Lebanon is a very complicated place.
You literally need a scorecard to keep track of all the different groups that make up Lebanon's political scene and their shifting loyalties. The three main groups are,of course, the Christians, the Shiites and the Sunnis, but each of those groups have splinter groups that may or may not be aligned with their co-religionists at any time. There are also the Druze and smaller groups, whose very survival depends on being able to anticipate which way the wind is about to blow and jump on the side of the winning team.
Add to this that these are not just political groups but they all generally were parts of militia in the 1970s and 1980s. Sometimes they have to take out their weapons to defend their towns and villages.
And add to this the entire recent history of civil war. Plus the collective memory of being effectively controlled by Syria, by Israel or (more recently) by Iran. Not to mention the French influence on Lebanese culture and the fact that it is a favorite vacation spot for decadent, rich Saudis. More ingredients in Lebanon's ratatouille is the generally liberal and Western-style of downtown Beirut compared with the poverty of the south and the traditionalism in other areas.
The resulting dish is dizzying in its complexity.
Michael Totten, in his great book "The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel ," explains it all (or at least a lot of it) in a wonderful first-person journalistic style.
We learn about Lebanon as Totten does. We follow him as he interviews Shi'ite, Maronite and Sunni leaders and ordinary people as well. We tag along as he gets threatened by people with guns and eventually finds that he is somehow safer with armed people around.
Unlike many journalists who speak as if they are omniscient, Totten lets us see his mistakes and how he learns from them.
He takes us on his journey during the Israel/Hezbollah war of 2006 and mini-civil wars precipitated by Hezbollah in afterwards. He speaks to many people on most sides, and lets us know when he doesn't believe what they say. He and his friends get into dangerous situations that are inconceivable to Western eyes - but he knows that and explains it so the audience gets it.
Totten often uses that skill to great effect. For example, he mentions that he asks Eli Khoury, a leader of the March 14th movement, "What is the solution?" Totten then goes on to tell his readers that this is a very American question, one that he soon learned not to ask, because the Lebanese know that there isn't one. However, Americans are solution-oriented and cannot grasp that basic concept that is so integral to survival in the Middle East.
We cannot solve the problems. We can only manage them as best we can, today.
One other talent that Michael Totten has is the ability to see the entire picture and relate to it. It is easy to get lost in the minutiae, especially in Lebanon where there are so many groups competing with each other and none of them are in the majority. But Totten is always there to remind us what the real danger is. It is Iran, using Hezbollah as its proxy. All of the desire to be pacifist or pan-Lebanese is doomed as long as Hezbollah, effectively an arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, has effective veto power over the Lebanese government and controls its own state within a state. No one can confront Hezbollah militarily nor politically, and as a result Iran is extending its hegemony over the region.
Totten's journalistic style is especially appreciated in the Lebanese arena. While most other journalists will meekly follow whatever restrictions their interview subjects impose on them, Totten reports on the entire context of his interviews, letting us know that if he cannot find out a piece of information it is not because he didn't try. He also lets us know when his subjects are not being entirely truthful.
Totten was not in Lebanon for all the events he covers so he relies on his friends to fill in the personal stories. Also, he didn't talk much about the Palestinian Arab experience in Lebanon outside of broad historical strokes; there is no interview with the Arabs in refugee camps and the Nahr al-Bared fighting is glossed over as a "sideshow." While this is probably true, there are about as many Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon as there are Druze, and demographics do matter. I would love to have seen him highlight Lebanese discrimination against them across the board as well as what they have done to help destroy Lebanon from inside.
These are minor points, though. The Road to Fatima Gate is a brilliant combination of memoir and journalism, and it is highly recommended.
Did Abbas recognize the existence of "The Jewish Nation"?
I reported a couple of months ago that one of the released "Palestine Papers" included this comment from the Negotiations Support Unit of the PLO:
So did Abbas goof in his Passover tweet to the "Jewish nation"?
If there is a Jewish nation, does it not have the right of self-determination?
