American Media Silence over Racist Comments by Israeli Former Chief Rabbi

One of the points Blum makes in his book America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy, is that the press and the media are complicit in American imperialism and its attendant horrors and crimes through propaganda designed to promote and justify it. And it isn’t what it publishes so much as what it doesn’t report. And news coverage of Israel in America is also very biased. As an example of what American’s didn’t read, he discusses the statement by a former Chief Rabbi of Israel and leaders of the extreme right-wing Shas party, Ovadia Yusuf, that non-Jews were created by the Almighty to serve Israelis. Blum wrote

‘Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the people of Israel,’ said Rabbi Ovadia Yusef in a sermon in Israel on October 16, 2010. Rabbi Yosef is the former Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel and the founder and spiritual leader of the Shas party, at that time one of the three major components of the Israeli government. ‘Why are gentiles needed?’ he continued. ‘They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi [master] and eat,’ he said to some laughter.

Pretty shocking, right? Apparently not shocking enough for the free and independent American mainstream media. Not one daily newspaper picked it up. Not one radio or television station. Neither did the two leading US news agencies, Associate Press and United Press International, which usually pick up anything at all newsworthy. And the words, or course, did not cross the kips of any American politician or State Department official Rabbi Yosef’s words were reported in English only by the Jewish Telegraph Agency, a US-based news service (October 18), and then picked up by a few relatively obscure news agencies or progressive websites. We can all imagine the news coverage if someone like Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said something like ‘Jews have no place in the world but to serve Islam.’ (p. 275).

People won’t have read it or seen it on the news over here either. Peter Oborne, in his documentary on the Israel lobby for Channel 4’s Despatches in 2009, described the attempts by the lobby in this country to suppress any reporting of atrocities committed by Israel and its allies. One of the talking heads on the programme was Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Graon. He told how, whenever his newspaper did so, he’d receive an angry visit from the President of the Board of Deputies and his pet lawyer demanding that the story should be spiked on the grounds that it would cause Brits to hate Jews. Senior, and very respected BBC journalists like Orla Guerin were also accused of anti-Semitism by the Board because they dared to report on national news the massacre of Palestinians by Israel’s allies, the Lebanese Christian militia the Phalange in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. A subsequent inquiry found that the report was not anti-Semitic, and only factually inaccurate in one detail.

Now I can appreciate that there are very good reasons why Yusef’s odious remark shouldn’t be reported. It is precisely the views that the Nazis and other anti-Semites and Fascists have claimed Jews have of gentiles. And claims that Jews believe they are superior to gentiles and wish to rule them are behind all the murderous conspiracy theories about them, theories that led to the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Such views of Jewish racial superiority, as I understand it, profoundly contradict Jewish theology. Contemporary rabbis have argued that Israel’s status as the ‘Chosen People’ does not mean that they are racially superior to anyone us, but rather that they have a special duty as a servant nation to act as moral exemplars, ‘to be a light unto the gentiles’ as the Hebrew Bible states. The prophet Isaiah also states that Jews in exile are to work and pray for the health of the city that they share with their gentile fellows. Since at least the 1920s Jews have been very careful to show that they reject the racial supremacist views that anti-Semites impute to them.

I very well appreciate why decent people would not want to report Yusef’s odious views, especially now with genuine anti-Semitism rising along with racism and Fascism generally. But I believe that these fears are somewhat exaggerated. The great mass of the American and British public, as well as the French, for that matter, aren’t anti-Semitic. Tony Greenstein has published surveys showing that the vast majority of Brits either have a positive view of Jews, or don’t have any particular views about them one way or the other. Less than 10 per cent have negative views of them. That’s clearly too large, but it shows that real Jew-haters are in a minority. Yusef’s views could easily be reported, accompanied by articles making the point that he speaks only for a Fascist Israeli fringe, accompanied by firm rebuttals and denunciations from respected Jewish organisations. There are any number of Jewish critics of Likudnik Fascism.

