The spot where Pope Francis chose to pray today at the start of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land
THE POPE, PALESTINE AND THE HOLOCAUST
[Note by Tom Gross]
Many Western media outlets have today highlighted the fact that the pope began his Middle East tour by praying at the small section of Israel’s security barrier that is actually a wall; the rest of the protective barrier is wire-mesh. (The security barrier, which has saved countless lives, was built to protect Israelis after some 1000 civilians were killed by suicide bombers.)
But none of the Western media I have seen have drawn attention to the exact spot that the Pope chose to pray: in front of large graffiti comparing Bethlehem to the Warsaw Ghetto.
The photo above is from the main EU-funded Palestinian media outlet, the Maan news agency. (There is another version of this photo below.)
A few comments:
(1) Comparing Israel with Nazi Germany forms part of the working definition of anti-Semitism formulated by the EU and others. Only yesterday, Israel’s prime minister was among those to point out that the atmosphere of incitement against Israel was a probable contributing factor in attacks such as the one in which four Jews (two Israeli tourists and a French woman, and a young Belgian man working at the museum) were shot dead at the Jewish museum in Brussels yesterday. Two other Jews were attacked and struck with metal objects outside a Paris synagogue last night, just hours after the Brussels shooting.
(2) Bethlehem is a relatively prosperous town where restaurants and juice bars are packed, and BMWs, Mercedes and Humvees compete for parking spaces in the center or town. By contrast, 400,000 Jews were herded into the Warsaw Ghetto and those who weren’t beaten or starved to death there, were taken to be exterminated at nearby camps.
(Yes, there is of course a political problem between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and one day, one hopes, the security barrier can be removed without its removal leading to increased terrorism, but this has nothing to do with the Warsaw Ghetto. One wonders why the Pope’s Vatican handlers were eager to choose that spot – or are so insensitive as to allow the Palestinian Authority to guide the Pontiff to that spot.)
(3) The Pope represents an organization, the Vatican, which even today, after seven decades of repeated appeals, is still refusing to make public its wartime archives detailing the full extent of its collaboration with the Nazis before, during and after the Holocaust.
What is known is that the Vatican helped several leading Nazi war criminals escape after the war, including Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele (responsible for barbaric experiments without anesthetic on children) and Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann, who were granted safe refuge in the Pope’s hometown of Buenos Aires, with the aid of the Catholic Church in Rome and in Argentina. (Ten years later Mengele moved to Brazil, joined by other leading Nazis who escaped with the aid of the Vatican, such as Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps.)
(4) There is also concern in Israel that the Pope called Palestinian Authority Leader Mahmoud Abbas a “man of peace” today at an event where Abbas, in the Pope’s presence, repeated his demand that any Palestinian who murders an Israeli must not be punished at all.
-- Tom Gross
* You can see these and other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.
Readers’ Comments
A reader, Berta Becker, writes: “The absurdity in this scene is that if Jesus were alive today, and tried to enter his birth place in Bethlehem, he as a Jew, would have been immediately massacred by a mob of Palestinians, his body dragged in the streets for all to see, and reduced to body parts just as it was done to Israeli Jews who lost their way, entering what is now a Palestinian territory. It is this very wall which would have saved Jesus’s life as a Jew. The only reason the Palestinians and the Muslim world have not committed a genocide of the Jewish people living in Israel today, is because they lost the wars of annihilation they waged against Israel while Jews won them. If Israel/Judea was as strong in the Roman era as it is now, Jesus would have remained alive.”
Another reader, Dom K, writes: “A prayer of thanks by the Pope, I hope, for all the good souls that the wall has saved, over the years, from being blown up.”
Dan writes: “This cheap Palestinian photo op, politicizing the Pope is beyond repulsive.”
UPDATE. May 26, 2014
The Pope has attempted to make partial amends by making an unscheduled visit today to a memorial in Jerusalem for Israeli victims of terrorism.
The Israeli Prime Minister is reported to have told the Pope in a meeting today: “When my son was 10 year's old his best friend was a beautiful Ethiopian girl who sat next to him in class. One day she didn’t come; she was blown up in a bus not far from here because there was no fence. There was no wall.”
Arrested in Tehran for dancing to the song “Happy”: Shots from the YouTube video
* A paralyzed Saudi Arabian man’s tweet asking for someone to visit him in hospital becomes most retweeted message in Saudi Twitter history, as visitors flood hospital to see him
* Divorce parties all the rage in major Iranian cities: “I don’t miss you at all,” says one invitation, quoting the lyrics of a Persian pop hit. “I swear I will not fall in love again as long as I live. Even if I do, it’s ok, as long as it’s not with you,” the lyrics continue inside the card.
CONTENTS
1. Happy in Gaza
2. Arrested for dancing to the song “Happy” in Tehran
3. Iranian women post photos free of Hijab – but only for a few seconds
4. Turkey’s Erdogan shouts anti-Israel slur while slapping mine disaster protester
5. Jews blamed for coal mine disaster by pro-Erdogan newspaper
6. Pope to visit PA Mufti who preached Jews should be killed
7. 9/11 museum film’s critic says Jews killed Jesus
8. Spanish web users post thousands of anti-Semitic messages following basketball loss
9. Saudis visit a lonely disabled man in droves
10. 8 months’ pregnant woman to be flogged, hanged for marrying a Christian
11. Divorce parties all the rage in major Iranian cities
12. A new low in Australian reporting?
[All notes below by Tom Gross]
HAPPY IN GAZA
This is a follow up to my dispatch of March 23, 2014 titled “Video dispatch 22: And on a happier note… Jerusalem. Tel Aviv. Beirut. Happy.”
A version of Gazans singing along to Pharrell Williams’s hit song Happy, can be seen here if you scroll halfway down this page.
This is what Gaza looks like, not the propaganda version put out by certain politicized NGOs and journalists trying to peddle the myth that Gaza is some kind of (Israeli) concentration camp.
Gaza is, however, ruled, by the highly authoritarian Hamas Islamist movement, and you can note that no men and women can be seen dancing together in this video.
ARRESTED FOR DANCING TO THE SONG “HAPPY” IN TEHRAN
A group of Iranians who created a tribute to Pharrell Williams’ hit song “Happy” have been arrested in Tehran. The video shows three men and three unveiled women dancing to the song on the streets and rooftops of Tehran.
The official ISNA news agency quoted Police chief Hossein Sajedinia as saying that the “vulgar clip” had “harmed public chastity”.
Iran’s state-run TV broadcast a program on Tuesday showing the men and women confessing to the “crime” on camera.
Their video, which was made several weeks ago, having been inspired to do it after seeing versions created by young people in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and elsewhere, has become a hit on Iranian social media sites.
You can see the video if you scroll halfway down this page.
Williams has protested at the arrests. The singer wrote on his Facebook page yesterday that “It is beyond sad that these kids were arrested for trying to spread happiness”.
Some of the Iranian dancers have now been freed on bail but the director of the video clip remains under arrest and is and is believed to be under interrogation in one of Iran’s harsh detention facilities.
IRANIAN WOMEN POST PHOTOS FREE OF HIJAB – BUT ONLY FOR A FEW SECONDS
In the past month, hundreds of Iranian women have been defying the rules requiring them to cover their heads in public, by sending photographs of themselves without headscarves to a newly created Facebook page.
“To those who say I should leave the country if I don’t want to wear the hijab, I say the hijab wasn’t my choice. I want to have freedom in my country,” wrote one.
“Freedoms that last only for a few seconds.”
In another, an unveiled young woman stands in front of a sign that reads: “Sisters, observe your hijab.”
The caption for the photograph of the woman standing near the Persepolis reads: “Freedoms that last only for a few seconds.”
The administrators of the Facebook page, titled “Iranian Women’s Freedoms Stealthy,” say they do not belong to any registered political group and merely want Iranian women to be free.
The site was launched on May 3, and has garnered tens of thousands of likes.
The hijab was made compulsory for women in Iran following the 1979 Islamic revolution.
The brave women who have posted their photos without the veil on a public page face arrest if they can be identified, but quickly put their hijabs back on after taking the photos.
TURKEY’S ERDOGAN SHOUTS ANTI-ISRAEL SLUR WHILE SLAPPING MINE DISASTER PROTESTER
Turkish media reported that Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan screamed an anti-Israel slur at a Turkish citizen protesting last week’s coal mine fire that left 301 people dead.
“Why are you running away from me, you Israeli sperm,” Erdogan reportedly said, according to TV footage of the incident published online. (For example, here: http://
sozcu.web.tv/video/acitlr6ttri )
Erdogan is seen in the video surrounded by security personnel who proceeded to beat the man following the incident.
Erdogan has come under heavy criticism following the mining accident for not supporting social security benefits for miners, and for failing to require coal mining companies to use updated equipment, which might have saved many lives.
The incident is the latest in a growing number of anti-Semitic slurs by Erdogan, who in the past has been naively praised by western leaders.
A few months ago, a group of Erdogan’s supporters, leaving a party rally, shouted “you are Jewish” as they attacked a (non-Jewish) woman as she was walking down an Istanbul street. Turkish media showed pictures of the woman with severe cuts and bruises on her face and body following the attack.
Last year, when protests against the Erdogan government were carried out by were carried out by Turkey’s middle classes, Erdogan’s spokesperson blamed “the Jewish Diaspora” for organizing unrest.
Erdogan is widely expected to run in Turkey’s presidential election in August, although he has not yet announced his candidacy. He has already served the maximum three terms as prime minister.
