The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) has published a nice summary of Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi’s recent visit to Gaza and titled “Sheikh Qaradawi’s Visit To Gaza” ” The JCPA report begins:
May 14, 2013 Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, visited Gaza on May 7-10 at head of an entourage of 45, including senior officials of the organization. In the past, Qaradawi was a candidate for leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, and over the years he has acquired the status of spiritual leader of this movement and of its Palestinian branch, Hamas.
Qaradawi received a warm welcome, especially from the Hamas leadership. They saw the visit as an important affirmation, by the longstanding and supreme religious authority of the Sunni Muslim world, of Hamas’ rule in Gaza. The visit affirmed Hamas as a faithful exponent of the Palestinian people and the jihadist enterprise, aimed at conquering the State of Israel and making it part of the Islamic state of Palestine – eventually to be one of the provinces of the Islamic caliphate whose capital will be Jerusalem.
Qaradawi’s visit was extensively covered in the Hamas government’s media, which again highlighted the ‘sheikh of jihad’s’ (as Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called him) backing for this Palestinian movement.
On May 10, the headline of the official Hamas daily Falastin was worded in that spirit: ‘Qaradawi calls for liberating the soil of Palestine.’ The subhead was a quotation of the most important statement he made: ‘We will never concede Palestine and we will never recognize Israel.’
During the visit, Qaradawi set forth his political outlook, thereby offering a sort of vision for the future (as well as a sort of last will and testament, given his advanced age (86) and his own recent remark that his days are numbered). The following are the main tenets of that outlook:”
The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch reported during the visit that:
Upon his arrival, he was greeted by the Hamas Prime Minister and called immediately for “Jihad to death” against Israel.
Qaradawi made comments in which he denied Israel’s right to exist and waxed enthusiastically about Hamas rocket fire into Israel.
We also reported that during Qaradawi’s visit, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood held its first ever anti-Israel rally since coming to power, surely no coincidence and likely an attempt to avoid being upstaged by Qaradawi.
The title of a recent panel discussion at the University of California, Berkeley was ominous: “SHHHH! Don’t Talk About Palestine: Chuck Hagel, Judith Butler, and the Israel Lobby’s Threat to Free Speech on Our Campus.” Taking place in Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley’s School of Law and sponsored by Students for Justice in Palestine, the event drew what appeared to be sixty hardcore anti-Israel activists—most in their early twenties—eager to embrace the notion that UC Berkeley is under siege by “pro-Israel advocates seek[ing] to silence debate about Palestinian human rights and divestment from Israel’s occupation.”
Although the event was billed as a discussion about the (nonexistent) efforts by the “Israel Lobby” to delay the appointment of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense and its criticism of the political science department at Brooklyn College for co-sponsoring a recent talk on Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) by UC Berkeley rhetoric professor and anti-Israel activist Judith Butler, neither subject arose. Instead, the panel engaged in paranoid fantasies about being “silenced,” which, given that this was a well-publicized event at a prestigious law school on a campus where the Palestinian narrative is constantly promoted both inside and outside the classroom, were patently and even hilariously false.
Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer in the departments of Near Eastern and ethnic studies, was introduced as the main speaker, one the “500 most influential Muslims in the world,” and, in a false claim, the originator of the term “Islamophobia.” While the latter is untrue, Bazian does have the dubious distinction of directing UC Berkeley’s Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project.
Announcing that, “I come first to discuss this subject as a Palestinian and a Muslim,” Bazian launched into the usual accolades surrounding the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley during the 1960s. Far from being a free speech advocate facing censorship, Bazian is an activist who uses his academic position to advance an anti-Israel agenda. A promoter of the BDS movement and executive director of the Holy Land Foundation-linked American Muslims for Palestine, he is infamous for having called for an “Intifada in this country!” at a San Francisco anti-war rally in 2004.
Lee Kaplan is an investigative journalist and columnist who writes forIsracampus.org.il, Israel National News, and the Northeast Intelligence Network. He is a Fellow at the American Center for Democracy and the founder of DAFKA.org and StoptheISM.com. He wrote this article for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.
In typically disrespectful and offensive fashion, Muslim Americans (for “Palestine”) have issued the latest blood libel against the Jews on the holy day of Passover.