Besides, Yusef also has other, equally disgusting views about other Jews. A few years ago he got in the pages of Private Eye and a few other publications for what he said about the Holocaust. He declared that the European Jews, who were murdered by the Nazis, got what they deserve because of their sins in their past lives. Yusef may be a Jew, but that’s blatantly anti-Semitic. I understand that it’s also rubbish theology. Judaism doesn’t have a doctrine of reincarnation. The closest I can find to it is the Wheel of Gilgal in Karaite Judaism. If I understand it correctly, this holds that the Lord sometimes gives sinners a second chance and so they are reincarnated after their death. But the Karaites are different from mainstream Talmudic Judaism. Whether you’re Jew or gentile, Yusef’s an unrepresentative, indeed, anti-Semitic, nasty bigot talking nonsense.

But I suspect the refusal to report his remarks isn’t actually about fears that they would promote genuine anti-Semitic. It’s to protect Likud and its coalition partners. An Israeli philosopher and chemist coined the term ‘Judeonazism’ to describe such views amongst Israeli politicians. He was, like many Jews, including Israelis, bitterly critical of the Israeli state’s treatment of the Palestinians. While the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism includes comparing Jews to Nazis, in this case the comparison is entirely apt. Likud and its coalition partners include too many, who have similar views. If Yusef was simply a gutter preacher, whom no-one in Israel listened to, he could be dismissed as yet another fanatical nutter. But he was the founder and spiritual head of one Likud’s coalition partners. His comments should have been reported, not because of what they show about Jews or even Israelis, but because of what they show about Likud.

I’ve made it clear that Fascism, racism and anti-Semitism are murderous doctrines that should be fought everywhere, whether it’s Nazi Germany, Netanyahu’s Israel or present-day China. But by demanding that the western media not report comments like Yusef’s, and the atrocities against the Palestinians that views like his promote, organisations like the Board of Deputies and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism are complicit in the perpetration of this Zionist permutation of Fascism.

Remember what one liberal Jewish opponent of Zionism once said: ‘To be a Jew is always to stand with the oppressor, never the oppressor’. It’s a view that condemns the right-wing media and the Israel lobby, as well as the Likudnik regime they protect.

Israel Graffiti Demanding the Genocide of the Palestinians

A few days ago I put up a piece reporting and commenting on the attempt by right-wing Zionist thugs to shut down a book launch in Brighton. The book in question was Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief, by a group of respectable, mainstream academics, Greg Philo, Mike Berry, Justin Schlosberg, Antony Lerman and David Miller. Greg Philo is Professor of Communications and Social Change at the University of Glasgow, and Director of the Glasgow University Media Unit. Mike Berry is a lecturer in the Journalism School at Cardiff University. Justin Schlosberg is a media activist, researcher and lecturer in Journalism and Media at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a former Chair of the Media Reform Coalition and Edmund J Safra Network Fellow at Harvard University. Antony Lerman is Senior Fellow at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna and Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at Southampton University. He has written on multiculturalism, racism, antisemitism, and Israel/Palestine for the Guardian, Independent, New York Times, Haaretz, Prospect, Jewish Chronicle and London Review of Books. And David Miller is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol. He is a founder director of Public Interest Investigations and a director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies.

What sent the Israel lobby berserk was that the book critically examines, and takes apart their claims that under Jeremy Corbyn the Labour party is institutionally racist and a threat to British Jews, showing that the party has been the subject of ‘shocking misinformation spread by the press, including the supposedly impartial BBC, and the liberal Guardian.’ The launch was due to be held at the Brighton branch of Waterstones, but they pulled out and cancelled the even following threats and intimidation made against their staff. The launch was then moved to the Rialto, also in Brighton, where it opened an hour later at 8.30. One members of Waterstone’s staff was so troubled by the threats they faced that they were unable to return to work.

