Guardian owns up to cases of anti-Semitism...will PF haters?

Israel is kind of our proxy. Granted, it's not like they seem to mind being aggressive.

With all of their talk of attacking Iran, however, I think we're going to have to rein them in.

If Israel attacks Iran, all hell is going to break loose.

 

Yes, the implications are unthinkable-except to the brain-dead neocons who can't wait for another war so they can wave their stupid flags and high-five each other over tens of thousands more dead. Of course it won't matter to them because the simpletons have been brainwashed into believing Iran is evil.

 

Iran is evil in some ways. It restricts the freedom of the press, harms gays and American citizens. But, I doubt that it is as "evil" as brain-dead neocons accuse it of being. Most of the US hostility towards Iran is based on the traditional US desire to be hostile towards Iran and American one-sided support for Israel adds to this, giving brain-dead neocons baggage to justify their desired views of hostility. Overall, if America chilled and accepted the nation of Palestine, then it would have little to fuss about.

 

The Guardian is one of the most respected news sources on the planet, it is also one of the most balanced. That it found it necessary to correct something that is susceptible to misunderstanding, is to its credit. End of.

 

I can see I made this too complex.

Permit me the chance to make it less so.

I was disgusted by the actions of NATO (therefore, Britain), in Libya. I have spoken about this often, on this very forum, on several recent threads.

Don't believe me - I shall link you to the threads, if you want me to.

I was disgusted by the British Gov's decision to get involved in Iraq, and Afghanistan. Indeed, I truly believe the former PM here, and his entire cabinet, should stand trial for war crimes.

How much more forceful do you want me to be about that?

And, lastly, yes, I am often disgusted with the actions of the Israeli regime.

Thanks

Jack

 

Oh, I do want you to be much more forceful, you are a brit so I want you to wage Internet jihad against the UK, right now you are engaged in internet jihad against Israel only. Your own government in your name is in Afghanistan and bombing the cr&p out of Libya and the ratio of your anti-Israel posts to your anti-British posts is 100:1 or worse. How do you explain that?

If this is not hypocrisy, i don't know what is. But hey, who can blame you. It's scary and unpopular to fight and protest your own government, your co-workers might find out and beat the sh&t out of your for not being patriotic and not supporting the troops. It's just dangerous to protest Arab dictators, can easily get you killed...but electronic jihad against Israel is safe popular and makes you feel like a Che Gevara. Keep up the good work.

 

Yes, sometimes the brain dead use that tactic, that false dichotomy - eg; If you don't support our troops being in Iraq, you 'must hate the troops', and so on, and so on. I think that sort of flawed thinking made it's way here, from over the pond, but anyway, it remains flawed and false. However, it does not deter me from being a robust opponent of the British Gov, this one, and several before that. They do not represent me. They represent themselves, and their elites. I am quite happy to say that, no matter how aggressive British morons may respond. Take for example the way that the use of the poppy has been hijacked, by white trash, here. Not so long ago, people here would, if they wanted, remember the fallen, in a quiet and humble manner. Now we have white trash cheapening it's use, by wanting to prove to their fellow white trash just how much of mourner they really are, by using it, gratitously, all over Facebook and the like.

Btw - these morons wouldn't lift a finger to me. Most are internet hard men, whose pants would turn brown in real life.

Here is an interesting article, which I found for you, and felt may be of interest.


http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...know-that-they-mock-the-war-dead-6257416.html

Robert Fisk: Do those who flaunt the poppy on their lapels know that they mock the war dead?

I turned on the television in my Damascus hotel room to witness a dreary sight: all the boys and girls of BBC World wearing their little poppies again.

Bright red they were, with that particularly silly green leaf out of the top – it was never part of the original Lady Haig appeal – and not one dared to appear on screen without it. Do these pathetic men and women know how they mock the dead? I trust that Jon Snow has maintained his dignity by not wearing it.