The Islamic supremacists announced triumphantly in a press release Friday that an “Israeli Apartheid ad” was going to begin to appear in New York train stations on Monday (Passover began Monday night). “The American Muslims for Palestine” described itself as a “national grassroots organization educating the public about Palestine and its rich cultural and historical heritage” – not an easy job to do for a made-up country and a fictional people.
They said that their new “nationwide outdoor advertising campaign” called for “an end to Israeli apartheid and to unconditional American aid for Israel.” And they said that the New York run was just the beginning, and that the ads would run elsewhere around the country as well.
And so again, with little fanfare and no outraged opposition or media firestorm or condemnation, Muslim Jew-haters are running their fourth repulsive anti-Semitic campaign in the New York City transit system. It is important to point out that it is these campaigns that were the impetus for the pro-Israel and #MyJihad campaigns of my organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, or AFDI. And I can assure you that this latest Goebbels-style demonization of the Jews will not go unanswered. We are working feverishly right now to get ads responding to these ready for submission.
Apartheid? Anne Bayefsky notes that “there were once an estimated 900,000 Jews” in the Muslim world, “but today there are less than a few thousand. They were given a choice: Die, convert or flee.” That’s apartheid. The slaughter of gays across the Muslim world: that’s apartheid. The persecution of Christians across the Muslim world: that’s apartheid. The prohibition of non-Muslims from even entering Mecca: that’s apartheid. Muslims are freer in Israel than in any Muslim country.
We submitted the following ads (scroll) responding to the repulsive, anti-Semitic American Muslims for Palestine ads (above) that were announced yesterday. Our ads will focus on the real apartheid, Islamic apartheid: the institutionalized oppression of women, gays and non-Muslims under Islamic law (Sharia). This is the fourth repulsive anti-Semitic campaign that Muslim Jew-haters are running in the New York City transit system. It is important to point out that it is these campaigns that were the impetus for the AFDI pro-Israel and #MyJihad campaigns. I can assure you that this latest Goebbels-style demonization of the Jews will not go unanswered. We are working right now to get ads responding to these ready for submission.
Anne Bayefsky notes that “there were once an estimated 900,000 Jews” in the Muslim world, “but today there are less than a few thousand. They were given a choice: die, convert or flee.” That’s apartheid. The slaughter of gays across the Muslim world: that’s apartheid. The persecution of Christians across the Muslim world: that’s apartheid. Muslims are freer in Israel than in any Muslim country.
Our ads will focus on the real apartheid, Islamic apartheid: the institutionalized oppression of women, gays and non-Muslims under Islamic law (Sharia).
Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman is an anti-Israel activist and English professor who has taught at Boise State University, al-Quds University, the American University of Beirut, and other universities in the Middle East. In The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans: Addressing Pedagogical Strategies (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), she has assembled a guidebook for American high school teachers on how to teach the Arab-Israeli conflict. (While writing it she transitioned from university to high school teaching herself.) The book’s documentation, though substantial, is extremely biased, as all of her quotes and references are part of a closed loop in which Palestinians are presented as innocent victims and Israelis as evil-doers. Her entire bibliography and a “What You Can Do” section are geared toward fomenting anti-Israel activism.
Inaccuracies abound, including the author’s historical account of the term “anti-Semitism.” Although the word has referred solely to hostility toward Jews since its coinage in the late nineteenth-century, Knopf-Newman politicizes it by distorting its etymology:
After World War II, anti-Semitism began to connote not racism directed at Semitic people (based on language groupings of Arabic, Aramaic, Akkadian or Hebrew) in general, but rather only to Jews, most of whom are of European origin and do not speak any Semitic language.
She attributes the motive behind this imaginary trend to “shift[ing] the discourse away from Palestine,” demonstrating that for Knopf-Newman, even the concept of anti-Semitism is a tool of censorship to suppress discussion of “Palestine.”
The author did not always hold such views. Raised in Los Angeles with what she describes as a Zionist education, she attended Hebrew day schools and participated in pro-Israel activities during high school. Growing up, she heard the well-known phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem,” which Jews have said for thousands of years at Passover Seders. This historical fact is omitted in the book’s preface, where she likens the phrase to a Zionist “cultural commemoration” serving “to foster unquestioned support of Israel.”