JEWS BLAMED FOR COAL MINE DISASTER BY PRO-ERDOGAN NEWSPAPER
In a front-page article, Turkey’s pro-government daily Yeni Akit has sought to blame Jews for the country’s recent Soma coal mine disaster, Turkish daily Hurriyet reported yesterday.
Yeni Akit also blasted the “Zionist-dominated media” for distorting the coal mining story, suggesting it wasn’t as bad as the media made out.
You can see the front page of Turkey’s pro-government daily Yeni Akit implicating Jews if you scroll down here:
The front page of Turkey's pro-government daily Yeni Akit implicating Jews
Hurriyet said Yeni Akit “has a long track record of anti-Semitic slurs”.
In separate development, Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine said it was withdrawing its Turkish-based reporter, Hasnain Kazim, after he received over 10,000 death threats from Erdogan supporters via e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, including threats to “cut his throat.” He had written an article which included quotes by Turks critical of Erdogan over his response to the mining disaster.
POPE TO VISIT PA MUFTI WHO PREACHED JEWS SHOULD BE KILLED
There is concern in Israel that in the course of his forthcoming visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Pope Francis, as a matter of protocol, is scheduled to meet with the most senior religious figure in the PA, the Mufti Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, who has an ongoing record of stirring up anti-Semitic hatred and saying it was a religious duty for Muslims to kill Jews.
For example, below is a video of his speech at an official Palestinian Authority celebration in East Jerusalem in 2012, organized by the Palestinian Authority.
(Video and information courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch.)
Britain’s then Minister for the Middle East, Alistair Burt, said afterwards: “I condemn the inflammatory words used by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and others at a recent event marking the 47th anniversary of the Fatah movement. To refer to the Jewish people in such a way and to talk of killing Jews is anti-Semitism, pure and simple.”
(Britain and other governments continue to fund the Palestinian Authority without preventing the regular recurrence of similar hate speech in Palestinian Authority media.)
In another speech, the Mufti praised suicide bombers who had murdered Israeli civilians.
In other sermons, the Mufti has consistently denied that a Jewish Temple ever existed in Jerusalem.
He has also rejected Christian tradition, teaching that Jesus was not a Judean, but a Palestinian who preached Islam.
I wonder what he is going to discuss with the Pope.
9/11 MUSEUM FILM’S CRITIC SAYS JEWS KILLED JESUS
During a news conference in New York last week called to criticize a short film to be shown at the new 9/11 museum which some claim is prejudiced toward Muslims, a speaker invoked one of the oldest and most deadly anti-Semitic claims, that Jews killed Jesus.
Talat Hamdani, whose son Salman Hamdani was a Muslim New York Police Department cadet killed on 9/11, said at the news conference: “Who crucified Jesus? Do we ever question that? Bring in the fact that not only the Romans but there were Jews who crucified Jesus?”
Jewish groups say the claim that Jews killed Jesus is one of the strongest notions fueling violent anti-Semitism and pogroms for the past 2000 years. (There have, of course, also been many anti-Semitic conspiracy theories doing the rounds following the 9/11 attacks.)
Former Pope Benedict wrote in 2011 that Jews were not responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus and people should stop repeating this dangerous myth, used as an excuse to attack Jews.
According to news reports, no one at the New York news conference tried to correct Hamdani’s statement.
The September 11 National Memorial Museum opened to the public on May 21.
SPANISH WEB USERS POST THOUSANDS OF ANTI-SEMITIC MESSAGES FOLLOWING BASKETBALL LOSS TO MACCABI TEL AVIV
Agence France Presse (AFP) reports that Twitter users in Spain posted over 17,500 messages of anti-Semitic abuse after Israeli basketball team Maccabi Tel Aviv beat Real Madrid last weekend, to become European Basketball champions in a surprise defeat for Madrid.
Twelve Jewish groups have lodged a legal complaint over the messages, which flooded the Twitter network, as well as Facebook and other sites, after Maccabi’s win in the Euroleague final on Sunday.
Angry Spanish supporters created an expletive anti-Semitic hashtag in their messages after the match, which briefly became the most popular keyword on Twitter in Spain.
Some of the tweets referred to death camps and called for remaining Jews to be gassed.
“Incitement to hatred and discrimination” is a crime punishable by up to three years’ jail in Spain.
The recent report by the Anti-Defamation League, (please see here), said Spain ranked third in Western Europe for prejudice against Jews, after Greece and France.
Jews have been scarce in Spain since the countries large Jewish communities were killed or expelled by Roman Catholic authorities in the late 15th century.
“Hardly anyone here knows any Jews, but the clichés and stereotypes persist and are also fed by Catholicism,” one of the country’s few remaining Jews told AFP.
SAUDIS VISIT A LONELY DISABLED MAN IN DROVES
Here is a much nicer story concerning twitter.
A tweet by Ibrahim, a paralyzed Saudi man, asking for someone to visit him in hospital, has become the most retweeted message in Saudi history
The bedbound Ibrahim, who had become paralyzed as the result of a car accident over half a year ago, tweeted that he had not had a visitor from his family in months and was in desperate need of life-changing surgery that he could not afford.
He tweeted that he hoped that at least one sympathetic person might provide him with some much needed company.
Not only has his message been retweeted over a million times, but also many hundreds of visitors have now gone to the King Khalid University Hospital in the country’s capital Riyadh to meet Ibrahim, bringing him gifts, flowers and pizza.
Others have provided donations that will allow him to travel to Germany for specialist surgery.
8 MONTHS’ PREGNANT WOMAN TO BE FLOGGED, HANGED FOR MARRYING A CHRISTIAN
A Sudanese woman doctor who was convicted last week on charges of “apostasy” for marrying a Christian man, has been sentenced to death, Sudanese judicial officials said.
The woman, 26-year-old Meriam Ibrahim, whose mother was an Orthodox Christian and whose (absent) father was Muslim, was convicted on Sunday and given four days to repent and escape death. She was sentenced after the grace period expired, the officials said. She is eight months pregnant.
Authorities said the woman’s death by hanging will not be carried out until two years after the birth of her child, who the government said would be raised a Muslim after her death.
The court in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, also ordered Ibrahim be given 100 lashes for committing “zena” – an Arabic word for illegitimate sex – for having sexual relations with a non-Muslim man.
Stories of this type are often ignored by mainstream Western liberal media, but this one has been covered by the BBC, and some other major news outlets.
Western embassies in Khartoum, and international rights groups, including Amnesty International, have condemned her flogging and execution. Amnesty called the sentence “appalling and abhorrent.”
Sudan’s current ruler, Omar Bashir, is an Islamist who seized power in a coup in 1989.
DIVORCE PARTIES ALL THE RAGE IN MAJOR IRANIAN CITIES
Iranian media report that divorce parties are becoming very popular as more marriages come to an end. (20% of Iranian marriages now end in divorce.)
“You go to a florist to order a bouquet of black roses. Next you come to us to order invitation cards,” reported the Jomhuri-ye Eslami newspaper (in Farsi here.)
“I don’t miss you at all,” says one invitation, quoting the lyrics of a Persian pop hit. “I swear I will not fall in love again as long as I live. Even if I do, it’s ok, as long as it’s not with you,” the lyrics continue inside the card.
The demand for divorce cards has been growing over the past two years, a card shop owner told the Shahr-e Khabar news website.
A NEW LOW IN AUSTRALIAN REPORTING?
Even by biased Western media standards, the lies crammed into this piece are shocking.
The piece, by Australian radio host Peter Goers published last Sunday in The Adelaide Sunday Mail, starts:
“Jesus wept. In Palestine, Jesus wept and so did I. I weep for the Palestinians living under the Israeli apartheid.”
Among the lies Goers tells:
“I weep for all 720km of this barbaric wall in Israel.”
“I weep for the many Israelis who want to destroy the 1400-year-old Dome of the Rock, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Christian churches in this land whence prophets come.”
“Jesus was a Palestinian born under another occupation.”
“I weep for the 1004 Palestinian children arrested, tortured, abused and abducted last year.”
Football (soccer) fans in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv last year
* Eve Garrard: Anti-Semitism is fun, there’s no doubt about it. You can’t miss the relish with which some people compare Jews to the Nazis, or the fake sorrow, imperfectly masking deep satisfaction, with which they bemoan the supposed fact that Jews have brought hatred on themselves, especially by the actions of Israel, and that they have inexplicably failed to learn the lessons of the Holocaust.
* There are (at least) three principal sources of pleasure which anti-Semitism provides: the pleasure of hatred; the pleasure of tradition, and the pleasure of displaying moral purity. Each of these is an independent source of satisfaction, but the three interact in various ways, which often strengthens their effects.
* What can be done about this state of affairs isn’t immediately obvious – the fact that some pleasures are vile doesn’t stop them being pleasurable, or prevent some people wanting to taste them again and again. In order to do so these people must bolster up their image of the Jewish state as oppressive and illegitimate, and the Zionists who support her as lying, manipulative, and hostile to human solidarity and justice.
THE WORLD’S MOST PERVASIVE FORM OF ABUSE
To coincide with another dispatch I am posting today -- Auschwitz commandant's grandson urges Europeans: please vote to stop the extremists (& other items) -- I attach an essay which I didn’t have time to send before: “The Pleasures of Anti-Semitism,” by Eve Garrard, a research fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manchester in England. (A shorter version of Garrard’s essay originally appeared last year in the British journal “Fathom”.)
