From Ian:
David Collier: From Manchester to Brunel, polishing the propaganda machine
David Collier: From Manchester to Brunel, polishing the propaganda machine
Brunel 2 MarchMelanie Phillips: Viewing antisemitism through a glass darkly
Last night, 2nd March 2017, I was in Brunel for yet another event during ‘Apartheid Week’. There is a difference between an argument shaped to reflect your perspective and delivering raw propaganda. Opposition to ‘Apartheid week’ is not about a difference of opinion. The endless distortion provided by speakers is supported by pillars of outright deceit. Those standing in front of the students on campus must *know* they are telling lies. They *know* they are purposefully omitting information. I have seen scores of speakers at dozens of events deliberately mislead students. This is fodder for the pulpit, not the campus.
This propaganda is designed to incite hatred towards the Jewish state. Logically, it has no other purpose. These events are created to sell an image of an Israel so twisted, so beyond ethical reach, that only mass global action will save the Palestinians from their fate. At the same time, the image has to be so terrifying, so inhumane, that someone walking onto a bus and killing civilians, becomes the understandable event born of lack of choice and frustration.
Only when both of these elements have been successfully delivered, is the true anti-Israel activist created. Therefore the movement has to take university students on a journey to accept horrific attacks against innocent Israeli civilians. A clear strategy of demonisation through propaganda. We have been here before.
Suddenly, everyone’s worried about surging antisemitism. Remarkable.Fred Maroun: Anti-Semitism: Staring straight into darkness
In recent decades, antisemitism has been the prejudice that dare not speak its name. The “Israel apartheid weeks” on campus, the blood libels about Israelis wantonly killing Arab children, the high proportion of attacks on Jews by Muslims – no one was allowed to call this anti-Jewish hatred.
Anyone who did so was accused of Islamophobia, sanitizing the crimes of Israel by waving the shroud of the Holocaust and so on.
Now people are shouting about antisemitism almost every day. Recent events are certainly alarming. Last month, Jewish cemeteries in Philadelphia and near St. Louis, Missouri were vandalized. Hoax bomb threats have forced the evacuation of nearly 100 Jewish community centers and other institutions across America.
No one knows who or what is behind all this. Some people, though, explain it in two words: Donald Trump. They just know it’s the work of white neo-fascists empowered by “dog-whistles” emanating from President Trump, who is said to harbor antisemitic sympathies, and his Svengali, Steve Bannon, who is held to be a white supremacist.
These are ludicrous smears. Trump is one of the most pro-Jewish US presidents ever to be elected. Bannon is also deeply pro-Jew and, far from being a racist or fascist, merely believes in restoring and defending the Judeo-Christian basis of Western national identity.
In any event, attacks on Jewish targets were going on long before Trump’s ascendancy.
From 2008 at least, Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated across America. And Jewish students on campus have long run a gauntlet of anti-Jewish hate and intimidation.
There is no valid excuse for having failed to help Israel become the secure state of the Jewish people. We reflect on anti-Semitism, we ho and we hum, then we sit back down and let the anti-Semites continue on their merry way.
When a Jewish center is threatened, it is not only an afternoon that is lost. When a Jewish cemetery is desecrated, it is not only a tombstone that must be replaced. It is 3000 years of hatred that come rushing back. It is the painful memories of the family members who died in Nazi crematoria that resurface. It is a very current reminder that a nation that is 79 times the size of the Jewish state has threatened to wipe it off the map and continues on its quest to acquire nuclear weapons.
After 3000 years of antisemitism, with countless pogroms, deportations of Jews from their own lands, and the cold-blooded murder of half its population in the interval of five years, how can we accept that Jews still today do not have one secure place on earth to call home? How can we get up in the morning, look at ourselves in the mirror and not feel the angst of having failed so miserably in the most elementary task that we “intelligent” animals have ever been given?
Why has no government anywhere in the world, other than Israel, placed the fight against antisemitism amongst its top priorities? Why do politicians keep repeating the same foolish lines about negotiating peace when there is no credible entity to negotiate with? Why do they denounce anti-Semitism but then do nothing to stop it? The security of a people that has been forced to struggle for its security for 3000 years is not a game. It is not a political chip to be negotiated.
I am ashamed of my leaders. I am ashamed of my society. I am ashamed of the human race.
If God exists, we will be judged, and the judgement will not be kind. If there is no God, there will be no one to redeem us, and we will always be guilty of the darkest crime in the sorry history of humanity.
















