Anti-Semitism and censorship

Thinking critically about Israel

In 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on writer Salman Rushdie for his book the Satanic Verses. British TV news showed people in Iran burning the US flag and denouncing the US as the 'Great Satan.' Since then the actions of the US have done much to reinforce that image. The reader will understand that as a comment on US foreign policy and not on the character of millions of individual American nationals, many of whom are skeptical of the actions of their government and welcome visitors with what seems to be the increasingly old fashioned hospitality of good manners and warm customer service.

Similarly, if one was to speak about paedophilia in the Catholic Church readers would acknowledge that though there have been numerous instances of such wrongdoing within the organisation this has no bearing on the conduct of the millions of Catholics who practice the religion quite literally in good faith. Again there is no requirement to make a disclaimer.

When investigating the perpetrators of 9/11 we can openly discuss, without being accused of racism or prejudice, the military stand down orders issued by Dick Cheney, the war games on the day that confused the air force response, the foreknowledge demonstrated by the BBC and other media outlets, the Saudi connection, the Bin Laden family flying in the aftermath of the attack when all other flights were grounded, and the anthrax attacks that could only have originated from a US laboratory. Yet if, for example, one had the inclination to inquire as to George Soros' motives in funding the now discredited Black Lives Matter organisation, one might find oneself accused of anti-semitism.

When we consider the lies we were told about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, 9/11, Kuwaiti babies being killed in incubators, the Gulf of Tonkin, Pearl Habor, the sinking of the Lusitania or of the USS Maine, there is no fear of being accused of being racist against the American or British people. It is accepted that the suspicion is directed at the wrongdoing of individuals within the government.

With that in mind we might consider similar events in the history of Israel. In 1946 Menachem Begin (who was later to be the sixth Prime Minister of Israel) led the Zionist paramilitary group the Irgun in an attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which served as the British administrative headquarters. Operatives disguised as Arabs planted bombs which killed 91 and injured 46 Arabs, Britons, and Jews. The bombing served the purpose of driving the British out of Palestine and is considered by some to be the start of modern terrorism in the area.

In 1954 Israel conducted a false flag operation known as the Lavon affair. Egyptian Jews were recruited to carry out attacks on Egyptian, US, and British, civilian targets in Egypt, that were to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood. The motive was to encourage the British to maintain a presence in the area around the Suez Canal as a bulwark against any Egyptian expansionist ambitions that threatened Israeli interests.

In 1967 Israel directly attacked the US when it torpedoed the USS Liberty in international waters and repeatedly strafed the vessel with aircraft fire. The Liberty was subjected to a 75 minute bombardment that left 34 sailors dead and 172 wounded. Despite the Israeli pilots identifying the ship as American, Israel later claimed it was a case of mistaken identity.

On the morning of 9/11 a group of men were seen in a parking lot in Liberty State park in New Jersey celebrating and photographing the attacks. They were arrested by the FBI and “when their 76 pictures were developed, they revealed the men had indeed been celebrating; smiling, hugging each other, and high-fiving.” One of them, Oded Ollner, later told Inside Israel that the men's purpose was to 'document the event,' and that they had arrived just after 8am. This time tallied with eyewitness reports, and was before the attacks had begun. The men were Mossad agents.

Elsewhere on 9/11 the former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak appeared on BBC television within minutes of the attacks to implicate Bin Laden and to announce the commencement of what was to become known as the 'war on terror.' “The world will not be the same from today,” Barak said.

“This is the time to deploy a globally concerted effort led by the United States, the UK, Europe, and Russia, against all sources of terror.” He went on to accurately predict the consequences of this effort.

“We will suffer. It will not so be so easy to go aboard an airplane in the near future ...very simple steps, crossing borders or going on a plane or on a ship will become more complicated.”

Also on 9/11 Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that “Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen.” In some quarters this has been conflated with a report from the Jerusalem Post Internet Staff of September 12, 2001 that “The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attack.”
This led to the erroneous view that all 4,000 Jews received the warning and that no Jews died in the attacks.

Yet apparently there were warnings made.

Relating such information runs the risk of being accused of anti-semitism in a way that does not accompany the following reports.

Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen recalled, “I received a message 5-10 minutes before it physically happened saying there was impending danger the tower would collapse. So I knew disaster was coming and this was confirmed the second I walked in, I believe.”

New York mayor Giuliani admitted receiving a similar warning -which was not passed on to the firefighters in the towers.
“we set up headquarters at 75 Barkley Street, which was right there with the Police Commissioner, the Fire Commissioner, the head of Emergency Management and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse.

And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building. So we were trapped in the building for 10-15 minutes and finally found an exit, got out, walked North and took a lot of people with us."

After she was elected to represent her community in Georgia, US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney expressed her surprise that every candidate for the US Congress had to sign a pledge to support Israel. "Every candidate for Congress at that time had a pledge. They were given a pledge to sign ... that had Jerusalem as the capital city, the military superiority of Israel" McKinney said in an interview with Press TV on May 22, 2011. “If you don't sign the pledge you don't get money... of course you have to have money in order to run a campaign. Two weeks, three weeks into the planning they would say did you sign the pledge and then I would say 'no I didn't sign the pledge' and then my fundraiser would go kaput.”

McKinney said that after she made the pledge issue public "the tactic changed." "But this is what is done for 535 members of the United States Congress, 100 senators, 435 members of the House of Representatives (who) have to now write a paragraph which basically says the same thing."

