The Innovative Minds website has posted an article titled “Al Quds Day – Is It For You?”, which aims to “cut through the hasbra (sic)” which it claims “Zionists” have been spreading to discourage people from attending. This includes an explanation of why, although Quds Day was created by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, Quds Day is “not an Iranian event”, but just to express support for the Palestinians; is not just for Muslims; and is certainly not an “an anti-Semitic ‘kill the Jews’ hate fest”. They finish by asking: “So will you stand with us in support of Palestine, or will you by your absence give your support to the Zionists?”

It is true that participation in Quds Day is certainly not limited to Iranians and that the purpose of the day is not to express support for Iran, but the Iranian influence over the day is still strong, so it is worth knowing what the current Iranian regime think it is all about. Quds Day is held in Iran on the last Friday of Ramadan, which is today (the march in London is tomorrow), and Press TV already has reports of some of today’s events. Here, for example, is a report of President Ahmadinejad’s speech at Tehran’s Quds Day rally earlier today, in which he is reported to have said that Israel “is on the brink of collapse”. However, the collapse of Israel alone is not enough for Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri, the deputy head of Iran’s Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said yesterday that Quds Day “appears to pave the way for the collapse of Israel and its allies, namely the US and Britain”. Iran’s Association for Liberation of the Holy al-Quds, which organises the Quds Day events in Iran, promoted their rally with a statement claiming that there is an “international resolve to annihilate Israel”.

Here in the United Kingdom, the organisers of London’s Quds Day march, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, have published a lengthy set of articles on their website to promote the day, and these, too, can be taken as a guide as to whether this is an event that is worthy of support.

The first five links are to quotes and writings of Ayatollah Khomeini, in a further clue to the Iranian origins of Quds Day (most of these links take you to the website of the Iranian state broadcaster IRIB). They make for interesting reading. In short, he believed that Israel and Zionism were plotting to occupy the entire Muslim world and destroy Islam completely, and he was not averse to employing antisemitic tropes in making his argument. For example, on “Israel the enemy of Islam and the Muslims” (all emphases added, as they are throughout this blogpost):

[...] For nearly twenty years now, I have been informing people of the danger of international Zionism. Today, I feel the danger for all the freedom-bestowing revolutions of the world, including the recent Islamic revolution in Iran, is no less than it was in the past, for at the present time these world-devouring bloodsuckers using various techniques to defeat the oppressed and weak of the earth have risen up and are active. Our nation and the free nations of the world should bravely and vigilantly resist these dangerous plots.

Imam’s message, 11 February 1981 (22 Bahman 1359 AHS). Sahifa-yi Nur, Vol. 14, p. 63.

The agents of imperialism are busy in every corner of the Islamic world drawing our youth away from us with their evil propaganda. They are not converting them into Jews and Christians, rather they are corrupting them, making them irreligious and indifferent, which is sufficient for their purposes. In our own city of Tehran now there are centres of evil propaganda run by the churches, the Zionists and the Baha’is in order to lead our people astray and make them abandon the ordinances and teachings of Islam.

Islamic Government,p. 176.

[...] Brothers and sisters, both sects must be vigilant and realise that these sightless, stipend-receivers, in the name of Islam, the sacred Qur’an and the customary practice (sunna) of the Prophet, want to pluck Islam, the Qur’an and the sunna out of the midst of the Muslims, or at the very least to lead the Muslims astray. The brothers and sisters should realise that America and Israel bear malice towards the very basis of Islam, because Islam, its book and the sunna are a thorn in their side and an obstacle to their plundering and because it was by following this book and this sunna  that Iran rose up to confront them, embarked on a revolution and was victorious.

Imam’s message on the occasion of the hajj pilgrimage and the auspicious `Id al-Qurban, 29 August 1983 (7 Shahrivar 1363 AHS). Sahifa-yi Nur, Vol. 19, p. 46.

(As an aside, it is striking that an organisation which claims to work for human rights should link to an article which accuses the Baha’is of conducting “evil propaganda” in Iran, given the ongoing persecution of Baha’is in that country).

