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What's New   Simon Webb:
a historian rouses the rabble

 Introduction
Labour Friends of Palestine and other friends
Democracies and warfare: harsh realities
Palestinians: harsh realities  
Palestinian civic society: an indictment
     On the streets of Gaza: animal abuse
     Homosexuality in Gaza
      'Nazi, genocidal Israelis'
     Holocaust denial and a 'war crime'
     Palestinian media
     Financial support for terrorists
The Goldstone Report and 'Apartheid' Israel
Gaza: starvation and obesity
Gaza Civic Society Leaders
Misunderstanding moderate Muslim society
Banning extremist speakers
The Hamas Charter: timidity and intimidation
Theodore Roosevelt, F. D Roosevelt, the IDF
Human Rights Watch
Blockades of Gaza, Cuba, boycotting Israel, US
Efraim Karsh: 'What occupation?'
Jeff McMahan: a philosopher goes to war
Bombardment: killing, the prevention of killing
Sentimentality and distortion
Freedom and partial freedom
Practical information
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Animal Rebellion and Palestine Action  


PROFILES: pro-Palestinian-anti-Israel people

      Academics 
      MU - Manchester University
      BU - Birmingham University 
      KU - Kingston 
      LSE - London School of Economics

      OU - Oxford RH - Royal Holloway, London
       SHU - Sheffield Hallam University
       SU - Sheffield University


    
 Sue Blackwell (BU) and Gilad Atzmon
      Prof.  Rosenhead (LSE): the Ship of Fools
       Dr A.Takriti (SU): historian, censor,  
      Dr John C Smith (KU) on imperialism
      
Dr Dick Pitt (SHU), blogger 

         
      Assorted grotesques
      Deborah Fink
      Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi
      Tony Greenstein
      Greta Berlin on Charlie Hebdo
      A confused dreamer
      The Quaker G. Ferguson:
      Antony Loewenstein and accuracy
      Vittorio Arrigoni and Kayla Mueller

See also the pages

Ethics: theory and practice

Cambridge University: excellence, mediocrity, stupidity

All the people criticized in the section 'Cambridge protest'  have anti-Israel pro-Palestinian views and support boycotts of Israel.  See in particular the section Dr Priyamvada Gopal's Rules of Etiquette. Dr Gopal is an academic at Cambridge University. She obviously thinks of Iran as a country which is far superior to Israel. I state the case against her view.

See also, since there are significant linkages between Irish nationalist ideology and Palestinian ideology

 Irish nationalist ideology

and my very critical page on some non-religious ideologies as well as Christianity, and in particular the Church of England.

 Religion and ideology

Simon Webb: a historian rouses the rabble

This is the newest material on the page. It will be revised and extended.

Simon Webb is a British historian with many published books, as well as a You Tube channel. His Website is at

 

https://www.simon-webb.com/

 

One of his You Tube videos has had a very disturbing impact. It wouldn't have been his direct intention to rabble-rouse, no doubt, but that's what he achieved. (I don't claim in the least that all the commenters belong to 'the rabble' of anti-semites, of course.) Almost certainly, in a historical career which includes the achievement of many published books, this is his worst achievement by far. The title of the video:

 

'How two Jewish academics in America created the modern concept of anti-racism.'

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTCc_6IKeIk

 

The two academics who allegedly created 'the modern concept of anti-racism' are Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. According to the evidence available to me, neither of them were observant Jews. Even if they had been observant Jews, the description Jewish academics would have been completely unnecessary. If Simon Webb thinks that no objection can be taken to the description Jewish academics, a large number of the commenters thought that the mention of 'Jewish' was very, very significant and responded.

 

 It's very, very disturbing that Simon Webb never intervened and responded to the blatatant anti-semitism. He did respond to one of the comments, which wasn't anti-semitic, 'Did your wife write this one?' Writing as 'History Debunked,' the title of his You Tube channel, he responded with 'That is an odd question! No, I wrote it myself.' The question posed in this comment was odd, but  he preferred to be silent about the hideous spectacle which was playing out on this You Tube page of his.

 

The comments included these. (Punctuation, spelling and grammar as in the originals):

'Europe and the US would truly be something magnificent without them.' [i.e., the Jews. And the Nazis believed that Germany would be something magnificent without the Jews.]

'Good work here Simon, finally calling them out.' [Again, 'them' obviously refers to the Jews.] 'Oh yes he's finally addressing the tribe [obviously the reference intended is to Israel] ... Many other things they inflicted on the west.' [No attempt made to give examples. The Nazis did, of course, come up with examples of alleged harm to justify their policy of exclusion and then extermination.]

'I always appreciate your honesty Simon.' [A less favourable view of some of his historical enquiries is now called for.]

'The thanks we get for saving them.' [The commenter would find in Martin Gilbert's book 'The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust' a great deal of information about 'Yad Vashem,' based in Jerusalem, which amongst other things honours, commemorates and makes completely clear the gratitude of the state of Israel for the many people who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. There are countless other pieces of evidence which could be cited.]

'Who would have guessed, a concept invented by the 'chosen' people.'

'It's always them. The same group behind everything.' [The Nazis had the same deluded conviction.]

'thank you so much for being such a brave fellow this needs to be heard the truth will finally be revealed to the public one of these days the german man [obviously a reference to Hitler] tried to warn us but nobody listened people like you are so brave thank you so much sir for making this video god bless'

'They [an obvious reference to Jews] even managed to make a teetotal vegetarian who loved animals and who enjoyed painting as a pastime ... into evil incarnate.' [an obvious reference to Hitler.]

'This [the thesis which the writer of the comment finds in the video and found by so many others who added a comment to the video] is explained in 'Culture of Critique' by Macdonald.' [Wikipedia gives this information, 'The Culture of Critique series is a trilogy of books by Kevin B. MacDonald, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, white supremacist and a retired professor of evolutionary psychology. MacDonald claims that evolutionary psychology provides the motivations behind Jewish group behavior and culture. Through the series, MacDonald asserts that Jews as a group have biologically evolved to be highly ethnocentric and hostile to the interests of white people. He asserts Jewish behavior and culture are central causes of antisemitism, and promotes conspiracy theories about alleged Jewish control and influence in government policy and political movements.' ]

'15.2 million Jews in the world. 6.3 million of those are in Israel. Therefore, there are only 8.9 million Jews in the entire world outside of Israel. Smaller than the population of London. They've got a lot to say haven't they? They do seem to be at the root of much of christian society's problems. I've never held antisemitic thoughts. I worked on a kibbutz in Israel when I was a teenager. However, even I am beginning to see a pattern here.'

'Oh yes he's finally addressing the tribe...Many other things they inflicted on the west.' [For a fuller account of these claims, see the annals of the antisemitic persecutors of the middle ages, and other periods.]

'Perhaps just perhaps that little fella with the strange moustache knew something all along ?' [Another obvious reference to Hitler.]

'Youll get the clicks. Thanks for sticking for the truth.' [Present statistics: 9,600 likes, no dislikes. It would have been far, far better for the reputation of his followers and admirers if for this video, there had been a very large number of dislikes. The herd mentality in action, perhaps?]

'Your channel could be taken down soon if you keep this up. It's not worth the risk. It's sad that merely speaking verifiable information with proof is this risky.'

 

'But isn't it strange that they never insisted on equality between Jews and Palestinians?' A reply to this comment:

 

'They don't consider anyone else to be their equals. Their sense of worth is vastly out of proportion to their contributions to humanity.'

Is the penny or should that be shekel starting to drop for Simon after all these years?'

'Universal troublemakers'

'WOAH 6 MILLION JEWS WERE MURDERED BRUTALLY IN YHE HOLOCAUST HOW DARE YOU CRITICIZE GODS CHOSEN PEOPLE.'

'I don't hate them, but they've pulled the wool over our children's eyes, enough is enough.'

Introduction  

The world is and always has been been harsh and dangerous.  There are many anti-Israel campaigners who promote the view that the contemporary world is harsh and dangerous for one reason above all others - Israeli policies and actions. This is a view which shamelessly distorts and falsifies. Unfortunately for the Israeli cause and the defenders of Israel, unfortunately for truth, unfortunately for clear thinking, unfortunately for moral values, Palestinian society has one undeniable advantage: an instinct for self-publicity, an instinct for exploiting the feelings of  many non-Palestinians who would like to identify with an exotic society about which they know not nearly enough.

Alan Dershowitz has written well on the allure of violence and the rewards of violence. This is from an article of his published in the 'Jerusalem Post'  

' ... terrorism has proved to be a successful tactic.  It works.  That’s why ISIS engages in it.  That’ why Al Qaeda engages in it.  That’s why Boko Haram engages in it.  That’s why the Taliban engages in it.  And that’s why Hamas engages in it.

'Compare the visibility and success of groups that employ terrorism as the main tactic for responding to their grievances, with comparably aggrieved groups that reject terrorism. [He gives the Tibetans as one example] Hamas is more popular than ever among Palestinians following their kidnapping and murder of three Israeli schoolchildren, their brutal slaughter of the Fogel family, and their deployment of rockets and tunnels against civilians from civilian areas.  The same is true of Hezbollah.  

'Now comes ISIS which is quickly becoming the terrorist group of choice for disaffected radicals, because their brutality is now in the headlines.'

Palestinians aren't to be equated with Nazis (the fact that so many Palestinians equate Israelis with Nazis is grossly stupid, based on ignorance of history or the deliberate ignoring of historical fact and is one reason why Palestinian society is grossly deficient) and so some words of the German general von Runstedt are quoted simply for their obvious good sense, for once. After D-day, when German forces faced  superior forces in Normandy, von Rundstedt advised, 'Make peace you fools!' the loose translation of 'Schluss mit dem Krieg, Idioten!' Good but abrupt and abrasive advice to the Palestinians would have been 'Make peace you fools!' at an early stage in the recent fighting (and earlier fighting)  when damage to Gaza was much lighter and the loss of life and the material damage were much less. But harsh realities have no meaning for all too many Palestinians - and their supporters.

Radical Islamism has been devastating in its damage, including the loss of human freedoms as well as the loss of so many lives. Nazism and communism were assaults on freedom too, but have been responsible for far greater loss of life. The highest death tolls occurred in Stalinist Russia, Mao Zedong's China and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Estimates of the total deaths inflicted by communist regimes range from 85 to 100 million.

Gunnar Heinsohn, the director of the Raphael-Lemkin-Institut für Xenophobie- und Genozidforschung at the University of Bremen has compiled statistics to rank conflicts since 1948 by the number of deaths incurred.

These are the first 14 entries in the list, showing the leading causes of death in conflict.

1. 40,000,000 China, 1949-76
2. 10,000,000 Soviet Bloc: late Stalinism, 1950-53; post-Stalinism, to 1987
3. 4,000,000 Ethiopia, 1962-92
4. 3,800,000 Zaire (Congo-Kinshasa): 1967-68; 1977-78; 1992-95; 1998-present
5. 2,800,000 Korean war, 1950-53
6. 1,900,000 Sudan, 1955-72; 1983-2006
7. 1,870,000 Cambodia: Khmer Rouge 1975-79; civil war 1978-91
8. 1,800,000 Vietnam War, 1954-75
9. 1,800,000 Afghanistan: Soviet and internecine killings, Taliban 1980-2001
10. 1,250,000 West Pakistan massacres in East Pakistan (Bangladesh 1971)
11. 1,100,000 Nigeria, 1966-79 (Biafra); 1993-present
12. 1,100,000 Mozambique, 1964-70 (30,000)
13.1,000,000 Iran-Iraq-War, 1980-88
14. 900,000 Rwanda genocide, 1994

If the list is extended back to the twentieth century, then the 'context' becomes even clearer but even more difficult to bear.

Estimates for the death toll during the Stalinist era vary very much, but 20 million is a not too-conservative estimate.

Estimates for the death toll during the Second World War are about 50 million.

At some periods in history, some Christians have been active persecutors, active torturers, active killers and active in suppressing human freedoms, although not remotely on this scale. But whereas Nazi, communist and the lesser Christian excesses are largely in the past, the excesses of radical Islamism are current and pose an immediate threat.

If one state (or would-be state) is in conflict with another, the decision as to which  to support is very easy if one of them  is immensely preferable to the other, unless support brings very great risks and very great disadvantages. The decision is unaffected by the fact that a vastly more civilized state which goes to war may often wage war ruthlessly, often using some of the  methods of the vastly less civilized state. States which wage war using barbaric methods at all times can't be regarded as more civilized states, of course. Barbaric methods aren't necessarily methods which lead to many, many civilian casualties. The accepted humanitarian legislation for the conduct of war accepts many civilian casualties, mass civilian casualties, in some circumstances, just as it permits the use of such horrific weapons as flame-throwers. I don't give here the reasons why Great Britain whilst the Nazis held power in  Germany was a vastly more civilized state than Nazi Germany, but Nazi Germany's practice of genocide is obviously one of the reasons, and Nazi Germany's aggression against Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium and other states.

Present day requirements for a civilized state include the rule of law, a free press, absence of torture (not counting very occasional abuses), few or no executions. Not too many states in the distant past would have qualified as civilized: judicial torture was used in German states during the time of Bach, as was generally the case in Europe at the time.  England at the time of the 'bloody code' executed very, very often.

When a state goes to war for such contrasting ends as to protect civilized values and for national survival, then the state of war is liable to lead to understandable changes, such as a press which is less free, and very drastic changes, such as the British policy of area bombing during the Second World War - the deliberate targeting of civilians and their housing. The bombing of Dresden is the best known example, although the policy was followed much more generally.

The bombing of Dresden and other German towns and cities was not a 'war crime' which showed that Britain was 'no better' than Nazi Germany. At all times, policies and actions have to be considered not in abstraction but as embodied. The accusation of a war crime may abstract the act from the reasons for the act, the times in which the act was carried out. Subtraction is allowable, but not cancellation. The policy of area bombing didn't 'cancel out' the British moral superiority, including that of the bomber crews, heroic men whose qualities have been recognized but who deserve wider recognition still.

Faced by obvious blunders and defects, my first recourse is to ask, is there any compensating evidence, are there any  their any  obvious successes and virtues? The BBC's coverage of Gaza has been biased, superficial and shameful, but the BBC's strengths aren't always missing. On one evening, there was a  ridiculously bad report on a Palestinian solidarity march for Gaza, against Israel (this was the news programme 'Look North,' for Yorkshire, so viewers in other parts of the country were spared this particular simplistic propaganda piece, even if not  simplistic propaganda pieces on their own regional news programmes, and the national news programmes). It made the false claim that anyone with any compassion would be bound to endorse the objectives of the march. In fact, the march had a false agenda, based on flagrant distortion.

Later that evening, there was a programme on the British bombing campaign and the Lancaster bomber which took account of drastic choices and hideous moral dilemmas. The BBC has strengths in military history, which demands strengths in compassionate realism, and not just the history of the bombing campaign. Recommended, another film about the bombing campaign,  Bomber Boys by Colin and Ewan McGregor.

I make every attempt to be fair-minded. My critical page on feminism includes a section, 'Friendly fire and hostile fire' where I criticize some anti-feminist sites. There can be no guarantee whatsoever that supporters of Israel can never be  mistaken. This was the case when some supporters of Israel were successful in calling for the cancellation of a conference at Southampton University. Professor Geoffrey Alderman of Buckingham University writes well about this blunder, as about the far worse blunders and deficiencies of anti-Israel activists,  in an article published in 'The Jewish Chronicle' (April 8, 2015)

http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/columnists/133640/an-own-goal-southampton

'As a research-orientated academic I receive many invitations to present conference papers. Last October one was forwarded to me from the University of Southampton, inviting expressions of interest in making presentations to a conference to be held in mid-April 2015 entitled "International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism." As it happened, I already had some material prepared (originally for inclusion in a submission I had already made to the UN Human Rights Council) that seemed to me ideally suited. So I contacted the conference organisers and was pleased that my proposal - to address the conference on the subject of "Jews, Judaism and the Jewish State: Ethnic Rights and International Wrongs" - was accepted.

'What I proposed to argue was that under international law and in principle ethnic Jews have the right of settlement throughout the area of Mandate Palestine west of the Jordan River (including what is known as the West Bank), that this right extends to Jews whether or not they are citizens of the state of Israel, but not to Israeli citizens who are not ethnically Jewish, and that the state of Israel has a legal obligation to take any step and all steps necessary to uphold this right. Now it appears that I may not have the opportunity to make this presentation because, following feverish lobbying by a miscellany of Jewish interests, and some threats of physical disruption, the university authorities at Southampton have unilaterally ordered the conference to be cancelled.'

Links to all Geoffrey Alderman's articles in the 'Jewish Chronicle,' which comment on Israeli affairs and give a cogent defence of Israel:

http://www.thejc.com/user/posts/5

His Website:

http://www.geoffreyalderman.com/

Palestinian society: an illustrated indictment

On the streets of Gaza: animal abuse


This video, on mistreatment of animals in Gaza, comes with a warning from 'Animals Australia:.' it's  very, very distressing:

https://www.animalsaustralia.org/features/gaza-video-evidence.php

Australian RSPCA makes this comment:

Footage uploaded onto YouTube during the Festival of Sacrifice in October 2013 revealed the horrific treatment of Australian cattle in the Gaza Strip in Palestine. It is some of the most shocking and distressing footage we have seen.

The footage documents Australian cattle:

  • Tethered to poles, trees, and trucks on the streets

  • Being beaten and dragged by ropes off trucks without unloading ramps

  • Being dragged, man-handled and chased along streets by crowds of youths in a  frenzy akin to bull running

  • Being stabbed in the eyes

  • Being kicked, pushed, pulled and tripped over with ropes to be forced onto the ground and under control for slaughter

  • Having their necks hacked, sawn and stabbed at with blunt knives

  • Being strangled by neck ropes while bleeding out

The middle east is reliant on authoritarian rule and Israel is the exception. The middle east tends to be oblivious to issues of animal welfare. The only exceptions are isolated individuals in those countries - and the state of Israel. Israel hasn't taken the attitude that, faced by enormous threats, it can neglect every other consideration but survival and protection. It recognizes that civilization requires care for animals. Israel was one of the first countries in the world to ban the use of wild animals in circuses, in 1995. (Britain still has no national ban, although many local authorities do have bans.)

Israel used to be the fourth largest producer of foie gras in the world. Unlike, of course, France, it banned the production of foie gras, recognizing that the ethical objections were unanswerable.

There are many other developments: animal rights/animal welfare activity in Israel has developed enormously. Israel has even banned dissection of animals in primary and secondary schools. At Universities, dissection is optional. Vegans in the Israeli Defence Force are given vouchers to buy vegan food and aren't required to wear leather boots. Boots made with synthetic materials are provided. Israel has never had a whaling industry but it joined the International Whaling Commission so as to vote against any resumption of whaling. Opposition to the fur trade is intense in Israel. Legislation is being considered which would be the most far-reaching in the world, to prohibit the import, production and sale of all fur products. A survey of Israeli opinion carried out by the polling company Maagar-Mohot gave these results. In answer to the question, 'Do you find it moral to kill animals if they are killed only for their fur?' 86% of Israelis were opposed. On the question, 'Would you support a bill to ban the trade of fur in Israel?' 79% were in favour of a ban.

Homosexuality in Gaza 


(I'm not myself gay. I decided to use 'homosexual' rather than 'gay' in this section, despite misgivings. The documents I quote from the Pew Research Center and the United Nations use 'homosexual.')

 
Richard Elliott, writing in 'The Commentator:'

' ... the Palestinian authority in the Gaza strip still legislates that homosexuality is illegal and faces severe penalties of up to10 years in prison. The West Bank is a slightly different matter; homosexuality was made legal as far back as 1951, and there has been no repealing of this law.

'The difference between the West Bank and the Gaza strip, however, is that the legalisation of homosexuality in the former was installed by the Jordanians, not the Palestinians.

'The legal punishments in place for homosexuals in Gaza may strike many readers as terrible; but the social injustices often outweigh the legal ones. In Russia, while the injustices enforced by law are technicalities compared to the far more serious civil intolerance and often physical cruelty which gay men face, so it follows that the social outweighs the legal in Palestine.  

'Several years in prison, as is the legal recommendation for homosexuality in Gaza, is nothing compared to what could happen if a gay man were to fall foul of a gang of radical Islamists ...

'There is nothing new about gay Palestinians fleeing to Israel because of the hostility they face from their fellow countrymen. Reports dating back to at least 2003 from the BBC suggest that many gay Palestinians who undertake the risk of fleeing to Israel feel far safer and socially accepted there than in their native Palestine.

'Palestinian homosexuals in Israel proper are grateful for the legal protection they receive from the kind of intolerant violence many men sharing their orientation are used to in Palestine; a report documented in a piece for Vice magazine suggests that there are at least 2,000 homosexual men originating from the Palestinian territories living in pluralist Tel-Aviv. Evidence that integration of Palestinian homosexuals works is that the gay bars in Tel-Aviv are filled with both Arabs and Jews.

'There is at present a large community of Arabs working to institute LGBT rights in Palestine, working under the name Al-Qaws. No doubt this is a noble endeavour, but one cannot help but notice the irony when the article states both that Al-Qaws is based in Jerusalem, and that the next edition of their monthly ‘Palestinian Queer Party’ is given the location of “TBD, Israel”.

'None of what I have mentioned is in any way an attempt to justify Russia’s recent reversion of tolerant standards; but the comparison with Palestine, the championed moral cause of so many, is worth noting.'

Anyone who has a strong interest in gay issues should devote time to the Iranian regime and its ruthless attitude. Iran, not Israel, not in the least Israel, is an enemy of gay rights. Boycotting Israel whilst excusing Iran is not just ridiculous but monstrous, for anyone who detests persecution of gay people, and in general, I'd claim. This is from the 'Guardian' (3 September, 2011):

'Three Iranian men have been executed after being found guilty of charges related to homosexuality, according to a semi-official news agency.

The men, only identified by their initials, were hanged on Sunday in the south-western city of Ahvaz, the capital of Iran's Khuzestan province.

"The three convicts were sentenced to death based on the articles 108 and 110 of Iran's Islamic penal code, for acts against the sharia law and bad deeds," the Isna agency quoted a judiciary official in Khuzestan as saying.

Iran Human Rights, an independent NGO based in Norway, said the men were charged with "lavat" – sexual intercourse between two men.' The page Persecution of Homosexuals (Palestinian Authority area) contains strong claims, with supporting evidence:

Quotes:

'What seems less well known, however, is the appalling treatment of gays under Yassir Arafat's Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. [Since that time, the situation seems not to have improved out of all recognition.] At least it was less known until Yossi Klein Halevi wrote about it in the August 19th New Republic. Palestine makes rural Texas look like San Francisco.

'According to Halevi, one young man discovered to be gay was forced by Palestinian Authority police "to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects." During one interrogation Palestinian police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle.

'When he was released he fled to Israel. If he were forced to return to Gaza, he said, "The police would kill me."

'An American who foolishly moved into the West Bank to live with his Palestinian lover said they told everyone they were just friends, but one day they "found a letter under our door from the Islamic court. It listed the five forms of death prescribed by Islam for homosexuality, including stoning and burning. We fled to Israel that same day," he said.

'The head of a Tel Aviv gay organization told Halevi, "The persecution of gays in the Palestinian Authority doesn't just come from the families or the Islamic groups, but from the P.A. itself."

'Palestinian police have increasingly enforced Islamic religious law, he said: "It's now impossible to be an open gay in the P.A." He recalled that one gay man in the Palestinian police went to Israel for a short time. When he returned to the West Bank, Palestinian Authority police confined him to a pit without food or water until he died.

'A 17-year-old gay youth recalled that he spent months in a Palestinian Authority prison "where interrogators cut him with glass and poured toilet cleaner into his wounds."

'The U.S. State Department, which more and more seems to be living on some other planet, blandly noted in a 2001 human rights report, "In the Palestinian territories homosexuals generally are socially marginalized and occasionally receive physical threats." That's one way to put it. 'In the last few years, Halevi reports, hundreds of gay Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, have fled to Israel, usually to Tel Aviv, Israel's most cosmopolitan city. Many are desperately poor, he says, "but at least they're beyond the reach of their families and the P.A.

. . .

' ... Many Palestinian gays say they would still rather live under house arrest in Israel, where homosexuality is not considered a crime, than at home.

...

'A 21-year-old university student with serious professional ambitions, Nawal wouldn't dream of performing in his hometown, where homosexuality, as in the rest of the Palestinian territories, is strictly taboo, sometimes violently so. Last year, a group of gay Palestinians visiting East Jerusalem from the United States were threatened and one of them badly beaten after they announced plans to join an Israeli gay pride rally ...'

United Nations statements shouldn't be considered sacrosanct, beyond criticism. Far too often they are biased, misguided or partial. But this declaration, from the UN News Centre, is far from misguided, I'm sure.

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=37026#.VHWVf3lyawU

'Universal decriminalization of homosexuality a human rights imperative – Ban

'10 December 2010 – Noting that over 70 countries still consider homosexuality a crime, Secretary-General  Ban Ki-moon today appealed for its complete and universal decriminalization ...

'In an event on sexual orientation at UN Headquarters in New York, held in conjunction with Human Rights Day, Mr. Ban deplored discrimination against homosexuals and the violence of which they are often victims, for which the perpetrators escape punishment.

' "Together, we seek the repeal of laws that criminalize homosexuality, that permit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, that encourage violence,” he said. “When individuals are attacked, abused or imprisoned because of their sexual orientation, we must speak out. We cannot stand by. We cannot be silent.

“This is all the more true in cases of violence. These are not merely assaults on individuals. They are attacks on all of us. They devastate families. They pit one group against another, dividing larger society. And when the perpetrators of violence escape without penalty, they make a mockery of the universal values we hold dear.” '

Repeal of anti-homosexual laws in Gaza - when is it going to happen? Soon or never?

Suicide bombing and 'Nazi, genocidal Israelis'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq9EkBZ6LmA

A film about Wafa al-Bass, who was treated at an Israeli hospital for severe burns caused by the explosion of a gas cylinder whilst she was cooking.  (The sub-titles are in French but the commentary is in English.) The hospital received a thank you letter ('une lettre de remerciements' in the sub-title below) from her family. The care she received at the hospital, it said, was 'wonderful and warm.'

The treatment was as different from Nazi, genocidal treatment as can be imagined. Is this the action of a 'genocidal' state? Or are Palestinians cynically misusing words?

Before going back to the hospital for further treatment, she put on a suicide bomber's vest. She stated that she intended to blow herself up, together with Israelis, at the outpatient clinic of the hospital (the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva.) She later said she had been angry about allegations that  guards had ripped out pages from the Qur'an at an Israeli prison, claims denied by Israel. She said, 'What angered me and the Palestinian people is the abuse of the Qur'an. Should we sit in silence with our hands tied?'

She was stopped as she crossed into Israel at the Erez Crossing and tried to explode the bomb. The detonator failed. She was imprisoned for some years and then released. The mildness of the punishment is in stark contrast with the portrayal of the Israelis in Palestine Solidarity circles. (The Nazis would have executed her and hundreds of others who had nothing to do with the incident.) Before being imprisoned, she showed remorse but after being relased, she told the schoolchildren gathered at her home in Northern Gaza to welcome her back, 'I hope you will walk the same path we took and if Allah so wills, we will see some of you as martyrs.'

From www.beyondimages.info

'In September 2004 Suhad Aslan, was sent by the Fatah Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in the Gaza Strip to carry out a suicide bombing in Israel, after she required medical treatment in the Al-Muqaddas hospital in Jerusalem. The plan had been for her to rendezvous with the bomb planners at the hospital who would instruct her where to go to carry out the attack.  Israeli security personnel arrested her before the attack could be carried out.'

From the algemeiner

'A report published ... by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Unit (COGAT) shows that 219,464 Palestinian patients received medical treatment in Israeli hospitals during 2012 – 21,270 of them children. These numbers include companions accompanying the patients to Israel.

'The numbers show a dramatic increase in Palestinians receiving treatment from Israeli medical professionals. 197,713 Palestinians received medical treatment in Israel in 2011, and 144,838 in 2008.'

A 'shahid' ('Martyr')
From Fatah’s Facebook page,

'Abd Al-Rahman Al-Shaloudi, who died as a Martyr (Shahid) on the noble soil of Jerusalem. Rest in peace, we are loyal to you.”

 “And never think of those who have been killed in the cause of Allah as dead. Rather, they are alive with their Lord, receiving provision." (Quran, Sura 3:169, translation Sahih International) 

The Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) - Silwan branch accompanies to his wedding the heroic Martyr Abd Al-Rahman Al-Shaloudi,

who carried out the Jerusalem operation, in which settlers in the occupied city of Jerusalem were run over.'

The driver killed a three year old girl with his car, and injured eight people. 


                 
 From a report in the Jerusalem Post
.

'Sources say the daughter of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was treated in Tel Aviv.was admitted to an Israeli hospital for emergency medical treatment this month after she suffered complications from a routine procedure, two sources familiar with the case said.

...

'Haniyeh, who has 13 children, is the leader of the Islamist group in Gaza and one of its most senior figures overall, serving as a deputy to Khaled Meshaal, who lives in exile.

...

'Butt he said that in most cases a request by a Palestinian doctor to allow a patient across the border for urgent treatment was sufficient - indicating Haniyeh may not have been personally involved in his daughter's application.

...

'Israeli media has reported that one of Haniyeh's granddaughter's was treated in an Israeli hospital last November, while his mother-in-law sought treatment in a Jerusalem hospital in June.'


The IRA conducted their dogged, doomed, futile struggle using as their main weapons bombs and bullets. In their planting of bombs, they were extraordinarily fastidious compared with Hamas in its prime, far more ethical, even though the reality was shocking.  The paramilitaries of the IRA sometimes blew themselves up  by accident as a result of mistakes or  incompetence, but they never blew themselves up deliberately, killing as many civilians as possible at the same time. Hamas and other Palestinian groups did, of course. The suicide bombings were carried out from 1989 until 2008 and killed a total of 804 people.

Holocaust denial and a 'war crime'

Above, scene at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Below, crematorium at Dachau concentration camp

Colonel William W Quinn of the US 7th Army said of the concentration camp at Dachau: 'There our troops found sights, sounds, and stenches horrible beyond belief, cruelties so enormous as to be incomprehensible to the normal mind.'

Trooper Fred Smith, who took part in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, wrote, '"Because the German civilians in nearby towns were still in denial, we took them to the camp to see what had happened.'

In its attitude to the Holocaust, Hamas is in denial and too many Palestinians are in denial. Dachau was liberated by soldiers from the American Seventh Army and Bergen-Belsen was liberated by British and Canadian troops. The number of witnesses is very large. Do these Palestinians doubt their testimony? Who is doing the lying? Not these soldiers and other witnesses.

The Holocaust is inextricably linked with Nazi atrocities to non-Jews. Do these Palestinians accept that non-Jews of many different nationalities died at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau (they included many Russian prisoners of war at Bergen-Belsen) but that no Jews died there? Do they accept that 2 000 Romani people died at the extermination camp at Treblinka but refuse to accept that at least 700 000 Jews were exterminated there? Do they accept that SS troops hanged almost 100 French non-Jews and that more than 100 others died at Dachau but that the executions of Jews throughout occupied Europe, enormous in number, are fictitious?
Palestinian holocaust denial is part of a much larger issue: Palestinian denial (or denial by many, many Palestinians) of any evidence which is in conflict with Palestinian ideology. Many, many Palestinians refuse to accept overwhelming. evidence. Palestinian denial (or the denial of many, many Palestinians ... ) that the Holocaust ever took place contradicts the Palestinian belief that the Holocaust did take place but that the Jwes planned it.  the Jews planned it.

Wikipedia has a good page on  the dispute between Hamas and the United Nations Reflief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which planned to include coverage of the Holocaust in schools it ran in the Palestinian territories. An extract from the page:

'Protesting what it said were plans to teach eighth-graders in U.N. schools about the Holocaust, the Hamas-affiliated Popular Committee of Palestinain refugees  sent an open letter to the chief of UNRWA offices calling the Holocaust "a lie made up by the Zionists" and demanding it "immediately" erase the part that speaks about the Holocaust from the Palestinian pupils' curriculum.

...

'The head of Hamas' education committee in Gaza, Abdul Rahman el-Jamal, said that the Holocaust was a "big lie".

...

'Hamas spiritual leader Yunis al-Astal  said teaching children about the Nazi genocide of Jews would be "marketing a lie", and characterized the possible introduction of the subject into Gaza schools as a "war crime".

...

'Jamila al-Shanti, a Hamas legislative official, said: "Talk about the Holocaust and the execution of the Jews contradicts and is against our culture, our principles, our traditions, values, heritage and religion" '.

Palestinian Media Watch gives disturbing insights into the vicious and warped Holocaust denial and distortion indulged in by so many Palestinians.

Extracts from a very candid interview with John Ging, head of UNRWA's operations in Gaza, from Adi Schwartz's site.

Are people in Gaza aware to the fact that they are responsible for their situation?

'We teach the children of Gaza the consequences of suicide bombing and of throwing rockets in Israel. They cannot turn around and be self indulgent of irresponsible behavior. We also teach them that on the other side there are good human beings who want nothing more than a peaceful solution to the conflict but their legitimate concern is that of security because of their experience. Due to history, people in Gaza have to prove to their neighbors that they are truly committed to peace”.

'Ging’s relationship with Hamas, the Islamic movement that controls the Gaza Strip, are far from being good, and he was even the victim of an unsuccessful assassination attempt in 2007. “We have a component of the population in Gaza which is very violent, destructive and extremist”, he says. “There is violence against Israel and also inside Gaza, for example against UNRWA’s schools. The extremists accuse us of the feminization of the society, which is the equal opportunity that we are teaching and of which we are proud. The violence is directed towards anyone who seeks to promote universal values”.

'What role is Hamas playing in the Gaza Strip? Is it helping the human development of the population?

“The economy of Gaza has collapsed during the period of Hamas governance creating unprecedented levels of impoverishment. The public services are overstretched and overburdened as there is no investment or development. The impact that Hamas has made on the economic status of the general population is negligible, as it is the donations of the international community that sustain the population.'


Israel has executed only one person since the foundation of the modern state in 1948: Adolf Eichman. I oppose the death penalty for a variety of reasons - see my page on the death penalty - but I agree with the Israeli exception here. None of the Palestinians who survived an attempt at suicide bombing or who killed by other terrorist action have been executed. A truly barbaric country would not have failed to enforce the death penalty. Truly barbaric nations have never failed to execute an a large scale.

The Palestinian authorities execute freely - and not only in the case of Israeli 'spies,' but for ordinary offences. Hamas executed 6 people in 2012. In the same year, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, far more populous, obviously, executed only 1 person in each country. Japan, again, far more populous, executed 7 people.

