I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
Apartheid Expert Fires Back At Israel-Bashers
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Benjamin Pogrund, born in South Africa and former deputy editor of the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg, now lives in Jerusalem and is founder/director of Yakar’s Center for Social Concern. He has written three books: about Robert Sobukwe, Nelson Mandela, and the press under apartheid, and is co-editor of Shared Histories: A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue, and has recently written a piece in the Guardian in which he explains the fallacy of the “Israel as apartheid state” argument. In particular, he goes after Neve Gordon, an anti-Israel left-wing propagandist Israeli, who recently wrote that “the most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state.”
Pogrund’s piece starts off [emphasis added]:
The most inaccurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state. That’s the exact opposite of what Neve Gordon said on Cif last week. Level whatever criticisms you want against Israel – start with West Bank occupation and oppression of Palestinians, and go on to the domestic discrimination suffered by the Arab minority – but the simple fact is that none of it is the apartheid of the old South Africa. Abundant evidence of this is readily available, in the Guardian and elsewhere.
Why then is the comparison so often made? One reason, in a different context, is in the words of American comedian Stephen Colbert: “Remember kids! In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant.”
For some, the apartheid accusation is the way to destroy Israel. If Israel can be linked with apartheid then it can be denounced as illegitimate as was white-ruled South Africa and hence be wide open to international sanctions.
Those who pursue this couldn’t care less about facts. They have an agenda and are unscrupulous about distortion, lying and exaggeration. Their ultimate purpose is exposed by how they answer a basic question: whether or not they accept the fact of Israel’s existence.
Others use the apartheid label because they are genuinely affronted and angered by Israeli behaviour – from the occupation to the attack on Gaza – and it seems an easy way to reduce to digestible size the complexities of the national-religious struggle between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians over a small piece of land. It’s wrong and it’s lazy but that’s how many people behave.
While I wouldn’t go as far as Pogrund does in general in condeming Israel for other faults, at least here’s one apartheid expert who lived through it and wrote books on it who can actually say that Israel is one of the farthest things from an apartheid state.
(Not like anyone cares about facts, though, when it comes to debates on Israel…)
Outstanding journalist Tom Gross notes that:
Neve Gordon is a tenured professor at Israel’s Ben Gurion University and a visiting professor at the University of Michigan where he has been teaching courses on the “Arab-Israeli Conflict”. His outrageous writings about Israel have been carried on the website of the prominent neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel.
Last year, Alan Dershowitz wrote about him, “It is my opinion that Neve Gordon has gotten into bed with neo-Nazis, Holocaust justice deniers, and anti-Semites. He is a despicable example of a self-hating Jew and a self-hating Israeli.”
Gordon continues to lead an international campaign of vilification against Israel. The latest paper to print his slanders was The Los Angeles Times which two weeks ago gave him a prominent place on its op-ed page.
Students in Michigan who dared question his anti-Zionist diatribes report being forcibly shouted down in the most intimidating way by Prof. Gordon, who used classic Stalinist intimidation tactics on a campus where open discussion is supposed to be encouraged. The University of Michigan refused to come to the aid of several students, who were left in tears.
In an article Gordon published in the National Catholic Reporter he said Israel was a Fascist state.