament. He left with his daughter Alice.
Goering was an architect of the Holocaust that killed six million Jews and was sentenced to die at the postwar Nuremberg war crimes trial. He cheated the gallows by taking cyanide in his cell.
Mr Brauner, who lost many family members in Nazi death camps, said: "This publication is shameful, both the words and picture. Goering was instrumental in the murder of the Jews.
"Is this spirit abroad in the club or is it a case of only one person going off the rails? Either way it is scandalous and unacceptable, particularly at a time when the crimes of the Nazis 60 years after the end of the war are in such focus on TV and in newspapers."
The club is based in Grunewald in Berlin, the pre-war home to many of Berlin's richest Jewish families. Many of their villas were robbed by the SS and seized as the families were either forced to flee or sent to extermination camps in Poland and the Baltic republics.
Dr Andreas Nachama, director of the Topography of Terror exhibition at the site of the old Gestapo HQ in Berlin, said: "Stupid, thoughtless and despicable. A good example that history is still not understood. This is deeply embarrassing for our town."
The club is falling over itself to apologise. Hans-Juergen Jobski, the director, said: "This article is a catastrophe that one simply cannot excuse. It is indescribably stupid."
MACCABI TEL AVIV WINS BASKETBALL EUROLEAGUE AGAIN
Mac TA beats Tau for 2nd Euroleague title in 2 years
By Yoav Borowitz
Ha'aretz
May 9, 2005
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/573782.html
Maccabi Tel Aviv won the Euroleague title for the second consecutive year and the fifth time in the team's history on Sunday, beating Tau Vitoria of Spain by 90 to 78.
For an entire season, the Euroleague had been gearing up for a seemingly inevitable Final Four championship game: Maccabi Tel Aviv against CSKA Moscow. But the script was given an unexpected twist on Friday, when Tau Vitoria upset CSKA and the whole of Europe by knocking the host team out of contention.
Maccabi Tel Aviv opened strongly in Sunday's match. Despite an initial lead of 5:4 by Tau, Tel Aviv's defense managed to stabilize the game and prevent the Spaniards from scoring even simple shots. Already, in the first quarter, Maccabi pulled ahead and ended with a lead of 26 to 15.
In the second quarter, Maccabi Tel Aviv kept its advantage, and led by 16 to 30 in the 15th minute. A three-pointer by Tal Borstein brought later brought the score to 39:24. Tau managed to reduce Maccabi's lead, bringing the score to 39:31 before Maccabi began to widen the gap. Maccabi entered half-time with a comfortable lead of 50 to 39.
Tau put up an excellent defense in the third quarter. Maccabi's lead shrank, and stood at only three points in the 28th minute.
Tau stayed in the picture as the fourth quarter opened. With Maccabi's Anthony Parker not at his best, the game was in the hands of Sarunas Jasikevicius, who again proved his ability to perform under pressure. Maccabi raised its lead to 74:66 four minutes before the end, ending the game with an eleven-point lead.
Some 6,000 Israelis were present in Moscow to cheer on the team, as opposed to 650 Tau supporters. In Israel, thousands of the team's fans filled Rabin Square in Tel Aviv after Maccabi won, dancing, honking horns and celebrating.
ABBAS SUWAN TO BECOME FACE OF ISRAELI NATIONAL LOTTERY
Arab soccer star to promote gambling: National team squad member Abbas Suwan chosen to lead advertising campaign for scratch-and-win cards
Ynetnews
April 8, 2005
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3069754,00.html
National team Arab-Israeli soccer player Abbas Suwan has been chosen to lead an advertising Lottery Corporation campaign. The new campaign aims to promote local scratch-and-win cards among Arab-Israelis.
The estimated cost of the campaign is USD 100,000. Suwan himself is expected to earn tens of thousands of dollars for his participation. The Lottery Corp. turned to Suwan following the national team's game against Ireland, Vice President of Marketing Doron Angel said.
Notably, Suwan's goal to tie the game with time running out catapulted him to the status of national hero overnight. "The decision to choose him to lead the campaign stemmed from his character, as a daring, creative player," Angel said.
The dramatic goal scored by Suwan boosted his status among both Jews and Arabs, Angel said, and added that the successful performance has turned Suwan into a role model for Arab-Israelis.
CHELSEA SOCCER COACH ACCEPTS UNOFFICIAL ROLE AS ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PEACE ENVOY
Chelsea soccer coach accepts unofficial role as Israeli-Palestinian peace envoy
The Associated Press
April 11, 2005
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/563686.html
Jose Mourinho, coach of Chelsea in the top British soccer league, will help pay for two schools to join a program that uses soccer to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the Peres Center for Peace said Monday.
Mourinho also will serve as a special envoy for sports and peace on behalf of the center. Mourinho was in Israel last month for a goodwill soccer tournament with Israeli and Palestinian youths.
The center's "peace soccer" program provides after school soccer lessons and math and English tutoring sessions twice a week, and brings together Israeli and Palestinian children every few weeks for joint activities, the center said.
Mourinho's sponsorship, in association with the sports agency Gestifute, will raise the number of soccer programs to 14 - seven Israeli and seven Palestinian, the center said.
As special envoy, he will promote awareness of the program in the international soccer community and help raise money to allow more children to participate, said Alon Be'er, director of the Peres Center's sport unit. He said each school costs about $80,000 to run.
About 1,200 children ages 6-14 participate in the soccer schools and a similar basketball program, he said. The Peres Center, founded by Vice Premier Shimon Peres, sponsors a number of projects to encourage economic and grass roots cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians.
SOCCER PHENOMENOM RONALDO ON PEACE MISSION
Soccer phenomenon on peace mission
Brazilian star Ronaldo to take part in Peres Center for Peace venture bringing Israeli, Palestinian children together
Ynetnews
April 14, 2005
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3072781,00.html
Brazilian soccer superstar Ronaldo is scheduled to visit Israel and the Palestinian Authority at the beginning of May, according to the Peres Center for Peace.
Ronaldo, who heads the squad of Spanish powerhouse Real Madrid, received updates regarding the Center's Twinned Soccer Schools project, in which some 800 Israeli and Palestinian children from low economic status participate in an educational program that promotes peace and cooperation through sports, the Peres Center said.
In the project's framework, mixed squads of Israeli and Palestinian children are set to compete in a "Mini World Cup" on April 18 at the Herzliya Stadium.
During a recent visit to Israel, Portuguese soccer coach Jose Mourinho, who has led British Club Chelsea to the European Champions League semi-finals, has agreed to serve as a special envoy for the Peres Center for Peace and assist in establishing and financing two soccer schools for Israeli and Palestinian children.
CONTENTS
1. "Three political web logs make a run for the mainstream" (New York Sun, May 3, 2005)
2. "Newspaper circulation continues to decline. Internet, cable cited as competition" (Washington Post, May 3, 2005)
3. "Newspaper circulation continues decline, forcing tough decisions" (Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2005)
[Note by Tom Gross]
Because a large number of journalists subscribe to this email list, I occasionally send out items about general developments in the media which don't necessarily relate directly to Middle East affairs.
While newspapers are feeling the effects of poor circulation, three popular weblogs are seeking to expand. It is doubtful whether the bloggers plans will be successful but with many regular and loyal readers, they do have a base from which to try.
To broaden their appeal beyond national security issues, the three – ArmedLiberal.com, RogerLSimon.com, and LittleGreenFootballs.com – will receive editorial advice from the owner of one of the most heavily trafficked blogs, Instapundit.com's Glenn Reynolds.
Rupert Murdoch gave a keynote address a few weeks ago in which he called on newspapers to change their strategy and outlook to adapt to an Internet world.
THE WASHINGTON POST DOWN, THE NEW YORK TIMES UP
The Washington Post reported a weekday circulation decline of 2.7 percent, to 751,871, compared with the corresponding period a year earlier. Sunday circulation decreased 2.4 percent, to 1,000,565.
Among those adding subscribers was the New York Times, which reported weekday circulation of 1,136,433 and Sunday circulation of 1,680,582. Its weekday circulation is up 0.2 percent from the same period last year. New York Times executives attributed the growth in the newspaper's circulation to its increased distribution nationally. It has lost readers in New York.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AND USA TODAY STILL THE MOST READ PAPERS IN THE USA
Circulation of the Wall Street Journal, owned by Dow Jones & Co., decreased by 0.8 percent, to 2,070,498.
Circulation at USA Today, owned by Gannett Co., was flat, at 2,281,830.
I attach three articles with summaries first.
-- Tom Gross
SUMMARIES
THREE POLITICAL WEB LOGS MAKE A RUN FOR THE MAINSTREAM
"Three political web logs make a run for the mainstream" (By Roderick Boyd, New York Sun, May 3, 2005)
In a dramatic sign that Web logs are going mainstream, three of the largest political blogs are banding together to form what is believed to be a first-of-its kind ad-supported network… The venture will be called Pajamas Media, a not-so-subtle reference to the September remarks of a CNN executive, Jonathan Klein, who said a typical blogger has "no checks and balances" and is just "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas." No launch date has been set.
The idea of Pajamas Media is to use an extensive network of globally affiliated blogs to provide first-person, in-depth coverage of most major news events, including both camera and video footage, Roger Simon said.
... Mr. Reynolds argued that the work of the blogger-reporters of Pajamas Media would improve the quality of reporting on major events. "Hopefully, reporters from larger organizations will use us as another resource to cite when they report on a big story," he said. "We're not a threat to their jobs, but we'll make them do their jobs better since their will be another record out there."
NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION CONTINUES TO DECLINE
"Newspaper circulation continues to decline" (By Annys Shin, Washington Post, May 3, 2005)
Circulation at 814 of the nation's largest daily newspapers declined 1.9 percent over the six months ended March 31 compared with the same period last year, an industry trade group reported yesterday.
The decline continued a 20-year trend in the newspaper industry as people increasingly turn to other media such as the Internet and 24-hour cable news networks for information… About one-third of U.S. newspapers reported gains in circulation, according to an analysis by the Newspaper Association of America.
NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION CONTINUES DECLINE, FORCING TOUGH DECISIONS
"Newspaper circulation continues decline, forcing tough decisions" (By Julia Angwin and Joseph T. Hallinan, The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2005)
The newspaper industry, already suffering from circulation problems, could be looking at its worst numbers in more than a decade.
Circulation numbers to be released today by the Audit Bureau of Circulations probably will show industrywide declines of 1% to 3%, according to people familiar with the situation -- possibly the highest for daily newspapers since the industry shed 2.6% of subscribers in 1990-91.
The biggest publishers may show the largest declines… The losses come at a time when Americans have many news outlets that didn't exist 20 years ago, including cable-television news channels and Internet sites, as well as email and cellphone alerts. Many newspapers have substantial and free online sites offering much of what is in the printed paper. These sites might not hurt readership overall, but they can erode a newspaper's paying audience.
THREE POLITICAL WEB LOGS MAKE A RUN FOR THE MAINSTREAM
Three Political Web Logs Make a Run for the Mainstream
By Roderick Boyd
New York Sun
May 3, 2005
In a dramatic sign that Web logs are going mainstream, three of the largest political blogs are banding together to form what is believed to be a first-of-its kind ad-supported network.
To broaden their appeal beyond national security issues, the three - ArmedLiberal.com, RogerLSimon.com, and LittleGreenFootballs.com - will receive editorial advice from the owner of one of the most heavily trafficked blogs, Instapundit.com's Glenn Reynolds, among others.
The venture will be called Pajamas Media, a not-so-subtle reference to the September remarks of a CNN executive, Jonathan Klein, who said a typical blogger has "no checks and balances" and is just "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas."
No launch date has been set.
The idea of Pajamas Media is to use an extensive network of globally affiliated blogs to provide first-person, in-depth coverage of most major news events, including both camera and video footage, Roger Simon said.
Using as an example the tsunami that swept through parts of Asia and Africa in January, Mr. Simon said bloggers managed to post hundreds of updates, first-person accounts, and video clips, often before major press organizations could deploy their staffs. With 162 affiliate blogs in dozens of different countries, according to Mr. Simon, the new venture will have the ability to get "in the middle of stories" that major news organizations can't, "because our affiliates will have a physical proximity, language, and cultural knowledge that the Associated Press man will often lack." Mr. Simon is a Los Angeles-based screenwriter and mystery novelist whose credits include the Woody Allen directed "Scenes From a Mall" and the Moses Wine detective series.
The LittleGreenFootballs blogger, Charles Johnson, said the challenge is to keep the freewheeling character of a popular blog - where opinions and criticism are given freely - while meeting high standards and aggressively pursuing stories.
"Look at how blogs, with no coordination and limited money, scooped major papers and the networks on stories like Dan Rather, Eason Jordan, and the tsunami," he said.
Mr. Johnson, whose blog averages about 70,000 unique visitors a day, has been called the first writer to conclude that documents purporting to prove that President Bush used political leverage to get out of Air National Guard training exercises in the early 1970s were computer-generated and inauthentic.
Instapundit.com's Mr. Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor whose blog averages more than 130,000 unique visitors a day - according to the Truth Laid Bear, a blog that tracks Web log traffic - said large press organizations have nothing to fear from a successful Pajamas Media.
"I think it is a tired cliche that because there won't be newspaper editors at PJM, that somehow the product will be diminished," Mr. Reynolds said. "We do not need four or five layers of editors to screw this up like they have at the L.A. Times. Hopefully, we'll have live feeds and middle-of-the-crowd commentary from the next Beirut demonstration."
Mr. Reynolds's mention of the Los Angeles Times was a reference to a March 29 column by that paper's press critic, David Shaw, asserting that reporting at the Times and other papers was preferable to the work of bloggers because of the multiple layers of editing that each story undergoes.
Mr. Reynolds argued that the work of the blogger-reporters of Pajamas Media would improve the quality of reporting on major events.
"Hopefully, reporters from larger organizations will use us as another resource to cite when they report on a big story," he said. "We're not a threat to their jobs, but we'll make them do their jobs better since their will be another record out there."
From a practical perspective, he said, one of the goals of the founders, once financing is in place, is to get a handheld camcorder and a laptop notebook into the hands of all their affiliated bloggers.
The economics of launching what is in effect a global blog-based wire service is complex but not insurmountable, Mr. Simon said.
"We have about seven different investment offers on the table right now," he said, "so getting off the ground shouldn't be a problem."
Syndicating advertisements through affiliated blogs so that advertisers reach a global network, according to LittleGreenFootball's Mr. Johnson, will sustain the project.
Citing demographic research he said he has done on his site, he said: "We've got a lot to offer advertisers. My blog and many others have a lot of six-figure readers, a lot of graduate degrees, and reader loyalty."
Mr. Simon went a step further, saying his readers, based on an informal survey he did on his site three months ago, have a median income of $100,000. His blog averages about 18,000 unique visitors a day.
The timing is right for Pajamas Media's advertising syndication approach, according to the president of a marketing company for Web sites, Tom Hespos, who said the key to successful advertising on blogs is tapping into what he called "their audience dedication." He said blog readers will frequently log into their favorite sites three or four times a day and often do not ignore or dismiss advertisements as readily as they do in print or on television.
"As long as they continue to identify the blogger as credible, blog audiences have proven remarkably loyal and resilient," Mr. Hespos said, "and that extends to advertising."
Mr. Simon said his blog makes about $1,000 a month and recently carried ads for Friendster blogs - featuring a revealing pose by the actress Pamela Sue Anderson - and a physical-conditioning program.
Mr. Hespos said that with attractive demographics, a popular blogger can make between $4,000 and $5,000 a month, which he said makes blogs economically viable. Based on standard rates of between $10 and $15 per thousand page views, he said it shouldn't be difficult to get Pajama Media's blog network into the $5,000-a-month range to start. Moreover, if the venture manages to gather page views going into the millions, the revenues could easily increase to between $12,000 and $15,000 per month.
There are caveats, however. The first is that blog advertising is unpopular with a large segment of traditional advertisers, such as Proctor & Gamble, who are uncomfortable with the potential of their products' being sold near potentially controversial copy.
When advertisers consider buying space on blogs, according to Underscore Marketing's Mr. Hespos, the notion of editorial material reflecting negatively on the advertiser is a big question mark.
"There are no controls for blog advertising, so you need an advertiser that has demonstrated a comfort level with that, because there is no moving a product away from a controversial opinion or off-color remark," he said.
Examples of name-brand advertisers that have had an aggressive blog advertising presence include Sony and Nike, which both have had large ad placements on various Gawker Media blogs.
WASHINGTON POST: NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION DECLINES
Newspaper Circulation Continues to Decline
Internet, Cable Cited as Competition
By Annys Shin
The Washington Post
May 3, 2005
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/02/AR2005050201457.html
Circulation at 814 of the nation's largest daily newspapers declined 1.9 percent over the six months ended March 31 compared with the same period last year, an industry trade group reported yesterday.
The decline continued a 20-year trend in the newspaper industry as people increasingly turn to other media such as the Internet and 24-hour cable news networks for information.
Newspaper industry officials also blamed the National Do Not Call Registry, which has forced newspapers to rely less on telemarketing to secure subscribers, and a shift in strategy among major newspapers away from using short-term promotions to acquire new readers.
"Of all the things that have happened, [the change in telemarketing rules] had the single largest impact," said John Kimball, chief marketing officer for the Newspaper Association of America, an industry trade group. Newspapers relied on telemarketing to acquire an average of 60 to 65 percent of their home delivery subscribers, Kimball said. As a result of the registry, newspapers have cut that figure down to 50 or 55 percent.
Kimball also said newspapers are focusing less on short-term promotions and more on going after people who are likely to subscribe for a longer period. Such subscribers "take a lot longer to acquire in the first place, and acquisition costs are higher," he said.
For the six months ended March 31, The Washington Post reported a weekday circulation decline of 2.7 percent, to 751,871, compared with the corresponding period a year earlier. Sunday circulation decreased 2.4 percent, to 1,000,565.
Post executives said the company is relying slightly less on so-called third-party sales, in which newspapers sell copies in bulk at a discounted rate to outside groups that distribute the paper, usually for free. But executives did not attribute the decline to any one factor and said the figures are an improvement.
"Our numbers are not down quite so much this year compared to last year," said publisher Boisfeuillet Jones Jr.