In many countries, governments are far more liberal than majority opinion. In abolitionist countries, governments often resist calls to reinstate the death penalty, for example. Hamas, a terrorist organization, governs a society where majority opinion is more barbaric than Hamas in matters relating to the death penalty. Although 84% of Palestinians support stoning to death for adultery, adulterers are not even executed by hanging. Although 66% of Palestinians support execution for people who leave Islam, apostates aren't hanged either. The majority of Palestinians would probably support the death penalty for homosexuals, as in Iran, but the maximum penalty is ten years, by Iranian standards barely a slap on the wrist.

Palestinians who claim that Israel executes freely - executes Palestinian citizens - are misusing language. It's essential to preserve the essential distinction between 'murdering' and killing in general and executing and killing in general. John Keegan wrote, in 'The Face of Battle,' 'killing on the scaffold and killing on the battlefield are, of course, markedly dissimilar activities.'  Even in Western Europe, the Nazis carried out many, many executions, for example at Tulle in France, where 99 people were hanged, and during the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane.

None of the failed Palestinian suicide bombers have been executed, no members of Hamas or other terrorist organizations have been executed. A state which never executes its active opponents - to regard Israel as Nazi or worse than Nazi is demented. Nazi Germany publicly hanged at Tulle 99 Frenchmen who were innocent of any crime. This was an exception in Western Europe, although, many, many individuals were executed. In Eastern Europe, similar acts were commonplace.

A statement published by the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights (whose view of the conflict in Gaza is in general very different from my own) on 22 August 2014:

'The Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) is deeply concerned by the extra-judicial and summary executions of suspected collaborators taking place in the Gaza Strip in violation with the law.  On 22nd of August 2014, 18 suspected collaborators including two women were executed by firing squad in different parts of the Gaza Strip.

'ICHR emphasizes on the importance of committing to the rule of law and present suspected criminals before the law through fair trials. Once their criminality is proved, criminals will be sentenced and punished according to the law. While fully  recognizing  the dangerous role those  accused of collaborations  with the  Israeli occupying forces,  ICHR strongly believes that suspected collaborators have the right to a fair trial and should be punished once proven of their collaboration in accordance with the law.

'ICHR confirms that rule of law should be respected and implemented in all circumstances especially in conflict situations and war time.  ICHR therefore calls upon the Palestinian Authority and all political factions in the Gaza Strip to take immediate measures to stop these summary executions and extra-judicial killings and their negative implications which violate the law to allow the legal institutions to take their role in guaranteeing justice, rule of law and respect to human rights.'

The Commission rightly opposes extra-judicial killings but supports judicial execution. A large number of jurisdictions have abolished the death penalty, for all offences or for offences committed in peacetime, and the Commission would do well to consider the arguments for abolition of the death penalty in Gaza, for all offences.

On 10 October 2014,a  Joint Declaration against the Death Penalty was released. It was  signed by these  Foreign Ministers of these (countries).

Héctor Marcos Timerman (Argentina), Julie Bishop (Australia), Nassirou Bako Arifari (Benin), Djibrill Yipènè Bassolé (Burkina Faso), Duly Brutus (Haiti), José Antonio Meade Kuribreña (Mexico), Luvsanvandan Bold (Mongolia), Børge Brende (Norway), Albert F. del Rosario (Philippines), Didier Burkhalter (Switzerland), Mevlüt Çavusoglu (Turkey), Philip Hammond (United Kingdom).

The World Coalition against the death penalty has a good page on the Declaration,

http://www.worldcoalition.org/foreign-ministers-declaration-world-day-against-death-penalty.html

An extract:

'The international declaration released on the 12th World Day Against the Death Penalty is an open invitation to all governments, but also to the public at large, to engage in serious investigations and frank discussions on the death penalty. It emphasizes the need for proper information on the risks and shortcomings of the death penalty, including on the irrational fears and hopes often involved in retaining it. 
The declaration aims to dispel the popular myths that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to crime, that it brings victims of crime relief and that a justice system can be free from error. It is believed that once properly discussed, only one conclusion will be made: there are no arguments in favour of the death penalty – only myths, risks and failures (and in some places, very high costs).
The signatories to the declaration are foreign ministers who come from all regions of the world and represent populations with different religions, of varying socio-economic status and culture, demonstrating that abolition is not related to any particular region, but truly universal.'

Opponents of the death penalty are likely to have opposing opinions about matters other than the death penalty. Many opponents of the death penalty will not agree with my views on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, for example. Many people who agree with me about the Israel-Palestine conflict will support the death penalty. These are instances of what I refer to as cross-linkage and cross-contrast.

A third example: Gaza Residents Celebrate Ceasefire (the open-ended ceasefire agreed on 26 August, 2104.) In the first twenty seconds of this film, two children are shown holding powerful automatic weapons.

Palestinian media

The gross crudity and gross excesses of the Palestinian media are documented on the Website of Palestinian Media Watch, a very comprehensive and very impressive site: www.palwatch.org If the Palestinian media which are documented on the site aren't the worst in the world, then they are surely amongst the worst. Admittedly, the world's worst or almost the worst is a category with a vast range of examples.

Youtube gives samples of children's programs and programmes featuring children which have been broadcast on Palestinian TV. This is one of them: horrific (and repetitive) questioning of the children of a female suicide bomber, who killed five Jews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay3ztL9wFq8

and this is another: an encouragement to 'beat up Jews and kill the Jews.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Q8K5TmivM

'Songs of praise.' Not in this instance the BBC's programme of hymns from parish churches but children singing in praise of suicide bombing on Hamas TV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3OYjKZ2Cu8

 From a Hamas TV programme for adults: the psychotic claim that the Jews planned the Holocaust.

Friday sermon on Hamas TV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPvc-eTym-Q

The call to 'come and kill' the Jew is frequently quoted in Gaza. This is what happened after Palestinians carried out an attack on a pizzeria in Jerusalem in 2001. It killed 15 Jews, including children, and injured 130 others. From the Associated Press report:

“Palestinian university students opened an exhibition that included a grisly re-enactment” of that mass murder. The students built a replica of the Sbarro pizzeria, with fake blood, splattered pizza, a plastic hand dangling from the ceiling, and a fake severed leg wearing jeans and a bloody black sneaker.

“The exhibit also includes a large rock in front of a mannequin wearing the black hat, black jacket and black trousers typically worn by ultra-Orthodox Jews. A recording from inside the rock calls out: ‘O believer, there is a Jewish man behind me. Come and kill him,’” The exhibition became a popular attraction in Palestine. Children were taken to see it.

Financial support for Palestinian terrorists

The subject is discussed in many places. The article 'How British and American aid subsidises Palestinian terrorism' by Edward Black, published in 'The Guardian'  is one:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/11/british-american-aid-subsidises-palestinian-terrorism

An extract:

'On both sides of the pond, in London and Washington, policymakers are struggling to weather their budget crises. Therefore, it may astound American and British taxpayers that the precious dollars and pounds they deploy in Israel and the Occupied Territories fungibly funds terrorism.

'The instrument of this funding is US and UK programs of aid paid to the Palestinian Authority. This astonishing financial dynamic is known to most Israeli leaders and western journalists in Israel. But it is still a shock to most in Congress and many in Britain's Parliament, who are unaware that money going to the Palestinian Authority is regularly diverted to a program that systematically rewards convicted prisoners with generous salaries. These transactions in fact violate American and British laws that prohibit US funding from benefiting terrorists. More than that, they could be seen as incentivizing murder and terror against innocent civilians.

'Here's how the system works. When a Palestinian is convicted of an act of terror against the Israeli government or innocent civilians, such as a bombing or a murder, that convicted terrorist automatically receives a generous salary from the Palestinian Authority.

...

'About 6% of the Palestinian budget is diverted to prisoner salaries. All this money comes from so-called "donor countries" such as the United States, Great Britain, Norway, and Denmark. Palestinian officials have reacted with defiance to any foreign governmental effort to end the salaries.'

A site which deals with the subject very comprehensively. 

http://www.notaxesforterror.com/

An extract:

'The PA does not discriminate: terrorists from every group - Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad - get funding.'

...

'The salaries are usually far higher than the West Bank average wage of $533/month and sometimes higher than those of any other civil servants ... The worst offenders, those who commit mass murder, get the top wage of 12,000 shekels ($3,400) per month—up to 10 times more than the average pay.'

The Goldstone Report and 'Apartheid' Israel

Judge Goldstone's United Nations Report of 2009 was severely critical of Israel.  A report that comes from the United Nations comes with no guarantee of objectivity, impartiality, fairness and accuracy.

The evidence is that whatever effort Richard Goldstone took to make the report objective, impartial, fair and accurate, his success was limited and that the report was flawed. There's general agreement that he reconsidered, recanted, although some disagreement about the extent.

Richard Goldstone  published a significant letter in the New York Times on the claim that Israel is an 'apartheid state.' (November 1, 2011.) Extracts:

"Israel and the Apartheid Slander," by Richard Goldstone for the New York Times, November 1:

The Palestinian Authority’s request for full United Nations membership has put hope for any two-state solution under increasing pressure. The need for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians has never been greater. So it is important to separate legitimate criticism of Israel from assaults that aim to isolate, demonize and delegitimize it.

One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues “apartheid” policies. In Cape Town starting on Saturday, a London-based nongovernmental organization called the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will hold a “hearing” on whether Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. It is not a “tribunal.” The “evidence” is going to be one-sided and the members of the “jury” are critics whose harsh views of Israel are well known.

While “apartheid” can have broader meaning, its use is meant to evoke the situation in pre-1994 South Africa. It is an unfair and inaccurate slander against Israel, calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations.
...

In assessing the accusation that Israel pursues apartheid policies, which are by definition primarily about race or ethnicity, it is important first to distinguish between the situations in Israel, where Arabs are citizens, and in West Bank areas that remain under Israeli control in the absence of a peace agreement.

In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute: “Inhumane acts ... committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”Israeli Arabs — 20 percent of Israel’s population — vote, have political parties and representatives in the Knesset and occupy positions of acclaim, including on its Supreme Court. Arab patients lie alongside Jewish patients in Israeli hospitals, receiving identical treatment.

...

The situation in the West Bank is more complex. But here too there is no intent to maintain “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group.” ... until there is a two-state peace, or at least as long as Israel’s citizens remain under threat of attacks from the West Bank and Gaza, Israel will see roadblocks and similar measures as necessary for self-defense, even as Palestinians feel oppressed. As things stand, attacks from one side are met by counterattacks from the other. And the deep disputes, claims and counterclaims are only hardened when the offensive analogy of “apartheid” is invoked.

Those seeking to promote the myth of Israeli apartheid often point to clashes between heavily armed Israeli soldiers and stone-throwing Palestinians in the West Bank, or the building of what they call an “apartheid wall” and disparate treatment on West Bank roads. While such images may appear to invite a superficial comparison, it is disingenuous to use them to distort the reality. The security barrier was built to stop unrelenting terrorist attacks; while it has inflicted great hardship in places, the Israeli Supreme Court has ordered the state in many cases to reroute it to minimize unreasonable hardship. Road restrictions get more intrusive after violent attacks and are ameliorated when the threat is reduced.

...

Jewish-Arab relations in Israel and the West Bank cannot be simplified to a narrative of Jewish discrimination. There is hostility and suspicion on both sides. Israel, unique among democracies, has been in a state of war with many of its neighbors who refuse to accept its existence ...

 Gaza: starvation and obesity 



Compare and contrast the Siege of Leningrad and the 'Siege' of Gaza. During the 900 days of the Siege of Leningrad (earlier and now again called St Petersburg) when the city was encircled by Nazi forces, 800 000 Russians died of starvation, about a third of the population at the beginning of the siege, reduced to eating wallpaper paste, in some cases, when rats were unavailable.

According to The Economist's 'Pocket World in Figures' (2007) Gaza and the West Bank had many people anything but emaciated, despite the Israeli 'siege.'  42.5% of women were classified as obese, the third highest in the world, and 23.9% of men, the eighth highest.

Steffen Jensen, a Danish reporter, wrote about food for sale in Gaza in 2010:

'Judging from the media, the situation in Gaza is desperate, everything is about to collapse, and the community is on the brink or at the level of a third world country.

'The Palestinian community's immediate downfall has been prophesied numerous times in the media. People have nothing to eat, we sometimes know. The UN must from time to time to stop food distribution, either because their stocks are running low, or because they can not get diesel for their trucks, and therefore can not carry food in. And so on.
...

'When I yesterday morning drove through Gaza City, I was immediately surprised that there are almost as many traffic jams as there always has been. Is there not a shortage of fuel? Apparently not. Gasoline is not even rationed.

' ... I went over to the Shati refugee camp, also known as Beach Camp. Here is one of Gaza's many vegetable markets that sell much more than just fruits and vegetables.

'I will not say whether, in better times has been a larger product range than there was yesterday. But there was certainly no shortage of vegetables, fruits or any other ordinary, basic foods. Tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, watermelons, potatoes - mountains of these items in the many stalls.

'I must admit I was a little surprised. Because when I call down here to my Palestinian friends, they tell me about all the problems and deficiencies, so I expected that the crisis was a little more clear.

'And the first woman we interviewed in the market confirms this strange, contradictory, negative mindset:

' "We have nothing," she said. We need everything! Food, drinks ... everything! "

'It disturbed her not at least that she stood between the mountains of vegetables, fruit, eggs, poultry and fish, while she spun this doomsday scenario.

'Yousuf al-Assad Yazgy owns a fruit and vegetable outlet here in the market. All his fruit is imported from Israel.

' "Not all fruit and all vegetables come from Israel. Ours does. They come from Israel. But in the Gaza Strip there is not very much fruit cultivated ... " '

From Elder of Ziyon

How is a 10% stunting rate [for children in the Palestinian territories] considered terrible in 2009 and 11.5% considered outstanding in 2011? It depends on what propaganda goal you have in what you are writing. When you want to demonize Israel, you cherry pick numbers to make the health situation look bad; when you want to make the PA look good and ready for a state you do the exact opposite. That "objective data" mentioned in the NYT is now seen to have been presented in the most subjective manner possible - by not comparing it to similar territories worldwide.

And by the way, both those numbers seemed to have been taken from studies made in 2006. Did things worsen? 

Well, the Lancet followed up in 2010, and reported on a newer 2008 Bir Zeit study:

6% of 1883 children who were assessed were stunted (8% of 930 boys vs 3% of 950 girls, p=0·01), less than 1% had wasting, 2% were underweight, 11% were anaemic (7% of boys vs 14% of girls), and 15% were overweight and obese (11% of boys vs 20% of girls; 11% were overweight, and 4% were obese).

Between 2006 and 2008 - when Israel already had the blockade in Gaza - children in the territories got a lot fatter, and stunting went down seemingly dramatically, from 11.5% to only 6%! 

Stunting rates according to a UNICEF report of November 2009:

Qatar 8%
Palestinian Territories- 10%
Algeria - 15
Lebanon - 11
Jordan - 12
Oman - 13
UAE - 17
Saudi Arabia - 20
Libya - 21
Morocco - 23
Kuwait - 24
Iraq - 26
Syria - 28
Egypt - 29
Yemen – 58

'Gaza Civic Society Leaders: 'An Important Statement'

The 'Important Statement' was signed by a large number of  'Gaza Civil Society Leaders' at an early stage of the hostilies of 2014.  At a stage in the conflict between Israel and Gaza when casualties were still relatively light, these Leaders declared their support for Hamas' refusal to accept ceasefires offered, their support for Hamas' use of indiscriminate weapons, the rockets aimed at Israel, and Hamas' futile insistence on ceasefires which were unrealistic, certain to be refused by the Israelis, certain to lead to further casualties in Gaza. A ceasefire was eventually accepted by Hamas under terms almost identical to the early ones.

These Leaders of Gaza Civic Society somehow failed to see what was staring them in the face. They failed to see that refusing a ceasefire would be followed by unnecessary casualties. If they were taken by surprise, they should not have been. An object released falling to the ground by the action of gravity would be no more surprising.

They believed that ceasefires should be rejectde when the ceasefires failed to meet all the Palestinian demands. Sisyphus in Greek mythology is the man who repeatedly pushed a heavy boulder to the top of a hill and found that every time, it rolled back down again: similarly futile behaviour.

The signatories showed monumental political obtuseness. They supported the continued firing of rockets into Israel - not counting the ones which fell short and landed in Gaza - if the unrealistic demands were not accepted. 

The Important Statement contained this:

'Hamas represented the sentiment of the vast majority of residents [repeating this phrase to give it the emphasis it warrants: Hamas represented the sentiment of the vast majority of residents ] when it rejected the unilateral ceasefire proposed by Egypt and Israel without consulting anyone in Gaza. We share the broadly held public sentiment that it is unacceptable to merely return to the status quo – in which Israel strictly limits travel in and out of the Gaza Strip, controls the supplies that come in (including a ban on most construction materials), and prohibits virtually all exports, thus crippling the economy and triggering one of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the Arab world.

To do so would mean a return to a living death.'

There was absolutely no prospect that Israel would agree to the preconditions demanded by the signatories, such as this: 'Unlimited import and export of supplies and goods, including by land, sea and air.' To include them was to guarantee failure, was to guarantee that there would be no ceasefire. Unlimited import means unlimited import of weapons for attacks on Israel, unlimited import of construction materials for building tunnels for attacks on Israel. This is the work of political innocents, people with a faint sense of realities.

Their failure to learn from the conflict between Israel and Gaza of 2008 - 9, when Israel undertook Operation Cast Lead, is astonishing. Then, the conflict began when Israel attempted to stop the firing of rockets into Israeli territory and to stop the flow of weapons into Gaza. Operation Cast Lead proved, if proof were needed, that Israel would stand firm and show vast military superiority in future conflicts, unless circumstances were to change dramatically in the interim. There were no dramatic changes which would make it in the least likely that Israel would accept rocket attacks and flow of weapons into Gaza in 2014. The signatories should have realized this at the very beginning of the recent hostilities. This is inability to learn from experience on a grand scale - or, rather, grandiose scale.

After hostilities ended in 2009, ' ... the European Union, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference   and over 50 nations donated humanitarian aid to Gaza, including the United States, which donated over $20 million. On January 7, a UN Relief Works Agency spokesman acknowledged that he was "aware of instances where deliveries of humanitarian aid into Gaza" were diverted by the Hamas government, though never from his agency.'

After hostilites ended in 2014, governments and non-governmental agencies must again donate on a massive scale to a territory which never seems to learn. A familiar dictum of economics is: 'Scarce resources and infinite wants.' The desperate needs of the world can never be met, and why the needs of Gaza should have priority is a mystery. Will Palestinians continue to fire rockets and continue to invite certain retaliation and continue to expect foreign aid for reconstuction at frequent intervals? Perhaps the donors will eventually draw conclusions and become less generous and decide to give their money to other causes.

The ceasefire which was eventually accepted in 2014 met none of the demands of the signatories, as could have been predicted.

The signatories should have been exerting as much pressure as they could on Hamas to accept a ceasefire and to keep to the ceasefire. 'Stop firing rockets. Stop breaking ceasefires.'

The Important Statement contains this:

'With temporary shelters full and the indiscriminate Israeli shelling, there is literally no place that is safe in Gaza.'

Since Hamas hasn't provided shelters for all the population, all the more reason not to fire rockets and invite certain  retaliation. Where would rockets fired in the future be fired from? As in the case of the rockets already fired, very often from sites near to residential buildings and such buildings as schools. All the more reason to do everything possible to avoid Israeli attacks on launching sites. Hamas is a terrorist organization which has carried out many suicide bombings in Israel, which has built a network of tunnels to attack Israel, and which declares that its objective is to destroy Israel. Given the fact that the Hamas personnel who are legitimate targets of the Israelis are very often to be found in close proximity with the general population, this is a further reason to avoid Israeli action by avoiding firing rockets.

If  these representatives of Gazan civic society can't realize the obviousness of this, they are doing nothing for the reputation of Gazan civic society. As for the claim of  'indiscriminate' Israeli shelling, then their knowledge of military history, the broad history which is essential for context, essential to provide comparisons, is dangerously lacking. Warnings of impending attack were evidently not given in all cases or most cases but they were given in very many cases, by phone message or by non-lethal blows to the roof of a building. In the history of warfare, this is virtually unprecedented. People who fail to concede obvious points and to make any necessary qualifications are liable to see their credibility lost, although not in gullible circles, such as the branches of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

 In the Gaza conflict, a main weapen was the IED or improvised explosive device, familiar from operations in Afghanistan. Familiar too are the fearful injuries to British soldiers when these devices have exploded.

A report on operations:

'Inside Gaza, Hamas has booby-trapped hundreds of homes and installations with improvised bombs. One such IED killed three Israeli soldiers on Wednesday in a building labeled as an UNRWA clinic in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, where IDF soldiers were searching for a tunnel shaft. IDF’s Gaza Division commander, Brig. Gen. Micky Edelstein, told journalists that in one Khan Younis street he encountered, 19 of the 28 homes were booby-trapped, ready to explode over IDF soldiers who enter them.

Operations in Khan Younis had been preceded by warnings. In a report in the New York Times for July 8:

'The call came to the cellphone of his brother’s wife, Salah Kaware said Tuesday. Mr. Kaware lives in Khan Younis, in southeast Gaza, and the caller said that everyone in the house must leave within five minutes, because it was going to be bombed.

'A further warning came as the occupants were leaving, he said in a telephone interview, when an Israeli drone apparently fired a flare at the roof of the three-story home. “Our neighbors came in to form a human shield,” he said, with some even going to the roof to try to prevent a bombing. Others were in the stairway when the house was bombed not long afterward.

'Seven people died, Mr. Kaware said, a figure also stated by the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, which also said that 25 people were wounded. The Israeli military said that targeted houses belonged to Hamas members involved in launching rockets or other military activity, and that they had been used as operations rooms.'

The Important Statement has its quota of distortion and falsification, for example this: 'As academics, public figures and activists witnessing the intended genocide of 1.8 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip ... ' The familiar misuse of the word 'genocide.' The Nazi genocide was an attempt to kill every Jew in Nazi-controlled territory. To suppose that Israelis intend to kill every Palestinian they can is psychotic rubbish. Whereas the Nazis set up gallows and gas chambers and used firing squads, the Israelis have never used the death penalty in the history of the modern state, with one exception, the Nazi Eichmann. (The Palestinian territories don't have gas chambers but they do make use of the gallows and firing squads.)

Without a constant barrage of simplifications, evasions, distortions and falsifications and the repetitive, debased language used to express them, the Palestinian ideology would be lost.

The statement refers to 'basic freedoms that have been denied to the people for more than seven years.' These 'basic freedoms' apparently include the freedom to import materials without restriction, including the freedom to import materials for constructing new tunnels for attacks on Israel and materials for constructing rockets for attacks on Israel. What of the basic freedoms which   are denied by Hamas and not acknowledged by the majority of Palestinians, such as the basic freedoms of gay people and Christiansto live their lives without fear? What of the   basic freedom to express opinion freely, including criticism of Hamas?

The Important Statement mentions poverty and unemployment in Gaza. Discoverthenetworks.org 'A Guide to the Political Left' has a significant discussion of these very topics, adapted from 'Who is Really Oppressing the Palestinians?' by David Meir-Levi.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=824

'How did the Palestinians reach their current tragic state? Are the Israelis responsible? What part of the blame falls on the other Arab states and the Palestinians’ own leaders?

These are important questions. The answers are complex, requiring a historical literacy and a willingness to go beyond the simplistic notion of the international media that the Mid-east conflict is a matter of conflicting rights and Israeli “occupation” of Palestinian lands.

'Within a few days of the June 10 cease-fire following Israel's victory in the Six Day War of 1967, Abba Eban, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, made his famous speech offering to negotiate the return of captured territories in exchange for three Arab concessions: diplomatic recognition of Israel; negotiations to decide on universally recognized borders and other issues; and peace as a final outcome. Western countries expressed amazement that the victor was offering to negotiate with the vanquished and was willing to make concrete concessions (return of territories) in exchange for symbolic and diplomatic ones.

'To formulate a response to this unexpected new reality, the Arab states called a summit meeting in Khartoum (capital of Sudan). The result was the now infamous three Khartoum NOs: no recognition, no negotiations, no peace. Thus Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was caused first by Arab aggression and then by Arab refusal to negotiate a peace after the Arab armies had been vanquished.

'After the war, Israel began what is sometimes called its “mini-Marshall plan” for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, investing hundreds of millions of dollars to bring them both into the 20th century with regard to infrastructure, roads, sewerage, electricity, phones, radio and TV broadcasting, water purification and water supply. World Bank records indicate that the GDP of the West Bank grew at the average rate of 13% per year between 1967 and 1994. Tourism skyrocketed, unemployment almost disappeared as hundreds of thousands of Arabs worked in Israel’s economy earning far more than their counterparts in other Arab countries ...

'And, perhaps most telling of all, free and unencumbered access to Israel’s medical infrastructure resulted in a declining infant mortality and a rise in longevity ...

'All this time, the Arab nations remained formally at war with Israel. In 1979, Egypt alone among the Arab states agreed to sign a peace treaty with Israel. In response to Egypt’s willingness to sign the peace, Israel withdrew its forces and settlements in the Sinai.

When the 1993 Oslo Accords allowed Yasser Arafat to set up shop in the West Bank as the head of the newly created Palestinian Authority, the existing robust economy created in partnership between Israel and the Arabs ground to a halt and then went into a steep decline. By 2002, the West Bank’s GDP was one-tenth of what it had been in 1993.

'Data provided by the UN Human Development program of 2005 indicate that the economic difficulties experienced by the Palestinian Arabs were largely the result of policies of the Arafat regime and not from any oppression by the State of Israel. Looking at what it calls “The Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT),” the UN report notes, for instance, that the second Intifada beginning in September 2000 resulted “in a sharp deterioration in living standards and life chances.”  The poverty rate nearly tripled from 20% in 1999 to 55% in 2003. In one telling example, the report notes that because of the Intifada, the town of Nablus -- a prosperous commercial hub prior to September 2000 -- became an economic basket case. Shops were closed; to survive, workers had to sell their tools, and farmers were forced to sell their land. It was Arafat’s war, not Israeli rule, that destroyed Palestinian prosperity and bled its people.

'Israel is the scapegoat for the plight of the Palestinians, but from the 19th century onward, Arab leaders, both local and external, have betrayed the Palestinian Arabs, forced them into poverty, cheated, intimidated, and oppressed them, condemned them to serfdom and stolen the land out from under them. Every opportunity for statehood was squandered by leaders who chose war and terrorism over peace and cooperation and thus condemned their people to poverty.'

BBC Watch on life in the Gaza strip:

http://bbcwatch.org/2013/01/01/life-in-the-gaza-strip-according-to-the-bbc/

Even with the corruption, mismanagement and incompetence of the Hamas administration, to describe life in Gaza as a 'living death' is flagrant exaggeration. Compare life in Gaza with life in the Warsaw Ghetto

One  magazine chosen for publication of the Important Statement, 'The Revival,' is one of the more enlightened Islamist publications, which is to say, not nearly enlightened enough. It attacks terrorist actions by Moslems which take place in this country - good, obviously - but where Israel is concerned, nothing but the blackest of blacks, nothing but the most absolute of condemnations, nothing but unflinching and complete criticism will do. Another outlet chosen for publication was the Freedom Flotilla Foundation's 'Gaza's Ark.' 

The Wikipedia entry for operation Cast Lead can be recommended. It contains multiple criticisms of Hamas and multiple criticisms of Israel. The comments on Israel's use of white phosphorus are of great interest:

'After watching footage of Israeli troop deployments on television, a British soldier who completed numerous combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Intelligence Corps defended the Israeli Army's use of white phosphorus. The soldier noted, "White phosphorus is used because it provides an instant smokescreen, other munitions can provide a smokescreen but the effect is not instant. Faced with overwhelming enemy fire and wounded comrades, every commander would choose to screen his men instantly, to do otherwise would be negligent."

'Colonel Lane, a military expert testifying in front of the fact-finding mission in July 2009, told that white phosphorus is used for smoke generation to hide from the enemy. He stated, "The quality of smoke produced by white phosphorus is superb; if you want real smoke for real coverage, white phosphorus will give it to you."

'Professor Newton, expert in laws of armed conflict testifying in front of the committee, said that in an urban area, where potential perils are snipers, explosive devices and trip wires, one effective way to mask forces' movement is by white phosphorus. In certain cases, he added, such choice of means would be less harmful for civilian population than other munitions, provided that the use of white phosphorus withstands the proportionality test. In discussing the principle of proportionality he said that the legality of using white phosphorus in an urban setting could only be decided on a case by case basis taking into account "the precise circumstances of its use, not in general, generically, but based on that target, at that time". He stressed that the humanitarian implications were vital in this assessment giving the example that using white phosphorus on a school yard would have different implications to its use on another area. He also said that in his view white phosphorus munition is neither chemical nor incendiary weapon and is not intended to cause damage. He said its use was not prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention.

'An article by Mark Cantora examining the legal implications of the use of white phosphorus munitions by the IDF, published in 2010 in the Gonzaga Journal of International Law, argues that Israel's use of white phosphorus in Gaza was technically legal under existing international humanitarian laws and "Therefore, it is imperative for the international community to convene a White Phosphorus Convention Conference in order to address these issues and fill this substantial gap in international humanitarian law."

Misunderstanding moderate Muslim society

A video which will astonish many people. It will correct some common misunderstandings of moderate Muslim society, even if many people in moderate Muslim society disagree strongly with the speaker's opinions, and   even if the title given to the film is pitiful: 'Muslims Admit That ALL Muslims are Sexist, Homophobic Murderers.'  I criticize the over-use and misuse of words such as 'homophobic,' 'sexist' and 'murderers'  but the content owes nothing to whoever posted the film. The speaker  claims to describe the attitude of  Moslems he describes as non-radical and non-extremist to issues as different as separation of men and women at Islamic events and stoning to death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jivSU139eLw

The speaker says, 'Everyone in the room. How many of you are normal Muslims, you're not extremists, you're not radical, just normal Sunni Muslims. Please raise your hands.'


'How many of you agree that men and women should sit separate? Please raise your hands.'


'How many of you agree that the punishments described in the Qur'an and the Sunna, whether it is death, whether it is stoning, for adultery, whatever it is, it is from Allah and his messenger, that is the best punishment ever possible for human kind, and that is what we should apply in the world? Who agrees with that?'

See also a film on 'Free speech' which is about gay people and Islam. The film takes a little time (about 45s) to reach the criticism and condemnation which are its most striking elements. The title of the film refers to 'Homophobic Muslim Women' and again, I object to the use of 'homophobic,' which means 'fearing homosexuals.' It's clear enough that it isn't  fear of homosexuals which is the dominant emotion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOdhlggNtY

From an article published in 'Harry's Place:'

On 20th June this year, Ghoncheh Ghavami had gone along to watch Iran’s national volleyball team play against the Italian side. In any normal country, this would have been a joyous event, but in Iran for Ghoncheh and other women it carried a risk. Women are not allowed to enter sports stadiums in Iran and watch men play sports like football or volleyball.

'Ghoncheh and some other women, who had seen this as an opportunity to protest against this discrimination against Iranian women, were arrested. They were later released on the same day after signing a pledge not to engage in such actions again. Their personal belongings however were kept by the security forces for further examination.

'Ten days later, Ghonche went to collect her personal belongings but was arrested again. Security agents then searched her house and collected more of her belongings. Ghoncheh was transferred to the notorious Evin prison and spent 41 days in solitary confinement. Although her interrogation is reportedly now finished, they have extended her detention by another 2 months.'

What are the factors which make opposition to this blatant injustice more likely to be effective? I give no arguments against the people who would consider it no injustice at all, but fully justified, I simply express my disgust. It might be easier to give some factors which make it less likely to be effective. Without allowing for obvious exceptions and himan inconsistency and unpredictability - people who insist that women must sit separately from men are less likely to oppose the imprisonment of someone who went to watch a segregated sporting event. And people who claim that the Palestinian territories have by far the most urgent claim on our attention and on our constructive action are less likely to support action in this case.

There are many, many other instances of injustice where the same convictions are likely to be a factor
This page draws attention to many common misunderstandings of Islam. For example, in the section on Dick Pitt, who is committed to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, I quote from one of my emails to him. He assumes that the attitude of Moslems to the Qur'an must be a selective and relaxed one, similar, perhaps, to the attitude of non-fundamentalist members of the Church of England,  with a selective and very relaxed attitude to the truth of the Bible - not so.

I'm astonished to read your observations on the Qur'an. Most contemporary Christians are non-fundamentalist – they do not believe that the whole of the Bible is the literal word of God. Christianity has undergone intellectual reforms which have transformed the outlook of most believers. You will find, as a matter of strict fact, that liberal Moslems, as well as radical Islamists, generally believe that the whole of the Qur'an is the literal word of God, or Allah. Those who believe otherwise aren’t regarded as Moslems at all.'

Anyone who fails to understand contradictions and paradoxes fails to understand human nature. There are convictions which are firmly held and inflexible, but these firmly held and inflexible convictions may be surprisingly pragmatic. Palestinians, and 'moderate' British moslems, may believe that sura 4:34, which advocates wife-beating, is, like all the suras in the Qur'an, is the literal word of God, without feeling the least need to implement it - although many, many Moslems do act upon it. Palestinians and 'moderate' British moslems may believe that people who leave Islam should be treated very harshly, by execution, perhaps, but give such low priority to the punishment that it is effectively forgotten. But there are Moslems who give high priority to the punishment and who have no hesitation in carrying out.

Banning extremist speakers

Haitham Al-Haddad has defended the hitting of a wife, female genital circumcision, the execution of apostates from Islam, called for the outlawing of homosexuality and praised Osama bin Laden. In an article on the man, which concentrated on his hostility to homosexuality, Habibi concluded, 'No wonder many people just want Haddad stopped. Liberal it’s not. Understandable it is. They’ve had enough. (Articles in 'The Guardian' which make excuses for Islamism or minimize the threats from Islamism are likely to be followed by huge numbers of comments from people who have had enough.)

Raheem Kassam, the director of 'Student Rights,' which campaigns against extremism on campuses, has concluded, 'He is the epitome of illiberal views that should have no place on university campuses.' 'Student Rights' makes frequent calls for the banning of extremist speakers. On the site of 'Student Rights,' there's this, in connection with Adnan Khan, a speaker from Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT), due to speak at the School of Oriental and African studies in London.

'HT has been 'No-Platformed'  by the National Union of Students (NUS), which declared  that the group was "responsible for supporting terrorism and publishing material that incites racial hatred".

Meanwhile, the government has stated there is “unambiguous evidence to indicate that…Hizb-ut-Tahrir, target specific universities and colleges...with the objective of radicalising and recruiting students”.

'Khan has argued  apostates that “openly leave Islam, and choose to remain in the state” should face the death penalty, as this is “treason and a political attack”.

'He has also claimed that apostasy should be viewed as “a question of what kind of person would openly and publicly abandon Islam with full knowledge that they will be killed for it”.

'In the same book Khan also writes that “equality is not the basis of Islam and never has been in the history of Islamic jurisprudence. This is a term alien to Islam”.