On “Israel’s expansionism (the plan for a Greater Israel)“:

The heads of the Islamic countries should be aware that this germ of corruption which has been planted in the heart of the Islamic countries has not been put there merely to suppress the Arab nation, rather it is dangerous and harmful to the Middle East region as a whole. The plan is for the domination and supremacy of Zionism over the Islamic world and the further colonisation of the rich lands and abundant resources of the Islamic countries…

Imam’s message to the Muslim governments, 7 November 1973 (16 Aban 1352 AHS). Sahifa-yi Nur, Vol. 1, p. 201.

With your union you should pluck this germ of corruption out from amongst you. If you do not, then this cancerous growth will spread to other places. For it will not be content merely with the Golan Heights, for they (the Zionists) are of the opinion that the Jews are superior to all other races and the land from the Euphrates to the Nile belongs to Israel and should be returned to it…

Imam’s speech dated 24 January 1982 (4 Bahman 1360 AHS). Sahifa-yi Nur, Vol. 16, p. 21.

What could be better  for all the governments of the region to muster all the power at their disposal to wipe Israel off the map? This maleficent Israel which has put the innocent Palestinians in the state they are now in, which has committed all these outrages against brave Lebanon, has encroached upon the countries of the region and has transgressed their borders. What could be better  for regional governments to take hold of one another’s hands and free the region from the iniquity of Israel and its supporter America? As I have reminded you time and again, Israel considers the area from the Nile to the Euphrates to be its own and it sees you as usurpers of its lands [...]

Imam’s message on the occasion of the great religio-politico gathering of hajj and the auspicious feast of `Id al-Qurban, dated 29 August 1984 (7 Shahrivar 1363 AHS). Sahifa-yi Nur, Vol. 19, p. 48.

And some general statements by Khomeini about Quds Day itself:

• The Quds Day is a day in which Islam is to be revived.

• The Quds Day is a day in which the destinies of the oppressed nations must to determine.

• The Quds Day is a universal day. It is not an exclusive day for Quds itself. It is a day for the oppressed to rise and stand up against the arrogant.

• The Quds Day is Islam”s Live Day!

• The Quds Day is the Day of Islam.

• The Quds Day which fall on the last days of the God”s Great Month (Ramadhan) is a proper day on which all Muslims be freed from the bondage of the Big Satan (Great Devil, USA) and other superpowers and join the Infinite Might of God.

• The Quds Day which is coincidental with the Night of Destiny (Laylatul-Qadr) must be revived among the Muslims and be the starting point of their awakening and awareness.

It is a sign of the successful growth of Iranian influence in anti-Israel campaigning, that an event which was described by its founder in such terms now attracts widespread support from secular (including Jewish) anti-Zionists.

The IHRC website links to another article, titled “Zionism – the Greatest Danger“, taken from the website of Tebyan, an Iranian organisation. The article describes Zionism in terms which come directly from the antisemitic view of Jews: there is no other way to describe it. It begins:

The greatest evil facing the Muslim community (Ummah)and mankind today is not AIDS, Pollution, or Nuclear War. It is international Zionism. It is the Zionist greed for wealth, lust for perverted sex, greed for power, domination, and economic exploitation that is causing AIDS, POLLUTION as well as threatening NUCLEAR WAR.

Zionist (sic) are behind every evil and conflict in the world today. Whether it is political, economical, social or moral.

The Holy Quran, says:

“And you will most certainly find them the greediest of mankind for life (greedier) and of those who are polytheists; every one of them loves that he should be granted a life of a thousand years, and his being granted a long life will in no way remove him further off from the chastisement, and Allah sees what they do.”(2:96)

“You will find the most violent of people in enmity for those who believe (to be) the Jews and those who are polytheists…”(5:82)

“… whenever there came to them an apostle with what that their souls didn’t desire, some (of them) did they call liars and some they slew.(5:70)

This same Yahud (i.e. Jews) tried to destroy the Holy Prophet (SAW) and his followers in Medina.

The same Yahud that killed Prophet Yahya (AS), that defied Prophet Musa (AS), that crucified Prophet Isa (AS).

Today this Zionist are doing their utmost to destroy`Masjidu’l-Aqsa’ (Muslim’s first Qibla). Their aim is to conquer all Muslim lands and grab the oil resources and destroy Islam completely. Because Islam is a challenge to their evil schemes and exposes them.

