Bastardisation of the East: Another vicious conspiracy from the Israel-hating left (Newsflash: Colonel Gaddafi is not a nice man)

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Another vicious conspiracy from the Israel-hating left (Newsflash: Colonel Gaddafi is not a nice man)

More conspiracy theories from Melanie Phillips, who arrogantly questions the reason for the absence of protests over Colonel Gaddafi’s latest piece of madness – his threat to deport the entire Palestinian population of Libya.

She takes uses as her source an entry on a weblog, entitled Fundamentally Freund, hosted on the website of right-wing extremist Israeli news agency Arutz Sheva, which immediately makes me worry about where she acquires her sources. A 23 February entry on the weblog was entitled ‘Bomb Iran now!’, (1) while a sister weblog called Back to Sanity makes repeated crass jokes about activist Rachel Corrie, whose death under the blade of an Israeli bulldozer blade is referred to as “suicide” and the author sniggers at the suggestion that Corrie is referred to in some quarters as “Saint Pancake” (2). Unfortunately discourse about the Israel-Palestine conflict sometimes plummets to lower depths than joking about the death, more accurately murder, of a young woman who leaves a grieving family behind, but that doesn’t make this statement any less shocking. Rational critics would run a mile from such a cesspit of extremism. Phillips doesn’t need a wetsuit or any encouragement to dive straight in.

Now, back to the main article. Phillips pulls this quote from the Fundamentally Freund blog entry:

“A Middle Eastern government has announced that it is considering a plan to deport untold thousands of Palestinians from their homes, forcibly uprooting them and compelling them to leave. It won’t be the first time this government has threatened such a move – in fact, back in 1995, it carried out those threats, and sent numerous Palestinians packing. But you won’t be reading much about this in the mainstream press, nor will you hear nary a peep of protest from much of the left and its sympathizers over the cruelty and brutality of such a move. And that’s because the government in question – believe it or not – is Libya, which views this as a form of protest against the policies of the new Palestinian Authority (PA) government.”

Full of moral outrage the author of the original entry, Michael Freund, concludes with this statement:

“Further proof, once again, of the cynical and manipulative manner in which the Arab states continue to exploit the issue of Palestinian refugees – and of the selective morality of those who criticize Israel on a regular basis.” (3)
The first part of that statement holds some truth. Through the years several governments, mostly but not always members of the Arab League, have used the Palestinian refugee problem as a means to snipe at Israel or achieve their own aims. Gaddafi is certainly cynical by claiming his irresponsible and schizophrenic manoeuvre is a way of helping the Palestinians to help themselves. According to the state run al Jamahiriya newspaper the expulsion would prevent “the conspiracy of liquidating the Palestinian cause”, (4) apparently due to come about through the revived 2002 Beirut initiative, also known as the Saudi peace plan, in which 22 Arab governments offered to normalise relations with Israel in return for its withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders and acceptance of a sovereign and independent Palestinian State, plus the working out of a “just solution” to the Palestinian refugee problem based on UN General Assembly Resolution 194. This plan is due to be discussed at the Arab League summit in Riyadh next week. According to press reports, Gaddafi is so concerned about them dropping the last condition that he is boycotting the summit and launching this deportation plan.

Concluding her weblog entry, Phillips is content to tartly observe: “So no protests anywhere. Natch.” The rather nasty implication here is that the left, the international community, the media, whoever is behind this anti-Israeli / anti-Jewish conspiracy that they have largely fabricated, does not care about the plight of the Palestinians but instead want to bash Israel, for reasons unknown, and are prepared to exploit their plight to provide a justification. If they had any genuine concern, these anti-Israelis in pro-Palestinian clothing would challenge the abuses that other Arab regimes carry out.

This line of argument does Phillips no favours at all. If she wants this view taken seriously then we have to apply it to her as well. The results are predictably disappointing. She herself does not set the ball rolling by condemning Gaddafi or his plan. Does that mean that she is unopposed to the move? Sticking with Gaddafi and the Palestinians, I see no sign of any condemnation for the appalling and backward death sentences imposed on a Palestinian doctor and five Bulgarian nurses last December, based on confessions extracted under conditions of torture. Is this of no concern to her? And of course, she has demonstrated frequently that not only does she not care about the plight of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, whose lives are made a misery by wretchedly inept leadership and even more so by brutal policies from the IDF and Israeli government, but she frequently supports and makes excuses for this latter category of policies. Her contempt for this people frequently includes vicious insult [“If they can smuggle weapons from Egypt into Gaza, how come they don’t they have food?” she asked last year (5), blithely brushing aside the cause of this hunger – the fact that the Israeli government has repeatedly closed the Karni crossing, the only active goods crossing into the Gaza Strip (6)] to convenient ignorance [no mention at all of the latest B’Tselem report and TV images that showed IDF personnel using three Palestinians including two children as human shields as part of the recent Operation Hot Winter in Nablus (7)]. And to the list of atrocities that she never complains about, how about Darfur, the Congo and Sri Lanka? Does her failure to ever mention these humanitarian disasters mean that she does not care, or would it be more reasonable to believe that to give every major atrocity in the world, especially those that occur in secretive and repressive regimes largely unknown or inaccessible to Western media, equal treatment would be too much to demand of most people? If there is one crime here, it is Phillips raising the issue as a means of deflecting attention from Israeli government policy.