'He will be joined at the event by SOAS student Mujahid Dattani, who has compared  Israeli actions to those of the Nazis - an anti-Semitic act in the definition  used by the Community Security Trust (CST). 

'That an activist from a ‘No-Platformed’ organisation has been invited to speak at this event should concern SOAS.

The views of Haitham Al-Haddad and Adnan Khan are loathsome and stupid and the view that they should be banned is plausible, but I don't think it's right. Surprisingly, Haitham Al-Haddad's  own Website allows freedom of expression. Contrary views are published and attempts are made to answer the criticism, even if the attempts are loathsome and stupid. He has to be given credit for this. These are two comments which were freely allowed

Mitchell

'The liberal principles cultivated in the West will not be sent to the moral mass grave of Islamic ‘values.’ We will not capitulate to unreasonableness, and we pride ourselves on the enlightenment values of Mill, Voltaire and Shelley. Alan Turing, Steven Fry, Douglas Murray.. these men are of solid moral fibre and to condemn how they love is to make a mockery of anything a decent religion would stand for. Churchill spoke of the retrograde nature of Islamism. Second class citizenship for homosexuals will not cut it. Your right to your opinion is there, but if you wish to flex your theocratic muscles, please do it to the tune of masturbating Ayotollahs and fawning Sheikhs, for you will not mobilise your totalitarian forces on the shores of rational, liberal democracy. I urge you to embrace the principles that built the World Trade Centre rather than the world-view that toppled it.'

Joe

'It’s people like you that cause tensions between muslim immigrants and nativesin the western world. People, including muslims, flock here from all over the world to benefit from our economic opportunity and freedom-and that is fine, and understanable. However, it is time for these people to realise that our prosperity is a direct result of the freedom we have to do, say, think, drink, smoke and sleep with whoever we like. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, if you want a state that represses and hates gays, go live in Iran. If you want to live in a nice house, plenty of food and no chance of getting your hands chopped off by the police, stay here but accept the life choices of others.

'Obviously, you are free to express your opinions just like I am (another one of the freedoms that make the western world so prosperous), but Islamic-Christian relations would be so much better if we had a few more Islamic preachers with the intelligence and maturity to respectfully disagree with other people’s life choices without calling them criminals.'

It's common for people not nearly as loathsome and stupid or not quite as loathsome and stupid or not loathsome and stupid at all to exclude all comments from the comments sections of their sites which are critical in the slightest.

The Hamas Charter: timidity and intimidation

The Hamas Charter (also known as the 'Hamas Covenant,' 'The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement,' 18 August, 1988) should strip away many illusions about Hamas and help to explain the loathing felt by the majority of Israelis towards Hamas. I share this loathing myself.

Apologists for Hams who aren't radical Islamists are likely to find the document not at all to their liking, for very different reasons. Although there are many, many people who like their illusions, and find them very comforting, for this purpose illusions which encourage sentimentality are generally preferred. Not many people outside the Islamist circle would find the Hamas Charter in the least comforting. The Charter gives no support for sentimentality. This is a chilling document, one of those documents which is too important to be neglected by people with any interest in the conflict between Gaza and Israel but so off-putting as to be almost unreadable. Like many manifestations of radical Islamism, it intimidates, but there has to be a forceful rejection of timidity when confronted by intimidation.

The full text in English is available at the site of the Avalon Project of the Yale Law School.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

Extracts:

The Covenant begins:

'In The Name Of The Most Merciful Allah

'Ye are the best nation that hath been raised up unto mankind: ye command that which is just, and ye forbid that which is unjust, and ye believe in Allah. And if they who have received the scriptures had believed, it had surely been the better for them: there are believers among them, but the greater part of them are transgressors. They shall not hurt you, unless with a slight hurt; and if they fight against you, they shall turn their backs to you, and they shall not be helped. They are smitten with vileness wheresoever they are found; unless they obtain security by entering into a treaty with Allah, and a treaty with men; and they draw on themselves indignation from Allah, and they are afflicted with poverty. This they suffer, because they disbelieved the signs of Allah, and slew the prophets unjustly; this, because they were rebellious, and transgressed." (Al-Imran - verses 109-111).

'Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory.

The section 'Definition of the Movement: ideological starting points' contains thirty-six articles. Article six includes this:

'The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine ...
From Article Seven:

'The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders. It goes back to 1939, to the emergence of the martyr Izz al-Din al Kissam and his brethren the fighters, members of Moslem Brotherhood. It goes on to reach out and become one with another chain that includes the struggle of the Palestinians and Moslem Brotherhood in the 1948 war and the Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 and after.

'Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

' "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).'

This is Article Eight in its entirety. It endorses jihad:

'Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.'

From Article Eleven, which amongst other things makes clear the status of Sharia law. When Hamas Chief of Staff Muhammad Deif said, 'Today you [sraelis] are fighting divine soldiers, who love death for Allah like you love life, and who compete among themselves for Martyrdom like you flee from death' he was faithfully following the principles of the Covenant.

'The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent Moslem generations till Judgement Day?

'This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.'

Anyone who believes that Hamas would like a peaceful resolution to the problems of the area will be disappointed - not if Hamas follows the Covenant.

This is Article Thirteen:

'Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse directed against part of religion.

Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that. For the sake of hoisting the banner of Allah over their homeland they fight. "Allah will be prominent, but most people do not know."

'Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Moslem problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?

' "But the Jews will not be pleased with thee, neither the Christians, until thou follow their religion; say, The direction of Allah is the true direction. And verily if thou follow their desires, after the knowledge which hath been given thee, thou shalt find no patron or protector against Allah." (The Cow - verse 120).


'There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with. As in said in the honourable Hadith:of Syria '

"The people are Allah's lash in His land. He wreaks His vengeance through them against whomsoever He wishes among His slaves It is unthinkable that those who are double-faced among them should prosper over the faithful. They will certainly die out of grief and desperation."

This is Article Fourteen, which, although it was written in the late twentieth century reflects  patterns of thought from very much earlier - the seventh century, in fact:

'The question of the liberation of Palestine is bound to three circles: the Palestinian circle, the Arab circle and the Islamic circle. Each of these circles has its role in the struggle against Zionism. Each has its duties, and it is a horrible mistake and a sign of deep ignorance to overlook any of these circles. Palestine is an Islamic land which has the first of the two kiblahs (direction to which Moslems turn in praying), the third of the holy (Islamic) sanctuaries, and the point of departure for Mohamed's midnight journey to the seven heavens (i.e. Jerusalem).

' "Praise be unto him who transported his servant by night, from the sacred temple of Mecca to the farther temple of Jerusalem, the circuit of which we have blessed, that we might show him some of our signs; for Allah is he who heareth, and seeth." (The Night-Journey - verse 1).

'Since this is the case, liberation of Palestine is then an individual duty for very Moslem wherever he may be. On this basis, the problem should be viewed. This should be realised by every Moslem.

'The day the problem is dealt with on this basis, when the three circles mobilize their capabilities, the present state of affairs will change and the day of liberation will come nearer.

' "Verily ye are stronger than they, by reason of the terror cast into their breasts from Allah. This, because they are not people of prudence." (The Emigration - verse 13).'

he opening of Article Fifteen, stressing jihad yet again:

'The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised. To do this requires the diffusion of Islamic consciousness among the masses, both on the regional, Arab and Islamic levels. It is necessary to instill the spirit of Jihad in the heart of the nation so that they would confront the enemies and join the ranks of the fighters.' Article Seventeen. A section supposedly on the Moslem woman turns out to contain mainly mad conspiracy theory|:

'The Moslem woman has a role no less important than that of the moslem man in the battle of liberation. She is the maker of men. Her role in guiding and educating the new generations is great. The enemies have realised the importance of her role. They consider that if they are able to direct and bring her up they way they wish, far from Islam, they would have won the battle. That is why you find them giving these attempts constant attention through information campaigns, films, and the school curriculum, using for that purpose their lackeys who are infiltrated through Zionist organizations under various names and shapes, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, espionage groups and others, which are all nothing more than cells of subversion and saboteurs. These organizations have ample resources that enable them to play their role in societies for the purpose of achieving the Zionist targets and to deepen the concepts that would serve the enemy. These organizations operate in the absence of Islam and its estrangement among its people. The Islamic peoples should perform their role in confronting the conspiracies of these saboteurs. The day Islam is in control of guiding the affairs of life, these organizations, hostile to humanity and Islam, will be obliterated.'

Conspiracy theory is continued with Article Twenty-Two, which includes very brief and, of course, deluded theories about the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars:

'For a long time, the enemies have been planning, skillfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.

'You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.

' "So often as they shall kindle a fire for war, Allah shall extinguish it; and they shall set their minds to act corruptly in the earth, but Allah loveth not the corrupt doers." (The Table - verse 64).

'The imperialistic forces in the Capitalist West and Communist East, support the enemy with all their might, in money and in men. These forces take turns in doing that. The day Islam appears, the forces of infidelity would unite to challenge it, for the infidels are of one nation.

' "O true believers, contract not an intimate friendship with any besides yourselves: they will not fail to corrupt you. They wish for that which may cause you to perish: their hatred hath already appeared from out of their mouths; but what their breasts conceal is yet more inveterate. We have already shown you signs of their ill will towards you, if ye understand." (The Family of Imran - verse 118).

'It is not in vain that the verse is ended with Allah's words "if ye understand." '

Article Thirty makes clear that free and independent thought is regarded as an impossibility and that the position of 'writers, intellectuals, media people, orators, educaters [sic] and teachers is a completely demeaning one:

'Writers, intellectuals, media people, orators, educaters [sic] and teachers, and all the various sectors in the Arab and Islamic world - all of them are called upon to perform their role, and to fulfill their duty, because of the ferocity of the Zionist offensive and the Zionist influence in many countries exercised through financial and media control, as well as the consequences that all this lead to in the greater part of the world.

'Jihad is not confined to the carrying of arms and the confrontation of the enemy. The effective word, the good article, the useful book, support and solidarity - together with the presence of sincere purpose for the hoisting of Allah's banner higher and higher - all these are elements of the Jihad for Allah's sake.

' "Whosoever mobilises a fighter for the sake of Allah is himself a fighter. Whosoever supports the relatives of a fighter, he himself is a fighter." (related by al-Bukhari, Moslem, Abu-Dawood and al-Tarmadhi).

Article Thirty-two has this - but by now, the sentiments are surely becoming predictable:

'Leaving the circle of struggle with Zionism is high treason, and cursed be he who does that. "for whoso shall turn his back unto them on that day, unless he turneth aside to fight, or retreateth to another party of the faithful, shall draw on himself the indignation of Allah, and his abode shall be hell; an ill journey shall it be thither." (The Spoils - verse 16). There is no way out except by concentrating all powers and energies to face this Nazi, vicious Tatar invasion. The alternative is loss of one's country, the dispersion of citizens, the spread of vice on earth and the destruction of religious values. Let every person know that he is responsible before Allah, for "the doer of the slightest good deed is rewarded in like, and the does of the slightest evil deed is also rewarded in like." '

Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D Roosevelt and the IDF (Israeli Defence Force)

The Swedish army and the army of the Irish Republic have never had to face the criticism and the accusations directed so often at the British army and the United States army and other forces, including the Israeli Defence Force. Sometimes, the criticisms and accusations have been fully justified, but in general, any mistakes and shortcomings are those to be expected in all complex human actions. Goethe: 'Man errs so long as he strives.'

Criticism is generally healthy - essential - but criticism may overlook vital distinctions. Criticism may  cynically ignore vital distinctions. Criticism of the Israeli Defence Force is so often blatantly ideological criticism, with no attempt at fair-mindedness and no attempt to understand extreme experience.

The American president Theodore Roosevelt wrote (there's surely no need for anyone to respond to the unfashionable style with condescension):

'It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.'

Criticism of the conduct of the British and the (segregated) American armed forces during the Second World War, which deliberately targeted German civilians (in the case of the British air force) and Japanese civilians (in the case of the United States air force) should never ignore the vital distinction between allied war aims and allied conduct of the war and Nazi war aims and Nazi conduct of the war. This comment of the American president Theodore Roosevelt is surely relevant to these matters, and to President Franklin D Roosevelt's conduct during the war. It can be applied too to the Israeli conduct of  operations in Gaza, including the conduct of the Israeli Defence Force.

So much for the armchair critics of Israel.

Éamon de Valera, who led Ireland during the Second World War, had no responsibility for the bombing of Tokyo or the bombing of Dresden. He led a state which stood aside, which never went into the arena.

My page Ireland and Northern Ireland: distortions and illusions includes this quotation:

'...it was difficult to withhold one's contempt from a country such as Ireland, whose battle this was and whose chances of freedom and independence in the event of a German victory were nil. The fact that Ireland was standing aside from the conflict at this moment posed, from the naval angle, special problems which affected, sometimes mortally, all sailors engaged in the Atlantic, and earned their particular loathing.

'Irish neutrality, on which she placed a generous interpretation, permitted the Germans to maintain in Dublin an espionage-centre, a window into Britain, which operated throughout the war and did incalculable harm to the Allied cause. But from the naval point of view there was an even more deadly factor: this was the loss of the naval bases in southern and western Ireland, which had been available to the Royal Navy during the first world war but were now forbidden them. To compute how many men and how many ships this denial was costing, month after month, was hardly possible; but the total was substantial and tragic.

'From a narrow legal angle, Ireland was within her rights: she had opted for neutrality, and the rest of the story flowed from this decision. She was in fact at liberty to stand aside from the struggle, whatever harm this did to the Allied cause. But sailors, watching the ships go down and counting the number of their friends who might have been alive instead of dead, saw the thing in simpler terms. They saw Ireland safe under the British umbrella, fed by her convoys, and protected by her air force, her very neutrality guaranteed by the British armed forces: they saw no return for this protection save a condoned sabotage of the Allied war effort: and they were angry - permanently angry. As they sailed past this smug coastline, past people who did not give a damn how the war went as long as they could live on in their fairy-tale world, they had time to ponder a new aspect of indecency. In the list of people you were prepared to like when the war was over, the man who stood by and watched while you were getting your throat cut could not figure very high.'

In the competing murals of Belfast, new images and messages have started to appear: in Nationalist areas, ones which support the Palestinians, in Loyalist areas, ones which support Israel. Irish nationalists may well overlook a potential conflict of interest. Many nationalists have taken for granted the 'fact' that the British are the worst exploiters in the world and the most brutal of people, but Palestinians make the conflicting claim that the Israelis are the worst exploiters and the most brutal of people.

Human Rights Watch

From an article by Robert L. Bernstein published in the 'New York Times,' not an original contribution, but a compelling one, and applicable in part to Amnesty International.

'As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.

'At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

'That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

'When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

'Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.

'Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

'Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

'Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

'Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again ... '

Blockades of Gaza, Cuba, boycotts  of Israel, US

It's often said that opponents of Israel, who call for boycotts of Israel and other action, are inconsistent. Israel is being singled out, unfairly, whilst states with vile records are excused - no boycotts for them. I agree with this argument. Here's another instance of inconsistency, one I've never come across anywhere: the arguments for boycotting Israel are arguments for boycotting the United States. The parallels are fairly exact. I don't, of course, think that the United States should be boycotted, any more than Israel.

We all know about the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Not nearly so many people know that there's a Cuba Solidarity Campaign which claims to work for 'the Cuban people's right to self-determination and sovereignty.'

There's been a United States blockade of Cuba for a long time: 'February 2012 marks 50 years since the US imposed its vindictive blockade on Cuba - a vicious policy which has cost the Cuban economy at least $105 billions and cause the Cuban people immense suffering and hardship.

The blockade denies access to food, educational and medical equipment.'

'3,478 Cubans have died in terrorist attacks from US backed right-wing exile groups.

'For the 23rd consecutive year the UN voted to condemn the illegal US blockade of Cuba.'

There are no parallels with the settlements in Palestinian territory, but what there is in Cuba is Guantanamo Bay, a place which many boycotters could well think merits a boycott even if there were no other objections.

Many of the same people who call for a boycott of Israel have very firm opinions about US actions in such countries as Afghanistan. There are different estimates of civilian deaths in Aghanistan, but according to Jonathan Steele of the Guardian, up to 20,000 Afghans may have died as a consequence of the first four months of US airstrikes in Afghanistan. The total is far higher.

The similarities between Gaza and Cuba are  similar when it comes to human rights violations. At this point, boycotters will want to turn their attention to more congenial things. I mention many Palestinian human rights violations on this page. The Cuban record is atrocious: human rights advocates and people not guilty of criminal acts sentenced to long periods of imprisonment - 20 years or more - forced labour camps where there's 'verbal and physical mistreatment ... work from dawn to dusk ... scare food.'

Castro described 'faggots' as 'agents of imperialism' and their treatment was very harsh. More recently, there has been much greater tolerance - unlike Gaza.

Efraim Karsh: 'What occupation?'


Efraim Karsh notes that 'Few subjects have been so falsified so thoroughly as the recent history of the West Bank and Gaza.' His article, 'What occupation?' is a calm correction of fraudulent claims, gross distortions and malicious lies about Israel's part in the history of the West Bank and Gaza. Professor Karsh is a leading academic in the field of Middle East (and Mediterranean) Studies and the author of many books on the history of Israel and Israel's opponents, including 'Palestine Betrayed' and 'Fabricating Israeli History.'

A lengthy extract follows. The complete article:

http://www.aish.com/jw/me/48898917.html


'Palestinian intellectuals routinely blur any distinction between Israel's actions before and after 1967. Writing recently in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, the prominent Palestinian cultural figure Jacques Persiqian told his Jewish readers that today's terrorist attacks were "what you have brought upon yourselves after 54 years of systematic oppression of another people" -- a historical accounting that, going back to 1948, calls into question not Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza but its very legitimacy as a state.

'Hanan Ashrawi, the most articulate exponent of the Palestinian cause, has been even more forthright in erasing the line between post-1967 and pre-1967 "occupations." "I come to you today with a heavy heart," she told the now-infamous World Conference Against Racism in Durban last summer, "leaving behind a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing naqba [catastrophe]."

' "In 1948, we became subject to a grave historical injustice manifested in a dual victimization: on the one hand, the injustice of dispossession, dispersion, and exile forcibly enacted on the population ... On the other hand, those who remained were subjected to the systematic oppression and brutality of an inhuman occupation that robbed them of all their rights and liberties."

'This original "occupation" -- that is, again, the creation and existence of the state of Israel -- was later extended, in Ashrawi's narrative, as a result of the Six-Day war:

The charges against Israel's various "occupations" represent a damning indictment of the entire Zionist enterprise. They are also grossly false.

' "Those of us who came under Israeli occupation in 1967 have languished in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip under a unique combination of military occupation, settler colonization, and systematic oppression. Rarely has the human mind devised such varied, diverse, and comprehensive means of wholesale brutalization and persecution."

'Taken together, the charges against Israel's various "occupations" represent -- and are plainly intended to be -- a damning indictment of the entire Zionist enterprise. In almost every particular, they are also grossly false.

'In 1948, no Palestinian state was invaded or destroyed to make way for the establishment of Israel. From biblical times, when this territory was the state of the Jews, to its occupation by the British army at the end of World War I, Palestine had never existed as a distinct political entity but was rather part of one empire after another, from the Romans, to the Arabs, to the Ottomans. When the British arrived in 1917, the immediate loyalties of the area's inhabitants were parochial-to clan, tribe, village, town, or religious sect-and coexisted with their fealty to the Ottoman sultan-caliph as the religious and temporal head of the world Muslim community.

'Under a League of Nations mandate explicitly meant to pave the way for the creation of a Jewish national home, the British established the notion of an independent Palestine for the first time and delineated its boundaries. In 1947, confronted with a determined Jewish struggle for independence, Britain returned the mandate to the League's successor, the United Nations, which in turn decided on November 29, 1947, to partition mandatory Palestine into two states: one Jewish, the other Arab.

'The state of Israel was thus created by an internationally recognized act of national self-determination -- an act, moreover, undertaken by an ancient people in its own homeland. In accordance with common democratic practice, the Arab population in the new state's midst was immediately recognized as a legitimate ethnic and religious minority. As for the prospective Arab state, its designated territory was slated to include, among other areas, the two regions under contest today -- namely, Gaza and the West Bank (with the exception of Jerusalem, which was to be placed under international control).

'None of the region's Arab regimes viewed the Palestinians as a distinct nation.

 As is well known, the implementation of the UN's partition plan was aborted by the effort of the Palestinians and of the surrounding Arab states to destroy the Jewish state at birth. What is less well known is that even if the Jews had lost the war, their territory would not have been handed over to the Palestinians. Rather, it would have been divided among the invading Arab forces, for the simple reason that none of the region's Arab regimes viewed the Palestinians as a distinct nation. As the eminent Arab-American historian Philip Hitti described the common Arab view to an Anglo-American commission of inquiry in 1946, "There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not."

'This fact was keenly recognized by the British authorities on the eve of their departure. As one official observed in mid-December 1947, "it does not appear that Arab Palestine will be an entity, but rather that the Arab countries will each claim a portion in return for their assistance [in the war against Israel], unless [Transjordan's] King Abdallah takes rapid and firm action as soon as the British withdrawal is completed." A couple of months later, the British high commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, informed the colonial secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, that "the most likely arrangement seems to be Eastern Galilee to Syria, Samaria and Hebron to Abdallah, and the south to Egypt."

'The British proved to be prescient. Neither Egypt nor Jordan ever allowed Palestinian self-determination in Gaza and the West Bank -- which were, respectively, the parts of Palestine conquered by them during the 1948-49 war. Indeed, even UN Security Council Resolution 242, which after the Six-Day war of 1967 established the principle of "land for peace" as the cornerstone of future Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, did not envisage the creation of a Palestinian state. To the contrary: since the Palestinians were still not viewed as a distinct nation, it was assumed that any territories evacuated by Israel, would be returned to their pre-1967 Arab occupiers -- Gaza to Egypt, and the West Bank to Jordan. The resolution did not even mention the Palestinians by name, affirming instead the necessity "for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem" -- a clause that applied not just to the Palestinians but to the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from the Arab states following the 1948 war.

'At this time -- we are speaking of the late 1960's -- Palestinian nationhood was rejected by the entire international community, including the Western democracies, the Soviet Union (the foremost supporter of radical Arabism), and the Arab world itself. "Moderate" Arab rulers like the Hashemites in Jordan viewed an independent Palestinian state as a mortal threat to their own kingdom, while the Saudis saw it as a potential source of extremism and instability. Pan-Arab nationalists were no less adamantly opposed, having their own purposes in mind for the region. As late as 1974, Syrian President Hafez alAssad openly referred to Palestine as "not only a part of the Arab homeland but a basic part of southern Syria"; there is no reason to think he had changed his mind by the time of his death in 2000.

...

'What, then, of the period after 1967, when these territories passed into the hands of Israel? Is it the case that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have been the victims of the most "varied, diverse, and comprehensive means of wholesale brutalization and persecution" ever devised by the human mind?

'At the very least, such a characterization would require a rather drastic downgrading of certain other well-documented 20th-century phenomena, from the slaughter of Armenians during World War I and onward through a grisly chronicle of tens upon tens of millions murdered, driven out, crushed under the heels of despots. By stark contrast, during the three decades of Israel's control, far fewer Palestinians were killed at Jewish hands than by King Hussein of Jordan in the single month of September 1970 when, fighting off an attempt by Yasir Arafat's PLO to destroy his monarchy, he dispatched (according to the Palestinian scholar Yezid Sayigh) between 3,000 and 5,000 Palestinians, among them anywhere from 1,500 to 3,500 civilians. Similarly, the number of innocent Palestinians killed by their Kuwaiti hosts in the winter of 1991, in revenge for the PLO's support for Saddam Hussein's brutal occupation of Kuwait, far exceeds the number of Palestinian rioters and terrorists who lost their lives in the first intifada against Israel during the late 1980's.

This "occupation" did not come about as a consequence of some grand expansionist design, but rather was incidental to Israel's success against a pan-Arab attempt to destroy it.

Such crude comparisons aside, to present the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as "systematic oppression" is itself the inverse of the truth. It should be recalled, first of all, that this "occupation" did not come about as a consequence of some grand expansionist design, but rather was incidental to Israel's success against a pan-Arab attempt to destroy it. Upon the outbreak of Israeli-Egyptian hostilities on June 5, 1967, the Israeli government secretly pleaded with King Hussein of Jordan, the de-facto ruler of the West Bank, to forgo any military action; the plea was rebuffed by the Jordanian monarch, who was loathe to lose the anticipated spoils of what was to be the Arabs' "final round" with Israel.

'Thus it happened that, at the end of the conflict, Israel unexpectedly found itself in control of some one million Palestinians, with no definite idea about their future status and lacking any concrete policy for their administration. In the wake of the war, the only objective adopted by then-Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan was to preserve normalcy in the territories through a mixture of economic inducements and a minimum of Israeli intervention. The idea was that the local populace would be given the freedom to administer itself as it wished, and would be able to maintain regular contact with the Arab world via the Jordan River bridges. In sharp contrast with, for example, the U.S. occupation of postwar Japan, which saw a general censorship of all Japanese media and a comprehensive revision of school curricula, Israel made no attempt to reshape Palestinian culture. It limited its oversight of the Arabic press in the territories to military and security matters, and allowed the continued use in local schools of Jordanian textbooks filled with vile anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda.

'Israel's restraint in this sphere -- which turned out to be desperately misguided -- is only part of the story. The larger part, still untold in all its detail, is of the astounding social and economic progress made by the Palestinian Arabs under Israeli "oppression." At the inception of the occupation, conditions in the territories were quite dire. Life expectancy was low; malnutrition, infectious diseases, and child mortality were rife; and the level of education was very poor. Prior to the 1967 war, fewer than 60 percent of all male adults had been employed, with unemployment among refugees running as high as 83 percent. Within a brief period after the war, Israeli occupation had led to dramatic improvements in general well-being, placing the population of the territories ahead of most of their Arab neighbors.

...

Under Israeli rule, the Palestinians also made vast progress in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the West Bank and Gaza fell by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 1990, while life expectancy rose from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 (compared with an average of 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa). Israeli medical programs reduced the infant-mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000 (in Iraq the rate is 64, in Egypt 40, in Jordan 23, in Syria 22). And under a systematic program of inoculation, childhood diseases like polio, whooping cough, tetanus, and measles were eradicated.

No less remarkable were advances in the Palestinians' standard of living. By 1986, 92.8 percent of the population in the West Bank and Gaza had electricity around the clock, as compared to 20.5 percent in 1967; 85 percent had running water in dwellings, as compared to 16 percent in 1967; 83.5 percent had electric or gas ranges for cooking, as compared to 4 percent in 1967; and so on for refrigerators, televisions, and cars.

Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, during the two decades preceding the intifada of the late 1980's, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102 percent, and the number of classes by 99 percent, though the population itself had grown by only 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. At the time of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not a single university existed in these territories. By the early 1990's, there were seven such institutions, boasting some 16,500 students. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults over age 15, compared with 69 percent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia, and 44 percent in Syria.'

Jeff McMahan: a philosopher goes to war

Jeff McMahan is a philosopher who has written  on the ethics of warfare. His books include 'Killing in War' and his articles include one in 'Prospect magazine: 'Gaza: Is Israel fighting a just war?'

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/gaza-is-israel-and-hamass-conflict-a-just-war

The article and the book are instructive examples of the catastrophic failure of so many philosophers when they turn their attention to the harshness of reality, although the catastrophic failure is due to low-level misunderstanding, and above all, laziness in approaching factors that are non-philosophical. The accusation of laziness is a strong one but justified, I think. Alternatively, he can be accused of culpable ignorance.

Philosophers concerned with the applied ethics of war are engaged in a composite study, one with a philosophical component and a non-philosophical component. (Here, I'm concerned almost entirely on the non-philosophical component of the article and the book.) The non-philosophical component requires a thorough study of military history, or at least an adequate background in military history. A philosopher writing about the conflict between Israel and Gaza needs to have more than a perfunctory knowledge of the intertwined histories of Israel and Gaza. A philosopher writing about the First World War should have avoided the stupidity and simplicity of this claim,  'There was no reason, in effect, for anyone to go to war.' He overlooks the fact that Belgium had every reason to defend itself in view of the fact that it lost most of its territory during the German invasion and overlooks so much else. In writing about the bombing of Hiroshima, he claims that the greatest civilian death toll of the war occurred here. Not so. He overlooks the need for simple fact checking.

This is the book that Thom Brooks, the editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy, praises in these terms:

' ... Killing in War represents a tremendous achievement from one of today's leading moral philosophers. Never before has a book so swiftly challenged my own views and convinced me that I was in error. I cannot recommend it highly enough.' (Review in the 'Times Higher Education Supplement,' 8 October 2009.)

To begin with, the article concludes with this:

'If Israel were to abandon the aim of controlling territories to which it has no right, and to respect the right of Palestinians to a fully self-determining life in the lands allotted to them in the UN settlement of 1948, those who now fire rockets into Israel and conduct raids on Israeli forces would lose what sway they now have over the Palestinian people. Ordinary Palestinians want what other people want: to live with dignity, free from domination and oppression by others, to be secure and self-determining, and thus to have the opportunity to flourish in their own way.'

The last phrase, 'flourish in their own way' is a reminder that this is a philosopher in full flow, even if the extract includes no distinctively philosophical argument. 'Flourish' is almost certainly an allusion to the virtue ethics of Aristotle, whose concept of εὐδαιμονία has such prominence in the Nicomachean ethics. 

Jeff McMahan's assumption that we're all the same, we all want simply to be left to get on with our lives in peace, is wide of the mark. 'Palestinians want what other people want: to live with dignity, free from domination and oppression by others, to be secure and self-determining, and thus to have the opportunity to flourish in their own way.' Many Palestinians want exactly that, many Palestinians want the exact opposite, and many Palestinians want simply want to get on with their lives in peace after first wiping Israel from the map.


The view of human nature presented is a product of the 'word-sphere,' a concept which I employ in various places in this site. 'The word-sphere is the natural home of imaginative writers. This isn't a pejorative use of the term. 'Word-sphere' in the pejorative sense refers to evasion, to faulty {substitution}. The word-sphere is often used to evade reality. Reality is very often difficult, intractable, sometimes defeating any attempt at {modification}. It's far easier to arrange words so that words become a substitute for action, so that words deflect attention from the lack of action. This is the world of ringing declarations and facile claims. It offers a more congenial home than reality. The word-sphere is the natural home for ideologists even when action in the world isn't an issue, avoiding the need to come to terms with uncomfortable facts.'

It would be impossible to explain the human recourse to war and conflict, time and again, if the quietism of this passage were the reality. 'Ordinary Palestinians want what other people want ...' Many, many ordinary people have simply wanted to get on with their lives in peace, 'free from domination and oppression by others' and many, many ordinary people have wanted to dominate and oppress others. They have shown every sign of eagerness to acquire easy pickings, an easy life at the expense of others. Those films of Germans and Austrians cheering as Hitler made one annexation and conquest after another have had countless parallels. The author's view of human nature and human history is stunted, impossible to take seriously. Palestinian support for Hamas is substantial but limited, but the majority of Palestinians support the extinction of Israel. The 'other people,' the people of supposedly good will he mentions so casually include the homicidal maniacs of ISIS (the Islamic State) and their supporters and apologists. The 'other people' include an endless variety of barbarians, suffocating conformists, hypocrites, mean-spirited nonentities ... and, of course, so many other exemplars of human failings, to accompany the exemplars of human triumphant success, and endlessly varied other characters.

The author lacks the imaginative capacity to enter into the worlds of people very different from himself. The world I delineate in  Palestinian society: an indictment is a very different world from the academic world at Oxford, Cambridge and other universities where the author has spent so much of his time.

The notion that anything that the Israelis could do, short of complete surrender or suicide, would appease 'those who now fire rockets into Israel and conduct raids on Israeli forces' is nonsensical. The notion that enlightened action by the Israelis would cause the rocket-firers to ''lose what sway they now have over the Palestinian people.' is nonsensical. The author writes,

'If Israel were to abandon the aim of controlling territories to which it has no right, and to respect the right of Palestinians to a fully self-determining life in the lands allotted to them in the UN settlement of 1948, those who now fire rockets into Israel and conduct raids on Israeli forces would lose what sway they now have over the Palestinian people.'

Philosophers tend to emphasize reason, which should be sharply contrasted with 'reasonableness.'  Philosophers have used reason to question the common-sense reasonableness of the commonly accepted world, pointing out the pitfalls of sense perception. Reasoned arguments, such as arguments which make use of the phenomenon of optical illusions, cast doubt on the 'reasonable world.' In the ethical world, philosophers like Jeff McMahan often use reason to exclude the unreasonable. Writing in 'Tablet,'  Lee Smith writes exceptionally well about the pitfalls of reasonableness: 'What's Wrong With Being Reasonable About the Middle East? Nicholas Kristof's totally reasonable, utterly delusional recipe for peace.'

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/179742/kristof-reasonable-middle-east

' ... there is a way out, according to  New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Luckily for both Israelis and Palestinians, the prescription for peace is a simple one: We need “to de-escalate, starting with a cease-fire that includes an end to Hamas rocket attacks and a withdrawal from Gaza by Israel ...

'Kristof’s formula is a reasonable and balanced one. The only problem with it is that, in order to be so reasonable and balanced, it ignores two basic facts that have been reported in every newspaper in America. A ceasefire has already been offered by Egypt: Jerusalem accepted the ceasefire, and Hamas rejected it. Israel then stopped shooting for six hours, while Hamas continued firing dozens of rockets into Israel while loudly proclaiming that it had no intention of honoring the truce. So, no ceasefire.

'The second fact that Kristof’s reasonable-sounding formula ignores is that there already was an internationally supervised election in Gaza, back in 2006, which was won handily by Hamas. There is little to indicate that Hamas would do any worse at the polls this time around—after all, they didn’t run on a good-government platform but a war with the Zionist Enemy platform, and they’ve delivered on their campaign promises not once but three times since taking office ...

'So, is Nicholas Kristof really that ignorant of basic facts reported by his own newspaper as well as the rest of the entire international press? Of course not. He is not describing reality but is rather re-touching his self-image as a man of reason and compassion who can look on the world of mere mortals from Olympian heights and see the suffering and folly of both sides. “Here we have a conflict between right and right,” Kristof writes, “that has been hijacked by hard-liners on each side who feed each other.”

'But of course, the conflict is not about hardliners on both sides. Rather, it’s between a state led by a risk-averse prime minister that, whatever its failings, openly wanted peace and quiet, and a U.S. State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization that openly announced its desire for war and has continued firing rockets despite warnings, attacks, cease-fire offers, and other devices in the military-diplomatic play-book.

...


'The posture of reasonableness requires one to blame both sides, because both sides are responsible for solving the issue ...'
Jeff McMahan writes, 'If Israel were to abandon the aim of controlling territories to which it has no right, and to respect the right of Palestinians to a fully self-determining life in the lands allotted to them in the UN settlement of 1948 ...' This is an account of the history of the time and place which is not so much inadequate - although it's clearly inadequate - as fraudulent.