The rest is in a similar vein. The IHRC website includes the standard disclaimer that “The opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect the views of IHRC”; but then you have to ask, what is it about this article that the IHRC thought was worth bringing to their readers, to promote Quds Day?

There is another question that springs to mind. This year, Quds Day takes place against a backdrop of renewed peace talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, hosted by America. Hamas have responded with a series of shootings in the West Bank, killing four Israelis (so far), and have announced a working alliance with twelve other violent organisations in Gaza to coordinate terrorist attacks against Israel. What, I wonder, will the speakers at tomorrow’s Quds Day march have to say about these two contrasting developments?

CST, together with the Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism (PCAA) Foundation, will be hosting fringe events at all three party conferences, looking at the role that the mainstream parties can play in combating the British National Party.

The BNP’s failures in the May 2010 general and local elections should be seen as a one positive step in a much longer journey. We now have a great opportunity to work together and ensure that the BNP is sent back to the political margins where it belongs.

The first fringe event will be at the Liberal Democrat conference in Liverpool on Monday 20th September at 1pm, with a panel including Mark Gardner from CST, Nick Lowles from HOPE Not Hate, Tom Brake MP and chaired by Nick Cohen.

Similar fringe events will follow at the Labour Party conference in Manchester on Tuesday 28th September at 12.30pm, and at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, on Sunday 3rd October at 12.30pm.

Please email partyconference@thecst.org.uk if you would like to attend any of these events.

Disputes and arguments over alleged antisemitism have a habit of quickly heading down a dead end of accusations and counter-accusations, leaving no common understanding or resolution. A derogatory comment about Jews, or Israel, or Zionism is made; the person who made it is accused of antisemitism; they deny it; everyone entrenches their position and closes their ears. A good example of the futility and frustration that often results is Deborah Orr’s article from 2001, “I’m fed up being called an anti-Semite“.

But what if the bigotry being displayed is not in fact antisemitism, but racism against Israel and Israelis? Israel’s detractors often accuse Israel of anti-Palestinian racism. What if some of them are guilty of racism against Israelis? And what is the difference between this and antisemitism?

I am brought to these questions by the  reports that the Chairman of Amnesty International in Finland, Frank Johannson, has called Israel a “scum state”. To be precise, according to  the Tundra Tabloids blog which translated his words into English, he wrote on his blog:

A friend of mine who works in Israel, was visiting while piling wood in the shed, we got into his favourite topic. Several years of  residence in the holy country, he has come to the conclusion that “Israel is a scum state”. On the basis of my own visit, which occurred during the 1970s and 1990s for the final time, I agree.

The comment has been translated elsewhere as “punk state” or “creep state”. According to the Jerusalem Post:

[Amnesty International spokeswoman Susanne] Flood said that Johansson used the phrase “creep state” to describe Israel, rather than “scum,” as the initial English translation of the Finnish word found. Native Finnish speakers from Tundra Tabloids said the Finnish term used by Johansson to denigrate Israel is a “highly derogatory term,” and is frequently translated as “scum,” “scum bag” or “douche bag.”

Whatever the precise translation – and “scum state” seems to have stuck – it is clearly a pretty insulting phrase. Johannson has since removed the post from his blog, and explained:

I decided to take down my blog because I appreciate that my comments were ill-judged and appear all the more so when taken out of context, and have obviously caused offence to many people although it was not my intention, at all, to cause such offence.

His comment is reminiscent of the 2001 remark by the then French Ambassador to the UK, Daniel Bernard, that Israel was a “shitty little country” and that “those people” were putting the whole world in danger of World War Three. On both occasions, other commentators were quick to see antisemitism in the comments, even though they were explicitly about Israel rather than, explicitly, about Jews. Of course, both Johannson and Bernard denied that they or their comments were antisemitic.

So is there another way to approach this question? Antisemitism is commonly understood to be prejudice, hatred or discrimination against Jews, often with an ideological component and, for some, specifically European in origin. Jews and Israel are clearly not the same thing: around half the world’s Jews are not Israeli, and around a fifth of Israelis are not Jewish. Israel is a formally constituted sovereign state, and the Jews are a disparate, amorphous set of people and communities. And so on. It follows, then, that anti-Israel feeling and antisemitism should be different things. However, Israel was created as a national home for the Jews, and it has a Jewish character. In almost every aspect of Jewish life – culture, religion, politics, academia and so on – Israel is the beating heart of the Jewish world. For most people, Israel and Jews will always be intuitively connected. So it also follows that anti-Israel feeling and antisemitism would not be entirely separate from one another.