Knopf-Newman’s encounters with her Palestinian peers (who, she admonishes, are never to be called “Arabs,” only “Palestinians”) as an impressionable undergraduate at the University of Cincinnati spawned her adoption of a virulently anti-Israel narrative. As a teacher at Boise State she spent three years engaged in research in a Palestinian refugee camp, during which time she recalls cheering with her Palestinian friends after hearing about a successful Hezb’allah missile attack on an Israeli ship. That four IDF sailors were killed doesn’t warrant a mention.
In order to deconstruct how Zionism is taught in America, based in part on her own sense of betrayal, Knopf-Newman revisited her old Los Angeles Hebrew school and examined its teaching materials. She concluded that the curriculum shifted from its original emphasis on Judaism to stress Zionism in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Her objective in writing the guidebook is “to explore how and what I learned as well as think about ways to disrupt the Zionist narrative altogether by teaching American youth about Palestine.”
To achieve this goal, Knopf-Newman advocates using the classroom as a bully pulpit, a place to correct social imbalances in which only the designated victim’s narrative is discussed. She exhibits no awareness of the differences between a teacher and an activist. Teaching “critical thinking” means indoctrinating students to believe that Palestinians are always right — and Israelis are always wrong.
In a chapter titled “Hip-Hop Education and Palestine Solidarity,” Knopf-Newman advocates using hip-hop, or rap, music because it has short, easy-to-remember segments that prove conducive to incorporating political material. Using her book as a guide, high school students can now rap, dance, or sing their way to anti-Zionism. Lesson plans include how to organize street theater with “apartheid walls” and “tunnels of oppression” that connect to other “sites of oppression.” Such agitprop can be adopted, she helpfully suggests, by teachers of literature, social studies, theater, music, and many other subjects. She particularly admires content that connects genocide, imprisonment, slavery, indigenous people, the “prison-industrial complex,” and even Hurricane Katrina with the delegitimization of Israel in the malleable minds of her students.
The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans is replete with false analogies to so-called “global colonialism,” such as Mexicans and Latin-Americans trying to cross the Arizona border illegally, South African blacks under apartheid, African-Americans under slavery, and Native-Americans. Knopf-Newman makes it a point to claim “indigenous” status for Native-Americans, yet ignores the widely accepted presence of Jews in Jerusalem and the West Bank for thousands of years to insist that “indigenous” cannot possibly refer to Jews in Israel. In the lexicon she reveres, “indigenous” equals “good” and can refer only to Jews who, like herself, have “un-learned Zionism.”
Berkeley resident Rima Greene co-wrote this book review with Cinnamon Stillwell, the West Coast Representative forCampus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. She can be reached atstillwell@meforum.org.
Israel, the only democracy and tolerant society in the Middle East, is surrounded by Muslim states that have sworn to destroy it and have conducted a genocidal propaganda campaign against the Jews, promising to “finish the job that Hitler started.” A global wave of Jew-hatred, fomented by Muslim propaganda and left-wing anti-Semitism, has spread through Europe and the United Nations and made Israel a pariah nation. David Horowitz’s classic Why Israel Is the Victim, now updated in the pamphlet below, sets the record straight about the Middle East conflict. In addition to restoring the historical record — a chronicle of obsessive aggressions first by Arab nationalists and then by Muslim jihadists, this pamphlet brings the story up to date by showing the systematic way in which the fanatical Islamic parties, Hamas and Hezbollah, sponsored by Iran, have subverted peace in the Middle East.
As Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield notes in his insightful Foreword, this pamphlet “tells us why we should reject the ‘Blame Israel First’ narrative that has so thoroughly saturated the mainstream media… It confronts the myth of Palestinian victimhood… and it delivers a rousing restatement of the true history of the hate that led us to all this.” America needs to be Israel’s protector, for as George Gilder has observed, “If the United States cannot defend Israel, it cannot defend itself.” Instead, under the leadership of Barack Obama, it has become Israel’s prosecutor with ominous portents for the future.
Foreword
In “Why Israel is the Victim” David Horowitz tells the ugly tale of the war against Israel, laying bare the sordid hypocrisies and deceits behind its campaign of violence. No volume can contain the full story of Islamic terrorism or the courageous ways in which the ordinary Israeli confronts it in the streets of his cities. What this essay does tell is the story of the lies behind that terror.