Now I've mentioned my Dad too many times in The Independent. He died almost 20 years ago so, after today, I think it's time he was allowed to rest in peace, and that readers should in future be spared his sometimes bald wisdom. This is the last time he will make an appearance. But he had strong views about wearing the poppy. He was a soldier of the Great War, Battle of Arras 1918 – often called the Third Battle of the Somme – and the liberation of Cambrai, along with many troops from Canada. The Kaiser Wilhelm's army had charitably set the whole place on fire and he was appalled by the scorched earth policy of the retreating Germans. But of course, year after year, he would go along to the local cenotaph in Birkenhead, and later in Maidstone, where I was born 28 years after the end of his Great War, and he always wore his huge black coat, his regimental tie – 12th Battalion, the King's Liverpool Regiment – and his poppy.

In those days, it was – I recall this accurately, I think – a darker red, blood-red rather than BBC-red, larger than the sorrow-lite version I see on the BBC and without that ridiculous leaf. So my Dad would stand and I would be next to him in my Yardley Court School blazer at 10 years old and later, aged 16, in my Sutton Valence School blazer, with my very own Lady Haig poppy, its long black wire snaking through the material, sprouting from my lapel.

My Dad gave me lots of books about the Great War, so I knew about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo before I went to school – and 47 years before I stood, amid real shellfire, in the real Sarajevo and put my feet on the very pavement footprints where Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shots.

But as the years passed, old Bill Fisk became very ruminative about the Great War. He learned that Haig had lied, that he himself had fought for a world that betrayed him, that 20,000 British dead on the first day of the Somme – which he mercifully avoided because his first regiment, the Cheshires, sent him to Dublin and Cork to deal with another 1916 "problem" – was a trashing of human life. In hospital and recovering from cancer, I asked him once why the Great War was fought. "All I can tell you, fellah," he said, "was that it was a great waste." And he swept his hand from left to right. Then he stopped wearing his poppy. I asked him why, and he said that he didn't want to see "so many (*)(*)(*)(*) fools" wearing it – he was a provocative man and, sadly, I fell out with him in his old age. What he meant was that all kinds of people who had no idea of the suffering of the Great War – or the Second, for that matter – were now ostentatiously wearing a poppy for social or work-related reasons, to look patriotic and British when it suited them, to keep in with their friends and betters and employers. These people, he said to me once, had no idea what the trenches of France were like, what it felt like to have your friends die beside you and then to confront their brothers and wives and lovers and parents. At home, I still have a box of photographs of his mates, all of them killed in 1918.

So like my Dad, I stopped wearing the poppy on the week before Remembrance Day, 11 November, when on the 11th hour of the 11 month of 1918, the armistice ended the war called Great. I didn't feel I deserved to wear it and I didn't think it represented my thoughts. The original idea came, of course, from the Toronto military surgeon and poet John McCrae and was inspired by the death of his friend Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, killed on 3 May 1915. "In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row." But it's a propaganda poem, urging readers to "take up the quarrel with the foe". Bill Fisk eventually understood this and turned against it. He was right.

I've had my share of wars, and often return to the ancient Western Front. Three years ago, I was honoured to be invited to give the annual Armistice Day Western Front memorial speech at the rebuilt Cloth Hall in Ypres. The ghost of my long-dead 2nd Lieutenant Dad was, of course, in the audience. I quoted all my favourite Great War writers, along with the last words of Nurse Edith Cavell, and received, shortly afterwards, a wonderful and eloquent letter from the daughter of that fine Great War soldier Edmund Blunden. (Read his Undertones of War, if you do nothing else in life.) But I didn't wear a poppy. And I declined to lay a wreath at the Menin Gate. This was something of which I was not worthy. Instead, while they played the last post, I looked at the gravestones on the city walls.

