The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics (Op ed in The Independent)

[JohnyCanuck]

<b>The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics</b>
By John Hari

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn't especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me "a Jew-lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile "pro-Israel" writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-loathsome-smearing-of-israels-critics-822751.html

[LeftishBrit]

1. People can and do get viciously smeared by some for criticizing any group or country

In fact, Hari has also been attacked (as he says) by Islamist groups.

And try criticizing Britain, America, Russia, China, India, etc, etc, and prepare to be virulently criticized by some people!

Hari is actually a very intelligent writer when he writes about things and people that he knows well: i.e. Britain and Europe more generally. He wrote the best critiques of Steyn's views of Europe that I've come across. He is quite right about Melanie Phillips, for example. She is a very simplistically right-wing individual, who rightly opposes antisemitism, but in the context of her other views I wonder if she would be continue to antisemitism if (a) she weren't Jewish; (b) there were currently a significant number of Jewish asylum-seekers in Britain. She is very anti-immigrant, anti-secular, xenophobic, anti-feminist, anti-liberal, economically and socially right-wing, anti-science, and one of the main spreaders of the 'vaccines cause autism' hysteria in Britain. I think it's misleading to compare Dershowitz to her: one is a scholar and lawyer; one is a populist RW journalist with a deep suspicion of the intellectual 'elite', so that even if some of their views are the same, they come to them in different ways.

While Hari's views of other countries are sometimes interesting, I think that he tends to view them all through a bit of a prism of "why can't they be more like us?" - this applies both to Israel and the Muslim countries. (He supported the Iraq war initially, though he turned against it some time ago.)

As regards Finkelstein: as I've said before, I believe in academic freedom and know of too many cases where it's been suppressed or denounced by people who don't welcome disagreement. Two of my close colleagues were separately and publicly denounced a few years ago by people associated with the government who objected, in both cases, to research that indicated that doing lots of homework in primary school does not NECESSARILY improve academic performance. And that's before you get into the situation of powerful workplace bullies who don't like anyone contradicting them and can be very vindictive. I know of lots of such cases - and none of them involve political matters, or have attracted any publicity. So my instincts are to sympathize with Finkelstein on this point, though to be a bit irritated by the fact that he sets himself up as some sort of unique martyr. However, it can be a complex issue. He put on his own website, when still an academic, the claim that the 'Holocaust industry' is 'one of the main causes of antisemitism'. What if a professor put on a public website the opinion that 'the affirmative action industry is one of the main causes of racism'? One might still defend his right to free speech (I suspect that Hari, who is a bit of an absolutist on such issues, would do so); but it would not, I think, be treated as nearly so much of a cause celebre for progressives. (His expressions of sympathy for Hezbollah are even more worrying in a sense, but they took place after he'd ceased to be a professor, so are less relevant here.