Tuesday, February 26, 2019
From Ian:
‘Telling Israel’s story in the 21st century will have a lot less to do with the Warsaw Ghetto than it will with Kurdistan and Aleppo.’ An interview with Matti Friedman
Jewish 'New York Times' writer to pen book on antisemitism
David Collier: The BBC and Guardian as fake news outlets. Enabling antisemites.
‘Telling Israel’s story in the 21st century will have a lot less to do with the Warsaw Ghetto than it will with Kurdistan and Aleppo.’ An interview with Matti Friedman
Journalist and author Matti Friedman talks to Fathom Deputy Editor Calev Ben-Dor about his acclaimed recent book, Spies of No Country which tells the little known story of the origins of Israeli intelligence by following four of Israel’s first spies through the 1948 War of Independence. He also discusses the importance of the ‘Mizrachi’ component in Israel’s identity, arguing that without grasping its centrality, neither Israelis, Westerners nor those in the Arab world can properly understand the country
CB-D: I recently interviewed Yossi Klein Halevi about his book, Letters to my Palestinian Neighbour and one of the things he emphasised was how he wanted to tell a 21st century Zionist story. You touched on this earlier, in that the story often told is overly Euro-centric – the narrative begins with the pogroms in Russia and ends with the Holocaust. Your book, which is different in many ways, has a similar idea in that if we are to tell the story of Israel today – both to Israelis and outsiders – we need to make it more accurate to include a Mizrachi component.
MF: People still tell the story of Israel as: When the Jews of the Islamic world moved to Israel they joined the story of the Ashkenazim – so the story of Israel is the story of the Jews of Europe. But having thought about this, and having lived here for 23 years, it is clear to me that what actually happened is much closer to the opposite. The remnants of the Jews of Europe come to the Middle East and inserted themselves into the story of the Jews of the Islamic world. The State of Israel is shaped by our contact with Islam and Jews who have lived here for centuries. The dominant narrative of the European Jews is wrong.
Looking ahead, telling Israel’s story in the 21st century will have a lot less to do with the Warsaw Ghetto than it will with Kurdistan and Aleppo. And Western observers find that difficult. But if we want to understand Israel, we are going to have to make an effort to move our centre of consciousness to the Middle East because that’s where we are.
Jewish 'New York Times' writer to pen book on antisemitism
New York Times opinion editor and columnist Bari Weiss will be writing a book about fighting antisemitism.
Weiss has penned a two-book deal with Crown Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House, she announced on Twitter this week. The first book, due out in September, is titled How to Fight Anti-Semitism, and was described as “an urgent wake-up call to all Americans, exposing the alarming rise of antisemitism in this country and in Europe – and explains what we can do to defeat it.”
Weiss gave a speech on the topic of fighting antisemitism on Monday evening, at the Temple Emanu-el Streicker Center in New York City.
The Jewish writer and editor, who grew up in Pittsburgh, worked at Tablet magazine and The Wall Street Journal before landing at The New York Times in 2017.
During her time there, she has written several columns on the Jewish-American experience and antisemitism in the 21st century.
Weiss called US President Donald Trump's refusal to condemn neo-Nazis in Charlottesville an "utter moral failure," and called out Rep. Ilhan Omar for "making accusations based on nothing more than prejudiced stereotypes." Last year, after the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where Weiss held her bat mitzva, she penned a moving op-ed.
David Collier: The BBC and Guardian as fake news outlets. Enabling antisemites.
When did the BBC and the Guardian become ‘fake news’ outlets? Last week the Guardian newspaper, published a letter, written by ‘over 200 Jewish members’. It was compiled to belittle the problem of antisemitism in the Labour Party, and in support of Jeremy Corbyn. For some (as yet to be discovered) reason, BBC News even gave airtime to it. The letter is no more than a rehash of the last time the Guardian decided to give this particular rabble a voice. Nor any different from the one before that, nor the one before that. We can follow this line all the way back to 2002, when the Guardian first gave publicity to the movement that was to become BDS.
Who is inside the rabble? People like Naomi Wimborne Idrissi, who have spoken under the flag of the soon to be proscribed Hezbollah and Elleanne Green, founder of the antisemitic Palestine Live Facebook group. Without the antisemites, this group could not gather a regular ‘minyan‘, which is why they never publicly demonstrate. In other words everybody should know, including those at the BBC and the Letters Editor at the Guardian newspaper, that this fringe crowd is not a legitimate ‘Jewish’ voice.
Last September, the Independent also gave publicity to another list of Jewish organisations that upon closer inspection was also not a legitimate Jewish voice. That list even contained the vile group ‘Scottish Jews against Zionism‘. The face of ‘ScottishJAZ’ is Jolanta Hadzic:
Jolanta is just another person who spreads rabid antisemitism and Holocaust denial:
What do all these letters have in common? That it is always the same names. Some of those involved are not Jewish and some are even publicly outed hard-core antisemites. Both the Independent letter and the Guardian letter have signatories who spread Holocaust Denial. The situation is absurd. There are always people who will stand in opposition to anything. You can find Christians who oppose Christ, people who believe in Santa and Muslims who fast on Yom Kippur. There are more people who believe that they were abducted by aliens, than there are active anti-Zionist Jews in the UK. Would the BBC or Guardian run an article about alien abductees every time they aired a show featuring Brian Cox in order to ‘add balance’?
No of course not, because they would quickly be regarded as fake new junk sites. Which is exactly why we must not let them get away with how they treat Jews.