According to the author, Palestinians are very easily pleased. After giving the land, the problem goes away. The moderates who would accept this are dominated and overwhelmed by the non-moderates who want far more, whose demands are almost insatiable - nothing less than the wiping out of Israel. The Hamas Charter is clear, but there are no signs that Jeff Mcmahan has looked at this fundamental document.

Another stumbling block is that he misunderstands and distorts the history of land occupation in the area, if he has made any effort to investigate it at all. A superb corrective is provided by Efraim Karsh, the author of What Occupation?

The author gives some remarkable proposals for enhancing the moral understanding of soldiers. He writes,

' ... if we wish to prevent the initiation of unjust wars, one of the most important courses of action we can take is to try, so far as possible, to eliminate the epistemic excuses available to unjust combatants - or, in other words, to enable soldiers to have both a greatly enhanced understanding of the moral character of the war in which they are commanded to fight, and certain forms of legal support if their improved moral understanding leads them to engage in conscientious refusal to fight.

'I have elsewhere proposed that the best way to pursue this goal would be to establish an impartial international  court whose function would be to interpret and administer a reformed and morally better informed body of law ... '

There are so many objections to this. These are just a few.

Utopians, and the excessively idealistic, never make good military thinkers and Jeff McMahan is in the grip of a full-blown utopian delusion. Breaches of the international laws relating to armed combat are relatively easy to recognize and interpret. An international court can decide these matters fairly easily. Not so the justice or injustice of a war. Here, bias and ideology run rampant, irreconcilable differences are rarely reconciled and an 'impartial' international court is  an impossibility. A court decision, if acted upon by the forces of a state in large numbers, causing the state to become the losing side in a conflict, would be catastrophic for the court.

The war in Vietnam was a war against communism and the greatest death tolls have  occurred in communist regimes. Gunnar Heinsohn, the director of the Raphael-Lemkin-Institut für Xenophobie- und Genozidforschung at the University of Bremen has compiled statistics to rank conflicts since 1948 by the number of deaths incurred. Stalinist Russia, Mao Zedong's China and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Estimates of the total deaths inflicted by communist regimes range from 85 to 100 million. If this is nothing like a full justification for going to war against Vietnam, Americans in doubt about the moral justification for going to war could be persuaded by such facts. It would not, however, fit in with  Jeff McMahan's view.

Any McMahian international court sitting at the time of the cold war would have been very unlikely to have condoned action against communist regimes, if communist regimes had their way. This was a time of deep and irreconcilable differences. This is still a time of deep and irreconcilable differences, with very little common ground and no endless supplies of impartiality.

Would this impartial court have ruled that British men should not enlist? A court decision on these lines would have been treated with contempt. After all, there seemed ample justification for thinking of this as a just war for the British.

Liddle Hart's 'History of the First World War' (which I quote because written by someone who fought in the war and wrote the book not so long after the war ended, is one of the very many historians who have stressed the injustice done to neutral Belgium by the Germans:

' ... the British Cabinet was still wavering. A majority of its members were so anxious for peace and uncertain of the public attitude that they had failed to give a clear warning which might have strengthened Bethmann-Hollweg in his feeble efforts to withstand his own war party. Now it was too late and the military machine was in control ...

'Germany came to the rescue. Her long-prepared ultimatum to Belgium, demanding a free passage for her troops as required by her still longer-prepared war plan, was delivered on the evening of August 2nd. The Belgian government sturdily refused to allow its neutrality to be violated. On the morning of August 4th, the German troops began their invasion. The threat, even before the act was known, was decisive in hardening British opinion to the point of intervention, even though that intervention was already inevitable, as the German Staff had correctly calculated.'

Gary Sheffield in 'Forgotten Victory:'

The Germans overran all but a sliver of Belgium in 1914. Belgium was a small state but an economically important one. Faced by the resistance of Belgian workers and industrialists to working for the invader, the Germans effectively de-industrialised Belgium by destroying plant or shipping it back to Germany. Belgium was also viewed as a valuable source of labour. As many as 120,000 Belgians were deported to Germany in 1916 - 17. The Germans used starvation as a weapon to force the Belgians to work. William Alexander Percy, an American volunteer with Herbert Hoover's Commission for Relief in Belgium, remembered seeing batches of Belgian workers returning from forced labour in Germany. 'They were creatures imagined by El Greco - skeletons, with blue flesh clinging to their bones, too weak to stand alone, too ill to be hungry any longer. This was only a miniature venture into slavery, a preliminary to the epic conquest and enslavement of whole peoples in 1940, but it seemed hideous and unprecedented to us in 1917.'

The armed forces of utterly ruthless states are the most likely by far to be ordered to fight in an obviously unjust war, and refusal to fight is likely to mean a very high likelihood of execution. The armed forces of liberal, democratic states may be conscripts or professionals. Conscripts who consider the cause to be unjust and refuse to fight are likely to be recognized as conscientious objectors. Professionals who consider the cause to be unjust and refuse to fight will lose their job and are likely to face imprisonment.

To expect ordinary military personnel to have a detailed and informed knowledge of the factors which make military action desirable or undesirable is asking the impossible. A government may have access to secret information which make military action desirable or essential. To divulge the information could well put at risk the informants.

Even if, as in  the majority of cases, recourse to war will not be based on top secret information, the circumstances are likely to be highly complex. Again and again, the moral case for going to war is accompanied by urgent practical reasons for not going to war, which may well be very abstruse and uncertain - the effects on various alliances, for instance. The moral case for opposing ISIS in Syria is as strong as the moral case for opposing ISIS in Iraq, but, of course, action in Syria has to take account of President Assad's rule in the country. In Iraq, the moral case for fighting against ISIS has to recognize the immense war weariness of the countries which fought for so long in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan.

The armed forces who are asked to be moral arbiters, to decide whether they should embark on a new conflict, may have been through the gruelling process of conflict recently, in no fit state to give much thought to the moral implications of a new conflict. Jeff McMahan only considers decisions to be made before a conflict, not the decisions which arise as a result of changes in the conflict. To ask troops who had fought their way up Italy in a conflict which was bloody and demanding to give thought to the morality of bombing Monte Cassino would be to ask the impossible.

Miners who were engaged in back-breaking work before the First World War, hewing coal with pick-axes in indesribably harsh conditions, at a time when mining accidents were common - does Jeff McMahan expect them to calmly give thought to 'epistemic excuses' for unjust war and how to avoid them?

Jeff McMahan seems to show not the least awareness of all the forces which make for distortion - the distortions of the media, not always good at analysis of current events, the tide of popular opinion, the shameless lying to be found in the social media.

If 100 000 soldiers see no moral difficulties in fighting in the next war but 5 000 soldiers see real difficulties, he would support the loss of these 5 000 soldiers. An army, navy or air force can't possibly be run on this basis. (And it may take a generation or two, or more, before a clearer view is obtained of the issues surrounding a conflict. At the time of the conflict, a clear view is much more difficult. Or there may be conflicting opinions about the morality of a conflict for an indefinite period.)

Jeff McMahan has proposed a reform which is no reform at all and which has absolutely no chance of being implemented. Any armed forces which did implement it would never gain by it.

The severe limitations of Jeff McMahan as a thinker on war are  revealed in more astounding passages in 'Killing in War.' Very near the beginning of the book is this. He presents outworn, conventional opinions in apparent unawareness that these opinions have been challenged by revisionist historians.

''World War I is the paradigm of an utterly pointless war. There was, in effect, no reason for anyone to go to war. This war was a consequence of fatuous assertions of misjudgments about anticipatory mobilization, alliance commitments, and so on ... '

One of these revisionist historians is Professor Gary Sheffield, the author of 'Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and realities.'

'The First World War was a tragic conflict, but it was neither futile nor meaningless.'

' ... the work of many diplomatic and political historians points firmly away from the popular view that the war was a ghastly accident and instead underlines that the war was fought over substantive issues.' 'In the aftermath of the Second World War, democratic West Germany was readmitted to the family of Western States. West German historians were understandably anxious to stress the discontinuities of German history, to arguethat Hitler and the Nazis had been a uniquely evil phenomenon. It is easy to understand the fury that exploded in the 1960's when the Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer published books arguing that Germany deliberately planned and executed a war of aggression in 1914. Perhaps worse, Fischer drew attention to the similarities between the German war aims under the Kaiser and those of the Third Reich. Fischer's writings caused more than a spat between historians; they were oyf national consequence. By implying continuities between some aspects of the policy of Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, he caused Germans to question the comfortable notion that Nazism had been an aberration. Forty years later, Fischer's thesis is still at the centre of the debate of the origins of the First World War ... '

Jeff McMahan's claim that nobody had any reason to fight is obviously nonsensical. Whether Fritz Fischer's thesis is accepted or not, it's historical fact that early in the war, Germany occupied almost all the territory of Belgium and a large part of France. The Belgians and French had every reason to fight to regain their territory.

As for the claim that Austria-Hungary's fight in the war was particularly futile, it would be difficult to deny the claims of Italy, which was the most opportunistic of the combatant nations and whose battles on the Isonzo under the leadership (for want of a better word) of General Cadorna were genuinely futile, unlike, for instance, the often quoted example of the forces taking part in the Battle of the Somme. (William Philpott's 'Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme' is an excellent corrective to the received view obviously shared by Jeff McMahan. William Philpott argues that the Battle was a necessary stage in an intensive war of attrition, a stage in which the British army learned so much.

Another supposedly 'killer argument' from Jeff McMahan:

'It is revealing about our attitudes in general that we sometimes do take combatants who have committed war crimes to be fully excused, or even justified… Perhaps the most notorious case of this sort is that of General Paul Tibbets, who was the commander and pilot of the Enola Gay,the plane … from which the atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August of 1945… This single act by Tibbets, with contributions by the other members of his small crew, had as an immediate physical effect the killing of more people, the vast majority of whom were civilians, than any other single act ever done … all plausible moral theories, including even the most radical forms of consequentialism, prohibit the killing of that many innocent people in virtually all practically possible circumstances. Tibbets's act is therefore the most egregious war crime, and the most destructive single terrorist act, ever committed, even though it was committed in the course of a just war. Yet he was congratulated for it by President Truman… (pp. 128–29)

To many people, this will seem very impressive. Who could argue against such a civilian death toll?

To begin with, the extract shows that his knowledge of military history isn't adequate to the task. Nobody who writes about the bombing of Hiroshima should be unaware that the bombing never involved 'the killing of more people, the vast majority of whom were civilians, than any other single act ever done.'

As I write in the section Democracies and warfare: harsh realities, the bombing of Tokyo on the night of 9 - 10 March 1945 caused more deaths than the bombing of Hiroshima.

The author fully indulges in the current tendency to use words irresponsibly, with no regard at all for essential distinctions - but concern for these essential distinctions, any care at all for the health of language, has been all but abandoned.  If I point out that since 1948, Israel has carried out only one execution, of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, and that this is in sharp contrast with such states as Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which carried out executions on a massive scale, then someone may claim that the Israelis have 'executed' thousands of Palestinian people. To use the term 'execution' for the people killed during operations of war is misuse of the word 'execution.' The word 'murder,' like the word 'execution' has a judicial context or background and should never be used freely. 'Genocide' is an attempt to kill all the members of a group and it should be obvious that Israel has never come remotely near to genocidal action in the Palestinian territories.

 

Jeff McMahan uses the word 'terrorist' for an operation ordered by the head of state and is misusing the word.

His misunderstanding of consequentialism is worrying in the case of a professional philosopher. Consequentialism has to work in the case  of very large numbers as well as in the case of small numbers. Whether a tiny number of civilian deaths is at issue or a massive number, the consequentialist has to look at the imperative to minimize the number of deaths. The war in Europe had ended. Every day that the war in the Pacific went involved many, many deaths, military and civilian. The imperative was to bring the war to an end in this theatre as quickly as possible, but the alternatives involved horrendous difficulties. Even now, with the benefit of hindsight, no agreement exists concerning the wisest choice in the circumstances. At the time, after the most gruelling and costly military operations, in the midst of the most gruelling and costly military operations, the choice was more difficult by far.

Without wishing in the least to minimize the arguments against the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these are some arguments in its favour. At least I avoid Jeff McMahan's completely spurious claim to certainty and to superior insight. The furious debate at the time and later leaves not a trace in his complacent and simple-minded account.

The Wikipedia account 'Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki' can be wholeheartedly recommended. If I quote only from the section concerned with support for the case for bombing, I recommend wholeheartedly not just reading more of this section but the study of as much as possible of the section which puts the case for 'Opposition.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

'Te U.S. anticipated losing many soldiers in Downfall, although the number of expected fatalities and wounded is subject to some debate. U.S. President Trumanstated in 1953 he had been advised U.S. casualties could range from 250,000 to one million men.[10][11] Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard, a member of theInterim Committee on atomic matters, stated that while meeting with Truman in the summer of 1945 they discussed the bomb's use in the context of massive military and civilian casualties from invasion, with Bard raising the possibility of a million Allied soldiers were being killed. As Bard opposed using the bomb without warning Japan first he cannot be accused of exaggerating casualty expectations to justify the bomb's use, and his account is evidence that Truman was aware of, and government officials discussed, the possibility of one million deaths or casualties.

...


'In addition, a large number of Japanese military and civilian casualties were expected as a result of such actions. Contemporary estimates of Japanese deaths from an invasion of the Home Islands ranged from several hundreds of thousands to as high as ten million. General MacArthur's staff provided an estimated range of American deaths depending on the duration of the invasion, and also estimated a 22:1 ratio of Japanese to American deaths. From this, a low figure of somewhat more than 200,000 Japanese deaths can be calculated for a short invasion of two weeks, and almost 3 million Japanese deaths if the fighting lasted four months ... A widely cited estimate of 5 to 10 million Japanese deaths came from a study by William Shockley and Quincy Wright; the upper figure was used by Assistant Secretary of WarJohn J. McCloy who characterized it as conservative.

...

'The great loss of lives during the battle of Iwo Jima and other Pacific islands gave US leaders a clear picture of the casualties that would happen with a main land invasion. Of the 22,060 Japanese soldiers entrenched on Iwo Jima, 21,844 died either from fighting or by ritual suicide. Only 216 were captured during the battle. 

...

'Supporters of the bombing argue waiting for the Japanese to surrender would also have cost lives. "For China alone, depending upon what number one chooses for overall Chinese casualties, in each of the ninety-seven months between July 1937 and August 1945, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 persons perished, the vast majority of them noncombatants. For the other Asian states alone, the average probably ranged in the tens of thousands per month, but the actual numbers were almost certainly greater in 1945, notably due to the mass death in a famine in Vietnam. Historian Robert P. Newman concluded that each month that the war continued in 1945 would have produced the deaths of 'upwards of 250,000 people, mostly Asian but some Westerners.'"

'The end of the war liberated millions of laborers working in harsh conditions under a forced mobilization. In the Dutch East Indies, there was a "forced mobilization of some 4 million—although some estimates are as high as 10 million—romusha (manual laborers)...About 270,000 romusha were sent to the Outer Islands and Japanese-held territories in Southeast Asia, where they joined other Asians in performing wartime construction projects. At the end of the war, only 52,000 were repatriated to Java."

...


'Supporters of the bombings have emphasized the strategic significance of the targets. Hiroshima was used as headquarters of the Fifth Division and the 2nd General Army, which commanded the defense of southern Japan with 40,000 military personnel stationed in the city. Hiroshima was a communication center, an assembly area for troops, a storage point and had several military factories as well. Nagasaki was of great wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials.

'On 30 June 2007, Japan's defense minister Fumio Kyuma said the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan by the United States during World War II was an inevitable way to end the war. Kyuma said: "I now have come to accept in my mind that in order to end the war, it could not be helped (shikata ga nai) that an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and that countless numbers of people suffered great tragedy." Kyuma, who is from Nagasaki, said the bombing caused great suffering in the city, but he does not resent the U.S. because it prevented the Soviet Union from entering the war with Japan. Kyuma's comments were similar to those made by Emperor Hirohito when, in his first ever press conference given in Tokyo in 1975, he was asked what he thought of the bombing of Hiroshima, and answered: "It's very regrettable that nuclear bombs were dropped and I feel sorry for the citizens of Hiroshima but it couldn't be helped (shikata ga nai) because that happened in wartime."

Nagasaki mayor Tomihisa Taue protested against Kyuma, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe apologized over Kyuma's remark to Hiroshima A-bomb survivors.In the wake of the outrage provoked by his statements, Kyuma had to resign on 3 July.' His resignation was surely unnecessary. This was a legitimate point of view.'

Aerial bombardment: killing and the prevention of killing

I begin with information about Musheir El-Farra of Sheffield but go on to criticize the 'leaders of Gaza civil society' (he was one of them) who signed an 'important statement' which did nothing to halt killing in Gaza.

The poet Richard Eberhart:

'You would think the fury of aerial bombardment
Would arouse God to relent ... '

Or furious criticism arouse the Israelis to relent?

On 5 August 2014, the Daily Mail' published a piece on the aerial bombardment of Khan Younis in Gaza. These are some extracts:

'The misery of Palestinians in Gaza has been brought home to the UK after a Yorkshire man lost 11 members of his family to a single Israeli air strike.

'Musheir El-Farrah, a civil engineer from Sheffield, learned on Friday morning that his cousin's home in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, was hit by a warplane overnight.

'Five children, aged from four to 15, are among the dead. Five of Mr El-Farrah's relatives - including his cousin Mahmoud El-Farra - are fighting for their lives in intensive care.'

'The El-Farrahs were killed in a flurry of Israeli air strikes just over an hour before a ceasefire was due to temporarily halt the relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip.'

'Israel's global standing has taken a nose dive after nearly 2,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in the 27 days that its forces have waged war on the besieged territory.'

Musheir el-Farra is the chair of Sheffield Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Is this not conclusive evidence that Musheir El-Farra is right to oppose Israel and that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is right to oppose Israel?

I sympathize with his loss. I recognize fully the hideousness of aerial bombardment: men, women and children killed, crushed beneath rubble, or horribly injured, crushed beneath rubble. But I give reasons for opposing Musheir El-Farra's view of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign's view of the conflict.

Harrowing experience is no guarantee that response to the experience, interpretation of the experience will do anything to make these terrible events less likely in the future. Politicians and other people who want to end a humanitarian catastrophe and to make similar humanitarian catastrophes less likely in the future have to be guided not just by intense emotion.

I sent an email to the Sheffield Solidarity Campaign (13.09.2014) to inform him that I'd added to the site a section which concerned him. I also wrote, 'If there are any comments and criticisms then I would be glad to receive them. (Alternatively, you could consider publishing them on your Website.) They may help to make the section, and the page as a whole, as accurate and fair as possible.' I haven't received any comments and criticisms and none have been published on the Campaign's Website.

Musheir El-Farra's relatives were killed 'just over an hour before a ceasefire was due to temporarily halt the relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip.' But Musheir El-Farra had already opposed ceasefires, except on terms which would make a ceasefire impossible.

Musheir El-Farra's relatives were killed or injured on 1 August, 2014. Just over a week before, on 23  July, an 'Important Statement' was published in various places, signed by a large number of  'Gaza Civil Society Leaders,' including Musheir El-Farra and his sister Mona El-Farra. To summarize, at  a stage in the conflict between Israel and Gaza when casualties were still relatively light, these leaders of Gaza civil society declared their support for Hamas' policies in the conflict, which included the use of indiscriminate weapons, the rockets aimed at Israel, and Hamas' futile insistence on ceasefires which were unrealistic, certain to be refused by the Israelis, certain to lead to further casualties in Gaza. A ceasefire was eventually accepted by Hamas under terms almost identical to the early ones.

These leaders somehow failed to see what was staring them in the face. They failed to see that refusing a ceasefire would be followed by unnecessary casualties. If they were taken by surprise, they should not have been. An object released falling to the ground by the action of gravity would be no more surprising.

The signatories showed monumental political obtuseness. Their support for the continued firing of rockets into Israel - not counting the ones which fell short and landed in Gaza - if the unrealistic demands were not accepted amounted to an ethical failure.

 

The signatories are at one with Hamas in rejecting the ceasefire offered. If an early ceasefire had been accepted, then the relatives of Musheir El-Farra would not have been killed, with so many others. The statement makes this claim:

'Hamas represented the sentiment of the vast majority of residents when it rejected the unilateral ceasefire proposed by Egypt and Israel without consulting anyone in Gaza. We share the broadly held public sentiment that it is unacceptable to merely return to the status quo – in which Israel strictly limits travel in and out of the Gaza Strip, controls the supplies that come in (including a ban on most construction materials), and prohibits virtually all exports, thus crippling the economy and triggering one of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the Arab world.

'To do so would mean a return to a living death.'

There was absolutely no prospect that Israel would agree to the preconditions demanded by the signatories, such as this: 'Unlimited import and export of supplies and goods, including by land, sea and air.' To include them was to guarantee failure, was to guarantee that there would be no ceasefire. Unlimited import means unlimited import of weapons for attacks on Israel, unlimited import of construction materials for building tunnels for attacks on Israel. This is the work of political innocents, people with a faint sense of realities.

Their failure to learn from the conflict between Israel and Gaza of 2008 - 9, when Israel undertook Operation Cast Lead, is astonishing. Then, the conflict began when Israel attempted to stop the firing of rockets into Israeli territory and to stop the flow of weapons into Gaza. Operation Cast Lead proved, if proof were needed, that Israel would stand firm and show vast military superiority in future conflicts, unless circumstances were to change dramatically in the interim. There were no dramatic changes which would make it in the least likely that Israel would accept rocket attacks and flow of weapons into Gaza in 2014. The signatories should have realized this at the very beginning of the recent hostilities. This is inability to learn from experience on a grand scale - or grandiose scale.

After hostilities ended in 2009, ' ... the European Union, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference   and over 50 nations donated humanitarian aid to Gaza, including the United States, which donated over $20 million. On January 7, a UN Relief Works Agency spokesman acknowledged that he was "aware of instances where deliveries of humanitarian aid into Gaza" were diverted by the Hamas government, though never from his agency.'

After hostilites ended in 2014, governments and non-governmental agencies must again donate on a massive scale to a territory which never seems to learn. A familiar dictum of economics is: 'Scarce resources and infinite wants.' The desperate needs of the world can never be met, and why the needs of Gaza should have priority is a mystery. Will Palestinians continue to fire rockets and continue to invite certain retaliation and continue to expect foreign aid for reconstuction at frequent intervals? Perhaps the donors will eventually draw conclusions and become less generous and decide to give their money to other causes.

The ceasefire which was eventually accepted in 2014 met none of the demands of the signatories, as could have been predicted.

Musheir El-Farra and the other signatories should have been exerting as much pressure as they could on Hamas to accept a ceasefire and to keep to the ceasefire. As I put it publicly at one of Sheffield Solidarity Campaign's events, 'Stop firing rockets. Stop breaking ceasefires.'

The Important Statement contains this:

'With temporary shelters full and the indiscriminate Israeli shelling, there is literally no place that is safe in Gaza.'

Since Hamas hasn't provided shelters for all the population, all the more reason not to fire rockets and invite certain  retaliation. Where would rockets fired in the future be fired from? As in the case of the rockets already fired, very often from sites near to residential buildings and such buildings as schools. All the more reason to do everything possible to avoid Israeli attacks on launching sites. Hamas is a terrorist organization which has carried out many suicide bombings in Israel, which has built a network of tunnels to attack Israel, and which declares that its objective is to destroy Israel. Given the fact that the Hamas personnel who are legitimate targets of the Israelis are very often to be found in close proximity with the general population, this is a further reason to avoid Israeli action by avoiding firing rockets.

If Musheir El-Farra and the others can't realize the obviousness of these considerations and their extreme importance, then these representatives of Gazan civic society are doing nothing for the reputation of Gazan civic society. As for the claim of  'indiscriminate' Israeli shelling, then their knowledge of military history, the broad history which is essential for context, essential to provide comparisons, is dangerously lacking. Warnings of impending attack were evidently not given in all cases or most cases but they were given in very many cases, by phone message or by non-lethal blows to the roof of a building. In the history of warfare, this is very, very uncommon. People who fail to concede obvious points and to make any necessary qualifications are liable to see their credibility lost, although not in gullible circles, such as the branches of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

The reports of the deaths of the relatives of Musheir and Mona el-Farra omit - and this is completely understandable - the military situation in the town. In the Gaza conflict, a main Palestinian weapon is the IEF or improvised explosive device, familiar from operations in Afghanistan. Familiar too are the fearful injuries to British soldiers when these devices have exploded.

Khan Younis has been a major centre for operations by the IDF against Hamas operatives, who have planted innumerable  IED devices in the area.

A report on operations:

'Inside Gaza, Hamas has booby-trapped hundreds of homes and installations with improvised bombs. One such IED killed three Israeli soldiers on Wednesday [30 August, a few days before the relatives of Musheir and Mona el-Farra were killed] in a building labeled as an UNRWA clinic in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, where IDF soldiers were searching for a tunnel shaft. IDF’s Gaza Division commander, Brig. Gen. Micky Edelstein, told journalists that in one Khan Younis street he encountered, 19 of the 28 homes were booby-trapped, ready to explode over IDF soldiers who enter them.

The claim is made that there was no warning before the operation which killed the relatives of Musheir and Mona el-Farra, but operations in Khan Younis have been preceded by warnings. In a report in the New York Times for July 8:

'The call came to the cellphone of his brother’s wife, Salah Kaware said Tuesday. Mr. Kaware lives in Khan Younis, in southeast Gaza, and the caller said that everyone in the house must leave within five minutes, because it was going to be bombed.

'A further warning came as the occupants were leaving, he said in a telephone interview, when an Israeli drone apparently fired a flare at the roof of the three-story home. “Our neighbors came in to form a human shield,” he said, with some even going to the roof to try to prevent a bombing. Others were in the stairway when the house was bombed not long afterward.

'Seven people died, Mr. Kaware said, a figure also stated by the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, which also said that 25 people were wounded. The Israeli military said that targeted houses belonged to Hamas members involved in launching rockets or other military activity, and that they had been used as operations rooms.'

The Important Statement has its quota of distortion and falsification, for example this: 'As academics, public figures and activists witnessing the intended genocide of 1.8 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip ... ' The familiar misuse of the word 'genocide.' The Nazi genocide was an attempt to kill every Jew in Nazi-controlled territory. To suppose that Israelis intend to kill every Palestinian they can is psychotic rubbish. Whereas the Nazis set up gallows and gas chambers and used firing squads, the Israelis have never used the death penalty in the history of the modern state, with one exception, the Nazi Eichmann. (The Palestinian territories  make use of the gallows and firing squads.)

Without a constant barrage of simplifications, evasions, distortions and falsifications and the repetitive, debased language used to express them, the Palestinian ideology would be lost.

The statement refers to 'basic freedoms that have been denied to the people for more than seven years.' These 'basic freedoms' apparently include the freedom to import materials without restriction, including the freedom to import materials for constructing new tunnels for attacks on Israel and materials for constructing rockets for attacks on Israel. What of the basic freedoms which   are denied by Hamas and not acknowledged by the majority of Palestinians, such as the basic freedoms of gay people and Christians to live their lives without fear? What of the   basic freedom to express opinion freely, including criticism of Hamas?

The Important Statement mentions poverty and unemployment in Gaza. Discoverthenetworks.org 'A Guide to the Political Left' has a significant discussion of these very topics, adapted from 'Who is Really Oppressing the Palestinians?' by David Meir-Levi.

 http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=82

'How did the Palestinians reach their current tragic state? Are the Israelis responsible? What part of the blame falls on the other Arab states and the Palestinians’ own leaders?

These are important questions. The answers are complex, requiring a historical literacy and a willingness to go beyond the simplistic notion of the international media that the Mid-east conflict is a matter of conflicting rights and Israeli “occupation” of Palestinian lands.

'Within a few days of the June 10 cease-fire following Israel's victory in the Six Day War of 1967, Abba Eban, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, made his famous speech offering to negotiate the return of captured territories in exchange for three Arab concessions: diplomatic recognition of Israel; negotiations to decide on universally recognized borders and other issues; and peace as a final outcome. Western countries expressed amazement that the victor was offering to negotiate with the vanquished and was willing to make concrete concessions (return of territories) in exchange for symbolic and diplomatic ones.

'To formulate a response to this unexpected new reality, the Arab states called a summit meeting in Khartoum (capital of Sudan). The result was the now infamous three Khartoum NOs: no recognition, no negotiations, no peace. Thus Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was caused first by Arab aggression and then by Arab refusal to negotiate a peace after the Arab armies had been vanquished.

'After the war, Israel began what is sometimes called its “mini-Marshall plan” for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, investing hundreds of millions of dollars to bring them both into the 20th century with regard to infrastructure, roads, sewerage, electricity, phones, radio and TV broadcasting, water purification and water supply. World Bank records indicate that the GDP of the West Bank grew at the average rate of 13% per year between 1967 and 1994. Tourism skyrocketed, unemployment almost disappeared as hundreds of thousands of Arabs worked in Israel’s economy earning far more than their counterparts in other Arab countries ...

'And, perhaps most telling of all, free and unencumbered access to Israel’s medical infrastructure resulted in a declining infant mortality and a rise in longevity ...

'All this time, the Arab nations remained formally at war with Israel. In 1979, Egypt alone among the Arab states agreed to sign a peace treaty with Israel. In response to Egypt’s willingness to sign the peace, Israel withdrew its forces and settlements in the Sinai.

When the 1993 Oslo Accords allowed Yasser Arafat to set up shop in the West Bank as the head of the newly created Palestinian Authority, the existing robust economy created in partnership between Israel and the Arabs ground to a halt and then went into a steep decline. By 2002, the West Bank’s GDP was one-tenth of what it had been in 1993.

'Data provided by the UN Human Development program of 2005 indicate that the economic difficulties experienced by the Palestinian Arabs were largely the result of policies of the Arafat regime and not from any oppression by the State of Israel. Looking at what it calls “The Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT),” the UN report notes, for instance, that the second Intifada beginning in September 2000 resulted “in a sharp deterioration in living standards and life chances.”  The poverty rate nearly tripled from 20% in 1999 to 55% in 2003. In one telling example, the report notes that because of the Intifada, the town of Nablus -- a prosperous commercial hub prior to September 2000 -- became an economic basket case. Shops were closed; to survive, workers had to sell their tools, and farmers were forced to sell their land. It was Arafat’s war, not Israeli rule, that destroyed Palestinian prosperity and bled its people.

'Israel is the scapegoat for the plight of the Palestinians, but from the 19th century onward, Arab leaders, both local and external, have betrayed the Palestinian Arabs, forced them into poverty, cheated, intimidated, and oppressed them, condemned them to serfdom and stolen the land out from under them. Every opportunity for statehood was squandered by leaders who chose war and terrorism over peace and cooperation and thus condemned their people to poverty.'

BBC Watch on life in the Gaza strip:

http://bbcwatch.org/2013/01/01/life-in-the-gaza-strip-according-to-the-bbc/

Even with the corruption, mismanagement and incompetence of the Hamas administration, to describe life in Gaza as a 'living death' is flagrant exaggeration. Compare life in Gaza with life in the Warsaw Ghetto.

One  magazine chosen for publication of the Important Statement, 'The Revival,' is one of the more enlightened Islamist publications, but not nearly enlightened enough. It attacks terrorist actions by Moslems which take place in this country - good, obviously - but where Israel is concerned, nothing but the blackest of blacks, nothing but the most absolute of condemnations, nothing but unflinching and complete criticism will do. Another outlet chosen for publication was the Freedom Flotilla Foundation's 'Gaza's Ark.' 

Musheir el-Farra is the author of 'Gaza: when the sky rained white fire.' The book is about the effects of Operation Cast Lead. The 'white fire' of the title is a reference to phosphorus munitions. 

The 2008 - 2009 Israeli operations in Gaza, operation 'Cast Lead,' were intended to stop rocket attacks on Israel and to prevent the flow of weapons into Gaza. From the Wikipedia entry on operation 'Cast Lead:'

 'After watching footage of Israeli troop deployments on television, a British soldier who completed numerous combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Intelligence Corps defended the Israeli Army's use of white phosphorus. The soldier noted, "White phosphorus is used because it provides an instant smokescreen, other munitions can provide a smokescreen but the effect is not instant. Faced with overwhelming enemy fire and wounded comrades, every commander would choose to screen his men instantly, to do otherwise would be negligent."

'Colonel Lane, a military expert testifying in front of the fact-finding mission in July 2009, told that white phosphorus is used for smoke generation to hide from the enemy. He stated, "The quality of smoke produced by white phosphorus is superb; if you want real smoke for real coverage, white phosphorus will give it to you."

'Professor Newton, expert in laws of armed conflict testifying in front of the committee, said that in an urban area, where potential perils are snipers, explosive devices and trip wires, one effective way to mask forces' movement is by white phosphorus. In certain cases, he added, such choice of means would be less harmful for civilian population than other munitions, provided that the use of white phosphorus withstands the proportionality test. In discussing the principle of proportionality he said that the legality of using white phosphorus in an urban setting could only be decided on a case by case basis taking into account "the precise circumstances of its use, not in general, generically, but based on that target, at that time". He stressed that the humanitarian implications were vital in this assessment giving the example that using white phosphorus on a school yard would have different implications to its use on another area. He also said that in his view white phosphorus munition is neither chemical nor incendiary weapon and is not intended to cause damage. He said its use was not prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention.

'An article by Mark Cantora examining the legal implications of the use of white phosphorus munitions by the IDF, published in 2010 in the Gonzaga Journal of International Law, argues that Israel's use of white phosphorus in Gaza was technically legal under existing international humanitarian laws and "Therefore, it is imperative for the international community to convene a White Phosphorus Convention Conference in order to address these issues and fill this substantial gap in international humanitarian law."

Runa Khan, a mother of six, was sentenced in December 2014 to more than five years imprisonment in this country for promoting terrorism. There are many, many Palestinian mothers (and fathers) who promote terrorism and extremist views. Runa Khan's views pervade Palestinian society. Runa Khan openly supported suicide bombings, amputation as a punishment and stoning to death. Palestinian majority opinion supports suicide bombings, amputation as a punishment and stoning to death. Palestinian society isn't shocked, on the whole,  to find that a mother wants her children to become suicide bombers. Wafa al-Bass, who was treated at an Israeli hospital for severe burns after a household accident, hasn't been condemned in the Palestinian media for putting on a suicide vest and attempting to bomb the hospital where she was treated.

From the BBC news Website article on Runa Khan.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-30439913

She had 'posted a picture of a suicide vest' on Facebook. '...  police had found photos of Khan's children holding guns and swords.' She had 'posted a message on an extremist website, saying she wished her son would one day become a jihadi.' 'Prosecutor Paul Jarvis said Khan held "extreme Islamist views."