There have been repeated crimes against the Palestinians perpetrated by Arab governments. These have usually been inflicted on the refugees who settled in Arab countries, largely in squalid and under-funded refugee camps. The individuals that have been bold enough to expose and document these heartless crimes have been men and women that cared about the Palestinians and want justice on their behalf. It is no coincidence that these same people are the ones that the likes of Phillips label anti-Semites, Jew haters, Israel-bashers and other infantile slurs because in their rabid anything-goes defence of Israel they wilfully misconstrue the battle for justice on behalf of the Palestinians as an attempt to de-legitimise and destroy the state of Israel. Some examples are in order.

1. That “deadly pathogen” Ilan Pappe, who has apparently “bent the national mind through a relentless agenda of lies and distortions” (8) wrote of the “uncompromising policy of oppression and exclusion” towards the Palestinian refugees in neighbouring Arab states, whose rulers treated them as outsiders, “confin[ing] them to miserable camps” (9).

2. The “grand vizier of venomous distortion” (10) Robert Fisk [whose views and experiences Phillips herself has lazily and calculated distorted, claiming he “he praised his Taleban [sic] attackers for having the good taste to beat up a westerner who was by definition evil” (11)] has done more than Phillips ever will to expose the horrors committed in the Middle East. He didn’t just document the Israeli-backed Phalangist massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon but also the Karantina and Tel al Zataar massacres committed against these same people by Lebanese militias and Syrian armed forces (12). Later on he wrote of the oppression faced by Palestinians in Kuwait due to the ill-judged support their leadership gave to Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War. Palestinians were “kidnapped from their homes by armed Kuwaitis”, as many as 400 (13). In his latest work he also reminds us of the mass deportation of Palestinians by the government of Kuwait (14).

3. Avi Shlaim, who after debating her in January 2005 left her “feeling the kind of emotion one feels — in a totally different context — when forced to listen to or even watch the details of paedophile assaults on children” and whom she hypocritically accuses of “sheer, laughable, intellectual dishonesty and vacuousness” (15) to some extent actually backs the charge made by Israeli administrations over the years that the Palestinian refugees have been exploited as “political capital” to put Israel “on the defensive in the court of international public opinion” (16).

And just over a week ago Rafeef Ziadah wrote of the harassment of Palestinian refugees in war-torn Iraq, who have been expelled by Iraqi landlords. The Jordanian and Syrian borders are closed to them but a comparatively fortunate few reside in sickening conditions in the al-Hol, al-Tanaf, al- Ruweished and al-Walid refugee [read “prison”] camps on the borders (17).

These revelations didn’t come about through the work of journalists and historians looking for clever ways to attack Israel, but by individuals concerned about the Palestinians. The majority recognise that the solution is a Palestinian state where they can finally belong. In denying them this state by approving settlements, annexing land through the unlawful route of the wall and by refusing to withdraw to the pre 1967 boundaries as ordered by UN Security Council Resolution 242, and by perpetuating and exacerbating a humanitarian crisis in Gaza due to the control its borders, its airspace and the coast, the Israeli government and IDF quite rightly is the focus on much of their indignation [In the same way that harsh and dangerous asylum rulings against Zimbabwean refugees in Britain should not detract from the beastly behaviour of Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF]. When this behaviour becomes blatantly inexcusable the likes of Phillips try and deflect attention. It puts them in bad company. Saddam tried the same tactic in 1990 by offering to withdraw from Kuwait if Israel withdrew from Palestine. It was a stupid and cynical move made by a desperate man in need of leverage and a good diversion.

There is clearly not some anti-Israeli conspiracy going on here in the world media. The main reason that Gaddafi’s move has received such little response from the “left and its sympathizers” is surely due to lack of reporting, in turn caused by the fact that Libya is still a closed country and Gaddafi is yesterday’s news (18). He has been welcomed into the western orbit, for example, having been dropped from the US list of state sponsors of terror. The two nations have resumed diplomatic ties, and along with other nations like the UK and are even cooperating in some fields like the environment, health, science and technology (19). Frankly, after abandoning his dream of a nuclear weapons programme and with no newsworthy ‘terror mastermind’ behaviour these days there is little for the media to feed on. On the other hand, it would be very hard to imagine Ahmadinejad making similar threats and having them slip beneath the radar.