As a young boy, I also went to Ypres with my Dad, stayed at the "Old Tom Hotel" (it is still there, on the same side of the square as the Cloth Hall) and met many other "old soldiers", all now dead. I remember that they wanted to remember their dead comrades. But above all, they wanted an end to war. But now I see these pathetic creatures with their little sand-pit poppies – I notice that our masters in the House of Commons do the same – and I despise them. Heaven be thanked that the soldiers of the Great War cannot return today to discover how their sacrifice has been turned into a fashion appendage.

 

Are you claiming John Pilger is an anti-Semite? Or is he just guilty by association?

Do you have any quotes of John Pilger being an anti-semite?

 

So is Sarah Palin.

So much lazy thinking here.

 

Interesting. It's like reading something written by a totalitarian news agency. The personal attack - a key feature of totalitarian abuse - is repeated despite it's victim already having just demonstrated quite the opposite.

Israel is to me distinguished as a democracy because it's own people and law courts can and do challenge the bloody excesses of their government. When holding beliefs like this gets you classified as a racist, the real racists get a free pass. The Guardian has many Jewish writers and a self reflection that it may have allowed some subliminal anti semitism to leak through is a credit to it. Those extremists who can brook no criticism of their country are the real self haters and ultimately, though they see themselves as patriots, traitors to their country's cause.

There are enough real Jew baiters to go at. Deliberately slandering all critics of Israel as such, and then lying that they attack no other countries, is just letting the real racists off the hook. It is an act of collaboration with anti semitism itself, an agent provocateur's taunt, deliberately aimed to nourish hatred of Jews, in pursuit if narrow, extreme nationalist goals.

 

Lets not talk absolute crap, at

There is a difference....a BIG difference between..could be read as anti-Semitic. and anti-semitic..given that, in "let's take offence over bugger all" mode any bloody thing anybody says about anything could easily be twisted by the English interpreters extraordinaire, of the PC and pro-Zionist communities, to mean what they would like them to mean.

I do not see how global domination is not an accurate description.....given that for much of my lifetime it the US/Israel effect on the world political situation has been a regular topic of conversation.

And slavish describes rather well the fact that the US is always there to clean up when Israel sh1ts on its own nest..or all over another country.

So basically........it's same old, same old..the Goverment controlled toeing the Government line.

I haven't commented on the Mallorcan stuff, because I have never come across it and really can't be arsed looking...but if it was specific (which I don't get the impression it was) it was definitely out of order.

I do have to say that if the Grauniad is one of the most anti-Israel papers on the planet, then it has done extremely well in biting its tongue over the dozens of other Iraeli "mistakes" made in the nine months.

 

To be clear. I did not make those examples up. I simply put them from the OP into list form, sio that we could all see exactly what the assertations are.

When removed from the sensationalistic thread title and analysed, they just happen to look pathetic. Which is not my fault, but the OP's.

 

I bring you the truth, you can do with it what you will.

Such is the extent to which the Israeli lobby operate, that it is almost an 'electric fence' for media in the West to offend their lobby.

Doing so results in a campaign of formal complaints and pressure placed on editiors.

Robert Fisk of the Independent has been told that his mother was Adolf Eichmann's daughter, that he belongs in hell with Osama Bin Laden, that he is a 'hate peddler', a leading anti semite, and a proto-fascist Islamophile propagandist, and a paedophile. After broadcasting an ITV programme about the Palestinians, John Pilger was told he was a 'demonic psychopath', a Nazi, and that the murder of his family 'was not a bad idea'.

The result is that some facts become dangerous: to report Palestinian casualties, to depict the Palestinians as victims of Israeli occupation, to refer to the historic outing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes; to refer to the killing of Palestinian civilians by Zionist groups in the 40's.

The facts are there, but the electric fence will inflict pain on any reporter who selects them. Words themselves become too dangerous; to speak of 'occupied territories', to describe Palestinian bombers as anything but 'terrorists', to reject the Israeli Gov euphemism of 'targetted killings'.

Crucially, there is no lobby of similar force on the Palestinian side. The pro Israeli groups are able to claim countless victories.