Judge Peter Birts QC described her as an "avowed fundamentalist Islamist holding radical and extreme beliefs".

He said: "You hold to an ideology which espouses jihad as an essential part of the Islamist obligation.

"I sentence you not for your beliefs, abhorrent though they are to all civilised people, but for your actions in disseminating terrorist material with the clear intention of radicalising others."

Referring to her online activities, he said: "Your purpose was to encourage and promote your particular brand of violent fundamentalism. This brand of violent fundamentalism is commonplace in Palestinian society.

"You were deeply committed to radicalising others, including very young children, into violent jihadist extremism.

The judge added: "You appear to have no insight into the effect of radicalising your children, having selfishly placed your own ideology and beliefs above their welfare in your priorities." Runa Khan gave her own children toy guns. On the streets of Gaza, children are given real guns.

Sentimentality and distortion





How could whoever posted the image above imagine that 'saving Gaza' would save humanity at the same time? (or perhaps a little later.) 'Saving Gaza' is difficult enough, whatever the interpretation of 'saving,' but 'saving humanity' is impossible. Anyone who would like to help to 'save Gaza' would be well advised to do so by offering constructive criticism, since 'saving Gaza' is much the same as saving Gaza from its own mistaken acts and policies, the dangerous delusions which fester in Gaza. Whenever healthy self-criticism is lacking, the best course of action is to offer healthy criticism, in the hope that the capacity for self-criticism will take root. All the same, Gaza is hard and unpromising ground.

Did the person who posted the image believe that a Gaza without Israeli actions would be a guarantee of peace and stability? Did this person imagine that all terrorist organizations, ISIS included, would leave the infant state in blissful contentment and have no interest in easy pickings?  What was the identity of this person? What sort of person? I found it was someone called Yasir Mukhtar, an Indonesian Moslem whose blog isn't entirely in the same rarified realm. It even makes concrete claims, all false,  including these. The last two are laughable, the first is despicable:

'There is a heavy indoctrination in Israel, from an early age in schools, which uses the holocaust to create paranoia and fear against ‘the enemy.’

'All media in Israel has to go through the IDF [Israeli Defence Force] censorship.

'All police departments in the US are trained by the Israeli military and are taught the same brutal tactics used against Palestinians.'

This mixture of mawkish-ethereal claptrap when the subject is Gaza and shameless distortion and falsification when the subject is Israel is a familiar one.

The Website of Sheffield Palestine Solidarity Campaign has a photo which shows a large banner, and on it is inscribed this sentimental sentiment, the prose equivalent of doggerel (but perhaps the members of SPSC think of it as not prose but poetry):





Freedom and partial freedom

 
Time for users of slogans such as 'Freedom for Gaza!' to give some thought to some potential difficulties and  to some overwhelmingly likely difficulties.

Have you given nearly enough thought to the place of disillusionment, disappointment, crushing disappointment in human experience? Have you given nearly enough thought to the fragility of freedom and the limitations of freedom? Nobody is completely free. The experience is captured in this quotation, from Yeats' 'Parnell' ('New Poems'):

Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man:
'Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.'

I quote these lines in the section The present: the residue of the Troubles of the page 'Ireland and Northern Ireland: distortions and illusions.'

Back-breaking work continues after the attainment of freedom. The freedom here is 'freedom from British rule,' but, as I point out in the section The Second World War of the same page, the freedom of the Irish Free State during the Second World War would have been lost if it had not been for the protection of Britain:

'According to the mythology of Irish nationalists,  nobody has suffered like the Irish, nobody has exploited others like the English. [Compare the mythology of the Palestinians: nobody has suffered like the Palestinians, nobody has exploited others like Israel.] But in a conflict which was more devastating than any other in history, which inflicted suffering on a greater scale than any other, the English, and the other countries of the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland, a constituent part of the United Kingdom, carried on the war against Hitler alone, for a time, with exiled groups from many countries and volunteers from many countries, including volunteers from the Irish Republic, who served in large numbers. Irish nationalism and the Irish Free State stood aside and did nothing. The IRA actively sought help from the Germans. During The Second World War, the Irish Free State was neutral. After the death of Hitler, condolences were offered from only two sources, Portugal and the government of The Irish Republic. 'The Cruel Sea' is a popular novel by Nicholas Monsarrat.' The factual claims here are confirmed by Brian Girvin in his scholarly 'The Emergency: Neutral Ireland 1939 - 1945).

'...it was difficult to withhold one's contempt from a country such as Ireland, whose battle this was and whose chances of freedom and independence in the event of a German victory were nil.'

If it had not been for British sacrifices, the Irish of the Irish Free State would have lost their freedoms and had to submit to the domination of incomparably worse rulers than the British: the Nazis.

Pro-Palestinian activists are lacking in political imagination if they can't envisage invasion and rule by forces vastly less enlightened than the Israelis. If they were ever to succeed in their objectives (overwhelmingly unlikely) they would have the responsibility of organizing an effective defence. They would no doubt be able to give excuses for not doing so and give excuses for incompetence, but they would most likely pay the price and go under.

Even if the worst possibilities are never realized, pro-Palestinian activists need to be reminded - but they should be capable of realizing this without any reminder - that freedom includes the freedom to commit blunders, the freedom to make a catastrophic mistake, or a whole series of catastrophic mistakes, for that matter.


The Palestine Solidarity  Campaign and its Index

The 'Index Librorum Prohibitorum' ('List of Prohibited Books) of 1599, replaced by the 'Tridentine Index,' abolished only in 1966, was a list of publications regarded as heretical by the Roman Catholic Church. It was intended  to protect the faith and morals of the faithful. 

There are indications that a PalSoliCamp Index may be emerging. The PalSoliCamp Index of prohibited fruit, vegetables and other foodstuffs, cosmetics, flags and other non-edible products, books, articles, advertisements, films, videos, sound recordings, Websites, emails, tweets, statistical analyses, philosophically possible worlds, maps, timetables, cartoons, jokes, doodles, graffiti, wishes, hopes, aspirations and thoughts - but not limited to these - is designed to protect the faith and morals of the faithful members and supporters of PalSoliCamp as well as the whole population of this country and eventually every other country by preventing the reading, writing, watching, speaking, singing, listening to and thinking of material regarded as heretical.

An example of the kind of prohibited material which the Index would rigorously ban, in this instance statistical analysis (from the Website of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign):

'October 1, 2014

'An open letter signed by 7,000 people was today sent to the BBC calling for the removal of the broadcaster's Head of Statistics from all reporting on Palestine and Israel.

'The demand followed an article published on the BBC website, in which the Head of Statistics, Anthony Reuben, misused Palestinian casualty figures in an attempt to back up Israel's claims that it had not targeted civilians during its July/August assault on Gaza.'



http://standforpeace.org.uk/palestine-solidarity-campaign-2/

Below, extracts from the page. There are many members of PalSoliCamp  who don't in the least hold the deranged views of so many of the individuals whose views and actions are described in these extracts, who don't in the least endorse the views of Gilad Atzmon, for example. They may not endorse the policies and acts of vile people, vile organizations and vile countries, they may simply want to see a free Palestinian state living in peace, but there are many, many reasons why their idyllic vision is overwhelmingly unlikely to be realized. Most of the optimistic hopes of the Arab Spring have been frustrated. There's absolutely no reason to think that a 'liberated' Palestine  would not be in the least danger of falling into the clutches of the Islamic State or another ultra-extremist group, or the least danger of civil war.  It's absolute folly - madness - to ignore or antagonize or not accept gratefully the support of Israel, the one democracy in the Middle East. To ignore every strategic consideration, every consideration of national interest by treating Israel and Hamas as equally worthy of support or - more likely - preferring Hamas to Israel, is deranged - not nearly as deranged as the views of Gilad Atzmon, but deranged enough.

From the Stand for Peace Website ('Stand for Peace' isn't the best of names, I think). The material may perhaps give undue prominence to the most fanatical element in PalSoliCamp. I think it likely that the different branches vary markedly in the balance between 'fanatics' and 'moderates:' but the moderates, in my experience, give analyses and propose 'solutions' which are not based on good arguments or good evidence.

The PSC employs a liberal and democratic narrative to advocate its message, and portrays itself as an organisation committed to supporting human rights. We believe the reality to be very different.

merely propagating the views of guest speakers; PSC members have repeatedly espoused virulently racist views – rhetoric almost identical to that encouraged by far-right organizations.

... The PSC’s bigotry is ...  accused of homophobia. In 2006, Outrage, an organization that campaigns for gay rights around the world, attended a PSC event at which they raised concerns about the systematic brutalization and murder of gay people in Gaza and the Disputed Territories. They were subsequently attacked ..

The failure of the PSC leadership to condemn the activities of its core members, while at the same time providing national platform for fascist ideologues such as Salah, is indicative of, at best, toleration of such ideas; and at worst, endorsement.

Well-meaning organizations that collaborate with the PSC on the basis of a presumed mutual belief in human rights, democracy and peace, should be informed of the PSC’s true nature ...

The PSC engages in a great deal of political lobbying, and regularly appeals to both British and EU politicians. It manages a group of MPs who coordinate their activities and raise relevant issues in Parliament – working to bring those putatively responsible for “war crimes” to justice, lobbying government to ban the import of settlement goods, and demanding an end to Britain’s arms trade with Israel. The PSC also calls upon the EU to suspend its Association Agreements with Israel. 

The website of Waltham Forest PSC recommends, and links to, the notorious Deir Yassin Remembered website, an organisation heavily criticised for its promotion of Holocaust denial

Merton has claimed that the brutal murders in Norway by Anders Breivik were part of a conspiracy by the Israeli government.

Gill Kaffash is the former Secretary ]of the Camden branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Here are her comments to Iranian news agency IRNA about the Holocaust:

“There is no doubt that a great number of Jews along with other victims of the Nazi army were killed by Hitler. However, historical phenomena need to be further examined to uncover the truth. Therefore banning opposition to the theses termed as `invariable reality` is irrational.”

Paul Eisen has noted that while he was supporting Holocaust denial within the PSC, Kaffash provided 'solidarity', as noted in his essay, ‘My Life as a Holocaust Denier’.

Sammi Ibrahem was chair of the West Midlands PSC, and runs an anti-Jewish website called Shoah.org.uk. Ibrahem is not a Holocaust denier; rather, and far more shockingly, he supports the Nazi attempt to eradicate the Jewish people. Ibrahem has voiced his admiration for the Nazi regime and poured scorn on Jewish holocaust victims. Here,he laments the trials of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg:

“I bow my head in reverence to those who were judicially murdered at Nuremberg. They were the world’s martyrs, not villains. Not one of them would have been condemned to death in a fair trial – not one! They sacrificed an entire nation, and in the end themselves, to save Western civilization. They were defeated by thugs in robes and gangsters in uniform – and by the conspiracies hatched by shysters from the ghettos of Eastern Europe.”

The Liverpool PSC website includes a page titled "The Power of Zionists"  The first item under this headline is this cartoon, showing a Jewish man with a hooked nose and a Star of David flag, ordering an American soldier to fight a war.

In 2011, a protest outside the Israeli embassy, partly organised by the PSC, had the crowds waving Hezbollah and Hamas flags – groups that have both declared their wish to eradicate the Jewish people from the face of the earth.

The crowds chanted ‘Khybar, Khybar al-Yahud’. Al-Yahud is Arabic for ‘the Jews’, and Khybar is in reference to the ancient slaughter of the Jewish tribe in Medina. In other words: Slaughter the Jews.


The PSC has openly and repeatedly made clear its support for Hamas. In October 2010, PSC representatives met with Mahmoud Al-Zahar, a Hamas leader in Gaza, who has made deeply homophobic and anti-Semitic comments.

In January 2009, he called for the killing of Jewish children “all over the world” and in an interview published by Reuters on 28 October 2010, he attacked the West for supporting Israel, saying “you do not live like human beings. You do not [even] live like animals. You accept homosexuality”. On 29 July 2011 Zahar said “we are not going to accept Israel as the owner of one square centimetre because it is a fabricated state.”

T
he list of examples could go on and on. To make our point, let’s take a look at just one PSC branch, based in York, whose senior members include staff from the University of York.

In
2009, Andrew Collingwood, a PSC activist, published photos of a protest in which he was involved, including one of a placard that featured a witch with accentuated Jewish features, which posited that anti-Semitism is a made-up concept.

In
2004 a vigil was held at Clifford’s Tower to commemorate the terrible massacre of Jews in 1190. This was gatecrashed by PSC activists, who saw fit to exploit the massacre of more than 110 Jews with their own political agitprop.

Endorsement of the far-right and overt anti-semitism now appears commonplace within the PSC. Reading PSC member Anthony Gratrex recently wrote:

'I
nfamous lunatic Gilad Atzmon is also a favourite of many PSC members. Atzmon claims that Fagin and Shylock accurately represent Jewish identity, the credit crunch was caused by the Jews, the Holocaust is a religion, and Hitler may be proved right about the Jews.'

 Tony Gosling, darling of the Bristol PSC, told the Muslim News  he was “personally disgusted” by books that teach about homosexual relationships: “No way should kids be indoctrinated in this way. Anyone who says so is branded as homophobic which they are not; it’s the gay mafia in full swing.'

In
early 2011, a Facebook page appeared calling for renewed violence in the Palestinian territories. The page contained the text: “Judgment Day will be brought upon us only once the Muslims have killed all of the Jews.” The page had more than 340,000 fans. The first two intifadas claimed thousands of Palestinian and Israeli lives, many of whom were murdered by terrorist attacks. The PSC joined the cacophony of extremist voices jcalling for a renewal of such ‘resistance’.

Following a great deal of support from pro-violence movements for a Third Intifada, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign helped organise a rally in favour ...

T
he PSC’s own website notes that it “works closely with trade unions and currently has seventeen unions affiliated – representing more than 80% of trade union members of the TUC – while a growing number of trade union branches and regions are affiliating to the campaign.” PSC chair Hugh Lanning is also the deputy chair of the Public Commercial Services Union.

B
ritain’s Trade Union Congress (TUC)  ended its annual conference with a call on its affiliates to review any bilateral relations they might have with Israeli organisations.

According to an amendment proposed by the PCS civil service union, “Congress calls on all unions on the basis of this policy to review their bi-lateral relations with all Israeli organisations, including Histadrut.”

TULIP, a pro-peace organisation dedicated to bringing Israeli and Palestinian trade unions together noted with disappointment:

'
Israel is being singled out, and the Histadrut is being isolated, because that is what the Iranian regime wants – and it using not only its proxies in Hamas and Hizbollah to do so, but its arm in the British trade union movement – the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

'T
he PSC has successfully pushed British unions to uncritically embrace the view of the rabidly anti-union dictators in Tehran regarding Israel and its trade unions.”

Martial Kurtz, National Organiser for the PSC, has said, “It will be for the Palestinians to decide which way this is going. A one-state solution, as a bi-national democratic state, will indeed mean the end of an Israeli Jewish state, as it exists.”

The PSC website states  that it is “in opposition to…[the] Zionist nature of the Israeli state”. There is a consummate hypocrisy in supporting the self-determination for one people while denying it for another. This is yet further suggestion that the PSC is not committed to peace.

T
he Israelis have accepted that the 950,000 Jews forced from their homes in Arab states from the 1940s onwards do not require any form of compensation, as few would wish to return. However, the return of Palestinian refugees who fled after the Arab states invaded Israel in 1948 is a key issue, and a driving force behind the emotional justification of pro-Palestinian activism.

'It is understood by genuine advocates for peace on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides that a compromise will have to be found over the issue of refugees. The PSC, however, advocates for the Palestinians to have an absolute “right of return” to their homes, or their ancestors’ homes, abandoned on Israel’s creation in 1948. It is this sort of absolutism – this unwillingness to negotiate – that is overtly detrimental to the prospects of peace.

'O
nce idealism sets in this strongly, truth itself is the usually the first to suffer. The outpourings, radicalism and obsessiveness of the PSC are an all clear example of this. For example, the PSC condemns Israel for “aggression against neighbouring states” but consistently fails to mention in its literature and events that Israel was attacked in 1948 (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria), 1967 (Egypt, Jordan and Syria) and 1973 (Egypt and Syria).

 

PROFILES: some pro-Palestinian-anti-Israel people. Introduction

This section gives profiles of  pro-Palestinian-anti-Israel people, with a growing number of profiles of propagandist academics - who, like the others, may well well have distinctive strengths, of course, apart from their propagandist weaknesses. There are two sub-sections, 'Acadaemics' and 'Others.'

Some of the profiles of  academics give information about denial of free expression with a direct connection with the Israel-Palestinian conflict, others are concerned with denial of free expression with no direct connection with the Israel-Palestinian conflict. In all these cases, the academic has pro-Palestinian-anti-Israel views. In the section Conjugates of my page 'Ethics: theory and practice' I explain the need to take account of  co-factors (such as denial of free expression in a matter which has no direct connection with the Israel-Palestinian conflict) which accompany the principal factor (a view of the Israel-Palestinian conflict).

The section 'Profiles' of my page About this site:

'I regard the many, many profiles of the site as having multiple functions. They reflect an interest in people. There's general recognition that novelists have to have an interest in people. Otherwise, characterisation in their novels will be defective. I think that polemicists and protestors - or opponents of protestors - should have an interest in people, not just in issues,  reasoning, causes, opposition to causes they view as harmful. Very, very often,opponents are viewed in grotesquely simplified ways. Opponents of feminists who use the term 'feminazis' are making a bad mistake, for example.  The profiles are also intended to go beyond the giving of information and commentary, to support activism, in ways which I don't spell out here.

'My criticism isn't relentless. I completed a profile of an individual who had written an ant-Israeli piece which I considered vile but  I found that he'd had to abandon his career as a result of serious health problems. I knew immediately that I couldn't publish the profile.'

PROFILES: Some pro-Palestinian-anti-Israel people. Academics

Sue Blackwell (and Gilad Atzmon, saxophonist)

Gilad Atzmon isn't an academic. He's a well known saxophonist. Robert Wyatt, writing in 'The Guardian,' has described him as 'the best musician living in the world today,' which is grotesque, but quoted on the home page of Giland Atzmon's Website. He's a notorious figure even in some hard-line anti-Israeli circles, with many outbursts to his discredit, such as: 'I'm not going to say whether it is right or not to burn down a synagogue, I can see that it is a rational act.' And, 'the Jewish tribal mindset – left, centre and right – sets Jews aside of humanity.'

But in an interview with Mary Rizzo, who, like Gilad Atzmon tempers fanaticism with civilized values, he says this:

'I truly believe in freedom of speech and oppose any form of Maccarthyism or intellectual censorship of any sort. Thus, interfering with academic freedom isn’t exactly something I can blindly advocate. Unlike some of my best enlightened friends, I am against any form of gatekeeping or book burning. But it goes further, I actually want to hear what Israelis and Zionists have to say. I want to read their books.'

The contrast with Sue Blackwell, who has taken a leading part in promoting the academic boycott of Israel, is stark. Sue Blackwell's Credo for Freedom isn't a resounding, uncompromising, heaven-storming, Beethovenian one but something more cautious. It goes something like this: 'I truly believe in limited freedom of speech and support some forms of Maccarthyism or intellectual censorship. Thus, interfering with academic freedom is something I can blindly advocate. Unlike some of my best enlightened friends, I'm not against some forms of gatekeeping or book-burning [figuratively, not literally, of course] ...'

Sue Blackwell is one of the people who have set themselves up as arbiters. Why such discredited people as this should feel competent to control in any way at all the musical life of this country, to control in any way at all its academic life, is difficult to credit.

I wrote to her - she didn't respond:

'Do please, if you can spare the time, let me have reasons why you think Israel is so much more vile than Iran, mentioning - more than mentioning, discussing honestly, in sufficient detail, with regard for their seriousness and their human cost - such matters as the execution of the 16 
year old girl for unchastity in Iran - and other horrific cruelties in Iran, your reasons for supporting (or opposing) suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israel. But you'd need to examine a far wider world of cruelty and injustice before you could feel in the least confident that out of all 
the perpetrators of cruelty and injustice in the world, Israel is the worst, the most worthy of being boycotted. I hope your knowledge of the history of war and conflict is up to the demands of the task. I hope your appreciation of the imperfections of the world in general is up to the task. Such matters as the history of blockades, reprisals and war crimes - quite distinct from what happens in an idealized world - are surely relevant, as are such abstract issues as the use of evidence, interpretation and inference. And abstract-sounding but very concrete matters such as unintended consequences ... '

Her Website, feeble in thought, feeble in emotion, feeble in language (www.sue.be/) contains a feeble denunciation of Birmingham University for declining to host the Website any longer. The idea that her Website might not be in the least suitable for academic hosting seems never to have occurred to her. A university shouldn't be expected to host the Website of someone who posts entries such as 'What I did on my holidays.' Details of her wedding to Willem Meijs likewise. Most of the material is 'stuff / Nobody minds or notices.' (Philip Larkin, 'Livings.') Her writing on Palestine isn't stuff that 'nobody minds' but it hasn't the least trace of the precious academic virtues of careful reasoning, scrupulous use of evidence, and the rest. She writes of the University 'censoring' her. This is complete hypocrisy. She's in the business of censoring musical performances. Birmingham University wasn't Sue Blackwell's only, her last remaining chance, of conveying her thoughts to the long-suffering public. Obviously, the number of possible Web hosts was, if not astronomically large, far more than a few hundred possibilities. 

This is also the Sue who threatened to sue 'Engage,' which puts forward arguments in defence of Israel. (Raymond foaming-at-the-mouth Deane threatened to sue an Irish journalist who wrote about him. Gilad Atzmon threatened to take legal action against Sue Blackwell.) Academics and others sometimes use the courts legitimately to protect their reputations, but the vast majority of academics never feel the need.

I quote Jim Denham, who is on the radical left. Some extracts from his insider's view of Sue Blackwell (www.http://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com):

'I notice that one of the organisers and spokespersons for the disruption of the IPO’s Proms performance was Sue Blackwell. I know Sue of old and, in fact, usually get on with her reasonably well. But in my view, her obsessive (I understand, Christian in origin) hatred of Israel and Zionism (ie Jewish nationalism) has led her on many occasions to slide over from legitimate (if misguided) hostility to Israel into antisemitism (by which I mean “political”, or “left” antisemitism, not personal hatred of Jews per se).

'In the miasma, something nasty stirs
.
'In the poisonous miasma that envelopes the overlap between proper concern and anger over the plight of the Palestinians, and hysterical rage against all things Israeli, a new cry has gone out: “I feel another boycott coming on” says Sue Blackwell, one of the leading spokespersons of the (defeated) campaign to get the AUT to boycott Israeli academics for being Israeli.The target of Ms Blackwell’s boycotting zeal this time is the LabourStart website and email list, devoted to organising international trade union solidarity. Why Ms Blackwell, a trade union activist, wants to boycott LabourStart is an interesting question, and the answer tells you a lot about the sort of politics that she and her “anti-Zionist” co-thinkers represent. Blackwell’s “I feel another boycott coming on” has now been taken up by Mr Tony Greenstein ... a professional Israel-hater, supporter of the Iraqi fascist “insurgency” and – apparently – a member of Brighton’s Unison branch. Mr Greenstein denounces LabourStart for being, in reality a “Zionist front”. But then for Mr Greenstein, more or less everyone who fails to call for the destruction of Israel (and supports the only rational and just solution, two states) is a “Zionist”. And as Zionism equals “racism” and –indeed- apartheid, then, ipso facto,if you fail to call for the destruction of Israel you are an apartheid-supporting racist who should be boycotted.

'That LabourStart should become a target is of interest mainly because of what it tells us about the politics of the people behind this crazy campaign. It won’t succeed – any more than the AUT boycott campaign did, once it was exposed to the scrutiny of that union’s membership and a democratic vote of the rank and file. But it is worth noting that the campaign against LabourStart has gained a new momentum in the aftermath of the defeat of the AUT boycott campaign, as the embittered boycotters thrash about, blaming “well-funded” international conspiracies and biased media coverage for the fact that the membership of the AUT rejected them and overturned their boycott.

[After discussion of an 'Open Letter' and the 'Background' document which accompanies it]:

'This is made even more explicit in the final section of the “Background” document, which is devoted to promoting the notion that Israel is an “apartheid society”. This description of Israel is a favourite of those who seek the delegitimisation and destruction of Israel. The “new apartheid” accusation has been widely debated and is rejected as an inaccurate, simplistic and politically misleading description by many people who are far from uncritical supporters of Israel (including Susie Jacobs on the “Engage” website, Benjamin Pogrud, the South African anti-apartheid campaigner in a recent seminar paper, and the self-styled “Muslim refusenik” Irshad Manji in her book “The Trouble With Islam” – to name just three. Oh yes: I forgot the late Edward Said: “Israel is not South Africa”).

' ... Sue’s reaction to the defeat of the “boycott” position within the AUT: instead of acknowledging that she and her supporters had simply LOST, like many of us have lost within unions, over the years, Sue fell back upon bizarre allegations of “a massive and well funded campaign against us and incredible pressure put upon members in the run up to this debate”. I’ll ask you straight, Sue: WHO, exactly, ran and financed this “massive campaign” against you? Tell me, please. As far as I am aware, it was the rank and file AUT members Camila Basi, Jon Pike and David Hirsh, who ran the campaign to overturn the AUT’s “boycott” policy. None of them are particularly rich. None of them were financed from “outside”. So what, exactly are you –Sue- trying to suggest? And you continue to protest that your campaign is not antisemitic?

'They are rich Jews? Paid agents of Israel? If that is not what you are suggesting, then please explain what you mean by “a massive and well funded campaign against us”? You really do have to explain your bizarre outbursts since losing the vote. And also, why you felt able to defy your union’s national position and your own local association, and vote in favour of the boycott position at Birmingham Trades Council on 2nd June 2005, after the AUT special conference had overturned the “boycott” position: who did you think you were representing? An imaginary AUT membership who agree with you about the destruction of Israel but don’t need to be consulted because their “anti Zionist” views can be taken as read? Even though they voted against you at a Birmingham AUT Association meeting? Have you any understanding of rank and file trade union democracy, Sue?

... 

'Greenstein and Blackwell’s ignorance concerning the basics of elementary working class politics might be dismissed as silly but harmless ultra-leftism if it had not lead them to attempt to destroy an invaluable organ of trade union solidarity: LabourStart. The fact that their campaign seems to be based upon the fact that its founder, Eric Lee opposed the AUT boycott of Israeli academics, and once ran his website from Israel, makes this nasty little campaign all the more distasteful and scabby.'

The indispensable Engage site, which has a moderate left perspective ingeneral, contains so much of value on boycotts directed against Israel and other issues (to give just one example, Howard Jacobson's fine piece on the Gaza flotilla) has pages which give an insight into this not overwhelmingly impressive figure.

It's to their credit that Sue Blackwell and Tony Greenstein, amongst others, have resisted the Nazi apologists and holocaust deniers to be found in pro-Palestinian circles, but Mary Rizzo (http://peacepalestine.blogspot.com) claims that Sue Blackwell has made mistakes in 'naming and shaming.' This has led to some instructive skirmishes, some instructive infighting, amongst the pro-Palestinian anti-Israeli comrades/enemies.

Mary Rizzo writes, 'let’s focus ... on the smear campaign run by a known activist for Palestine, someone who actually believes that Zionism is responsible for the troubles in the Middle East. Some in the UK might be familiar with Sue Blackwell. She is a university professor who was one of the promoters of the failed PSC motion about Zionism, the DYR and anti-Semitism. She also managed to somehow not be able to pull off the Academic Boycott she was organising for a Union of British university Teachers ... What is rather interesting, however, is her personal crusade to lead the Palestinian Solidarity movement and to dictate who is acceptable and who is not, and she of course, is the one in the know. Just like the Zionists, it’s about what she feels and thinks, not what is objectively true.

'Let’s look at the facts: two years ago, upon consulting her “Jewish comrades”, as she puts it, Sue Blackwell added a page to her “famous” (like, where??) Palestinian Web Page. She called it Nazi Alert. Listed are some notorious right-wingers but also “people who should know better who give support to nazis, racists and holocaust deniers by circulating their material”. It makes things sound very sinister indeed, especially because connected in her mind to Nazi scum, we see the names and profiles of many Palestine solidarity activists who have nothing whatsoever to do with rightwing activity or have any Nazi affiliation in any way, shape or form. So ludicrous were her claims and so undocumented as to whom she put up there, before shifting some of the contents to another area, she even included my name on it. Besides having translated thousands of pages for the site commemorating Italians deported into Nazi camps, I’m known in Italy for having been involved in actions to nail Michael Seifert, the Nazi war criminal of the Bolzen Concentration Camp (see pages, 10, 11, 12, 13), so this placement on a page of "people who give support to Nazis, racists and holocaust deniers" is outrageous, as well as defamatory and false ...

...

'Back to the “famous” Nazi Alert list. Gilad Atzmon was on it, and still is on the “Removed links” page with this text:

Gilad is Jewish (and plays great jazz) but there have been some disturbing reports about things he has allegedly said recently which appear to condone violence against civilians. Not sure whether he said them or not, but anyway I found his "Protocols of the Elders Of London" highly offensive, not least because it slagged off some of my closest Jewish comrades while cosying up to the highly dubious Israel Shamir. So long, Gilad, thanks for the music.”

“disturbing reports” – by whom?

“things he has allegedly said” – did he or didn’t he?

“appear to condone” – do they or don’t they?

“not sure whether he said them or not” – oh, but she sticks the idea in people’s heads of rumours as truth…. This is not a very firm basis to smear someone at levels that it creates something of a monster and anathema of them, but that did not stop Sue.

'Just like Sue, no one likes their friends being slagged off, but slagging off people seems to be the speciality of Sue and her own friends. Yet, if it is done, there should be a legitimate REASON for it and proof that there is something concrete behind the slagging. Crimes or instigation to crime, words and deeds that demonstrate the suppression of the rights of others, that sort of thing. Neither she nor her comrades could ever come up with a reason for it beyond affiliations that they have pumped to mean what they want them to mean, actions that they have blown out of proportion and wilfilly manipulated and distorted, and worst of all, intent. Wherever in the world does Sue Blackwell get the idea that Gilad Atzmon condones violence against civilians? Isn’t a claim that is this inflammatory and defamatory be one that should be substantiated? She has thrown the accusation around and hasn’t bothered to substantiate it in any way. Sue says it, that has to be enough.

Well, at a certain point, Gilad said to himself “Enough is enough,” and decided to have a London legal office look into the charges. Faced with having to actually substantiate her claims or face litigation, Sue Blackwell has now removed the text from the (nameless?) Poison Icon, created a separate page for Gilad, still full of insinuations, but inserted this text (errors in original) into the bottom of the page full of the people who are damaged goods (if they aren’t out and out Nazis, natürlich).

A note on Gilad Atzmon

My comments about Mr. Atzmon have been removed from this page at the request of his lawyers. I would like to make it clear that I have never called Mr. Atzmon a a nazi, a neo-nazi or a fascist. To the extent that readers of my website may have been misled into an impression that I regard Mr Atzmon as a Nazi sympathiser, I apologise to him.

And on the “former” Nazi Alert page writes: 

“Please note: I have never suggested that Atzmon is a nazi. He just calls himself a "proud self-hating Jew" and has very poor taste in friends and politics, in my personal opinion.” [I agree fully].

'Well, if having poor taste in friends and political views that are in poor taste in her “personal opinion” is a hanging crime, get out the rope for Ms Blackwell herself.

'But, seriously, a question does remain and it should be an example and a reflection on how all of these smear campaigns start, grow, develop and ultimately end: if Gilad Atzmon is not and was not ever a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser, why did Sue Blackwell brand him as one or both for more than two years, lumping many others with him, and all of them with right-wingers? ... Now she is taking the advice of solicitors. Does someone slur just as long as they can get away with it, without any criterion besides “what people say” and stop doing it when threatened with litigation? Is this any way to operate in the task of campaigning for Palestinians?? Is this rendering service to their cause?'

Sue Blackwell and others have tried to combat anti-semitism and holocaust denial in the pro-Palestinian movement but it's entrenched. The site 'Holy Hoax: the Heretical Holocaust Museum' has this: 'We refuse to believe in dogmas' and mentions 'three core dogmas - a plan to kill most, if not all European Jews, 6 Million Jewish victims, and the use of chemical slaughter houses - is treated like medieval heresy ...' There are many pro-Palestinian anti-Israel activists who would agree, and many who, to their credit, would oppose this wholeheartedly. 

But these opponents have overlooked or ignored the anti-semitism and holocaust denial to be found amongst Palestinians. Just a few examples, from the site Palestinian Media Watch which gives very disturbing insights into the Palestinian media: (Palestinian Media Watch is an Israeli organization, an excellent one, but a search for information and comment from other sources is recommended, of course.)

'Holocaust desecration, denial, and abuse, are all components of Palestinian Authority ideology. A PA TV children’s broadcast taught that Israel burned Palestinians in ovens, and at an exhibit in Gaza children put dolls in a model oven adorned with a Star of David and a swastika. A senior Palestinian academic taught adults on PA TV: “There was no Dachau, no Auschwitz; these were disinfecting sites.” A Hamas TV documentary explained that it was Jewish leaders who planned the Holocaust, in order to eliminate Jews who were "disabled and handicapped”.

A crossword puzzle clue in the official PA daily identified “Yad Vashem” (Israel’s Holocaust memorial) as a “Center for the Holocaust and Lies.” The same PA daily has published many articles denying the Holocaust, including one that termed the Holocaust a “hen laying golden eggs.”

'Source: Palestinian TV (Fatah), Nov. 29, 2000

Dr. Issam Sissalem, history lecturer, Islamic University Gaza, Palestinian expert on Jews and Judaism, appearing on PA TV educational program "Pages From Our History":
"Lies surfaced about Jews being murdered here and there, and the Holocaust. And of course these are all lies and unfounded claims. There was no Dachau, no Auschwitz! [They] were cleansing sites... '

'Mahmoud Abbas's thesis: Zionists were Nazi allies 
Source: The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, by Mahmoud Abbas, Feb. 15, 1984
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s thesis, "The Other Side: The Secret Relations between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement" (Translation by Wiesenthal Center):
"A partnership was established between Hitler's Nazis and the leadership of the Zionist movement... [the Zionists] gave permission to every racist in the world, led by Hitler and the Nazis, to treat Jews as they wish, so long as it guarantees immigration to Palestine."

The 'Holy Hoax' Website has this as well:

'We consider Israel to be the most racist and evil country on this planet.'

Do Tony Greenstein, Sue Blackwell and the others disagree with this loathsome claim as well? If they disagree, why are they singling out Israel for boycotts? why do they give only Israel this pariah status? These are dangerously deluded people, surely, if not nearly as dangerously deluded as the contributors to 'Holy Hoax.'