I have called this dispatch “The world’s most pervasive form of abuse”. It could be argued that sexism or homophobia or other forms of discrimination are equally pervasive, and in some ways they are. However, Jews are a miniscule minority of the world’s population, women or gays aren’t, and proportionately no one has suffered for such a long period and in such a sustained and murderous way as the Jews.
There are even some anti-Semitic Jews who get pleasure (perhaps in some cases sub-consciously) from baiting and stirring up hatred against fellow Jews. (Several writers have noted this, most recently Edward Alexander, emeritus professor of English at University of Washington in Seattle, in this new essay (“Jews Against Themselves”. Professor Alexander is a long-time subscriber to this email list.)
-- Tom Gross
LOVING TO HATE
The Pleasures of Anti-Semitism
By Eve Garrard
Antisemitism is much more than a cognitive error. It attracts by providing the deep emotional satisfactions of hatred, tradition, and moral purity.
***
There is something strangely ineffective about many of our attempts to combat anti-Semitism. We treat it as involving various cognitive errors – false beliefs about Jews or about Israel, the application of double standards to the assessment of Jewish activities, the one-sided focus on things which can be criticised and the neglect of things which might be praiseworthy. We try to combat these cognitive failures (of which there certainly are plenty) by pointing out the errors involved, listing the relevant facts which correct those errors, and revealing the logical inconsistencies involved in, for example, the use of double standards. And when these attempts prove to be totally fruitless, as they so often do, we’re puzzled and dismayed. Don’t people want truths which would enable them to abandon their hostilities to various aspects of Jewish existence?
The answer, of course, is very often that no, they really don’t want these truths. They prefer the errors, with all their dramatic fears and hatreds, and the excitement of conspiracy stories, to the unremarkable truth that Jews are on the whole just like everyone else, a mixture of good and bad, strong and weak, but with a history which has very real and terrible implications for the present. Why is this? We can’t explain it just in terms of cognitive error, since part of what we want to know is why the cognitive errors are so immune to alteration, why they appear and reappear so very persistently. We have to look outside the cognitive domain to the realm of the emotions, and ask: what are the pleasures, what are the emotional rewards which anti-Semitism has to offer to its adherents?
Anti-Semitism is fun, there’s no doubt about it. You can’t miss the relish with which some people compare Jews to the Nazis, or the fake sorrow, imperfectly masking deep satisfaction, with which they bemoan the supposed fact that Jews have brought hatred on themselves, especially by the actions of Israel and its Zionist supporters, and that they have inexplicably failed to learn the lessons of the Holocaust. (The Holocaust was not, of course, an educational exercise; and if there are lessons to be learned from it, we might think that the weakest pupils are those who once again wish to single out Jews above all others for hostile attention.) Like other forms of racism, anti-Semitism provides a variety of satisfactions for those who endorse it, and it’s worth trying to analyse these pleasures, so that we may better understand and combat the whole phenomenon. In what follows I will be mentioning and briefly describing various anti-Semitic attitudes, all of which I believe to be deeply and often culpably misguided. But I won’t be discussing their errors, nor will I be distinguishing the circumstances in which criticism of Jews and Israel is legitimate and accurate, and circumstances in which it is not. Much has been written on just those topics; here I will simply take it for granted that some such criticisms are accurate, but that others, often many others, are false, and constitute a form of racist discrimination against Jews – in short, anti-Semitism. My concern here is not with the falsity of anti-Semitic discourse, but with the pleasures which it offers to those who engage in it.
There are (at least) three principal sources of pleasure which anti-Semitism provides: first, the pleasure of hatred; second, the pleasure of tradition, and third, the pleasure of displaying moral purity. Each of these is an independent source of satisfaction, but the three interact in various ways, which often strengthens their effects. No doubt the different sources of pleasure appeal to different individuals and groups, so that the appeal of tradition may resonate most strongly with those who are politically on the Right, and the attraction of displaying moral purity may be most strongly felt by those on the political Left, but both varieties can be detected in most political groupings, and the pleasures of hatred are well-nigh universal.
THE PLEASURES OF HATRED
The satisfactions which hatred has to offer us are regrettably familiar to most people. Most of us know only too well the surge of self-righteousness, the thrill of condemning others, the intense bonding with a like-minded hater, which we feel when a good jolt of vicious hostility has risen within us. Of course there are some situations in which hatred is justified – there are some actions and attitudes to which hatred is the proper response, and anyone who is broadminded and tolerant at the building of an Auschwitz needs to clean up his moral compass. But the pleasures which hatred provides are just as available when the hatred is entirely unjustified, as most of us also know, at least in retrospect. Hatred and its cognates – contempt, rancour, and detestation – offer the seductive satisfaction of feeling our own superiority to the hated object, and feeling also a sense of deep justification and indeed righteousness in taking steps to punish or otherwise hurt him (or her, or them). Hurting others is also fun, for more people than we would normally like to believe (see for example the notorious Zimbardo experiments, and the evidence from those involved in the genocidal killing in Rwanda; but also the ubiquitous phenomenon of playground bullying, and its various adult analogues such as workplace bullying and the kind of political hostilities that sometimes break out in small ideologically overheated groups). So where anti-Semitism takes the form of Jew-hatred, it’s not hard to understand that it offers psychological rewards which are nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of people’s beliefs about Jews. Nor is it hard to see that people would prefer not to be deprived of these pleasures, especially if, as is often the case with those who are formally committed to anti-racism, they don’t recognise themselves to be anti-Semitic, and hence pay no inner price in damage to their own self-esteem.
THE PLEASURES OF TRADITION
Since the pleasures of hatred are universal, why, we must ask, do they get realised in Jew-hating in particular, here and now? At this point we can turn to the second main source of the pleasures of anti-Semitism: tradition. There is a Jew-shaped space in Western culture, and the shape is not a pleasant one. Long centuries of tradition have constructed the Jew as a being who is both contemptible and dangerous, the purveyor and transmitter of evil; and various tropes have been deployed to flesh out this picture – in particular the blood libel, according to which Jews use the blood of Christian children for their terrible ceremonies of machination and control, but also tropes about uncanny power, in which Jews are depicted as the puppet-masters of the rest of the helpless non-Jewish world. (There’s a version of this trope in which tentacles, rather than puppet-strings, figure most prominently. Being classified as killer octopi rather than as puppet masters isn’t noticeably an improvement for the Jews.)
As has often been pointed out, the tradition of anti-Semitism is very flexible, and it generally gets expressed in terms of the preoccupations of the period: so mediaeval Jew-hatred was religiously based; 19th and, even more 20th, century hostility was given a scientific top-dressing in terms of the now discredited theories of ‘race science’; and late 20th century and early 21st century prejudice is generally cast in terms of human rights violations. (I speak here primarily of anti-Semitism in the West. Anti-Semitism in other parts of the world, while undoubtedly deriving large parts of its force from Western examples, is an even more complicated matter.) Although an anti-Semitism which was proud to speak its name became unfashionable on the liberal left after the Second World War, for reasons which are too obvious to mention, it’s a remarkable feature of the persistence of anti-Semitic tropes that they have survived relatively unaltered through these cultural changes. Recent cartoons expressing profound hostility to the Jewish state, on the grounds of supposedly outstanding human rights-violations, reproduce fantasies of sinister control and bloodthirstiness which earlier anti-Semites would have recognised without difficulty.
The weight of tradition, which makes it feel comfortable, perhaps even natural, to fit living Jews into the space created for them by so many centuries of hostility, may help to explain one of the many failures of logic infecting contemporary anti-Semitic discourse: where the Jewish state does bad things, these are taken to reveal its true inner nature; where it does good things, these are interpreted as deceitful, as mere propaganda designed to cover up its vile motives and actions. (The relative freedom which is afforded to gay and bisexual people in Israel, as witnessed by the Gay Pride marches there, has been described as ‘pinkwashing’ – that is, as a mendacious attempt to persuade people that Israel is a tolerant respecter of human rights, instead of the colonial imperialist baby-killing oppressor which many anti-Zionists declare her to be. It will be interesting to see whether the selection of a very beautiful black woman of Ethiopian descent to be Miss Israel gets described as ‘black-washing’.) The suggestion by the [British] Lib Dem peer, Baroness Jenny Tonge, that Israeli medical aid to Haiti was a cover for organ-stealing by Israeli medics was perhaps the crudest and most egregious of such examples, though people trying to defend Israel against such criticisms have become accustomed to being told again and again that they only mount these defences as a way of covering up Israel’s crimes.
Why are people so ready to make these hostile moves, in a way which they wouldn’t tolerate with respect to other forms of racism? Anyone who announced that the political and economic troubles of African countries were the result of low intelligence in black Africans, or who drew a cartoon of President Obama as an ape, would be committing social and political suicide among those members of the bien-pensant classes who so often display the forms of prejudice against Jews and the Jewish state with which we’re here concerned. The availability of the traditional picture of the Jew as sinister and controlling and duplicitous may make these moves against living Jews, right now, seem comfortably familiar, and perhaps even freshly revealing of an age-old wisdom. There has been a distinctive tradition on the Left, going back to the 19th century and beyond, of what might be called rich-Jew anti-Semitism, where the basis of the objection to Jews was that they were rich, and hence exploitative and oppressive. It is easy to see how that can be picked up today. To that we might add the consideration that Jews have intermittently been treated appallingly, and sometimes genocidally, in the West; and as Tolstoy and others have noticed, we often hate people in proportion to the injustices which we have done them. It’s very hard for Europe to forgive the Jews for the Holocaust, and seeing Jews as hateful makes life easier – people needn’t worry about whether they’re treating Jews quite fairly if they believe them to be lying, bloodthirsty and oppressive. But the main difference between resurgent hostility to Jews on the part of sections of the Left, and the absence of any such resurgence towards people of colour, is probably the result of the rise of imperialism as the political hate object of the post-Marxist Left. Israel can be cast, though only at the expense of an enormous distortion of historical facts, into the role of imperial coloniser, and hence hostility towards Israel and the Jews who support her existence can be legitimised as part, sometimes a leading part, of the global fight against imperialism. This construal of Israel’s geo-political position permits those people who are hostile to her to see themselves as warriors against the great evil of colonialism, a role which many on the Left find very gratifying to contemplate themselves as occupying.