And if there is a Jewish nation, where is its land? It is obviously in the Biblical Land of Israel, which includes the entire West Bank.
So was this a gaffe, or just another of a long line of English language doubletalk by Palestinian Arab leaders? I could not find any Arabic version of his Passover holiday wishes for this year (in 2009 he gave a more generic message to Jews worldwide, which raised eyebrows among some Islamists.)
(h/t Challah Hu Akbar)
Recognizing the Jewish state implies recognition of a Jewish people and recognition of its right to self-determination. Those who assert this right also assert that the territory historically associated with this right of self-determination (i.e., the self-determination unit) is all of Historic Palestine. Therefore, recognition of the Jewish people and their right of self-determination may lend credence to the Jewish people’s claim to all of Historic Palestine.
So did Abbas goof in his Passover tweet to the "Jewish nation"?
If there is a Jewish nation, does it not have the right of self-determination?
And if there is a Jewish nation, where is its land? It is obviously in the Biblical Land of Israel, which includes the entire West Bank.
So was this a gaffe, or just another of a long line of English language doubletalk by Palestinian Arab leaders? I could not find any Arabic version of his Passover holiday wishes for this year (in 2009 he gave a more generic message to Jews worldwide, which raised eyebrows among some Islamists.)
(h/t Challah Hu Akbar)
After Hamas wins student elections, PA arrests Hamas students
I reported last week that Hamas had won student elections in Birzeit University, which had generally been pro-Fatah in recent years despite a strong Hamas presence.
The PA apparently didn't think much about this show of student democracy, because Arabic media is reporting today that the PA arrested 12 Hamas supporters both at Birzeit as well as at Hebron Polytechnic University.
The reports say that the police broke into students houses to arrest them, damaging their contents.
Unity!
Why doesn't anyone compare Baltimore to Hamas police? (update)
Now that police beatings are in the headlines again, it is fashionable for so-called progressives to equate the police with Israeli soldiers - as if Israeli police and soldiers are the quintessential example of police brutality.
From The Guardian:
To use Israel as the standard of brutality is not only an obscene slander, but it shows how successful anti-Israel propaganda is, and how open and susceptible otherwise intelligent people are to being manipulated by the haters.
Even more absurd is that the standard for treating Gazan civilians like subhumans comes not from Israel - but from those Israel was fighting..
This AFP report from yesterday will get about 1/10th of one percent of the coverage that stories about Israel do:
It is not easy to find videos like this on YouTube in English. And coverage of daily Hamas brutality is minuscule compared to the much exaggerated, out of context and often fictional stories of Israeli law enforcement brutality.
Meanwhile, videos showing Israeli police helping Arabs - videos that completely destroy the lazy assumptions that journalists and writers like Simon make - are even more rare: This is not a coincidence. Journalists are lazy in accepting the fiction of widespread Israeli brutality, and anything that shows that to be false is naturally going to be buried because it is too hard to explain the reality to readers compared to reporting-by-meme.
This video shows an army patrol reviving an Arab in Hebron whose heart stopped after he was electrocuted.
Clearly, these soldiers are frantically trying to save the life of someone that David Simon thinks they passionately loathe.
People like Simon are well meaning - and are literally clueless that they are being brainwashed every day by an army of anti-Israel activists and a complicit media that discards even the appearance of objectivity while willing to accept and repeat the narrative of hate without question.
But when David Simon writes his own analysis for the public, he has the same responsibility as any journalist to get his facts right. His being exposed to lies for decades is not an excuse to skip fact-checking.
The irony is that much of the audience for these lazy reporters want to know the truth, even if Simon doesn't. There is a reason that the most popular video I've ever uploaded, with 400,000 views, shows IDF soldiers acting kindly towards Arab children.
(h/t Alexi, Ian)
UPDATE: Simon changed the text in his original article from Gaza to the West Bank. I suppose I could link to more videos of Israeli patrols playing soccer with Palestinian youths, but clearly he stands by his account of how Israel treats Arabs like dirt, and that turns him from someone who one could assume was duped by the media into someone who is doing the duping.
