* “Politics makes artists stupid”
* “Corrie, like so many idealists, treated her emotions as facts”
* “Rickman himself ought to know better”
* “I heard one man choking back sobs and another snoring”
CONTENTS
1. “My name is Rachel Corrie” opens in New York
2. “An ill-crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop”
3. “One man choking back sobs and another snoring”
4. “No attempt to analyze both sides of the situation”
5. North Korea and Rachel Corrie
6. She was no Anne Frank
7. “Bulldozed by naivete” (By Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 21, 2006)
8. “Notes from a young idealist in a world gone awry” (NY Times, Oct. 16, 2006)
9. “Review: ‘Rachel Corrie’ an uneven work” (Associated Press, Oct. 15, 2006)
10. “My name is Rachel Corrie: Off-stage drama” (Broadway World, Oct. 15, 2006)
“WARMLY RECEIVED WITHOUT SETTING OFF POLEMICAL FIREWORKS”
Notes from a young idealist in a world gone awry
By Ben Brantley
The New York Times
October 16, 2006
theater2.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/theater/reviews/16rach.html?8dpc=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1160986402-xNzZqGS4YHIusMzgkc7o8Q
Few plays have traveled to New York with as much excess baggage as “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” which opened last night at the Minetta Lane Theater. This small, intense one-woman drama, first staged last year at the Royal Court Theater in London, makes its delayed American debut freighted with months of angry public argument, condemnation, celebration and prejudgment: all the heavy threads that make up the mantle of a cause cיlטbre.
So how does it stand on its own, this quiet, 90-minute work that has been preceded by so much noise?
Toward the end of the performance I attended, I heard one man choking back sobs and another snoring. I could sympathize with both responses.
I doubt that either was inspired by the sort of partisan politics that have made the play a topic of such bruising debate in New York. Edited by the British actor Alan Rickman and the journalist Katharine Viner, “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” is assembled from journal entries and e-mail messages written by its title character, a 23-year-old American who was killed in March 2003 by an Israeli Army bulldozer while protesting the razing of a house in the Gaza Strip.
In its initial London run, the play which starred the American actress Megan Dodds, who repeats her performance here was warmly received without setting off polemical fireworks. Those didn’t erupt until the New York Theater Workshop, a nonprofit institution known for championing politically daring work, announced in late February that it would indefinitely delay the play’s American premiere.
Given Ms. Corrie’s lightning-rod status as a pro-Palestinian activist she has been held up as both a heroic martyr (by Yasir Arafat, among others) and a terminally naןve pawn the New York Theater Workshop drew accusations of moral cowardice. Theater artists including Vanessa Redgrave, Harold Pinter and the American playwrights Tony Kushner and Christopher Shinn joined the fray. Rachel Corrie became a name best not mentioned at Manhattan dinner parties if you wanted your guests to hold on to their good manners.
Now that the Royal Court production of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” has finally arrived in Manhattan, under the aegis of James Hammerstein Productions, many theatergoers wonder what all the shouting was about, especially in a town where one-person shows expressing extreme points of view are common theatrical fare.
The play, directed by Mr. Rickman, is not an animated recruiting poster for Palestinian activists. Its deeper fascination lies in its invigoratingly detailed portrait of a passionate political idealist in search of a constructive outlet. And its inevitable sentimental power is in its presentation of a blazing young life that you realize is on the verge of being snuffed out. (I kept thinking of the letters from Julian Bell, Virginia Woolf’s nephew, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War.)
The play’s most obvious hold on the audience’s attention comes from its being structured as a sort of countdown to a tragic death. The very look of the stage at the beginning in which Rachel’s bedroom in Olympia, Wash., seems to float against a ravaged Middle Eastern townscape presages a journey we know will be fatal.
It is all the more surprising, then, to discover that for long stretches “Rachel Corrie” feels dramatically flat, even listless. This is not the fault of the text. From earliest adolescence, Ms. Corrie, who wanted to be a poet, had a voice that was unusually and emphatically her own, and a precocious gift for concrete metaphors that give form to nebulous feelings.
To read what she wrote in the last decade of her short life, as assembled by Mr. Rickman and Ms. Viner, is to perceive sometimes eerie patterns of recurring images, with that sense afforded only by hindsight of how each human existence seems to possess its own poetic structure.
From the opening scene, in which Rachel says living in her room in Olympia is like being “inside a terrifying mirror,” an aura of claustrophobia and confinement prevails that must be overcome. The description of a dream of “falling to my death off of something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah,” recorded shortly after she arrived in Gaza in early 2003, acquires a harrowingly prophetic echo. And throughout there is an awareness, uncommon in the young, of how easily a life can be erased.
The production does not belabor the ominous here, and it doesn’t need to. Nor, when Rachel gives voice to her increasingly firm convictions about the Middle East conflict (“What we are paying for here is truly evil”), does Ms. Dodds ever seem to be orating from a platform, bullhorn in hand.
Both her performance and Mr. Rickman’s direction emphasize Rachel as a figure of radiant and unsullied youth, given to striking physical poses (head to the sky, arms extended) that bring to mind movie posters about odds-defying mavericks with big dreams. Sometimes, especially when embodying the pre-Gaza Rachel, Ms. Dodds appears to be merely playing young, with all the attendant cuteness.
Though Ms. Corrie had a streak of preciousness (what poetry-loving teenager does not?), there’s nearly always a redeeming grit in her writing and a feeling of energy that could burn. (You sense that fierceness in photographs of the real Ms. Corrie in demonstrations in Gaza.) These textures are mostly absent from Ms. Dodds’s performance. And when Rachel, describing an encounter with a sometime boyfriend, speaks self-mockingly of acting as if she were in a Mountain Dew commercial, it seems like a reasonable assessment of Ms. Dodds’s performance at that point.
Her Rachel is most compelling after she has arrived in Israel, and later Gaza, when her childhood habit of making lists of things to do, of items needed to keep chaos at bay acquires a heartbreaking urgency. No matter what side you come down on politically, Ms. Corrie’s sense of a world gone so awry that it forces her to question her “fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature” is sure to strike sadly familiar chords.
AN UNEVEN WORK
Review: ‘Rachel Corrie’ an uneven work
By Michael Kuchwara
The Associated Press
October 15, 2006
www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/15767697.htm
“My Name Is Rachel Corrie” is theatrically and politically earnest, an uneven scrapbook drama about an idealistic, some might say naive, young woman trying to do good against the backdrop of the swirling, seemingly insolvable Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The play, which opened Sunday at off-Broadway’s Minetta Lane Theater, has arrived here with considerable non-theatrical baggage. Amid charges of censorship, a production planned for last spring by New York Theater Workshop never happened. It subsequently was picked up for a limited run this fall by other producers.
You can’t say “Rachel Corrie” doesn’t have a point of view, despite the scattered dramatic trajectory of the evening. “I’ve had this underlying need to go to a place and meet people who are on the other end of the tax money that goes to fund the U.S. military,” Corrie says near the beginning of the 95-minute solo show.
The play, a hit for London’s Royal Court Theater, was put together by British actor Alan Rickman (who also directs this production), and Katherine Viner, features editor of The Guardian newspaper in London. They drew on the diaries, letters and e-mails of Corrie, a 23-year-old activist from Olympia, Wash., who died when struck by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in March 2003 while trying to prevent Israelis from demolishing a Palestinian home. She had gone to the Middle East with the International Solidarity Movement.
The play briefly deals with Corrie’s thoughts on the Israelis. With a nod toward the suffering and oppression of Jewish people, she says, “We still have some responsibility for that, but I think it’s important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel as a state, and Jewish people.”
Yet the heart of the play is about the Palestinians, and its best moments are nonpolitical: Corrie’s descriptions, for example, of living in Gaza, her journalistic impressions of ordinary Palestinians and their families.
To get to Gaza, the authors take us through Corrie growing up in Olympia, giving us the story of an imaginative, maybe precocious girl who writes in her notebook that among the people she would like to hang out with in eternity are Rainer Maria Rilke, Jesus, Gertrude Stein, Zelda Fitzgerald and Charlie Chaplin.
It’s these moments that strain dramatically, taxing actress Megan Dodds to the fullest. Dodds, with her wholesome blond good looks, never quite connects with the character as a little girl. She gives a distant, oddly detached performance that seems more like an acting exercise than a portrait of a passionate young woman.
That passion comes through most forcefully late in the evening, in a raging e-mail Corrie types about the consequences of doing nothing.
“It is my own selfishness and will to optimism that wants to believe that even people with a great deal of privilege don’t just idly sit by and watch,” she writes.
Rachel Corrie refused to just watch.
“LACKLUSTER, ULTIMATELY HEAVY-HANDED AND ONE-SIDED”
My name is Rachel Corrie: Off-stage drama
By Michael Dale
Broadwayworld.com
October 15, 2006
www.broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=12925
Please note: In reviewing My Name Is Rachel Corrie, I found it necessary to describe the final moments of the play in the last few paragraphs.
After all the controversy, the accusations of censorship and the petitions and letters of protest, Britain’s Royal Court Theater production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie has finally made it to New York. Sadly, the off-stage drama far exceeds anything taking place on stage at the Minetta Lane Theater. Journalist Katherine Viner and actor/director Alan Rickman have assembled the solo performance piece from the diaries, emails and letters of the 23-year-old American who was killed in March of 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer while trying to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian home in Gaza. Viner and Rickman may have put their hearts and souls into this work, but what they didn’t put into it is dramaturgy. The story of Rachel Corrie may be an important one. Her words may deserve to be heard. But this lackluster and ultimately heavy-handed and one-sided presentation is not the way to do it.
According to published reports earlier this year, James Nicola, the artistic director of the New York Theater Workshop, said his company was considering staging the play’s New York premiere in March, but it was never formally announced as definite. Explaining his reasons for postponing the production, Nicola wrote, “In researching My Name Is Rachel Corrie, we found many distorted accounts of the actual circumstances of Rachel’s death that had resulted in a highly charged, vituperative, and passionate controversy. While our commitment to the play did not waver, our responsibility was not just to produce it, but to produce it in such a way as to prevent false and tangential back-and-forth arguments from interfering with Rachel’s voice. We spoke to friends and colleagues in the artistic community and to religious leaders as well as to representatives of the Jewish community, because the play involved Israeli action.”
Released statements quoted Rickman as saying, “I can only guess at the pressures of funding an independent theater company in New York, but calling this production ‘postponed’ does not disguise the fact that it has been cancelled
This is censorship born out of fear, and the New York Theater Workshop, the Royal Court, New York audiences all of us are the losers.”