What if we view Johannson’s comment, and Bernard’s, not as examples antisemitism but rather of anti-Israel racism, or bigotry, or prejudice? British law recognises that national groups can be subject to racism: in Section III of the Public Order Act 1986 (pdf), “racial hatred” is defined as “hatred against a group of persons in Great Britain defined by reference to colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins.” (my emphasis). Now, it should be recognised that both Johannson and Bernard spoke of Israel the “state” or “country”, not Israeli people either in Israel or in Britain. Plus, the name of a country is often used as a shorthand for its government. Still, both comments are so sweeping and unqualified as to give the impression that they take in Israel, its government, people and perceived national character. Nor are they alone: similar sentiments about Israel and Israelis are not hard to find, particularly on anti-Zionist blogs or in the comment threads on mainstream media websites. Language in this context is important. Take, for example, the Guardian’s description of Israel as “an arrogant nation“, and Professor Colin Shindler’s response in their letters column.

This leads me onto the comparison of Israel with South Africa which is so beloved of Israel’s opponents, but from the rather different angle of this famous Spitting Image song:

For non-British readers or those of a young age, Spitting Image was a satirical puppet show that ran during the 1980s and 1990s; I’ve Never Met a Nice South African was broadcast in 1986 and then released as the B-side to The Chicken Song, which reached no. 1 in the charts.

The lyrics of this song are brutal: the choruses describe South African people variously as “a bunch of arrogant bastards / Who hate black people”; “a bunch of talentless murderers / Who smell like baboons” and “a bunch of ignorant loudmouths / With no sense of humour”. Even allowing for the fact that it is a comedy song for a notoriously cruel satirical show, I’m not sure these particular lyrics could be written and broadcast nowadays; or at least if they were, there would be a deluge of complaints and possibly even demands for a prosecution. Opinions will differ on whether or not this change in atmosphere is a good thing. My point is that hatred of a country or anger at its government’s policies, can easily find expression via racist or bigoted statements about all of its people, especially if you believe that the particular policies to which you object are intrinsic to the character of the country. There is much in the anti-Israel discourse in this country that smacks of an emotional reaction to Israel, up to and including hatred, which goes beyond its government and encompasses the country and people as a whole. I would call it anti-Israel racism; if you don’t like that term, use bigotry or prejudice instead.

Nobody likes to think of themself as racist, but there is a particular resistance amongst left-wing people to the idea that they are capable of racism or antisemitism. This is partly because the left defines itself as anti-racist, and views racism in narrow terms as a function of power relations rather than a form of bigotry that can go in any direction. There is also a reluctance amongst many opponents of Israel to even engage with the idea that anti-Israel (or even more so, anti-Zionist) discourse may, at times, utilise tropes that have an antisemitic history. There is also a large dose of hypocrisy: many of the people who misquote Golda Meir as saying that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” think nothing of denying Israeli national identity.

Still, for those opponents of Israel who do not want to consider the possibility that their attitudes may be polluted with antisemitism, they could instead consider whether they are susceptible to racist ideas or feelings about Israel and Israelis. (And note, the defence of knowing or supporting Israeli leftists is just a variant of the old ’some of my best friends are Jewish’ line; it is the attitudes towards the rest, as an undifferentiated mass, that are at question). If it is possible to harbour racist views about French people, or Americans, or Nigerians, or, for that matter, Palestinians, then surely it is also possible to harbour racist views about Israelis. For the record, I am not suggesting that all opponents of Israel are guilty of racism, which would obviously be a meaningless generalisation. I am just discussing the principle.

And if it is possible to hold racist views about Israelis, then there is a follow-up question: what if these racist views about Israel and Israelis are similar, to a greater or lesser extent, to things that antisemites believe about Jews? Would this mean that, after all, anti-Israel racism is the same as antisemitism? or does anti-Israel racism exist separately from, but sometimes influenced by, antisemitism? And does it make a difference, morally or politically, which prejudice is in play? This is not mere sophistry. These are genuine questions about the nature and limits of contemporary antisemitism, and I am not sure of the answers.