From The Guardian:
David Simon, the creator of The Wire, has again weighed in on unrest in his adopted city of Baltimore, turning his frustration from the protesters to the “army of occupation” of the city’s police.I will bet anything that the lowest private in the IDF in Gaza last summer would act with more restraint towards those trying to kill him than David Simon would. I would also bet that the same private knows more about international law and the laws of armed conflict in protecting civilians than David Simon does.
“They were collecting bodies, treating corner folk and citizens alike as an Israeli patrol would treat Gaza, or as the Afrikaners would have treated Soweto back in the day. They’re an army of occupation. And once it’s that, then everybody’s the enemy.
To use Israel as the standard of brutality is not only an obscene slander, but it shows how successful anti-Israel propaganda is, and how open and susceptible otherwise intelligent people are to being manipulated by the haters.
Even more absurd is that the standard for treating Gazan civilians like subhumans comes not from Israel - but from those Israel was fighting..
This AFP report from yesterday will get about 1/10th of one percent of the coverage that stories about Israel do:
Police in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip beat and arrested protesters on Wednesday at a youth rally in the north of the besieged coastal territory, an AFP correspondent said.This undated video shows how much restraint Hamas shows towards civilians in Gaza.
More than 400 demonstrators gathered in Shujaiyeh, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City that was razed during a July-August war between Hamas and Israel, urging reconstruction and calling for an end to intra-Palestinian division.
It is not easy to find videos like this on YouTube in English. And coverage of daily Hamas brutality is minuscule compared to the much exaggerated, out of context and often fictional stories of Israeli law enforcement brutality.
Meanwhile, videos showing Israeli police helping Arabs - videos that completely destroy the lazy assumptions that journalists and writers like Simon make - are even more rare: This is not a coincidence. Journalists are lazy in accepting the fiction of widespread Israeli brutality, and anything that shows that to be false is naturally going to be buried because it is too hard to explain the reality to readers compared to reporting-by-meme.
This video shows an army patrol reviving an Arab in Hebron whose heart stopped after he was electrocuted.
Clearly, these soldiers are frantically trying to save the life of someone that David Simon thinks they passionately loathe.
People like Simon are well meaning - and are literally clueless that they are being brainwashed every day by an army of anti-Israel activists and a complicit media that discards even the appearance of objectivity while willing to accept and repeat the narrative of hate without question.
But when David Simon writes his own analysis for the public, he has the same responsibility as any journalist to get his facts right. His being exposed to lies for decades is not an excuse to skip fact-checking.
The irony is that much of the audience for these lazy reporters want to know the truth, even if Simon doesn't. There is a reason that the most popular video I've ever uploaded, with 400,000 views, shows IDF soldiers acting kindly towards Arab children.
(h/t Alexi, Ian)
UPDATE: Simon changed the text in his original article from Gaza to the West Bank. I suppose I could link to more videos of Israeli patrols playing soccer with Palestinian youths, but clearly he stands by his account of how Israel treats Arabs like dirt, and that turns him from someone who one could assume was duped by the media into someone who is doing the duping.
Those Jewish extremists trying to pray again
Official Palestinian Arab news agency WAFA reports:
Hamas' Palestine Times in Arabic is a bit more strident - and fanciful:
A group of Jewish settlers prayed at Joseph’s Tomb on Thursday, east of Nablus in the north West Bank, under the protection of Israeli forces.I always wonder how they know that the worshipers are "settlers." Oh, right - all Israelis are "settlers"!
Local sources said the worshippers snuck into the site under the protection of Israeli soldiers, prayed until the early hours of the morning and left, with no confrontations reported.
Israeli radio said forces stopped and arrested some 13 settlers while they were on their way to the tomb, although another group managed to enter the site despite the road blocks the Israeli army had set up.