Circulation of the Wall Street Journal, owned by Dow Jones & Co., decreased by 0.8 percent, to 2,070,498, said Amy Wolfcale, a Wall Street Journal spokeswoman.
Wolfcale attributed the decline to a 23 percent increase in price over the past three years and a change in distribution strategy as the Journal prepares for a scheduled September rollout of a weekend edition. The Journal, for example, has stopped supplying some public waiting rooms where people don't congregate on the weekends, Wolfcale said.
About one-third of U.S. newspapers reported gains in circulation, according to an analysis by the Newspaper Association of America.
Among those adding subscribers was the New York Times, which reported weekday circulation of 1,136,433 and Sunday circulation of 1,680,582. Its weekday circulation is up 0.2 percent from the same period last year.
New York Times executives attributed the growth in the newspaper's circulation to its increased distribution nationally. The Times is now available by home delivery in 318 markets, up from 266 at this time last year, said spokeswoman Catherine J. Mathis.
Circulation at USA Today, owned by Gannett Co., was flat, said spokesman Steve Anderson. As of March 31, its weekday circulation was 2,281,830, Anderson said.
USA Today's circulation held steady even as the newspaper increased its newsstand price to 75 cents from 50 cents in September. Anderson attributed the stability in circulation in part to higher travel-related sales.
Circulation at the New York Post was virtually flat in the six-month period compared with the corresponding period a year ago, at 678,086. The New York Post still lags behind its arch rival, the New York Daily News, which saw its circulation slip 1.5 percent, to 735,536.
The circulation figures were the first released in the wake of circulation scandals at several major newspapers last year. The Chicago Sun-Times, Newsday and the Dallas Morning News said they overstated their circulation. As a result, the Audit Bureau of Circulations censured them and did not include their circulation numbers in yesterday's report.
WALL STREET JOURNAL: NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION DECLINES
Newspaper Circulation Continues Decline, Forcing Tough Decisions
By Julia Angwin and Joseph T. Hallinan
The Wall Street Journal
May 2, 2005
The newspaper industry, already suffering from circulation problems, could be looking at its worst numbers in more than a decade.
Circulation numbers to be released today by the Audit Bureau of Circulations probably will show industrywide declines of 1% to 3%, according to people familiar with the situation -- possibly the highest for daily newspapers since the industry shed 2.6% of subscribers in 1990-91.
The biggest publishers may show the largest declines: Gannett Co., which owns about 100 newspapers, says it will be down "a couple of points" from last year's levels. Circulation at Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times is likely to be off in excess of 6% of its most recently reported figures. Belo Corp.'s Dallas Morning News expects to report daily circulation down 9% and Sunday circulation down 13% from the year-earlier period. All projected figures are for the six months ended in March.
The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Co., expects to report today that total circulation for the six-month period declined 0.8% to 2.07 million.
Long stuck in a slow decline, U.S. newspapers face the prospect of an accelerated drop in circulation. The slide is fueling an urgent industry discussion about whether the trend can be halted in a digital age and is forcing newspaper executives to rethink their traditional strategies.
Rather than simply trying to halt the decline, which can be done readily through discounts and promotions, they're being forced to try to "manage" their circulation in new ways. Some publishers are deliberately cutting circulation in the hope of selling advertisers on the quality of their subscribers. Others are expanding into new markets to make up for losses in their core markets. Some are switching to a tabloid format or giving away papers to try to attract younger readers. Others are pouring money into television and radio advertising and expensive face-to-face sales pitches to potential subscribers.
The losses come at a time when Americans have many news outlets that didn't exist 20 years ago, including cable-television news channels and Internet sites, as well as email and cellphone alerts. Many newspapers have substantial and free online sites offering much of what is in the printed paper. These sites might not hurt readership overall, but they can erode a newspaper's paying audience.
At the same time, many newspapers have undercut the print product itself, trimming staff and coverage. They also have failed to figure out how to attract younger readers to their pages.
At a recent industry conference, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch sounded the alarm about what he called a "revolution" in how young people access news. News Corp. owns television stations, movie studios, cable channels and 175 newspapers world-wide. Mr. Murdoch said young people essentially relied on the Internet for news, and unless the newspaper industry recognized these changes, it will "be relegated to the status of also-rans."
Others say newspapers are simply facing the familiar fate of TV and magazines, which have also lost audience in the past 20 years and have tried to adapt by focusing more on demographic groups. "Mass media in general has just become a little bit less mass," says Jason E. Klein, president of the National Newspaper Network LP, a sales arm of the industry.
Daily circulation of American newspapers peaked in 1984 and had fallen nearly 13% to 55.2 million copies in 2003, according to the Newspaper Association of America. At the same time, advertising revenue -- adjusted for inflation -- has barely budged. In 1985, newspaper advertising, adjusted for inflation, was $43.04 billion, not much less than the $44.94 billion reported in 2003. That's just 4.4% real growth over 18 years. During that same period, the gross domestic product, measured in current dollars, grew 161%.
The circulation declines have accelerated recently due in part to two major problems. The federal do-not-call law, which went into effect in 2003, particularly hurt newspaper publishers, who had relied on telemarketing for as much as 60% of new subscribers. And scandals at several newspapers have made some publishers less aggressive about counting certain kinds of subscribers.
Newspapers have long used various techniques to boost circulation. The New York Post famously doubled its circulation in the early 1980s through contests and giveaways -- but lost all those readers as soon as the contests stopped. In recent years, the Post, owned by News Corp., has boosted circulation in part by cutting its price to 25 cents.
"If you're willing to spend the money to buy circulation, you can pretty much make your circulation what you want it to be," says John Morton, a newspaper-industry consultant.
In the past year, some newspapers fabricated circulation figures. Hollinger International Inc.'s Chicago Sun-Times, Belo's Dallas Morning News and Tribune's Newsday have all acknowledged that they overstated circulation figures.
The large decline at the Dallas Morning News is partly due to circulation figures for the March reporting period being compared with year-ago figures compiled before the company announced that circulation had been overstated. The company said at the time that these overstatements would reduce circulation by about 1.5% daily and 5% Sunday. Dallas-based Belo says it expects its March 2005 report to be audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations and released in mid-May.
And many other companies have come under scrutiny for bulking up their circulation with discounted copies that didn't attract high-quality readers.
In the wake of these scandals, advertisers have been demanding accountability from publishers. "I want the quality readers proved to me," says Brenda White, who buys newspaper ads for clients of the media-buying agency Starcom, a unit of Paris-based Publicis Groupe.
Now, many publishers are taking fewer shortcuts to boost circulation. Chicago-based Tribune, for instance, is cutting back significantly on the number of discounted copies sold to places such as hotels, hospitals and schools. Scott Smith, president of Tribune's publishing unit, said this number will be down 10% from year-ago levels.
Such readers -- who often pay nothing for the paper -- often aren't considered good quality and their actual numbers are impossible to validate. Good-quality readers tend to pay for the newspaper with the intention of reading it.
At the Tribune-owned Orlando Sentinel, those types of daily sales jumped 53% in two years, to nearly 38,000 copies a day. But advertisers were unenthusiastic, so the newspaper pulled back. Take hotel copies, Mr. Smith says: "Are the people staying in those hotels actually going to shop with those advertisers?" The answer in many cases, he says, is no. In February, the Sentinel sent a letter to advertisers saying it was cutting many of the nearly 20,000 papers a day it sent to hotels.
At the same time, publishers are searching for ways to attract new readers to replace telemarketing and discounted sales. McClatchy Co., which has posted 20 straight years of subscriber growth -- an unprecedented record in the industry -- uses everything from door-to-door sales crews to sending lapsed subscribers handwritten notes imploring them to resubscribe. McClatchy is a small newspaper chain that operates 12 dailies, including the Sacramento Bee and the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
McClatchy Vice President of Operations Frank Whittaker notes that the company keeps its newsstand and subscription prices low, guarantees "on the porch" delivery in most of its markets, has never cut the amount of space it allots to news and has never had across-the-board layoffs -- all of which is fairly unusual in the industry. The company has also been favored by strong markets such as Sacramento, Minneapolis and Raleigh-Durham. "There's no silver bullet," says Mr. Whittaker. "It's really a story of blocking and tackling."
The New York Times Co., which is losing circulation in its core market of New York, says it will post circulation gains in today's report due to its strategy of expanding into new markets around the nation. In the past year, the company has added about 50 markets. At the same time, the Times is marketing to immigrants in New York and college students around the country. "We are cultivating the next generation of readership," says Scott Heekin-Canedy, president and general manager of the New York Times.
The Wall Street Journal's 2.07 million circulation total after an expected 0.8% decline includes some paid online subscriptions allowed under ABC rules. A company spokeswoman said the decline in print circulation reflects the impact of aggressive price increases over the past few years as well as a decision to drop some marginal marketing programs and to eliminate some copies distributed to public waiting rooms. The spokeswoman said that the Journal's year-earlier figures, reported last May at 2.1 million, have since been adjusted downward by 13,600 copies due to minor errors and the effects of rule changes.
But replacement marketing efforts can be costly. The Los Angeles Times, where circulation has fallen to 902,000 copies from 1.1 million in 1999, has pledged to spend $10.5 million to boost circulation. Gannett Chief Financial Officer Gracia Martore told analysts last month that "we are clearly spending more money per order" to bring in circulation."
Gannett, which is based in McLean, Va., and whose daily circulation is likely to be down in today's report, has also joined an industrywide effort to promote an alternative metric: readership. Readership is how many readers view each copy of the newspaper -- a number that is typically two to four per copy. Readership is a widely used metric in the magazine industry but has only recently begun to be promoted by newspaper publishers.
"Newspaper circulation is important but readership is the key issue," says Don Stinson, senior vice president of marketing for Gannett's newspaper division. "At the end of the day what we want to deliver to advertisers is prospects who are ready, willing and able to buy what they have to sell. Whether the person pays for the newspaper or got it from somebody else isn't particularly relevant. It's whether they read it."
To that end, 500 newspapers have begun submitting detailed demographic data about their readers to the Audit Bureau of Circulations to provide newspaper ad buyers with the same kind of data they get about radio listeners and TV viewers, such as age, gender and household income.
"Generally what we're trying to do is get a level playing field," says Kevin Campbell, director of marketing and sales at ABC.
Corrections & Amplifications:
The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Co., said it expects to report that total circulation for the six months ended in March declined 0.8%. The initial version of this article incorrectly said total circulation declined 1.5%.
* As Israel commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Day today, theater critics suggest Rachel Corrie should be compared with Primo Levi and Anne Frank.
* Following its critical acclaim, "What's on Stage" magazine reported yesterday that "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" will return to a larger London theatre in the fall, premiering October 11.
This is an update to a number of previous dispatches on this list including:
* Anti-Israel propaganda sells out on London stage (April 27, 2005)
* My Name is Rachel Corrie, Levy, Thaler, Levi, Gavish, Charhi, Shabo (April 14, 2005)
* Alan Rickman, Rachel Corrie, David Irving, and Robert Fisk (December 7, 2004)
CONTENTS
1. "Dachau liberation commemorated" (The Age, Australia, May 2, 2005)
2. "My Name is Rachel Corrie" (BA Magazine, April 2005)
3. "Heroine of the Palestinian struggle" (The Daily Nation, Kenya, April 14, 2003)
4. "My Name is Rachel Corrie" (British Theatre Guide, 2005)
5. "Primo" (British Theatre Guide, 2004)
6. "London plays engender both solidarity and controversy" (Daily Star, Lebanon, April 28, 2005)
7. "Going Out in London: Two Dramas Bring Mideast Politics to Life" (Bloomberg wire service, April 26, 2005)
HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM
Further reviews of the play "My Name is Rachel Corrie" have been published since the last dispatch on this subject. Some ignorant critics have engaged in de facto Holocaust revisionism by comparing Rachel Corrie (an adult political activist who died in an accident) with Anne Frank (a schoolgirl murdered in Belsen) and Primo Levi (a survivor of Auschwitz, a truly great writer, and one of the twentieth century's most important witnesses.)
Today marks Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. This week also witnessed the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau, and I include an article about that as a reminder of what the Holocaust actually was.
ANNE FRANK
Those searching for reviews of "My Name is Rachel Corrie" on Google will find near the top – and placed more prominently than many reviews from established newspapers – a review in "BA magazine." The review (attached below) compares the Rachel Corrie Play to the diary of Anne Frank. (This is a magazine which "aims to provide information, advice, features, and fun for students, parents and teachers.")
In case anyone needs reminding, Anne Frank was a German-Jewish teenager forced into hiding. She spent 25 months in a tiny annex above an office in Amsterdam, before being betrayed to the Nazis. Nine months later she died of disease and starvation in Bergen Belsen concentration camp. (As detailed recently on this list, the horrors of Belsen were so great that BBC directors in London refused to broadcast a report from correspondent Richard Dimbleby for four days following the liberation of the camp, because they simply could not believe the full horror of what he had witnessed.)
Anne Frank's diary, written during her time in hiding, was first published in 1947. Today it has been translated into 67 languages and is one of the most widely read books in the world. The Kenyan newspaper the Daily Nation has also compared Corrie to Anne Frank.
PRIMO LEVI
The review of the Corrie play in "The British Theatre Guide," written by Philip Fisher, compares it to a play last year by Sir Anthony Sher, which recounted Primo Levi's time in Auschwitz, and was based on Levi's book "If This is a Man." (That book was published in the US under the title "Survival in Auschwitz.")
Primo Levi, an Italian-Jewish chemist, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His powerful memoirs of the death camp are regarded by some critics as the "most important book of the twentieth century."
To suggest that Rachel Corrie's situation bears any resemblance to the experiences of Anne Frank and Primo Levi is not only grotesque. It is also insulting since both Frank and Levi were accomplished writers while the Corrie play is based on her often rambling, political emails. (Fisher also compares Corrie to George Orwell.)
FROM LONDON TO LEBANON
Also attached below are two more reviews of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" from the Daily Star (Lebanon) and a mixed review from the Bloomberg wire service. The Daily Star, employing its own brand of revisionism, compares the youth in London going to the play with "the young activists in Lebanon still camped out in Beirut's symbolic Martyrs' Square."
"My Name Is Rachel Corrie" continues to receive coverage all over the world, far outstripping the interest a new play in London usually generates. For example, a discussion forum in the Czech capital Prague (prague.tv/forum/viewpost.php?id=3723) also contains comparisons between Corrie and Anne Frank. The power and freedom of the Internet means malicious historical revisionism can spread quickly around the world, in this case from a theater in London to the rest of Europe, and to the Middle East.
NAZI SYMPATHIZER NOMINATES CORRIE FOR NOBEL PRIZE
Revisionist "historian" David Irving has nominated Rachel Corrie for the Nobel Peace Prize on his website. The link has been widely circulated on the Internet.
BULLDOZING PALESTINIAN HOMES
Last Monday (May 2, 2005), three two-story Palestinian homes were destroyed by a bulldozer in Gaza – this time on the orders of Mohammed Abbas's Palestinian Authority. (The homes belonged to three Palestinian military officers whom the P.A. says illegally took public land for their homes.)
The bulldozer was guarded by seven jeeps and 30 Palestinian officers. The International Solidarity movement (to which Corrie belonged), made no attempt to prevent the bulldozer razing these structures. One house was surrounded by a small flower garden, which was also destroyed. Abbas has ordered the destruction of hundreds more illegal shops, cafes, kiosks and homes in Gaza.
"This is a good start. The demolitions sent an important message to Palestinians that corruption will no longer be tolerated," said Ghadeer Omari, a Palestinian human rights activist.
(See the Associated Press report from Gaza City titled "Palestinians demolish officials' illegal homes in law-order move" www.cbc.ca/cp/world/050502/w0502112.html.)
I attach seven articles with brief summaries first for those who don't have time to read them in full.
-- Tom Gross
SUMMARIES
PILES OF CORPSES LAY IN CATTLE TRUCKS IN DACHAU
"Nazi camp in Dachau liberation commemorated" (AFP / The Age, Australia, May 2, 2005)
More than 1,000 survivors of the Nazi concentration camp Dachau marked the 60th anniversary of their liberation today with US army veterans who threw open the gates... In 1945 US soldiers arrived at the Dachau camp north-west of Munich to find a scene of horror. Piles of corpses lay in cattle trucks while starving prisoners were almost too weak to acknowledge their salvation.
LIKE "THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK"
"My Name is Rachel Corrie" (Review by "RW", BA Magazine)
A young American woman ends up standing between an Israeli bulldozer and a Palestinian home... Like "The Diary of Anne Frank", this piece has problems as the text was not written to engage or entertain an audience, but was a private correspondence…
HEROINE OF THE PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE
"Heroine of the Palestinian struggle" (By Betty Caplan, The Daily Nation, Kenya, April 14, 2003)
... Anne Frank was 13 when she and her family were forced to escape the Nazis in Amsterdam in 1941 because they were Jewish. The diary she was given as a birthday present sustained her for the following two years while they were crowded into a few rooms with strangers behind a false bookcase in one of those tall, narrow buildings that still face the city's many canals...
Similarly, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American, was a fairly normal young woman – one of many who have travelled to dangerous places because they wanted to show their anger, and to convince the world that what was being done in Palestine and Iraq was not in their name…
Rachel's death will, like Anne Frank's, serve as a reminder... Rachel wrote to her family regularly from the Gaza Strip, and like Anne Frank, seemed to have a premonition of her own death...
"MY NAME IS RACHEL CORRIE" – REVIEW BY PHILIP FISHER
"My Name is Rachel Corrie" (Review by Philip Fisher, British Theatre Guide, 2005)
Rachel Corrie was an apple-cheeked All-American girl, brought up in Washington State... Like Sir Antony Sher's Primo, My Name is Rachel Corrie is a remarkably moving 90-minute solo piece about human dignity and suffering. Rachel Corrie was little more than a girl and while she could be naive, she also had a saintly aspect, meeting death with the beatific happiness of a martyr...
"PRIMO" – REVIEW BY PHILIP FISHER
"Primo" (Review by Philip Fisher, British Theatre Guide, 2004)
[Extract only on this email]
This slice of autobiography tells the tale of the year spent by a young Italian chemist Primo Levi in Auschwitz... The book should be compulsory reading, and the play a requirement for every teenager, as a lesson on the horrors of the Holocaust and as a warning as to what can happen in apparently civilised societies...
