Friends of Al-Aqsa and Israeli propaganda

Monday, 05 September 2011 18:00

 

A response to the deeply-misleading Meir Amit Report

It is the usual policy at Friends of Al-Aqsa (FOA) not to respond to blatant attempts to discredit our work by Israel's propaganda machine. Since 1997, many such attempts have been made, yet our organisation goes from strength to strength and our support base continues to grow. However, the Meir Amit Report on FOA is deeply and deliberately misleading and requires a response.

Since the inception of FOA almost 15 years ago, we have worked peacefully and tirelessly with individuals and organisations across the globe on highlighting the issue of Palestine, the Occupation and the threats posed to the sacred Al-Aqsa Sanctuary in Jerusalem. During this time we have witnessed innumerable human rights abuses, increasingly audacious attempts by Israel to "transfer" native Palestinians away from their homeland, and countless acts of aggression and escalating aggression labelled as "responses" to Palestinian threats.

Our data, literature and materials are all researched thoroughly and based on facts and statistics obtained by human rights organisations who work on the ground in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel itself. These include United Nations agencies and well-established and respected international human rights groups.

We also consult Israeli and Palestinian organisations for verification of the materials' accuracy where possible.
The staff and volunteers of Friends of Al-Aqsa are all British and based in Britain. Our views and narrative reflects this. We live in a real democracy and are able to decipher the difference between the equality afforded to, say, all British citizens, and Israel's brand of apartheid, which is a deliberate denial of equal rights to almost a quarter of its citizens based purely on ethnic and religious factors, and to the Palestinian population which it controls through its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel continues to flaunt itself as a democracy even though FOA's work, and the work of hundreds of organisations like us around the word, has revealed numerous Israeli policies which contradict fundamental democratic principles. As a result, Israel has escalated its propaganda war against Friends of Al-Aqsa, relying on its own distorted vision to push it forward. This is clear in the latest Meir Amit Report which seeks to highlight issues to do with religion and ethnic origin as a means of distinguishing FOA from other British organisations. Unfortunately, Meir Amit's internet-based research has failed to reveal the simple fact that FOA's membership spans a cross-section of British society. It seems we are not as concerned about racial and religious segregation as Meir Amit.

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre

The report by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre seeking to tarnish and discredit the work of FOA is an embarrassingly defective piece of work based; it would seem, wholly on internet research including our very own web-site.

Meir Amit is known unofficially as a branch of the Israeli Defence Forces; it peddles misinformation in a bid to make Israel's untenable political positions and military actions seem justifiable and therefore acceptable. It plays a big role in Israel's self-proclaimed drive against 'de-legitimisation', by attempting to discredit all those who take legitimate stands against Israel's Occupation and human rights abuses.

Thus, Meir Amit has produced an extremely poorly researched, deliberately misleading report on FOA.  It makes for embarrassing reading given that it has been produced by what is alleged to be one of the most sophisticated institutions supposedly monitoring terrorism. The report is inaccurate and deliberately obfuscatory, and attempts to place a sinister cloak over what is actually a very open organisation. Perhaps Meir Amit's "researchers" need to be reminded that Friends of Al-Aqsa is based in Britain, not Israel. We have laws which apply to everyone equally, and we abide by them.

All the information compiled by Meir Amit pertaining to FOA and our Chairman Ismail Patel is available widely on the internet. The only information apparently not available is Mr Patel's ethnicity, so Meir Amit seems to have decided to take a stab in the dark. Incidentally, he is not from Pakistan.

In order to confer the Report with credibility in the UK, Meir Amit has naively used the utterly vacuous blog "Harry's Place" as a source. Clearly, news of the many actions for defamation springing from that website hasn't filtered through. The sham articles on Harry's Place are regurgitated against anyone who dares to take up the mantle of the Palestinian cause. The spineless writers behind Harry's Place have no confidence in the veracity of their own output, so they cower behind pseudonyms in order to tarnish reputations without the need to substantiate their allegations.

Perhaps this is the new age of intelligence gathering which, rather like lazy journalism, can be accomplished by anyone with a laptop and access to the internet. We await eagerly Meir Amit's promise to provide further evidence of FOA's 'written material', but we rather suspect checking out www.aqsa.org.uk may provide all the information needed.

Friends of Al-Aqsa - The Facts

1. FOA Chairman Ismail Patel participated in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. He witnessed the murder of one Turkish peace activist who was shot right in front of him. His ordeal was detailed in a press conference and numerous interviews covered by dozens of TV Channels, radio stations and newspapers.

2. The website www.aqsa.org.uk attracts hundreds of visitors daily who are looking for news and updates on Palestine. It carries detailed information about our vision, aims and ethos.