A pig’s head adorned with a Chasidic hat and fake peyot (side-locks), and with a Star of David carved on its forehead, was left outside a synagogue in Kaunas, Lithuania, on Saturday. EJP reports:

Lithuania’s Jewish organisations on Monday condemned an apparent neo-Nazi attack in which a pig’s head was left at the entrance of a synagogue by unknown perpetrators.

“The Lithuanian Jewish community and the Religious community of Lithuanian Jews judge this as Nazi provocation aimed at insulting the ethnic and religious feelings of Lithuanian Jews,” their leaders, Simonas Alperavicius and Chief Rabbi Chaim Burstein, said in a statement.

The statement said that the pig’s head was found on Saturday — the Jewish holy day — outside a synagogue in Lithuania’s second city Kaunas.

The use of a pig is particularly offensive because Judaism, like Islam, considers pigs unclean and bars the consumption of pork.

Simonas Gurevicius, executive director of the Lithuanian Jewish community, told AFP the incident should be treated as an attack on all believers, not only Jews.

“We hope that Lithuanian society will not be impassive, as this act of a few anti-Semitic vandals does not reflect the attitude of Lithuanian society,” he added.

Kaunas police have launched a formal investigation but there are no suspects so far, officer Gintautas Dirmeikis told the Baltic News Service.

Lithuania was once home to a 220,000-strong Jewish community, and Vilnius was a cultural hub and world centre for the study of the Torah, known as the “Jerusalem of the North”. At the end of the 19th century, the number of synagogues in Vilnius exceeded one hundred.

But 95 percent of Lithuania’s Jews perished during the country’s 1941-1944 German occupation at the hands of the Nazis and Lithuanian collaborators.

Today there are no more than 5,000 Jews in Lithuania, of whom around 500 live in Kaunas, Gurevicius said.

A Dutch appeals court has found against the Arab European League for publishing a Holocaust Denial cartoon on its website in 2006, according to Reuters: 

A Dutch Muslim group was fined 2,500 euros ($3,200) for publishing a cartoon which suggested the Holocaust was made up or exaggerated by Jews, a Dutch appeals court ruled on Thursday.

The court in the western city of Arnhem overruled an acquittal handed down by a Dutch lower court, saying the cartoon, published on the website of the Arab European League’s (AEL) in 2006, was “unnecessarily hurtful.”

“The court points out that the European Court of Human Rights, which considers freedom of speech of paramount importance and defends it thoroughly, makes an exception for the denial or trivialization of the Holocaust,” the court said.

The court also imposed a 2-year probation period on the AEL.

The cartoon shows two men in Auschwitz looking at several dead bodies. “I don’t think they are Jews,” says one man. The one man replies: “We have to get to the 6,000,000 (figure) somehow’. Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

The Dutch group says it had no intention of disputing the Holocaust, but wanted instead to highlight what it described as double standards in free speech.

The AEL circulated it in 2006 after a Danish newspaper published a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad which triggered an outcry among Muslims in many countries.

This is the cartoon for which the AEL was prosecuted:

We covered some of the issues in this case in an article on this blog when it was initially brought last year. As we pointed out then, the AEL’s explanation – that they did not deny the Holocaust, but just published the cartoons in response to the Danish newspaper cartoons of Mohammed – suggests a cynical politics that can only be divisive, inflammatory and harmful. It also suggests an attitude that Holocaust Denial is a legitimate tool to be deployed in mainstream political debate.

At the time that the AEL published this cartoon it was run by its founder, Dyab Abou Jahjah, who has since left to join the Iranian-run International Union of Parliamentarians for Palestine (IUPFP). At the time, he defended the AEL’s use of Holocaust Denial in strident terms:

People in Europe are not allowed to do a free historical examination of the Second World War and the holocaust and freely express an opinion on it that is different than the dominating dogmatic line.  Any attempt to have deviant historical examination of the holocaust will earn you the title of revisionist, anti-Semite and a jail sentence.