THIS MAY WELL BE CORRIE'S GREATEST LEGACY
"London plays engender both solidarity and controversy" (By Ramsay Short, Daily Star staff, Daily Star, Lebanon, April 28, 2005)
... But, more importantly, the buyers of those tickets have been one of the youngest audiences the theater can recall. It is this that may well be Corrie's greatest legacy. Thanks to the writing, editing and producing of actor Alan Rickman and Guardian Weekend magazine editor Katherine Viner, Corrie, through her touching and eloquent writings, has become an aspirational figure for the U.K.'s young people - people who are not generally considered highly involved in international politics and who are relatively apathetic when it comes to world issues...
TWO DRAMAS BRING MIDEAST POLITICS TO LIFE
"Going Out in London: Two Dramas Bring Mideast Politics to Life" (Bloomberg, April 26, 2005)
... Yet throughout the 90-minute presentation, we watch her ever-increasing pro-Palestinian position. The play is admirably faithful to her vision. By presenting only one perspective, however, it never gives voice to an Israeli position. That, for some, will be a stumbling block...
NAZI CAMP IN DACHAU LIBERATION COMMEMORATED
Nazi camp in Dachau liberation commemorated
The Age (AFP)
May 2, 2005
More than 1,000 survivors of the Nazi concentration camp Dachau marked the 60th anniversary of their liberation today with US army veterans who threw open the gates.
"This ceremony inevitably stirs up deep emotions in the former prisoners," General Andre Delpech, a French Dachau survivor, told the assembled guests gathered at the former camp under bright spring sunshine.
He said today's commemoration would be the last for many of the aging survivors, who he said had attended "so that this memory would not be forgotten or lost to indifference".
The Archbishop of the Bavarian state capital Munich, Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, said that "human dignity had been trampled underfoot" at Dachau, which was built in 1933 - the year Adolf Hitler rose to power.
On April 29, 1945 - nine days before the German surrender in World War II - US soldiers arrived at the Dachau camp north-west of Munich to find a scene of horror.
Piles of corpses lay in cattle trucks while starving prisoners were almost too weak to acknowledge their salvation.
Between 1933 and 1945, more than 200,000 people from 38 countries and across the religious and political spectrum were held by the Nazis under appalling conditions. At least 30,000 people were killed, starved or died of disease.
Today's ceremony was marred by complaints by a German Jewish group that it was held on the Jewish holiday Passover.
Jewish law prohibits driving, riding in a car or leaving one's town on the holiday, which ends at sunset today, meaning that several survivors were unable to attend.
A national memorial to the six million Jewish victims of the Nazis is due to open in central Berlin on May 10, two days after the 60th anniversary of Germany's capitulation.
WHAT COST A CAUSE?
What cost a cause?
BA Magazine
Theatre Reviews
My Name is Rachel Corrie
Royal Court Theatre (Jerwood Theatre Upstairs)
London, England
www.ba-education.demon.co.uk/for/entertainment/rctl/mynameisrachelcorrie.html
A young American woman ends up standing between an Israeli bulldozer and a Palestinian home. This is a non-fiction play, Rachel Corrie was a real woman whose horrific death occurred on March 16th 2003. The text itself is no playwright's invention, it comes from Rachel's own emails and journal entries, edited by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner.
Like "The Diary of Anne Frank", this piece has problems as the text was not written to engage or entertain an audience, but was a private correspondence. The production therefore has its slower moments, particularly the first half which comes from her diary entries before she went to Palestine. These ruminations about American college life give an endearing portrait of Rachel Corrie the young woman as opposed to Rachel Corrie the international campaigner, but they aren't terribly absorbing. Rickman and Viner could have edited these entries a little more. It gets a lot more interesting once she is actually in Palestine, reporting the shocking events around her.
Megan Dodds courageously carries this one-woman show. She would have benefited from a little more guidance from Rickman (who also directed it) in terms of varying her vocal tone and pitch. If a play consists of an hour and a half of one person speaking, then it is important that they modulate their speech patterns so that it doesn't get tedious. Alan Rickman is a far better actor than he is a director. Despite this, the Rachel Corrie that Dodds presents to the audience is three-dimensional and engaging, a woman with a strong sense of humour and an even stronger sense of injustice. I doubt if anyone in the audience ever met the real Rachel Corrie, but we all left the theatre feeling like we had.
This play tells an amazing story about a modern day martyr that is all the more astonishing because it is true. © RW
Support your local theatres and see a live show.
HEROINE OF THE PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE
Heroine of the Palestinian struggle
By Betty Caplan
The Daily Nation - Kenya
April 14, 2003
www.palestinemonitor.org/Activism/Heroine_of_the_Palestinian_struggle.htm
There is something special about diaries written in times of war or in prisons: they serve to give us the feeling of the day-to-day humdrum existence that history tends to overlook.
Anne Frank was 13 when she and her family were forced to escape the Nazis in Amsterdam in 1941 because they were Jewish. The diary she was given as a birthday present sustained her for the following two years while they were crowded into a few rooms with strangers behind a false bookcase in one of those tall, narrow buildings that still face the city's many canals.
To this day, no-one knows for sure who betrayed the inhabitants to the Germans, but Otto Frank, Anne's father (the only one of the family to survive the death camp at Auschwitz) salvaged his daughter's diary which has since become the most enduring record of its time. Her gaunt face has become instantly recognisable to millions who have read her book or seen the many plays and films based on it. She might have become an ordinary person had fate not struck her a tragic blow which ended up making her immortal.
Similarly, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American, was, until last month, a fairly normal young woman – one of many who have travelled to dangerous places because they wanted to show their anger, and to convince the world that what was being done in Palestine and Iraq was not in their name.
She died on March 16 when an Israeli army bulldozer flattened her in what witnesses described as a deliberate killing. She was one of eight foreign volunteers – four from the US and four from Britain – who were with the International Solidarity Movement seeking to block house demolitions in the Gaza Strip's Rafah refugee camp, one of the most desperate places on earth.
The Israelis said that the activists had been warned. Earlier, a tank protecting a bulldozer had tried to drive protesters away with warning shots and teargas, but according to Chris McGreal and Duncan Campbell (The Guardian, March 17) "there had been no trouble immediately before Ms Corrie was crushed."
A fellow activist who witnessed the event said: "The driver cannot have failed to see her. As the blade pushed the pile, the earth rose up. Rachel slid down the pile. It looks as if she got her foot caught. The driver didn't slow down; he just ran over her. Then he reversed the bulldozer back over her again."
Does a bulldozer need more protection than a vulnerable young woman? There is a hidden irony in all this: the Nazis also used bulldozers to churn over the remains of the people for whom they thought they had found the Final Solution.
Because our TV screens are currently filled with images of Iraq, other, equally vital stories have been moved to the sidelines, but the daily toll of murdered Palestinians has not ceased despite Sharon's promises that peace talks would begin in earnest once they behaved themselves.
On March 20, The Guardian published a letter from 50 British MPs pointing out that the bombing in Haifa was "a savage ending of two months in which there have been no suicide bombings within Israel."
In that period Israel killed more than 154 Palestinians. "Why did Ariel Sharon and the international community miss this opportunity to restart the peace process?" they asked. Because they have never meant it seriously is the answer one must draw.
Rachel's death will, like Anne Frank's, serve as a reminder that the Middle East problem won't be solved until there is a proper settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. Although many deaths go unnoticed in that troubled region, every so often it takes one story to arrest the public's imagination and move things out of their stale rut.
Rachel wrote to her family regularly from the Gaza Strip, and like Anne Frank, seemed to have a premonition of her own death. She wrote with insight and understanding: "Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world, and that we, in fact participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world."
She didn't try to hide the truth from herself or her mother; she knew that she would have nightmares when she returned and feel guilty for leaving the people she had become close to, but she was optimistic: "I can channel that into more work. Coming here is one of the better things I've ever done."
Not everyone felt sympathy for her; one Israeli woman no doubt voiced the feelings of many when she said that it served Rachel right. What business did she have going to another country and poking her nose into its affairs?
If that were true, neither of the Gulf wars would have happened; they were, ostensibly at least, about liberating certain Arab people and ridding them of the tyrant who had oppressed them for so long.
Rachel knew there was a sense of urgency about what she was doing; and that her position was privileged because she could leave any time. She was a born writer because she wanted to know things intimately, at first hand. For her, incomprehensible statistics became living human beings whom she took the trouble to get to know, and whose language she was beginning to master.
She had a keen sense of the duty to use words carefully and responsibly: "I don't like to use those charged words. I think you know this about me. I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions."
She was committed to the work she was doing there, and pitched in with the chores and tasks: "I sleep on the floor next to the youngest daughter, Iman, and we all share blankets."
The large family which had adopted her must have enjoyed her lively sense of humour: "The other day, by the way, Grandmother gave me a pantomimed lecture in Arabic that involved a lot of blowing and pointing to her black shawl. I got Nidal to tell her that my mother would appreciate knowing that someone here was giving me a lecture about smoke turning lungs black."
Her family had asked her about non-violent resistance; her reply was to translate it into the personal: When that explosive detonated yesterday it broke all the windows in the family house–. I'm having a hard time right now. Just feel sick to my stomach a lot from being doted on...., very sweetly, by people who are facing doom.
At 23, and literally "shell-shocked", she wasn't yet in a position to formulate an answer on a grand scale. But in her short life, she achieved what so many idealistic people, young and old, want - to make a difference.
MY NAME IS RACHEL CORRIE – REVIEW BY PHILIP FISHER
My Name is Rachel Corrie
Taken from the writings of Rachel Corrie by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner
Royal Court Theatre Upstairs
Review by Philip Fisher (April 2005)
British Theatre Guide
www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/rachelcorrie-rev.htm
Rachel Corrie was an apple-cheeked All-American girl, brought up in Washington State. The only thing that separates her from tens of millions of her peers is a desire to do good and a love for humanity.
Her life is brought to the stage thanks to the efforts of actor Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner. They have sifted through notebooks and e-mails in order to produce a meaningful example of a genre that has become known as Verbatim Theatre - a reconstruction using the words of protagonists, like Bloody Sunday, currently showing at the Tricycle.
In some ways, My Name is Rachel Corrie is a Twenty-First Century equivalent to George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Like Spain in the 1930s, Palestine today has the power to attract Internationalist activists who want to help, regardless of personal risk.
For twenty minutes, we share a Tracey Emin mess of a bedroom (Allen Ginsberg's Howl on the floor speaks volumes) with this idealistic, unworldly college student. Megan Dodds, from TVs Spooks, seduces her audience so that all must be won over by this woman who sums herself up as "scattered and deviant and too loud".
Then, as the bedroom rolls away and designer Hildegard Bechtler introduces a bullet-holed wall, things become more serious as Rachel arrives in Israel/Palestine. Initially, she feels secure and mildly angry.
Soon, as she sees dead bodies and puts herself into the firing line, she achieves real empathy with her hosts and an inner peace. However this is accompanied by a growing rage towards the Israelis who are making the lives of innocent Palestinians hellish. Some might argue that there are Palestinian terrorists around who have caused the latest Intifada but Rachel's rosy view misses this point.
Just as the tension is becoming too great, the editors cleverly bring us back to earth with a brief interlude taking us back to a job that Rachel did as a counsellor to a group of the mentally ill.
After this breather, it is back to the front line and an increasingly despairing young woman who has gone beyond her previous life to become a true Palestinian.
The final moments after Miss Dodds walks off the stage come from a TV screen as we hear an eye-witness account of the 23-year-old's death and then see a clip of her as an amazingly assured activist for peace a full thirteen years before.
Like Sir Antony Sher's Primo, My Name is Rachel Corrie is a remarkably moving 90-minute solo piece about human dignity and suffering. Rachel Corrie was little more than a girl and while she could be naive, she also had a saintly aspect, meeting death with the beatific happiness of a martyr.
This play features a great performance from Megan Dodds and is the kind of theatrical experience that can have a significant political effect. The world should be filled with beautiful idealists like Rachel Corrie. Some may feel that she was misguided but none could doubt her sincerity and commitment.
This review originally appeared on Theatreworld in a slightly different version
LONDON PLAYS ENGENDER BOTH SOLIDARITY AND CONTROVERSY
London plays engender both solidarity and controversy
'My Name is Rachel Corrie' inspires youth, 'Twilight of the Gods' provokes debate and Palestinian writer Samir al-Youssef wins prestigious award
By Ramsay Short
Daily Star, Lebanon
April 28, 2005
www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=4&article_id=14637
Last week The Daily Star published a story about a new play in London based on the writings of the young American activist and member of the International Solidarity Movement, Rachel Corrie. She was tragically run over and killed by an Israeli bulldozer two years ago while protesting the destruction of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip.
In the time since we previewed "My Name is Rachel Corrie," the Royal Court where the play is showing announced that it sold out all tickets for the 24-performance run in less than two days - a record time in the theater's 50-year history.
But, more importantly, the buyers of those tickets have been one of the youngest audiences the theater can recall.
It is this that may well be Corrie's greatest legacy. Thanks to the writing, editing and producing of actor Alan Rickman and Guardian Weekend magazine editor Katherine Viner, Corrie, through her touching and eloquent writings, has become an aspirational figure for the U.K.'s young people - people who are not generally considered highly involved in international politics and who are relatively apathetic when it comes to world issues.
The way one young woman from Olympia, Washington, stood up against oppression in a far away land, however is now inspiring a new youthful audience to become more political in a depoliticized age - and showing them a peaceful way to do it.
Like the young activists in Lebanon still camped out in Beirut's symbolic Martyrs' Square, who have a discovered a newfound energy in seeing their mass action actually be part of a successful protest in the Arab world (the last Syrian soldier left Lebanon on Tuesday), the youth in London - and perhaps it is not so far to suggest those in the rest of Europe too - are becoming responsive to acting against injustice and protesting for their beliefs. Corrie's tragic death, her letters and diaries published in the British left-wing newspaper The Guardian, and now the Royal Court's play, have proven a catalyst for action if the sell-out run is anything to go by.
The play also indicates to young Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in the various refugee camps in Middle Eastern states neighboring Israel that a sense of solidarity, when it comes to injustice, does exist.
Rickman, star of numerous movies and stage productions, in a bold move is already looking at taking "My Name is Rachel Corrie" to the U.S. where the 23-year-old's murder has generated much less media coverage.
Corrie herself, as her writings so obviously suggest, was very much an activist who worked for peace and believed in change and justice, in this case for the Palestinians through peaceful means.
The impact of this play is an example of the transforming nature of drama and the power of theater as protest. It also recalls the Lysistrata Project produced in March 2003 to protest the American-led invasion of Iraq. The famous anti-war Athenian drama had performances simultaneously acted or read in over 20 countries around the world, the idea being that no one would be able to ignore such an enormous network of theater artists reading in solidarity for peace.
Although the Lysistrata Project failed to stop the war, it did gain huge support and popularity from people across continents and provides a way for people to become active in promoting peace.
Today it is not only art and theater, especially when it comes to the Palestinian context, which are touching nerves and promoting a wider interest in international issues amongst the young and old alike.
With stronger opportunities for negotiation and recognition of the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories now than there have been in the last three years, more Palestinian artists are being recognized for their cultural contributions to the world and the situation they live in and operate under, especially those doomed to exile.
In 2004 Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, who currently resides in Ramallah, won the Prince Claus Fund Award for his poetry.
On Wednesday, one of the first Palestinians to win a prize this year was the exiled Palestinian writer, Samir al-Youssef. He was awarded the annual Tucholsky Award by the Swedish chapter of the Pen Club - an independent international organization working for international literary cooperation and freedom of the press.
The prize, established in 1984, honors writers, journalists and publishers who face persecution, threats or indeed exile from their home countries.
Youssef was born in the Rashidia Palestinian refugee camp in Southern Lebanon, in 1965. Since 1990, he has lived in London, where he studied philosophy. As a novelist, he has published four books of fiction, of which "Gaza Blues: Different Stories" (reviewed in The Daily Star earlier this year) is the most recent. He writes in both Arabic and English and is also an essayist with interests ranging from literature, politics, philosophy and cultural studies. "Gaza Blues" is particularly notable in that it is a collaboration of short stories between Youssef and Israeli writer Etgar Keret based on their very different backgrounds and experiences reflecting the reality of living in Israel and in Lebanon during the intifadas. The writing by both, and particularly Youssef, is hard-edged and compelling and is a provocative piece of art in that they both share the belief that their work can and should coexist - as Israelis and Palestinians will have to learn to coexist in peace and the harder point of equality.
A literary study of the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani is Youssef's next book forthcoming from Biann Press in Beirut.
Previous winners of the Tucholsky prize, which is worth 150,000 kronor ($21.300) and is named for German writer Kurt Tucholsky, who fled to Sweden in the 1930s from Nazi Germany, include the Indian-born author Salman Rushdie and exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin.
Yet there are examples in current theater productions where references to Palestinians in a more provocative sense are also being placed clearly to engender reaction.
In the current and very contemporary production in London of Richard Wagner's "Twilight of the Gods," the culmination of the Ring Cycle by the English National Opera, Brunnhilde, played by Kathleen Broderick, appears as a female suicide bomber on stage prior to blowing herself up along with the cast. The opera itself, which examines Wagner's profound observations on human frailty, is about a cursed ring that sees the character of Hagen murder Brunnhilde's lover Siegfried, which in turn provokes her to kill herself and everyone else. Yet her sacrifice results in a world free of the ring's curse. It is a very dangerous and thought-provoking contemporary reference - does it promote self-sacrifice and the murder of others if the result is positive change? Or does it argue that if you drive someone to despair and the end of all hope that they will react in desperate ways?
Whatever the answer to that question, the suicide bomber reference yet proves how theater can bring to the fore contemporary issues and politics and raise interest in world issues.
Though whether Rachel Corrie knew of the power of her writing to move and provoke is something we will never know.
TWO DRAMAS BRING MIDEAST POLITICS TO LIFE
Going Out in London: Two Dramas Bring Mideast Politics to Life
Bloomberg
April 26, 2005
www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000102&sid=aRGJTU93.lRY&refer=uk
Lives under political threat form the basis of two absorbing dramas now playing in London.