THE PLEASURES OF MORAL PURITY
This takes us to the third source of satisfaction which anti-Semitism provides: the desire for moral purity, especially a purity which is readily visible to others, and can count as a ticket of entry to socially and politically desirable circles. This source of satisfaction is in many ways the most interesting of them all, partly because it seems to be the motive du jour of anti-Semitism coming from sections of the Left, which might have been expected to be hostile to all forms of racism and sadly isn’t; and partly because it’s so supple and flexible, it can accommodate and explain away a very wide range of facts which tell against it. (I say that these things are interesting to contemplate and analyse, which indeed they are. But in no way do I want to underestimate the extent to which meeting them in the flesh, so to speak, is primarily disgusting, and also in many cases exhausting and sometimes frightening.)
Moral goodness and purity is of course genuinely desirable and admirable – it’s good if people have deep moral insight, and the ability to judge correctly what’s the right thing to do in complicated circumstances, and the strength of character and will to carry out their decisions, and the understanding and factual knowledge and courage and kindness and sympathy to judge others fairly, and to fight for justice where need be. But one look at that list is enough to remind us of how hard it is to be good, and how much easier it is to pursue the appearance rather than the reality. Israel as the Jewish state is a real opportunity for people who want to display their supposed moral purity, and harvest a suitable quantity of admiration from like-minded others, without having to deliver on the exacting demands of genuine moral probity. So we find people declaring that Israel is an apartheid state, thus allying themselves to the righteous fight against apartheid half a century ago, but omitting to notice the huge moral, social and political differences between Israel and apartheid South Africa; they declare that Israel is a colonial settler state, thus displaying their hostility to colonialism without having to ask who the colonising power is, and where else the survivors of the mid-century horrors should have gone, and why the UN decided that the Jews of the world should have the opportunity for self-determination, and why they were so clearly in need of it; we have people publishing in the broadsheet press complaints about how their hostile views about Israel have been silenced by powerful unnamed forces, without noticing the performative contradiction in what they say; we have people explaining that they do of course completely condemn the Holocaust, and this shows that they can’t be anti-Semitic, but, they go on to declare, it’s appalling to find Jews behaving in the same way against the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank that the Nazis did in the Warsaw ghetto. And so on, and on.
However, my concern here is not with the factual and logical errors in these various charges; I want rather to point out the emotional dividend they provide to those who deploy them. Such people can present themselves as the champions of the weak against the strong, of the colonised against the supposedly imperialist colonisers, of wholly innocent Palestinian victims against bloody and heartless Jewish oppressors. They can also present themselves as being victimised, both by the way in which powerful forces have imposed silence on them (albeit one of the noisiest silences ever heard), and also by the charge, deeply offensive to their moral purity, that their extraordinarily selective hostility towards Israel and its supporters might constitute discrimination against Jews. Indeed so offensive is this charge that it amounts, so it is claimed, to a further victimisation, of a kind which can only be explained by the deceitful and manipulative nature of those who raise the concerns about alleged anti-Semitism. So people who deploy these tactics against Jews can see themselves, and can hope to be seen by others, as being not only on the side of morally pure victims against morally vicious villains, but also as having the coveted status of victims themselves, slandered by people who are determined to exploit their own past sufferings in order to oppress others. Furthermore, since in this narrative Jews are cast as the powerful oppressors, those who single them out for hostile attention can see themselves as ‘speaking truth to power’. And paradoxically, focussing on Jews for singular criticism can be also be presented as subversive and transgressive, flouting the conventions of polite discourse, and thus conferring on the hostile critic the accolade of being untrammelled by convention, excitingly edgy, possibly even outrageous. All in all, that’s an awful lot of moral bang for your anti-Semitic buck.
The reason that it’s plausible to construe these various claims and attitudes as being driven by a concern to display moral purity, rather than simply as showing honest moral commitments, is that the hostile attitudes displayed towards Israel and Zionists are rarely directed against other malefactors, including those who have committed far more, and far more serious, violations of human rights than any that Israel has managed. Furthermore, the charges made against Israel are often simply false, and demonstrably so. These two considerations together suggest that what’s in play is not serious moral concern, but rather an easy simulacrum of it, along with a conviction of moral rectitude which, though misplaced, offers distinctive pleasures of its own.
The various sources of pleasure which anti-Semitism provides interact in diverse ways. Sometimes the effect of this interaction is simply to reinforce the rewards on offer: tradition plus hatred is a natural pairing, as is tradition plus the desire for moral purity – these relations are simply multipliers. But other relations look at first sight as if they might involve a certain tension: tradition plus transgressiveness, or hatred and condemnation plus the desire for moral purity. However these tensions can be and often are resolved in anti-Semitic discourse in ways which leave the discriminatory drive undisturbed. The claim of transgressiveness can be asserted with respect to the post-war convention of being polite about Jews, arising understandably from their sufferings at the hands of Nazi Germany, but now, it is suggested, exploited by Jews to cover up their wrongdoings. And in the description of such alleged wrongdoings, the rich seam of traditional Jew-hatred can be drawn on without embarrassment, indeed with a delicious frisson, because the transgressiveness defuses in advance any objections based on more conventional concerns about racism. The defusing of such concerns is expedited where the transgressor uses the device of claiming that he himself is not anti-Semitic, but he can understand those who are, since the Jews bring hostility on themselves by their behaviour. The tension between the pleasures of hatred and those of moral purity can also be reconciled, allowing them to co-exist and even reinforce each other. Hatred, it can be suggested, is an excusable and perhaps even appropriate response to the bloodthirsty acts of Israel; the hatred supposedly arises out of an overwhelming sensitivity to injustice, and is a sign of the extreme moral purity of the hater, who selflessly struggles for justice for the innocent victims of a tyrannical state and its supporters. It’s easy to see the attractions of this self-serving self-image to one who wishes to claim moral rectitude, and also to enjoy the pleasures of hatred. It’s a terrific opportunity both to have your moral cake, and to eat it up in huge and satisfying gulps.
The factual, logical and moral errors in the various forms of anti-Semitism under consideration are legion, and have been discussed extensively elsewhere (for example in the work of David Hirsh and Norman Geras, both in their contributions to previous issues of Fathom and in many other places). In trying to account for the prevalence of these errors, and also to combat them, we shouldn’t overlook the pleasures, sometimes very intense ones, which they provide. With the increasing normalisation of anti-Semitic hostility in many parts of the Left as well as the far Right, we can expect these pleasures to be more widely disseminated and enjoyed. What can be done about this state of affairs isn’t immediately obvious – the fact that some pleasures are vile doesn’t stop them being pleasurable, or prevent some people wanting to taste them again and again. In order to do so these people must bolster up their image of the Jewish state as oppressive and illegitimate, and the Zionists who support her as lying, manipulative, and hostile to human solidarity and justice. Here the devil frequently does have the best tunes, and the thin and reedy voice of rational argument is often quite drowned out by their brassy insistence. But we’ll do better in the combat, however we conduct it, if we realise that the views which we’re struggling against provide deep emotional satisfactions to those who hold them, satisfactions not easy either to overcome or to replace.
A screenshot from YouTube of the far-right British National Party’s ‘Fight Back’ election video. The BNP accuses “Zionists” of corrupting Britain and “attempting to eradiate British culture and British identity”
* As far-right parties poll strongly ahead of next week’s EU elections, Rainer Hoess releases a video urging Europeans to turn out and vote to prevent anti-Semites gaining seats.
* Rainer Hoess now wears a Star of David around his neck, in solidarity with Jews.
***
* Most extensive ever worldwide survey on attitudes towards Jews finds Iran is the least anti-Semitic country in the Middle East, although a majority of adults (56 percent) in Iran still harbor extreme anti-Semitic views.
* More than one-quarter of those surveyed in over 100 countries, 26 percent, harbor anti-Semitic attitudes, representing an estimated 1.09 billion adults around the world.
* It’s not about the Jews: The poll shows that anti-Semitism is higher among people who have never met a Jew. (Tom Gross: Of course, anti-Semitism has nothing, or next to nothing, to do with actual Jews. It has got to do with incitement against Jews (and Israel) by some in the media, some teachers, Muslim and Christian religious figures, “historians,” and others.)
* 30 percent of those polled worldwide, believe Jews make up between 1 to 10 percent of the world’s population. Another 18 percent believe Jews make up more than 10 percent of the world’s population. In fact, 0.19 percent of the world’s population are Jews, including unaffiliated Jews.
* Only 54 percent of people in the world have heard of the Holocaust -- and half of those think it is a myth or hugely exaggerated. Only in Western Europe, have the vast majority of people -- 94 percent -- heard of the Holocaust.