You don’t even have to go that far, I would be curious to see the reactions of these champions of the freedom of speech  in case that same Danish paper would have published pictures of Jewish rabbi’s, or Moses for that matter, with a Jewish nose, the star of David and represented him as a greedy banker, or other form of economical parasite sucking the blood of the people referring to stereotypes on Jews. Or of King David with the same typical Jewish features and outfit conspiring together with other Jewish prophets to dominate the world inspired by the protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Yes Arabs and Muslims are uptight when you touch their religious and national symbols, but Europe had made of political correctness and the cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshiping its alternative religion and is even more uptight when you touch that. Europeans might not respect their flags, and they might laugh with Jesus and Mary but if you touch their new religious symbols, they will bombard you with indignation and persecute you in the best European inquisition tradition.

I am for the absolute freedom of speech everywhere, and that’s why I call upon every free sole among Arabs to use the Danish flag as a substitute for toilet paper. To illustrate every wall with graffiti making fun of everything Europe holds as holy: dancing rabbis on the carcasses of Palestinian children, hoax gas-chambers built in Hollywood in 1946 with Steven Spielberg’s approval stamp, and Aids spreading fagots. Let us defend the absolute freedom of speech altogether, wouldn’t that be a noble cause?

Last year, Abou Jahjah was twice invited to London, to speak at meetings organised by the Stop The War Coalition and IUPFP. The first time, he spoke in person; the second time, having been excluded from the UK, he spoke via video link, courtesy of Hizbollah’s al-Manar TV. His exclusion was contested by Jeremy Corbyn MP, who spoke alongside him on his visit to London. Now that the AEL has been convicted of Holocaust Denial under Abou Jahjah’s leadership, will the STWC and Jeremy Corbyn still consider Abou Jahjah a suitable person to work with?

A Socialist Workers Party editorial reveals (again) the manner in which the party’s anti-Israel fervour prevents it from acknowledging antisemitism in any such setting.

The SWP understands the significance of the Holocaust upon support for the mere continued existence of Israel. However, this does not change the fact that for the SWP, Israel is always in the wrong. That is the only way it can ever be, and if the Holocaust, or antisemitism, get in the way of that fact, then they must be spun away by any means necessary.

The latest example of this lies in the SWP’s editorial against BBC’s Panorama programme regarding what happened with the flotilla to Gaza and the killing by Israeli commandos of nine people aboard the Mavi Marmara.

The SWP (like many other anti-Israel groups) were simply livid that Panorama had the chutzpah to accept some of Israel’s version of events. This included the BBC referring to the antisemitic catcall “Shut up, go back to Auschwitz”: said in a radio transmission by one of the flotilla participants in response to the Israeli navy.

The editorial does not explicitly deny that the words were spoken, but its context and wording is every bit as close as you can get to it:

…Immediately after the attack the IDF said that its soldiers had been shot, though it soon had to withdraw this allegation. It released a recording it claimed was broadcast from the flotilla, telling the Israelis, “Shut up, go back to Auschwitz.”

The IDF soon backed off, admitting that the recording had been doctored. But both these allegations were included in the “evidence” presented by Panorama.

And the programme repeated as fact Israel’s lying defence that problems in Gaza are down to the rise of the Islamist movement Hamas and IDF attacks are a measured response to rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.

The press release therefore says that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) admitted to having “doctored” “Shut up. Go back to Auschwitz”.

Despite not having not explicitly denied the antisemitic remark, the very next sentence includes it under the term “allegations” and deliberately places the word “evidence” within quotation marks. It doesn’t say that this was an imaginative fake from the IDF, but the inference is clear and will no doubt be wheeled out again and again in years to come.

The SWP’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge antisemitism within the context of anti-Israel activism, is a Trotskyist spin of Stalinist proportions. It is also very stupid. Antisemitism does not help the Palestinian cause and every time the SWP turns a blind eye to such antisemitism, or actively colludes in its promotion, it does not nothing more than prove that its own human rights credentials are a joke – as those concerned with the SWP’s tactical abandonments of homosexual rights will also readily testify.

NB – Those wishing to see what lies behind the SWP’s “doctored” claim should read, view and listen to the following:

Firstly, the original recording supplied by Israel of “Shut up. Go back to Auschwitz”, which the IDF originally said came from the flotilla’s lead boat, the Mavi Marmara.

