Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press.

by Robert Fisk
The Independent, London
21 October 2002
Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press. For
where else will you find the sort of courageous
condemnation of Israel's cruel and brutal treatment of
the Palestinians? Where else can we read that Moshe
Ya'alon, Ariel Sharon's new chief of staff, described
the "Palestinian threat" as "like a cancer -- there are
all sorts of solutions to cancerous manifestations.
For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy."
Where else can we read that the Israeli Herut Party
chairman, Michael Kleiner, said that "for every victim
of ours there must be 1,000 dead Palestinians". Where
else can we read that Eitan Ben Eliahu, the former
Israeli Air Force commander, said that "eventually we
will have to thin out the number of Palestinians
living in the territories". Where else can we read
that the new head of Mossad, General Meir Dagan -- a
close personal friend of Mr Sharon -- believes in
"liquidation units", that other Mossad men regard him
as a threat because "if Dagan brings his morality to
the Mossad, Israel could become a country in which no
normal Jew would want to live".
You will have to read all this in Ma'ariv, Ha'aretz or
Yediot Ahronot because in much of the Western world, a
vicious campaign of slander is being waged against any
journalist or activist who dares to criticise Israeli
policies or those that shape them. The all-purpose
slander of "anti-Semitism" is now used with
ever-increasing promiscuity against anyone -- people
who condemn the wickedness of Palestinian suicide
bombings every bit as much as they do the cruelty of
Israel's repeated killing of children -- in an attempt
to shut them up.
Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer of the Middle East
Forum now run a website in the United States to
denounce academics who are deemed to have shown
"hatred of Israel". One of the eight professors
already on this contemptible McCarthyite list -- it is
grotesquely called "Campus Watch" -- committed the
unpardonable sin of signing a petition in support of
the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. Pipes wants
students to inform on professors who are guilty of
"campus anti-Semitism".
The University of North Carolina is being targeted --
apparently because freshmen were required to read
passages from the Koran -- along with Harvard where,
like students in many other US universities,
undergraduates are demanding that their colleges
disinvest in companies that sell weapons to Israel. In
some cases, American universities -- which happily
disinvested in tobacco companies -- have now taken the
step of blocking all student access to their records
of investment.
Lawrence Summers, the Jewish president of Harvard, has
denounced "profoundly anti-Israel views" in
"progressive intellectual communities", that are -- I
enjoyed this academic sleight of hand -- "advocating
and taking actions that are anti-semitic in their
effect if not their intent". Mr Said himself has
already described all this as a campaign "to ask
students and faculty to inform against pro-Palestinian
colleagues, intimidating the right of free speech and
seriously curtailing academic freedom".
Ted Honderich, a Canadian-born philosopher who teaches
at University College London, tells me that Oxfam has
refused to accept £5,000 plus other royalties from his
new book After the Terror following a campaign against
him in the Toronto-based Globe and Mail. Now I happen
to take issue with some of Professor Honderich's
conclusions and I think his book -- praised by the
American-Jewish scholar Noam Chomsky -- meanders. I
especially don't like his assertion that Palestinians,
in trying to free themselves from occupation, have a
"moral right to terrorism". Blowing up children in
pizzerias -- and Professor Honderich's book is not an
endorsement of such atrocities -- is a crime against
humanity. There is no moral right to do this. But what
in God's name is Oxfam doing refusing Professor
Honderich's money for its humanitarian work? Who was
behind this?
Our own John Pilger made a programme for Carlton
Television called Palestine Is Still The Issue. I have
watched it three times. It is accurate in every
historical detail; indeed its historical adviser was a
left-wing Israeli academic. But Carlton's own
chairman, Michael Green -- in one of the most gutless
statements in recent British journalism -- announced
that it was "a tragedy for Israel so far as accuracy
is concerned". Why Mr Green should want to utter such
trash is beyond me. But what does he mean by
"tragedy"? Is he comparing Pilger to a suicide bomber?
And so it goes on. It is left, of course, to the likes
of Uri Avneri in Israel to state that "the Sharon
government is a giant laboratory for the growing of
the anti-Semitism virus". He rightly says that by
smearing those who detest the persecution of the
Palestinians as anti-Semites, "the sting is taken out
of this word, giving it something approaching
respectability". But we can take comfort that 28 brave
academics have signed a petition condemning President
George Bush's build-up to war and Israel's support for
it and warning that the Israeli government may be
contemplating crimes against humanity on the
Palestinians, including ethnic cleansing.
Have Mr Pipes and his chums put the names of these
good men and women on their hate list? You bet they
haven't. Because all of them are Israeli scholars at
Israeli universities. I wonder why we weren't told
about this.

 normal Jew would want to live".
Parrebbe persino ovvio. "Liquidation unit" suona molto
"Sondereinsatzkommando".
Mi chiedo come facciano a non rendersene conto.
--
ArAmesh
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