What is particularly disturbing, though unsurprising, is that this display of very aggressive bullying was not only supported by the usual horde of bigots and trolls online, but also the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Sussex Jewish Representatives Council.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/09/24/bullying-bigots-tried-to-stop-book-launch-when-will-they-be-arrested/

In fact, as Tony Greenstein has repeatedly described in his blogs, the pro-Israel right have used abuse, threats and intimidation to try and close down any criticism of Israel for a very long time. And 11 years ago Peter Oborne, a journalist who formerly wrote for the Torygraph, presented a documentary on the Israel lobby for Channel 4’s Despatches. The programme described how respectable journalists, such as Alan Rusbridger, the-then editor of the Groaniad, and the BBC’s foreign correspondent, Jeremy Bowen, had all faced false and malicious accusations of anti-Semitism by the Israel lobby when they correctly reported atrocities by Israeli forces during the war in Lebanon. Rusbridger stated that when he printed accounts of massacres and other human rights abuses by the Israelis or their Lebanese Christian allies, the Phalange, the head of the Board of Deputies would visit his office, complete with his pet lawyer in tow, demanding that these stories be pulled. His argument was that they would lead to anti-Semitism and attacks on British Jews.

On the 28th January 2009, that indefatiguable opponent of all forms of racism, including Anti-Semitism and Zionism, Tony Greenstein, published a piece on his blog. Tony was attacking the clause in the I.H.R.C. definition of anti-Semitism, which forbids comparing Jews to Nazis. Tony stated, as he has done many times since, that it is hypocritical, as Israeli politicians frequently call each other Nazis. He also supported his argument with photographs of Israeli graffiti which was bitterly hostile to Arabs to the point of demanding their death and extermination.

 

This is ugly, horrific stuff, and the people that scrawled these messages of hate are Nazis. There is no other way to describe them. These pictures also show why an increasing number of Jewish young people over in America no longer want to have anything to do with Israel. American Jews are banding together in groups to attack Israel and its genocidal policies towards the indigenous Palestinians. Take up of places on the heritage tours Israel runs to encourage American Jews to visit Israel and identify with it have fallen by half. American Jews tend to be politically liberal, and have traditionally been determined to enjoy the comfortable lives they have in the Land of the Free as American citizens, than move to Israel. As a result, mass support for Israel in America has shifted from Jews to right-wing evangelical Christians, like Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel.

In Israel there are also a number of courageous people and organisations challenging the government and its gross intolerance and inhumanity. These include the human rights organisation B’Tselem and the veterans organisation, Breaking the Silence. But Netanyahu is doing his best to silence them, and indeed anyone who photographs a human rights abuse by the country’s armed forces. And in Britain, America and Israel Jewish opponents of Israeli apartheid and genocide are particularly abused and smeared as anti-Semites. Decent men and women like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni, Cyril Chilson and so many others. They are accused of being self-hating and ‘traitors’ – even though the I.H.R.C. definition of anti-Semitism states that it is anti-Semitic to accuse a Jew of being more loyal to a foreign country than his homeland. They receive vile threats and even assault. Tony was physically attacked by an American Jew. Jackie has been told she should be lynched, burnt and her body dumped in bin bags.

But despite the statement by the Israel lobby that comparisons with the Nazis are offensive, Israeli policy towards the Arabs not only resembles that of apartheid South Africa, but also Fascist Italy in its attempts to colonise Africa and the Nazi invasion of Poland and eastern Europe. The Nazis attempted the ethnic cleansing of a stretch of territory stretching across Poland into the Ukraine and beyond of their Slavic population in order to transform it into a German colony. Tony has also repeatedly compared Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews pre-1942, before the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’.

But these pieces of graffiti show that there is a section of Israeli society – the Fascists and Settlers supporting Netanyahu and his wretched coalition – who would like to see a real programme of organised genocide implemented similar to the Nazi death camps, but for Arabs.

And this raises a very, very disturbing question. If Netanyahu or someone worse did start organising the systematic massacre of Palestinians, would the Board of Deputies, Sussex Jewish Representatives Council and other Zionist organisations, both Jewish and non-Jewish, cover it up and silence those who did tried to report it, just as the Nazis tried to hide the horrors of Auschwitz and the rest of the Shoah?