3. FOA works with numerous organisations, including some run by Jews, Christians and people of no faith who share common goals. We all promote the boycott of Israeli goods as a means of opposing Israel's Occupation and human rights abuses. We organise demonstrations and pickets in London and elsewhere as a means of getting the voices of ordinary British people heard.

4. FOA has no need for 'fine-tuning its rhetoric for Western ears' and uses such terms as "peace in Palestine", "respect for international law", "respect for human rights", and "implementation of UN resolutions" as they are commonly understood in British society. These are clear mission statements. We are part of the fabric of our societies and communities and we live in the West. Clearly, this makes our 'ears' also 'Western'. We have no need to spin or 'fine-tune' propaganda the way Israel does.

5. FOA does not support any particular Palestinian political party. We believe that the Palestinian people have a right to choose their own leadership. FOA has met with several Palestinian political leaders, figures and peace activists from a cross-section of Palestinian society. It does not discriminate amongst them based on political leanings.

6. FOA supports the right of the Palestinian people to resist occupation strictly in accordance with international law. FOA strongly condemns all violence against civilians which have been perpetrated in the main by Israeli armed settlers and army personnel and to a lesser degree by armed Palestinian groups. The armed conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is unequal and the death toll on the Palestinian side bears testimony to this. Deaths of innocent civilians on both sides of this conflict are avoidable and this makes the losses even more tragic and damning.

7. FOA believes that Israel's policies against Palestinians who are Israeli citizens are discriminatory. Numerous policies including those relating to housing and schooling are racist in nature, providing Israel's Jewish citizens with far more rights than its Palestinian citizens (Christian and Muslim) although all are expected to pay the same taxes.

8. FOA believes that Israel's policies on the ground in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, including settlement building, land expropriation and the building of the Wall on occupied land, have made a two-state solution to the conflict unviable. However, the ultimate decision rests with the Palestinians.

About Meir Amit

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre is based in Tel Aviv and is headed by a former Israeli Army Colonel, Reuven Erlich. According to the Washington Post, Meir Amit maintains an office at the Israeli Defence Ministry, and has close and direct connections with the Israeli government and Israeli lobby; the centre acts as a conduit for Israeli government propaganda.

These facts reflect the defective and predictable narrative emanating from the Centre and anyone wishing to obtain accurate information about the work of Friends of Al-Aqsa should not hesitate to contact us or simply visit our website.

http://www.middleeastmonitor.org.uk/articles/europe/2789-friends-of-al-aqsa-and-israeli-propaganda

US main obstacle to peace in Palestine

September 6, 2011

Tue Sep 6, 2011 5:10AM GMT

Interview with Hussein Ibish, senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP)

 

Acting Palestinian Authority (PA) Chief Mahmoud Abbas is to address the United Nations in three weeks from now to finally deliver the highly anticipated request of admitting Palestine as a full UN member state.

The move has received mixed reviews from Palestinians. Some have welcomed it while others are casting doubt on its usefulness.

Press TV talks with Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, to further discuss the issue. Following is the text of the interview:

Press TV: Let’s begin with the veto from the US which seems to be the main obstacle for the Palestinian bid for statehood.

Ibish: It is the main obstacle to the Palestinian bid for full UN membership because the way the process works is a putative state applies for the Secretary General who refers that application to the Security Council. The Security Council has to recommend it to the General Assembly which then needs to adopt it by a two-third vote.

The US has made it clear that it would veto that, so the possibility for full UN membership for the Palestinian is out of the question at the moment. The alternative that people are discussing, or one of the many alternatives, is to bypass the Security Council all together and forgo full UN membership and not even force the question but go directly to the General Assembly and ask for a change of status, from having a Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) mission, which is a political entity observer to having Palestine being a non-member observer state.

In the past there have been 16 non-member observer states, all of which have become UN members eventually with the exception of the Vatican which doesn’t want to be a member and that is if you count unified Germany and unified Vietnam. So, that is a big appeal to the Palestinians.

There is a complication here though, because although there is no doubt that they can get a majority very easily for that in the General Assembly, the Israelis seem to have put together a group of about 28 or 30 major countries, most of the West and Japan which would probably vote “no” on that so that they could say, “Well, yes most of the Asia and Africa and Latin America have voted for this Palestinian observer non-member “state” but we have what they would present as a so-called civilized world in their camp and it would be a kind of weird victory for [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu. So, the Palestinians find themselves in a very awkward situation and then of course there is the question of Israeli and American retaliation so it is really a very complicated problem.

Press TV: So, let’s skip over the problem for a second. What would be the benefits of Palestine getting UN recognition as a state?