My own feelings about censorship, the artistic decisions of a theater company and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict are, of course, irrelevant here. Those with strong opinions on these issues may certainly have highly emotional and passionate reactions to My Name Is Rachel Corrie, but what follows is a critique on how it stands on its own as a work of theater.
Call it a heartfelt tribute. Call it a sincere memorial. Call it the writings of a dedicated youth fighting for a cause she believes in. But My Name Is Rachel Corrie can barely be called a play. With all due respect to the deceased, her writings, as presented in this edited ninety-minute form, reveal no more of a character than the stereotypical bright, idealistic youth with big dreams:
“Okay, I’m Rachel. Sometimes I wear ripped blue jeans. Sometimes I wear polyester. Sometimes I take off all my clothes and swim naked at the beach. I don’t believe in fate but my astrological sign is Aries, the ram, and my sign on the Chinese zodiac is the sheep, and the name Rachel means sheep but I’ve got a fire in my belly. It used to be such a big, loud blazing fire that I couldn’t hear anybody else over it. So I talked a lot and didn’t listen too much.”
As a fifth grader in Olympia, Washington, when asked to write what she wanted to be when she grew up, Rachel delivered a “five-paragraph manifesto on the million things I wanted to be, from wandering poet to first woman president.” Her lists of “Five People I Wish I’d Met Who Are Dead” and “Five People To Hang Out With In Eternity” are the kinds of things that may be fun to read on a friend’s blog but hardly contribute to an evening of compelling theater.
As a member of the International Solidarity Movement, an organization which is never mentioned by name in the script, Corrie and other Americans and Europeans acted as human shields to help protect Palestinians living in Gaza from the Israeli military; the logic being that an unarmed American in peaceful protest is a dangerous target to eliminate. Though she separates the policies of Israel as a state with the Jewish people as a whole, her descriptions of the conflict, told through correspondence, are a one-sided account of atrocities committed by one people upon another. The piece fails dramatically because the text doesn’t provide basic information about her mission and there is no attempt to analyze both sides of the situation. It’s never mentioned that the Israeli government was bulldozing down certain homes because they were suspected of hiding tunnels used to supply arms to Palestinian terrorists. She goes as a far as writing, “The vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance.”
Megan Dodds, who plays Rachel Corrie during evening performances (Bree Elrod plays the role during matinees), gets little support from Rickman’s direction in trying to create an interesting human being from this patched together text. She spends a lot of time standing center stage, speaking out to the audience with little vitality or vocal variety. She also spends a good deal of time sitting upstage behind a computer, typing emails which she narrates in a monotone I-am-typing-an-email voice.
And yet there’s a ten-minute stretch near the end of the evening where My Name Is Rachel Corrie miraculously begins to resemble good theater. In a long letter home to her mother, her language suddenly turns eloquent and mature as Corrie writes of “questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature.” She writes passionately and provocatively of the world’s growing class imbalance and of the rights of those to defend their very chance for a decent survival. If the purpose of My Name Is Rachel Corrie is to humanize a name in a news story, this monologue, sensitively performed by Dodds, is the only instance where it works.
What follows, we’re told, is a recorded transcript of an eyewitness account of Corrie’s death as described by someone named Tom Dale. He tells of a brutal and intentional murder. What we’re not told is that Tom Dale was a colleague of Corrie’s and that the two of them, along with others, had been spending two hours monitoring and obstructing two bulldozers. And though Dale’s description may very well have been accurate and unbiased, there is no mention made that other eyewitness accounts conflict with his report.
The final image we see, on a video monitor, is of a ten year old Rachel Corrie speaking at her fifth grade press conference on world hunger. The moment seems a shameless attempt to send the audience out weeping.
Maybe in the hands of a better dramatist the words of Rachel Corrie could have made powerful theater. But perhaps it would be best to simply read what she wrote, unedited, without involving the interpretations of creative artists.
CONTENTS
1. Human Rights Watch update
2. Relatives of beheaded Iraqi priest say kidnappers demanded apology for pope
3. Sharansky plans to resign from politics; Wiesel for president?
4. Jordan plans new Temple Mount minaret
5. Soros plans an alternative to AIPAC
6. Terrorists with a PR firm
7. Muslims’ anger as London Olympics will clash with Ramadan
8. Syria clamps down on freedom-of-speech students
9. Iran’s clerics caught up in blogging craze
10. Protestors hurl petrol bombs at Danish mission in Iran
11. Dozens killed in Sudanese shootings
12. Another concern within Conservative ranks
13. Israel recalls ambassador to Australia
14. SNCF hit with compensation claims over Nazi-camp transport
15. Russian Jews protest over Hitler restaurant
16. Vienna street to be renamed after Simon Wiesenthal
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH UPDATE
The following is an update to yesterday’s dispatch Human Rights Watch confirms: Hizbullah used cluster bombs against Israel.
Professor Gerald Steinberg, a longtime subscriber to this list who among other things runs the important website NGO Monitor, writes:
Human Rights Watch’s short statement on October 18 contrasts with over 30 statements, reports (the longest was 49 pages), op-eds, media interviews, and so on, from July 13 through and beyond the end of the Israel-Hizbullah war that focused primarily on accusing Israel of “war crimes”. A short statement two months after the interest in this issue has largely disappeared, without the usual accompanying PR campaign by HRW is clearly too little, too late. HRW officials, including Ken Roth, are under enormous pressure for their long-running anti-Israel campaigns, and this statement now about Hizbullah is their effort to defend themselves. They have used these tactics before: in November 2002, they issued a report on suicide bombings, and as soon as the pressure eased, they ignored their own report and its implications. All of this is documented on www.ngo-monitor.org.
RELATIVES OF BEHEADED IRAQI PRIEST SAY KIDNAPPERS DEMANDED APOLOGY FOR POPE MUSLIM COMMENTS
Relatives of an Orthodox priest who was kidnapped last week and found beheaded three days later, said that his captors had demanded his church condemn the pope’s recent comments about Islam and pay an enormous $350,000 ransom.
More than 500 people attended a memorial service for father Amer Iskender in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul after his decapitated body was found last Wednesday evening in an industrial area of the city. Iskender was a priest at the St. Ephrem Orthodox church in Mosul.
Relatives, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said the unidentified group that seized Iskender last week said Pope Benedict XVI bore “sole responsibility” for Iskender’s fate.
SHARANSKY PLANS TO RESIGN FROM POLITICS; WIESEL FOR PRESIDENT?
The human rights activist and former Soviet political prisoner Natan Sharansky, who is now a Likud Member of the Israeli Knesset, is resigning from the Knesset and says he will quit politics.
However, if Moshe Katsav resigns as Israeli president, as he is expected to do after sex crime charges were leveled against him, there is speculation that Sharansky would make a good Israeli president. Sharansky recently marked the 20th anniversary of his 1986 release from a Soviet prison and subsequent immigration to Israel. He used various information from this email list/website for his bestselling book, The Case for Democracy.
Ehud Olmert says he is in favor of (his political ally) Shimon Peres becoming the next Israeli president. The post is supposed to be largely ceremonial. Others have suggested Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel should assume the position so as to restore dignity to the office following the latest scandal.
JORDAN PLANS NEW TEMPLE MOUNT MINARET
Israel says it will not object to Jordanian plans to construct a fifth minaret on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.
A senior Jordanian official said the Hashemite Kingdom is planning to construct the minaret early next year. The minaret will be built on the eastern wall of the Temple Mount near the Golden Gate, and at 42 meters it will be the highest of the minarets on the Mount and the first to be built in more than 600 years. Dr. Raief Najim, vice chairman of the committee running the project, toured the intended site with a top Jerusalem police commander, a senior government official and the head of the Israel Antiquities Authority and none of them voiced any opposition, said Najim.
The Temple Mount has been Judaism’s holiest site for thousands of years. The first Muslim minaret was constructed on the southwest corner of the Temple Mount in 1278. The second was built in 1297, the third in 1329, and the last in 1367.
Israeli Jewish groups who also wish to build on the site are expected to voice their outrage at the Israeli government’s decision to instead allow Jordan to build at the site.
SOROS PLANS AN ALTERNATIVE TO AIPAC
Billionaire philanthropist George Soros has met with other left-wing Jews to discuss setting up an alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Even though AIPAC consistently adopts centrist positions, the leftists regard it as too right-wing.
A source close to Soros said the aim would be to pressure the U.S. government to lean on the Israeli government to make more concessions to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.
A follow-up meeting by the leftist Jewish businessmen will take place in New York on October 26, sources tell me. Other major Jewish liberals invited, include Peter Lewis, who like Soros is a major contributor to MoveOn.org, the Web-based anti-Bush group; and Edgar and Charles Bronfman. Several former Clinton administration staffers and Debra DeLee, president of Americans for Peace Now, are also expected to attend. There are apparently differences of opinion about the degree to which the new structure should confront AIPAC.
Soros has on numerous occasions been criticized by other Jews for his supposed anti-Jewish positions. For example, after he told a conference in 2003 that Israel bore responsibility for the outbreak of anti-Semitism in Europe because of its response to Palestinian terrorism.
TERRORISTS WITH A PR FIRM
Hizbullah have hang up an advertising poster showing fighters launching Katyusha rockets, with the French words reading: “Divine Victory,” at the highway leading to Beirut’s international airport. The terror group never short of funds, thanks to western government aid money that finds its way into their hands paid a public relations firm $140,000 to design a campaign called “Divine Victory,” according to Lebanese media. Hundreds of billboards have sprung up across the country in Arabic, English and French glorifying what many in Lebanon see as a Hizbullah victory over Israel in its 34-day war with Israel in July and August.
MUSLIMS’ ANGER AS LONDON OLYMPICS CLASH WILL WITH RAMADAN
The 2012 London Olympics have been plunged into controversy by the discovery that the Games will clash with the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.
The clash will put some Muslim athletes at a disadvantage as they will be expected to fast from sunrise to sunset for the entire duration of the Games.
In 2012, Ramadan will take place from July 21 to August 20, while the Olympics run from July 27 to August 12.
About a quarter of the 11,099 athletes who took part in the 2004 Athens Olympics came from countries with predominantly Muslim populations. It is not known how many observe the fast.
Commentators say the clash will be a huge embarrassment for London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who have been keen a keen supporter both of hard-line Muslim groups and of the London Olympic Games.
Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of the London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission, said: “They would never have dared to organize this at Christmas.”
During Yom Kippur last month, several Jewish soccer players were forced to play matches for their European clubs during the fast, but didn’t complain.