* The Guardian commissions and publishes what is being described as “a repulsive and thoroughly misleading piece even by The Guardian’s standards,” written by extreme left-wing Jews, dismissing the seriousness of this survey and of anti-Semitism in general.
* I have been in Doha for the past few days, as a guest of the Qatari foreign ministry, meeting a broad range of opinion formers, and interestingly I did not hear even one piece of criticism of Israel from the Arabs I met – who were all far more concerned about pressing issues for them such as Syria, Egypt, the succession in Saudi Arabia, the future of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian nuclear threat. Also, in reading the local Qatari press each day this week, I noticed that there was far less criticism of Israel (and even some positive pieces about Israel) than in the International New York Times, which I also read each day this week, and which contained its usual quota of invective and bile against the Jewish state.
***
* You can see these and other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.
CONTENTS
1. Grandson of Auschwitz commandant urges Europeans to vote against extremist parties
2. Younger Germans more tolerant
3. The dangers of not voting
4. Largest ever survey finds more than a quarter of the world is anti-Semitic
5. Is some of the response to this survey itself anti-Semitic?
6. Among the survey’s key findings
7. The most and least anti-Semitic countries, according to this poll
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
GRANDSON OF AUSCHWITZ COMMANDANT URGES EUROPEANS TO VOTE AGAINST EXTREMIST PARTIES
Rainer Hoess, the grandson of the commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp Rudolf Hoess, who oversaw the murder of over a million Jews at Auschwitz, has released a video as part of his campaign against the rise of the far right across Europe.
Hoess, aged 48, said he felt it was his moral duty to do so. “Anti-Semites are not stupid,” he told Swedish media on a visit there this week. “They are growing, gaining ground, very slowly but very effectively.” Anti-Semites are not just found among the working classes, but among journalists, academics and teachers, he warned.
His grandfather experimented with different methods of mass killing, before choosing the pesticide Zyklon B as the most effective method of gassing to death the maximum number of Jews.
“He brings a lot of pain in our family, not only for his children but it will last over decades for generations to come,” his grandson said. Rainer Hoess’s grandfather had five children and many grandchildren. Some relatives have criticized him for his forthright stand against anti-Semitism.
On a trip to Israel, where Hoess met Holocaust survivors, he was asked by a group of Jewish students what he would have done if he had met his grandfather (who was hanged in 1946). He replied: “I would have shot him.”
His video, “Never forget to vote,” can be viewed here:
YOUNGER GERMANS MORE TOLERANT
In the poll outlined in the item below, 52% of Germans and Austrians said Jews should talk less about the Holocaust and fewer books should be written about it. However, younger Germans disagree – “only” 15% of Germans aged under 34, said they were tired of hearing about the Holocaust.
THE DANGERS OF NOT VOTING
Tom Gross adds:
Even if you are not sure which party to vote for, vote for one of the center, center-left or center-right parties. To not vote at all will allow the extreme right (and possibly extreme-left) greater representation in the European parliament.
In countries such as France, the extreme-right wing National Front (which now attracts some Muslim anti-Semitic support including the followers of anti-Semitic “comedian” Dieudonne M’bala M’bala who has endorsed the party) is forecast to come first in next week’s European elections, according to several polls.
In the UK, the British National Party released a slick election video this week titled “Fight back” which attacked “Zionists” for “attempting to eradiate the British culture and British identity.”
In interviews, British National Party founder John Tyndall has said, “Mein Kampf is my Bible,” and other BNP leaders have said the Holocaust is a myth invented by Israel to carry out a real Holocaust against Palestinians, and have cited reports in left-wing media such as The Guardian and Independent to back up their claims.
In election leaflets last week it urged people to “help us prevent the genocide of the indigenous peoples of Britain!”
LARGEST EVER SURVEY FINDS MORE THAN A QUARTER OF THE WORLD IS ANTI-SEMITIC
The most extensive survey ever conducted into attitudes towards Jews around the world has revealed that 26 percent of those polled – representing about 1.1 billion adults worldwide – harbor deeply anti-Semitic views.
Tens of thousands of people were surveyed in 93 languages, in 102 countries and territories, covering approximately 86 percent of the world’s population. The survey was commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League, using some of the world’s leading polling agencies.
The ADL, conscious of past criticism from the far left about how to define anti-Semitism, said for their latest and most extensive survey, if anything they were over-cautious and too conservative, and the extent of the problem has been understated rather than overstated.”
To avoid controversy, questions about Israeli policy or the Israeli-Arab conflict were not included in the survey.
IS SOME OF THE RESPONSE TO THIS SURVEY ITSELF ANTI-SEMITIC?
As far as I can tell, this survey is as accurate as it can be, although it is not without its faults and no such survey could be free from some valid criticism – for example, two of the questions (about finance) seem similar, whereas there is no question about, for example, whether people think Jews kill Christian children for Passover or engage in human organ harvesting – and some people in eastern Europe, where such murderous blood libels have been historically prevalent, might have answered yes to that. There are also one or two surprising results, such as the very low level of anti-Semitism in Sweden, given the high number of anti-Semitic attacks there in recent years.
Of course, all polls are useful only up to a certain point. This is no less the case in this instance. One wonders whether the sizeable amount of criticism this poll has received could easily have been leveled at any poll ever conducted (similar problems plague most polls, where researchers have to decide what questions to leave in and what to take out based on time and financial constraints). The amount of criticism being directed at this poll, and at the organization which commissioned it (the ADL) might itself be viewed as an example of the double standard used in judging Jews.
-- Tom Gross
AMONG THE SURVEY’S KEY FINDINGS
* Some 70 percent of anti-Semites said they have never met a Jew. (Overall, 74 percent of respondents said they had never met a Jew.)
* Thirty-five percent of those surveyed had never heard of the Holocaust. Of those who had, about one-third said it is either a myth or greatly exaggerated.
* The most anti-Semitic region in the world is the Middle East and North Africa, with 74 percent harboring anti-Semitic views. Eastern Europe was second at 34 percent. The least anti-Semitic region was Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) at 14 percent.
* The three countries outside the Middle East with the highest rates of anti-Semitic attitudes were Greece, at 69 percent, Malaysia at 61 percent and Armenia at 58 percent.
* About 49 percent of Muslims worldwide hold anti-Semitic views, compared to 24 percent of Christians.
* The West Bank and Gaza were the most anti-Semitic places surveyed, with 93 percent of respondents expressing anti-Semitic views, including the belief that “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars.” As I have repeatedly outlined in these dispatches much of this hate is a result of incitement found in European-funded Palestinian Authority state media.
* The Arab country with the lowest level of anti-Semitic views was Morocco, at 80 percent. Surprisingly (to some) Iran ranked as the least anti-Semitic country in the Middle East, at 56 percent.
* After the Palestinian territories, the most anti-Semitic places were Iraq, where 92 percent harbor anti-Semitic views; Yemen at 88 percent; Algeria and Libya at 87 percent; Tunisia at 86 percent; Kuwait at 82 percent; and Bahrain and Jordan at 81 percent.
* While a large majority of Middle Easterners (74%) hold anti-Semitic views, the two least anti-Semitic peoples among the 18 polled were the two non-Arab ones, although a majority were still found to be anti-Semitic. Over half of Iranians (56%) and two-thirds of Turks (69%) hold anti-Semitic views, compared to 82.5% of Arabs. (Historically too, Persians and Turks were more tolerant of Jews, compared to the Arabs where – contrary to the myths propagated by anti-Zionists – Jews were mistreated for centuries, though not, of course, to the same level as in Europe.)
* Among all Muslims (Arabs included), less than half (49%) are anti-Semitic. Muslims in India, Indonesia and elsewhere are less likely to be anti-Semitic.
* In some places, such as Eastern Europe, Muslims are less likely to be anti-Semitic (20%) than Christians (35%).
* The least anti-Semitic country overall was Laos, where 0.2 percent of the population holds anti-Semitic views. The Philippines, Sweden, the Netherlands and Vietnam all came in at 6 percent or lower.
* Approximately 9 percent of Americans and 14 percent of Canadians harbor anti-Semitic attitudes.
* Anti-Semitic attitudes in Britain are relatively low. However, in contrast to some other countries, some anti-Semitic myths about Jews in Britain are more prevalent among young people than older people.
* The Czech Republic stands out as the least anti-Semitic country in Eastern Europe, with 13 percent of Czechs harboring anti-Semitic views. In Eastern Europe, the most anti-Semitic country was Poland (45 percent).
* In Western Europe, the most anti-Semitic countries were Greece (69 percent) and France (37 percent).
* Christians in Eastern Orthodox and Catholic countries are more likely to harbor anti-Semitic views than those in Protestant countries.
* Survey finds that more Ukrainians (38%) than Russians (30%) hold anti-Semitic views.
* Overall, 34 percent of respondents older than 65 were deemed anti-Semitic, compared to 25 percent of those younger than 65. Men polled were slightly more anti-Semitic than women.
THE MOST AND LEAST ANTI-SEMITIC COUNTRIES
According to the poll, the most anti-Semitic countries/territories are:
West Bank and Gaza – 93 percent of the adult population holds anti-Semitic views
Iraq – 92 percent
Yemen – 88 percent
Algeria – 87 percent
Libya – 87 percent
Tunisia – 86 percent
Kuwait – 82 percent
Bahrain – 81 percent
Jordan – 81 percent
Morocco – 80 percent
The least anti-Semitic countries/territories are are:
Laos – 0.2 percent of the adult population holds anti-Semitic views
Philippines — 3 percent
Sweden – 4 percent
Netherlands – 5 percent
Vietnam – 6 percent
United Kingdom – 8 percent
United States – 9 percent
Denmark – 9 percent
Tanzania – 12 percent
Thailand – 13 percent
There is another dispatch today here:
The world’s most pervasive form of abuse: The Pleasures of Anti-Semitism.