Ibish: I mean, they couldn’t get membership so we don’t need to be bothered with that [and] that would be the final stage in the creation of a Palestinian state; that would mean Palestine is an independent state forever but that is not going to happen this year.

The benefits to joining as a non-member observer state would be greater privileges and what they are hoping for among many things is that if they were a non-member observer state, they could try to exceed to the stature of Rome and join the assembly of parties of the ICC and then start bringing charges against Israel in the International Criminal Court and other such parties.

Now that is a bit of a long shot even if they got that membership because in their application during the Israeli war on Gaza a couple of years ago, the PA in Ramallah did apply to the stature of Rome, saying that we give you authorization to have jurisdiction over the territories under our control including Gaza meaning please prosecute the Israelis for what they are doing in Gaza, that is basically what it meant.

The ICC received that but they didn’t make a judgment because of two things. First, because of the undetermined nature of Palestinian state with which I don’t think would be resolved by observer state status and also because of the question of the territory which again would not be resolved.

So, I think the advantage would probably be largely symbolic although it would solidify the international consensus that a two state solution is absolutely the only thing the world will accept and they will not accept the occupation and that would be a benefit.

Press TV: [US President Barack] Obama talks of two states but then is clearly going to veto any vote towards that solution. How is that playing in America?

Ibish: This is really a very serious situation for the United States because they will end up as they did with the vote against the settlement activity in February voting against their own policies. In this case, it is pretty simple. They want to protect the American brokered process, the bilateral negotiations brokered by the United States.

They don’t want this process move into the multilateral forum of the United Nations where they would have less control. The problem is that in the end nobody else wants to be a broker. It is not just that the United States is hoarding the process; it is that there are any other candidates…

MN/MSK/HRF

Video report can be watched here

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/197653.html

Glenn Beck, fear and the Jewish community

By Joseph Dana

There is an old joke about two stocky Austrian men walking down a street in Vienna. One of the men turns to the other with an open newspaper and says, “Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-Semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!” Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek often uses this joke to demonstrate how potentially dangerous some Christian Zionist support for Israel can be for the Jewish community. Indeed, the sentiment expressed in Zizek’s joke was on display last Wednesday as American political pundit Glenn Beck began his ‘restoring courage’ spectacle in Jerusalem.

Glenn Beck is one of America’s most controversial political commentators due to his mix of radically conservative politics and fiery anti-left rhetoric. This year, Beck’s vicious attacks of Democrats like George Soros got him fired from Fox News, the conservative 24-hour news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch, but it did not impede his programme of stoking the flames of conservatism in the United States.

After Beck was fired from Fox News, he set his sights on cultivating a close relationship with the Israeli government. In July, the newly independent radio host addressed a special session of Israeli politicians in Jerusalem. Beck openly endorsed Israel’s controversial policies in the occupied Palestinian territories using deceptive language to describe Israeli courage in the face of overwhelming problems with the Arab world. For Beck, Israel at the centre of a clash of civilisations and a global battle between good and evil.

For some in the Israeli government, worried about the wave of revolution sweeping the Middle East and Palestinian attempts to declare statehood at the United Nations in September, Beck has become a fast friend. Like other Christian Zionist leaders in the United States, Beck employs language saturated in fear of the Arab world and his complete lack of obloquy for Israel’s clear violations of international law fit nicely with Israeli campaigns to stem international isolation.

While Israeli leaders embrace Beck, many Jews in the United States have openly criticised him for using anti-Semitic tropes. Jewish leaders such the conservative Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League and Rabbi Eric Yoffe, the president of the Union of Reform Judaism have cited Beck’s routine references to anti-Jewish writers such as Elizabeth Dilling as evidence that Beck might not be a friend to the Jews.

Standing under the golden dome of the rock next to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Beck delivered a sunset speech about restoring “courage” in the US. He praised Israeli leaders deeply connected to the settlement project inside the occupied West Bank for their charity to Palestinians but mostly focused on attacking international bodies such as the United Nations who, in Beck’s imagination, unfairly tarnish Israel’s image.

Praising Israeli courage in the face of adversity, Beck elevated Israel to a near mythic model of how Western countries should face the issues which define our age, most specifically, conflicts between East and West.
Just before his events in Israel, Beck labelled Israel’s tent protesters — a movement with 87% public support demanding a reallocation of economic resources inside Israeli society — as leftist socialists with possible links to global Islamic networks. The idiocy of his statements dried up much of Beck’s popular support inside Israel, a possible reason for the extremely low turnout to his events in Jerusalem and outside of Haifa, but did not stop the warm relationship between Beck and senior Israeli officials such as Likud Knesset Member and chair of the committee for immigration, absorption and diaspora affairs Danny Danon.