SYRIA CLAMPS DOWN ON FREEDOM-OF-SPEECH STUDENTS
Syria has arrested and continues to hold students who are trying to express views that are not in accordance with those of the regime in Damascus, according to the Arab Organization for Human Rights. Additionally, the AOHR’s staff in Damascus has been arrested and generally finds its work all but impossible to carry out, it told western journalists. Occasional reports from the major human rights organizations point to Damascus’ perceived violations of international laws on subjects including freedom of speech and other basic rights. Most of those human rights organizations spend far more time criticizing Israel.
IRAN’S CLERICS CAUGHT UP IN BLOGGING CRAZE
The craze for blogging in Iran has reached an unlikely set of adherents the country’s conservative Islamic clerics. Following the example of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ayatollahs, seminary students and theologians are receiving training in setting up their own weblogs.
Courses run by the newly-established Office of Religious Weblog Expansion have begun in the holy city of Qom, the traditional home of Iran’s religious establishment. Students of the Koran will receive instruction on practical matters such as blog content and technical support. Some 300 clerics, religious students and writers have been signed up.
The arrival of the religious ruling class on Iran’s blogosphere is ironic in view of the harsh crackdown launched by the authorities against bloggers who have used it to voice political dissent. Scores of bloggers have been jailed in recent years while many sites have been blocked using U.S.-made filtering technology.
The blogging trend began among the political reformist movement in Iran in 2001 as a response to the closures of dozens of liberal newspapers and magazines on the orders of religious hardliners. Ahmadinejad jumped on the bandwagon last month when he launched a blog attached to his presidential website.
PROTESTORS HURL PETROL BOMBS AT DANISH MISSION IN IRAN
Dozens of protesters pelted the Danish embassy in Teheran last week with stones and petrol bombs after Danish television broadcast new footage deemed insulting to the Muslim Prophet Mohammad, witnesses said.
Denmark’s state TV aired footage of a number of members of the youth wing of the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party (DPP) drawing cartoons in August mocking the Prophet. Reuters reported that protesters hurled stones and petrol bombs into the embassy compound. The crowd chanted, “Down with Zionists” and “God praise the party of God”.
DOZENS KILLED IN SUDANESE SHOOTINGS
Unknown gunmen killed at least 38 people in southern Sudan yesterday. The dead included women, children and male civilians. Southern Sudan has been relatively peaceful for more than a year and these killings are unrelated to the ongoing massacres by Arab Sudanese of non-Arabs in the western province, Darfur, where some 200,000 people have been killed and more than two million made homeless.
Recently, the BBC has finally begun to mention that the killings and ethnic cleansing are being carried out by Arabs. For years, they have strenuously avoided saying this, as I have pointed out in private meetings with senior BBC producers and in published articles such as this. (See the section titled: Is something happening in Sudan?)
ANOTHER CONCERN WITHIN CONSERVATIVE RANKS
The (London) Daily Telegraph reports that a fresh row has broken out after another Conservative MP made inflammatory comments about Israel. In a parliamentary debate last week, Andrew Turner, MP for the Isle of Wight said of Israel’s campaign against Hizbullah two months ago: “Those were the tactics of the Nazis.”
Other Conservatives have been dismayed at recent remarks critical of Israel and America by the party’s new leader David Cameron, and by the shadow foreign secretary, William Hague.
As noted in my article Media missiles, during the recent Israel-Hizbullah war, Conservative MP Sir Peter Tapsell told the House of Commons that Israel was committing war crimes “gravely reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter of Warsaw.” This article can be read in the dispatch The media war against Israel (Aug. 3, 2006).
ISRAEL RECALLS AMBASSADOR TO AUSTRALIA
Israel has recalled its ambassador to Australia, Naftali Tamir, after Ha’aretz quoted him as saying that Israel and Australia are “like sisters in Asia,” because “we don’t have yellow skin and slanted eyes.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry was checking to see if Tamir’s comments were accurately reported. If they were, Tamir would be dismissed, said a spokesperson. He added that there was no room for racism among Israeli officials.
Tamir, a veteran diplomat who has served in Australia since 2005, was quoted in Ha’aretz as saying, “Israel and Australia are like sisters in Asia. We are in Asia without the characteristics of Asians. We don’t have yellow skin and slanted eyes. Asia is basically the yellow race. Australia and Israel are not we are basically the white race. We are on the western side of Asia and they are on the southeastern side.”
Tamir is also Israel’s non-resident ambassador to New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Fiji.
SNCF HIT WITH COMPENSATION CLAIMS OVER NAZI-CAMP TRANSPORT
Some 1,200 claims for compensation have been submitted against the French state rail network (SNCF) for its role in helping transport Jews to Nazi camps during World War II, the railway said last Friday. The 1,200 French, Israeli, American, Belgian and Canadian families are basing their demands on a successful court challenge by French MP Alain Lipietz. In June, a French court ordered the government and SNCF to pay about $77,600 in damages for their role in transporting four of Lipietz’s relatives to a Nazi concentration camp. SNCF loaded Jews like cattle into packed carriages and then tried to charge them third class ticket fares as it transported them to their deaths.
The rail network contests the claims, saying it was under orders from the French authorities at the time and exercised no autonomy under the occupation government.
RUSSIAN JEWS PROTEST HITLER RESTAURANT
Jewish leaders in a Russian region are protesting against the use of Adolf Hitler’s name by a new pub. The pub, set to open soon in the city of Ekaterinburg, is named “Hitler Kaput”. In a letter to the local mayor, leaders of the Jewish community said that any use of Hitler’s name to attract public attention is unacceptable. Authorities haven’t yet responded to the Jewish community. The letter also referred to a similar development in India where a restaurant initially named after Hitler changed its name after protests from the Jewish community.
VIENNA STREET TO BE RENAMED AFTER SIMON WIESENTHAL
Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal is to have a street named in his honor in the Austrian capital Vienna. The Vienna city council’s culture committee has approved a proposal by Leopoldstadt district politicians to rename a lane in the area from Ichmanngasse to Simon-Wiesenthal-Gasse.
The Jewish Community’s wish to have the street named after Wiesenthal, who died last year, was backed by all political parties except the right-wing Freedom Party.
Vienna was once a vibrant hub for Jews in Central Europe. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were 200,000 Jews living there. Today about 7,000 Jews live in the Austrian capital. Many Jews say that anti-Semitism is still commonplace in Austria.
-- Tom Gross
“SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?”
[Note by Tom Gross]
Because this website so often contains very serious, depressing stories, I occasionally send items of light relief.
Here are three videos for your amusement:
* Tony Blair (who is under intense pressure from his own Labor party to resign), singing “Should I stay or should I go?”.
* George Bush, singing “Imagine” (and featuring many other politicians previously mentioned on this email list).
* And for those of you who don’t like George Bush, here he is singing “Sunday Bloody Sunday”.
ENDLESS LOVE
* Here is a “classic” I first sent out in March 2003, shortly before the beginning of the Iraq war: George Bush and Tony Blair singing “Endless Love”.
* And for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, here are U.S. baseball commentators giving their views on Mel Gibson’s recent anti-Semitic comments, while commenting on a Boston Red Sox baseball game. (Also available here.)
Enjoy!
-- Tom Gross
ONE OF THESE COUNTRIES GAVE HIZBULLAH CLUSTER BOMBS
[Note by Tom Gross]
There has been an enormous amount of reporting by the international media on the Israeli use of cluster bombs in the recent conflict with Hizbullah. By contrast, there has been virtually no reporting on Hizbullah’s use of cluster bombs, even though Hizbullah (unlike Israel) deliberately aimed them at civilian targets.
Even the mainstream liberal media should have no excuses for their continual refusal to report on Hizbullah’s use of cluster bombs the first time in the world they have been used by a non-state armed group following publication yesterday of a report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch.
Human Rights Watch confirm what Israeli officials have been saying since mid-July: that Hizbullah fired cluster munitions into civilian areas in northern Israel during the recent conflict.
Hizbullah’s deployment of the Chinese-made Type-81 122mm rocket is also the first confirmed use of this particular model of cluster munitions anywhere in the world.
Five countries China, Egypt, Italy, Russia, and Slovakia produce nine types of 122mm rockets carrying submunitions. Two other countries, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, also stockpile them.
ISRAELI ARABS AMONG THE VICTIMS
Human Rights Watch documented two Type-81 cluster strikes that took place on July 25 in the Galilee village of Mghar. Each of the Type-81 cluster munition 122mm rockets used by Hizbullah carries 39 Type-90 or MZD submunitions. Each submunition in turn shoots out hundreds of steel spheres, about 3.5mm in diameter, with deadly force.
It is not known when and how Hizbullah obtained these foreign-made cluster munitions. Human Rights Watch say their findings raise serious concerns about the proliferation of these weapons to non-state armed groups. Human Rights Watch has previously reported on Israel’s use of cluster munitions in southern Lebanon during the conflict.
Those injured by Hizbullah’s cluster bombs include both Israeli Jews and Arabs. For example, on July 25, 2006, between 2:15 and 2:30 p.m., a cluster munition landed by the home of Jihad Ghanem in the western part of Mghar village (population 19,000). The attack injured three family members: his son Rami, 8, his brother Ziad, 35, and his sister Suha, 33. Rami’s arms bore irregular scars caused by pieces of shrapnel as well as smaller round marks that Jihad said were caused by steel spheres.
Israeli police say they documented 113 cluster rockets that were fired at Israel during the conflict, causing one death and 12 injuries: in Mghar one death and six injuries, in Karmiel three injuries, in Kiryat Motzkin two injuries, and in Nahariya one injury. The police said they discovered the first of these rockets on July 15 in the Upper Galilee village of Safsufa.
Various governments have used other kinds of cluster weapons in recent conflicts, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo.
Human Rights Watch condemn Hizbullah for deliberately attacking civilian areas with these weapons. Will all those international politicians who have been condemning Israel also condemn Hizbullah and those that supplied them with these weapons?