Frank McGuinness's "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me," is as perfectly crafted and compassionate a play as you could wish for. What's more, its focus on three men taken hostage is, sadly, as pertinent now as at its first appearance in 1992.
The subject matter may sound somber yet the most striking aspects of the play, a hit in London and on Broadway, are its resourceful humor and the profound degree of humanity that rise up from the script. Not one word has been changed for the first West End revival of a play whose simple though effective premise sounds like the beginning of a racist joke: an American, an Irishman and an Englishman are locked up in a cell.
Taken hostage in the Lebanon, these three men are, in turn, a doctor (Jonny Lee Miller), a journalist (Aidan Gillen) and a lecturer who specializes in ancient English (David Threlfall). Their nationalities are far from accidental yet McGuinness uses them as a springboard to questions about home and belonging.
When the Englishman resorts to acting out British heroine Virginia Wade winning the 1997 Wimbledon Ladies Final, it reduces the audience to gales of laughter. It also dramatizes arguments about the nature of identity that a lesser playwright would have presented as unleavened speechifying.
The entire play takes place in their windowless cell. Rather than dwelling on dulling repetitive angst, the true subject matter is hope and human invention. Struggling, sometimes in vain, to beat despair, the men develop their imaginations to an extraordinary degree.
Indeed, the play's great trick is to parallel the imaginative work the characters do with that done by the audience. All three characters mentally lasso each other and us as they create ever more vivid stories, recite touching unsent letters home and act out movies spun from their lives.
Unlike prison dramas from "Midnight Express" to "The Shawshank Redemption," this play eschews sensationalism and the emotional manipulation of showing direct cruelty. The men's captors and guards are completely absent, which paradoxically raises rather than lessens the intensely concentrated threat.
Clearly intent on demarcating the differences between the men, director Dominic Dromgoole has cast three very different actors. What he hasn't done is make their acting styles cohere.
Gillen is nicely edgy but we need to see him listening to the other men and he is too self-absorbed. Threlfall builds an impressively gauche characterization of a nerdy Englishman yet you're so aware of how expertly he maintains the act that much of the pathos is lost. The best performance is from Miller. Expressive even when in silent repose, his is the least showy performance. When he speaks, you hear the play, not the actor.
'My Name Is Rachel Corrie'
Although by no means biographical, McGuinness's play sprang from the case of the abduction and incarceration of Brian Keenan and John McCarthy. By contrast, "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" at the Royal Court Upstairs is autobiography and nothing else.
Rachel Corrie was a 23-year-old American who was killed when she was mowed down by an Israeli bulldozer in Palestine in March 2003. Actor/director Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner have edited her diary entries and e-mails home to paint a powerfully affecting portrait of young hope.
The earliest text stems from a diary entry written when Corrie was a 12-year-old living in Olympia, Washington. Even at that age her voice is mature and distinctive. The quality of her writing and her passionate vision of the world makes her tragic death all the more potent.
Rubble of Palestine
Rickman's production, unmediated by any other characters or voices, is stripped down yet surprisingly theatrical. Hildegard Bechtler has adapted the 65-seat auditorium to create a long corridor of stage space with Rachel's teenage bedroom at one end and a tree amid the rubble of Palestine at the other with her computer set up against crumbling plaster and a breezeblock wall scattered with bullet holes in between.
Unusually bright and committed to ideas of understanding and peace, Rachel left her studies and went to join other foreign nationals in Gaza to work with the International Solidarity Movement. Her first diary entry there makes the important distinction between the policies of Israel as a state and Jewish people. "There is very strong pressure to conflate the two. I try to ask myself, whose interest does it serve to identify Israeli policy with all Jewish people."
Yet throughout the 90-minute presentation, we watch her ever- increasing pro-Palestinian position. The play is admirably faithful to her vision. By presenting only one perspective, however, it never gives voice to an Israeli position. That, for some, will be a stumbling block.
Youthful Zeal
Megan Dodds is superb as Rachel. Extremely good at capturing the zeal of youth, she is also alive to the wit and warmth of the early part of the diaries. She never resorts to winning easy sympathy by soft-pedaling the earnestness which occasionally surfaces in the writing.
The vigor with which she conveys the arguments about violent versus non-violent resistance in an e-mail to her mother -- her last words -- makes as strong a case as you could imagine.
The dignity of the entire production goes a long way toward making up for a partial view of a crucial political reality.
[This is an update to several previous dispatches on this list detailing the admiration for Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime by the Fatah regime in the territory which is slated to become a Palestinian state.]
[Note by Tom Gross]
In another sign that not that much has changed in terms of Palestinian Authority attitudes to democracy and human rights since Yasser Arafat was succeed by his deputy, Mohammed Abbas, an advertisement warmly sending birthday greetings to Saddam Hussein was published on Sunday in the official Palestinian Authority daily newspaper, Al Hayat Al Jadida.
Saddam Hussein continues to be seen as an example of good governance and strong leadership by the Palestinian leadership and much of its brainwashed population.
Senior Palestinian academic have also called for violent attacks against Americans in Iraq (and Israelis everywhere), but no teachers' union in America, Britain or elsewhere has called upon them to be boycotted.
More mass graves of many hundreds of Iraqi Kurdish women and children civilians executed on Saddam's orders were found only a few days ago, but it seems that neither Fatah officials nor many leftist Western university teachers care.
-- Tom Gross
The following is the text of the birthday greeting published in the PA daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, on May 1, 2005:
"Blessings to the leader of the masses, Saddam Hussein the faithful, the legal President of the Iraqi Republic on the occasion of his 68th birthday.
Two members of the leadership of the Fatah Movement, Bader Tewfik Hassan "Abu Yunis" and Fuzi Kamel Shahrur, express to the leader of the nation and her warrior knight SADDAM HUSSEIN
The president of the Iraqi Republic best wishes on the occasion of his 68th birthday, and bless all of the faithful among the Iraqi and Arab nations, who support and defend justice.
We wish him long life for the sake of Iraq and to free the Arab nation from the enslavement of foreign imperialism. Oh, the glory of victory, with the help of Allah."
(Information and translation courtesy of Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, of Palestinian Media Watch. Itamar Marcus is a long-time subscriber to this email list.)
"Refuse everything to the Jews as a nation" -- Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, a liberal aristocrat.
[Note by Tom Gross]
Attached below is a lengthy and well-researched essay by David Pryce-Jones, the British political analyst, who is a leading expert on French, Arab and Soviet foreign policy (and also a long-time subscriber to this email list). It appears in the May issue of the influential American magazine Commentary, and I thank Neal Kozodoy, the editor-in-chief of Commentary (and also a long-time subscriber to this email list) for making the full text of this important article available in advance of its publication this week, so that it could be summarized for recipients of this email list.
Using documents from the archives of the French foreign ministry (generally known as the Quai d'Orsay), David Pryce-Jones explores the historical basis for French perceptions of both Arabs and Jews, and for French antipathy to Zionism.
A POLICY FORMED WELL-BEFORE MASS MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO FRANCE
Pryce-Jones examines the period from 1789 until the present. Although many commentators today point to the fact that a large number of Muslim Arabs live in France, this article makes clear that France's policies towards Israel were decided long before most of these immigrants arrived.
Pryce-Jones appraises the Dreyfus affair, the rise of Zionism, World War I and the Balfour declaration to chart France's attitude to the Jewish people.
He notes the early recognition by French officialdom that an effective Zionist state would probably orient itself toward the English-speaking world and thereby thwart France's ambitions in the Middle East.
He observes that in the inter-war years, virulent anti-Semitism blocked the path of many Jewish refugees trying to flee Europe. The Vichy government compounded this during the Nazi occupation of France.
THE FRENCH WRITERS AND ANTI-SEMITISM
Pryce-Jones also looks at the role of French writers, many of whom entered the Quai d'Orsay. For instance, Paul Claudel (1868-1955), who combined a career in diplomacy with the pursuit of literature, used Jewish characters for literary effect. In one of his books, for example, one of his Jewish characters says: "For us Jews, there's no little scrap of earth so large as a gold coin."
HELPING HAJ AMIN AL-HUSSEINI TO ESCAPE
Following the World War II, the French authorities held (in some comfort) Haj Amin al-Husseini, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem, who during the war had been a close ally of and collaborator with Hitler. But by October 1946 Haj Amin, safely tucked away in Cairo sent his thanks to the French government for its hospitality and tacit approval of his escape.
Pryce-Jones also looks at the life of Louis Massignon, another Frenchmen who believed France was a "Muslim power" and reinforced the Quai d'Orsay in its support of the Arab world.
RELEASING THE OLYMPIC MURDERER ABU DAOUD
The role of France towards the nascent Jewish state was probably most positive in the mid 1950's, but since then French policy has been hostile to Israeli interests.
In the 1970s, Abu Daoud, a terrorist at the head of the group responsible for the murder of Israeli Olympic athletes at Munich in 1972, was arrested for murder while in Paris but almost instantly released to Algeria.
JACQUES CHIRAC, YASSER ARAFAT, SADDAM HUSSEIN
Pryce-Jones considers the often stormy relations between the present French President Jacques Chirac and Israel, including Chirac's support for Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein. This partly led to the diminishing power of French leverage in the Middle East and "has evidently been an intellectual illusion all along, and highly dangerous to the interests of everyone concerned."
-- Tom Gross
FRANCE COULD BE SAUDI STRATEGIC ALLY
Adding to David Pryce-Jones's article, Tom Gross writes:
Saudi Arabia may soon expand relations with France to try and counteract the kingdom's deteriorating strategic ties with the United States and Britain.
A French defense memorandum released last week noted an "understanding" that could pave the way for the French sale of up to $15 billion in aircraft and security projects to Riyadh.
EXTRACTS FROM THE ARTICLE:
"REFUSE EVERYTHING TO THE JEWS AS A NATION"
Jews, Arabs, and French Diplomacy: A Special Report
By David Pryce-Jones
Commentary Magazine
May 2005
The resounding slogan of "liberty, equality, fraternity," leaves no room for racism in the French state, in theory. In practice, over the two centuries since that slogan was coined, rulers of France have tried with varying success to fit two peoples—Arabs and Jews—into their grand design for the French nation and for its standing in the world.
... The official position taken toward French Jews goes back to the revolution of 1789. In December of that year, during a debate over granting citizenship to the country's Jewish minority, Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, a liberal aristocrat, declared in the Constituent Assembly: "Everything must be refused to the Jews as a nation, and everything granted to the Jews as individuals"
... Depending on the figure one accepts, Muslim Arabs outnumber Jews in France by a factor of at least six to one, perhaps by as much as eight to one. As the number of Arabs rises, and as France fails to deliver on its promise of equality and prosperity, the question of their place as a minority has come increasingly to the fore. That question has been made all the more complicated by the fact that, over the decades, Arabs and Jews alike have transformed themselves from passive subjects of history into active agents on the world stage, acquiring new identities and modern nation-states of their own.
... The French foreign ministry, generally referred to as the Quai d'Orsay, is the institution above all others in France that has been responsible for realizing the state's grand design and the political outcome that has followed from it. The archives of that institution, along with the testimony of generations of diplomats writing in their memoirs, show how a small number of highly motivated and carefully selected men have fostered preconceptions of Arabs and Jews that have now come to threaten the integrity of the French nation.
... In "The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War, 1898-1914" (1993), H. B. Haynes writes that entry to the Quai d'Orsay was determined by "nepotism, patronage, and political persuasion [that was] Catholic and hostile to Jews and Protestants and the parliamentary system"
... By the 1920's, the diplomatic service was open to Jews, but they would have needed thick skins to survive... The historical record displays evidence of unremitting hostility to Jews, decade after decade… Seeking to show who the Jews really were, an unsigned report dated December 2, 1925 drew attention to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Although this work, purporting to show evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, had already by then been exposed as a czarist forgery, the author gives credence to its "facts" and concludes that, if the matter is to be taken seriously, have to deal with a really diabolical plan.
That same year, the French ambassador in Warsaw reported that a local Zionist conference constituted an appeal for special privileges by Jews unwilling to accept any idea of Polish nationality, or even of simple loyalty. Covering another Zionist congress in Cracow ten years later, the succeeding ambassador to Poland adapted this same critique to the changing tenor of the times: "Basing themselves on conceptions that are more racial than religious, they aspire to set up on both banks of the Jordan a Jewish state conceived on the fascist model." This ambassador appears to have been among the first to draw a comparison between Zionism and Nazism, likening the Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky to Hitler.
... In the immediate aftermath of Hitler's invasion of Austria in March 1938, the United States invited 28 European and Latin American governments to a conference at Evian to discuss how to facilitate the emigration of political refugees. By tacit agreement, and ostensibly for fear of stoking anti-Semitism, there was no open reference to Jews. Nothing of substance was agreed upon at the conference, which has been called "the Jewish Munich." In the judgment of one authority, the historian Catherine Nicault, "the absolute lack of generosity in French policy was less striking [at Evian] than the indifference toward even keeping up any appearance of it"; she also notes outright and frequent anti-Semitic pronouncements on the part of French officials.
... Zionists with whom French diplomats were in contact are reviled or condescended to in various documents. David Ben-Gurion is said to be "avid with ambition." At the top right-hand corner of a personal dossier devoted to him are the hand-written words, "Nationality: Jewish." The dossier of Moshe Shertok (afterward Sharett) carries the same identification, and a separate note says, "Like all his compatriots he is highly gifted as a journalist of propaganda, but much less as a politician." Abba Eban "possesses the art of playing offended and making a travesty of facts." Of Menachem Begin the French consul in Haifa, Pierre Landy, wrote: "Of modest demeanor, he has the humble exterior of a small merchant."
... In the decades after the 1967 war, France steadily nourished the ambition to lead what would become the European Union and to assemble a bloc powerful enough to rival the United States. In line with this, the principal objective in the Middle East was to broker a peace that would satisfy Arab demands on Israel and thus eliminate American influence.
... Outright appeasement of the Arabs was complicated both by French self-interest and by Arab resentments over a lost heritage perceived as glorious. Measures nevertheless were taken. They included the pursuit of favorable oil contracts, especially in the aftermath of the 1973 war and the OPEC embargo; the sale of Mirage fighter planes to Libya and the building of the Osirak nuclear reactor for Iraq; a vote at the United Nations accusing Israel of committing war crimes in the occupied territories; the denial of landing rights to American aircraft during the 1973 Yom Kippur war; permission granted to the PLO to open an office in Paris, and the reception of Yasir Arafat at the Elysée Palace; and diplomatic initiatives to protect Saddam Hussein from the consequences of his multiple aggressions. With the exception of the former Soviet Union, no country did more than France to promote a PLO state, and thereby to endanger the existence of Israel.
... Recently the Quai d'Orsay has condemned Israel's efforts to contain Hizballah in southern Lebanon, and criticized the annexation of Rachel's Tomb near Bethlehem. The foreign ministry dragged out the effort to block the Hizballah television station al-Manar from spreading its hatred of Jews via a Paris-based satellite, and the French government still steadfastly refuses to designate Hizballah itself as a terrorist organization. Sophie Pommier, the official responsible for following Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, revealed her emotional involvement in her work by plastering the walls of her office with portraits of Arafat.
French consulates have been forbidden from recognizing Jewish weddings solemnized by West Bank rabbis. Jacques Huntziger, the French ambassador to Israel, slammed his fist on the table and left the room when the parents of three Israeli soldiers captured by Hizballah asked him to intervene on their behalf after a visit by Chirac to Lebanon. Gérard Araud, the current French ambassador, declared in December 2004 that "Israelis suffer from a neurosis, a veritable mental disorder that makes them anti-French." At a London dinner party, Daniel Bernard, ambassador to England and previously the Quai d'Orsay's official spokesman, called Israel "a shitty little country." And so it goes...
JEWS, ARABS, AND FRENCH DIPLOMACY: A SPECIAL REPORT
Jews, Arabs, and French Diplomacy: A Special Report
By David Pryce-Jones
Commentary Magazine
May 2005
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11905029_1
The resounding slogan of "liberty, equality, fraternity," leaves no room for racism in the French state, in theory. In practice, over the two centuries since that slogan was coined, rulers of France have tried with varying success to fit two peoples—Arabs and Jews—into their grand design for the French nation and for its standing in the world. Today, as long-held but misconceived ambitions collide, racism with its hates and fears increasingly plagues France, calling into question the relationship that the country's Arab and Jewish minorities have with each other, that each has with the state, and that the state has with Arab nations on the one hand and with Israel on the other.
The official position taken toward French Jews goes back to the revolution of 1789. In December of that year, during a debate over granting citizenship to the country's Jewish minority, Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, a liberal aristocrat, declared in the Constituent Assembly: "Everything must be refused to the Jews as a nation, and everything granted to the Jews as individuals." This idea was soon enshrined in law. Behind it lay the suspicion that Jews had their own brand of nationalism, one that cut across the French nationalism emerging from the revolution. To the French elite, moreover, Jews have consistently seemed to be the conspiratorial tools of others, first of Germany and Russia, then of Britain, and finally, in the 20th century, of Zionists.
What is remarkable is that, in spite of the unregenerate anti-Semitism revealed and unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century, in spite even of French participation in the Nazi mass murder of World War II, French Jews have generally accommodated themselves to the state's view of the necessary relation between them, and have been content, at least until recently, to downplay the ethnic element in their own identity as a people. This has, however, been less true of those hailing from French-speaking North Africa, who today make up the majority of the 600,000-strong community. In addition, the return of anti-Semitism during the last few years in France has willy-nilly raised the ethnic consciousness of even the most assimilated elements of the older community.
* * *
On the Muslim and Arab side, although virtually no Muslims lived in France until the 20th century, the French state long regarded its vital interests as tied up in Arab lands. Napoleon Bonaparte's 1798 campaign in Egypt and the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 were military adventures undertaken with the express purpose of emulating imperial Britain: England might have India, but France could move into, and ultimately colonize, the Arab world. Moreover, France traditionally claimed the right to protect Catholics and Christianity in the Ottoman empire, and in the Holy Land in particular; in 1843, a French consulate opened in Jerusalem. By the 1850's, Napoleon III and his administration had elaborated the concept of a "Franco-Arab kingdom," grandiosely expanding this to visualize France itself as "a Muslim power" (une puissance musulmane).