The Simpsons episode from 2001 showing a jeep bearing a Syrian opposition flag, 10 years before the outbreak of the civil war. Suspicious, eh?!. (See the video below.)
CONTENTS
1. Jordanian journalists smash up TV studio as debate gets out of hand
2. “Pioneers of Tomorrow”: Hamas children’s show encourages young kids to kill Jews
3. Young Israeli paramedic receives President’s Award for saving the lives of Syrians
4. Hamas marks Israel’s Independence Day
5. Egyptian TV: Fox’s cartoon The Simpsons shows Syrian civil war “was planned”
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
JORDANIAN JOURNALISTS SMASH UP TV STUDIO AS DEBATE GETS OUT OF HAND
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
A Jordanian television discussion on Thursday about the war in Syria descended into violence and chaos, with the participants destroying the set.
Journalists Shaker al-Johari and Mohammad al-Jayousi were debating the Syrian conflict, when al-Johari accused Al-Jayousi of backing President Bashar Assad in exchange for money.
(Tom Gross adds: Incidentally, people sometimes ask why dictatorial and authoritarian leaders, Vladimir Putin for example, have hoarded tens of billions of dollars for themselves in private accounts. It is precisely for such circumstances. I am told by reliable intelligence sources that the Assad family had accumulated (i.e. stolen from their people) tens of billions of dollars over the last four decades of rule – and that they are now using a substantial part of this to pay Hizbullah and others to kill their opponents for them, to buy weapons, and to otherwise fund their genocidal-type war against Syria’s Sunni population.)
Below is a brief video showing the extraordinary Jordanian TV bust-up.
***
You can watch the BBC report on it here.
“PIONEERS OF TOMORROW”: HAMAS TV CHILDREN’S SHOW ENCOURAGES YOUNG KIDS TO KILL JEWS
It is chilling to see just how young the Palestinian children are in the video below.
This is not, of course, the first time that young Palestinian children have been urged to kill Jews on the TV stations of both Fatah and Hamas – but this is the first new show calling for murder to be broadcast just days after Hamas signed a much-hyped reconciliation pact with Fatah, which was welcomed by some European politicians and diplomats.
Some commentators (labeled as delusional by others) in Western media (and even some at papers such as Ha’aretz in Israel) are trying to persuade readers that Hamas have somehow now come out in support of peace.
“Yes,” the young child smiles to her interviewer’s obvious delight, when prompted to say, “I will shoot all the Jews!”
The show is called “Pioneers of Tomorrow”. Hamas may soon become part of the Western-funded Palestinian Authority.
The recent episode has been removed by YouTube.
Here is an older episode:
And in this episode Mickey mouse is martyred by the Zionist Jews:
***
FROM THE TRANSCRIPT ABOVE:
Adult host: And they shoot Jews, right?
Little girl in the studio: Right.
Host: You want to be like him? Allah willing, when you grow up.
Little girl: I will shoot the Jews.
Host: All of them?
Little girl: Yes.
Host: Good.
(Video translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute.)
YOUNG ISRAELI PARAMEDIC RECEIVES PRESIDENT’S AWARD FOR SAVING THE LIVES OF SYRIANS
This week, Israel celebrated its Independence Day. To mark the occasion, the annual President’s Award for Excellence was given to Noga Erez, a young paramedic in the IDF who works in Israel’s field hospital on the Syrian border treating injured civilians and fighters from that country’s civil war.
As the award criteria states “Every year, out of thousands of candidates, the President of Israel honors the most outstanding Israelis. They are an inspiration to their peers, acting as leaders and demonstrating the highest degree of excellence.”
Not too many countries give their highest honors to those who save the lives of people from an enemy country, including people who in other circumstances might try and kill them.
This video tells her story. At just over 5 minutes, it is perhaps not the most dynamic video ever, but nonetheless of interest.
***
Tom Gross adds: For a related video, please see here.
HAMAS MARKS ISRAEL’S INDEPENDENCE DAY
Also to mark Israel’s Independence Day, Hamas (which its Western apologists claim is supposedly poor and without money to make slick videos) released this animated video for the Israeli public.
It features an “alternative” to Israel’s Hatikva national anthem, and calls on Jews to be killed or transferred to Germany and elsewhere. Hamas put Hebrew subtitles on it.
Playing on the meaning of “Hatikva” (“The Hope”) Hamas entitled it “The End of Hope” and also placed it on their website here.
The two-minute video says those “stupid and stubborn” Jews that don’t go to Germany and who insist on staying [in Israel] would end up “buried under the earth.”
EGYPTIAN TV: FOX’S CARTOON THE SIMPSONS SHOWS SYRIAN CIVIL WAR “WAS PLANNED”
The Egyptian media is renowned for its conspiracy theories (which millions in Egypt actually believe.) Among those outlined on this website before, for example, is this one: Egypt claims Mossad to blame for shark attacks (& details of new Mossad head).
***
In the latest such conspiracy, an Egyptian television station this week claimed that an episode of the cartoon show, The Simpsons, from as long ago as 2001 was part of a long-standing global conspiracy to overthrow Arab governments during the Arab Spring. The so-called Arab Spring broke out a decade later.
Al-Tahrir TV said that in the episode of the Simpsons that originally aired on February 25, 2001, Bart Simpson and his friend drop bombs on Arab men and on one of the Arab trucks one can see the flag currently used by the Syrian opposition.
This has sparked speculation on Facebook and elsewhere in the Egyptian media in recent days that, in the words of Al-Tahrir TV, “what is happening in Syria today was premeditated.”
“This raises many question marks about what happened in the Arab Spring revolutions and about when this global conspiracy began,” the TV anchor said.
What the Al-Tahrir TV host doesn’t seem to know is that the flag used by the Free Syrian Army today is not a new flag, but the flag that was used by Syria before 1963, when the Ba’ath party led by Hafez Assad, seized control. (You can see the previous flag, together with the Ba’ath party flag, here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_Syrian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat )
Update (2014): The video I originally posted has now been removed by YouTube, so here is another report on it:
* Please “like” these dispatches on Facebook here: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.
Other dispatches in this video series can be seen here:
* Video dispatch 1: The Lady In Number 6
* Video dispatch 2: Iran: Zuckerberg created Facebook on behalf of the Mossad
* Video dispatch 3: Vladimir Putin sings “Blueberry Hill” (& opera in the mall)
* Video dispatch 4: While some choose boycotts, others choose “Life”
* Video dispatch 5: A Jewish tune with a universal appeal
* Video dispatch 6: Carrying out acts of terror is nothing new for the Assad family
* Video dispatch 7: A brave woman stands up to the Imam (& Cheering Bin Laden in London)
* Video dispatch 8: Syrians burn Iranian and Russian Flags (not Israeli and U.S. ones)
* Video Dispatch 9: “The one state solution for a better Middle East...”
* Video dispatch 10: British TV discovers the next revolutionary wave of Israeli technology
* Video dispatch 11: “Freedom, Freedom!” How some foreign media are reporting the truth about Syria
* Video dispatch 12: All I want for Christmas is...
* Video dispatch 13: “Amazing Israeli innovations Obama will see (& Tchaikovsky Flashwaltz!)
* Video dispatch 14: Jon Stewart under fire in Egypt (& Kid President meets Real President)
* Video dispatch 16: Joshua Prager: “In search for the man who broke my neck”
* Video dispatch 17: Pushback against the “dictator Erdogan” - Videos from the “Turkish summer”
* Video dispatch 18: Syrian refugees: “May God bless Israel”
* Video dispatch 20: No Woman, No Drive: First stirrings of Saudi democracy?
* Video dispatch 21: Al-Jazeera: Why can’t Arab armies be more humane like Israel’s?
* Video dispatch 22: Jerusalem. Tel Aviv. Beirut. Happy.
* Video dispatch 23: A nice moment in the afternoon
* Video dispatch 24: How The Simpsons were behind the Arab Spring
* Video dispatch 25: Iranians and Israelis enjoy World Cup love-in (& U.S. Soccer Guide)
* Video dispatch 26: Intensifying conflict as more rockets aimed at Tel Aviv
* Video dispatch 27: Debating the media coverage of the current Hamas-Israel conflict
* Video dispatch 29: “Fighting terror by day, supermodels by night” (& Sign of the times)
* Video dispatch 30: How to play chess when you’re an ISIS prisoner (& Escape from Boko Haram)
* Video dispatch 31: Incitement to kill
* Video Dispatch 32: Bibi to BBC: “Are we living on the same planet?” (& other videos)
Some of the dangerous hate books on sale
* There is also a lighter, more fun dispatch this weekend here: A nice moment in the afternoon.
* You can see these and other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.
UPDATE
Regarding item 7 below, Belgium riot police used water cannon yesterday to disperse the crowds gathered for the anti-Semitic summit.
And among those linking to this dispatch are former Pentagon official Michel Rubin who kindly adds a nice compliment here.