-- Tom Gross
* Hizbullah launches Hebrew-language website
* Islamic Jihad put Hebrew captions on Qassam rockets
* Hamas spokesman questions if violence is a Palestinian “disease”
* Ahmadinejad: “Yes, I have been in touch with God”
CONTENTS
1. “Would-be suicide bomber killed near Karni crossing” (Jerusalem Post, Oct. 11, 2006)
2. “Hamas spokesman questions if violence is Palestinian ‘disease’” (Reuters, Oct. 17, 2006)
3. “Intransigent Hamas” (Washington Post, Oct. 11, 2006)
4. “Syria aiding arms smuggling into Lebanon: Israeli official” (AFP, Oct. 15, 2006)
5. “Hamas says aid from Iran is forthcoming” (J. Post, AP & Reuters, Oct. 12, 2006)
6. “Katyusha defense at least 4 years away” (Jerusalem Post, Oct. 11, 2006)
7. “New calls by Hamas militants to target the U.S.” (Time magazine, Oct. 13, 2006)
8. “U.S. man pleads guilty to aiding Hamas” (Associated Press, Oct. 13, 2006)
9. “Ahmadinejad: God told me we would win” (Yediot Ahronot, Oct. 16, 2006)
10. “Olmert: Iran nukes could reach Hizbullah” (Yediot Ahronot, Oct. 15, 2006)
11. “New Iranian moderate daily hits newsstands” (AFP, Oct. 16, 2006)
[Note by Tom Gross]
This dispatch concerns violence and threats of violence against Israeli civilians by Hamas, Iran, Hizbullah and Syria.
An Israeli truck driver was shot and wounded in a terror attack this morning. He was delivering bread to bakeries and supermarkets. The Palestinian gunmen were hiding along the roadside.
HIZBULLAH LAUNCHES HEBREW WEBSITE
Hizbullah has launched a Hebrew-language website in an attempt to cater to “non-Zionist” Israelis opposing Israeli army operations. The website appears to be a translation into Hebrew of an existing Hizbullah website. This marks the organization’s first attempt to address an Israeli audience through the Internet. The site, which is stored at an Iranian address, offers reports on supposed IDF misdeeds, and includes information provided by extreme leftist Jews. It also has news on Israeli domestic politics, including an update on the sex charges leveled against Israeli President Moshe Katsav.
The website’s name means “resistance” in Farsi. The site has many Hebrew-language mistakes and it appears Hizbullah may have used automated translation software rather than a real person to translate much of it
Hizbullah may have taken this idea from Iran, who have since 2001 produced their own official Hebrew website by IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting). This features both news and radio broadcasts. The URL for the Iranian Islamic Hebrew website is: 62.220.120.178/KolDavid. The Hebrew for this site, while not perfect, is good and according to my intelligence sources has been well translated by Iranians that speak Hebrew quite well. It is much more professional than the Hizbullah Hebrew site.
ISLAMIC JIHAD CHALLENGE HAMAS FOR MEDIA COVERAGE
Meanwhile, Palestinian Islamic Jihad is also stepping up its propaganda war on Israelis.
For the first time this week, a Palestinian rocket bearing a Hebrew caption “al-Quds 3” landed in Israel. The rocket was fired by Islamic Jihad. The group’s spokesman in Gaza, Abu Abdullah, explained to his friends and contacts at Reuters Gaza bureau that the decision to write the rocket’s name in Hebrew was aimed at ensuring that credit for the attack went to Islamic Jihad. He said Islamic Jihad members were unhappy that the Israeli media refer to all rockets hitting Israel from Gaza as “Qassams,” a name identified with Hamas.
The rocket, which was fired on Monday evening at the southern Israeli town of Sderot, narrowly missed a residential building, housing elderly people. One person was lightly injured and six others received treatment for shock. On Monday, another rocket with Hebrew inscriptions landed in a field near the western Negev kibbutz of Nir Am.
HAMAS SPOKESMAN QUESTIONS IF VIOLENCE IS PALESTINIAN “DISEASE”
The second report below is on an opinion piece in the Palestinian newspaper al-Ayyam by Ghazi Hamad, a spokesman for the Hamas-led Palestinian government. Hamad asks whether “violence [has] become a culture implanted in our bodies and our flesh? [It] has taken away the language of brotherhood and replaced it with arms... It has stolen our unity and divided us into two camps, or three, or ten Shouldn’t we be ashamed of this ugly behavior which scandalizes us before our people and before the world?”
Hamad urged Palestinians to “disown this disease, this cancer, which has damaged our brains and paralyzed our hearts.” It is not clear whether Hamad feels the same way when Palestinians kill Israeli children.
Throughout the Intifada, many Palestinians have been killed by other Palestinians. Yet western news agencies continue to include these among numbers of “Palestinian dead in the Intifada,” wrongly implying that Israel killed them.
They also blur numbers together, obscuring who the perpetrators were. For example, AFP wrote on October 15: “All told, 5,436 people most of them Palestinians have died since the Palestinian intifada resumed in 2000, according to an AFP count.”
So far this year alone, according to Hamad (but not mentioned by AFP), 175 Palestinians have been killed by “Palestinian gunfire”.
TAKING ON THE GREAT SATAN
In the seventh article below, “New calls by Hamas militants to target the U.S.,” Tim McGirk of Time magazine reports that Hamas leaders “are locked in a fierce debate over whether to launch terrorist attacks on U.S. targets in the Middle East. Despite its anti-American rhetoric, Hamas has until now refrained from any known terror strikes against the U.S. only Israel,” claims the magazine. An Israeli intelligence official says that until now Hamas’s thinking seemed to be: “One enemy Israel is enough. Let others in Iraq and Afghanistan take on the Great Satan.”
Last week, Hamas-authorized kidnappers struck again: an American “aid” worker, Michael Philips, 24, from Louisiana was kidnapped from Nablus. Phillips has since been freed and it is not known whether a ransom was paid. (It appears Phillips was freed after he proved to the kidnappers that he was fully supportive of their cause and tactics. He appears to be the same Michael Philips who is an ISM member the group which Rachel Corrie belonged to and recently wrote an article for an English-language pro-Jihad website titled “Israeli Occupation Terrorist Forces Reinvade Nablus, Kill One Member of the Resistance.”)
THE WASHINGTON POST: ENOUGH FLOWERY APPEALS
I particularly encourage you to read The Washington Post editorial below. After years of denial, the Post editorial writers finally seem to be asking the right questions: “It’s easy enough for global leaders to issue flowery appeals for action on the Middle East or to imply that progress would be possible if only the United States used its leverage with Israel. But what if Palestinian leaders don’t want it? The stubborn reality is that there can be no movement toward peace until a Palestinian leadership appears that is ready to accept a two-state solution.”
I wonder if The New York Times editorial writers will ever dare to ask themselves the same question?
HAMAS PREPARES FOR WAR
Other articles below include reports on the latest suicide bomb attempt in Israel, and an admission by Hamas that aid from Iran is forthcoming. Previously Hamas called Israeli press reports that Iran was helping Hamas a “Zionist smear campaign”; now a Hamas website admitted such help in the course of a report about the recent visit to Teheran by Palestinian Interior Minister Said Siyam.
Separately, reports from Teheran suggest the Iranian government is prepared to train Hamas’ armed force. The agreement was reached during a series of meetings there last Thursday between top Iranian officials and Siyam. Hamas’ Executive Force comprises almost 4,000 men, of whom 500 were recruited from what Israel sees as a second terror group the Popular Resistance Committees.
In addition, since the beginning of the year, more than 20 tons of explosives, anti-aircraft missiles and antitank missiles have been smuggled into Gaza. Israeli Brigadier General Yossi Baidatz, said the movement of these weapons could greatly endanger the lives of Israelis, and would require the army to consider a different and stronger approach to its activities in Gaza.
Also, the Fatah movement, bolstered by Western aid, has received new shipments of assault rifles and ammunition. Palestinian sources said Fatah units in the West Bank received thousands of U.S.-origin M-16 assault rifles. They said the rifles were supplied to Fatah units as part of Israeli-approved Western aid to forces loyal to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
For space reasons, I have included edited down versions of some of the news articles below.
-- Tom Gross
SUICIDE BOMBER THWARTED
Would-be suicide bomber killed near Karni crossing
By Yaakov Katz
The Jerusalem Post
October 11, 2006
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1159193415567&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
A suicide attack was thwarted last Tuesday night when IDF troops shot and killed a Palestinian wearing an explosives belt when he tried to infiltrate into Israel from the Gaza Strip. He was shot after he was spotted by soldiers entering Israel. His body was transferred back to Gaza on Tuesday night.
Another Palestinian was shot and killed overnight Tuesday in Nablus, near the security fence. According to the army, he was armed and had attacked the troops. Relatives identified him as Abdullah Mansour, 31, a member of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, who was wanted by Israel.
Earlier, IAF aircraft bombed the home of Mariam Farhat, also known as Umm Nidal literally “mother of the struggle” a Hamas parliament member and the mother of three sons who were killed during the Intifada.
Residents were warned in advance of the attack and, while the building was severely damaged, no one was injured. The IDF said that the strike was on a building that housed a weapons warehouse and manufacturing facility.
Farhat made headlines when in 2002 she was filmed preparing her 17-year-old son Muhammad for a suicide attack he perpetrated in which five students in the pre-military academy in the Gaza settlement of Atzmona were killed.
“THIS UGLY BEHAVIOR”
Hamas spokesman questions if violence is Palestinian “disease”
Reuters
October 17, 2006
haaretz.com/hasen/spages/775946.html
Ghazi Hamad, a senior figure in Hamas and spokesman for the Hamas-led government, published an article on Tuesday condemning internal violence and questioning whether it has become a “Palestinian disease”. Hamad said he was disturbed by growing factionalism in the Palestinian territories, including recent deadly clashes between rival political movements.
“Has violence become a culture implanted in our bodies and our flesh?” he asked in the sharply worded article, published in the widely read Palestinian newspaper al-Ayyam. “We have surrendered to it until it has become the master and is obeyed everywhere in the house, the neighborhood, the family, the clan, the faction, and the university.”
It was the second time in recent months that Hamad, who is based in Gaza, had written an opinion piece in al-Ayyam critical of Palestinian in-fighting. In August, he criticized Palestinian militant groups fighting Israel, saying they were not doing the cause of Palestinian independence any good by launching attacks at moments when it appeared progress was being made.
In the article published on Tuesday, Hamad said the presence of armed men on almost every street, and their attendance at every rally, whether political or not, had created an atmosphere of guns and violence that damaged prospects for calm.
It also meant that television pictures of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict broadcast around the world too often showed armed men and images of violence, casting the Palestinian struggle in a poor light, he suggested.
He wrote that violence “has taken away the language of brotherhood and replaced it with arms... It has stolen our unity and divided us into two camps, or three, or ten. Shouldn’t we be ashamed of this ugly behavior which scandalizes us before our people and before the world?” he asked.
Hamad’s article follows a period of intense in-fighting, with some of the worst intra-Palestinian violence since the formation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994.
Earlier this month, at least 15 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in clashes between armed members of Hamas and gunmen from the rival Fatah movement, prompting fear of an impending civil war.