Propaganda precedes war; it digs the graves and waits for them to be filled. The war against the Jews has never been limited to bullets and swords; it has always, first and foremost, been a war of words. When bombs explode on buses and rockets rain down on Israel homes, when mobs chant “Death to the Jews” and Iran races toward the construction of its genocidal bomb; the propaganda lies to cover up these crimes must be bold enough to contain not only the murders of individuals, but the prospective massacre of millions.
The lie big enough to fill a million graves is that Israel has no right to exist, that the Jewish State is an illegitimate entity, an occupier, a warmonger and a conqueror. The big lie is that Israel has sought out the wars that have given it no peace and that the outcomes of those wars make the atrocities of its enemies understandable and even justifiable. That is the big lie that David Horowitz confronts in “Why Israel is the Victim”.
From the latest outburst of violence to its earliest antecedents under the Palestine Mandate, “Why Israel is the Victim” exposes the true nature of the war and wipes away the lies used by the killers and their collaborators to lend moral authority to their crimes. It shows not only why Israel must exist, but also why its existence has been besieged by war and terror.
“Why Israel is the Victim” tells us why we should reject the “Blame Israel First” narrative that has so thoroughly saturated the mainstream media. It challenges the false hope of the Two State Solution in sections such as “Self-Determination Is Not the Agenda” and “Refugees: Jewish and Arab”. It confronts the myth of Palestinian victimhood in “The Policy of Resentment and Hate” and delivers a rousing restatement of the true history of the hate that led us to all this in “The Jewish Problem and Its ‘Solution’”.
Recent history shows us that it was not an Israeli refusal to grant the Palestinian Arabs the right of self-determination that led to their campaigns of terror, but that Palestinian self-determination empowered a people steeped in the hatred of Jews to engage in terrorism.
Continue reading at Front Page where the entire pamphlet has been published
David Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine,Ramparts. He is the author, with Peter Collier, of three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism. Horowitz examined this subject more closely in Radical Son (1996), a memoir tracing his odyssey from “red-diaper baby” to conservative activist that George Gilder described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.”
Guess which one of these men, Obama is arming? It’s the one that hates Jews the most.
In other news, the administration also condemned something that Adolf guy said, but will still give him all the tanks he wants.
The mainstream media mostly refused to cover Morsi’s remarks, but every outlet is now broadcasting that White House spokesman Jay Carney condemned them. This is the media’s typical handling of any foreign policy issues that are politically damaging to O. They refuse to report on them until they get talking points or a positive angle from the White House.
The media is emphasizing the raw hatred, which with statements like “the descendants of apes and pigs” and “Egyptian children must feed on hatred“, are pretty glaring. But the Carney condemnation of religious hatred misses the point. This isn’t just bigotry. Lots of people are bigots. Some are even extreme bigots.
Morsi’s statements called for the destruction of Israel and for terrorist attacks on Jews around the world. This isn’t about bigotry, it’s about the Obama Administration arming a violently bigoted leader… who has called for war and genocide.
Forget the “apes and pigs” for a moment. That’s gutter Islamic bigotry and very commonplace. It’s something for the ADL to obsess over. But it’s not what is truly important.
Morsi’s statements are more radical and extreme than those of Ahmadinejad. And that is what we should be paying attention to.
Therefore, these negotiations must stop once and for all. Everybody must turn to the support of the resistance, which is the option chosen by the Palestinians and by us all – the Arabs and the Muslims, Palestinians and others. We must all realize that resistance is the only way to liberate the land of Palestine.
Morsi rejects a peace settlement and supports terrorism as the only way.
We should employ all forms of resistance against them. There should be military resistance within the land of Palestine against those criminal Zionists, who attack Palestine and the Palestinians. There should also be political resistance and economic resistance through a boycott, as well as by supporting the resistance fighters. This should be the practice of the Muslims and the Arabs outside Palestine. They should support the resistance fighters and besiege the Zionist wherever they are.
None of the Arab or Muslim peoples and regimes should have dealings with them. Pressure should be exerted upon them. They must not be given any opportunity, and must not stand on any Arab or Islamic land. They must be driven out of our countries.
This contains not just a call for terrorism against Israelis, but calls on Muslims around the world to support Hamas and “besiege the Zionist wherever they are”. That looks a lot like a call for international terrorism against Jews.