CONTENTS
1. State Department, French embassy “partner” anti-Semitic book fair
2. Jordan’s ex-foreign minister approvingly quotes Mein Kampf
3. Jewish man who urged Muslims to kill Jews, found guilty
4. Murder of 20-year-old believed to be a hate crime
5. Neo-Nazis honor Ukrainian SS on Holocaust Memorial Day
6. Hungarian PM defends revisionist World War II monument
7. Brussels mayor urges ban on “European Anti-Semite summit” due to be held today
8. British MP resigns after “bloody Jew” remark
9. “Anti-Semitic” Pink Floyd stars again call on Rolling Stones to boycott Israel
10. “Moderate” Rouhani bans WhatsApp: owned by “American Zionist Zuckerberg”
11. “Kill Jews” Spanish town name change vote set for May 25
12. Novelist Alice Walker says she “doesn’t know” if Al-Qaeda was behind 9/11 attacks
[All notes below by Tom Gross]
Below are a number of blatantly anti-Semitic news developments from recent days.
As nasty as these are, most people can easily recognize them for what they are: hateful anti-Semitic lies. Personally I find more dangerous the subtle, often hidden anti-Semitism that is sometimes found in, for example, the supposedly neutral reports of respectable news outlets like The Guardian, New York Times and BBC. Uninformed readers and viewers will not be aware they are being misled about Jews or the Jewish state by these journalists and commentators.
***
STATE DEPARTMENT, FRENCH EMBASSY “PARTNER” ANTI-SEMITIC BOOK FAIR
The U.S. State Department is listed as a “cultural partner” of the 24th Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, which is currently being held (from April 30 to May 5). Among the anti-Semitic publications on display at the fair (in both English and Arabic) – books which paved the way for The Holocaust – are “The International Jew,” “Mein Kampf” and “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”.
“The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” is now reported to be the second most widely published book in the Arab world. It promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that Jews are planning global domination.
Then other “cultural partners” for this year’s Abu Dhabi International Book Fair include the French government TV channel France 24, National Geographic magazine, and the French Embassy. (There are, it should be noted, many other titles on display at the book fair, which are not anti-Semitic or have nothing to do with Jews.)
Several senior diplomats at the U.S. State Department, as well as a number of French Foreign Ministry employees (not those stationed in Abu Dhabi) subscribe to this website email list and one would hope they would take steps to have the Book Fair’s organizers remove the anti-Semitic titles.
Similar anti-Semitic literature appeared at the 2014 Casablanca Book Fair and in the recent past at the Frankfurt Book Fair. For more, see this dispatch:
Iran sells hate literature at Frankfurt Book Fair, breaking German laws against anti-Semitism (Oct. 25, 2005)
JORDAN’S EX-FOREIGN MINISTER APPROVINGLY QUOTES FROM MEIN KAMPF
In a rare move, Israel’s foreign ministry has summoned the Jordanian ambassador to Israel to protest a blatantly anti-Semitic article published in the Jordan Times by a former Jordanian foreign minister.
The former foreign minister, Kamel Abu Jaber, quoted from Mein Kampf to support his vehemently anti-Israel arguments, which appeared as Israel commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day last Monday.
Jaber, who is currently director of the Royal Institute for Interfaith Studies, also mixed various other anti-Semitic myths into his article.
JEWISH MAN WHO URGED MUSLIMS TO KILL JEWS, FOUND GUILTY
And then there are the occasional Jewish anti-Semites too:
Joseph Leonard Cohen, a Jewish man from New Jersey, who converted to Islam and changed his name to Yousef al-Khattab, has been found guilty after he encouraged violent attacks against Jews.
Cohen / al-Khattab ran RevolutionMuslim.com, an online hate site where he preached radical Islamist ideology, and shared training videos over YouTube with millions of Muslims around the world, and called for death threats against Jews.
Cohen / al-Khattab, who was raised in New Jersey and Brooklyn, studied at an Orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem in his early 20s, and returned to the U.S. in 2000, before converting to Islam after the 9/11 attacks.
In 2007, al-Khattab and a recent Columbia University graduate Jesse Morton, now known as Younes Abdullah Mohammed, launched the website RevolutionMuslim.
In 2009, al-Khattab posted a video urging viewers to seek out Jews in the U.S. and “deal with them directly in their homes.” He posted a photo of a synagogue in Brooklyn, complete with directions and a note that it tended to be full at prayer time.
According to American law enforcement officials, terrorists using and gaining encouragement from al-Khattab’s website include: “Jihad Jane,” from Philadelphia, arrested in 2009 for plotting to kill a cartoonist who had drawn Prophet Muhammad; blogger Zachary Chesser, from Virginia, arrested while boarding a flight to Somalia where he was to join al-Shabab, a group linked to al-Qaeda; and Samir Khan, from North Carolina, who edited an al-Qaeda magazine and was killed by a drone while riding in the same vehicle as radical American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.
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Tom Gross adds: Among anti-Semitic movements throughout history – including during the Spanish Inquisition, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany – there have always been a few psychologically disturbed former Jews who have encouraged the mass killing of other Jews.
MURDER OF 20-YEAR-OLD BELIEVED TO BE A HATE CRIME
Shelly Dadon, a 20-year-old Israeli woman who was brutally murdered and dumped in a parking lot on Thursday night, is believed to have been killed for nationalistic motives by Palestinians because she was Jewish, police investigators say.
Another murder of a young Jewish Israeli woman took place on Thursday in Ashkelon in southern Israel which police believe was not nationalistically motivated.
NEO-NAZIS HONOR UKRAINIAN SS ON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY
Some in the Western media seem to have been so eager to denounce Vladimir Putin in recent weeks, that they continue to ignore the extreme-right in Ukraine. As I have pointed out in previous dispatches, Putin may well be a criminal (for his genocidal policies in Chechnya, his continued arming of the murderous Assad regime in Syria and in other respects too). But on the point of whether there are Fascist sympathizers in the Ukrainian government that seized power in what many say was a Western-backed coup in February, Putin is in some respects right.
The latest manifestation of this came last Monday, when as the “March of the Living” commenced in neighboring Poland, in honor of Holocaust Memorial Day, just over the border in the former Polish-Jewish city of Lwow/Lvov (now taken over by Ukraine and re-named Lviv) a very different type of march took place in support of the wartime Ukrainian divison of the Waffen-SS.
They were marching in Lvov to commemorate the creation of the 14th SS-Volunteer ‘Galician’ Division on April 28, 1943.
Many of the demonstrators bore the SS insignia and chanted in support of wartime Ukrainian Fascist leader Stepan Bandera.
The demonstrators were members of the (Fascist) Svoboda party which has several cabinet posts in the new Ukrainian government. Putin and his supporters have denounced the “Banderists” in that government.
The inclusion of Svoboda in the government has made Israel one of the only Western democracies to refuse to vote with the new Ukrainian government at the UN recently. (Israel abstained. Both Russia and Ukraine have a long history of anti-Semitism.)
The 14th Waffen Division of the SS, which was infamous even among other Nazis for its ferocity, was a volunteer brigade of Galicians – mostly ethnic Ukrainians, but it also included some Slovak, Dutch, and Czech volunteers. It received the support of senior Ukrainian church leaders.
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The Jewish mayor of Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv (or Kharkov), has been airlifted to Israel for specialist medical treatment.
Gennady Kernes, 54, who narrowly survived an assassination attempt, was flown to Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center on Tuesday after being shot in the back of his head by an unidentified gunman on Monday while he was going for his morning swim.
On Wednesday, he underwent surgery by leading doctors in Israel. According to hospital officials, Kernes has now been taken off a respirator and is conscious.
Kernes had been a strong supporter of deposed pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. But following Yanukovych’s overthrow, Kernes had said that Kharkiv should remain part of Ukraine.
Kernes had become more closely connected to Judaism in recent years, receiving a Hebrew name and a brit milah, according to local Rabbi Moshe Moskowitz. “He’s a good friend of the Jewish community,” Moskowitz said.
HUNGARIAN PM DEFENDS REVISIONIST WORLD WAR II MONUMENT
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told Jewish community leaders last Wednesday that he would build a controversial Nazi occupation monument despite their opposition.
The Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary, as well as Jewish groups abroad, have criticized the Hungarian government for planning to build a memorial that whitewashes the role that the wartime Hungarian pro-Nazi government played in the murder of 550,000 Hungarian Jews and instead pretends Hungary was a mere victim. (For decades critics have accused successive Austrian post-war governments, including the one headed by Nazi war criminal and former UN chief Kurt Waldheim, of doing the same.)
In protest, Hungarian Jewish organizations have said they will boycott the unveiling of the statue at Budapest’s Freedom Square at the end of this month.
Jewish leaders also expressed “shock” at the recent decision of the Holocaust Memorial Center, a government institution established in 1999, to cooperate with the newly established (revisionist) Veritas Historical Research Institute. In January, the government appointed another controversial historian, Sandor Szakaly, to head Veritas. Also in January, Szakaly said in an interview that the deportation and subsequent murder of Jews was an “action of the immigration authorities against illegal aliens.”
***
In what is seen as a rebuke to his own government, the (largely ceremonial) Hungarian President Janos Ader took part with thousands of Jews in Sunday’s “March Of The Living” remembrance walk, which was held for the 12th time in Budapest, the Hungarian capital.
President Janos Ader said Auschwitz, where a third of those killed in the death camp were Hungarian Jews, “forms part of Hungarian history.”
