A few questions the Independent could have asked Roger Waters
What’s the role of a journalist while conducting an interview about a charged political topic? In the UK, it seems that the accuracy clause of the Editors’ Code likely demands that questionable claims be challenged, or some minimal context provided to readers.IsraellyCool: Roger Waters Attacks Israel While Praising The “Humane” Palestinian Civilization
Yet, in an “exclusive” interview published at the Independent, Paul Gallagher allows famed rock star Roger Waters to level several misleading and inaccurate claims against Israel and its supporters without even suggesting that his views are in dispute.
Waters’ first claim unchallenged by Gallagher: His 2006 concert in Israel (at Neve Shalom, an Arab/Israeli peace village) was segregated, and attended by “Israeli Jews only”.
How Gallagher could have responded:
But, there is no racial or religious segregation in Israel. Further, the country’s population is 25% non-Jewish. As 50,000 people attended that show, are you really claiming that the entire audience was Jewish? No Christians or Muslims attended? How did you arrive at this conclusion?
Waters’ second claim unchallenged by Gallagher: there are “40 to 50 discriminatory laws” against non-Jews in Israel.
How Gallagher could have responded:
Can you name some of these discriminatory laws? How do you respond to media critics who refuted this very allegation?
Waters rambles on about Israeli apartheid, which as I have posted about on many occasions, is an outright lie. He then compares it to the amazing thing that is palestinian society.IDF Reservists Debunk ‘Breaking the Silence’ Tantrums, Offer Grownup Approach to Irregularities [video]
Waters likened Israeli treatment of Palestinians to apartheid South Africa. “The way apartheid South Africa treated its black population, pretending they had some kind of autonomy, was a lie,” he said.
“Just as it is a lie now that there is any possibility under the current status quo of Palestinians achieving self-determination and achieving, at least, a rule of law where they can live and raise their children and start their own industries. This is an ancient, brilliant, artistic and very humane civilisation that is being destroyed in front of our eyes.”
Yes, he said that. About a society that brought us the airline hijacking, a society that incites murder against Jewish civilians, a society that names streets after terrorists, a society of modesty police, honor killings and the murder of “collaborators.”
Meanwhile, Israeli society in which Arabs have more rights than anywhere else in the Middle East, in which homosexuals are not persecuted, in which there is religious freedom for all – that is what attracts his ire.
Roger Waters is accused of being antisemitic because all signs point towards it. And his statements in this piece only serve to make this clearer to me.
Deri’s organization Reservists in the Front has shifted gears in recent weeks, and he and his partners have been making the rounds among past and present decision makers and high ranking military officers, pushing a program that mixes long-term evaluation of the IDF role in various areas, as well reporting real problems on the ground.PreOccupiedTerritory: NGOs That Badmouth IDF Obviously More Patriotic Than You (satire)
According to reserve officer Shachar Debi, even when leftwing groups report events truthfully, they do it in a way that turns those events into a paradigm of what the IDF is about, rather than keeping them in proportion to everything the IDF is doing right while dealing with its never-ending mission of protecting civilians against countless enemy attacks. “This kind of conflict exists the world over,” Debi said, “and the IDF behavior can set an example for others — it shouldn’t be dragged to the negative place those NGOs are taking it.”
The new group is interested in coming to terms with the challenge faced by a squad of soldiers who are being attacked by a raging 14-year-old girl brandishing a sharp scissors. “Our challenge is to deal in a practical, real and purposeful way with complex situations and not to commit the sin of oversimplification of either ‘everything is wonderful,’ or ‘everything is terrible,” Shlomo Peled, a reserve officer in special force Sayeret Matkal, told Channel 10.
On Tuesday, March 1, the new group will hold its first large-scale conference in Rishpon, Israel, with President Reuven Rivlin as honorary keynote speaker. The conference will debate ethical and moral issues related to the war against Terror.
Non-governmental organizations that make it their business to paint Israeli security forces in the most negative light possible not only occupy a higher moral plane than you, sources reported today, but also demonstrate a more worthy form of patriotism than yours.
Groups that monitor IDF interactions with Palestinians, and that publicize incidents that depict Israeli soldiers in a way calculated to portray them as brutal or inhumane have always shown that their ethical sensibilities lie far above yours. However, the new reports also indicate that those groups have greater love for their country than you do, since they are even willing to flat-out accuse Israel of crimes based on partial or tendentious evidence in an effort to get the IDF to improve itself, whereas you, pathetically, do not demand that the country you claim to love live up to idealized notions of how its army should behave.
The reports give short shrift to the tired notion that IDF soldiers perform critical security tasks day in and day out, preventing terrorist attacks and apprehending people suspected of involvement in terrorism, instead nobly insisting that the military be defined by its treatment of the Palestinians as demonstrated only by selected incidents specifically chosen for the negative impression those incidents convey. Such an approach, according to the reports, are manifestly the only way the country will ever, ever change its ways, which are just leading to disaster, don’t you know. This attitude contrasts markedly with your naive, obsolete sensibilities, which would show appreciation to the IDF for its constant, continuous operations that allow you and the people running the NGOs to live relatively normal lives unmolested by would-be stabbers, suicide bombers, gunmen, or homicidal drivers who wish you harm for being Israeli. You Neanderthal.