Hamas' Palestine Times in Arabic is a bit more strident - and fanciful:
In a new level of arrogance, about twenty Zionist extremist settlers blew up a roadblock Thursday east of Nablus and stormed Joseph's Tomb, where they performed Talmudic rituals, under the protection of the Zionist army, which was spread extensively in the vicinity of the region amid flying reconnaissance planes nearby.Israeli media is apparently not aware of any visits to the tomb last night, saying only that the IDF stopped dozens of would-be worshippers.
Witnesses said that the settlers went to sabotage public utilities, destroying the electricity grid and throwing dirt and rubbish on the street nearby. They also burned tires during their withdrawal.
Al Saud al-Yahud - Iran's anti-Saudi cartoons
These cartoons have been found in Iranian media:
Notice the Saudi offering a blood offering to the Jewish Golden Calf, and the last cartoon says "Hypnosis Jewish," not "Zionist."
But Iranians insist that they aren't antisemitic,and Roger Cohen agrees, so that's that.
(h/t Gidon Shaviv)
“Whatever Politician is in Charge of Britain’s Middle East Policy, the Foreign Office is Unbeatable” (Daphne Anson)
“Yesterday we heard the Leader of the [Labour] Opposition [Harold Wilson], its spokesman on foreign affairs, and the leader of the Liberal Party [Jeremy Thorpe] urging our government [prime minister Edward Heath’s Conservative one] to supply arms to Israel, when the Israeli Army is fighting 125 miles inside Egypt and over 20 miles inside Syria,” R.G. Cookson, FRS, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southampton – apparently an ideological antecedent to today’s monstrous regiment of anti-Israel academics – wrote from his Winchester home to The Times newspaper in October 1973 during the Yom Kippur War. “When will they think Israel has conquered enough territory – or do they support the Zionist ideal of a state stretching from the Euphrates to the Nile?”
At the London headquarters of the very proper and rather patrician Anglo-Jewish Association, a body steeped historically in anti-Zionist or at least non-Zionist sentiment, its Council, anxious to avoid the accusation of “dual loyalties,” chose its words carefully in arguing the opposing view in the same venerable publication. The eleven men and one woman settled upon the following text:
“We … express our distress at the violation of the ceasefire by Egypt and Syria.
With our sympathy for Israel reinforced by a shared historical experience, we believe that this onslaught sustained by Soviet equipment must inevitably damage the strategic interests of Britain, the country of our allegiance.
We therefore call on His Majesty’s Government not to persist in an embargo on arms for Israel which will inevitably and unfairly injure Israel in her struggle to survive.”
It bore the signatures of Victor Lucas (businessman and multi-faceted communal heavyweight), (Sir) Leon Bagrit (industrialist), (Sir) Isaiah Berlin (political philosopher), Maurice Edelman (MP, Labour), (Sir) Louis Gluckstein (ex-MP, Conservative), Toby Jessel (MP, Conservative), David Kessler (Jewish Chronicle proprietor), Ewen Montagu (judge and famous wartime intelligence officer), Frances Rubens (wife of prominent Judaica expert Alfred Rubens), Neville Sandelson (MP, Labour), Harold Sebag-Montefiore (Greater London Council official and judge), and Harold Soref (MP, Conservative).
Although derided in less squeamishly and more overtly pro-Israel quarters as fustily cautious in its wording, the AJA’s statement was a welcome addition to the robust Jewish communal protest against the Heath government’s embargo – which although imposed upon all combatants in the war was in practice disadvantageous only to Israel, and extended even to a ban on supplying spare parts for that country’s British-made Centurion tanks.
Meanwhile the usual anti-Israel propaganda was at work on other fronts, for example in an obnoxious letter to The Times (19 October) by Sir Kennedy Trevaskis (1915-90), a Foreign Office Arabist who, as his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography regarding the Aden phase of his diplomatic career notes, “was back in an environment, essentially Muslim, where his experience, personal qualities, and sympathies were at home”. In short, a typical member of the Foreign Office “Camel Corps” that is still going strong today: consider Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Sir Oliver Miles, Sir Vincent Fearn, Frances Guy, James Watt, and many others.