Hamad wrote that 175 Palestinians had been killed by “Palestinian gunfire” since the beginning of the year. Recently launched talks on forming a unity government have so far failed.
“Are we all responsible? Yes. Do we all participate in this great sin? Yes,” wrote Hamad. “All of us have the desire not to see arms in the streets except with policemen.”
“We want to disown this disease, this cancer, which has damaged our brains and paralyzed our hearts,” he said. “Have mercy on your people. Let us walk in peace, sit in peace, have a dialogue in peace and sleep in calm,” he added.
THE WASHINGTON POST RETHINKS
Intransigent Hamas
It’s easy to call for a Middle East peace. But what if Palestinian leaders don’t want it?
The Washington Post
October 11, 2006
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001241.html?referrer=email
Stirring but thoughtless appeals for a Middle East peace settlement continue to ring out around the world. Just last week a new one appeared, signed by 135 “global leaders,” that called for “a new international conference, ideally held as soon as possible.” Most of the sponsoring statesmen live far from the region in Europe, Latin America, Africa, Australia. Their statement asserted that “the injection of new political will” from “the international community” was what is needed to break the impasse between Israel and the Palestinians.
In fact, the problem is a lot more specific, and a lot tougher. That’s why it was helpful that the foreign minister of Egypt decided to publicly speak his mind on the subject the other day. Ahmed Aboul Gheit who has spent the past several months immersed in a failing effort to restore the broken connections between the Palestinian Authority and its international donors, as well as Israel placed the blame exactly where it belongs: on the Palestinian political leadership. “The Palestinian situation is marred by sharp divisions and battling; it is a misery and shameful for any Arab and any Palestinian,” the minister told the government newspaper al-Ahram.
The Egyptian frustration is understandable. Negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel, and Western aid to the Palestinian government, can’t go forward because the governing Hamas movement refuses to recognize Israel or previous Israeli-Palestinian accords. It also won’t renounce the use of violence against Israeli soldiers or civilians, or release the soldier its militants abducted from inside Israel in June. Egyptian negotiators have won Israeli agreement to release up to 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the hostage, but Hamas won’t go along.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, from the competing Fatah movement, has tried repeatedly to win Hamas’s agreement on a new unity government that would indirectly recognize Israel, a half-step that might lure back some desperately needed European aid. No deal. This week the government of Qatar intervened, sending its foreign minister shuttling around Gaza with a six-point plan under which Hamas and Fatah would unite on the platform of a two-state solution. Once again Hamas said no.
In case there was any doubt, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh spelled out Hamas’s position at a rally last weekend: “I tell you with all honesty, we will not recognize Israel, we will not recognize Israel, we will not recognize Israel.” Mr. Abbas responded by threatening, as he has before, to dissolve the Palestinian government or order a referendum. But he lacks the legal authority either to remove Hamas from power or to schedule a vote of any kind.
It’s easy enough for global leaders to issue flowery appeals for action on the Middle East or to imply that progress would be possible if only the United States used its leverage with Israel. The stubborn reality is that there can be no movement toward peace until a Palestinian leadership appears that is ready to accept a two-state solution. That’s why there need to be fewer manifestos and more frank messages such as the one delivered by Mr. Aboul Gheit: “Those leaders and the Palestinian people will find out that they are losing a chance.”
SYRIA SENDS MORE ARMS TO HAMAS, ISLAMIC JIHAD AND HIZBULLAH
Syria aiding arms smuggling into Lebanon: Israeli official
Agence France Presse (AFP)
October 15, 2006
news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061015/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictisraellebanonsyriaweapons
Syria is aiding arms smuggling into Lebanon in violation of a UN resolution that ended 34 days of war between Israel and Hizbullah this summer, a senior Israeli intelligence officer has said.
“The weapons smuggling from Syria into Lebanon is continuing with official Syrian involvement,” General Yossi Baidatz, head of the intelligence research department, told the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday.
“Syria’s (President Bashar) al-Assad continues to play an active role in the anti-Israel axis and supports Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah,” a senior government official quoted Baidatz as telling the cabinet. “There is conclusive and decisive evidence,” Baidatz said.
“Syria is continuing to sabotage the implementation of (UN Resolution) 1701 and is playing a conspirator’s role in sabotaging (Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad) Siniora’s ability to carry out his agenda,” he said.
“Syria is trying to create an opposition block in the Lebanese government in order to damage the prime minister.”
IRAN PROMISES TO HELP HAMAS
Hamas says aid from Iran is forthcoming
The Jerusalem Post, AP & Reuters
October 12, 2006
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1159193428310&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Iran has promised to give assistance to the security forces of the Hamas-led Palestinian government, a Hamas Website said Friday. A senior Hamas official said Teheran had promised to give vehicles to the group’s 3,500-member militia.
The promise came during a visit to Teheran by Palestinian Interior Minister Said Siyam, according to the Website. Siam was accompanied by four of his advisers and the head of the militia.
Siyam met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, visited Iran’s security branches and attended a training session at the police academy, the Website said. Senior Iranian officers promised to assist the Palestinians, it said.
“We see the positions of Ahmadinejad as a source of pride for Muslims,” Siyam was quoted as saying on the Hamas Website. “Especially when he challenges the sources of international arrogance,” he said, in an apparent reference to America and Israel.
Ahmadinejad said Iran had no reservations that would stop it from helping the Hamas government, the Website said. “The victories of Hamas and Hizbullah have put the Zionist entity in a difficult situation,” the site quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.
The Hamas representatives discussed the possibility of training its operatives in Iran, Channel 2 reported.
In 1999, the IDF claimed Iran had been training Hamas guerrillas near Teheran for several years to carry out attacks on Israel, after a military court indicted two Hamas members from Gaza for carrying out illegal activities for the movement that included initiating Iranian training.
Hamas denied at the time that it had any military training camps in Iran, dismissing the reports as part of a smear campaign against the Islamic republic because of its arrest of 13 Jews on spying charges.
MISSILE DEFENSE AT LEAST 4 YEARS AWAY
Katyusha defense at least 4 years away
By Yaakov Katz
The Jerusalem Post
October 11, 2006
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?c=JPArticle&cid=1159193420403&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
A missile defense system that can intercept Katyusha rockets and destroy them before striking their targets won’t be ready for at least four years, senior defense and IDF officials told The Jerusalem Post this week.
The prediction by the officials, some of whom are involved in the development of missile defense systems, came two weeks after Defense Minister Amir Peretz declared that such a system would be up and operational within two years. “Nothing will be ready in two years,” said one senior military official this week. “Peretz was mistaken.”
Peretz has appointed Defense Ministry (MOD) Dir.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi to head an internal committee assigned the task of locating and developing a defense system for short-range rockets. During the recent war against Hizbullah in Lebanon, close to 4,000 short-range Katyusha and medium-range rockets landed in northern Israel.
Following the war, the defense establishment’s hunt for a cheap system that would be operational in the near future picked up speed. In an interview published last week, Peretz claimed that Qassam rockets fired by Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the Katyushas fired by Hizbullah in the North had turned into “strategic threats” against Israel and were no longer, as they were supposed to be, simple tactical weapons.
“Both Qassams and Katyushas are tactical weapons that have become strategic threats because we have yet to find an answer to them,” he said. “We want to turn the system into a significant system that can operate, and this will happen in no more than two years.”
The MOD is currently interested in two systems, one being developed in the U.S. and one in Israel. The first system, designed to defend against short-range missiles with a range of three to ten kilometers, such as the Qassam or the short-range Katyushas that struck northern towns during the recent war, is a chemical laser cannon called Skyguard under development by the U.S.-based company Northrop Grumman. The second system, under development by an Israeli company, works with an anti-missile missile that uses a kinetic warhead interceptor.
HAMAS DISCUSSING TARGETING THE U.S.
New calls by Hamas militants to target the U.S.
Washington’s efforts to isolate and topple the Islamist government is amplifying calls from its more extreme element to abandon its reluctance to directly attack U.S. interests
By Tim McGirk
Time magazine
October 13, 2006
www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1546101,00.html
Commanders of the military wing of Hamas, the Islamist movement elected to power in the Palestinian territories earlier this year, are locked in a fierce debate over whether to launch terrorist attacks on U.S. targets in the Middle East. Despite its anti-American rhetoric, Hamas has until now refrained from any known terror strikes against the U.S. only Israel is in its bomb-sights, Hamas says. That position has been reinforced by the argument of more moderate elements in Hamas that if the movement acted in a reasonable manner, the U.S. and Europe would eventually be persuaded to release funds and foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority blocked last March after Hamas assumed office.
But within Hamas, the argument may be tipping the other way. In furtive, underground meetings held in the West Bank and Gaza, a growing number of Hamas commanders say they are running out of patience with the U.S. and want to strike back. Insiders say the radicals are trying to exploit the exasperation within the movement at what they perceive as the Bush Administration’s one-sided support of Israel and its attempts to press Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to dissolve the Hamas cabinet.
The radicals’ gained ground after a visit to the Middle East earlier this month by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who tried to rally “moderate” Arab regimes into a united front against Iran, Hamas and the Lebanese militia Hizbullah. “The U.S. has become very hostile to the Palestinians,” one Hamas field commander told TIME. “We shouldn’t stand by idly while the Americans are plotting against us.”
Israeli intelligence sources say they are aware of the debate within Hamas over whether to target U.S. interests in the region. An Israeli intelligence official says that for now Hamas’s thinking seems to be: “One enemy Israel is enough. Let others in Iraq and Afghanistan take on the Great Satan.”
Such restraint may crumble if Abbas moves, as he is expected to do in the coming weeks, to dismiss the Hamas government a move that would be seen by most Palestinians as doing Washington’s bidding, and might tip the balance inside the Hamas leadership strongly in favor of the more extreme faction. That would likely involve a retreat from Democratic politics and a reemphasis on terrorism, in which the movement may not confine its targets to Israelis. In this scenario, Hamas would likely seek support from Iran and international jihadists, whose anti-American agendas might increasingly shape Hamas’s own. Israeli officials say Iran recently offered to train Hamas in the weapons and tactics used to such lethal effect by the Hizbullah fighters who held their own against Israeli forces in Lebanon over the summer. Israel’s Shin Bet security service also claims that Hamas had smuggled over 19 tons of explosives into Gaza.
