Love Israel, Hate Jews

If you wouldn’t do it to Jews, don’t do it to Muslims - Levi Tazir

 

Spare a thought for the racists. They’re having a really hard time lately. They keep trying to oppress Muslims in a liberal, rational way but accidentally end up looking like Nazis.

Take, for example, recent discussions of banning halal meat. On the surface, it looks perfect for the racists. It involves animals, which everyone loves, so they can dress up the issue as about the welfare of cuddly sheep and, because making meat tends to involve killing animals, they can blow up the issue so it looks like killing animals is an exclusively Muslim practise.

They feign outrage at halal slaughter – you can’t kill an animal by slitting its throat! You’ve got to chase it through woods and have it ripped apart by dogs! That’s the civilised way of doing things.

But, the thing is, Jewish and Muslim methods of butchery are pretty much identical. The traditions barely diverge at all, except for the languages in which prayers are said. Personally, I’m happy to see halal as basically the same as kosher and, unless a rabbi is willing to sanction a chicken house that will give me six nuggets and a can of Coke for £3, I won’t be convinced otherwise.

What that means is that racists – when they do try to attack Muslim eating habits – end up attacking Jews’ too. This puts them in quite an uncompromising position. When Jewish News recently asked UKIP how they could justify banning Jews from eating meat, their agricultural spokesperson, Stuart Agnew,stammered over the phone: “This isn’t aimed at you – it’s aimed elsewhere – it’s aimed at others. You’ve been caught in the crossfire; collateral damage. You know what I mean.”

Oh yes, Mr. Racist, yes we do. You’d like to persecute Muslims but – oops – some Jews just got in the way and made you look, well… like a racist.

I’m under no illusion that the racists don’t want to appear anti-Semitic because they actually like Jews. Far from it. They still hate us. It’s just that now we’re not numerous enough or obvious enough to be the principal target of their ire. Think that might be because we went through a bit of a genocide seventy years ago that we’re still trying to cope with.

And that’s why the racists don’t want to appear anti-Semitic. Everyone schoolchild learns the facts of the Holocaust and how awful the toxic combinations of nationalism and capitalism can be. Everyone – well, almost everyone – now agrees that it was one of the worst things Europeans have ever done. Jews are living reminders to those racists of where their policies actually lead. They can’t get away with doing it to us, because it just makes them look too obviously like Nazis.

Perhaps that’s why Scotland Yard were so quick to say that the white supremacist Joshua Bonehead probably couldn’t march through Stamford Hill. The police’s response was that “it is unlikely to faciliate an event that would itself faciliate someone breaking the law. Using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour… can be prosecuted as a criminal offence.”

Oh really? Where was this application of the law for ten years of English Defence League thugs storming through British streets? Why wasn’t that the case when the BNP and the National Front wanted to march?

I’m sure Bonehead’s White Power clan will still have a go at marching anyway, and I’m sure we’ll need to resist them anyway, but the utter hypocrisy from the police is astounding. On anti-fascist marches, I’ve seen police forces throughout the country casually facilitate racist thugs walking past mosques, through mixed residential areas and across town centres using plenty of threatening, abusive and insulting behaviour. In nearly every case, it was the people who came out to oppose them that were arrested, not the fascists.

I’m glad, I genuinely am, that the police want to take action to stop neo-Nazis in London. It makes a welcome change from them joining in and helping out. But it pains me that this policy is applied only to attacks on Jews, and not to all of Britain’s minorities.

This goes far deeper than obviously racist organisations like UKIP, National British Resistance and the police. Every lie in the establishment press that is told about Muslims today was told about Jews in the 1930s. Now, I’m not trying to be a hipster about this and say they’re copying our style, but the evidence speaks for itself.

The lie that Muslims are trying to take over the country? Told all the time about Jews in the 1930s. So pervasive was that belief that George Orwell dedicated an essay to debunking it.

The idea that Muslims are trying to impose their own laws here? Yeah, that’s exactly what the Jews were accused of too.

Even the claims of paedophile grooming gangs and gangsters are a re-hash from previous centuries. Dickens’ character of Fagin was based on pretty much that exact anti-Semitic trope. (Obviously there are Jews and Muslims who do such unspeakable things, as there are from literally every group on the planet – but if you’re looking for a private club that does them then colludes together to cover it up, I’d take a look at the Houses of Parliament and the Royal Family, rather than Britain’s minorities.)

Intelligent people would now never fall for such smears against Jews. They’ve learnt their history and they understand its lessons. So why do people continue to believe these lies about Muslims?

I think it’s clear that Jews need to step in to defend against the virulent Islamophobia in Europe. At every turn, we need to make clear that racists all begin in just the same way and that it will end up in just the same way. We need Jewish communal organisations to be at the forefront of fighting prejudice against Muslims. And if you’re not convinced by every moral and ethical argument there is, just remember: they’ll come for us next.