Secondly, the IDF’s subsequent explanation that the transmission in the recording had not necessarily been from the Mavi Maramara. (Note however that the SWP’s spin relates to the entire “flotilla”: and not just the Mavi Marmara.)

…So to clarify: the audio was edited down to cut out periods of silence over the radio as well as incomprehensible comments so as to make it easier for people to listen to the exchange. We have now uploaded the entire segment of 5 minutes and 58 seconds in which the exchange took place and the comments were made.

This transmission had originally cited the Mavi Marmara ship as being the source of these remarks, however, due to an open channel, the specific ship or ships in the “Freedom Flotilla” responding to the Israeli Navy could not be identified…

Thirdly, the IDF’s entire recording of the transmissions

Ben Cohen, Associate Director of Communications at American Jewish Committee, has written another excellent and thought provoking piece: this time on the nature of antisemitism. His penultimate paragraph echoes much of CST’s current work on the vexing topic of antisemitic discourse

…many of the grand myths of our own time – Israel as the ultimate rogue state, U.S. policy as a hostage of the “Israel Lobby,” the Palestinians as the iconic symbol of human suffering – draw on a much older tradition that, just twenty years ago, most people regarded as a matter for historians, not chroniclers of the present.

Written in the context of Oliver Stone’s highly objectionable remarks to the Sunday Times and his subsequent apology, the article may be read in full here at the Huffington Post.   

The following excerpts show the thrust of Ben Cohen’s argument

…Stone quickly apologized for his remarks, prompting the question of whether it is fair to call him an antisemite. The answer lies in understanding what antisemitism is – and what it isn’t.

…Should one’s worst instincts win out, will a subsequent, timely apology annul the offense? If antisemitism is boiled down to a matter of insult, then yes, it probably will. But the problem here, as Marx might have said, is the confusion of appearance with essence.

What makes antisemitism distinctive is that it’s a worldview, a means of explaining why there is injustice and unfairness and conflict in our societies. In his recent epic study, the scholar Robert Wistrich cited the French monarchist Charles Maurras’ admiration for the succinctness of antisemitism. “It enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over and simplified,” Maurras said.

In the nineteenth century, Maurras and his cohorts wore the antisemite’s button with pride. So did Wilhelm Marr, the German rabble-rouser widely credited with coining the term antisemitism, who went on to found The League of Antisemites in 1879. For these men and their followers, antisemitism was not so much an attitude as an ideology.

…In keeping with its politically and theologically promiscuous history, antisemitism is again perfectly compatible with what would commonly, if incorrectly, be regarded as a progressive outlook, especially if the focus is upon the State of Israel.

That is why antisemitism remains one of the most furiously contested terms in political debate today. Invariably, those accused of it angrily reject the charge, retorting that they have been unfairly maligned by a crude tactic designed to muzzle what they insist is the horrible reality of Israel.

These are people who would have you believe that the victims of antisemitism today are no longer Jews, but those who are labeled antisemitic. Such sophistry, however, was not available to Oliver Stone, because of his candor in talking about Jews, and not “Zionists” or “The Israel Lobby.”

…There is a deeper point about those who recycle the favorite themes of antisemitism, yet are careful not to…speak about Jews qua Jews. In Tablet this week, Lee Smith…argued that the matter at hand is not the “indiscernible beliefs of individuals,” but the way in which these writers, when they write about Israel, are “complicit in the common work of mainstreaming the kind of antisemitic language, ideas, and discourse that were once confined to extremist hate sites on the far right.”

It’s unlikely that Lee Smith’s opponents will engage in any critical reflection, perhaps because the truth is too painful to bear. For many of the grand myths of our own time – Israel as the ultimate rogue state, U.S. policy as a hostage of the “Israel Lobby,” the Palestinians as the iconic symbol of human suffering – draw on a much older tradition that, just twenty years ago, most people regarded as a matter for historians, not chroniclers of the present.

It was these myths which effectively licensed Oliver Stone’s remarks. If there is a lesson to be drawn from L’Affaire Stone, it is that he did not – and this is why his apology is really by the by – act alone.

You can follow Ben Cohen on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ZWord