Then there is a call for the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from “Arab or Islamic land.” That means the ethnic cleansing of the Jews of Israel, and of Egypt and every other Muslim country, or every country that Muslims consider their own.
We’re talking about the destruction of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Muslim world. I repeat, this is worse than anything Ahmadinejad has said.
This is not about a racist insult. This is about Obama sending F-16s and 200 tanks to a man who makes Ahmadinejad seem moderate.
And the White House’s response to that is, “President Morsi should make clear that he respects people of all faiths, and that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable or productive in a democratic Egypt.”
And Morsi will no doubt, at some point issue a statement about all the three great religions and how much Mohammed loved Jews. Some boilerplate thing laced with safe quotes. Or maybe he won’t even bother to do that much, because he knows Obama will go on acting as his arms dealer no matter what.
A video disseminated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) should blow a giant hole in the fantasy the Obama administration refers to as their Muslim “outreach” initiative. Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi is shown in 2010 delivering an anti-Semitic diatribe, during which he referred to “the Zionists” as “bloodsuckers,” “warmongers,” and “the descendants of apes and pigs.” He also called for “military resistance within the land of Palestine,” further noting that the PLO “was created by the Zionist and American enemies.”
The tape is a compilation of excerpts from two different interviews given by Morsi on March 20 and September 23 in 2010. MEMRI discovered the footage, translated it, and combined it into the aforementioned video. Morsi was a member of the Guidance Office of the Muslim Brotherhood when he delivered the remarks. “The Zionists have no right to the land of Palestine,” he said March 20. “There is no place for them on the land of Palestine. What they took before 1947-8 constitutes plundering, and what they are doing now is a continuation of this plundering. By no means do we recognize their Green Line. The land of Palestine belongs to the Palestinians, not to the Zionists.”
He was sure to include the United States in the mix as well. “We must confront this Zionist entity. All ties of all kinds must be severed with this plundering criminal entity, which is supported by America and its weapons, as well as by its own nuclear weapons, the existence of which is well known. It will bring about their own destruction. The peoples must boycott this entity and avoid normalization of relations with it. All products from countries supporting this entity–from the U.S. and others–must be boycotted.”
Such a boycott must be quite selective. Beginning January 22, Egypt is scheduled to receive the first installment of 10 F-16 fighter jets and 200 Abrams tanks from the United States as part of a $213 million foreign aid package originally promised to former president Hosni Mubarak. Morsi hasn’t cancelled it. Neither has the Obama administration, despite Mubarak’s ouster. Such seeming indifference by Obama has engendered increasing criticism, with the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) circulating a petition that has garnered more than 150,000 signatures. “A Shariah dictatorship on Israel’s border–armed with American weapons–is a deadly threat to Israel and America,” it reads. “All U.S. funding to Egypt must be cut off until we can certify that aid to Egypt will help the national security interests of the United States and Israel.”
In two separate 2010 interviews with Al-Quds TV in Lebanon, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi makes disparaging remarks about Jews and dismisses peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. In one interview, dated September 23, Morsi refers to Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs.” During the interview, which was released by The Middle East Research Institute’s (MEMRI) today, Morsi also declares that peace negotiations are futile and promotes the use of force. “There should be military resistance within the land of Palestine against those criminal Zionists, who attack Palestine and the Palestinians,” he says.
In another interview, dated March 20th, Morsi continues to promote the use of force against Israel. “We must all realize that resistance is the only way to liberate the land of Palestine,” he says. Then he dismisses Israel’s right to exist. “The Zionists have no right to the land of Palestine. There is no place for them on the land of Palestine.”
Full Transcript (provided by MEMRI):
Mohamed Morsi: These futile [Israeli-Palestinian] negotiations are a waste of time and opportunities. The Zionists buy time and gain more opportunities, as the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the Muslims lose time and opportunities, and they get nothing out of it. We can see how this dream has dissipated. This dream has always been an illusion. Yet some Palestinians, who erroneously believe that their enemies might give them something… This [Palestinian] Authority was created by the Zionist and American enemies for the sole purpose of opposing the will of the Palestinian people and its interests.
[...]
No reasonable person can expect any progress on this track. Either [you accept] the Zionists and everything they want, or else it is war. This is what these occupiers of the land of Palestine know – these blood-suckers, who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.