Trevaskis’s jaundiced claptrap, with, among other points, its nasty reference to “immigrants from Europe” displacing the “indigenous” inhabitants, was ably refuted by D. M. (David Malcolm) Lewis of Christ Church, Oxford, whose letter appeared in The Times of 22 October. Lewis – subsequently Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, and well versed in Jewish, Persian and Greek antiquity – wrote, inter alia:
“I must say that Sir Kennedy Trevaskis does not inspire much confidence in the command of the facts enjoyed by British Arabists. I can attach very little precise meaning to his assertion that nine-tenths of the indigenous population of Israel has been expelled from its home …. Apart from the Israeli-born Jewish population, the total of Jewish immigrants to Israel from Asia and Africa between 1948 and 1970 was 723,073. The vast majority of these came from Arab lands, leaving their homes and possessions of centuries behind them. No doubt this fact would be more clearly recognised if they had been left in refugee camps.”
He added:
“I certainly have sympathy for Palestinians, but we should nevertheless realise that part of what has gone on in the Middle East in the past 25 years has been a massive exchange of populations. If philhellenes were still agitating for the return of the Greek population of Asia Minor, they would universally be regarded as stupid and dangerous.”
I’ll continue this issue of British reactions to Israel during the Yom Kippur War in my next column, but right now I want to draw attention to what the British Labour MP Richard Crossman, a staunch and enduring friend of Israel, had to say regarding the issue of the arms embargo. For in so doing so he made a withering indictment of Foreign Office Arabism which appears as relevant today as it did then. His op-ed in The Times (17 October 1973), under the heading “Arabists hold all the cards at the FO” – which had prompted Trevaskis’s sour little outburst commending the Arabist outlook – commenced:
‘The official British attitude to the Arab-Israeli War is odious – but not more odious than usual. Ever since in the mid-1920s the Foreign Office discovered that in backing Zionism, Lloyd George had acquired not a Jewish goldmine but a political liability, the Foreign Office has been politely anti-Zionist. Every time an Arab-Jewish crisis breaks out, the officials concerned work out a policy which can be shown in legal terms to be strictly fair to the Jewish side but which also provides some undercover material advantage to “our friends the Arabs”.
It was absurd to hope that in this crisis the Foreign Office would suddenly acquire a genuine impartiality between Jew and Arab, and a sense that a commitment to the Jews should be honoured even when it pays to get rid of it. No – the policy which evolved within a matter of hours was one which in legal terms would be strictly fair but in military terms would be of enormous benefit to the Arabs.’
In order to achieve that aim, he continued, the Foreign Office had advised Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home that three things were necessary. First, that Sir Alec “should send a telegram to [Britain’s] representative at the [UN] Security Council making sure that at the very first session he should propose a ceasefire though there was not the slightest chance of anybody paying attention”. Second, that Sir Alec should state publicly, as he duly did, that “as the proponent of a ceasefire, Britain must impose on herself a quite unusually severe form of neutrality”. Third, that “having made this statement, he should coolly assert that this new and severe neutrality required a total embargo on arms to both sides”.
The effect, Crossman went on, “is to deny to the six Arab states we have been supplying with arms a small amount of the superfluity of ultramodern weapons systems they have been acquiring from us, among others. For many months they will not feel it, and if they do the Russians will fill the gap”. In sharp contrast, however,
“The arms embargo we have imposed on Israel is of an entirely different dimension. For many years we have divided with the Americans the responsibility for providing a very large part of the armaments used by the Israeli army. The navy has come to rely on us for certain kinds of vessels – submarines, frigates, torpedo boats. Even more important, we have become a main purveyor to the army of a vast amount of military hardware – a huge list with, right at the top, artillery, armoured cars, and tanks plus spares and ammunition.
