Unbiased about the Holocaust?
It sure was formulated rather delicately on the BBC website:
The BBC also reported that the UN, which runs most schools in Gaza and teaches some 200,000 children there, relies primarily on Egyptian textbooks but "has added its own coursework about human rights." According to the BBC, the UN has now consulted with local groups regarding "whether the Holocaust should be taught." Well, one might wonder whether the head of the education committee, who describes the Holocaust as a "big lie," is a graduate of Gaza's UN-run schools. One might also wonder how many UN-employed educators in Gaza share his views, and how many of these educators - and how many of their UN employers - realize the irony in the fact that adding "coursework about human rights" was apparently uncontroversial, while "suggestions" that lessons about the Holocaust be added elicited indignant protests. The UN hypocrites' council
An investigation initiated by the UN Human Rights Council to examine allegations about war crimes committed during the recent war in Gaza will begin this week, as widely reported. In order to fully appreciate the implications of this endeavor, some other recent news reports should be taken into account. Consider this report from the London Times:
The "facts-don't-matter" campOver the past year, Antony Lerman has published quite a few articles defending anti-Zionist views against the charge that they often serve as a cover-up for antisemitism. If his articles include any biographical information, Lerman is usually presented as (former) director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London; he has also been described as a "leading Jewish thinker." Of course, anyone who writes "as a Jew" and single-mindedly focuses on whatever is wrong with Israel and Zionism can count on having an appreciative audience that can't get enough of this message - particularly if it comes with regular complaints about how unfair it is to suspect people of anti-Semitism simply because they feel that the world would be a better place if Israel didn't exist. UNRWA in the spotlightIt's not just because of the recent fighting in Gaza that UNRWA has recently been the subject of several articles: the UN agency that was founded to support the Palestinian refugees created during the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948 will mark the 60th anniversary of its establishment at the end of this year. It is arguably a very special anniversary of a very special agency: at a time when millions of destitute refugees all over the world struggled to cope with their fate, UNRWA was set up in December 1949 to just care for one group of refugees - and six decades later, UNRWA is the biggest UN agency with a staff of over 29.000, most of them (99 percent) Palestinians, and it is still devoted to supporting millions of Palestinians that remain classified as "refugees", even though they may live in the same place where they, and indeed their parents, were born, and even though they may have citizenship where they live. The elections and Israel's image
In his recent "Editor's Notes", David Horovitz offers a grim assessment of the challenges facing Israel as the country prepares for elections this week. Horovitz focuses in particular on the "relentless process of delegitimization" that Israel has been exposed to for quite some time now and he suggests that this process will likely intensify if the Likud wins the elections, because Israel's critics would interpret this as a sign that Israel has "turned its back on peacemaking." However, Horovitz also makes clear that what Israel does or doesn't do matters very little to those who are eager to delegitimize the Jewish state. Indeed, recent events have shown once more that there is a chorus of indignation whenever Israel moves to defend its citizens - such unfathomable chutzpah will naturally result in comments like: "Israel's international reputation slumped to its lowest point for two decades yesterday, amid condemnation in Britain and Europe of the Israeli army's behaviour ... There were calls for a United Nations-led inquiry into allegations that the Israeli army carried out a massacre and that its soldiers were guilty of war crimes." This may sound like a very recent condemnation of the fighting in Gaza, but it's actually from April 2002: that's how the Guardian - and indeed many other news media around the world - reported about the Jenin "massacre" that never happened. Iran's Islamic revolution at 30"Crowds chanted 'Death to America! Death to Israel!' at the ceremony at Khomeini's mausoleum in southern Teheran ... attended by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, government ministers and military commanders." It's scary, scarily pathetic, that this is apparently considered a dignified way to begin the ten-day celebration marking the 30th anniversary of Iran's "Islamic revolution" this weekend. Pragmatism, Hamas-styleWhile the New York Times has Libya's Muammar Qaddafi laying out the case for "Isratine", the Guardian has taken to offering various Hamas leaders and spokesmen a platform to try themselves as op-ed writers. Apparently, the editors are confident that a majority of the paper's readers won't mind to have this ostensible legitimacy bestowed on the leaders of a group that has been busy in recent weeks with killing, torturing and maiming their political opponents - indeed, the author of one of the recent offerings, Mousa Abu Marzook, confirmed just shortly before his piece was published that Hamas had executed "collaborators", whose crime was according to Marzook that they were Fatah members who "had taken to the streets to blow kisses at IAF planes and handed out candies as they attacked Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip." The boycott tradition
Some 300 British academics, writers and intellectuals have declared their resolve "to stop Israel from winning its war." In order to achieve this lofty goal, the ivory tower powers have called for a campaign against Israel "starting with a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions". While they say that this is what they envision for starters, they are not very specific about what is to come afterwards, though the end goal is crystal-clear: "Israel must lose." Of course, it would be positively offensive and entirely outrageous, unjustified and hypocritical if anybody should be reminded of another call for a boycott, made a few decades ago in the early 1930s. Without a doubt it would be much more polite and infinitely more "politically correct" to overlook the fact that back then, the boycott was also just for starters. And, come to think of it, there is another curious concurrence: back then, the boycott campaigners gave out the call "Deutsche wehrt Euch!" That is: Germans, defend yourselves, defend yourselves against the evil machinations of the Jews. This time around, the boycott campaigners call on their British compatriots, on the British government, and indeed on the wider civilized world to defend the Palestinians against the evil militarism of the Jewish state. Rallying against Israel
There is good reason why news reports describe the demonstrations that took place in many European cities on Saturday against the fighting in Gaza not as demonstrations for peace, but as "anti-Israel rallies". To be sure, some of the protesters may well have been motivated mainly by the images of death, destruction and despair coming out of Gaza and the desire to see this suffering end. But many of the demonstrators were clearly motivated by something else altogether - that's why you could hear chants like "Hey! Ho! Israel Has Gotta Go", and why you could find at a protest in London "more Nazi imagery on display ... than you'd expect to see at a fascist rally" - go to "Harry's place" to see for yourself. "We are Hamas"
Perhaps you remember the demonstrations during the Lebanon War in the summer of 2006, when protesters proudly carried placards announcing "We are all Hizbullah". Over at Z Word, you can admire the updated version: "We are Hamas" - a slogan that, as Ben Cohen rightly observes, was "entirely predictable". What Hamas - and therefore the people who identify so enthusiastically with the Islamist group - really stand for has been gruesomely illustrated in the past few days. Last week, an Israeli air strike targeted and killed Nizar Rayyan (sometimes also spelled Ghayan). He was a Hamas military commander who was regarded as one of the most popular and influential Hamas leaders in Gaza; in addition, he served as a "spiritual" leader for Hamas's armed wing and taught at the Islamic University in Gaza City, where his students reportedly revered him as a prominent Muslim scholar. |
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