According to senior Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood official Essam el-Erian, Israel “will be destroyed within a decade.” In an interview with the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, Erian said the 80,000 Jews who fled Egypt since Israel’s founding to escape violence and persecution should come back. He urged former Jewish residents of Egypt to “leave historic Palestine (i.e., Israel) and return to the land from which they came.”
“The Jews are occupying the historic Land of Palestine and are an obstacle to the Right of Return of the Palestinians,” added Erian, vice chairman of the Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, majority leader in Egypt’s upper house of Parliament and an advisor to President Mohamed Morsi.
“The Jewish occupiers of this territory” can “go out to other places they consider best for them,” Erian said in the interview, translated by the newspaper Israel Hayom. “The Zionist ideology ended in failure and this project (Israel)” is “fated to collapse in coming years,” he said.
Erian blamed Israel for Arab nations’ weapons purchases and longstanding failure to democratize.
“The Zionist project in Palestine came to prevent the existence of democracy in the Arab countries, and to prevent the presence of Arab unity and development in the Arab region,” he said. “It came to deplete the wealth of the Arabs by making them stockpile weapons.”
“There will be no such thing as Israel; it will be called Palestine,” Erian stated. “We tell all those who came and occupied Palestine to return to their countries.”
Erian repeatedly has supported Hamas and likened Israelis to terrorists. In a July 2011 interview with journalist Michael Totten, Erian termed Hamas “a resistance group fighting for freedom and the liberation of their land from occupation.” He said their land “is occupied by the real terrorists (Israelis)” and that suicide bombings did not constitute terrorism because Hamas is fighting “for liberty.”
In a 2011 interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Erian again called Hamas a “resistance group” fighting “for freedom and liberation of their lands.” He also said the West “must revise their knowledge about Hamas, [so] that war and terrorism will come to an end. And mixing cards and putting (designating) Hamas and other resistance groups among terrorist groups, this was a fatal mistake of the West.”
But Erian’s anti-Jewish slurs and advocacy for a terrorist organization haven’t been enough to deny him entry to the United States. The Egypt Daily Newsreported that he traveled this country last month with an Arab parliamentary delegation and was scheduled to participate in a hearing about the United Nations’ role in “peace building” and “conflict resolution” in the Middle East.
Iran’s Press TV scored an international scoop Tuesday. It turns out, it reports, the massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six of their teachers and administrators was not the work of a troubled loner. Rather, it was Israeli death squads exacting vengeance over a recent United Nations General Assembly vote granting Palestine nonmember observer status.
In a time of national grieving unmatched since the 9/11 attacks, the Iranian government’s English-language news outlet used the opportunity to promote vile anti-Semitic conspiracies so extreme that not even the most strident Islamists have offered anything close to them.
The claim came from Michael Harris, who was one of three panelists in a discussion about the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. While the other panelists focused on a culture of violence in America, or the issue of gun laws, Harris unleashed a torrent of Jew hatred.
“Hollywood is Jewish owned and Jewish controlled and they spew filth and they spew violence out,” he said. Jews are the ones pushing for gun control. Jews control Congress.
“And now here we go, here’s a revenge killing in the U.S., sponsored by Israel, that killed all these innocent children,” Harris said. “And that is something that Israelis do very, very well. They target the innocent, they target children, they target women and they avoid the issue. Because they’re angry they didn’t get their way and now Palestine has standing in the U.N. and Israel is going to be subject to the International Criminal Court and their leadership is going to be taken to task. So let’s connect the dots here about what’s going on globally, geo-politically with Israel involved.”
While the other two guests dismissed Harris’ theories, saying Israel had nothing to do with Newtown and tried to steer the conversation back to the brutal killing, the Press TV hostess never pushed back. A video of the segment shows Harris spoke longer than the others during the 25-minute segment and was given the last word.
The United States considers Iran the world’s leading state-sponsor of international terrorism. But that fact hasn’t stopped American Islamists, led by officials from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) from repeatedly appearing on Press TV programs to bash American policy or culture. It might be different if they tried to speak truth to power, criticizing Iran for its terror support or repression of its own people.