BRUSSELS MAYOR URGES BAN ON “EUROPEAN ANTI-SEMITE SUMMIT” DUE TO BE HELD TODAY
Vincent De Wolf, the mayor of Etterbeek – one of 19 municipalities that make up the Brussels region – has asked the governor of the region to issue a ban on what is being described as an “European anti-Semitic summit” due to be held today.
The event is being organized by Laurent Louis, a Belgian MP with a record of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements. In January, he said in parliament that “the Holocaust was set up and financed by the pioneers of Zionism.” Last year, he posed for pictures outside parliament while trampling and spitting on an Israeli flag.
He said the event he was planning in Brussels was a “European Congress of resistance.”
A keynote speaker will be the anti-Semitic French “comedian” Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, who has seven convictions for inciting racial hatred against Jews and whom French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has called a “professional anti-Semite.”
Other speakers include Alain Soral, the author of several anti-Semitic books and various people who collaborate with Dieudonne.
The Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, says that if the event occurs, “it will be the worst gathering of conspiracy theorists and anti-Semitic propagandists that Belgium has seen since World War II.”
It urged authorities to prevent the event from taking place saying “it represents a grave danger to democracy.”
BRITISH MP RESIGNS AFTER “BLOODY JEW” REMARK
British MP Patrick Mercer, who is a member of the governing Conservative Party, has resigned after the House of Commons Standards Committee concluded he had breached a number of regulations.
Among the statements that were criticized by the Standards Committee, Mercer had said that a female soldier from Fiji “looks like a bloody Jew”.
Mercer also used his position for paid advocacy and described a fellow MP as a “crook of the first order.”
Mercer has apologized for the statement against Jews, saying that he had been “very tired at the time” and that it was a “stupid thing to say.”
He added: “I am married to a woman of Jewish extraction. I have lots of Jewish friends … and I am conscious that my speech isn’t always as balanced as it should be.”
“ANTI-SEMITIC” PINK FLOYD STARS AGAIN CALL ON ROLLING STONES TO BOYCOTT ISRAEL
In an op-ed published on Thursday for the online magazine Salon, two founding members of the rock band Pink Floyd, Roger Waters and Nick Mason, again called on their fellow British rockers from The Rolling Stones to cancel their upcoming concert in Tel Aviv on June 4.
Roger Waters is at the forefront of international efforts to boycott Israel, and has also been denounced by Jewish groups as an anti-Semite for, for example, using pig-shaped balloons emblazoned with Jewish Stars of David at his concerts. He has suggested the Jews are Nazis. At one such concert in Belgium last year (a country where many thousands of Jews were murdered), under his “Jewish pig” balloon, he wore a long black leather jacket with a red-and-white arm band, which concert goers said was reminiscent of a Nazi uniform.
“The Jewish lobby is extraordinarily powerful in the music industry and they are trying to stop my freedom of expressing,” he alleged, following criticism of the concert.
ADL director Abe Foxman said that “Waters has absorbed classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and these have now seeped into the totality of his views. How sad that a creative genius could become so perverted by his own narrow-minded bigotry.” (Foxman, who is a Holocaust survivor, is a longtime subscriber to this email list.)
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Besides the Rolling Stones, other major artists scheduled to defy the boycotters and perform in Israel this summer include Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber and Neil Young.
* For that and other items please see this recent dispatch: Jewish teacher in Paris has nose broken, swastika drawn on chest (& Iran leader again denies Holocaust) (March 23, 2014)
“MODERATE” ROUHANI REGIME BANS WHATSAPP: OWNED BY “AMERICAN ZIONIST ZUCKERBERG”
The Iranian government has announced a ban on the popular worldwide messaging application WhatsApp, which was recently purchased by Facebook for $19 billion. It said that the decision was reached because WhatsApp was bought “by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is an American Zionist.”
(Tom Gross adds: In fact there is no indication that Zuckerberg is a Zionist, and WhatsApp was purchased from its founder, the Ukrainian-born Jew Jan Koum, who said in interview earlier this year that he fled anti-Semitism in Ukraine before settling in America and going on to found WhatsApp.)
The announcement was made by Iran’s Committee on Internet Crimes, which hinted that other social media projects, including Viber, Tango, Instagram and Facebook, may soon be shut down in Iran.
One Iranian blogger, speaking anonymously, told Fox News that “The Revolutionary Guard sees these social sites as a major threat because there’s an appeal for young people and the government worries about the exchange of information.”
Thirteen government officials sit on the committee that polices internet users, six of whom are also members of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet.
In October of 2012, Iran’s cyber police arrested 35-year-old blogger Sattar Beheshti, for crimes “against national security on social networks and Facebook.” Beheshti had openly criticized the government online. He was found dead a month later in his prison cell and is believed to have been tortured to death.
***
You may also wish to watch this video I posted in 2010:
* Iran: Zuckerberg created Facebook on behalf of the Mossad.
“KILL JEWS” SPANISH TOWN NAME CHANGE VOTE SET FOR MAY 25
In my dispatch on April 14, 2014, I highlighted the story “Spanish village says it may agree to remove words ‘kill Jews’ from its name”.
Senior correspondents for the Associated Press who subscribe to this list, told me they have read my dispatch and have now written about it. The AP story of April 25 has been picked up by others, for example, on ABC news:
abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/spain-town-kill-jews-mulls-change-23420101
The village’s 56 registered voters will now be asked on May 25 whether they want to keep the name or change it to the similar, but non-offensive name that the town had before the Spanish inquisition. Even before the Inquisition, the region was known for its massacres of Jews. For example, in the pogrom of 1035, 66 Jews were killed in a nearby town.
NOVELIST ALICE WALKER SAYS SHE “DOESN’T KNOW” IF AL-QAEDA WAS BEHIND 9/11 ATTACKS
Award-winning novelist Alice Walker, who has a track record of making anti-Israel statements now says she “doesn’t know” whether Al-Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks.
She was speaking on the sidelines of a conference at New York University last week, organized by leftist historian Howard Zinn.
Even though Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have taken credit for the attacks, conspiracy theorists in America still believe that it was “inside job” by the Bush administration or that Israel was behind the attacks.
Walker’s own half-Jewish daughter has suggested that her mother has a problem with Jews.
In 2012 Walker refused to allow the translation of her novel The Color Purple into Hebrew. For more, please see here.
[Notes above by Tom Gross]
A NICE MOMENT IN THE AFTERNOON
[Note by Tom Gross]
These Middle East dispatches often contain depressing items, and indeed two such dispatches will be posted here, later this weekend.
Israel, in particular, is subjected to relentless, sometimes fabricated, and often totally out of context criticism by respectable Western journalists, academics and artists.
Here is something more fun. From yesterday afternoon in the Neve Tzedek district of Tel Aviv:
A PROPOSAL IN NEVE TZEDEK
OPERA AMONG THE SHOPPERS OF TEL AVIV
Here is another uplifting video (which I posted before, here).
The Friday morning food market at Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff shopping center.
L’CHAIM, TO LIFE!
And on the theme of weddings, here is another uplifting video. (I have also posted this before, here).
From a Catholic Puerto Rican wedding in the United States:
* Please “like” these dispatches on Facebook here: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.
Other dispatches in this video series can be seen here:
* Video dispatch 1: The Lady In Number 6
* Video dispatch 2: Iran: Zuckerberg created Facebook on behalf of the Mossad
* Video dispatch 3: Vladimir Putin sings “Blueberry Hill” (& opera in the mall)
* Video dispatch 4: While some choose boycotts, others choose “Life”
* Video dispatch 5: A Jewish tune with a universal appeal
* Video dispatch 6: Carrying out acts of terror is nothing new for the Assad family
* Video dispatch 7: A brave woman stands up to the Imam (& Cheering Bin Laden in London)
* Video dispatch 8: Syrians burn Iranian and Russian Flags (not Israeli and U.S. ones)
* Video Dispatch 9: “The one state solution for a better Middle East...”
* Video dispatch 10: British TV discovers the next revolutionary wave of Israeli technology
* Video dispatch 11: “Freedom, Freedom!” How some foreign media are reporting the truth about Syria
* Video dispatch 12: All I want for Christmas is...
* Video dispatch 13: “Amazing Israeli innovations Obama will see (& Tchaikovsky Flashwaltz!)
* Video dispatch 14: Jon Stewart under fire in Egypt (& Kid President meets Real President)
* Video dispatch 16: Joshua Prager: “In search for the man who broke my neck”
* Video dispatch 17: Pushback against the “dictator Erdogan” - Videos from the “Turkish summer”
* Video dispatch 18: Syrian refugees: “May God bless Israel”
* Video dispatch 20: No Woman, No Drive: First stirrings of Saudi democracy?
* Video dispatch 21: Al-Jazeera: Why can’t Arab armies be more humane like Israel’s?
* Video dispatch 22: Jerusalem. Tel Aviv. Beirut. Happy.
* Video dispatch 23: A nice moment in the afternoon
* Video dispatch 24: How The Simpsons were behind the Arab Spring
* Video dispatch 25: Iranians and Israelis enjoy World Cup love-in (& U.S. Soccer Guide)
* Video dispatch 26: Intensifying conflict as more rockets aimed at Tel Aviv
* Video dispatch 27: Debating the media coverage of the current Hamas-Israel conflict
* Video dispatch 29: “Fighting terror by day, supermodels by night” (& Sign of the times)
* Video dispatch 30: How to play chess when you’re an ISIS prisoner (& Escape from Boko Haram)
* Video dispatch 31: Incitement to kill
* Video Dispatch 32: Bibi to BBC: “Are we living on the same planet?” (& other videos)