Professor Rosenhead: the Ship of Fools



'Narrenshiff,' 'Ship of Fools,' depicted in a German woodcut of 1549. The Ship of Fools carried 'crazed and crazy' people and 'foreign lunatics' (Michel Foucault, 'Madness and Civilization') although no foreign lunatic  so crazed and crazy as Greta Berlin.

Professor Rosenhead sailed on a 'Free Gaza'
ship in 2008, together with another academic from the Management department at LSE, the Research Fellow Mike Cushman. So far as I'm aware, neither has commented on the views of Greta Berlin of the Free Gaza movement. Greta Berlin has claimed that Jews played a leading part in promoting the Holocaust and that Jews (specifically MOSSAD)  carried out the recent murders in Paris, at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket. Professor Rosenhead is recorded as criticizing the views of another  demented and deranged individual, Gilad Atzmon.

 

Dr A. Takriti, historian, censor, slogan-shouter

See also Dr Jason Scott-Warren (CU) and Out! Out! Out!' with video link, 'Cambridge University students hijack talk by David Willetts, Minister for Higher Education 22/11/11.'

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMQaIJoTr2M

 

Film of Shimon Peres speaking at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford University. At 4:00 Abdel Razzaq Takriti begins to shout slogans and is removed.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbT2Z4dh-KA

This noisy and chaotic episode, described below, dates from his time at Wadham College, Oxford, when he was a doctoral student. 

 

Dr Abdel Takriti  is now a lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield. Although elimination of all bias in the teaching of history is obviously impossible, the avoidance of gross ideological bias and outright propaganda in the teaching of history isn't an impossible objective. If Wikipedia can make strenuous efforts to be fair-minded, no less should be expected of a department of history in a British university. He currently teaches a module  'Palestine and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Whether his teaching of the topic is partisan, or propagandist I've no way of knowing. I'm receptive to any evidence.

  One principle he was certainly  attacking, a principle under relentless attack now, not least in so many universities, and a principle which it's essential to defend, is the enlightenment principle of freedom of speech, expressed memorably in the credo 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.' (often attributed to Voltaire, but in fact the words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, in her  book 'The Friends of Voltaire' of 1906. She summarized Voltaire's attitude towards Helvétius, not the words of Voltaire.)

 

A report on Mr Takriti, soon to be Dr Takriti, in action. I find it very disturbing. It was published by the pro-Palestinian site 'Electronic Intifada' (20 November, 2008.)

  'Text messages came from student protestors who had managed to get inside the lecture hall. They let the their  fellow demonstrators outside know that their chanting could be heard inside over the voice of Israeli President Shimon Peres. There was clapping and stamping of feet and placards banged on the railings to make as much noise as possible, along with the constant “Free, free Palestine” which did not stop for a moment of the hour-long lecture.

Silent women in black, shouting students, small babies in prams, university lecturers and a local elected official were just some of the crowd gathered to voice their protest against an Oxford college’s decision to honor Peres on Tuesday, 18 November as he gave the inaugural lecture in a series to be named after him. Some handed out leaflets and many were carrying signs, one of which read “Globalization of Apartheid,” a pun on the title of the lecture, “Globalization of Peace.”

'After the Master of Balliol College, Dr. Andrew Graham, refused to cancel the series  the Oxford University Student Palestine Society in conjunction with the city’s branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) called for the people of Oxford to protest outside the hall as students interrupted the lecture inside.

 

'Halfway through the lecture, Abdel Razzaq Takriti, a Palestinian graduate student at Oxford’s Wadham College, Oxford was ejected from the hall. “Shimon Peres was making a particularly offensive remark claiming that ‘you [Palestinians] could have had a state if it wasn’t for your own mistakes’ and that Israelis fought for their state,” he told this writer, who was also participating in the protest. He then stated “We don’t need your permission to exist” and got support from other students for it. Takriti explained: “So I stood up and walked towards [Peres], saying, ‘how dare you say this at a time when you are besieging 1.5 million people in Gaza? 1.5 million people are starving to death! Shimon Peres, you’re a war criminal. You are responsible for the massacre of hundreds of people in Qana [southern Lebanon]. You’re responsible for an apartheid state. Shame on you.’ so I was dragged out.” '

Some comments, with background information. First of all, Shimon Peres was a 'dove' not a 'hawk,' or at least became a dove early in his career - but Israeli 'hawks,' like the 'doves,' deserve to be listened to without any attempts to shout the speaker down if they come to speak at a British university.

 

Some extracts from 'Israel: A History,' by Martin Gilbert on Shimon Peres. The estimate of other historians may be different, possibly very different, but Abdel Takriti's description is a travesty. Perhaps he would like to give a much fuller, carefully considered estimate of Shimon Peres, with evidence. If he still regards him as a war criminal, what does he think about the use of rockets by Hamas against Israeli civilians: a war crime or not?

Martin Gilbert writes,

'Turning to Shimon Peres, Leah Rabin urged him 'to lead the people of Israel to peace', and to do so 'in the spirit of Kitzhak [Rabin]' who had spoken in these terms:

'I want this government to exhaust every opening, every possibility, to promote and achieve a comprehensive peace. Even with Syria, it will be possible to make peace.'

'Shimon Peres continued with the peace process. The Oslo Accords had been his creation: he now had the full authority as Prime Minister to pursue their timetable.'

' ... on February 25 [1996] a suicide bomber, entering a bus in Jerusalem, killed twenty-five people, most of them Israeli soldiers. A Muslim Arab, Wael Kawasmeh, who was waiting for a bus, was also killed. That same day a suicide bomber in Ashkelon blew himself up at a bus stop. One Israeli was killed, twenty-year old Hofit Ayash, who had recently chosen a wedding gown for her marriage in four months' time.

'Arafat's adviser, Ahmed Tibi, condemned the bus bombs. 'The circle of violence must be broken and stopped,' he said. 'There is no place for revenge attacks.' But on March 13, thirteen more Israelis were killed by a suicide bomber in the heart of Jerusalem on the same bus route, No. 18, as the previous bomb. One of those killed, nineteen-year-old Chaim Amedi, had unintentionally missed the bus that had been destroyed in the last attack. Another of those killed, thirty-eight-year-old George Yonan, was a Christian Arab who had been deaf from birth.

'On the following day a suicide bomber struck in Tel Aviv, in a crowded shopping street in the centre of the city, killing eighteen. These were enormous explosions that ripped the buses apart, mutilating many of the dead beyond recognition. The mood inside Israel was of near despair. It seemed impossible that the peace process could go on while such terrorist killings, on a far larger scale than before, went on.

'Immediately after the March 3 bus bomb, Peres had warned Arafat that the future of the peace process 'hangs in the balance' unless the Palestinian Authority took immediate action against Hamas. Israel could not be the only party to the agreements to keep its commitments. 'It cannot be unilateral.' ...

'The continuation of the Oslo Accords was under great strain. The Government of Israel, first under Rabin and then under Peres, repeatedly declared that it would not allow terror to derail the peace process, and negotiations with the Palestinians continued on the many issues relating to Palestinian autonomy and Israeli withdrawal ...

'Peres, the architect of Oslo, was himself under enormous public pressure to react  to the killings. But he declined to suspend the timetable of the Oslo Accords. Instead, in agreement with the Palestinians, he postponed the redeployment on Hebron, and called an election. In doing so, and thus inviting the Israeli public to express its opinion through the ballot box, he hoped to win and endorsement for continuing the peace negotiations. These included negotiations with Syria, to which Peres, like Rabin before him, was prepared to return most, and even all, of the Golan Heights in return for a full peace between the two countries.'

...

'The election was held on May 29 ... Labour emerged with the largest number of seats in the Knesset: 34 seats as against Likud's 32. But in the separate vote for Prime Minister the former leader of the opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu, won, by the narrowest of margins ...

...

'Following his defeat in the 1996 election, Shimon Peres [described as a 'war criminal' by the demonstrators in Oxford who tried to stop him speaking, including the would-be censor Abdel Takriti] had refused to give up his vision. 'We shall continue to dream together,' he wrote, 'of a Middle East of light and hope.' In pursuit of that dream, he continued to advance the cause of economic cross-border activities, and to 'tutor' his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, in what could be achieved for the region through mutually acceptable agreements with all its neighbours.'

In a speech in the Knesset on October 7, Shimon Peres said,

'I want to say what real peace is in my experience. True peace is the way of agony. I remember what my comrades and I have gone through over the past year, seeing that man, the great military leader and the courageous statesman Yitzhak Rabin murdered before my eyes.' [He was assassinated by a Jew, not a Palestinian.]

...

'And afterwards I saw - I, a man who pursues peace - the terrorist attack in Jerusalem. I know what it is to leave one's office and be told that a bus has exploded. You also showed it on television. Thank you. I went there and I saw the blood and the flesh and the murder and the killing, and I saw the people screaming at me: 'You are guilty'.'

 

 

 

Dr John C Smith on racism and imperialism

 

Accusations of racism are flung around so freely now, and it’s sometimes assumed that anyone accused of racism – wrongly accused – has no alternative but to creep into a hole and admit that the accuser has a vastly higher moral sense. It won’t work. There are legitimate uses for the word, but 'racist,' like 'sexist' and 'elitist' is often used as a simplification-word. Accusations of racism have become reflex responses for many people. They by-pass the brain. Nothing is easier than shouting out 'racist!' and the word has come to be used as an all-purpose condemnation, the use of which confers instant superiority, supposedly. If the word is used, then the user should be prepared to give evidence and to give some sort of meaning to the word. In practice, the word is used again and again as an all-purpose derogatory word, signifying not much more than intense disapproval - and self-approval for the user.

'Racist' is one of the commonest words in the debased lexicon of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, along with genocide, apartheid, oppression. 'Racist' means 'not agreeing with the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign or defending Israel or criticizing Palestinians.'

Musheir el-Farra uses the PSC definition of racism without shame.

John C. Smith is one of the many, many supporters of the Palestinian cause whose opposition to Israel goes with opposition to Britain and the United States, not including, of course, elements of Israeli, British and American society which share his views. There are many, many Islamists who will be completely opposed to John C. Smith and the elements of Israeli, British and American society who share his views, if they are 'kuffars' (non-Muslim.)

From an interview with Efraim Karsh, the author of Islamic Imperialism: A History.'

'FP: If the Left hates imperialism so much, where is it moral indignation regarding Islamic imperialism?

'Karsh: There is a pervasive guilt complex among left-wing intellectuals and politicians, which dates back to the early twentieth century and stems from the belief that the West “has been the arch aggressor of modern times,” to use the words of Arnold Toynbee, one of the more influential early exponents of this dogma. This has resulted in a highly politicized scholarship (especially under the pretentious title of “post-colonial studies”) which berates “Western imperialism” as the source of all evil and absolves the local actors of any blame or responsibility for their own problems. But this self-righteous approach is academically unsound and morally reprehensible. It is academically unsound because the facts tell an altogether different story of Islamic and Middle Eastern history, one that has consistently been suppressed because of its incongruity with the politically-correct dogmas ... '

The fact that I've written on the horrors of American slavery and worked on death penalty cases involving black defendants (disproportionately represented on American death rows) will do me no good. Racism is first and foremost  a Palestinian issue. Palestinians are the victims and Israelis and defenders of Israel are the racists.

The PSC definition of compassion is equally restricted. We all know what 'political correctness' is. 'Compassion correctness' is the view that compassion is ideologically determined. In the PSC interpretation, the suffering of Palestinians takes priority over any other form of suffering. It's legitimate for people to feel compassion for Christians persecuted in Nigeria or Moslems persecuted in Syria, but if a person feels more compassion for these Christians or these Moslems, then this is not real compassion. People who have compassion for Palestinian suffering but defend Israel are completely lacking in compassion and feeling. People who have compassion for Palestinian suffering but no compassion for other suffering - animal suffering, suffering in the Congo, Tibet, Kurdistan, anywhere but Palestine - are people of compassion and genuine feeling. My own record is a very poor one and I'm a person without any compassionate feeling, according to this definition, because I've spent so much time on animal causes, such as factory farming, and human rights, but not specifically Palestinian rights.

Niall Ferguson's 'Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World' should have been subtitled 'How Britain Helped to Make the Modern World' but the actual title doesn't exaggerate wildly. The book is a corrective to John C Smith's fastidious determination to deny any benefits at all to British rule.

In his conclusion, Niall Ferguson and in other places, Nill Ferguson defends the record of the British empire. John C. Smith would no doubt consider that his careful and balanced discussion is the work of an imperialist and that this makes him a racist as well.

'Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world. Those empires that adopted alternative models - the Russian and the Chinese - imposed incalculable misery on their subject peoples. Without the influence of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of states in the world, [but not, of course, the overwhelming majority of states] as they are today. India, the world's largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule. Its elite schools, [cries of rage at the mention of 'elite'] its universities, its civil service, its army, its press and its parliamentary system all still have discernibly British models. Finally, there is the English language itself, perhaps the most important single export of the last 300 years. Today 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on the planet.

'Of course no one would claim that the record of the British Empire was unblemished. On the contrary, I have tried to show how often it failed to live up to its own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in the early era of enslavement, transportation and the 'ethnic cleansing' of indigenous peoples. Yet the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the Empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the twentieth century too it more than justified it own existence, for the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly far worse. And without its Empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them.'

My discussion of material factors in Irish and Northern Irish history on the page Ireland and Northern Ireland: distortions and illusions is relevant here. See the sections Late 19th century stagnation and poverty and The Great Famine.

The section on ''The Great Famine' includes this:

'Christian Wolmar's 'Blood, Iron and Gold: how the railways transformed the world,' after pointing out one way in which diet was improved by the coming of the railways: 'There were countless other examples of the railways improving not only people's diets but their very ability to obtain food ...

'An isolationist interpretation of the Great Famine will focus attention on the callousness of the English response. A ((survey)) will take account of that but also such a factor as the incalculable benefits of the railway revolution, which began in this country. Christian Wolmar quotes Michael Robbins: 'Until about 1870 ... Britain was the heart and centre of railway activity throughout the world.' Writers on the evils of English colonialism have generally failed to acknowledge these incalculable benefits. Their ((survey)) has been defective.'

Simon Hornblower, the historian and commentator on Thucydides, writes in 'Greece: The History of the Classical Period,' the section 'Empire: Athens and the Alternatives,'

'That the fifth-century Athenian Empire (despite the protection which it offered to the more uncomfortably placed Greeks against Persia and, we should add, pirates) was, or became, an oppressive instrument should not be disputed. The strongest argument, against desperate efforts to see it as a benevolent and generally popular institution, is to be found in an important inscription of the year 377, which sets out the terms and aims of a second Athenian naval cenfederacy and explicity repudiates for the future a number of fifth-century practices - tribute, territorial encroachments, garrisons, governors, and so forth - which were clearly felt in retrospect to have been abuses.'

Simon Hornblower's evaluation of the Athenian Empire would benefit from the  counterfactual approach used in 'Alternative History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals.' The strength of Athens, which owed so much to its Empire, enabled it to play a dominant part in repelling the Persian invasions. What if ... an Athens without an empire had been unable to resist the Persian invasions, and the whole of Greece had become part of the Persian Empire?

 Dr Dick Pitt, blogger and debater


Dick Pitt was until recently a lecturer in Mathematics at Sheffield Hallam University. A non-mathematician, I have enormous respect for the abilities of mathematicians such as Dick Pitt, but his non-mathematical ability is a different matter. Those interested in same of the  non-mathematical thought and activities of Dick Pitt are welcome to read his blog, published on the Website of the Sheffield PSC:

www [dot] sheffieldpsc [dot] org [dot] uk/

The Website has a short section

'SPSC bloggers listing
Have a look at all the blog posts here'

but following the link gives very meagre and disappointing results: a few pages of one blogger only, Dick Pitt. There's no reason why the Website shouldn't host many, many pro-Palestinian blogs, but there's seems to be a shortage of informed, interesting comment in the ranks which should concern Sheffield Palestine Solidarity Campaign very much.

The blog is mainly dispiriting, without  the least freshness, originality, individuality or depth. Unflinching honesty isn't a strong point.  Anyone who doubts this or denies this is welcome to study it carefully, to read and re-read it - all of it - to emit little gasps of admiration and delight whilst reading and re-reading it, and to share with as many people as possible  its wealth of insights.

I think that Dick Pitt is a dim blogger with a dismal blog which is hosted by the dire Website of Sheffield Palestine Solidarity Campaign. 'Dim' refers only to his capacity to enlighten in his blog, in his role as a fixture of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. He's a low-wattage would be enlightener or rather no-wattage would-be enlightener, with all the power of a dead firefly. He's not dim academically.

A page which is markedly better:  the one on Egypt and the Muslim brotherhood, despite its many defects. The topic called for a much fuller treatment. This is the page's final paragraph in its entirety. It doesn't mark the conclusion to an argument but is simply stranded on the page, an isolated comment which should certainly have been amplified:

'I have no doubt that the Arab street is much more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than the officers of the Egyptian army.' 

I mention one very important misconception which he has - one of many. I emailed him in connection with the contents of an email he'd sent me. I wrote,

'I'm astonished to read your observations on the Qur'an. Most contemporary Christians are non-fundamentalist – they do not believe that the whole of the Bible is the literal word of God. Christianity has undergone intellectual reforms which have transformed the outlook of most believers. You will find, as a matter of strict fact, that liberal Moslems, as well as radical Islamists, generally believe that the whole of the Qur'an is the literal word of God, or Allah. Those who believe otherwise aren’t regarded as Moslems at all.'

Bernard Lewis, a prominent historian of Islam, wrote in 'The Political Language of Islam:'

' "Fundamentalist" is a Christian term. It seems to have come into use in the early years of last century, and denotes certain Protestant churches and organizations, more particularly those that maintain the literal divine origin and inerrancy of the Bible. In this they oppose the liberal and modernist theologians, who tend to a more critical, historical view of Scripture. Among Muslim theologians there is as yet no such liberal or modernist approach to the Qur'an, and all Muslims, in their attitude to the text of the Qur'an, are in principle at least fundamentalists. Where the so-called Muslim fundamentalists differ from other Muslims and indeed from Christian fundamentalists is in their scholasticism and their legalism. They base themselves not only on the Qur'an, but also on the Traditions of the Prophet, and on the corpus of transmitted theological and legal learning.'

The Qur'an contains some suras which Dick Pitt might like to receive pleasant non-literal interpretations but which Muslims have to take literally. Examples (translation from http://www.quran.com )

 

 4:34

 

Men are in charge of women by [right of] what Allah has given one over the other and what they spend [for maintenance] from their wealth. So righteous women are devoutly obedient, guarding in [the husband's] absence what Allah would have them guard. But those [wives] from whom you fear arrogance - [first] advise them; [then if they persist], forsake them in bed; and [finally], strike them. But if they obey you [once more], seek no means against them. Indeed, Allah is ever Exalted and Grand.

 

5:33

 

Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment.

 

He wrote the piece 'Liberals show their true face' for a page in the Socialist Worker Website. He and his co-writer Angela Shann are described as 'Socialist Alliance prospective city council candidates.' To be a candidate is more often than not to be a long way from political power, or to have not the least hope of political power. But to be a prospective candidate, a possible candidate? This is very, very tentative. It's possible that he's no longer  committed to the Socialist Worker cause.

This extract from weeklyworker conveys the futile work of this secular sect. Supporters of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign include members of many other secular sects, often with relations of fraternal hatred. However, Socialist Alliance (English branch) is actually supported by quite a large number of other political organizations, although none of them with any political power. They include the Communist Party of Great Britain, the International Socialist Group, the International Socialist League, Lewisham Independent Socialists, Red Action, the Revolutionary Democratic Group and the Socialist Solidarity Network


'Accordingly, comrade Hoveman suggested that the executive committee produce a composite document based on the 80-20 platform and that this be then circulated to all Socialist Alliances for amendment.

'Comrade Hoveman did, however, concede a major point floated in advance by the CPGB in the Weekly Worker. Each local SA will be allowed to submit both majority and minority amendments, which a conference arrangements committee would then composite.'

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is an opponent, with many others. An insight into the pitiful bickerings and hatreds of far-left politics, again, with an influence and  representation in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign which are far from negligible:

'So who are the Socialist Alliance? They are an eclectic rag bag of Trotskyists, former Stalinists, various other groupings and assorted individuals. The main organisations involved include: Socialist Workers Party, Militant (now calling itself Socialist Party of England and Wales, or SPEW), Alliance for Workers Liberty, Communist Party of Great Britain, International Socialist Organisation and Workers Power ...

'In any case, it is interesting to learn how such a disparate collection of former enemies could have come together in the first place. It does not seem so long ago that the AWL were accusing the SWP of 'violent thuggery' against some of their own members (see AWL pamphlet Why the SWP Beats Up Its Socialist Critics), and surely the former Stalinists of the CPGB would have balked at the prospect of talking to Trotskyists, let alone organising with them. But whatever particular ism each of these leftist sects subscribe to, they all represent the left-wing of capitalism's political apparatus, and thus are the enemy of the working class.'

 

I mention Dick Pitt in this contribution to a Comments section of the site 'Harry's Place,' given next. After that, I write a little more about Dick Pitt before turning to other matters: the freedom which is treated very finely in the section 'Comments Policy' of Harry's Place, and the freedom which is treated sentimentally, inadequately in the outpourings of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. The comment I added to the Website began by criticizing a pro-Israeli commenter, 'Tokyo Nambu,' who makes a dim, dismal and dire comment:

'Tokyo Nambu's comment 'If the Labour Party weren't anti-Semitic scum ... ' is a grossly misguided generalization. Its ignorance is extreme. It ignores the Labour MP's who openly support Israel, many, but not all, members of the group 'Labour Friends of Israel.' It may have far less members than 'Conservative Friends of Israel' (it's a heartening fact that 80% of Conservative MP's belong to this group) but these MP's don't in the least deserve to be included in Tokyo Nambu's lazy-minded dismissal.

' think it's likely that supporters of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign are far more active in lobbying MP's than British supporters of Israel. I see it as essential to write to MP's, the ones who denounce Israel and the ones who support Israel - to write to a wide range of people and organizations - to express support for the supporters of Israel and to challenge the views of Israel's opponents.


Some pro-Palestinian-anti-Israel people: others

Assorted grotesques

Deborah Fink

Film of Deborah Fink's deranged reaction after being ejected from the Sadler's Wells Theatre for disruption of a performance, by the young people of the Israeli Batsheva Ensemble.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIg3v6pxeQ

She posted this comment on an anti-Zionist weblog: 'Israel does not deserve to be called ‘The Jewish state.’ It should be called ‘The Satanic state.' [

Compare this statement of Deborah Fink with some statements of the former President of Iran,  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

He predicted that Muslims would uproot 'satanic powers' and reaffirmed his prediction that the Jewish state will soon be wiped off the map, the Agence France-Presse news agency reported.

'I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene.' 

'Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started.' 

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi

is a tireless campaigner against parking fines as well as against the state of Israel. She once chained herself to some railings as a protest against a fine. She only has the tirelessness of unending misdirected effort. She's a tired, stale, predictable person, capable of mechanically using words like 'genocide' but not of making scrupulous distinctions, or carrying out a wide and compassionate ((survey)): if she, and the others, had much genuine compassion, it wouldn't be so subject to {restriction}.

The literary critic F R Leavis wrote of the poet Edith Sitwell and her brothers (in 'New Bearings in English Poetry'): ' ... the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than poetry.' The disruption of the Proms concert by Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and the others belongs to the history of exhibitionism rather than authentic struggle. It's no more likely to lessen in the slightest the intractable problems of the Middle East than her parking protest.

Tony Greenstein


The site Harry's Place gives this interesting discussion of Tony Greenstein. It quotes Oliver Kamm:

'Tony Greenstein, is himself a political crank of the first order. I had a brush with him in the 1980s when he came to speak to my university Labour Club on behalf of his Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine. His views on terrorism ensured that a motion to affiliate to his organisation received only two votes in favour. A little while later he distinguished himself by writing in outrage to the far-Left London Labour Briefing complaining that it had praised Mrs Thatcher’s courage in defying the Brighton bombers ...'

'Tony Greenstein's response included this: 'The attack on Thatcher by the IRA was obviously legitimate. She was a military target.' Obviously legitimate to eliminate the Prime Minister of a democracy? You've got a lot to learn! Tony Greenstein has been described as an 'ignoramus.' This seems exceptionally generous.

Harry's Place points out that when he visited Syria, the visit was paid for by the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and that he was involved in previous disruption of Israeli music-making, the disruption of the Jerusalem Quartet's concert at the Wigmore Hall.

It goes on to comment, 'But of course, it is not just boycotting Israel that will satisfy Greenstein. He admitted in a letter to Weekly Worker that his revolutionary aim is ”Yes, I want the state of Israel to be destroyed.' On the holocaust, he argued that “without a Zionist movement... it is hard to believe that anything like 6 million would have been allowed to die.”

He isn't popular in some radical left circles, either (which, for the record, aren't circles I very often frequent.) This is from 'Lies, Damn Lies and Tony Greenstein:' by Daniel Randall and Sacha Ismail of the AWL (the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, www.whatnextjournal.co.uk)

 

They write of him ''attacking the AWL in characteristic terms, even though he knew this would harm the coalition of which he himself was part. This sort of behaviour is illustrative of Tony’s general approach – not rational, worked-out criticism but frenzied slander. His diatribe in What Next? [‘The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty – Britain’s Revolutionary Imperialists’] is no different. It is embarrassing in its lack of rigour, in the way it substitutes anecdotal slander for political critique, and in its use of blatant lies, distortions and half-truths.'

Greta Berlin on Charlie Hebdo

Greta Berlin, described as 'one of the key campaigners for the Free Gaza Movement,' has made the psychotic claim  that Israelis, not Islamist terrorists, carried out  the killings at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and that the Israelis carried out the attack to cause division between France (which had voted for recognition of a Palestinian state) and the Palestinians:

'MOSSAD just hit the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo in a clumsy false flag designed to damage the accord between Palestine and France ... Here's hoping the French police will be able to tell a well executed hit by a well trained Israeli intelligence service and not assume the Moslems would be likely to attack France when France is their friend ... Israel did tell France there would be grave consequences if they voted with Palestine. A four year old could see who is responsible for this terrible attack.'

Amedy Coulibaly, who killed the hostages at the kosher grocery shop in Paris, made no allowances for France's support for the Palestinians. He claimed that he was defending 'oppressed Muslims' in Palestine, according to a telephone interview with him conducted by a TV channel.

mondoweiss.net is an anti-Israel-pro-Palestinian site but it draws the line at approval of Greta Berlin

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/10/if-only-it-was-just-one-tweet-one-activists-experience-in-the-our-land-facebook-group

The information it provides is very disturbing, including another psychotic claim: that Jews played a leading part in promoting the Holocaust:  according to Greta Berlin, the Holocaust 'was aided, abetted and to a large degree - created by them [the Zionists].'

There's an urgent need for people and organizations who have endorsed Greta Berlin to state publicly that they don't endorse her any longer. A photograph of Musheir El-Farra, the Chair of a branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and  one of the 'leaders of Gaza civil society' who signed the 'important statement' encouraging Hamas not to observe a cease-fire (except under impossible conditions) shows him with Greta Berlin: 

http://www.sheffieldpsc.org.uk/content/greta-berlin

On the page, she is  described as 'one of the key campaigners for the Free Gaza Movement.

Greta Berlin's stepdaughter (quoted on the site www.danielpipes.org):

'On numerous occasions I heard Greta launch the insults "the god damned Israelis and those f****** Jews" at the dinner table in front of my father (a Jew) and the few Israeli friends and relatives who ventured to visit. Additionally, any rational debate attempted by anyone with an opposing view to Greta's, was immediately terminated with the responses: "Shut up" or "You don't know what the hell you're talking about." '

The Russian analyst Alexei Martyonov offers an alternative view. He has claimed (on the mainstream news channel 'LifeNews') that US intelligence was responsible for the Charlie Hebdo killings, for various reasons, one of them being to exert pressure on the French President to maintain economic sanctions against Russia, and to prevent European countries from becoming allies of Russia and maintain their dependence on the US.

A confused dreamer

After making a public stand in defence of Israel at a large demonstration organized by Sheffield Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the city centre, I talked to some of the folk gathered there and heard one or two pieces of folk-lore.

I had a constructive talk with one individual, to begin with. I mentioned the Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar, in acute danger from ruthless ISIS militants, and mentioned with approval that there would be bombing to relieve the danger ... he agreed with me ... but his mood abruptly changed when I mentioned that it would be the Americans doing the bombing. No! Not at all!

Useless to mention that to a Yazidi in imminent danger of death, bombing of ISIS militants nearby by Americans would be an absolute, unqualified good, that no other air force was nearby and able to do the bombing, that there was absolutely no prospect that the bombing could be carried out by an air force which the man approved of, such as the Cuban air force. This was a shocking insight into the mind of someone living, politically and militarily, at least, in a dream world.

If ISIS continues to make territorial gains, it's not impropbable that ISIS (or another ultra-militant force) will be able to threaten the Palestinian territories. The territories are militarily very weak and will inevitably fall, unless aided by outside forces. In their extreme need, the Palestinian territories may be very, very glad to accept the help of the Americans, and the Israelis, who would oppose with all their might territories on their borders controlled by ISIS.

People can suit themselves. They can accept realities or refuse to accept realities. In the past, Palestinians have chosen to refuse to accept realities again and again. But in this scenario, they might even choose to accept the reality of American or Israeli help.

There are many, many people in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign who resemble this dreamer. They are the people who detest Israel but who also detest America, and detest Britain too, but with no strong feelings about, say, the Iranian regime, unless they are strong feelings of approval.

On my page Ethics: theory and practice I discuss the concept of outweighing which illuminates moral dilemmas in ethics, other ethical issues and many non-ethical issues. I use the symbol > for outweighing.

In the Second World War, an alliance with Stalinist Russia could have been rejected by Britain. The Stalinist regim was, after all, one which had terrorized, packed off to labour camps and killed huge numbers of Russians and other nationalities, such as the Ukrainians who were starved to death. But to reject Russian help would lead to certain defeat by Germany and the invasion and occupation of Britain, with forced labour, executions and other harsh penalties. This was a clear-cut case of outweighing. The moral objections to Stalinist Russia were outweighed by the overwhelming importance of national self-preservation and the avoidance of defeat and occupation. Symbolically:

[national self-preservation] > [moral objections to Stalinist Russia]

On the same page, I explain my concept of conjugates, which amongst other things accompany - are linked with - the single issues of single issue campaigners. These campaigners often support and oppose very strongly a range of other issues. What we get is not a single issue in isolation but a packet of issues. So, vegans oppose cruelty to farm animals and have adopted a diet which cuts out all animal products (with the possible exception of honey) but their conjugates are many: vegans are almost always pacifists, for example, or at least tend to have no interest at all in such matters as defence.

The conjugates of pro-Palestinian-anti-Israel activists very often include pacifism and a complete lack of interest in defence too, hostility to British and American policies and hostility to capitalism, often accompanied by a belief in small-scale economic organization which could never meet the demands of an unavoidably complex world.

Not many things seem to disturb their dream world (except for the nightmarish Zionist threat and the British and American threat) but their complacency is probably being undermined little by little by realities. If ISIS ever did try to invade the Palestinian territories. there might well be extreme disillusionment, similar to the disillusionment which took hold of so many communists after the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956. Caroline Hoefferle, 'British Student Activism in the Long Sixties:'

' ... thousands left the Communist Party that year and the British Left was fractured into dozens of tiny Marxist sects, competing for membership and struggling to create a new vision of socialism.'

The dozens of tiny far left sects are still in evidence, and the  Palestine Solidarity Campaign includes many joint members, people who members of the Solidarity Campaign and members of one or another far left sect.

The Quaker Gordon Ferguson: not totally harmless


Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to describe the Quaker Gordon Ferguson  as deranged - or perhaps not. His naivety, his complete, uncritical acceptance of the Palestinian narrative is overwhelmingly stupid.

He writes, in connection with 'World Week for Peace in Palestine and Israel: 21 - 27 Sept.

'This year’s theme is prisoners. Resources and activities prepared for the week will focus on the plight of Palestinians imprisoned by Israeli occupation forces ...

Everyone is invited to:

1write an open letter to the Palestinian people, offering your prayers and support for prisoners and their families. Rather than offering a template, you are asked to write a short message (around 200 words) from your own heart, expressing your solidarity with those in prison. Feel free to write the messages and/or prayers in your own language! If you can, please email your short message by 15 September to Yusef Daher, executive director of the Jerusalem Inter-Church Centre, atyusefdaher@yahoo.com. Yusef will collect all messages, and then prepare them for circulation among the Palestinian people.'

 

' ... prepare them for circulation among the Palestinian people' is a grandiose way of putting it. 'The Palestinian People' has become a very prestigious phrase for far too many people. As a matter of strict fact, the Palestinian people is made up in varying proportions of armed and unarmed psychopaths, very good and not so good people,  people well above average in insight, average and well below average in insight, and many other groups and sub-groups, although not so many Quakers. Those imprisoned by the Israelis are disproportionately once armed psychopaths, including failed suicide bombers.

Asking people to write 'in your own language' is the advice of a clueless person, one who doesn't think things through. I can't think of any initiative less likely to end the danger of hostilities in Gaza or the Middle East as a whole than the prayers and messages of these Quakers in Urdu or Somali or Bengali as well as English as a gift to Arabic speaking Palestinians.

A  Palestinian's view of Gordon Ferguson may be very different from what he imagines. This brings me to an issue which is not widely discussed. The majority of Palestinians - the vast majority of Palestinians, surely - believe that hell awaits the Quaker Gordon Ferguson, and for that matter all the people who call for boycotts of Israel and 'freedom' for Palestine, if these people happen not to be Moslem. This view of the future prospects for Quakers may not have occurred to many Quakers because Quakerism lacks a doctrine of eternal damnation.

The dire reality of rocket attack from Gaza is obviously far from the thoughts of this far from harmless individual. Anyone who, like Gordon Ferguson, believes in the power of prayer could try praying for Gordon Ferguson.

 

Antony Loewenstein and accuracy

From the Daily Telegraph Tim Blair blog, LEARN FROM THE MASTER


'Antony Loewenstein, a “long-term Middle East watcher and participant” who is writing a book on Israel and Palestine, reveals the vast extent of his specialist knowledge: 

 

'     Yet more evidence of Israel speaking the language of ‘peace’ but acting entirely differently came from a senior ally of Sharon, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni. He told a legal conference in early December that, despite years of Israeli denials, Sharon himself imagines the 425-mile separation barrier as the future border between Israel and a potential Palestinian State.'    

 

As Tim Blair points out, Tzipi Livni is a woman.

 

Antony Loewenstein is an Australian. I'm a Yorkshireman. Australians and Yorkshire folk are supposedly no-nonsense, blunt-talking types who have no patience with obvious garbage. The Scots too. In my experience, pro-Palestinian anti-Israeli Australians, Scots and Yorkshire folk don't conform in the least to this stereotype. They're receptive to outlandish ideas and regurgitate outlandish ideas. To me, the claim that it's Israel, not Isis or Iran, which is by far the biggest threat to peace in the Middle East is an outlandish, a freakish idea. The claim that Palestinian society, in contrast to Israeli society, is a model society for humane, progressive people, likewise. 