Jihadi culture is also taking root in the Palestinian territories, with the Bush Administration routinely denounced in apocalyptic tones during Friday prayers at mosques throughout the West Bank and Gaza, and recordings of Jihadi songs and chants selling briskly at West Bank bazaars. Westerners also face a growing risk of kidnapping, and the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem has warned that Americans traveling in the Palestinian territories are no longer safe. The consulate in mid-August issued kidnap warnings for Gaza and the West Bank after the abduction of two Fox News reporters. On Wednesday, kidnappers struck again: an American aid worker, Michael Philips, 24, from Louisiana was kidnapped from Nablus by a new gang calling itself ‘Jaish al-Sunna’ (the “Sunni Army”) which demanded the release of Palestinian women and minors from Israeli prisons. Palestinian security police freed Phillips, but the identity of his captors is still unknown. According to both Israeli and Palestinian police sources, there is no evidence linking the kidnappers with Hamas or any other known militant group. But as the economic squeeze tightens in the territories, more and more Palestinians are blaming the U.S. for their woes and are wanting to hit back.
(With reporting by Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem, and Aaron J. Klein/Tel Aviv)
AMERICAN IMAM PLEADS GUILTY TO AIDING HAMAS
U.S. man pleads guilty to aiding Hamas
The Associated Press
October 13, 2006
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1159193432962&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
The imam of a mosque pleaded guilty to providing material support to the militant group Hamas in a case in which the agreement, charges and even the plea hearing were handled in secret.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Friday that the charges and plea agreement involving Mohamed Shorbagi were filed Aug. 28 in a federal court, but were sealed until today. Shorbagi, 42, agreed to a maximum 15 years in prison, prosecutors said. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for Nov. 3.
According to prosecutors, between 1997 and 2001, Shorbagi provided financial support to Hamas, a group designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization. He also was accused of conspiring with unnamed others to provide material support to Hamas.
The donations were through the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, prosecutors said. U.S. Attorney David Nahmias said the prison time could be reduced if Shorbagi cooperates, as he is expected to do.
AHMADINEJAD: “I HAVE BEEN IN TOUCH WITH GOD”
Ahmadinejad: God told me we would win
By Dudi Cohen
Yediot Ahronot
October 16, 2006
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3315855,00.html
While the West is preparing to impose sanctions on Iran, due to the country’s failure to suspend its nuclear activities, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still optimistic. “We shall win,” he was quoted in the Iranian media as saying Monday, and added: “One day I will be asked whether I have been in touch with someone who told me we would win, and I will respond: ‘Yes, I have been in touch with God’.”
“We must not be afraid of them,” he stated, hinting to the western countries. Ahmadinejad also noted that although he was at times mocked for his preoccupation with spiritual matters and his use of “divine” words,” he was nevertheless certain that Iran would prevail, after having secured the support of international public opinion for its cause.
Meanwhile, Iranian news agencies reported Monday that Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi addressed the possibility of an attack on Iran and said, “If Americans and Zionists want to try their luck in Iran, they will experience a larger defeat than in Iraq.”
Safavi added during a memorial service held at his headquarters: “We are obligated to our fallen to maintain the readiness and deal a powerful blow on the enemies in case of an attack.
“The Basij (branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) and the Revolutionary Guards are so strong they will not allow the enemy to even think of launching an operation against Iran,” he said.
“The blood of our shahids will bring about not only the liberation of Jerusalem and Karbala (Iraq) but the liberation of all mankind from the evil powers of the world; the blood of our shahids boiled the blood of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, and they will overcome the evil Americans and Israel.”
OLMERT: “IF THE ATOM BOMB REACHES IRANIAN HANDS IT WILL REACH OTHER HANDS”
Olmert: Iran nukes could reach Hizbullah
By Ronny Sofer
Yediot Ahronot
October 15, 2006
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3315165,00.html
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday that Iran poses a strategic threat to Israel, warning that the Islamic Republic would transfer nuclear weapons to its Lebanese proxy Hizbullah.
“If the atomic bomb reaches Iranian hands it will reach other hands. International fears not only Israel’s are that these weapons reach other players like Hizbullah,” Olmert said, adding that the international community should take seriously the North Korea’s claimed nuclear test.
Olmert is set to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday to discuss Iran’s disputed nuclear program and North Korea’s claims that it successfully tested a nuclear weapon.
Speaking about Syria, Olmert accused Damascus of plotting to oust the government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. “It is no coincidence that there is a Syrian decision, with Hizbullah, to bring about the fall of the Lebanese Prime Minister Siniora. All those demanding peace with Assad and long for the peace he is offering, should remember that the same Assad is mulling the fall of Siniora, the same Assad we are supposed to negotiate with a political solution when Khaled Mashaal acts freely there,” Olmert said.
Diverting his attention to the internal agenda, Olmert said the Israel Defense Forces have been ordered to continue operations against Qassam attacks from the Gaza Strip and brushed aside claims that his government is not taking the issue seriously.
“We cannot allow ourselves the continuation of Qassam fire at this rate from Gaza. The fact that 17 terror activists were killed in the last couple of days is not a sign of restraint from our side. There is no restraint and there will be no restraint,” he said.
He slammed Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal, who accused the government of not doing enough to halt Qassam fire on the city. “I never saw a bigger gap between capabilities to lip service. Leadership is also about the ability to calm and not only to incite the public,” he said.
Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter called on the government to widen the scope of military operations in the Gaza Strip. “We only hear about surgical operations, and we need to expand the operation,” Dichter said.
Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon told Olmert that had Qassams rockets been falling on Tel Aviv, the government would have responded differently.
Olmert said the government is doing more to protect Sderot that other governments did against terror attacks in Tel Aviv.
“I understand well people in Sderot. It is not easy to live in a routine of Qassam fire; we are operating and will continue to operate with all force against Qassam fire until we bring about a drop in this fire,” he said.
NEW IRANIAN MODERATE DAILY, WITHOUT A CARTOON SECTION, HITS NEWSSTANDS
New Iranian moderate daily hits newsstands
Agence France Presse (AFP)
October 16, 2006
www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20061016-052320-7504r
A new Iranian moderate daily, Rozegar (Times), was published Monday, nearly a month after the Islamic republic’s conservative press watchdog shut down the leading moderate broadsheet, Shargh.
Bylines on articles in the newspaper’s first edition showed that many of the journalists writing for Rozegar are former Shargh reporters. The format and typeset of the new paper closely resembled that of the shut-down daily.
But in its first issue, the 24-page color broadsheet published articles from across the political spectrum. These included a piece from Abbas Abdi, a leading reformist, alongside an article from Fatemeh Rajabi, a hardline figure and the wife of government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham.
On the international pages, Rozegar published stories about the North Korean nuclear crisis and also about the Turkish winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Orhan Pamuk.
However, the paper does not carry any cartoon section, one of the reasons why Shargh was shut down. A disputed cartoon in Shargh had depicted two chess pieces, a white knight facing a black donkey surrounded by a white halo on a checkboard perceived by some as an insult to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
With a circulation of around 100,000, Shargh (which means East in Farsi) was the standard-bearer moderate publication among some 40 national dailies, half of which are close to the moderate and reformist camps.
In May, a government daily, Iran, was banned and two of its journalists were arrested for publishing a cartoon that provoked rioting by Iran’s large Azeri community.
The daily has since been given the green light to publish again, although it has yet to reappear on newsstands.
The Iranian press enjoyed some freedom under the previous reformist government of Mohammad Khatami from 1997-2005 but even then the hardline judiciary shut down scores of titles and detained dozens of journalists.
* BBC blocking release of report critical of its own Mideast coverage
* New Statesman invites readers to plant trees for Palestine
* Reuters cameraman arrested for inciting rock attacks on Israelis
CONTENTS
1. “British magazine buys olive trees ‘in Palestine’ for new subscribers” (J. Post, Oct. 16, 2006)
2. “New style guide” (BBC Editors blog, Oct. 13, 2006)
3. “Israel and the Palestinians: Key terms” (BBC, Oct. 12, 2006)
4. “BBC mounts court fight to keep ‘critical’ report secret” (Sunday Telegraph, Oct. 15, 2006)
5. “Evening, infidels! Here is the news from the BBC...” (Daily Mail, Oct. 13, 2006)
6. “BBC: where facts are expensive and comment runs far too free” (The Observer, Oct. 8, 2006)
7. “BBC’s rising star quits for al-Jazeera” (The Guardian, Oct. 5, 2006)
REUTERS CAMERAMAN ARRESTED FOR INCITING ROCK ATTACKS
Reuters cameraman Imad Muhammad Intisar Boghnat was arrested yesterday by Israeli police for his part in rock-throwing attacks on Israelis in the Arab village of Bil’in in the West Bank.
Israel has obtained videotape evidence that on October 6, 2006, Boghnat encouraged and directed rioters in Bil’in to throw large chunks of rock at Israeli vehicles. He is heard shouting “throw, throw!” and “throw towards the little window!” Rocks are then thrown at the drivers’ passenger windows. In the past Israeli drivers and their children have died after rocks were thrown at their moving cars.
Some Reuters employees have a long history of inciting violence against Israel, as documented several times on this website.
NEW STATESMAN READERS PLANT TREES FOR PALESTINE
The once respected British political magazine, The New Statesman, is offering readers the chance to sponsor “the planting of three new olive trees in Palestine,” as an incentive to take out a subscription to the magazine.
Unsurprisingly, The New Statesman neglects to tell readers that if any piece of land is in need of help with tree-planting it is northern Israel. Many thousands of trees were destroyed in northern Israel this summer by thousands of Katyusha rockets fired by Hizbullah from Lebanon.
John Kampfner, editor of the New Statesman, is a leftist Jew who specializes in running extremely anti-Israel pieces in his magazine. Recently, for example, I pointed out that the New Statesman made up racist quotes by Ariel Sharon. For more, please see A colossus of our time (Oct. 3, 2006).
BBC BLOCKING REPORT CRITICAL OF ITS MIDEAST COVERAGE
The BBC is doing its utmost to block the release of a report that is believed to be highly critical of its Mideast coverage. The Sunday Telegraph reports that the corporation has spent thousands of pounds of British license (tax) payers’ money mounting a High Court action to prevent the release of The Balen Report under the UK Freedom of Information Act, despite the fact that BBC reporters often use the very same Act to pursue their own journalism.
The 20,000-word Balen Report, which is believed to include evidence of anti-Israeli bias in news programming, was compiled by Malcolm Balen, a senior BBC journalist and editorial adviser appointed by the BBC in 2004 to monitor BBC Mideast coverage. Balen was appointed following sustained criticism of the BBC’s inflammatory coverage by several people, including myself.