But instead, they have blamed America for Muslim riots over the Internet video mocking Mohammed last fall. They have cast America as being at war with Islam, a message considered to be one of the most potent tools in recruiting Muslims to violent jihad, and likened America’s treatment of Muslims to the way Jews were treated in Nazi Germany. Examples go on and on.
Press TV followed up the Newtown panel discussion by publishing a story on Harris’ theory on its website. “Israeli death squads involved in Sandy Hook bloodbath: Intelligence analyst,” the headline blares. It describes Harris as “a former Republican candidate for governor of Arizona and GOP campaign finance chairman.”
The Press TV article asserts Israel staged the attack “to teach America a lesson, knowing that America would take the punishment, keep ‘quiet,’ and let a ‘fall guy’ take the blame.”
If the publishing of cartoons and Internet videos depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad can spark riots and killings throughout the world, what does a blood libel like the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory do to Muslim attitudes toward Jews?
Blaming Zionists and blaming Jews for problems large and small is a reflex action in parts of the Middle East, including claims Jews were behind the 9/11 attacks. Hamas instills it in young children. Islamists in Egypt blamed Jews for a New Year’s Eve 2011 bombing at a Coptic church that killed 21 people, a message echoed by Press TV.
The article on the Newtown shooting was written by Gordon Duff, identified as “a Marine Vietnam veteran, a combat infantryman, and Senior Editor at Veterans Today.” Harris also writes for Veterans Today, including articles defending David Duke as “a shining example of western freedom and democracy.”
Another article details his suspicions that Jews, what he calls “organized jewery” was behind Jared Loughner’s shooting attack in Tucson that wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six people, including U.S. District Judge John Roll.
“My point here is: will organized jewery, the Neo-Pharisees that comprise the unelected criminal shadow government sacrifice an asset like Congresswoman Giffords to advance their bigger agenda?? You bet they will. The criminals who took down the WTC and the Murrah Building in Oklahoma, will eagerly sacrifice a pawn to pass stricter gun control measures and dis-arm the US population. The armed US population is the biggest obstacle that still exists for the shadow government of the Neo-Pharisees to fully implement a totalitarian state here in the USA, just like they destroyed Czarist Russia and created the Soviet Union, they work day and night to impose that same hell on the citizens of the USA.”
Press TV officials should have been aware of Harris’ views before they invited him on the air and let him unleash his empty conspiracy theories and hate rhetoric.
Duff’s Press TV article says Harris points to “the flood of inconsistencies in the ‘cover story.’” But those amount to a series of unanswered questions about alleged accomplices and unsourced claims that police gunned down the shooter, Adam Lanza, after he tried to surrender.
“After Harris’ broadcast, key members of the military and law enforcement community contacted Veterans Today in full support of Harris’ analysis,” Duff writes.
“One three star general is quoted as saying, ‘Harris hit the nail right on the head and it is about time someone spoke up.’”
What other proof is needed? In the broadcast interview, Harris predicted a grand cover-up by Congress, which he said is owned by Zionists. The absence of proof, therefore, is his proof.
“So any truth of this, if there’s going to be, is going to be hidden because Israel wants it hidden because they are once again the guilty party,” Harris said. “You have to realize, Israel has been operating death squads in the United States now since Gabby Giffords and Judge Roll were shot in Tucson. There’s been other incidences. The Aurora, Colorado shooting that was, again, Israeli death squads operating in the U.S.”
Fellow panelist Raynard Jackson, a Washington-based political consultant, called Harris’ comments “irresponsible.” A third panelist, Don Debar, said that the United States is the “pre-eminent imperial power in the history of the planet.” As such, it controls Israel “although there is some backwash in the Congress and other places.”
Given the last word, Harris went off on another rant, condemning American drone strikes abroad, which, “again,” he said, “it goes back to Israeli influence in U.S. foreign policy.” If he had not done so in the previous 20 minutes, he made it clear that he and Iran are on the same page.
In two separate 2010 interviews with Al-Quds TV in Lebanon, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi makes disparaging remarks about Jews and dismisses peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. In one interview, dated September 23, Morsi refers to Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs.” During the interview, which was released by The Middle East Research Institute’s (MEMRI) today, Morsi also declares that peace negotiations are futile and promotes the use of force. “There should be military resistance within the land of Palestine against those criminal Zionists, who attack Palestine and the Palestinians,” he says.