 

 

Vittorio Arrigoni and Kayla Mueller, hostages

 

Vittorio Arrigoni, a pro-Palestinian activist, was abducted in Gaza and strangled, badly beaten, soon after abduction. Two Palestinians were sentenced to life imprisonment for his murder (the death sentence is often imposed for murder in Gaza) but the sentence was reduced to only fifteen years on appeal.

From www.frontpagemag.com/

'Arrigoni was sent to Gaza to assist the Islamist terrorists by the pro-terror International Solidarity Movement or ISM, the same group that once sent Rachel Corrie into Gaza to collaborate with terrorists and obstruct Israeli anti-terror operations ...

'So just why did the Islamists murder Arrigoni?  The answer is simple: These fanatics believe that everyone who is not a Muslim, and especially not a Muslim of their own particular fundamentalist genre, is an infidel, an enemy, someone deserving death.  It does not matter in the least that the infidel in question has come to Gaza to assist the terrorists.  In the case of Arrigoni, it did not even matter that he had tattoos on his body endorsing their terrorism.  The “bewilderment” being expressed by the ISM and its amen chorus, along with Arrigoni’s Stalinist Italian groupies, is simply further indicative of how little these people know about the Middle East.'

Islamists' murder of a 'peace activist,' someone completely committed to the Palestinian cause and completely opposed to Israel, was met with revulsion and incomprehension. The revulsion is not just understandable but thoroughly deserved. The incomprehension shows how little many people know about radical Islamism. The same response was made in the case of a victim vastly more deserving of respect, Alan Henning, the aid worker to Syria beheaded by Isis. When his aid convoy was held up by ISIS, all the Moslem members of the convoy were released. Alan Henning was made captive. To his captors, all non-Moslems are contemptible, worthy of death - and this includes all the non-Moslem people who work tirelessly for the Palestinian cause, such as Vittorio Arrigoni. The word used by Islamists for non-believers is 'kuffar.'

Kayla Mueller was the 'aid worker' who may have have been killed in a Jordanian air strike but was more likely killed by the ISIS group which held her captive after she was abducted  in Syria. Her courage can be admired - the courage needed to enter Syria, at least -  but not her  ideological idealism. She gave uncritical support to Palestinian rioters, had a liking for the rhetoric of rioting but, like Vittorio Arrigoni, was  no more than a 'kuffar,' one of the despised unbelievers, to  the repulsive people holding her captive. This is a sample of her writing. She views minarets as agents of liberation and resistance:

'Oppression greets us from all angles. Oppression wails from the soldiers radio and floats through tear gas clouds in the air. Oppression explodes with every sound bomb and sinks deeper into the heart of the mother who has lost her son. But resistance is nestled in the cracks in the wall, resistance flows from the minaret 5 times a day and resistance sits quietly in jail knowing its time will come again.'

She has no conception of realities. Included in the resistance which 'sits quietly in jail' are the terrorists who have slaughtered Jews and are given payment by the Palestinian authority for doing that.

Tom Gross writes about some of the victims of Palestinian terrorism. The category of Palestinian terrorism went unacknowledged by Kayla Mueller. It was missing from her world view. He mentions the 'Rachels.'

'Rachel Thaler, aged 16, was blown up at a pizzeria in an Israeli shopping mall. She died after an 11-day struggle for life following a suicide bomb attack on a crowd of teenagers ... Rachel Levy (aged 17, blown up in a grocery store), Rachel Levi (19, shot while waiting for the bus), Rachel Gavish (killed with her husband, son and father while at home celebrating a Passover meal), Rachel Charhi (blown up while sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe, leaving three young children), Rachel Shabo (murdered with her three sons aged 5, 13 and 16 while at home), Rachel Ben Abu (16, blown up outside the entrance of a Netanya shopping mall) and Rachel Kol, 53, who worked at a Jerusalem hospital and was killed with her husband in a Palestinian terrorist attack in July a few days after the London bombs.'

 Edwin Black, writing in 'The Guardian:'

'On both sides of the pond, in London and Washington, policymakers are struggling to weather their budget crises. Therefore, it may astound American and British taxpayers that the precious dollars and pounds they deploy in  Israel and the Occupied Territories funds terrorism.

'The instrument of this funding is US and UK programs of aid paid to the Palestinian Authority. This astonishing financial dynamic is known to most Israeli leaders and western journalists in Israel. But it is still a shock to most in Congress and many in Britain's Parliament, who are unaware that money going to the Palestinian Authority is regularly diverted to a program that systematically rewards convicted prisoners with generous salaries.  These transactions in fact violate American and British laws that prohibit US funding from benefiting terrorists. More than that, they could be seen as incentivizing murder and terror against innocent civilians.

'Here's how the system works. When a Palestinian is convicted of an act of terror against the Israeli government or innocent civilians, such as a bombing or a murder, that convicted terrorist automatically receives a generous salary from the Palestinian Authority. The salary is specified by the Palestinian "law of the prisoner" and administered by the PA's Ministry of Prisoner Affairs. A Palestinian watchdog group, the Prisoners Club, ensures the PA's compliance with the law and pushes for payments as a prioritized expenditure. This means that even during frequent budget shortfalls and financial crisis, the PA pays the prisoners' salaries   first and foremost – before other fiscal obligations.'



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Above, survivers of the Holocaust travel to Israel after World War 2.

The monument in memory of those deported by rail for extermination during the holocaust. The monument is at Yad Vashem (Hebrew: 'a memorial and a name'), Israel's memorial centre for the victims of the Holocaust. The memorial is near to the 'Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations,' which honours non-Jews who chose to save Jews from genocide, for reasons not to do with financial gain or evangelism.

https://www.yadvashem.org/

Above, the Hebrew for 'Israel'

Above, Bronislaw Huberman The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra was founded as the Palestine Symphony Orchestra in 1936 by this Polish-Jewish violinist, at a time when many Jewish musicians were being dismissed from orchestras in Europe.

During the Second World War, the orchestra performed 140 times before Allied soldiers, including a 1942 performance for soldiers of the Jewish Brigade at El Alamein. At the end of the war, it performed in recently liberated Belgium. In 1948, after the creation of the State of Israel, the orchestra was renamed as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

The conductor Zubin Mehta with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Their recording of the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante K364 (soloists: Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman) is one I listen to very often.

After these achievements,  this dross:

Animal Rebellion and Palestine Action

This section includes a link to a film published by Animals Australia which shows scenes of horrific cruelty to farm animals in Gaza. (Links are shown highlighted in grey.)

https://www.animalsaustralia.org/features/gaza-video-evidence.php

It also includes material from other sections of the page which are relevant to people who share the views (and illusions) of Animal Rebellion and Palestine Action.  I don't regard campaigning for animal welfare as mistaken, not in the least. There's information about my own work in animal welfare on the page Animal welfare and activism and there's also  Bullfighting: arguments against and action against which is very extensive.

A report by Justin Knowles was published in 'Tamworth Informed (Tuesday, 16th March 2021)

https://www.tamworthinformed.co.uk/elitekl/

with the title 'Palestine Action and Animal Rebellion Shut Tamworth Factory.' It included images of the factory smeared with red paint. The factory is owned by EliteKL, a subsidiary of Elbit. The owners are Israeli.

Palestine Action informed Tamworth Informed that 'Elbit Systems produces surveillance technology and the engines for military drones, among other munitions and components required for the business of war.' There's more about drones and the business of war later - from me, not Palestine Action or Animal Rebellion.

Animal Rebellion don't know nearly enough about a topic that should be important to them, the treatment of animals in Israel and the treatment of animals in Palestine - to be fair, I only mention one aspect of animal abuse,  in Gaza, but it's so horrific that Animal Rebellion, like Palestine Action, should waste no time in preparing some sort of defence - but of course they won't, because they can't.

This video, on mistreatment of animals in Gaza, comes with a warning from 'Animals Australia:.' it's  very, very distressing:

https://www.animalsaustralia.org/features/gaza-video-evidence.php

Australian RSPCA makes this comment:

Footage uploaded onto YouTube during the Festival of Sacrifice in October 2013 revealed the horrific treatment of Australian cattle in the Gaza Strip in Palestine. It is some of the most shocking and distressing footage we have seen.

The footage documents Australian cattle:

The middle east is generally reliant on authoritarian rule and Israel is the exception. The middle east tends to be oblivious to issues of animal welfare. The only exceptions are isolated individuals in those countries - and the state of Israel. Israel hasn't taken the attitude that, faced by enormous threats, it can neglect every other consideration but survival and protection. It recognizes that civilization requires care for animals. Israel was one of the first countries in the world to ban the use of wild animals in circuses, in 1995. (Britain still has no national ban, although many local authorities do have bans.)

Israel used to be the fourth largest producer of foie gras in the world. Unlike, of course, France, it banned the production of foie gras, recognizing that the ethical objections were unanswerable.

There are many other developments: animal rights/animal welfare activity in Israel has developed enormously. Israel has even banned dissection of animals in primary and secondary schools. At Universities, dissection is optional. Vegans in the Israeli Defence Force are given vouchers to buy vegan food and aren't required to wear leather boots. Boots made with synthetic materials are provided. Israel has never had a whaling industry but it joined the International Whaling Commission so as to vote against any resumption of whaling. Opposition to the fur trade is intense in Israel. Legislation is being considered which would be the most far-reaching in the world, to prohibit the import, production and sale of all fur products. A survey of Israeli opinion carried out by the polling company Maagar-Mohot gave these results. In answer to the question, 'Do you find it moral to kill animals if they are killed only for their fur?' 86% of Israelis were opposed. On the question, 'Would you support a bill to ban the trade of fur in Israel?' 79% were in favour of a ban.

 A further topic:

Homosexuality in Gaza 

 
Richard Elliott, writing in 'The Commentator:'

' ... the Palestinian authority in the Gaza strip still legislates that homosexuality is illegal and faces severe penalties of up to10 years in prison. The West Bank is a slightly different matter; homosexuality was made legal as far back as 1951, and there has been no repealing of this law.

'The difference between the West Bank and the Gaza strip, however, is that the legalisation of homosexuality in the former was installed by the Jordanians, not the Palestinians.

'The legal punishments in place for homosexuals in Gaza may strike many readers as terrible; but the social injustices often outweigh the legal ones. In Russia, while the injustices enforced by law are technicalities compared to the far more serious civil intolerance and often physical cruelty which gay men face, so it follows that the social outweighs the legal in Palestine.  

'Several years in prison, as is the legal recommendation for homosexuality in Gaza, is nothing compared to what could happen if a gay man were to fall foul of a gang of radical Islamists ...

'There is nothing new about gay Palestinians fleeing to Israel because of the hostility they face from their fellow countrymen. Reports dating back to at least 2003 from the BBC suggest that many gay Palestinians who undertake the risk of fleeing to Israel feel far safer and socially accepted there than in their native Palestine.

'Palestinian homosexuals in Israel proper are grateful for the legal protection they receive from the kind of intolerant violence many men sharing their orientation are used to in Palestine; a report documented in a piece for Vice magazine suggests that there are at least 2,000 homosexual men originating from the Palestinian territories living in pluralist Tel-Aviv. Evidence that integration of Palestinian homosexuals works is that the gay bars in Tel-Aviv are filled with both Arabs and Jews.

The people at Palestine Action and Animal Rebellion are smugly certain that the manufacture of drones and military equipment is always wrong. Events in Afghanistan and many other places show that their confidence is based on delusion, illusion and ignorance. Recently, two members of ISIS-K were killed by a drone. Is this to be regretted, given that ISIS-K killed more than 90 Afghan civilians as well as members of the American military? The terrorist group has targetted hospitals (including a maternity ward), universities and other places. In May, ISIS-K targeted a school for girls in Kabul, killing 85 and wounding 275 students, according to a Defense Intelligent Agency assessment.

Another extract from another section of the page:

Israeli power prevents the incursion of forces into the Palestinian territories which are vastly less enlightened than the Israeli state, just as British power prevented the invasion of the Irish Republic by the Nazis during the Second World War. Irish nationalist ideology ('nobody has suffered like the Irish and there are no oppressors as bad as the British') and Palestinian ideology ('nobody has suffered like the Palestinians and there are no oppressors as bad as the Israelis') have significant linkages.

The evidence is that the conditions needed for the establishment of a successful democratic Palestinian state, such as a concern for freedom of speech, are largely lacking. If the external enemy, Israel, were ever to  disappear and a Palestinian state became a reality, then it's likely that there would be internal conflict and power struggles within the Palestinian state, perhaps pursued by violent means, such as suicide bombing, rather than peaceful decision-making after free debate.

A Palestinian state  would still be vulnerable, at risk of invasion by a much stronger state or organization. The call to 'stop arming Israel,' if successful, would be disastrous for Palestinians as well as Israelis. An Israel without the means to defend itself would be attacked very quickly, to be followed by slaughter of Jews on a massive scale. It's overwhelmingly unikely that the territory of a Palestinian state with only its own forces available for defence, in the absence of powerful Israeli forces, would be respected. It's overwhelmingly likely that in this volatile region, a Palestinian state denied the power of the Israeli forces would be invaded, by another state or by a non-state power. People who have lived under the domination of ISIS will have no illusions about the barbarities which are possible when a non-state power takes control of a territory. Anti-Israel activists and their uncritical supporters are in the grip of illusion: they ignore political and military realities in the region.

Palestinians:  harsh realities

Homosexuality is legal in Israel but illegal in Gaza and punishable by imprisonment for up to ten years. All those people who call themselves 'Friends of Palestine,' such as the members of  'Labour Party Friends of Palestine' have many, many questions to answer. A good starting point would be this simple question: Why does Gaza penalize homosexuality? The persecution of homosexuals can't possibly be blamed on Israel.

Hamas is a radical Islamist organization but a substantial section of Palestinian society has radical Islamist views. Percentages below are from the Pew Research Center's extensive surveys of attitudes in Islamic countries.  'Labour Party Friends of Palestine, members of Palestine Solidarity Campaign groups and others - what do you make of the startling information below? I'm simply giving the findings of an established organization with a high reputation. What do you make of the arguments I give, such as the one concerning the overwhelmingly likely results if the slogan 'Stop arming Israel'  was ever put into practice?

Some findings of the Pew Research Center:

Stoning to death for adultery may not be practised in the Palestinian territories but 84% of Palestinians support the punishment. 

The conviction that a woman must always obey her husband is widely held, with 87% support in the Palestinian territories.

Support in Gaza for suicide bombings has declined but 62% of people in Gaza still believe that suicide bombings are often justified or sometimes justified to protect Islam. This is the highest level of support in the Islamic world.

66% of people in the Palestinian territories believe in execution for those who leave Islam.

There is widespread Palestinian support for such cruel punishments as amputation of the hand. 76% of people in the Palestinian territories support these punishments.

(The statistics relate to opinions at the time of the survey, conducted in 2013.)

The death penalty in the Palestinian territories may be imposed after a very brief trial, lasting only a day, or no trial at all, as in the case of some of the people executed by Hamas for alleged 'collaboration with Israel.' Israel has used the death penalty only twice in its modern history - including the execution of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. 

Palestinian sanctions against unmarried women who have children can be severe. A Palestinian woman was sentenced to six years imprisonment for having an illegitimate child, whose formative years have now been spent in prison.

Honour killings have increased dramatically in the Palestinian territories. The Palestinian Minister of Women's Affairs, Rabiha Diab, blamed Israel for the increase in honour killings. Claims to victimhood will do nothing to solve the problem.

A vigorous and free press - vigorous and free media - is essential. Anyone who claims that the Palestinian media are just as free as the Israeli media, just as free to comment and criticize, anyone who claims that freedom of opinion is just as much allowed in Palestine as in Israel, is surely living an illusion. The Palestinian authorities should end their restrictive attitude to matters of free expression, but aren't in the least likely to.

Hamas and very many Palestinians have  refused again and again to recognize harsh realities, such as this one - attacking Israel with rockets or other weapons will be followed by retaliation, just as attacks upon Britain during the Second World War were followed by retaliation. Casualties in Gaza during  recent conflicts -  and material damage - would have been very light if only this principle had been followed: stop firing rockets, stop breaking ceasefires.

Gaza has been  confident that whenever it went to war, the international community would pay for reconstruction but now, donor countries are less ready to contribute. Meanwhile, building materials intended to be used for reconstruction are diverted to the construction of more tunnels for terrorist action and the Palestinian Authority continues to give financial support to people convicted of terrorist action by the Israelis - the worst terrorists receive a salary which is ten times the average Palestinian wage.

There are many extenuating circumstances in the case of Israeli use of force, such as the issuing of warnings before attack in innumerable instances. There are no extenuating circumstances which could possibly excuse Hamas' indiscriminate use of rockets against Israel.

Anti-Israel action, including BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) action, would almost certainly have these results, if successful: the replacement of Israel by a state with vastly less enlightened policies in such areas as the ones mentioned above, a state which would be militarily very weak - unable to prevent invasion by  forces which are completely ruthless - and the  slaughter of Jews on a massive scale.

Israeli power prevents the incursion of forces into the Palestinian territories which are vastly less enlightened than the Israeli state, just as British power prevented the invasion of the Irish Republic by the Nazis during the Second World War. Irish nationalist ideology ('nobody has suffered like the Irish and there are no oppressors as bad as the British') and Palestinian ideology ('nobody has suffered like the Palestinians and there are no oppressors as bad as the Israelis') have significant linkages.

The evidence is that the conditions needed for the establishment of a successful democratic Palestinian state, such as a concern for freedom of speech, are largely lacking. If the external enemy, Israel, were ever to  disappear and a Palestinian state became a reality, then it's likely that there would be internal conflict and power struggles within the Palestinian state, perhaps pursued by violent means, such as suicide bombing, rather than peaceful decision-making after free debate.

A Palestinian state  would still be vulnerable, at risk of invasion by a much stronger state or organization. The call to 'stop arming Israel,' if successful, would be disastrous for Palestinians as well as Israelis. An Israel without the means to defend itself would be attacked very quickly, to be followed by slaughter of Jews on a massive scale. It's overwhelmingly unikely that the territory of a Palestinian state with only its own forces available for defence, in the absence of powerful Israeli forces, would be respected. It's overwhelmingly likely that in this volatile region, a Palestinian state denied the power of the Israeli forces would be invaded, by another state or by a non-state power. People who have lived under the domination of ISIS will have no illusions about the barbarities which are possible when a non-state power takes control of a territory. Anti-Israel activists and their uncritical supporters are in the grip of illusion: they ignore political and military realities in the region.

All the criticisms of Palestinian society and policies I make on this page are with the recognition that Palestinian society isn't remotely as barbaric in its practice as Iran, in such areas as the  criminal law and punishment. To consider that Israel is a country which is much worse than Iran is contemptible. To compare Israel with Nazi Germany is contemptible. Nazi Germany, like Stalinist Russia, is in a category of its own.

Democracies and warfare: harsh realities




This photograph shows the aftermath of a bombing raid on Cologne, according to  Wikipedia (Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1979-025-19A), but 'Der Zweite Weltkrieg in Bildern und Dokumenten,' Dritter Band, 'Sieg ohne Frieden 1944 - 1945' edited by H-A Jacobsen and H Dollinger places the grim scene in the city of Braunschweig, which experienced 42 air raids during the war.

Israel, the city of Be'er Sheva. The missile defence system 'Iron Dome' in action, November 15, 2012, 2nd day of operation 'Pillar of Defence.'

The threat from much smaller missiles

Nazi Germany deserved to lose the Second World War, not Great Britain. The moral superiority of Great Britain, the evil of Nazi Germany, are not erased by the fact that British bombers killed these schoolchildren, killed a total of 593 000 German civilians, according to some estimates, and converted vast areas of German towns and cities to rubble. W G Sebald, 'On the Natural History of Destruction:' ' ... at the end of the war 7.5 million people were left homeless, and there were 31.1 cubic metres of rubble for everyone in Cologne and 42.8 cubic metres for every inhabitant of Dresden.'

The democracies which are the focus of attention in this section are Israel, Britain and the US.


It's a gross misconception to believe that Israel cannot possibly be a liberal, humane state in view of its  attacks on Gaza by bombing from the air and other means. It's a gross misconception to believe that totalitarian states, such as the Nazi state, may kill many civilians and destroy many civilian homes, but that democratic states, such as Britain, the United States and Israel, can be expected always to fight wars without sometimes killing civilians and destroying civilian homes.

It's a gross misconception to equate Israelis with Nazis, just as it's a gross misconception to equate the British and the Americans with the Nazis, or to claim that the British and Americans were no better than the Japanese at the time of the Second World War.

 

When a democracy is fighting for survival, in the midst of extreme danger, then the measured response which is approved by armchair critics is an ideal not always attained - impossible of attainment.

To overcome fanatical opposition, the armed forces of a democratic state often have no alternative but to use extreme force. To use slight force would be to guarantee defeat.

All the same, the armed forces of democracies have often used force which was excessive and cannot claim to have never broken the rules of war.         

Excesses, mistakes, blunders are often pounced on and taken as evidence that the forces of a democracy responsible for excesses, mistakes and blunders - generally committed under conditions of acute danger and danger which is not short-lived but which has tested the courage and stamina of the democratic forces in extreme ways - are just the same or almost as bad as their opponents. I find it essential to use the concept of 'outweighing,' which I explain on the page Ethics: theory and practice. The excesses, mistakes and blunders are considered as part of an overall ((survey)). They are outweighed by other considerations.


Britain's nuclear deterrent has cost not a single civilian (or military) life, but most deterrents in war aren't nearly so free of harm. A deterrent has to involve pain or loss, or possible pain and loss. When deterrents involve no pain or loss, they cease to be deterrents, or effective deterrents. (The British justice system sometimes fails to understand this simple point.)

A deterrent in war may involve many civilian casualties. It would be difficult to establish that Israeli actions amounted to war crimes, and even if some of them were war crimes, it would no more undermine Israeli superiority than the 'war crimes' of Britain during the Second World War undermined British moral superiority. The Palestinian use of rockets against civilians is without any doubt at all a war crime. In general, it would be very difficult to criticize the actions of The Israeli Defence Force without knowledge which it's impossible to acquire now. For example, a Hamas sniper is shooting at Israeli soldiers. In a built-up environment, the sniper is very difficult to remove. Israeli soldiers can't possibly be expected to expose themselves to continued fire and put their lives at great risk by trying and persisting with very 'conservative,' methods, methods which cause no harm to anyone else and no damage or very little damage to anything. At all times, the terrible risk of being captured by Hamas will be obvious to them - the risk of being held captive for years and years or being killed. (Operations of war where there it's certain that being captured by the enemy will be followed by death or mistreatment, not by prisoner-of-war status in accordance with accepted international legislation generally give rise to particularly intense revulsion against the enemy forces.) The longer the IDF forces have to operate here, the greater the dangers. Who can blame them for calling on the firepower which will remove the danger from the sniper reliably, even if it entails the destruction of the building where the sniper is based, or harm to civilians sheltering in the same building?

The gulf between a liberal democracy and a totalitarian state is most apparent not in what happens on the battlefield but the actions which take place away from the battlefield, such actions as  mass executions of civilians.

The combat operations of totalitarian states and of liberal democracies have many similarities, just as their weapons tend to be similar, including the use of flame-throwers. (This is not to overlook the differences, such as the use of penal battalions by the Soviet army, which were forced to undertake very dangerous or suicidal operations, and, of course, the use of suicide pilots by the Japanese.)

The image of civilian casualties above is no evidence at all for the slogan, 'One picture is worth a thousand words.' Rather, 'one picture may need a thousand words of explanation.' The image of a sombre and dignified woman and a pile of bodies does nothing at all to establish the barbarity of British airmen and the barbarity of the British cause during the Second World War. Images are often a refuge for superficial people too lazy to do the work of acquiring the deep and comprehensive understanding necessary for an adequate  ((survey)).

The reports shown on BBC television and Channel 4 news in this country - to mention no others - on Israeli action during Operation Protective Edge in Gaza were  inadequate and very  often actively misleading. The use of graphic film footage was unaccompanied by adequate analysis. Adequate analysis would not have been hard-hearted but a necessity for fairness. Some of the sites mentioned in the Links section are concerned with the bias of the BBC and have explored the bias very thoroughly. An example is the site BBC Watch, which made these comments on the BBC's failure to inform and to do far more than transmit graphic images without adequate discussion. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign's complaints that the BBC has shown pro-Israeli anti-Palestinian bias is the opposite of the truth.


'In a very interesting article in The Tower David Daoud ...  explains Everything You Need to Know about International Law and the Gaza Warand it is well worth the long read. Another recent interesting article on a similar topic is titled The Ethics of Protective Edge” and it was written by Professor Asa Kasher.

[These two articles would enlighten members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and similarly minded people, but their RESISTANCE! entails resistance to evidence and arguments.]

'Throughout the seven weeks of conflict the BBC made remarkably little effort to explain to audiences the actual meaning of terms such as ‘disproportionate’, indiscriminate’,  ‘collective punishment’‘targeting civilians’ or ‘war crimes’ which were so frequently bandied about by its reporters and guests ... 

'Apparently though, there was no BBC memo informing its own employees that the indiscriminate and unwarranted use of such terms is both inappropriate for an organization professing to adhere to editorial standards of accuracy and impartiality, as well as misleading to audiences who would quite reasonably (but wrongly) assume that the BBC’s frequent employment of such language must mean that a legal justification for its use exists. Obviously too, BBC presenters and producers had not been issued with any sort of guidelines on the topic of the legal definitions of such labels and the resulting significance of their use by correspondents and interviewees whilst no proven justification was available.'

First impressions ignore knowledge. Judgment requires knowledge, even if the acquiring of knowledge is no guarantee that the knowledge will be put to good use. Images of distraught, suffering people in Gaza are no substitute for acquiring knowledge, making an adequate ((survey)) and exercising judgment.

Opposition to Israeli actions in Gaza has often been based on the dogma of feeling, the supposition that feelings of outrage are conclusive. Feelings of compassion and humanitarian feelings are not necessarily conclusive. They can mislead, they can apportion blame mistakenly, they can lead to disastrously misguided action, doing nothing to correct a humanitarian catastrophe, perpetuating a humanitarian catastrophe. The selectivity of so many supporters of the Palestinians has often been noted. Almost all human suffering seems to pass these people by, or to be treated with insufficient seriousness, such as suffering at the hands of ISIS.

 

Anyone who believes that the Israeli Defence Force has fought in Gaza with unprecedented savagery needs to undertake as soon as possible a remedial course of study in military history. IDF warnings to civilians to evacuate an area are, of course, exceptional in the history of warfare.

There follow comments on British and American bombing operations during the Second World War.

 

Above: Lancaster bomber over Hamburg. Martin Middlebrook, 'The Battle of Hamburg:' 'During the whole of its wartime bombing, Hamburg lost approximately 55 000 civilians killed. This figure approaches the 62 856 Hamburg servicemen who were killed in action or who died of wounds or sickness during the war.'

Hamburg, like Dresden, suffered a firestorm, which had been deliberately caused by using a mixture of high explosive bombs and incendiary bombs. W G Sebald describes the grim aftermath of the raid of 27 July, 1943:

'Horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere. Bluish little phosphorus flames still flickered around many of them; others had been roasted brown or purple and reduced to a third of their normal size. They lay doubled up in pools of their own melted fat, which had sometimes already congealed. In the next few days, the central death zone wa declared a no-go area. When punishment labour gangs and camp inmates could begin clearing it in August, after the rubble had cooled down, they found people still sitting at tables or up against walls where they had  been overcome by monoxide gas. Elsewhere, clumps of flesh and bone or whole heaps of bodies had cooked in the water gushing from bursting boilers. Other victims had been so badly charred and reduced to ashes by the heat, which had risen to 1,000 degrees or more, that the remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away in a single laundry basket.' Sir Arthur Harris on the bombing offensive against Germany:

'The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive...should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany.'

' ... the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.


'I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.


'The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.'

From the Website of RAF Bomber Command, 'Assessment of the campaign:'

'The bombing campaign was the only way by which Britain could hit back at an aggressive enemy who had invaded most of Europe, had bombed British cities from Glasgow to Plymouth, had taken the first steps to invade the UK by an aerial assault in the Battle of Britain and who represented the greatest danger Britain had faced for centuries.

...

'Bombing disrupted production and held the full potential of the German industrial machine in check. Equally importantly, bombing attacks on the German homeland forced the Nazis to divert over one million men and 55,000 artillery guns to anti-aircraft defence within Germany itself. German aircraft production had to focus on fighter production for defence against bomber attack, rather than, as Hitler desperately wanted, be able to produce more bombers for offensive use. These resources were urgently needed elsewhere, particularly on the eastern front fighting the Russians, who were finally able to overcome the Germans and force them into a retreat.

'Historian Professor Richard Overy had studied the bombing campaign at length. He writes: ‘The critical question is not so much “What did bombing do to Germany?” but “What could Germany have achieved if there had been no bombing?”…... Bombing was a blunt instrument. It was a strategy that had a long and painful learning curve. But for all its deficiencies the 125,000 men and women of Bomber Command made a larger contribution to victory in Europe than any other element of Britain’s armed services.’

Albert Speer, Hitler’s Armaments Minister, knew more than anyone else in Europe about the true effect of the bombing campaign. He summed it up thus: ‘It made every square metre of Germany a front. For us, it was the greatest lost battle of the war.'

Martin Middlebrook: 'So there it was - Area Bombing - a terrible means of waging war but believed at the time to have been necessary and without any reasonable alternative, introduced by the R.A.F. only after all other, more acceptable, means of strategic bombing methods had been found to be unworkable with the tools available at the time. It was an awful means in search of a most desirable end - the swiftest and most economical defeat of an evil philosophy and the liberation of Europe ... '


The British policy of area bombing during the Second World War involved the deliberate targeting of civilians. British bombing of Nazi Germany was far more devastating than the Nazi German bombing of Britain.  However, international humanitarian law regulating aerial warfare was not in existence before or during the Second World War, so that strategic bombings did not amount to official war crimes. For this reason, no Germans or Japanese were prosecuted after the war for the aerial bombardment of such cities as Warsaw, Rotterdam, British cities attacked during the Blitz, and Shanghai.


Antony Beevor, writing in 'D-Day: The Battle for  Normandy,'
about French civilian casualties during 'Operation Overlord,' the allied invasion which began with D-day:

' ... the debate about the overkill of Allied bombing and artillery is bound to continue. Altogether 19,890 French civilians were killed during the liberation of Normandy and an even larger number seriously injured. This was on top of the 15,000 French killed and 19,000 injured during the preparatory bombing for Overlord in the first five months of 1944. It is a sobering thought that 70,000 French civilians were killed by Allied action during the course of the war, a figure which exceeds the total number of British killed by German bombing.'

The allied bombing after D-day included the devastation of Caen.

Below, Caen after the bombing:



The liberation of France and the liberation of Europe by the allies did not become immoral on account of these facts. The moral superiority of Great Britain over Nazi Germany is not cancelled by these facts, or other facts, such as the fact that sometimes, British soldiers shot German soldiers who surrendered instead of granting them the status of prisoners of war. But it  was Nazi Germany, not Great Britain or any of the allies, which deserved to lose the Second World War.
   


The charred body of a woman who was carrying a child on her back, killed in the American bombing raid on Tokyo of 9/10 March 1945. This was the bombing raid with the highest death toll of the Second World War, higher than Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

 

The US Strategic Bombing Survey later estimated that nearly 88,000 people died in this one raid, 41,000 were injured, and over a million residents lost their homes. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated a higher toll: 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department established a figure of 124,711 casualties including both killed and wounded and 286,358 buildings and homes destroyed. These casualty and damage figures could be low. Mark Selden, writing in 'Japan Focus:'

'The figure of roughly 100,000 deaths, provided by Japanese and American authorities, both of whom may have had reasons of their own for minimizing the death toll, seems to me arguably low in light of population density, wind conditions, and survivors' accounts.' (The Wikipedia entry.)

From

http://www.pacificwar.org.au/AtomBomb_Japan.html

'To undermine Japan's capacity to continue the war, it was necessary for America to strike at Japan's industrial base. In doing so, the Americans faced a problem. Unlike the situation in many Western countries, most of Japan's major cities did not have clearly defined industrial districts in 1945. Instead, Japanese industrial facilities were mostly dispersed in residential areas. As precision bombing did not exist in 1945, it was impossible for high altitude American B-29s to destroy factories that serviced Japan's war machine without also hitting residential neighbourhoods that adjoined these factories.

'As the cost in American lives soared, and Japan showed no inclination to surrender, the Americans finally decided in early 1945 to strike at Japan's war industries even if it inevitably cost civilian lives. For ten days in March 1945, huge formations of B-29 bombers carried out saturation raids on five of Japan's largest industrial cities, including Tokyo. The raids were then suspended. Instead of inclining Japan to surrender, the Japanese government was able to use the air raids to whip up hatred of Americans and stiffen the will of the Japanese people to fight to the death as a nation. This was not as difficult in Japan as it would have been in Western countries. It has to be remembered that the Japanese people were products of a militaristic culture dating back hundreds of years. They felt intense pride in the power of their military, and Japan's military conquests in Asia and the Pacific. Japanese culture permitted Admiral Yamamoto to be viewed as a national hero after he engineered the treacherous sneak attack on the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese government plans a fanatical defence of Japan's home islands to the last man, woman and child

In April 1945, the Japanese Suzuki government had prepared a war policy called Ketsugo which was a refinement of the Shosango victory plan for the defence of the home islands to the last man. These plans would prepare the Japanese people psychologically to die as a nation in defence of their homeland. Even children, including girls, would be trained to use makeshift lethal weapons, and exhorted to sacrifice themselves by killing an American invader. To implement this policy of training children to kill, soldiers attended Japanese schools and trained even small children in the use of weapons such as bamboo spears.

'The American government was aware from intelligence intercepts of the chilling implications of these Japanese defensive plans. Intelligence reports indicated that the Japanese would probably be able to muster two million troops and eight thousand aircraft for the defence of the four home islands against a traditional amphibious invasion. The dispersal of these military resources across Japan, and their careful concealment, would provide the Americans with no opportunity to destroy them from the air. The Ketsugo policy placed heavy reliance on suicide attacks on the American troops and their covering warships. For this purpose, several thousand aircraft would be adapted for suicide attacks. Other methods of suicide attack being developed included dynamite-filled "crash boats", guided human torpedoes, guided human rocket bombs (similar to the "Baka" rocket plane used against American ships at Okinawa), and specially trained ground suicide units carrying explosives. In addition, the invading Americans would have to face a civilian population drilled in guerilla tactics.'