BBC IGNORES OWN RECOMMENDATIONS ON USE OF “TERRORIST”
Writing on the BBC blog, BBC Jerusalem bureau chief Simon Wilson claims “the style guide on Israeli/Palestinian coverage which we’re publishing [but only in an abbreviated form for the public] on the [BBC] website for the first time today is the fruit of hours and hours of hard work by some of the BBC’s most experienced Middle East specialists. The aim is not to be prescriptive, but to give colleagues who can’t reasonably be expected to follow every twist and turn of the conflict some suggestions to deal with the more contentious topics.”
Wilson first claims that the aim of the style guide is to be “careful not to adopt, even inadvertently, the language of one side or the other, which may give an impression of bias.” However, two paragraphs later we are told that “sometimes good journalism requires that we take a position on an issue even when the facts themselves are under dispute.”
Wilson adds: “Our credibility is undermined by the careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgements [such as ‘terrorist’].”
One reader commented on the BBC blog that “It is also interesting that, in respect of the T [Terrorist]-word, you have ignored entirely the recommendations of the BBC’s own impartiality review panel which recommended the use of the word where circumstances so merited.”
Another reader comments: “Homicide bombings is the correct term, as the intent is to murder people. Suicide bombings would suggest only one person dies.”
“THAT’S OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT AND, OF COURSE, EVERY OTHER NIGHT”
In his piece attached below about the planned new BBC Arabic and Persian language TV networks, leading British columnist Richard Littlejohn writes that for “Those of us who live in the London area might just as well be watching the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation when it comes to ‘local’ news.”
“One night last week, the first five items on the World’s Worst News Bulletin were all about Muslims. Coverage of the debate over the veil was conducted exclusively from an Islamic viewpoint, from what I could gather.”
Littlejohn (who is a subscriber to this list) goes on to describe what a BBC News bulletin may look like in the future: “Good evening, infidel dogs. I spit on you. The mujahideen are coming to murder you in your beds and the blood of your kafur children and your drunken whores will run through the streets of your decadent, godless cities. That’s our top story tonight and, of course, every other night. Some breaking news this evening a plane has crashed into a skyscraper in New York. Unfortunately, only two people were killed ”
Leftist British commentator Nick Cohen, writing in the Observer, also recently criticized the BBC: “Although it is impossible to generalise about such a vast organisation, the bias charge has enough truth in it to stick.” (Article attached below).
Nick Cohen, who is not Jewish, wrote an article last year about how his left-wing readers, assuming he was Jewish, directed anti-Semitic comments at him. This article can be read in the dispatch, “Don’t be silly, Ann, there’s no racism on the left” (Oct. 11, 2005).
BBCZEERA
The final article below reports that Darren Jordon, a BBC newsreader described as one of the rising stars of the organization, is the latest in a series of BBC staff to join al-Jazeera. Some believe the BBC is in any case more anti-Israeli and anti-American in its coverage and manipulation of the facts than al-Jazeera is.
For those interested, it is worth reading several previous dispatches concerning BBC coverage. Among them:
* Israeli soldier kidnapped? Not on the BBC (July 3, 2006).
* “The BBC pro-Israeli? Is the Pope Jewish?” (May 15, 2006).
* New internal BBC memo warns staff over “terrorism” (Dec. 20, 2005).
-- Tom Gross
BRITISH MAGAZINE PLANTS OLIVE TREES “IN PALESTINE”
British magazine buys olive trees ‘in Palestine’ for new subscribers
By Jonny Paul
The Jerusalem Post
October 16, 2006
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1159193447736&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
The New Statesman, a respected weekly current affairs magazine, is offering readers the chance to sponsor “the planting of three new olive trees in Palestine,” as incentive to take out a subscription to the magazine.
Those who participate in the offer will receive a certificate to mark support for the campaign, and the promise that the magazine will provide updates on the progress of the trees.
The offer, in conjunction with a Manchester-based fair trade nonprofit organization called Olive Cooperative, states that “each tree represents a long-term source of income for Palestinian families, who have been harvesting olive oil, fruit and wood for generations.”
Also with subscriptions, the magazine offers membership in a campaign called Trees for Life, which it says aims to “help to repair the enormous destruction years of war have inflicted on the olive groves of Palestine.”
To date, the publication has had 150 responses, which translate into the planting of 300 trees. For seasonal reasons, the trees will be planted in February of next year.
John Kampfner, editor of the New Statesman, said that the offer was just one of the many marketing strategies the magazine provides on a monthly basis.
“Usually it’s books; sometimes it’s activities relating to NGOs. This came about, and I was very happy to support it as it seems to be a very valid economic based initiative with which very few right-minded people could take issue,” he said.
Kampfner, who has just returned to England from a trip to Israel, began editing the publication just over a year ago. He calls himself a strong advocate of the “two-state solution as the core of a bigger Middle East peace settlement.”
BBC PRODUCES NEW MIDEAST STYLE GUIDE
New style guide
By Simon Wilson
BBC Editors blog
October 13, 2006
www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2006/10/new_style_guide.html
It may not immediately look like it, but the style guide on Israeli/Palestinian coverage which we’re publishing on the website for the first time today is the fruit of hours and hours of hard work by some of the BBC’s most experienced Middle East specialists.
The aim is not to be prescriptive, but to give colleagues who can’t reasonably be expected to follow every twist and turn of the conflict some suggestions to deal with the more contentious topics.
In many cases, it’s about being careful not to adopt, even inadvertently, the language of one side or the other, which may give an impression of bias.
So, for example, we recommend using the term “West Bank Barrier” for the system of fences, walls, ditches and barbed wire which Israel is currently building. The official Israeli term is “Security Fence”, the Palestinians call it an “Apartheid Wall”. Each has their point but we believe this is the clearest generic term for our audiences. Individual reporters standing in front of a particular section can, of course, still refer to a “fence” or “wall” behind them.
Sometimes good journalism requires that we take a position on an issue even when the facts themselves are under dispute. The civilian settlements which Israel has built on land it occupied in the 1967 Arab/Israeli war are illegal under international law. That is the position of the UN Security Council, the British government and the Geneva Convention. So it is right that we make that clear in this guide. Israel disputes this and has argued the case legally and vociferously on numerous occasions. That’s also important and we recommend that where space allows our language should reflect the Israeli objection as well.
Palestinians and their supporters sometimes take us to task for using the term “suicide bombing” to describe what they view as a “martyrdom attack”. Again, we feel it’s right to take a position and that clear, simple, accurate language is best. In America, some news organisations describe them as “homicide attacks”, a phrase we have discussed and rejected.
Although initially a little sceptical, the more I think about it, the happier I am that we are publishing this guide to the public. BBC journalists, whether they are in Israel, the Palestinian Territories or London, put an enormous amount of thought and effort into trying to get these things right. And if this shows just a glimpse of that to the people we are reporting to, it may prove a very useful exercise.
“OUR RESPONSIBILITY IS TO REMAIN IMPARTIAL”
Israel and the Palestinians: Key terms
BBC Website
October 12, 2006
news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ukfs/hi/newsid_6040000/newsid_6044000/6044090.stm
(Excerpt)
TERRORISTS
Note the BBC producer guidelines which state: “We must report acts of terror quickly, accurately, fully and responsibly. We should not adopt other people’s language as our own. Our credibility is undermined by the careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgements. The word ‘terrorist’ itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. It is also usually inappropriate to use words like ‘liberate’, ‘court martial’ or ‘execute’ in the absence of a clear judicial process. We should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them. We should convey to our audience the full consequences of the act by describing what happened. We should use words which specifically describe the perpetrator such as ‘bomber’, ‘attacker’, ‘gunmen’, ‘kidnapper’, ‘insurgent’ or ‘militant.’”
Our responsibility is to remain impartial and report in ways that enable our audiences to make their own assessments about who is doing what to whom.
BBC GOES TO HIGH COURT TO BLOCK HIGHLY CRITICAL REPORT OF ITS MIDEAST COVERAGE
BBC mounts court fight to keep ‘critical’ report secret
By Chris Hastings and Beth Jones
The Sunday Telegraph
October 15, 2006
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/15/nbeeb15.xml
The BBC has spent thousands of pounds of licence payers’ money trying to block the release of a report which is believed to be highly critical of its Middle East coverage.
The corporation is mounting a landmark High Court action to prevent the release of The Balen Report under the Freedom of Information Act, despite the fact that BBC reporters often use the Act to pursue their journalism.
The action will increase suspicions that the report, which is believed to run to 20,000 words, includes evidence of anti-Israeli bias in news programming.
The court case will have far reaching implications for the future working of the Act and the BBC. If the corporation loses, it will have to release thousands of pages of other documents that have been held back.
Like all public bodies, the BBC is obliged to release information about itself under the Act. However, along with Channel 4, Britain’s other public service broadcaster, it is allowed to hold back material that deals with the production of its art, entertainment and journalism.
The High Court action is the latest stage of a lengthy and expensive battle by Steven Sugar, a lawyer, to get access to the document, which was compiled by Malcolm Balen, a senior editorial adviser, in 2004.
Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, who is responsible for the workings of the Act, agreed with the BBC that the document, which examines hundreds of hours of its radio and television broadcasts, could be held back. However, Mr Sugar appealed and, after a two-day hearing at which the BBC was represented by two barristers, the Information Tribunal found in his favour.
Mr Sugar said: “This is a serious report about a serious issue and has been compiled with public money. I lodged the request because I was concerned that the BBC’s reporting of the second intifada was seriously unbalanced against Israel, but I think there are other issues at stake now in the light of the BBC’s reaction.”
The BBC’s coverage of the Middle East has been frequently condemned for a perceived anti-Israeli bias.
In 2004, for example, Barbara Plett, a Middle East correspondent, was criticised for revealing in an episode of Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent that she had been moved to tears by the plight of the dying Yasser Arafat. MPs said it proved that the corporation was incapable of presenting a balanced account of issues in the Middle East.
Figures released by the Information Commissioner’s Office show that there have been 105 complaints about the BBC’s attitude to the Act since it came into force in January 2005. Only four of these have been dismissed and the rest are being examined. The BBC has lodged at least 25 complaints about the way other organisations have dealt with its requests.
The BBC declined to say how much it was spending on the High Court action. “We will be appealing the decision of the Information Tribunal,” a spokesman said. “This case has wider implications relating to the way the Act applies to public broadcasters.”
“GOOD EVENING, INFIDEL DOGS”
Evening, infidels! Here is the news from the BBC...
By Richard Littlejohn
The Daily Mail
October 13, 2006
The BBC is launching two new channels. One, in Arabic, will compete with al-Jazeera. The other, in Farsi, will be beamed into Iran. A spokesman said of the Persian-language venture: ‘The new television service will be editorially independent of the UK government.’