SOURCE

Spot on...

Defamation - A Yoav Shamir Film

A series of controversial Israeli films are provoking outrage and plaudits in equal measure at the London Film Festival.

The best documentary award has gone to one of the year's most controversial films.

Defamation is a polemic by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. In his expose of America's Anti-Defamation League (ADL), he claims anti-Semitism is being exaggerated for political purposes. He argues that American Jewish leaders travel around the world exploiting the memory of the Holocaust to silence criticism of Israel.

He gets inside the ADL, which claims to be the most powerful lobby group of its type anywhere in the world. With unprecedented access, he travels with them as they meet foreign leaders, and use the memory of the Holocaust to further their pro-Israeli agenda.

At one point, an ADL leader admits to Shamir that "we need to play on that guilt".

Shamir says his film, Defamation, started out as a study of "the political games being played behind the term anti-Semitism".

"It became more a film about perceptions and the way Jews and Israelis choose to see themselves and define themselves - a lot of the time unfortunately choosing the role of eternal victims as a way of life."

He wanted to find out how this mentality has become part of Israel's national psyche.
The film suggests that the attitude is thrust upon children from an early age. School trips to concentration camps in Poland run year-round.

From just 500 children in the 1980s, he claims around 30,000 are now flown to Europe every year.

He discovers that the trips are not designed to educate, but to provoke an emotional reaction. They fly out of Israel euphoric, and end their journey in tears, talking about their shared hatred.

They are accompanied by secret service agents who prevent them from talking to any locals - they are led to believe that most Poles are anti-Semites.

The end result is disturbing. The victim mentality is being used to justify Israel's occupation and colonisation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza.

In the film, one Israeli Jew tells Shamir that she refuses to get upset by Israeli aggression against the Palestinians because "we" faced worse. To her, the Holocaust justifies anything the Israeli army does.

And for Shamir, that is the real danger. "We are experiencing the most right-wing government we've ever had, and there is very little room for discussion. Putting so much focus on hate and the negative, I don't see it as a healthy thing."

In Israel, the film has received a mixed response. "It's kind of a love or hate type of response to the film," Shamir says. "It's very hard to get people to come and watch documentaries in the cinemas in Israel."

In the UK, too, there is anger towards Defamation.

Mark Gardiner from one of Britain's biggest anti-Semitism campaign groups, the Community Security Trust, believes the film could put Jews at risk.

"All of a sudden some bloke appears out of nowhere, oh he's an Israeli, oh he's a Jew, therefore what he says must have more credence than what organisations like my own and the ADL have said for years - I think that shows a deep-seated bias."

And he is furious at the suggestion that anti-Semitism is being used for political purposes.

"This assumption that people are saying it because they're being malicious, because they know that it's not anti-Semitic, but hey lets use anti-Semitism in order to win the Israel case, that's what I find really really offensive," Gardiner says.

Shamir is not surprised by reactions like that.

"Anti-Semitism is a very touchy subject and making a film about anti-Semitism is almost like walking on thin ice, you're going to hurt people's feelings."

Martial Kurtz from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) believes the film can make a difference to activists like him.

He says all too often Israel's supporters label groups like the PSC as anti-Semitic.

"There are many Jewish organisations which campaign [with us] against the occupation, campaign against the siege in Gaza," he says. "So the whole argument falls flat."

Heard this one: Anti-Semitic Jews

British Jews attacked for pro-Gaza solidarity
By Emily Dugan
Sunday, 18 January 2009

British Jews have been attacked for expressing support for Palestinians suffering under Israeli military strikes in Gaza. Police confirmed yesterday that they have provided protection to a number of people believed to be victims of UK-based Zionist extremists angered by expressions of solidarity with Palestinians.

Israel's assault on Gaza has prompted a rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Britain, with more than 150 incidents reported by the Community Security Trust (CST), an organisation for the protection of Jews. But the past two weeks have also seen aggression within the Jewish community towards those sympathetic to the plight of Gaza.

Rabbi Elchenon Beck, 39, was among six rabbis expressing support for Gaza's Palestinians who were set upon by a gang of what they allege were Zionists while walking back from opposing rallies outside the Israeli Embassy on 6 January. "They were shouting and pushed someone to the floor, so we called the police," Rabbi Beck said. "All the time they are trying to intimidate us, but we get used to it."

Rabbi Aharon Cohen, a Palestinian sympathiser and member of the anti-Zionist group Neturei Karta, had his letter box destroyed by a powerful firework after attending the peace march in Manchester this month.

Mark Gardner, of the CST, said it had not kept records of attacks within the Jewish community, but condemned those using the situation in Israel to justify violence in Britain.

"There's passionate political debate," he said, "but what's vitally important is that it does not spill over so that we become participants in a war by proxy."