“If you don't perform appropriately then you do not get money to run your campaign."

Perhaps not coincidentally McKinney was one of few US politicians who publicly questioned the 9/11 attack, and called for a full and unlimited investigation. She was vilified for doing so.

It is in the context of this history that we can view contemporary events. Efrat Fenigson, an Israeli journalist who served in the Israel Defense Forces for 25 years observes of the events of October 7th 2023,

“Israel has one of the most advanced and high-tech armies. How come there was zero response to the border and fence breaches? I cannot understand that. There is no way, in my view, that Israel did not know what [was] coming. A cat moving alongside the fence is triggering all forces. So this? What happened to the “strongest army in the world”? How come border crossings were wide open? Something is very wrong here. Something is very strange. This chain of events is very unusual and not typical for the Israeli defence system. So, to me, this “surprise attack” seems like a planned operation on all fronts.’

As Simon Elmer elucidates,“Perhaps the strongest support for these speculations is that the Israel Government has refused to explain why the Israel Defense Forces, with 173,000 active personnel, 193 fighter jets, 38 attack helicopters and 1,760 tanks on standby, and with numerous advance warnings of an attack, took 8 hours to arrive at the Re’im music festival that reportedly had been moved to a location 4 kilometres from the Gaza barrier two days before; a further 30 minutes to reach the Nir Oz kibbutz, just 2 kilometres from the barrier; more than 13 hours to reach the Be’eri kibbutz, about 4 kilometres away; and 20 hours to reach the Kfar Aza kibbutz, also 2 kilometres from the barrier. None of these locations are more than 35 kilometres from the military bases of the IDF’s Southern Command and its two infantry and two armoured divisions stationed in and around the city of Be’er Sheva; and yet it took almost 3 days for the Israel Defence Forces to reach the Gaza Strip barrier.”

It is now accepted that on October 7th “large numbers of Israeli casualties resulted from a massive military operation carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF),” and that none of the horrific stories of babies being beheaded “have been verified by any Israeli or international source – probably because they never happened.”

Media figures who purported to be in favour of freedom of movement and bodily autonomy when opposing the lockdowns have unquestioningly supported Israel's bombardment and restriction of innocent people in Gaza. Some of these commentators failed to ‘stand with the Jewish people’ when the Israeli state coerced them into receiving dangerous injections in violation of the Nuremberg code. It's interesting to compare the media attention given to Jewish people claiming to feel unsafe in Britain with the lack of concern for people in Britain who have been demonstrably unsafe, like the girls and women who faced grooming and rape gangs, those living near unvetted migrants, or the unvaccinated who the media encouraged their audience to hate.

Indeed, the villification of Palestinians is comparable to the recent dehumanising of the unvaccinated and similarly passes largely without media censure. The rationing of electricity, food, and water, and the checkpoint controls imposed on Gaza seem to herald the creeping imposition of Net Zero restrictions. Israeli police have been used to train British and US forces. Where it is possible to view Gaza as a prototype for tyrannical totalitarian control, commentators see a war. The fact that Gaza has no military and is inhabited by an impoverished population half of whom are children seems to escape notice. The contrast with Israel, one of the most technological advanced and powerful militaries on earth could not be more stark. At 365 km² Gaza compares in size with the English cities of Birmingham at 267.8 km² and Greater Manchester at 1,276 km².

Yet criticism of Israeli government policy is widely denounced as anti-semitism. In 2002 former Israeli Minister Shulamit Aloni was asked why this might be.

“ Often when there is dissent expressed in the United States against policies of the Israeli government people here are called anti-semitic. What is your response to that as an Israeli Jew?”

She replied,

“Well it's a trick. We always use it. When from Europe somebody's criticizing Israel then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country people are criticizing Israel then they are anti-semitic, and the organization is strong and has a lot of money and the ties between Israel and the American Jewish establishment are very strong and they're strong in this country. As you know they have power which is okay, they are talented people and they have power, money and media and other things…and their attitude is ‘Israel my country right or wrong’ -the identification- and they are not ready to hear criticism. And it's very easy to blame people who criticize certain acts of the Israeli government as anti-semitics and to bring up the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people -and that's to justify everything we do to the Palestinians.”

The former motto of the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, was “by way of deception thou shalt make war.” If the truth does not fear inquiry, what are we to make of narratives that are supported by a barrage of media propaganda, or that are taboo or even illegal to question? This hardly inspires confidence. Perhaps history is indeed a lie agreed upon, written by the powerful and victorious.

The naming of the modern state of Israel after the Biblical people encourages sympathy even for its most immoral policies from Jews and Christians alike (-and even when those policies are opposed by Jews). This is as egregious a misplaced loyalty as the patriotism and indignant fervour used by the duplicitous governments of the US and UK to justify their imperial invasions of some of the poorest nations on earth in the aftermath of 9/11. In Europe it encourages division between the traditionally christian indigenous people and the rapidly expanding muslim population. In the case of Israel it is being used as a smokescreen to justify the genocide of Palestinians.

Israel has invoked the ‘right to defend itself’ as its justification for the collective punishment of the defenceless and trapped population of Gaza. There is another parallel in the response to the October 7th attacks with the reaction to the similarly questionable ‘covid outbreak,’ of 2020. In both cases, even if the initial threats were as presented, the risks posed to the majority remained minimal but have been used to further the notion that individual rights evaporate where the perceived safety of those advocating government narratives begins.