In a gesture aimed at rewarding North African Arabs for their service in World War I, the Great Mosque of Paris was opened in 1926. But large-scale immigration did not begin until after the end of the Algerian war in 1958, when 250,000 so-called "harkis," Algerians who had opposed the nationalist movement, sought refuge in France. In the 1960's and 1970's, immigrants arrived steadily from each of the newly independent Maghreb countries. Initially they were allowed to come only as guest workers seeking to better themselves and return home, but a change of law in 1974 gave them residence and other rights.
The size of today's community is a matter of contention. A figure of upward of 6 million has long been accepted, but Nicolas Sarkozy, a one-time minister of the interior now aspiring to be president, and the semi-official newspaper Le Monde have both spoken of 5 million, while the demographer Michèle Tribalat has reduced this further to 3.65 million. Muslims tend to congregate in the outskirts of the great cities, where bad housing conditions and a lack of employment generate all the ills and violence of alienation. More than 5,000 mosques serve as community centers; at the national level, there is a representative Muslim institution, the Conseil français du culte musulman (CFCM). Some of the demands or practices of Islam being incompatible with bedrock republican secularism, embarrassing conflicts have arisen like the one over the right of Muslim girls to wear the hijab in school; it took the French authorities fifteen years to decide that this defied the constitution.
Depending on the figure one accepts, Muslim Arabs outnumber Jews in France by a factor of at least six to one, perhaps by as much as eight to one. As the number of Arabs rises, and as France fails to deliver on its promise of equality and prosperity, the question of their place as a minority has come increasingly to the fore. That question has been made all the more complicated by the fact that, over the decades, Arabs and Jews alike have transformed themselves from passive subjects of history into active agents on the world stage, acquiring new identities and modern nation-states of their own.
* * *
For Arabs, one of the most evident signs of self-identity is hostility toward Jews and Israel. In a 2003 collection of essays about Islam in France, the sociologist Barbara Lefèbvre offered typical examples of this prejudice in the younger generation. Addressing a teacher, a boy in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis quotes his father: "There will be a final war between Muslims and Jews, and the Jews will be destroyed; it says so in the Qur'an." In another Paris district, a teacher overhears Arab children telling Jewish children: "Jewish dogs, we're going to burn Israel, go back to your country."
Of course, Arab aggression against Jews has been rising everywhere in the last decades. But it is particularly virulent in France, where it has been accompanied by occasional loss of life, street violence against individuals, and bombings of synagogues, restaurants, offices, and shops. For a long time, the authorities maintained that this was mere hooliganism rather than the manifestation of a vengeful jihad. (Many Arab ghettos are outside the law: no-go areas for the police.) But as it became clear that imams were using their mosques to preach anti-Semitism and the hatred of all non-Muslims, the agents of law enforcement at last began to take action. A number of extremists have been deported, and the police have been able to foil and arrest terrorists coming from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Morocco.
But this is to raise a much larger issue—namely, the differential attitude of the French elite toward Arabs and Jews. Much has been written about the role of European academics, intellectuals, and journalists in excusing, justifying, or sympathizing with Muslim anti-Semitism. But no less pertinent, and arguably more so, is the role of policy-makers. Ideas and attitudes work downward from the political elite that conceives them to the people who have to live with the consequences.
The French foreign ministry, generally referred to as the Quai d'Orsay, is the institution above all others in France that has been responsible for realizing the state's grand design and the political outcome that has followed from it. The archives of that institution, along with the testimony of generations of diplomats writing in their memoirs, show how a small number of highly motivated and carefully selected men have fostered preconceptions of Arabs and Jews that have now come to threaten the integrity of the French nation.
THE QUAI D'ORSAY
Situated next to the National Assembly on the left bank of the Seine, the Quai d'Orsay occupies a splendid building in the opulent style of 19th-century Paris. Here, both the site and the architecture declare, is where the nation's fate is shaped, by men of exceptional intelligence. Many of these men have had literary as well as diplomatic gifts: a huge body of memoirs harks back with nostalgia to the enduring club-like atmosphere of the place, symbolized in the tea ceremony at five o'clock where the Quai d'Orsay in its heyday used to gather and consolidate its collective thoughts.
Recurrent governmental instability has reinforced the importance of the Quai d'Orsay. Between September 1870 and August 1914, for example, there were no fewer than 30 foreign ministers of France; the pace of turnover was just as turbulent during the Fourth Republic (1949-59), improving only in today's Fifth. Although a few foreign ministers have been able to impose their own policy objectives, the majority have come and gone with bewildering rapidity and to little effect. Prime ministers have further devalued the position by often reserving it for themselves. In sum, foreign ministers have had to rely disproportionately on their permanent civil servants: not only their private staffs but the secretary-general of the Quai d'Orsay, also referred to as the political director, and the heads of its various departments.
From the start, the ministry was staffed by self-selected members of the aristocracy. Competitive examinations were introduced in 1894, but this and other reforms mainly served to perpetuate the ministry's sense of itself, handed down by the old to the young. In successive generations, the Cambons, Herbettes, Margeries, François-Poncets, and Courcels became nothing less than dynasties. In The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War, 1898-1914 (1993), H. B. Haynes writes that entry to the Quai d'Orsay was determined by "nepotism, patronage, and political persuasion [that was] Catholic and hostile to Jews and Protestants and the parliamentary system."
Indeed. A document in the archives from October 1893 reveals that "an Israelite" by the name of Paul Frédéric-Jean Grunebaum had applied to the personnel office of the Quai d'Orsay and wished to know "if this fact [was] of a kind to forbid him access to a diplomatic or consular career." The margin carries a note from Louis Herbette, secretary general at the time: "I saw M. Grunebaum, who spontaneously withdrew his request. . . . He bowed with good grace to the motives dictating the department's decision."
By the 1920's, the diplomatic service was open to Jews, but they would have needed thick skins to survive. As J.-B. Barbier, who joined the Quai d'Orsay in 1904, commented in his memoirs, "the career had no Jews among its members, at least as far as the important governing levels were concerned."* And this was a matter of some gratification since Jews, Barbier held, belonged to an "often parasitical ethnic element," and the way some of them had managed to penetrate the service was "disastrous." Against one of them, Jean Marx, the head of overseas cultural programs, Barbier would wage a passionate campaign as the epitome of the "anti-national Jew" who, duly backed by "International Jewry," had recruited unreliable and even traitorous people of his own kind.
JEWS IN THE MIND OF THE QUAI D'ORSAY
The historical record displays evidence of unremitting hostility to Jews, decade after decade.
In 1840, a rumor spread in Damascus that an Italian Capuchin friar and his Arab servant had disappeared. The French consul in the city, Comte Ulysse de Ratti-Menton, immediately accused the Jewish community of ritual murder, and persuaded the Ottoman governor to arrest Jewish notables and hold Jewish children hostage. Some of the notables died under torture; others were forcibly converted to Islam.
The scandal rocked Europe, but Ratti-Menton was unrepentant and the Quai d'Orsay defended him. In the National Assembly, Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers complained that Jews were "besieging all the chancelleries with their petitions." When Arab media today depict ritual murder as a fact of Jewish life, they are retailing, whether they know it or not, lessons learned from French teachers long ago.
But the seminal event of the 19th century was the 1890's trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely accused of betraying military secrets to the Germans. The conspiracy to prove Dreyfus guilty of treason was hatched in the ministry of war; the Quai d'Orsay stayed at a watchful distance. But when the guilty verdict was declared in December 1894, and partisans of Dreyfus's innocence refused to let the injustice stand, a number of ambassadors could be heard lamenting the damage to France that the case was doing. The brilliant but slippery Maurice Palèologue represented the foreign ministry in 1899 at Dreyfus's successful appeal. He saw the documents, met the officers who had forged the incriminating evidence, looked hard at Dreyfus's face as the reprieve was about to be announced, and thought he could detect there a perduring Jewish trait: "an immense pride beneath a mask of humility." Fortunately, he would confide in a letter to a colleague, he himself was immune as a diplomat from prosecution.
Few men left a greater mark on the Quai d'Orsay than Paul Cambon, born in 1843, and his brother Jules, two years younger. Both were powerful personalities. Paul, ambassador in London for 22 years, was a principal architect of the Entente Cordiale with Britain. Jules served in Washington. Both were also involved with Arab affairs, Paul as resident in Tunisia, Jules as governor-general of Algeria. Paul believed that Dreyfus, as a Jew, was a traitor by definition, and appears to have changed his mind only once the appeal process had started; his brother Jules, in common with many other colleagues in the diplomatic service, persisted in thinking Dreyfus guilty to the end. To one of those colleagues (Auguste Gérard), the anti-Dreyfus forces were the "natural defenders" of the nation, the "true representatives of France and its genius."
Pogroms in czarist Russia were occurring at the same time as the Dreyfus trial in France. A. Bompard, ambassador in Saint Petersburg from 1902 to 1908 and a man much esteemed at the Quai d'Orsay, wrote in an August 1903 report: "I pass over in silence anti-Jewish disturbances such as those in Kishinev because they are, so to speak, on the rebound from agrarian disturbances. The Jewish population . . . is a nursery of nihilists and agitators." A year later, writing to Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé, he compared the Finns, "wise and calm," to the Jews, "detested but [economically] indispensable at the same time, themselves full of hatred as they hold the people to ransom and undermine authority."
In due course Paléologue succeeded Bompard at Saint Petersburg. Czarist policy toward the Jews, he asserted, seemed devised to sustain
"their hereditary defects and their bad passions, to exasperate their hatred for goyim, to plunge them deeper into their talmudic prejudices, to affirm them in their state of permanent inner rebellion, to bring the indestructible hope of promised reparations shining in their eyes. . . . [T]he vengeful and vindictive stubbornness of the Jews could not have found a more favorable climate."
In 1915, as World War I raged, he sent a laconic telegram: "Since the beginning of the war, Russian Jews have not had to submit to any collective violence. . . . In the zone of operations a few hundred Jews have been hanged for espionage: nothing more."
THE CATHOLIC FACTOR
In the late 19th century, the French built up their position simultaneously in North Africa and in the Ottoman provinces comprising Syria, Lebanon, and the Holy Land. In the latter case, the process was slow and piecemeal, often promoted by pious and wealthy individuals. Comte Paul de Piellat, for instance, settled in Jerusalem, purchasing real estate and bequeathing it to the Catholic Church. The French had hospitals in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Nablus, as well as monasteries and seminaries and several churches; they also owned and operated the Jeru-salem-Jaffa railway.
In 1888 the Vatican decreed that Catholics and Catholic institutions in the Levant should henceforth look for protection exclusively to France. Prime Minister Jules Ferry, most imperial of French politicians, held that "this protectorate of Christians in the Orient is in some sense part of our Mediterranean domain." Aspiring to counteract the British, who were then consolidating their hold on Egypt, Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux believed that, through its Catholic protectorate, France was now the only European power "capable of acting without fatal contention but side by side with Muslim monotheism."
Treaties in 1901 with the Turkish sultan and in 1913 with the Young Turks protected France's privileged position in the Holy Land, then still under Ottoman dominion. A Comité de l'Asie Française was founded in 1901; eight years later, a second committee was formed to develop "our moral, economic, and political standing in the Orient." These appeared to be building blocks toward the goal of becoming a true "puissance musulmane."
The anti-clericalism of the French Left, and France's eventual break with the Vatican, cut right across any such sweeping Catholic ambitions. Soon, too, Germany, Italy, and Russia would challenge France's position, expanding the institutions belonging to their own respective religions. Kaiser Wilhelm's visit to the Holy Land in 1898 represented one such open challenge.
ZIONISM vs. FRENCH AMBITIONS
The rise of political Zionism promised to bestow a modern national identity on the Jews, one that would altogether overturn the French state's preferred definition of who they were. French diplomats in central and eastern Europe, where the most ardent Zionists could be found, were quick to register dismay and to search for the causes, open or occult, of this disturbing new development. Writing from Bucharest in June 1902, L. Descoy regretted the "extreme enthusiasm" of that city's Jewish community at the arrival of Bernard Lazare, a gifted French Jewish polemicist and early Zionist, suggesting that it had been whipped up by a newspaper "whose leading editors are Israelites." In Budapest, Vicomte de Fontenay, in charge of the consulate, reported in August 1906 that, for the Magyar population, the advent of Zionism was "a new cloud" on the horizon, one likely to grow "worse with time." In February 1912, Max Chouttier, consul in Salonika, relayed warnings against Zionism in the official local press, expressing the hope that these warnings would "give the Jewish communities pause for thought and encourage them to oppose Germano-Zionist propaganda."
G. Deville, minister in Athens, commented adversely on the role in Salonika of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the school system set up by French Jews to promote Jewish education and culture in the Middle East. To Deville, the Alliance was screening its true ambitions; its Parisian director "might be a good Frenchman, but those of his religion in Salonika think only of serving themselves and not of serving France... In these circumstances, is it to our benefit to upset the Greeks in order to flatter Jewish pride?" In Le Mirage Oriental (1910), Louis Bertrand, another polished writer-diplomat, wrote of the "displeasing" Jews he had met in Ottoman Palestine, with "their hybrid clothes, half European, half Oriental, dirty, with glowering looks . . . hordes crazed with poverty and mysticism."
In the Holy Land itself, Zionism had implications far greater than it did in Europe: by definition, it represented a rival to French expansionism and France's Catholic protectorate. The spontaneous reaction was twofold—to heap contempt on Jewish nationalism and to sponsor Arab nationalism in opposition to it.
Najib Azoury, a Maronite Christian from Beirut who had once been employed in the Ottoman bureaucracy in Jerusalem but now lived in Paris, published a booklet, Le Réveil de la nation arabe, predicting that Jews and Arabs were destined to fight until one eliminated the other. The Quai d'Orsay apparently subsidized a journal, L'Indépendence arabe, that this unsavory character began to put out in 1907, and paid for a meeting in Paris in June 1913 at which 23 Arabs from Syria and the Holy Land effectively launched the Arab nationalist movement.
* * *
After World War I, two highly restricted groups of specialists in the Quai d'Orsay handled the redrawing of the map of the Middle East in the wake of the demise of the Ottoman empire. The personnel overlapped, and were of a single mind: France already controlled the Arab western shores of the Mediterranean, and now could add the eastern ones, what these experts referred to as la Syrie intégrale or Greater Syria (that is, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine). The question before them was how to turn both Arab nationalism and Zionism to their purposes.
The background was as follows. François Georges-Picot had been counselor at the wartime French embassy in London. In secret negotiations in 1916 with Sir Mark Sykes, a Conservative member of Parliament, he reached what he believed was an agreement granting France possession of la Syrie intégrale after the war. The Germans, it was suspected, were about to issue a proclamation of support for Zionism, and this could swing Russian Jews to their side, with ominous consequences for the outcome of the war; American Jews were thought to exercise a comparable influence on their country's policy. Therefore, according to André Tardieu, the French high commissioner in the U.S. and a future prime minister, the right of Jews to self-determination should be taken into consideration, lest "certain elements in American Jewry" lose interest in helping to recover Alsace and Lorraine for France.
Others similarly saw the Jews as holding France's postwar fate in their hands. On May 7, 1917 Jean Gout, head of the Asian section of the foreign ministry with responsibility for the Ottoman provinces, sent a memorandum to Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau:
"The millenarian hopes of the Jews, especially the proletarians of Poland and Russia, are not socialistic as their social standing might suggest, nor national as the declarations of their intellectuals pretend, but they are essentially talmudic, that is to say religious. These poor devils have been nurtured on myths of misery which gives them a glimpse of Jerusalem as the end of their ills. . . . Even intelligent and educated Jews who have come to the top in countries with equal opportunities cherish for generations in a corner of their heart the dream of the old ghettos. Thanks to their wealth and the links they preserve among themselves, and the pressure they exert on ignorant governments, they represent an international weight."
An earlier proposal, to help create a small autonomous Jewish state with Hebron as its capital and Gaza as its port, had prompted Jules Cambon to comment bitingly that the Jews there could "grow oranges and exploit each other." But since the powers were all bidding for Jewish favor, the French could, too; in June 1917, Cambon wrote a letter assuring the Zionist leadership of French support "in the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that land from which the people of Israel were exiled so long ago." This letter was no sooner sent than regretted, as the Quai d'Orsay rapidly returned to circulating anti-Zionist memoranda and bombarding the British with demands to abstain from any action that might raise unrealizable Jewish hopes.
That November, Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, issued the declaration bearing his name. It was far more supportive of Zionism than Cambon's letter. The British government, Balfour wrote, was in favor of "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. With 150,000 soldiers fighting the Turks to France's 800, the British were able to propose and dispose. On Christmas day 1917, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem with Georges-Picot in his entourage. At a picnic, the latter suggested setting up the civil administration he thought he had negotiated with Sykes. Also present was Lawrence of Arabia, and his description of Allenby's scornful response is one of the more famous passages in Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
In December, a French diplomat in the embassy in London reported that, although wealthy English Jews were hostile to the Balfour Declaration, the enthusiastic view of poor and immigrant Jews was that "the Israelite race was superior to all others; it possessed colonies in all the countries and one day it shall dominate the world." An unsigned position paper from around the same time suggested that Zionists, who drew their strength from the mysticism of Russian-Polish Jewry, were trying to spread their nefarious ideas to Jews in Algeria and Morocco, thereby seeking "to exploit great-power rivalry." The author had some classic advice: "Our Jewish policy in North Africa is necessarily linked to our Muslim policy. We have to avoid Jewish nationalism, as also pan-Islamism or pan-Arabism, by favoring a slow and careful evolution in the direction of our civilisation."
On January 15, 1919, Foreign Minister Stephen Pichon instructed Paul Cambon to alert the British government to the Zionist danger, lest it become a cause for international trouble in the Middle East. "The Zionists must understand once and for all that there can be no question of constituting an independent Jewish state in Palestine, or even forming some sovereign Jewish body." Three days later Cambon reported back. He could hardly believe the conversation he had just had with Balfour. In his usual dilettantish manner (Cambon wrote), Balfour had said that "it would be interesting to be present at the reconstitution of the [ancient] Kingdom of Jerusalem." When Cambon protested that, according to the New Testament book of Revelation, such an event would signal the end of the world, Balfour rejoined: "It would be still more interesting to be present at the end of the world."
