Saturday, June 02, 2018
From Ian:
Evelyn Gordon: Baby Layla Shows What’s Wrong with Israel’s PR
Evelyn Gordon: Baby Layla Shows What’s Wrong with Israel’s PR
Instead, Israel’s critics treated Ghandour’s death as proof of Israel’s evil. In other words, they effectively declared that Israel had no right to defend its border by any means whatsoever–even with non-lethal means like tear gas–unless it could somehow achieve the impossible feat of guaranteeing that no Palestinian would ever be killed under any circumstances. And if the only way Israel can win the PR war is leaving its border completely undefended, that war would indeed be inherently unwinnable; at least, among this portion of its critics.Jonathan Marks: Do Jews Get to Define Anti-Semitism?
But many people do understand that leaving a border undefended against angry mobs isn’t a tenable option. If Israeli public diplomacy had been even minimally competent, it would have made clear that this is the logical implication of blaming Israel for Ghandour’s death.
Critics might retort that even tear gas shouldn’t be used against completely peaceful demonstrators. But as the Times’ story makes clear, Ghandour wasn’t in a peaceful demonstration when she died. She had been deliberately taken from a peaceful one into a violent one.
On May 14, as in all the preceding weeks, there were actually two demonstrations taking place. One, which was largely peaceful, was hundreds of meters from the border fence. The other, which was right up against the fence, was anything but peaceful. Members of terrorist organizations threw bombs, Molotov cocktails, and slingshot-propelled rocks at soldiers. They flew incendiary kites across the border to set Israeli fields ablaze (to date, some 300 of these kites have ignited 100 fires, destroyed more than 3,000 acres of wheat and caused millions of shekels worth of damage). They vandalized the fence and tried to break through it. These are the “demonstrators” Israel targeted with measures ranging from tear gas to, when necessary, live fire, as evidenced by the fact that 53 of the 62 killed belonged to terrorist organizations.
Baby Layla was taken to the nonviolent protest by her 12-year-old uncle, who mistakenly thought her mother was there. Upon discovering his mistake, he responsibly kept her in the nonviolent section until late afternoon, when she began crying. Then, wanting to hand her off to an older relative, he “pushed forward into the protest in search of her grandmother, Heyam Omar, who was standing in a crowd under a pall of black smoke, shouting at Israeli soldiers across the fence,” the Times reported. Panicked by Layla’s crying, he deliberately brought her into the most violent part of the protest, where Israel was exercising its legitimate right of self-defense and where no baby should ever have been. And she died.
But even if it was Israeli tear gas that killed her, Israel cannot be held culpable for her death unless you start from the premise that it had no right whatsoever to defend its border against violent attacks of the type launched during this protest, even by the most nonlethal of means. That, of course, is precisely what many of Israel’s critics do think. And this is the point that Israel and its advocates should have been hammering home.
Carly Pildis, a political organizer, is a critic of the left from within. She has been doing the good work of pleading with her fellow progressives to stop tolerating anti-Semitism. She did so admirably in her widely-read piece for Tablet, “Jews Get to Define Anti-Semitism: Not Shaun King.” The kind of anti-Semitism to which Pildis objects has brought back the “Zionism is racism” slur. That is a paradigm through which Jews are judged unfit for social justice work and the deeply anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, is rehabilitated. Tamika Mallory, a co-chair of the Women’s March, was happy to be present at a speech in which Farrakhan said, among many other equally anti-Semitic things, that “the powerful Jews are my enemy.”German intelligence: Iran still working to acquire WMD technology
Apart from a boilerplate assertion of her opposition to anti-Semitism, Mallory has not reckoned with her embrace of Farrakhan. Indeed, in the thick of the controversy, Mallory tweeted, “If your leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader.” Law professor and blogger David Schraub spoke for many Jews of various political persuasions when he described this comment as “less of anti-Semitic dog-whistle than a bullhorn.” Mallory has since focused on shifting attention from her downplaying of the virulent, naked anti-Semitism of Farrakhan, which is still a problem on the left, to her hatred of Israel, which mostly isn’t.
Shaun King, a columnist best known for his Black Lives Matter activism, chose to focus on what he considered the most important aspect of the story. His preoccupation was with the fact that people like Schraub, who criticize Mallory for, at the very best, warmly embracing an anti-Semite, are not merely oversensitive but damned liars. Having given Mallory a clean bill of health concerning anti-Semitism, he added, “Your lies won’t work.”
This is where Pildis’s criticism comes in. How dare Shaun King give Mallory a clean bill of health, when a “central tenet of anti-oppression work is that marginalized communities are the authors of their own experiences,” and “those who experience a specific oppression get to define it”?
Iran has been continuing its efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, Fox News reported Saturday, citing an intelligence report published by a German state intelligence agency.
“Iran continued to undertake — as did Pakistan and Syria — efforts to obtain goods and know-how to be used for the development of weapons of mass destruction and to optimize corresponding missile delivery systems,” said the dossier put together by the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the intelligence agency of the German state of Baden-Württemberg — the German equivalent of the FBI that operates at a state level.
The Iranian efforts were heavily focused on the southern German state, which is home to many specialized technology and engineering companies, the report said.
The Baden-Württemberg intelligence officials said they had gathered “intensive intelligence on activities of Iran’s spy agencies.”
The report said Tehran’s activities focused on trying to acquire “German software, sophisticated vacuum and control engineering technologies, measurement devices, and advanced electrical equipment for its missile program.”
The German intelligence agency said that Iran has also carried out espionage activities against government offices in Berlin as well as continuing to spy on Iranian dissidents in Germany.