Gaddafi’s threat is sickening and only worthy of contempt, increased by his insulting claim that the move is to be carried out for the benefit of the Palestinians. With such limited channels for dissent and due to the closed nature of Libyan society, the most appropriate means of communicating these concerns, as with the case of the medical professionals on death row, is for powerful and vocal governments to lobby Libya hard to improve its human rights record from top to bottom. Last May David Welch, US Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, told the audience at a special briefing that the decision to develop relations with Libya strengthened the ability of the US government to “press our freedom agenda in Libya” (20). Along with the EU, the US should take every opportunity possible to condemn the erratic and despotic behaviour that this man is still frequently prone to, without driving it into another period of international isolation.

While the day when Melanie Phillips and the cretins blogging for Arutz Sheva actually give a damn about Palestinian suffering is still a long, long way away, the least they could do is cut out the ill-informed and callous sniping against those that do care. And if their hearts aren’t working they should think with their heads. Like it or not, the Palestinian aspiration for statehood is now widely backed, and frustrating it will only lead to more danger for Israel, who could immediately eliminate a key recruiting tool for jihadists and bigots by being as receptive as possible to a substantial peace plan such as the 2002 Beirut initiative, which is up for discussion once again at the upcoming Arab League Summit in Riyadh. The short-sighted inflexibility of Gaddafi’s Libya is certainly not a good model for Israel to follow.

(1) Michael Freund, ‘Bomb Iran Now!’, Fundamentally Freund, 23 February 2007: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/2009

(2) Steven Plaut, ‘Klingons Upon You, Rachel Corrie’, Back to Sanity, 21 March 2007: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/2056

(3) Michael Freund, ‘Look Who’s Threatening to Deport Palestinians’, Fundamentally Freund, 18 March 2007: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/2048

(4) Cited in al Jazeera (English) 14 March 2007

(5) Melanie Phillips, ‘The Gaza crisis and its monstrous response’, Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 6 July 2006. For health and safety reasons I’m restricting the number of Phillips links.

(6) In the first year of life under the Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA) the crossing was only open for 222 days, and of those days, for 166 it was only partially open for limited hours and with a small number of lanes [Data from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), cited in Disengaged Occupiers: The Legal Status of Gaza, Gisha, January 2007]

(7) See ‘Israeli soldiers use two Palestinian minors as human shields’, B’Tselem, 8 March 2007

(8) Melanie Phillips, ‘The war within the west (5)’, Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 22 November 2006

(9) Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land Two Peoples (Cambridge University Press 2004) p.145

(10) Melanie Phillips, ‘Fingering Fisk’, Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 14 November 2003

(11) Ibid; Even if one is too lazy to read the article itself, the title gives the game away: ‘My beating by refugees is a symbol of the hatred and fury of this filthy war’ (emphasis). Nowhere in the article does he claim he was attacked by the Taleban and nowhere does he praise them. If the Taleban attacked him he probably would not be alive today. His exact words are: “If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.” While the conclusions he comes to are hardly something to support, he is empathising with a population that various western powers claimed they were liberating in 2001. After their ordeal throughout the previous decades, to tar them as “Taleban” is a very cheap shot indeed. And I don’t want a lecture from Melanie Phillips of all people on how to behave towards minorities when a country is under attack. [Robert Fisk, ‘My beating by refugees is a symbol of the hatred and fury of this filthy war’, Independent, 10 December 2003]

(12) See Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, Third Edition (Oxford University Press 2001), pp. 79, 85.

(13) Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization (Harper Perennial, London, New York 2006), pp. 798 -799

(14) Ibid, p.801

(15) Melanie Phillips, ‘Intelligence squelched’, Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 28 January 2005

(16) Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Allen Lane 2000), p.50

(17) Rafeef Ziadah, ‘Palestinian Refugees of Iraq”, ZNet, 10 March 2007

(18) The website Allafrica.com has only four news stories on Libya for the whole of March 2007, including the deportation story. Nigeria’s Daily Trust (15 March 2007) managed to pick up on it, like al Jazeera relying on the Libyan state-run al Jamarhirya as its source Google news currently has just under 4,000 stories that even mention the name of the country. Updates on the trial of the medical professionals, including a slander hearing against them after they claimed Libyan officers tortured them into making a confession, and an audacious plan to nominate them as MEPs, scrapes just over 300 hits, the vast majority coming from Bulgarian news sources.

(19) ‘Under Secretary Paula Dobriansky Leads Senior U.S. Delegation to Libya: Deputy Secretary Alex Azar, Health and Human Services, and Deputy Secretary David Sampson, Department of Commerce Join Effort to Build Science and Technology Cooperation’, US Department of State, 10 July 2006: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2006/68783.htm; House of Commons Hansard Written Answers for 21 November 2006, Column 60W

(20) ‘Issues Related to United States Relations With Libya’, US Department of State, 15 May 2006: http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rm/2006/66268.htm

¶ posted by the leech at 3/22/2007

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