BETWEEN THE WARS
The postwar treaty of peace signed at Sèvres settled the disposition of the former Ottoman provinces. France was to have a mandate for Syria, but not for Greater Syria: Palestine would be incorporated into a British mandate. Since the British at least were Christian (where the Ottomans had been Muslim), France duly renounced the letter of its Catholic protectorate. But not the spirit: as a Catholic paper, L'Oeuvre d'Orient, editorialized, "It is inadmissible that the 'Country of Christ' should become the prey of Jewry and of Anglo-Saxon heresy. It must remain the inviolable inheritance of France and the Church." The Quai d'Orsay never ceased to play one side off against the other, at every level.
In October 1919, General Henri Gouraud arrived in Damascus to take up his appointment as French high commissioner and to scatter the minuscule number of Arab nationalists who sought to resist the French mandate. Meanwhile, Georges-Picot was alerting the Quai d'Orsay that British authorities in Jerusalem were finally becoming aware of growing Muslim restiveness, something that "could only be to the profit of our influence." During the first six months of 1920, Gouraud bombarded his superiors with anti-Zionist telegrams. Both Muslims and Christians, he wrote, were expecting conditions in Palestine to be worse under the British than under the Turks. Suggesting the need for a renewed Catholic protectorate, he thought the French "should take advantage of circumstances to enlarge the scope of this protectorate to include the Muslims whom we cannot leave alone and unarmed to face Zionism." A February 1920 dispatch states outright that Palestine would benefit from the guardianship of France.
Since the exact boundary between the French and British mandates remained uncertain, Gouraud's personal secretary, Robert de Caix, was dispatched to Jerusalem to discuss the issue with Sir Herbert Samuel, the British high commissioner. One historian, Peter A. Shambrook, has described de Caix as "the eminence grise at the Quai d'Orsay on the Levant question." In a preliminary letter dated October 19, 1920, de Caix confirmed what was already political orthodoxy in his circle: the British and the Jews were conspiring together against French interests. From the outset he felt personally slighted because he had been "received in a rather mediocre way." Samuel, he explained,
"represents in Palestine what it is appropriate to call Anglo-Jewish policy. This well-mannered English Jew, scraped clean of the ghetto, has been completely taken up in Jerusalem by his tribe, and he attends synagogue, accepts no invitations on the Sabbath, and on holy days goes only on foot. It is a strange phenomenon when one reflects on the evident ignominy of Jews from Galicia and other surrounding regions who are now flooding Palestine but who draft people like Sir Herbert into their buffoonery. Before doing anything worthwhile in the country, these people dream of spreading at our expense, and you may be sure that the complete Jewry of both hemispheres will apply a policy consisting of rejecting our frontier."
In a lengthy final report, de Caix mentioned another personal insult: Samuel had declined an invitation to dine at the French consulate on the Sabbath. British policy, de Caix elaborated, may have been intended to exploit Jewish strength against France, but was in fact being exploited by it. Jews had infiltrated the local administration, and British officials were either lying low or leaving the country in disgust. As for the Jews, their religion was only a means to an end—"passionate nationalism and a thirst for revenge." They would prove, he continued, harmful neighbors:
"The frequent revolutionary and prophetic spirit of the Jews derives from the Bolshevism of the colonists whom Eastern Europe is sending to Palestine. Through conviction, and also through their instinctive tendency to fragment societies whose cohesion might stand in the way of their expansion, these people will . . . try to break the traditional framework of religious confessions [in Lebanon and Syria] that are already threatened for other reasons."
British rule in Palestine, de Caix concluded, amounted to a kind of despoiling. It had been allowed to occur only because the French had sacrificed themselves for the Allied cause on the Western front. But the French language and French intellectual influence were and ought to have remained paramount in the Holy Land. After all, the principal door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was constructed "in the solid and massive ogival style born in the 12th century in the Ile de France." He ended with the consoling thought that the future of Zionism remained doubtful: more than any other people, the Jews had lost the habit of agriculture, and their settlement of the land was artificial, expensive, and divisive. "If under the British mandate the native [Arab] peoples have a tendency to react, there is every chance that they will try to maintain, as indeed they do in Egypt, the French culture, which retains such attraction."
On November 3, General Gouraud seconded the conclusions of de Caix's "remarkable report," adding his opinion that Zionism was a threat to Syria as well. The loss of the Catholic protectorate made the care of French institutions more essential than ever. Twelve days later, Georges-Picot in a telegram from Beirut informed the ministry that British authorities in Jerusalem were taking precautions against riots and warning Muslims that they would be held responsible for any disorder. "This [British] attitude can only benefit our influence, as irritation with Zionism is only growing among . . . Muslims." French consuls in mandatory Palestine became increasingly alarmist: Durieux in Haifa reported that the British were recruiting unemployed Jews as the core of a future Jewish army, and that Jewish and Protestant elements were attempting to cut the ground out from under the Catholics (that is, France). In May 1921, after riots in Jaffa, Durieux could at least write in relief that "our car was borne in triumph by the population crying 'long live France, down with the Jews. '"
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De Caix's interpretation of Zionism would have a lasting impact at the Quai d'Orsay. From the French protectorate of Morocco, Marshal Hubert Lyautey, perhaps the most respected spokesman for old-style French imperialism, reiterated in June 1923 that Zionism lacked any internal authenticity; at the same time, he advised extreme caution lest this doctrine, which had "received its directives from abroad, [and] served principally the interests of a determined power," be imported into Morocco.
Seeking to show who the Jews really were, an unsigned report dated December 2, 1925 drew attention to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Although this work, purporting to show evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, had already by then been exposed as a czarist forgery, the author gives credence to its "facts" and concludes that, if the matter is to be taken seriously, have to deal with a really diabolical plan. That same year, the French ambassador in Warsaw reported that a local Zionist conference constituted an appeal for special privileges by Jews unwilling to accept any idea of Polish nationality, or even of simple loyalty. Covering another Zionist congress in Cracow ten years later, the succeeding ambassador to Poland adapted this same critique to the changing tenor of the times: "Basing themselves on conceptions that are more racial than religious, they aspire to set up on both banks of the Jordan a Jewish state conceived on the fascist model." This ambassador appears to have been among the first to draw a comparison between Zionism and Nazism, likening the Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky to Hitler.
To be sure, one does find an occasional official disposed to a favorable view of Zionism, usually on the basis of first-hand experience. One such was Henry de Jouvenel, Gouraud's successor as high commissioner in Syria. He visited Jerusalem in 1926 and later wrote: "Anti-Zionist when I arrived in the East, I became Zionist, or rather jealous of the British high commissioner in Palestine and all that the Zionists contribute." Naturally, he added, France was obliged to support Christians, but the Jews were models of self-help, and their spirit of enterprise was admirable.
There were also realists like Philippe Berthelot, secretary general from 1920 to 1933, who commented that "Zionism is a fact" and regretted only that the Jews of England had understood the point of the movement while French Jews had proved unable to take "the lead of world Jewry to the benefit of France." At Berthelot's instigation, the Quai d'Orsay set up a special department for religious affairs under Louis Canet, which soon became, in the words of one historian, an obligatory antechamber for visiting Zionist leaders. After a meeting with Chaim Weizmann in May 1927, Canet concluded a memorandum with a clear expression of his own inner thoughts: "Jewish nationalism is a mistake and Israel [i.e., Jews] can find peace only through assimilation."
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Throughout the interwar period, many of the Quai d'Orsay's leading lights were extremely capable men. Yet they and the politicians whom they served sought the shelter of the status quo, even though this meant appeasing the powerful and the vicious at the expense of the weak. All of a kind, they were conditioned to the task by background and temperament. Nor were their ranks enlarged or made more diverse. Candidates groomed in the select higher schools were examined in history, international and civil law, and economic geography, then vetted by a committee of four senior diplomats to ensure that they were socially and culturally presentable.
Here, in short, was a prime example of a French institution unable to take the measure of the age of the dictators. As the Nazi threat grew, and as Jews tried to escape from Europe to Palestine, French authorities feared violence in Muslim countries under French rule. And so, from March 1933 on, Jewish "travelers" were allowed to enter Syria only on condition that they had obtained immigration visas to Palestine from a British consulate abroad. Henri Gaillard, consul in Cairo, condemned the Jews of Egypt for "complaining without limit about the fate of those [in Europe] who share their religion." In doing so, he grumbled, "they have succeeded in creating a strong current of Arab opinion against themselves in this country, where until now their position was completely privileged." Gaston Bernard, consul in Trieste, reporting that his city was profiting from the traffic of Jewish emigrants on their way to Palestine, complained nevertheless that, on Lloyd Triestino steamships, "care has been carried to the extreme of ensuring that the emigrants have services of the talmudic cult and the exclusive use of kosher cuisine: and this, it has to be said, communicates a sui generis odor to these ships which customers of a normal composition no doubt appreciate less highly."
In the immediate aftermath of Hitler's invasion of Austria in March 1938, the United States invited 28 European and Latin American governments to a conference at Evian to discuss how to facilitate the emigration of political refugees. By tacit agreement, and ostensibly for fear of stoking anti-Semitism, there was no open reference to Jews. Nothing of substance was agreed upon at the conference, which has been called "the Jewish Munich." In the judgment of one authority, the historian Catherine Nicault, "the absolute lack of generosity in French policy was less striking [at Evian] than the indifference toward even keeping up any appearance of it"; she also notes outright and frequent anti-Semitic pronouncements on the part of French officials.
After the collapse of France in June 1940, Marshal Pétain agreed to an armistice with Hitler and then formed his Vichy government with the intention of collaborating with Nazi Germany. That October, without any prompting from Berlin, Vichy passed the Statut des Juifs, its version of Germany's Nuremberg laws, excluding Jews from whole areas of public life. Jacques Guérard, director of the office of Foreign Minister Paul Baudoin, telegraphed the French ambassador in Washington with instructions for allaying any disquiet in American public opinion. The prewar Left, he asserted in contravention of the facts, had allowed Jews to enter France in the hundreds of thousands, and these Jews, with "their special mentality," had attacked "all the ideas from which the French had never wavered." Again in contravention of the facts, since dispossession and arrest were already the order of the day, Guérard stated flagrantly that "no measure has been taken against individuals or property." The sole purpose of the statute, he concluded, was "to allow the peaceful existence in France of elements whose racial characteristics make them dangerous when they mix too intimately with our political and administrative life."
Collaboration with the Nazis was incompatible with any genuine foreign policy. Ambassadors in important capitals resigned, as did officials in the Vichy zone, some escaping into Spain and then onward to Algiers or London. A list of personnel at the Quai d'Orsay in February 1943 names the secretary general, Charles Rochat, along with a tiny handful of men under him. Asked later why he himself did not resign, Rochat answered that he was maintaining "the continuous affirmation of French sovereignty." This was of course illusory: the Quai d'Orsay had virtually ceased to function.
WRITERS TAKE SIDES
In his years as secretary general (1920-21, 1925-32), Philippe Berthelot set a special tone to which many of those who served with him would pay tribute in print. The son of a celebrated industrial chemist, Berthelot had supreme self-confidence and dedication, wide social connections, and genuine literary tastes. His wife, Hélène, conducted a fashionable salon. Under his sponsorship and protection, Paul Morand, Paul Claudel, Jean Giraudoux, and other writers employed at the Quai d'Orsay were given time and a sense of security, enabling them to build international literary reputations. It was as if they were members of an elite club rather than an institution of government. Berthelot's successor as secretary general, Alexis Saint-Léger, an elusive personality from the French West Indies, was a poet who under the pseudonym of Saint-John Perse would win the Nobel Prize. Taken together, these men perpetuated the image of the Quai d'Orsay as the repository of culture and brilliance.
Paul Morand grew up in an artistic milieu. He entered the Quai d'Orsay in 1913 at the age of twenty-five. Among his early writings was Mort d'un Juif ("Death of a Jew"), a short story in which a Jew on his death bed refuses to pay his doctor until the rate of exchange has improved. In a second piece of fiction, Mort d'un autre Juif ("Death of Another Jew"), the mortally wounded victim of a pogrom feels that he has been "faithful to the truth under the mask of eternal treason." Alexis Saint-Léger wrote to Morand, "You have a prodigious gift." Berthelot expected great things of him.
Morand used his status as a diplomat to travel in style all over the world. In 1927 he married the divorced wife of Prince Dimitry Soutzo, the Romanian military attaché in Paris, and the couple settled smoothly into the beau monde. His many books display a cosmopolitan superiority verging on flippancy, and resorting time and again to malicious descriptions of Jews. In New York (1930), for example, he writes of Jewish intellectuals as "preachers, self-immolators, socialists, anarchists, Bolsheviks, Communists, and others 'ists' perpetually quarrelling and cursing each other," altogether "giving a rather exact idea of what Jerusalem must have been." The Lower East Side prompts this reaction: "Grilled and salted almonds are sold by peddlers whose frozen hooked noses stick out of moth-eaten fur caps brought over from Russia by their ancestors." Morand claimed that his novel France La Doulce ("Sweet France," 1934) was satire; although he was no Céline calling outright for the massacre of Jews, the book, whose theme is that Jews control the movie industry and that their sole objective is money-grubbing and the debauchery of public taste, has a central place in the anti-Semitic literature of the period.
In 1940 Morand was in London at the head of an economic warfare mission. Like all but a handful of the 800 French officials in Britain at the collapse of France, he rejected Charles de Gaulle's appeal to join the Free French and instead returned home. In Vichy he was made president of the Commission for Film Censorship. In 1943, Morand took up an appointment as French ambassador in Bucharest, and for a few weeks before the end of Vichy served as ambassador in Berne, where he and his wife judged it prudent to remain as long as there was any chance of recrimination at home. In 1958, de Gaulle, then president of France, vetoed Morand's election to the Académie Française, only to consent to it ten years later. By then such reversals had become standard practice in France, in this case serving to sugarcoat Morand's embrace of fascism as just another aspect of his inveterate dandyism.
Jean Giraudoux was among Morand's closest friends and colleagues. He knew England and America well, and spoke English fluently. An aesthete, he wrote in a style elegant and subtle, suffused with irony. He too littered his work with aspersions against the Jews. In an autobiographical book published in 1939, he stated that "we are in complete agreement with Hitler in proclaiming that [national] policy attains its superior form only when it is racial." As for Jews, he had been taken to meet a family from Eastern Europe and found them "black and inert, like leeches in a jar." "The Jews," he wrote, "sully, corrupt, rot, corrode, debase, devalue everything they touch." On the eve of war, he was appointed to run the Commission for Information, supposedly as a counter to the propaganda ministry run by Goebbels in Nazi Germany but in fact complementing the latter's racial opinions. In Paris throughout the occupation, Giraudoux mingled socially with German officials and collaborators; a play of his was staged there in 1943. His death early the following year saved him from being brought to account.
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Paul Claudel (1868-1955) combined a diplomatic career with the pursuit of literature. A high Catholic and a political conservative, very much a man of the world, he seemed a contemporary standard-bearer of the values and tradition of pre-Revolutionary France. Saint Louis and Joan of Arc, whom he constantly invoked, were living symbols for him. When W.H. Auden wrote that "time . . . will pardon Paul Claudel,/Pardons him for writing well," he was expressing the view of his generation that in spite of his obvious limitations, Claudel was a literary star of the first rank, a French Yeats or Eliot.
Claudel's father and sister, he later acknowledged, had been admirers of the notorious anti-Semitic polemicist Edouard Drumont, and during the Dreyfus affair he himself had not been "on the right side." His first foreign posting, in 1893, was as French consul in New York. Soon afterward he was sent for six years to China. As late as 1910, by which time Dreyfus had been rehabilitated, Claudel was writing to his fellow Catholic Charles Péguy, a militant for the faith but a Dreyfusard, "I have difficulty understanding how you can deny the role of Jewry in this affair. I have lived in all the countries of the world, and everywhere I have seen the newspapers and public opinion in the hands of the Jews. I was in Jerusalem in December 1899 and at the moment of the second condemnation [of Dreyfus] I saw the rage of those lice with a human face who live in Palestine on the razzias [desert raids] which their kith and kin operate against Christianity."
In the early years of the 20th century, Claudel began portraying Jewish characters for literary effect. Ali Habenichts and Sichel are the names he gives to a Jewish father and daughter in a trilogy of plays. Money-making, the drive to assimilate, and the absence of any patriotism are their distinguishing traits. Claudel has Sichel say: "For us Jews, there's no little scrap of earth so large as a gold coin."
In the 20's Claudel was ambassador in Tokyo and then Washington (where he received Morand). But his outlook seems to have evolved somewhat when one of his sons married the daughter of Paul-Louis Weiller, a prominent French Jew who was the managing director of a leading manufacturer of aircraft engines. In 1935, Weiller appointed Claudel to the board of this company, paying him a large salary; perhaps fortuitously, Claudel then wrote an open letter to the World Jewish Congress objecting to the Nuremberg race laws as "abominable and stupid legislation directed against those of your religion in Germany."
Apparently his new mood was variable. The demise of the Third Republic's parliamentary regime in June 1940 enthused Claudel. After 60 years, he wrote in his diary, France had finally been delivered "from the yoke of the radical and anti-clerical party (professors, lawyers, Jews, freemasons)." The replacement of democracy by an authoritarian system based on Catholic values had long been his ideal. He knew Marshal Pétain, who had voted for his election to the Academy in 1935. On the other hand, he disapproved of unqualified collaboration with Germany as was recommended by some Catholics. Already in his early seventies by now, Claudel retired to his country house in the non-occupied zone.
On October 6, 1940, Paul-Louis Weiller was arrested on trumped-up charges. Claudel went to Vichy to intercede for him, but to no effect. Soon afterward, Weiller's French citizenship was revoked, and his property was confiscated; released from prison, he managed to escape to New York. On December 27, Claudel published an ode to Pétain, presenting him as the national savior and an almost saintly figure. To an interviewer after the war, he would explain his enthusiasm for Pétain with the phrase, "He took me in."