Quite deliberately, the Americans left this side of the job to us. As a result, when the Russians began to pour arms into the Arab side and the Americans began to redress the balance, our high-minded statement that in pursuance of our policy of trying to obtain a truce we must at once embargo all kinds of British arms exports to Israel meant that the deadly imbalance as regards this aspect of the war would not be rectified. The spare parts and ammunition for the armoured divisions in the desert are not to be sent: Sir Alec Douglas-Home, with the strict impartiality which has inspired British foreign policy in the Middle East for 50 years, has imposed an arms embargo which leaves the Arabs almost unaffected while it stabs the Jews in the back.”
Not that Sir Alec had acted very differently from a Labour Foreign Secretary in the circumstances, conceded Crossman, although more of an objection would have been made had Michael Stewart, let alone George Brown, held that portfolio. “Whatever politician is in charge of Britain’s Middle East policy, the Foreign Office is unbeatable.”
“We have had real Foreign Secretaries whose presence in that august office made a real difference to British policy in other parts of the world,” Crossman observed.
‘But in this one area, a tight little group composed of the officials at home and the ambassadors abroad, has always managed to impose its will on the politicians. These, of course, are the “Arabists” who monopolize the Middle Eastern department and regard the Middle Eastern embassies as theirs by right. Lesser mortals can be sent to an area where the language is new. An Arabist can hope that once he has been through his special linguistic training and established his special pro-Arab reliability, he can spend a lifetime either sitting at an Arab desk in the Foreign Office or sitting in a British Embassy in an Arab state.’
Crossman recalled that, when he was a minister in Harold Wilson’s government, he had witnessed “the Arabists’ techniques”. Denis Healey, the Secretary of State for Defence, Crossman explained,
“was going into business in a big way as an arms merchant trying to cut his ministry’s cost by upping its sales. It was the time when the Chieftain tank was being developed. The Centurion was marketed as the best tank in the world and the Chieftain as one better. The Arabs were biting and the Israelis began to show an interest. So a long dialogue took place in the course of which two prototypes were sent out for testing and development by the Israeli army, which had had much more battle experience than ours.
My Israeli friends were proud of the new example of Anglo-Israeli cooperation and certain they would get the contract. I was sure they wouldn’t, and tried to show them that Britain is not the right place to buy military hardware, since in any Jewish-Arab crisis, when the Arab pressure was applied we would let Israel down whatever promises we had made.”
He attempted to persuade the Israelis to buy their artillery from Sweden. He warned them that in reality they stood no chance of obtaining Chieftain tanks, since as soon as news leaked that such a deal with Britain was in the offing, the UK’s Arabist diplomats would unleash their mischief on the government, claiming that British embassies in the Middle East were in danger of being torched by angry demonstrators – and, consequently, the Israelis would be out of the running.
“Of course, I was right,” his op-ed concluded.
“But what I did not foresee was this total arms embargo in the first week of a war. But I should have known. One of the rules of the unique kind of strip poker they play is that a British Arabist is entitled to have an extra ace up his sleeve.”
Daphne Anson is an Australian who under her real name has authored and co-authored several books and many articles on historical topics including Jewish ones. She blogs under an alias in order to separate her professional identity from her blogging one.
Britain's tough sanctions against Syria
From the BBC:
The Foreign Office says the invitation for the Syrian ambassador in London has been withdrawn following reports that up to 400 pro-democracy protesters have been killed in Syria by security forces in recent weeks.Bashir Assad must be quaking in his boots in the face of such strong Western opposition to his murdering hundreds of civilians.
A Foreign Office statement said: "Buckingham Palace shares the view of the Foreign Office that it is not considered appropriate for the Syrian ambassador to attend the wedding."
PA TV says Jews control banks, media.. Will CNN consider it newsworthy?
From Palestinian Media Watch:
The one thing it won't do is report on this pervasive antisemitism in the "moderate" Palestinian Authority media. That topic is kryptonite for the mainstream media.
Another expression of Palestinian Authority Antisemitism appeared on government-controlled PA TV earlier this month. The host of a weekly program on Islam, Imad Hamato, who is also a professor of Quranic Studies at the University of Palestine in Gaza, stated that Jews engage in profiteering and control "the money, the press and the resources."