So America decided to use the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were arguments for and against this weapon, just as there were arguments for and against invasion of Japan and continuing the war by conventional means. The fighting in the advance towards Japan from one Pacific island to another had produced horrendous casualties, American and Japanese, and the closer the Americans got to Japan, the more fanatical the resistance.

R. J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the  University of Hawaii,  estimates that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered from nearly 3 to over 10 million people, most likely 6 million Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos and Indochinese,  among others, including Western prisoners of war ... According to Rummel, in China alone, during 1937–45, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians, as a direct result of the Japanese operations and 10.2 million in the course of the war.The most infamous incident during this period was the Nanking Massacre  of 1937–38, when, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunar for the Far East,  the Japanese Army massacred as many as 300,000 civilians and prisoners of war, although the accepted figure is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.'

I distinguish low-tension and high-tension thought, and to appreciate the human qualities of the allied bomber crews and the massiveness of their achievement - including the crews whose operations involved the area bombing of civilian targets -  ultra-high tension thought is a necessity. (In the earlier period of the bombing campaign, there could be no clear distinction between civilian targets and targets of military importance, since precision bombing of military targets was an impossibility at the time.)

From my page on the philosopher Nietzsche:


'I regard Nietzsche as often, but not always, a low-tension thinker. A low-tension thinker can't keep opposed ideas in consciousness simultaneously, but has to emphasize one whilst denying others. There's a low-tension view unable to come to terms with the shocking aspects of reality but instead distorting reality. Sentimentalizing reality is a common approach.

'Nietzsche could keep the two ideas in consciousness at once, the harshness of reality and the wonder of reality. However, he lessened tension by flagrantly diminishing the harshness. And he refused to acknowledge one more strand which can't be ignored without distorting reality, or so I claim: active humanitarianism, the urge to reduce suffering, to improve the world, an attempt which will often be frustrated but which is not always frustrated, an attempt which is difficult and sometimes impossible but absolutely essential. This is a high-tension view.'

To appreciate the  bomber crews'  achievement, and their sacrifices, requires, preferably, sustained reading.

My page on the writer A L Kennedy includes appreciation of the crew of the B-17 Flying Fortress. Mi Amigo which on 22 February 1944 crashed not far from here with the loss of all crew members. Each year, on the anniversary, there is held at the crash site a commemorative service, which I attend. I write this about the risks they faced:

'Crews who completed twenty-five missions would return back to the United States. Some died on the first mission, some survived the twenty-five missions, but in the year before Mi Amigo was lost, the average was only fifteen missions survived. On just one raid in that year, the raid on the ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt (a great deal of the German armaments work, including tanks and planes, depended upon ball-bearings) sixty American bombers were lost, and their six hundred crew members. Of the 15 aircraft in the 305th group, to which Mi Amigo belonged, only two returned. In the year that Mi Amigo was lost, the chances of survival were better, but still desperate. On the same day that this Flying Fortress was lost, 43 aircraft and 430 aircrew were lost also.'

Labour Friends of Palestine

 Labour Party MP's and other Labour Party members often have preoccupations - and obsessions - which either mean nothing to ordinary working people or arouse their active dislike. This is more clear than ever now, after the debacle of the election results of May 2021. Here, I concentrate on one issue, the Israel-Palestinian issue.   Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot, Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy are amonst the members. The issue gives a very revealing insight into the gross incompetence to be found in the Labour Party and the grossly distorted perspectives to be found in the Labour Party.

 

Above, a photo of Lisa Nandy in action, and, of course, a photo of Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner.  Lisa Nandy is the Chair of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East (LFPME) https://www.lfpme.org/ as well as the Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs - appointed to the position by Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer is a member of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East. So too are Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott. For years, the LFPME site contained gross blunders: a very striking - massive - instance of Labour Party incompetence, or the incompetence of a section of the Labour Party.

To give just one example, the people of Oldham West and Royton and their constituency MP, Jim McMahon, would be surprised to learn from the membership list which remained on the LFPME Website years after Lisa Nandy became Chair that their MP is Michael Meacher. He died in 2015. When Lisa Nandy became Chair of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East in 2018, the membership list, which hadn't been updated for years, stayed exactly the same, taking absolutely no account of Labour Party election losses over the years or the voluntary (and involuntary) exits of Labour Party MP's. For years and years, the membership total claimed remained the same, the grossly inflated figure of 131. In the Labour Party, the tendency is for ideological soundness to matter far more than attention to detail, including important detail.

False claims stayed on the Website for years without anybody at LFPME noticing. None of the MP's on the list, including Keir Starmer, seem to  have noticed. You would have thought that some of them at least would have looked at the list to find out about changes - who had joined, who had left. You would have thought that a good look at the Website was an absolute necessity when she became Chair of the organization. Her mind was on other things, it seems, such as Website Cosmetics - making sure that the introductory loop which contained the film of her and other LFPME celebrities looked good, making sure that the list of parliamentary supporters looked good, whilst neglecting factual accuracy. Even so, the current Website is very weak on Website cosmetics - the elementary issue of aspect ratio is neglected. The images are grossly distorted. People are shown with faces which are wide, very wide.

I wrote an article on the blunders for the site Conservative Woman' https://conservativewoman.com published on 7 January 2020.

'On 9 January, 2020, I contacted Lisa Nandy and other members of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East to inform them about the mistakes. I sent two emails to all the members, as well as a large number of other people. Result: Lisa Nandy acts decisively! On 13 January, the list was replaced by a much slimmer (or shorter) one: 40 members were lost, including Michael Meacher and many well-known names. Now there are 91 left.

'The current membership list on the Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East Website gives 91 members, including Jeremy Corbyn, Lisa Nandy, of course, Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Emily Thornberry, Jess Phillips, Richard Burgon and Angela Rayner. Corbynites and anti-Corbynites, people with varying degrees of delusion, have this in common - membership of this discredited organization, or an organization which deserves to be discredited. The policy of carrying on as if nothing has happened, as if there isn't a case to answer, the ignoring of the impact on the reputation of the Labour Party - Lisa Nandy shows no sign of recognizing the need for action which goes well beyond the replacement of the old membership list.

'The membership information on the Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East Website has been updated, at last, but nothing has been done about the other content. It offers low-level platitudes in so many places, not proof in the least that these are enlightened people. The shockingly naive claims could be summarized in words such as these, 'The politics of hope must replace the politics of conflict,' This is Green Party thinking about the harsh world of international relations and conflict. No mention of the fact that homosexuality is fully legal in Israel and illegal in Gaza. No mention of the Palestinian payments to terrorists, such as the large payments made every year to the terrorists who attacked Kay Wilson and Christine Luken whilst they were out walking. They killed Christine Luken and left Kay Wilson with multiple stab wounds and multiple broken bones. They also confessed to killing Neta Sorek, stabbed to death after they gained entry to Israel from the West Bank through gaps in the security fence at a time when the fence was unfinished (the security fence - one of those hated symbols of Israeli brutality, according to many.)'

The LFPME Websitehad a glossy introduction with Lisa Nandy, MP for Wigan, announcing her 'Plans As The New Chair Of Labour Friends Of Palestine & The Middle East.'

On the same page, lower down, there's 'Latest Activity in Parliament ... EDM's, Debates and Questions posed by our supporters.' One of these 'supporters,' it's claimed, is 'Simon Danczuk MP.' But Simon Danczuk isn't an MP! Simon Danczuk, suspended by the Labour Party in 2015 after it was claimed that he'd sent explicit messages to a 17-year old girl, banned by Labour from standing as a Labour Candidate, replaced as MP for Rochdale by Anthony Lloyd in 2017  is claimed to be the  current MP for Rochdale, the MP for Rochdale who supports Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East!

The New Plans Of The New Chair (now not-so-new: she became Chair in 2018) obviously haven't included the basics, such as sorting out the glossy membership list. To view this 7 page document, click on ABOUT US at the top of the Home Page of the LFPME site and then click on Our Supporters - or simply go to

https://www.lfpme.org/supporters

The LFPME Website claims that

Currently, 131 MPs support our work in Parliament

and gives information about the MPs, their name and constituency and in all cases but two, a photo. The figure of 131 MP's is false, grossly inflated, and has been false and grossly inflated for many years.

The MP's on the Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East Website's current membership list  include Michael Meacher, constituency, Oldham West and Royton. But Michael Meacher  isn't currently an MP or a supporter of LFPME. He died in 2015! (His entry is one of the two without a photo. The other is Diane Abbott.)

Other people falsely claimed by Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East to be currently MP's and supporting the organization (they may support the aims and objectives of the organization but they aren't MP's):

Sadiq Khan (Tooting.) Left parliament in 2016  to become Mayor of London

Steve Rotheram  (Liverpool Walton). Left Parliament in 2017 to become Metro Mayor of Liverpool City Region.

Andy Burnham (Leigh.) Left Parliament in 2017 to become Mayor of Manchester.

These six people on the LFPME membership list also left Parliament in 2017. Again, the claim that they are current parliamentary supporters is false.

David Winnick (Walsall North).
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough).
Gisela Stuart (Birmingham Edgbaston).
Ian Wright (Hartlepool). 
Jim Dowd (Lewisham West and Penge).
Rob Marris (Wolverhampton South West).

It wouldn't be surprising if the actual MP's for these constituencies feel aggrieved when they find that other people, people who left parliament years ago, are claimed to do the job that they do. If Lisa Nandy likes to imagine that she's destined for high office, such as the office of Leader of the Opposition, then she'll have to improve - or perhaps that isn't a necessity in the current Labour Party. After all, the standard reached by Jeremy Corbyn is pitifully low.

I saved the LFPME membership list, complete with blunders, on 10 September, 2019. The membership list on the LFPME, complete with blunders, is the same now, at the time of updating this section (5 January 2019). It hasn't been updated to reflect the many changes of MP which took place with the election of 2019. The Wikipedia list of members was updated after the election - the amateur writer or writers of the Wikipedia page on LFPME showed professional standards whilst Lisa Nandy has shown not the least interest in doing something about the chaotic Website of the chaotic organization of which she's chair. Now, the claimed numbers are out of line with the reality even more. The Website claims 131 MP's as members. The actual number is far fewer: 93. This is falsifying the figures, inflating the membership figures - or would be if complete cluelessness wasn't the reason for the wildly inflated membership number claimed.

This is  just a puzzle, but difficult to solve. You can have a go at solving it if you like. Just read the next paragraph but no further. Otherwise, read the next paragraph and read on, to find the solution.

Take a look at the page https://www.lfpme.org/supporters and ask yourself: is there an organizing principle here, or is the list of (alleged) supporters without an organizing principle, in random order? How would you find out if a particular MP is a member of LFPME or not? Is there an organizing principle which would help you or do you have to plough through the pages - 7 in all - until you come to the name of the MP (if the MP is a member)? If the MP isn't a member, do you have to plough through the list of names right to the last name on the list? Obviously, if you want to find a particular name on a list of 10,000 names or more, then a random list is unusable.

The solution to the puzzle:

Anyone consulting the list of MP's to find out if a particular MP is a member or not will find that the list uses a remarkable organizing principle. It isn't in random order at all - the first impression. These are the first few names on the list: Afzal Khan (Manchester Gorton), Alan Whitehead (Southampton Test), Albert Owen (Ynys Mon), Alex Cunnigham (Stockton North) ...

This isn't in alphabetical order of surname or alphabetical order of constituency but it is in alphabetical order of first name! So, the last few names on the list, on Page 7, are Virendra Sharma (Ealing Southall), Wes Streeting (Ilford North) and Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East).

If ever a Labour MP called, let's say, Zebedee Aardvark joins LFPME he won't be in first place on the first page but in last position on the last page, and anyone trying to find out if Zebedee Aardvark is or isn't a member will need to plough through all seven pages before finding out - or, more likely, will look at the first page, find that 'Aardvark, Zebedee' isn't listed in first position, and conclude, mistakenly, that he isn't a member. If Zebedee Aardvark leaves this chaotically organized organization the inquirer may well find that he's still listed as a member years after he left.

The Wikipedia list of members of LFPME uses useful ordering, by alphabetical order of last name. So, Diane Abbott (constituency Hackney North) is listed first and Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) is listed last.

I've saved the complete membership list on these pages of the LFPME Website as evidence. Eventually, the organization will find out that they've blundered and will make the necessary changes -  too late.

The problems posed by Palestine and the wider world of the Middle East are massive and intractable, many of them. They can't be solved by the methods advocated by Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East - the suggestions of the well-meaning MP's  and the demands of the hard core. This page gives a comprehensive account, with arguments and evidence which show, I'd claim that the well-meaning MP's as well as the hard core MP's are deluded in their views of Israel and the Palestinians.

This is Louise Haigh, Labour MP for the Sheffield Heeley constituency. The LFPME list is accurate: she's currently a Parliamentary supporter.  She describes herself as 'a long-standing animal rights campaigner.' I can make the same claim. See, for instance, my page Animal welfare and activism (it contains criticism of some animal welfare/rights activists).

Like Jeremy Corbyn, the well known apologist for Hamas,   Louise Haigh is a member of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East (LFPME). What does Louise Haigh MP LFPME the 'long-standing animal rights campaigner' make of this shocking video, on the mistreatment of imported cattle in Gaza? Australian RSPCA: 'It is some of the most shocking and distressing footage we have seen.

https://www.animalsaustralia.org/features/gaza-video-evidence.php

More on these issues in the section on this page, 'On the streets of Gaza: animal abuse.' It also gives evidence of Israel's outstanding record in the field of animal welfare.

This is an aspect of Palestinian civic society she'd prefer didn't exist, but in matters relating to Israel, like Jeremy Corbyn and so many others, Louise Haigh is surely an evader, a denier, someone with a very weak grasp of realities.  I recognize that there are fields where Louise Haigh has a strong sense of realities, such as policing. I don't claim in the least that members of LFPME are completely without strengths. Some seem deluded about many or perhaps most things whilst others seem much more impressive - but not in matters relating to Israel and Palestine. In concentrating their attention on Israel, they neglect matters of vast importance, such as the threats posed by , terrorist-supporting Iran, a mass executioner whose actions against shipping in the straits of Hormuz and other parts of the Middle East pose immense dangers.

This is Jeremy Corbyn MP LFPME and deluded fanatic, addressing a demonstration against Israel called 'Rage against Israel,' with flags fluttering in the breeze of change or hanging limply. I don't know what the yellow flag represents. The capital letters on the large banner seen in reverse appear to spell 'IHH INSANI YARDIM VAKF (which makes much more sense than what comes out when Jeremy Corbyn opens his mouth. Perhaps INSANI is a cryptic, unintentional reference to Jeremy Corbyn.)


Many members of LFPME aren't supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and probably dislike him or loathe him. I loathe him but he seems to me too insignificant and deluded to be a suitable object of very intense loathing. He's capable of causing immense damage, of course, so he can't possibly be overlooked or excused. A government led by Jeremy Corbyn would inflict catastrophic damage on the economy of this country, the defence forces of this country and so much else. Many of Jeremy Corbyn's supporters are repulsive people. Lisa Nandy MP LFPME has written about the abuse she suffered when it became known that she couldn't support Jeremy Corbyn. Like those other MP's, she chooses to belong to the same pressure group as him. They should be more careful.

A picture from my page Cambridge University: excellence, mediocrity, stupidity the section on Dr Priyamvada Gopal, a denouncer of Israel and an apologist for Iran There are far more overlookers of Iranian cruelty than apologists for Iran amongst the members of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East but all of them are grossly unfair, grossly deficient in singling out Israel for special condemnation.

At a demonstration in Paris against the death penalty in Iran. The poster includes an image showing a woman being buried up to the waist: the preparations to stone her to death, almost certainly for adultery. According to the Iranian regulations, the stones must not be so large that they cause death quickly.

The 'Rage against Israel' event where Jeremy Corbyn spoke took place in 2010. In August 2010, Iran Human Rights reported that seven  executions by stoning to death had been carried out over the past four years, and that 14 or more sentences of stoning to death (11 women and three men) were pending. There were no 'Rage against Iran' events in that year or any other year, of course.

Crimes punishable by death in Iran include  homosexuality, incest, fornication, prostitution, adultery, apostasy, blasphemy, repeated consumption of alcohol, production of pornography, 'waging war against God' and 'spreading corruption on Earth. Iran is the most prolific executioner in the world, on a pro capita basis, and executes people who were under the age of 18 at the time of the 'offence.' Israel has used judicial execution only twice in the history of the state, including the execution of Adolf Eichmann.

See also my page on the death penalty.

This is Grahame Morris, MP for Easington.

Like Louise Haigh, Graham Morris MP LFPME has a concern for animal welfare. This self-professed 'Friend of the Middle East' really should find out more about the poor treatment of animals in so much of the Middle East - Israel is the exceptional exception.

In 2019, he retweeted a video supposedly about Palestinian children with the caption Israeli soldiers "caught on camera beating up Palestinian children for the fun of it." However, these were Guatemalan, not Israeli soldiers.

This is another member of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East, Rachael Maskell, Labour and Co-operative MP for York Central.


Attribution at end of this section

Rachael Maskell MP LFPME is a vegan. It's not likely that she appreciates the support which vegans receive in Israel. I point out on this page that vegans in the Israeli Defence Force are given vouchers to buy vegan food and aren't required to wear leather boots. Boots made with synthetic materials are provided.

 I'm glad that these Israeli vegans are given vouchers for vegan food and are provided with boots made with synthetic materials, but I'm not sympathetic to veganism, as my  anti-vegan page makes clear.

Rachael Maskell voted against the extension of abortion rights to Northern Ireland and abstained on the extension of same-sex marriage to Northern Ireland.

This is a local lad, Clive Betts MP LFPME. I discuss his frailties in the section 'Clive Betts MP: Israel, irregularities, expenses' on my page Cambridge University: excellence, mediocrity and stupidity. (I've nothing to relate on the subject of Clive Betts' excellence, I'm afraid.) Clive Betts was educated (or trained) at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

This is Olivia Blake, at the time Deputy Leader of Sheffield City Council and now the MP for Sheffield Hallam Parliamentary Constituency, posing with a Palestinian flag.

 

The last time the Labour Party picked a candidate for Sheffield Hallam, they made the disastrous choice of Jared O' Mara, who proudly proclaimed 'Jared stands in support of Palestine' not long before he abandoned his constituents. (More about this below.)

At the time that this publicity photo was taken, did Olivia Blake know that in Gaza, unlike Israel, homosexuality is illegal? LGBT gay pride events are common in Israel but - this may come as a surprise to Olivia Blake - LGBT gay pride events aren't in the least common in the Palestinian territories. They never take place there, they would be unthinkable. Sheffield City Council goes out of its way to show its support for the LGBT cause and here is one of the elected councillors (of course there are more who think like her) endorsing and supporting a state which criminalizes and persecutes homosexuals. This just one issue, of course, a very important one but, despite the claims of so many LGBT people, not the supreme issue. LGBT people should give far more thought to the plight of homosexuals not just in Gaza but in other countries where homosexuals are criminalized and persecuted and far more than thought - constructive, sustained campaigning.

Extract from an email I sent to Councillor Blake:

' ... You're obviously a far more prominent figure in local politics than Councillor Gibson, with aspirations to play a part in national politics as MP for Sheffield Hallam constituency. In a fifteen month period, the current MP, Jared O' Mara, discussed, or mentioned, on his Website only one international matter, the Palestinian issue, and declared his support for the Palestinian cause. His Website page can't, or shouldn't be consulted, as it poses a security threat to computer systems

https://www.jaredomara.co.uk/recentactivity/2018/5/15/jared-stands-in-support-of-palestine

It's certain that if elected, you'd be a vastly more competent MP than Jared O' Mara but it seems that Israel-Palestinian matters have dominated your statements on international affairs too. There's a photograph of you holding a Palestinian flag with a group of pro-Palestinian activists. The May Day rally which took place in Sheffield on Saturday May 4 included a group of pro-Palestinian activists holding a banner with the slogan 'Stop Arming Israel.' I give reasons on my Website page why this slogan is deluded. I did point out to the people with the banner that in Gaza, unlike Israel, homosexuality is illegal. If you believe that you can offer arguments and evidence to oppose the views I present on my page, let me have them. I intend not just to publish a profile of you but to take steps to publicize these issues in other ways.

I drew her attention to the material on this page, which at the time didn't include this section.


From an article published 2 May 2017 on the selection of Jared O' Mara as the Hallam Constituency Labour candidate.

https://www.jusnews.net/labour-picks-disability-campaigner-jared-omara-to-challenge-nick-clegg-in-sheffield-hallam/

'Jane Thomas, the constituency chair, said it was good that Labour had selected a young, local candidate for the seat.

...

'Hallam votes came close to electing a Labour MP in 2015. Once again we have a strong, Sheffield candidate who is committed to serving the people of Hallam.'

'Committed to serving the people of Hallam.' How wrong she was.

From an article written by Jane Thomas, 2 August, 2019 on the subject 'What Labour should learn from Jared O' Mara's selection

https://labourlist.org/2019/08/what-labour-should-learn-from-jared-omaras-selection/

'Hallam activists (some of whom have campaigned for 50 years to get a Labour MP) are angry, demotivated or both. Our enthusiastic newer members see their campaigning efforts wasted. Our constituency is deprived of a functioning MP, with casework not being undertaken. And probably a crucial Labour gain is lost for some time.'


From the Website of Sheffield Hallam Labour Party

https://labourhallam.org.uk/

'We support Jeremy Corbyn as party leader, and embrace enthusiastically the democratic socialist policies and principles of the party under his direction.' It's possible that Olivia Blake doesn't support Jeremy Corbyn as party leader and doesn't embrace his 'policies' and 'principles' with as much enthusiasm as many 'Hallam activists.' If she does support him and is enthusiastic about his policies and principles, then the electorate of Hallam Constituency would gain by knowing this, so that they can make an informed choice when it comes to voting.

 

Extract from the email I sent to Councillor Gibson:

'Today, I talked to you and other Walkley Labour Party members at your stall on South Road. I take an active interest in Sheffield politics, as in other aspects of Sheffield life, and take great care to be as well informed as possible. However, when I spoke to you, it was without knowledge of some of your views and of complaints and criticisms which have been made about you. I mentioned that I was an activist in various fields, including defending Israel. I gave some information about my involvement. You could have mentioned that you support Sheffield Labour Friends of Palestine but chose not to. You were eager to move on to purely local issues, such as bus services.'

I drew his attention to the material on this page, which at the time didn't include this section.

I sent emails to all the other Sheffield Labour Councillors, quoting the emails sent to Olivia Blake and Neale Gibson in full.

Julie Pearn is the Chair of Sheffield Labour Friends of Palestine, which organized a petition with more than 18,000 signatures to Sheffield City Council, calling on the Council to recognize Palestine as a state. Julie Pearn was the lead petitioner and spoke at a meeting of the Council. The petition wasn't accepted - most of the signatures were found to be invalid, added by people outside Sheffield. The Council's guidelines for submitting a petition are absolutely clear. The signatories must live, work or study in Sheffield. After this display of incompetence, let's hope that Julie Pearn and other people associated with Sheffield Labour Friends of Israel can do better in a task which is surely essential - defending their views on Israeli-Palestinian issues against reasonable criticism. I'd claim to present reasonable criticism of their views on this page, in great quantity. I've sent them an email in which I challenge them to answer objections to their views.

Sheffield Labour Friends of Palestine condemned the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel - good. Sheffield Labour Friends of Palestine condemns the supply of arms to Israel. It supports the slogan 'Stop arming Israel.' Hopelessly naive and clueless. If rockets are fired into Israel, Israel has to be able to respond and to deter the firing of rockets. If Israel's existence is threatened, and it is, it has to have the means to defend itself. If an Irish nationalist group had condemned the Nazi's firing of V1 and V2 rockets into Britain during the Second World War but had supported the slogan 'Stop arming Britain' then they would have been regarded, by anyone with any sense, as deluded. Britain had to have the means of defending itself. Israel has to have the means of defending itself. Israel is not only defending itself but also defending the Palestinian territories.


The Sheffield Palestine Solidarity Campaign's policies aren't identical with those of SLFP. The SPSC doesn't oppose the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel. There are all sorts of questions I'd like to ask SPSC but I think they would be even less willing than SLFP to make an honest attempt to answer them - or any attempt at all to answer them.

I'm completely prepared to have my own views questioned, the arguments and evidence I use subjected to criticism. Musheir El-Farra, and others - what are you waiting for?

Musheir El-Farra is a prominent figure in Sheffield Palestine Solidarity Campaign. He was one of the 'leaders of Gaza civil society' who signed a statement, described as an 'important statement.' 


Extract from my page Green ideology: deficiencies:



ISRAEL
You have Become
Like Your
NAZI
Predecessors

From an image on a page of the Sheffield Green Party site

http://sheffieldgreenparty.org.uk/2014/07/27/stop-the-violence-now/ ]

The page has the title 'Stop the violence now!' and begins, 'Green Councillor Jillian Creasy and other local Greens took part in the  rally in support of Palestinians in Gaza.' This was organized by Sheffield Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

One of the photographs on the Green Party site shows a placard held by one of the demonstrators. The placard can be seen at a glance, without the least difficulty. The  image near the top of this section shows the placard.  The placard obviously reads in full:

ISRAEL
You have Become
Like Your
NAZI
Predecessors

The 'ss' in 'predecessors uses the lettering which was employed by the German SS.

The equivalence of Israel and the Nazis is a claim which is despicable. The Green Party's inclusion of this placard on their Website is despicable. If the party never noticed this placard, they are negligent and should do everything possible to examine far more carefully the material they post  on their Website. They should also examine far more carefully the record and policies of the organization they endorse, in effect, by attending the organization's demonstration. Even a modest expenditure of effort should have revealed that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) is not what it seems.
 
A placard with exactly the same wording was on display at a demonstration organized by Sheffield Palestine Solidarity Campaign on 19 January 2009. Workers' Liberty, a  left wing organization which strongly supports the Palestinians but opposes Hamas, had its anti-Hamas placard ripped up and stamped on. My account of the incident and

the account of the incident on the Workers' Liberty Website.

In the comments section of this Workers' Liberty page, a commenter called Heather makes this point very strongly and very effectively:

'I witnessed (and photographed) a placard that said "Israel you have become like your nazi predecessors" with the "ss" done in the lightning bolt style of the Nazi SS. I found is [sic] disgusting, frightening even. But did I rip it out of the hands of the person holding it and destroy it there and then? I did not. I talked to the people around me, a lot of whom I didn't know and expressed what it was that I felt was wrong with such a statement.'

 Heather on the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), fully aware, obviously, of the PSC's many failings, unlike some naive members of Sheffield Green Party (I don't in the least endorse her Marxist views and her views of the class struggle):

' ... we do not support Hamas as the resistance to the occupation, because our analysis is based on Marxism and rooted in class struggle and because Hamas is an organisation rooted in political Islam and violently oppresses women, LGBT people AND the left. [That it places the people that it claims to protect in the line of fire of Israeli tanks and bombs. That it does not recognise the right of the State of Israel to exist and we do. I could not fit all of that on to a placard.

'Since 2005 when I visited Israel and the West Bank I have been involved with solidarity work with the region. I did not join PSC because at their 2005/6 conference I was alarmed by the often sinister undertones of anti-semitism. I am not an anti-semite and that has more often than not set me apart from the people I meet who fly Palestinian flags, attend demos and shout popular slogans. I am a socialist and an internationalist.

...

'I was not suprised to hear that on the fourth demo the placard [the Workers' Liberty placard, 'No to  IDF, No to Hamas] had met with aggressive responses after spending a good hour at the demo before defending myself verbally against claims that I was "an Israeli spy" "a disgusting zionist provocatur" and being told in no uncertain terms that I was not welcome on this demo.'

I object to the placard, not for its rejection of Hamas but for its naivety. It crams a great deal of political and military stupidity into those few words, 'No to IDF.' An Israel without the Israeli Defence Force, an Israel which can be invaded and taken over at will, by the military wing of Hamas or by any other force so minded. If the occupier is Hamas, then the result would almost certainly be not just repression for the groups mentioned by Heather, such as gay people, but mass slaughter. The fate of the Jews really would remind the world of the true meaning of the much misused word 'genocide.'

There's evidence that many members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign don't endorse Hamas' policies, whilst keeping a discreet silence about their lack of support. Unfortunately for them, unfortunately for Heather, I have to say, there's overwhelming evidence that the majority of people in Gaza fully share Hamas' viewpoint. These people are anti-semitic, want to see Israel wiped off the map and share the radical Islamist views of Hamas - see the findings of the Pew Research Center for further information. The distinction between the virtuous views of the Palestinian people and the obnoxious views of Hamas is an untenable one.

On the same page of the Workers' Liberty site there's a photograph of the Sheffield Solidarity Campaign demonstration of 2009 which includes another despicable placard:



Life and death in the Warsaw ghetto (which can't be compared at all with the so-called 'Gaza Ghetto'):

The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest Jewish ghetto in Nazi Europe. 400 000 Jews were crammed into an area of 3.4 km2 (1.3 sq mi). The population density was 23 times the present population density of Gaza. Gaza's population density   is similar to that of Chicago, Boston and San Francisco.  

Many, many Jews died from starvation - the food allowed was completely insufficient - and diseases such as typhus. At least 254 000 Jews from the Ghetto were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp in the summer of 1942. Many Jews were killed during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the razing of the ghetto. The number of deaths among the Jews in the ghetto is estimated to be at least 300 000.


___________________________________________________

More about Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East


From the Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East Website

https://www.lfpme.org/20181220-lfpme-wins-sme-4-labour-award

'LFPME wins SME 4 Labour Award

'LFPME were delighted to recieve an award from the SME 4 Labour Awards. SME 4 Labour awards, co-founded by Ibrahim Dogus and Sonny Leong are an important event in the Labour calendar.' The dynamic introduction to the Website includes this (with the same spelling mistake, 'recieve.')

The SME 4 Labour Website has information about the event, which was held at the Park Lane Sheraton Hotel in Piccadilly on 20 December, 2018 and attended, it seems, by over 400 guests.

http://www.sme4labour.org/2nd_sme4labour_gala_and_labour
_excellence_awards_press_release

LFPME won the 'Friends Group of the Year Award.' SME 4 Labour will obviously have examined the Website of LFPME - if they didn't, then they were very careless - and obviously found nothing amiss with the information in the list of supporters. I don't think SME 4 Labour scrutinized the activities of LFPME with nearly enough care. And how could they think that the activities of LFPME have any relevance to the small businesses they claim to support?


List of members of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East, February 2019.

There are a few MP's who are members of both Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East and Labour Friends of Israel. One of them is Chris Bryant (Rhondda). I don't discuss Labour Friends of Israel here but I have to say that the prospects of a 'negotiated two state settlement,' mentioned on the Labour Friends of Israel Website, are remote, not based on realities.

The members of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East aren't all deluded fanatics, like Jeremy Corbyn, far from it. It's obvious that many of them - probably most of them - have a touching belief in the benefits of negotiation. Peace is often mentioned at the same time as negotiation.  Negotiation is seen as the surest way to bring peace to this part of the Middle East. There are many cases in which negotiation is the best or only way forward, but many cases in which negotiation is unlikely to work or even futile, hopeless. Negotiation seems very unlikely to bridge the differences between Brexit supporters and Remainers in this country. Theresa May had boundless faith in negotiation, negotiation with Jeremy Corbyn to secure agreement on the question of the country's relationship with the European Union, negotiation as a way of resolving the differences between the European Union's view of things and the United Kingdom's view.

A report in the 'Daily Telegraph (9 September, 2019),' 'Sense of relief for ordinary Afghans at news that talks have collapsed. The 'months of negotiations' between America and the Taliban, which have now ended, were strongly opposed by many Afghans. Some of their comments:

The negotiations in opulent Doha hotels had lent the Taliban credibility and legitimacy, when they were no more than a criminal group..

[The Taliban] perceived that they were winning the war and the peace talks. It was the worst ever peace negotiation.

'Peace talks' between Hamas and Israel would be just as futile, with or without the support of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East> Even if it has been made forcibly clear to Hamas that the disadvantages of armed struggle against Israel are massive, overwhelming, this is a group that never seems to learn. After an interval, a return to firing rockets.

If, at the time that V1 and later V2 rockets were being fired at United Kingdom targets during the Second World War, the government of the Irish Republic had offered to help in a negotiated settlement between this country and Nazi Germany, then it's certain that their offer of help would have been rejected. Before the war and in the early stages of the war, there were the believers, people who had such faith in negotiation. One of them was the Ambassador Henderson. From William L Shirer, 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:' 

'Henderson: 'Hitler may ask to see me after Reichstag as a last effort to save the peace.'

'What peace? Peace for Britain? For six hours Germany had been waging war - with all its military might - against Britain's ally.

'Hitler did not send for Henderson after his Reichstag speech, and the ambassador, who had accommodatingly passed along to London Goering's lies about the Poles beginning the attack, became discouraged - but not completely discouraged. At 10.30 m he telephoned a further message to Halifax. A new idea had spring up in his fertile but confused mind.

'I feel it my duty [he reported], however little prospect there may be of its realization, to express the belief that the only possible hope for now for peace would be for Marshal Smigly-Rydz to announce his readiness to come immediately to Germany to discuss as soldier and plenipotentiary the whole question with Field-Marshal Goering.

'It does not seem to have occurred to this singular British ambassador that Marshal Smigly-Rydz might have his hands full trying to repel the massive and unprovoked German attack, or that if he could break off and did come to Berlin as a 'plenipotentiary' it would be equivalent, under the circumstances, to surrender. The Poles might be quickly beaten but they would not surrender.'

This is the most recent section of the site. It will be revised and extended. I intend to include comments on some of some members who do support Israel to a greater or lesser extent, such as Wes Streeting. I think that it's a mistake for anyone who supports Israel to a greater or lesser extent to belong to Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East.

John Mann MP on why he's leaving Parliament.

Jhttps://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-mp-john-mann-quits-to-become-government-anti-semitism-tsar-hlrwb66z5

“Every time I go into a meeting with a group of Jewish people, I wince when they raise the issue of the Labour Party and Corbyn. It is impossible to overstate the anger that I have about that . . . He has not just hijacked my political party; he has hijacked its soul and its ethics. I will never forgive him for that.”

...

“I could not have stood at the next election and looked people in the eye and answered them the question they will ask an awful lot, ‘If I vote for you I’m also voting for Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister’. In the 2017 election, nobody thought Corbyn would be prime minister . . . so I was able to say ‘he’s not going to be prime minister’.

“But I can’t do that this time and I’m not prepared to lie to my voters. And neither am I prepared to tell them that Corbyn is appropriate to be prime minister. Because I don’t think he is.”

Joining the Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East is voluntarily joining an organization which has Jeremy Corbyn as a member. No Labour MP who regards Jeremy Corbyn as mistaken (or deluded) in many of his views should join.

Attributions for this section:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61324718

Rachael Maskell MP

By Chris McAndrew - https://beta.parliament.uk/media/tQKZndrH, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61319357


Clive Betts MP
By Chris McAndrew  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61321513

Lisa Nandy MP
By Rwendland https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52401814