Be that as it may, on December 24, 1941, Claudel wrote to the chief rabbi of France, expressing "the disgust, horror, and indignation that all decent Frenchmen and especially Catholics feel in respect of the injustices, the despoiling, all the ill treatment of which our Jewish compatriots are now the victims." Catholics, he concluded, could never forget that "Israel is always the eldest son of the promise [of God], as it is today the eldest son of suffering." The rank of "Ambassadeur de France" after his signature added to this act of civil courage. When the letter was published, the Vichy authorities, who suspected Claudel of having facilitated Weiller's flight abroad, duly searched his house and kept him under observation. In September 1944, in keeping with the twists and turns of that tormented period, Claudel published an ode to de Gaulle, as embarrassing in its high-flown obsequiousness as his earlier ode to Pétain.
Claudel was one of the earliest to understand that the Holocaust was an event like no other, a stain forever on Christian Europe. But he also thought there might be something "providential" about it, a "redeeming effectiveness." For the remainder of his life, he pondered in his visionary manner on "the mystery of Israel" and its "vocation." His support of the state of Israel was genuine, however, and marked a complete reversal of the animus against "lice with a human face" that had once possessed him. Still, the place of the Jews in the modern world remained, for him, in question. Jews were a people apart but also "ecumenical," possessors of the Holy Land not through any historic link or right but as ambassadors of humanity, with "a message addressed to man as he emerged pure from the hands of his Creator." Even for someone trying sincerely to come to grips with the meaning of the events of his time, Jews were evidently not to be seen as human beings like any other but as agents of other purposes, now lower, now higher.
THE RESCUE OF THE MUFTI
"We hate France—it is the enemy of Islam and religion because it is governed by atheists and Jews." Thus spoke one Arab nationalist propagandist among many on Mussolini's Radio Rome in 1938. Along similar lines, a tract distributed throughout North Africa contained the words: "The Jew feeds on you [Arabs] as vermin feed on sheep; France protects him; he is the
On May 8, 1945, the day marking Allied victory in Europe, Algerians rioted in the provincial town of Setif. Over 100 French people were killed, and as many injured. In the reprisals that followed, at least 6,000 Algerians died. At the same time, law and order broke down in Syria and Lebanon. Over 400 Syrians were killed, and the parliament in Damascus was destroyed. British forces temporarily stationed in Syria and Lebanon as a result of the war ordered the much weaker French units back to their barracks, in effect negating French rule and handing independence to both countries. In the National Assembly, the French foreign minister Georges Bidault warned the British with a Latin tag: "Hodie mihi, cras tibi"—today me, tomorrow you.
That same May, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem, along with his staff of some sixteen aides and the officer assigned to him by the Nazi Gestapo, left what had been German-occupied Silesia and fled to Switzerland. Denied asylum there, he and his entourage found themselves in the hands of the French authorities.
Haj Amin had been responsible for rejecting any notion of partitioning Palestine between Arabs and Jews, and for precipitating the Arab revolt of 1936 in which many British personnel as well as Jews and Arabs had been killed. With French connivance, he had escaped in 1938 to Lebanon, going on to participate in the 1941 anti-British coup in Iraq before finally fleeing to Berlin. Wartime photographs show him in his clerical robes and turban in the company of Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and Eichmann, both privately and at public occasions, including a tour of Auschwitz. After the Allies invaded North Africa in November 1942 and the Germans took over Vichy France, Haj Amin urged Hitler to exploit the local populations of both places in order to break "the Judeo-Anglo-Saxon stranglehold." He also recruited a Bosnian Muslim division for the SS, an act for which the Americans, the British, and the Yugoslavs wanted him extradited as a war criminal.
On May 11, 1945, the ministry of the interior briefed the Quai d'Orsay that Haj Amin was considered "the brains of German espionage in all Muslim countries." The next day, the French embassy in Cairo confirmed what was to become policy. "The mufti has certainly betrayed the Allied cause," the telegram ran. "But he has above all betrayed Britain without affecting us directly. Seemingly, therefore, nothing obliges us to undertake any action in his regard that could harm us in the Arab countries." The main point was that Haj Amin held the future of Palestine in his hands at a time when "the problem of Palestine remains open."
On May 18, in a note marked "Urgent," Jean Chauvel, now secretary general of the Quai d'Orsay, confirmed to the minister of war that Haj Amin was "capable of imposing himself on the Muslim community." By May 23 Chauvel had informed the relevant embassies that "in spite of the very heavy accusations weighing against him, Haj Amin is to be treated with consideration." The reason given was his "religious prestige." An unsigned note of May 30, apparently in Chauvel's handwriting, asserts that "at the moment when [British] policy . . . is tending to throw us completely out of Syria, we must make use of the strong personality who has fallen into our hands and above all refuse to deliver him to our English friends."
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Haj Amin was housed in a villa in the Paris suburbs. With him were two secretaries and a cook supplied by the Paris mosque. The Quai d'Orsay's go-between, Henri Ponsot, a former high commissioner and ambassador in Syria, was impressed by the mufti's "certain air of dignity and aristocratic grace," as well as by his intellect and his correct French. As for war crimes, Haj Amin claimed that he knew nothing about extermination camps and had never heard of "Karl Hichman" (Ponsot's garbled version of Adolf Eichmann). Approvingly, Ponsot passed on Haj Amin's view that, since Britain was unable "to break loose from the influence that the Jewish world exercised on its politics," France and the Arab states should come to an accord to settle the future of both Syria and Palestine. What Haj Amin offered, Ponsot reported on June 26, was either a "positive" collaboration, in return for which he promised to calm the general Arab agitation concerning Syria, or, almost as good, a "negative" collaboration, in which case he would provoke crises in Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, and Transjordan "to the benefit of our own policy." (These words of Ponsot's are lightly scratched out on the document.)
At the end of July, Haj Amin was moved into a comfortable country house where he could receive visitors, walk in the park under supervision, and visit Paris, where the couturier Lanvin cut him a civilian suit. The documents hint at financial and material help in an atmosphere of growing good will. Reporting on August 14 to the Quai d'Orsay on a visit to the mufti, Louis Massignon, France's most distinguished Orientalist scholar, could not resist confiding that they had spoken Arabic together and that he had addressed the mufti as "za'imnaa," our leader. Haj Amin, Massignon wrote, "is persuaded that he can launch a durable Franco-Arab cooperation," and had asked permission to meet Arab diplomats since "time was pressing, if the Zionists attack."
Already there was talk in the ministry of letting Haj Amin go free. Should the British insist on having him brought to trial, Chauvel commented in October, "we should probably be obliged to have the party slip directly into Switzerland." In April 1946, the French press published an officially inspired announcement that the government would not prevent Haj Amin's departure to an Arab country. Taking the hint, he left Orly airport on a TWA flight to Cairo. Under the name of a retainer who had been with him in Nazi Germany, and wearing his new Lanvin suit, he traveled on a false Syrian passport. Once in Cairo he held regular interviews with members of the French legation there, who praised his "quite particular interest in French cultural activity" while also expressing certain reservations about his trustworthiness.
On October 11, Haj Amin declared his official thanks to the French government for its hospitality and its tacit approval of his escape. In a secret annex, he reiterated a favorite theme: the British and American governments were in the hands of the Jews, just as had been the case in Germany, "where, thanks to the natural simplicity of the leaders, the Jews prior to Hitler had taken hold of all the commanding reins." Now, he told the French, there was a chance for "your civilization, your spirituality, and your liberalism" to bring about an accord with the Arabs.
From Cairo, Haj Amin went to Lebanon. Still in touch with French officials, he did his best to orchestrate his "negative" policy of violence against the emerging state of Israel, a policy that extended the ruin of the Palestinian Arabs and has bedeviled the Middle East ever since.
LOUIS MASSIGNON
For his contemporaries, Louis Massignon revitalized the belief that France was indeed a "Muslim power"—and that the duty of Jews was to accommodate themselves to other peoples' conceptions of them. Born in 1883, Massignon was a particularly brilliant misfit, a fabulist with a personality strong enough to persuade interlocutors that the quirks of his imagination corresponded to the movements of the real world. He spread mystification right through the Quai d'Orsay, to lasting effect.
In Cairo and Baghdad before World War I, Massignon learned the languages of the Middle East and initiated the research that led to a professorship at the Collège de France and a growing reputation as an Orientalist. The special object of his study as a scholar was Mansur al-Hallaj, a medieval Shiite mystic tortured to death as a heretic in Baghdad in 922. A Spanish friend, Luis de Cuadra, introduced him to the homosexual debauchery of Cairo. Soon afterward, consumed by remorse, he had a religious epiphany, a vision of what he called "the divine fire." He believed that he, too, had a religious vocation, one that would be accompanied by martyrdom as suffered by both Jesus and al-Hallaj.
Marriage hardly interfered with Massignon's incessant travels or his work. Paul Claudel, a longstanding friend and a witness at Massignon's wedding, wrote to him from Prague on February 8, 1911, "You would make an incomparable agent. I have dropped the word to my friend Berthelot, to whom I must introduce you one day." Although the Massignon files in the Quai d'Orsay remain closed, enough is in the public domain to show that he indeed acted as some sort of roving ambassador, engaging in secret and confidential work. Loosely identified as the head of a "scientific mission," he traveled on a diplomatic passport. Algeria, Morocco, and Syria were among his special areas of concern, and in one of his books he would admit to "sailing under false colors in Damascus from 1920 to 1945."
In 1917, as a member of the Georges-Picot mission, Massignon was present when the British captured and entered Jerusalem. So, we have seen, was T.E. Lawrence. Speaking to one another in Arabic, they were two of a kind; just as Lawrence always suspected the worst of the French, so Massignon always suspected the worst of the British.
For Massignon as for Claudel, Jews were a theological "mystery," conducting their private dialogue with God to the imagined ultimate benefit of Christianity. He took his time deciding how Zionism fit or failed to fit into his Catholic scheme of things. Work on the land might be redemptive for a few proletarian Jews, but in the background, he warned as early as 1920, was "the horrible Israel of cosmopolitans, bankers with no country of their own who have exploited Anglo-Saxon imperialism, . . . eating you down to the bone." Visiting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in 1934 he detected "powerful financial interventions" that alone enabled Zionism to survive. The conviction hardened in him that only "a Franco-Islamic bloc" could save the Holy Land, indeed the whole Middle East.
In a 1939 article, Massignon deplored how "Germanized Ashkenazim have taken the Palestinian issue into their hands, with the perfect and implacable technique of the most exasperating of colonialisms: slowly pushing the Arab 'natives' toward the desert." At the outbreak of war he served under Giraudoux, directing propaganda to Muslim countries. His state of mind at the time is revealed in a remark he made to a devoted pupil who had converted to Islam: "My country is the Arab world." In the same spirit he had once written to Claudel, "It is in Arabic no doubt that [God] is pleased that I should one day serve Him." Out of mortification, he fasted during Ramadan.
After the war, Massignon campaigned with passionate fury against the creation of the state of Israel. Any agreement struck with Zionists was intrinsically wrong—the Jewish national home was "an imposture in which we should not be accomplices"—and would serve only to "convulse our North Africa." Not really a nation, Jewry "signifies nothing unless it lives through spirituality, and if this spirituality is exclusive, as it is trying to ensure against the Muslim Arabs, it will be a catastrophe." He founded a committee to help lobby for the cause, and above all for retaining the holy places in French-Catholic hands. In an extended polemic in print, he maintained that the infamous blood libel accusing the Jews of needing Christian blood for their rites had an authentic historical basis.
The United Nations vote in November 1947 in favor of partition—in which the Quai d'Orsay concurred—appalled Massignon. His frequent articles in Catholic publications like Témoignage Chrétien and L'Aube became infused with religiosity and political hysteria. According to him, Christian or Muslim recognition of Israel had no value in law. The "State-without-a-Messiah of Israel" had been formed at the expense of the Arabs, who were "victims of repulsive Yankee technology." Obsessed with the Virgin Mary, he insisted that "the world will never know a just peace until Israel [i.e., Jews] reconsiders its rejection of the mother of Jesus." Visiting the state of Israel in February 1949, he felt his "heart pierced by the ignominiousness of the Jews.” An angry Claudel broke off a lifetime's friendship, noting in his diary that Massignon “has gone off the rails as usual."
In 1950, in Cairo, the city where he had discovered his homosexuality, Massignon took holy orders as a priest in the eastern Melkite church. After his death in 1963, many a Quai d'Orsay colleague would lament the loss of a genius. Then and ever since, Massignon's learning and showmanship have served to reinforce the Quai d'Orsay in its collective predisposition in favor of Arabs and in its view that it is better equipped to define Jews, and to ordain their path, than are Jews themselves.
"A PERNICIOUS EXAMPLE AND A GREAT PERIL"
Nominally a victor in World War II, France was in reality more like one of the defeated. Its standing in the world had to be rebuilt virtually from scratch. The same may be said for the Quai d'Orsay.
In 1945, somewhere between 100 and 200 former French soldiers or members of the Resistance were granted admission to the "career" without an examination. That year also saw the founding of the Ecole nationale d'administration (ENA), whose purpose was to train civil servants; thereafter, a handful of its graduates would become diplomats. In theory this was a new dispensation, but in practice the old institutional mindset survived intact. As far as the Middle East was concerned, Zionism was seen as more of a danger than ever to what French diplomats were convinced would otherwise be a smooth and equitable relationship with Arab countries.
There are numerous attestations to this persistent attitude. As the historian Jean-Baptiste Duroselle has mildly observed, the first postwar foreign minister, Georges Bidault, was "not unreceptive to the arguments of the Islamists in the Quai d'Orsay." Christian Pineau, a subsequent foreign minister well disposed toward Israel (and by chance the son-in-law of Jean Giraudoux), would write frankly in his autobiography that the Quai d'Orsay's Middle East policy was motivated by a "more or less conscious" anti-Semitism. Chauvel, the secretary general, used to caution journalists against Pineau and do what he could to frustrate the minister's initiatives. In his own memoirs Chauvel makes the revealing remark that at the end of the war, "Jews and Communists, formerly untouchables and moreover deported or living underground, had been reintegrated with honor into the community."
The archives similarly expose the predispositions of the Quai d'Orsay. Early in 1945, a committee was set up "to examine the different problems posed by the Jewish question." The committee seemed a hangover from Vichy. Its chairman, Henri Ponsot, considered one of the department's most eminent authorities on the Middle East, was at the same time regularly calling on the mufti, Haj Amin, to flatter and promote him. The Holocaust and its consequences feature in the archives only in a contorted and euphemistic style. This, for example, is from an April 15, 1945 report on postwar prospects:
"It is probable that many Israelites who were obliged under one pressure or another to leave their country of origin or their residence would not like to return there. One can ask if on the one hand it might be useful to include in the peace treaties minority clauses in favor of Israelites, and if on the other hand it will be desirable to favor, by some means or other, their establishment either in Palestine or in another territory to be decided."
The committee rapidly concluded that Zionism faced "insurmountable obstacles" and Palestine was not the right place for a Jewish state.
Zionists with whom French diplomats were in contact are reviled or condescended to in various documents. David Ben-Gurion is said to be "avid with ambition." At the top right-hand corner of a personal dossier devoted to him are the hand-written words, "Nationality: Jewish." The dossier of Moshe Shertok (afterward Sharett) carries the same identification, and a separate note says, "Like all his compatriots he is highly gifted as a journalist of propaganda, but much less as a politician." Abba Eban "possesses the art of playing offended and making a travesty of facts." Of Menachem Begin the French consul in Haifa, Pierre Landy, wrote: "Of modest demeanor, he has the humble exterior of a small merchant."
French representatives in Cairo and Beirut, Damascus and Amman, insisted more and more urgently that any support for Zionism or the nascent state of Israel was bound to aggravate Arab nationalism and therefore to harm French interests. Moral issues, right or wrong, were not involved; power was at stake. Armand du Chayla, minister in Lebanon, compared the prospective Jewish state with wartime Japan; its "exacerbated will to power" was bound to lead to a similar catastrophe. Others in the department built their case on the alleged need to protect France's cultural and religious presence in the Holy Land.
Although France finally voted in favor of partition, beforehand it took whatever diplomatic measures were available to it both in the United Nations and elsewhere to avert or delay the vote. Alexandre Parodi, its delegate to the UN, would later explain that his country had been motivated by the desire to maintain good relations with the Arab world. If so, its final vote in favor of partition was a travesty, or so an anonymous official at the Quai d'Orsay pointed out to the foreign minister, writing that France was now a "banana republic," unable to hold its own against Britain (which had abstained in the voting).
In a diary entry of June 29, 1948, six weeks after Israel declared statehood, Vincent Auriol, then president of the Republic, recorded a meeting with Parodi. The latter was now of the view that a Jewish state in the midst of the Arab world was a guarantee of stability, and so in France's interest, but that matters should have been handled in such a way as to avoid anything like a defeat for the Arabs. No doubt out of some such consideration, France would refuse de-facto recognition of Israel until January 1949, and de-jure recognition until four months later. Such were the tergiversations and self-deceptions to which policy had sunk.
René Neuville was consul general in Jerusalem from 1946 to 1952. Undoubtedly intelligent, he was as narrow-minded as he was sincere. His inability to come to terms with the idea of a Jewish state offers a case study in the formation of policy within the Quai d'Orsay.
Jews, Neuville wrote in a lengthy dispatch dated April 12, 1947, were "racist through and through . . . quite as much as their German persecutors and in spite of their democratic pretensions." From biblical times onward, they had striven to inculcate within themselves the sense of being God's chosen people, and this bred a xenophobia and fanaticism that could not be ascribed to mere national feeling. The Zionist press, he further adduced, "displays beyond all possible doubt the ancestral traits of a completely Oriental cast of mind." Jews were on no account to be allowed any control over the holy places, and should be denied statehood.
In an equally characteristic report dated April 4, 1948, Neuville warned that the founding of a Jewish state would mean the death of any hopes once placed in the UN, a victory of "obscurantism over enlightenment . . . a pernicious example and a great peril." At the same time, Neuville foresaw an Arab victory in the hostilities to come, although he feared that this would itself lead to the danger of greater Arab militancy in French North Africa.
In April 1950, Neuville escorted his superior Jean Binoche on a week's visit around Israel. In a note to the Quai d'Orsay, Binoche said of Neuville that "he is susceptible, stormy, and bitter, but he has an ardor that I cannot find much exemplified in the people of our house." He recommended keeping Neuville in place, adding the thought that he should be brought to confer in Paris along with the ambassadors in both Israel and Jordan. "Today," according to the wistful Binoche, "it is indispensable for the department to define clearly the French political line."