Hamato also stated that Israel, which he calls "a cancerous tumor," is trying to "Judaize" everything and influence the mind of "the Arab intellectual" so that he will accept Israel as "an entity that has a right to live":
Israel has worked hard to Judaize the land, [but] it did not stop at that. [Israel] worked to realize something else: the Judaization of culture, [so that] the Arab intellectual embraces the idea of acceptance of Israel as a recognized body and as an entity that has a right to live. Israel, the invading country, the cancerous tumor - which we have already called a cancerous tumor in the past - many intellectuals today talk about coexistence and offering our hands in peace, and [say] Israel is part of the region. The noblest Arabs in terms of their Arabness were those who spoke up and said: 'Israel does not exist!' Those who did not say that were ostracized. Now, whoever says that Israel should exist is met with approval... They [the Jews] are usurers. See, the usury money and usurer banks, those who control the money in the world can be counted on one hand - a few individuals - and all of them belong to the Jewish world. They control the media, the money, the press, the resources, the plans.
If CNN feels that it is newsworthy to quote absurd stories from PA media about "settlers" chopping down and seizing 800 olive trees without any comment on the veracity of the source, then perhaps it will quote this Imad Hamoto as a source as well of Jewish world domination.[Official PA TV, May 1, 2015]
The one thing it won't do is report on this pervasive antisemitism in the "moderate" Palestinian Authority media. That topic is kryptonite for the mainstream media.
Tel Aviv protests are a win-win for Israel haters
PreOccupied Territory has been making a series of flowcharts showing how anything Israel does can be spun against it.
The recent demonstrations in Tel Aviv seem to be a similar situation:
The Arab media has been enthusiastically reporting on the protests, happily using them s evidence that Israel is racist. (Al Jazeera, ironically, refers to the Ethiopians by the derogatory name "Falashas" while self-righteously reporting on Israeli racism.)
Funny, the only African people in Gulf countries seem to be servants.
The Jewish Press reports that the violence seems to have been instigated from outsiders who want to paint Israel as racist, and want to help it along when the police don't cooperate.
Of course not. Police have used water cannons, rubber bullets and tear gas against haredi Jewish protesters in Israel.
So surely Israeli police are just violent in general, using tear gas at the drop of a hat?
Tell the British, who used tear gas only last week at a protest against gentrification of neighborhoods.
Tell it to Canadians, whose police recently used tear gas and rubber bullets against a student protest.
For some reason those didn't make world headlines. In fact, they didn't even make major headlines in their own countries.
But the desire to paint Israel as a racist society is irresistible to a large number of reporters.
The recent demonstrations in Tel Aviv seem to be a similar situation:
Funny, the only African people in Gulf countries seem to be servants.
The Jewish Press reports that the violence seems to have been instigated from outsiders who want to paint Israel as racist, and want to help it along when the police don't cooperate.
Police said Monday morning that anarchists incited protesters to violence in last night’s march in Tel Aviv against police brutality and racism undermined demonstrators’ objectives.So do Israeli police only use tear gas and stun grenades against blacks and Arabs?
Protesters were armed with rocks and metal objects that they hurled at police officers, 56 of whom were injured lightly. Police arrested 43 demonstrators and hurled stunned grenades in the middle of a crowd blocking a major artery at rush-hour in Tel Aviv.
Both a senior police official and “Elazar,” who made Aliyah to Ethiopia years before the massive airlift in Operation Shlomo, told Voice of Israel radio (Reshet Bet) that the protest turned violent partly because of anarchists.
Of course not. Police have used water cannons, rubber bullets and tear gas against haredi Jewish protesters in Israel.
So surely Israeli police are just violent in general, using tear gas at the drop of a hat?
Tell the British, who used tear gas only last week at a protest against gentrification of neighborhoods.
Tell it to Canadians, whose police recently used tear gas and rubber bullets against a student protest.
For some reason those didn't make world headlines. In fact, they didn't even make major headlines in their own countries.
But the desire to paint Israel as a racist society is irresistible to a large number of reporters.