So why is Gordon Brown subsidising it to the tune of £15 million?
Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to put out the BBC’s domestic service on satellite? No one would notice the difference.
In recent days, Radio 4 has given over a substantial chunk of the flagship Today programme to a party political broadcast by an Islamist maniac.
Those of us who live in the London area might just as well be watching the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation when it comes to ‘local’ news.
One night last week, the first five items on the World’s Worst News Bulletin were all about Muslims.
Coverage of the debate over the veil was conducted exclusively from an Islamic viewpoint, from what I could gather.
First, there was a live vox-pop from a curry house opposite a mosque in Southall, where all those asked to comment had just turned out of Friday prayers. Back in the studio, the two invited guests were a ‘moderate’ Muslim and a bird in a burqa. This is what the BBC calls ‘balance’.
We’ve even had the weatherman standing in the Edgware Road the famous ‘Arab Street’ giving us the forecast for Ramadan.
Why don’t they just cut out the middle man and install a studio in Captain Hook’s cell at Belmarsh?
‘Something to look forward to on BBC1 this weekend, a brand new series of Fasting With Frost. Songs Of Praise comes from Regent’s Park Mosque and this week’s What Not To Wear features Jack Straw being given a complete makeover by the fashion editor of al-Mujaharoun. Over on BBC2, in Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson tests the latest range of people-carriers available free of charge to unemployed Muslim clerics. And don’t forget to stay tuned for live beheading from Trafalgar Square, coming up after the latest national and international news, read by Abu Hamza.
(Roll titles)
Good evening, infidel dogs. I spit on you. The mujahideen are coming to murder you in your beds and the blood of your kafur children and your drunken whores will run through the streets of your decadent, godless cities. That’s our top story tonight and, of course, every other night.
Some breaking news this evening a plane has crashed into a skyscraper in New York. Unfortunately, only two people were killed.
We also celebrate the fourth anniversary of the glorious Bali martyrdom operation, a shining day in history for all true believers.
In an exclusive interview from Lebanon, the president of Iran tells our diplomatic editor, Sheikh Omar Bakri, of his plans to wipe the pariah, pigs-and-monkeys state of Izza-ray-el off the map in a nuclear holocaust, just as soon as he receives the plutonium from North Korea.
Our crime correspondent, Abu Izzadeen, reports on the progress in the fatwa against the Danish cartoonists who insulted Islam.
Later in the programme, in our consumer affairs slot, I’ll be presenting a special report from West London on how you can become a property tycoon while living on benefits and, indeed, while in prison.
Our legal aid correspondent, Anjem Choudary, will be bringing you an update on the imposition of Sharia law in East Ham.
There’ll be the latest news on the campaign to have London Underground stations renamed after the four members of the July 7 martyrdom brigade.
We’ve got exclusive footage from our brothers in Iraq showing a Western aid worker slut having her head sawn off. If you can’t wait for that, it is available right now on our website, where you’ll also find easy to-follow instructions on making Ricin in your own kitchen.
Sir Ian Blair apologises to all Muslims for something which hasn’t actually happened yet.
In sport, we ask if England goalkeeper Paul Robinson should have his right leg amputated to punish him for letting in that soft own goal in Croatia.
And coming up after the break, a shocking report from the Great Satan on how, in their latest outrage against Islam, the rapacious, infidel running dogs of the illegitimate and immoral Bush regime have, er, banned online gambling.
COMMENT IS FREE, BUT FACTS ARE EXPENSIVE
The BBC where facts are expensive and comment runs far too free
By Nick Cohen
The Observer
October 8, 2006
observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1890349,00.html
Clive Anderson recently hosted a private viewing of his Hypotheticals show, in which the experts reacting to a rolling crisis were BBC senior managers. The corporation’s governors had gathered them at the Institute of Physics, near Broadcasting House, to see how their impartiality stood up to the pressures of religious passion and psychopathic terror.
The scenario they faced began pleasantly enough. Anderson told them that the BBC had found a new presenter who was able to read an autocue with the right combination of prettiness and authority television requires. To make matters better, she was a British Muslim and her presence on screen emphasised the managers’ commitment to diversity.
One day, she arrived at work wearing a hijab. Would it be religious discrimination to force her to remove it before she went on air? Or was she trying to make a political statement? While the executives agonised, she invited them to her wedding in a village in the badlands on the Pakistan-Afghan border. After a long flight and dusty car ride, they were enjoying the ceremony when in walks Osama bin Laden. On being told BBC managers were in the room, bin Laden offered an exclusive interview.
They decided to take it and summoned Justin Webb, one of the BBC’s best reporters. Confronted for the first time by a Western journalist who asked hard questions, bin Laden flipped and kidnapped the luckless Webb.
And so it went on. Media grandees who were in the audience told me that the executives were very impressive. They dealt with each dilemma by referring to coherent moral principles and professional standards. Yet they didn’t convince everyone that the BBC was a beacon of journalistic integrity. Jeff Randall, the BBC’s former business editor, described how he was surrounded by intellectuals of the type who ‘would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God Save the King” than of stealing from a poor box’, as George Orwell put it.
While Randall was at the BBC, two producers tried to stop him wearing his hijab: a pair of Union Jack cufflinks. ‘They said they were a symbol of the BNP and I couldn’t wear them,’ he recalled. He had to explain with some force why they were mistaken.
As you might expect, Janet Daley, a columnist for the Telegraph, denounced the BBC for its bias against conservatives, but then Sue Lawley unexpectedly said the consensus of the meeting was that the BBC had a liberal bias. The BBC managers must have felt unloved. They will have felt more so last week when they heard rumours that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown want to peg the licence fee to inflation. If Alastair Campbell’s attacks on the corporation are a guide, I would guess that a belief in its bias has turned them against the BBC.
Although it is impossible to generalise about such a vast organisation, the bias charge has enough truth in it to stick. If you doubt me, research one opinion outside the liberal consensus. Read up on the arguments for making Britain a fairer country by giving trade unionists more rights, for instance, or saying that abortion is murder or that Tony Blair’s foreign policy is correct in its essentials.
You don’t have to believe it, you just have to convince yourself that serious people can hold it for good reasons. You will then notice something disconcerting about most BBC presenters. Although they subject opponents of, say, abortion to rigorous cross-examination, their lust for ferocious questioning deserts them when supporters of abortion come on air. Far from being tested, they treat upholders of the liberal consensus as purveyors of an incontestable truth.
The way out for the BBC is not to swing to the right it is not an advance to replace soft interviews for Menzies Campbell with soft interviews for John Reid but make a tactical withdrawal from the opinion business. Less airtime should be given to talking heads and celebrity interviewers in London studios and more to reporters who leave Television Centre to find out what is happening in the world.
Indeed, the speed with which newspapers and commercial TV companies are declining may mean that the BBC will soon be the only institution with the resources to send large numbers of reporters into the world. Yet for all its advantages, the fashion in the media world its executives inhabit is against journalism.
Producers know that comment is free, but facts are expensive. As well as being cheap, fervent opinions can increase market share because their very vehemence can hold the attention of the channel-hopping audience for a few more minutes.
You can see this Michael Mooronification of journalism everywhere from the success of Fox News to the Independent’s embrace of agitprop. At the BBC’s Hypotheticals meeting, Adam Bolton of Sky praised Fox and Dorothy Byrne of C4 declared that reporting should be ‘passionate’. No it shouldn’t; reporting should be true.
If the BBC governors abandon that principle, they will end up with a corporation which isn’t so much left-wing or right-wing, but irrelevant.
ANOTHER BBC JOURNALIST QUITS FOR AL-JAZEERA
BBC’s rising star quits for al-Jazeera
By Tara Conlan
The Guardian
October 5, 2006
media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,,1888251,00.html
BBC newsreader Darren Jordon is leaving to join al-Jazeera International, the corporation confirmed today. Jordon has been a regular face on all the BBC bulletins, particularly the One O’Clock News. He will leave at the end of the month to join the much-delayed English-language service from the pioneering Arab broadcaster.
Jordon has been at the BBC for eight years. It is thought he is being lined up by al-Jazeera as an onscreen partner for former ITN presenter Shiulie Ghosh, who has already signed up.
Jordon said today: “I’ve had a wonderful time at the BBC; I’ve learned an awful lot and worked with some exceptionally talented individuals. The move, however, comes at the right time for me and I look forward to the fresh challenges that it will no doubt present.”
The BBC’s head of television news, Peter Horrocks, said: “I’m sorry to see Darren go. He is an extremely accomplished news presenter always straightforward in his reporting, and rigorous but fair in his questioning. We wish him all the best for the future.”
Jordon joined BBC Sport as a broadcast journalist in 1998, following a three-year stint as a sports broadcaster in South Africa. He made the move to TV news in 1999, when he became a presenter on BBC News 24.
He was seen as a rising star at the BBC, co-presenting several major events in recent years, most notably the D-Day 60th anniversary celebrations and the Lord Mayor’s Show.
CONTENTS
1. “Beyond the veil” (By Mohammed Galadari, Khaleej Times, Oct. 9, 2006)
2. “Al-Qaeda affiliate burns coffee shop in Gaza Strip” (Yediot Ahronot, Oct. 8, 2006)
3. “Ireland: Pro-Palestinian protesters attack Israeli ambassador” (Yediot, Oct. 8, 2006)
4. “Baghdad’s last rabbi to leave Iraq” (News Agencies, Oct. 4, 2006)
5. “Major chains refuse to play Bush death film” (Hollywood Reporter, Oct. 6, 2006)
6. “‘This is ethnic cleansing’ Georgia” (Sunday Times, Oct. 8, 2006)
7. “‘Unclean’ guide dog banned by Muslim cab driver” (Daily Mail, Oct. 6, 2006)
[Note by Tom Gross]
Because of other work commitments, I do not have time to summarize these articles, but I would recommend you read them, in particular the first remarkable op-ed from Mohammed A.R. Galadari in yesterday’s Khaleej Times in Dubai.
He writes: “Unfortunately, many British Muslims do not understand that when they choose to become citizens of a country and make it their home, they also embrace its culture, customs, habits and social behavior. This is a reality that is as clear as daylight. Dear readers, in this respect, there are lessons for British Muslims in the example of the British Jewish community
Jews wanted to integrate with the host society and its social values and norms.”
(The Khaleej Times is an English-language daily newspaper read in the Gulf. It should be noted that this article was not produced in Arabic in any paper according to a search conducted specifically for this website/email list.)
The second article concerns al-Qaeda’s rise in strength in Gaza, where pictures of the organization’s former leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, are plastered on walls throughout the Strip.
-- Tom Gross