TAKING ADVANTAGE
The coup mounted in Cairo in 1952 by Gamal Abdel Nasser and other so-called Free Officers transformed Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism into popular causes. In one Arab country after another, and especially throughout French North Africa, claimants to power soon imitated Nasser. One of them was the National Liberation Front—FLN in its French acronym—in Algeria.
In November 1954, a series of violent terrorist acts signaled the opening of the FLN's campaign for independence. Nasser's radio station, the Voice of the Arabs, regularly incited the FLN; its leaders had their headquarters in Cairo, and Nasser supplied them clandestinely with arms. Lasting for eight bloody years, the conflict brought something approaching civil war in France itself, and the return of General de Gaulle to power. Meanwhile, the ups and downs of French policy had unforeseen but dramatic repercussions affecting the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
As a prime target of Nasser and Arab nationalism, Israel unexpectedly acquired a community of interest with France—or rather with certain French decision-makers. Thus, the ministry of defense and the leaders of the armed forces collaborated unconditionally with Israel, in the belief that doing so would help overthrow Nasser and preserve French Algeria. Apart from a few hostile Catholic publications, the media were also supportive of Israel, as was public opinion at large. Guilt over wartime deportations figured as an element in the mix; so did admiration for Israel's spirit of self-determination. All this constituted an open—but partial—repudiation of the Quai d'Orsay and its ingrained pro-Arabism.
Arms sales alone were what gave France any importance in the Middle East. In the Israeli view, it was urgent to procure aircraft, tanks, and heavy artillery to prevent Nasser from exploiting the military edge conferred on him by the Soviet Union. While the United States and Britain took cover behind a declaration not to supply weapons to belligerents in the region, French manufacturers and the ministry of defense rushed to accommodate Israel. For its part, the Quai d'Orsay did what it could to block sales outright or to ensure that deliveries were too minimal to be effective.
The inter-ministerial fighting had something conspiratorial about it. Pierre-Etienne Gilbert, ambassador in Israel from 1953 to 1959 and altogether exceptional among his colleagues, was the first French diplomat openly to admire the Jewish state. Gilbert introduced Israel's defense establishment to its counterparts in Paris: Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, the minister of defense, and Abel Thomas, his chief of staff. In Comment Israël fut sauvé, "How Israel Was Saved," Thomas recalls "our quarrels and our chicaneries with the Quai d'Orsay," and how "it was agreed that the administration of the Quai would in no case be involved" in policy concerning Israel. Consistently, the Quai d'Orsay reacted with anger and frustration; in March 1956, Pierre Maillard of the Afrique-Levant department informed an Israeli interlocutor that French-Israeli arms deal were an aberration, and there was no basis for cooperation between the two countries.
Egypt's September 1955 arms deal with Czechoslovakia, followed by nationalization of the Suez Canal the next July, were defining events of Nasser's career. The French and Israeli governments were of one mind: only a preemptive war could eliminate the danger Nasser now presented to them both. Prime Minister Guy Mollet undertook to persuade the hesitant British to join what became the real conspiracy behind the 1956 Suez campaign. It was encapsulated in Foreign Minister Pineau's advice to the ministry of defense: "Above all, not a word to the Quai d'Orsay!"
But animosity and secrecy among those making vital decisions did not—could not—result in successful coordination. Fatefully, the United States intervened, obliging the British and French to withdraw their invading forces and then compelling Israel to evacuate Sinai and the Gaza strip. In 1957, in a compensatory gesture, France agreed to build for Israel a nuclear plant at Dimona, an installation more up-to-date than anything the French themselves possessed at the time. From that point on, the France-Israel relationship declined in inexorable stages.
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Nasser's emergence as the political victor of the Suez campaign inflated Arab nationalism into the prime ideology of the Middle East. The FLN was evidently going to gain power in Algeria, the French army to lose it. In 1958, emerging from seclusion, de Gaulle once more enacted his role as national savior. Even as the Suez campaign ushered in the Fifth Republic, it transformed the Arab-Israeli dispute into one of the most complex of international issues.
Methodically, the Quai d'Orsay began the French disengagement from Israel. In 1959, in deference to the Arab economic boycott, it managed to cancel a contract to assemble Renault cars under license in Haifa. The following year, Ben-Gurion met de Gaulle at the Elysée Palace; the Quai d'Orsay was at pains to ensure that this was not seen as a state visit, and that the Israeli flag would not fly at Ben-Gurion's hotel.
In an official report presented to de Gaulle in 1963, Jean Chauvel wrote that Israel displayed "a heterogeneous character in relation to everything surrounding it." This euphemism for Israeli aberrancy led to the conclusion that, since good Franco-Israeli relations "in no way gain France any credit in Arabia," closer cooperation between Arabs and France "is not only acceptable, it is desired." Under Maurice Couve de Murville, de Gaulle's long-standing foreign minister and a critic of the Suez campaign (and advocate of Algerian independence), the Quai d'Orsay took revenge for the Pineau years by, as the historians Samir Kassir and Farouk Mardam-Bey have put it, successfully reaffirming its old "Muslim policy."
The hitch was that the constitution of the Fifth Republic had handed the conduct of foreign policy to the president, with the result that the Quai d'Orsay's role was reduced to advice and administration. Always idiosyncratic, de Gaulle enacted a policy often grounded more in personality than in political reality. Although there are numerous testimonies to his professed admiration for Israel and its achievements, it is also true that he had once been influenced by Charles Maurras, an ardent enemy of Jews. As for Arabs, Ambassador Gilbert quotes de Gaulle as saying that they were "all passion, sometimes even demented. What can you do with that?" In all likelihood, his deepest belief was that Jews and Arabs, like everyone else, had to serve the purposes he allotted to them.
Above all, de Gaulle aspired to great-power status for France, and toward that end he sought to maneuver between the United States and the Soviet Union, playing them off against each other and eventually removing France from NATO. The hope was that this brand of militant neutrality would muster the whole third world behind him. Pineau, the former foreign minister, spoke for many in noting that de Gaulle felt "a mortal hatred" for the British and the U.S. Increasingly resentful of the latter's projection of power in the Middle East, de Gaulle suspended aid to Israel's nuclear plant; played cat-and-mouse games over sales of arms and aircraft to Israel; and, after signing a peace treaty with Algeria, issued instructions to his new ambassador in Cairo to adopt "a more liberal attitude toward Nasser." When Abba Eban, the Israeli foreign minister, expressed anxiety in early 1966 over Israel's relationship with France, an irritated Couve de Murville replied that "General de Gaulle doesn't have to be patting you ceaselessly on the shoulder to reassure you."
In a series of political and military miscalculations, Nasser precipitated the Six-Day war of 1967. During the run-up to the crisis, France embargoed the delivery of offensive weapons to the Middle East, a move affecting only Israel. In a meeting with Abba Eban, de Gaulle warned Israel not to fire the first shot. ("They didn't listen to me!," he was to exclaim in anger and hurt pride a few days later.) He also told British Prime Minister Harold Wilson that the West would thank him one day for remaining "the only Western power to have any influence with the Arab governments."
After the war, Roger Seydoux, now France's permanent representative at the United Nations, lost no time declaring that Israel's reunification of Jerusalem was "inopportune and not founded in law." Israeli assurances of free access to the holy places "touched on questions of sovereignty to which we cannot remain indifferent." That November, de Gaulle ranted in public that the Jews were "an elite people, self-assured and domineering," and possessed of "a burning ambition for conquest." In the ensuing scandal, de Gaulle pretended that his abusive generalizations had been intended as compliments.
In January 1969, in response to Palestinian hijackers operating out of Lebanon, Israeli commandos blew up thirteen civil aircraft in Beirut. Nobody was hurt in this largely symbolic action. "It's unbelievable, without any sense," de Gaulle nevertheless thundered. "They think they can do as they like." The arms embargo was now extended to all weapons, defensive as well as offensive. France thereby renounced any influence it had on Israel (as the political thinker Raymond Aron argued at the time in a polemic of great force). Meanwhile, René Massigli, highly respected as a former ambassador to London and later as secretary general of the Quai d'Orsay, spoke for the foreign-policy establishment by repeating in print the shopworn canard that French Jews who supported Israel were guilty of dual loyalty.
Although de Gaulle had once been wary of the Quai d'Orsay, he too ended by speaking of France as a "Muslim power." In his memoirs, his summary judgment was that "no strategic, political, or economic state of affairs [in the Middle East] will last unless it gets Arab support." But his self-importance had stranded his country in contradiction, prejudice, and grudge. François Mauriac, a Nobel Prize winner and fervent Gaullist, wrote in 1969: "I saw men whom the General's policy toward Jerusalem had driven mad." The Quai d'Orsay had won, but there was nothing to show for it.
TERMINAL CONTRADICTIONS
As Arab immigration into France increased, successive French presidents extended de Gaulle's policy of closely linking France and the Arab states. In the decades after the 1967 war, France steadily nourished the ambition to lead what would become the European Union and to assemble a bloc powerful enough to rival the United States. In line with this, the principal objective in the Middle East was to broker a peace that would satisfy Arab demands on Israel and thus eliminate American influence.
Outright appeasement of the Arabs was complicated both by French self-interest and by Arab resentments over a lost heritage perceived as glorious. Measures nevertheless were taken. They included the pursuit of favorable oil contracts, especially in the aftermath of the 1973 war and the OPEC embargo; the sale of Mirage fighter planes to Libya and the building of the Osirak nuclear reactor for Iraq; a vote at the United Nations accusing Israel of committing war crimes in the occupied territories; the denial of landing rights to American aircraft during the 1973 Yom Kippur war; permission granted to the PLO to open an office in Paris, and the reception of Yasir Arafat at the Elysée Palace; and diplomatic initiatives to protect Saddam Hussein from the consequences of his multiple aggressions. With the exception of the former Soviet Union, no country did more than France to promote a PLO state, and thereby to endanger the existence of Israel.
Anti-Israel policies strengthened under Presidents Georges Pompidou, who served from 1969 until his sudden death in 1974, and his successor Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. The former was in all likelihood no more anti-Semitic than his mentor de Gaulle. The latter, too, may not have had anything personal against either Israel or Jews, yet his presidency from 1974 to 1981 intensified the harm done to them and the favoring of Arabs. At the outset of Giscard's term in office, and clearly at his direction, the Quai d'Orsay issued a PLO-influenced statement to the effect that a just and lasting peace in the Middle East had to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people. Soon he sent his foreign minister, Jean Sauvagnargues, to Lebanon for an official meeting with Arafat; the secretary general of the Quai d'Orsay then helped set up the PLO office in Paris. In one rather mysterious incident, Abu Daoud, a terrorist at the head of the group responsible for the murder of Israeli Olympic athletes at Munich, was arrested for murder while in Paris but almost instantly released to Algeria. Eventually Giscard invited Arafat on an official visit to Paris.
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The 1973 war deepened the fault lines among Western allies. Setting the countries of the European Community against the United States, Giscard refused to abstain from finalizing a deal for Iraq's nuclear plant and actively sought to replace the weakening Soviet Union as the chief arms supplier of Egypt and Syria. In language identical to the PLO’s, he criticized the peace between Egypt and Israel sealed at Camp David in 1978. The analyst Maurice Szafran speaks of "open warfare" between France's Jews and Giscard.
Foreign ministers in this period uniformly supported the appeasement of Arab states. Of them all, the most single-minded was Michel Jobert, who took over the Quai d'Orsay in 1973. Born in Morocco, he spoke fluent Arabic and had once written a novel, set in his home town of Meknes, that featured obnoxious Jewish characters. French foreign policy, Jobert used to explain, was not pro-Arab but simply "active, a just reflection of the interests of France" in the Arab part of the world.
Succeeding Giscard as president, François Mitterrand—a 30's fascist, a Vichy official, a Gaullist, a socialist—was a man politically, morally, and personally corrupt. His presidency from 1981 to 1995 bore the stamp of his opportunistic personality and cynical intelligence. Quickly, Mitterrand demonstrated what Le Monde was to call his "talent for trickery."
Mitterrand had once visited Israel, and now he let it be known that he intended to restore good relations with Jerusalem. But as his secretary Jacques Attali records in his published diary (Verbatim), Mitterrand covered his flanks by ordering two of his foreign-policy aides, Hubert Védrine (a future foreign minister) and Claude de Kemoularia, to make the rounds of Arab embassies in Paris and explain that "good contact between France and Israel will be in your interest." Mitterrand's two-faced approach was exemplified by his condemnation of Israel's destruction of the Iraqi nuclear plant in 1982 followed by a fawning address to the Knesset some months later, or by his airy proposal of a federation of Jordan, Israel, and Arab Palestine that was incompatible with his role in preserving Arafat from the consequences of his multiple campaigns of violence and terrorist mayhem.
With characteristic equivocation, Mitterrand maintained the Quai d'Orsay as Europe's foremost official pro-Arab and anti-Israel lobby. Kemoularia, entrusted with confidential matters, had close connections to Saudi Arabia. For the first three years of Mitterrand's term, the foreign minister was Claude Cheysson, whose hostility to Israel was matched by his friendship with PLO representatives like Naim Khadir in Brussels. "My condemnation of Zionism is absolute," he was to say once he was no longer minister. "The state of Israel created itself against the will of the rest of the world."
Roland Dumas followed Cheysson in 1984. Within three months of taking office, Dumas visited Arafat in Tunis, where the PLO leader had taken refuge after his forced evacuation from Beirut. A lawyer, Dumas had helped defend Hilarion Capucci, a Greek Orthodox priest caught gun-running for the PLO, and he played a part in ensuring that the terrorist Abu Daoud was hurried out of the country in the 1970's. Air piracy, he was to tell a newspaper in December 1984, "was the only way for Palestinian resistance to smash international indifference."
Under Cheysson, the Quai d'Orsay's secretary general was Francis Gutmann, parachuted into the ministry from a previous job with the Red Cross. A colleague of Jobert's, he had impeccable Arabist credentials. Later, the post went to another influential Arabist, Bertrand Dufourcq, who had served on the staffs of Couve de Murville, Cheysson, and Dumas. PLO documents captured by the Israeli army in Beirut in 1982 showed that French diplomats or their informers in Tel Aviv and Damascus had been leaking information about Israel's impending operation. In 1987 it emerged that the Quai d'Orsay was subsidizing an Arab lobby, the Cercle France-Pays Arabes. In return for such favors, ostensibly, Arafat brought himself to pronounce after another official visit to Paris in 1989 that the clauses of the PLO Charter calling for the destruction of Israel were "caduc," null and void. As events were to prove, this unexpected display of mastery of French masked an empty promise.
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France's current president, Jacques Chirac, began his career in the governments of de Gaulle and Pompidou, becoming prime minister under Giscard as well as Mitterrand before being elected president in 1996. In the several crises engulfing the Middle East during his tenure, Chirac has imitated his predecessors by taking issue with the "Anglo-Saxons," a Vichy-style phrase loose enough to include the United States, Britain, and anyone else perceived to stand in France's way.
In April 1996, in a speech in Cairo, Chirac claimed that France intended to follow its traditional policies in the Middle East with renewed vigor. Visiting Jerusalem that October, and walking through the Old City, he accused Israeli security guards of closing in on him, pushing them away angrily with a gesture as symbolic as it was physical. At his next stop, in Ramallah, he declared that Arafat's Palestinian democracy might serve as an example to all Arab states. Moving on to Amman in Jordan, he denounced the Western sanctions on Saddam Hussein, with whom he had maintained a friendly relationship dating back to the mid-1970's. He advised Arafat not to sign at Camp David in 2000.
By means of supporting Arafat and Saddam, France was clearly hoping to lever itself into a position of mastery in areas where once Britain had been supreme and where the United States now had responsibility for keeping the peace. The end of the Oslo peace process and the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in 2000, the failure of the United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq, the wrangling over Resolution 1441 at the UN and then the invasion of Iraq in 2003—all spurred Chirac and his administration to prolonged diplomatic activity in pursuit of this grand design. The results have hardly been impressive.
Recently the Quai d'Orsay has condemned Israel's efforts to contain Hizballah in southern Lebanon, and criticized the annexation of Rachel's Tomb near Bethlehem. The foreign ministry dragged out the effort to block the Hizballah television station al-Manar from spreading its hatred of Jews via a Paris-based satellite, and the French government still steadfastly refuses to designate Hizballah itself as a terrorist organization. Sophie Pommier, the official responsible for following Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, revealed her emotional involvement in her work by plastering the walls of her office with portraits of Arafat. French consulates have been forbidden from recognizing Jewish weddings solemnized by West Bank rabbis. Jacques Huntziger, the French ambassador to Israel, slammed his fist on the table and left the room when the parents of three Israeli soldiers captured by Hizballah asked him to intervene on their behalf after a visit by Chirac to Lebanon. Gérard Araud, the current French ambassador, declared in December 2004 that "Israelis suffer from a neurosis, a veritable mental disorder that makes them anti-French." At a London dinner party, Daniel Bernard, ambassador to England and previously the Quai d'Orsay's official spokesman, called Israel "a shitty little country." And so it goes.
As such pinpricks suggest, France today lacks the resources and the influence either to supplant the United States or to enlist the Arab world in its camp, to create a Palestinian state, or to dismantle Israel. Moreover, its nuisance value has rebounded on itself. Its chosen instruments, Saddam Hussein and Arafat, both proved untrustworthy: support for the former was evidently related to French profiteering from the UN oil-for-food scam, which dwarfed the corruption even of the Mitterrand era, and support for the latter had roots in obscure deals, protection rackets, and emotional anti-Americanism.
In the Middle East, France has forfeited whatever leverage it might once have enjoyed. At home, meanwhile, it has had to come to terms with a growing Arab underclass, one whose resentments and tendencies to violence have been whipped up in no small part by the inflexible hostility displayed by the French state to Jewish self-determination. The pursuit of une puissance musulmane, fitting Arabs and Jews into a grand design on French terms, has evidently been an intellectual illusion all along, and highly dangerous to the interests of everyone concerned.
* "The career" (la carrière) was shorthand for employment as a diplomat, as though no other career were worthy of the name.