Towards the end of Beck’s sermon in Jerusalem he flatly rejected claims that Israel is practicing a form of Apartheid in the West Bank. “Next week, I am travelling to Cape Town to see what Apartheid really looked like,” Beck told a jubilant crowd of wealthy American Christian Zionists, “some say Israel is practicing Apartheid, and it is not!”

Compared with other diaspora communities, the Jews of South Africa have maintained extremely tight bonds with the State of Israel, formed in part because of a strict allegiance to Zionism formulated in Zionist youth movements’ which engender deep psychological bonds to the state and the idea of a Jewish national homeland. Unwavering support for Israel, no matter its policies, has been the majority trend among South African Jews, especially in the post-apartheid years. In comparison, the Jewish community of the United States — the largest and strongest in the world — has become more nuanced in its approach to Israel in the last 25 years.

Group 18, the pro-Israel advocacy outfit which hosted Beck in Cape Town, has dedicated enormous resources to defending an image of Israel which is light on factual analysis and heavy on an emotional pull, which describes an Israel under attack from international forces which seeks to isolate the small Mediterranean country through boycotts similar to the ones which helped to end apartheid in South Africa. While Group 18 is certainly the fringe of pro-Israel advocacy in South Africa, part of its success is the exploitation of fear and insecurity inside the Jewish community.

Efforts to protect Israel from international isolation over its treatment of Palestinians, similar to the isolation which South Africa experienced during apartheid, have pushed some of the most vocal pro-Israel supporters into the hands of people with narrow and dangerous political goals. As the international community wakes up to Israeli intransigence regarding international law and the occupation, Israel’s remaining friends might turn out to be anti-Semites.

Joseph Dana is a journalist based in Tel Aviv. He is a senior writer at the Israeli web magazine+972.com.

http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/readerblog/2011/09/02/glenn-beck-fear-and-the-jewish-community/

Turki putuskan kerja sama pertahanan dengan Israel

Terbaru  6 September 2011 - 23:52 WIB

Sembilan aktifis Turki tewas akibat serangan Israel terhadap kapal bantuan ke Gaza

Perdana Menteri Turki Recep Tayyip Erdogan mengatakan negaranya menghentikan semua hubungan pertahanan dengan Israel.

Langkah itu dilakukan menyusul pengusiran duta besar Israel karena menolak meminta maaf atas penyerangan kapal aktivis yang menuju Gaza.

Penyerangan itu menyebabkan sembilan aktivis Turki tewas.

Laporan PBB menyimpulkan bahwa Israel menggunakan "kekuatan berlebihan" dalam serangan itu namun blokade angkatan laut itu legal.

Turki berjanji untuk membawa kasus itu ke Mahakamah Internasional (ICJ) yang bermarkas di Den Hag, Belanda.

ICG adalah mahkamah PBB yang didirikan untuk menangani masalah antarnegara.
Para pakar mengatakan Turki tampaknya tidak akan mungkin menggiring Israel ke ICJ karena berdasarkan peraturan mahkamah, Israel perlu memberikan persetujuan agar kasus itu diangkat.

Erdogan mengatakan Turki "memutus total" hubungan pertahanan dengan Israel, setelah menurunkan tingkat hubungan diplomatik dengan negara itu.

"Hubungan dagang, militer, menyangkut industri pertahanan, kami hentikan," katanya kepada wartawan di Ankara.

Kerja sama perusahaan

Turki mengusir duta besar Israel tanggal 2 September lalu dan juga menghentikan hubungan militer dengan Israel minggu lalu.

Israel menyatakan penyesalan atas meninggalnya aktivis Turki dalam penyerangan kapal bantuan itu.
Namun Erdogan menggambarkan serangan itu sebagai keji dan menuduh Israel bertindak sebagai "anak manja" di kawasan.

Kedua negara memiliki hubungan militer dalam 20 tahun terakhir, namun menurun dalam tahun-tahun terakhir, kata wartawan BBC di Turki, Jonathan Head.

Namun sebagian besar kesepakatan dengan perusahaan-perusahaan Israel, seperti peningkatan jet dan tank Turki, telah selesai.

Sepuluh pesanan terakhir pesawat pengintai telah dikirimkan dan Turki tidak memiliki rencana untuk membeli lagi.

Namun negara itu kemungkinan masih memerlukan bantuan teknis Israel untuk mengoperasikan pesawat tanpa awak yang penting dalam perang melawan pemberontak Kurdi.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/indonesia/dunia/2011/09/110906_turkeyisrael.shtml

Foreign ministry: Palmer report not objective

[ 03/09/2011 - 08:07 AM ]

GAZA, (PIC)-- The Palestinian foreign ministry in Gaza has criticized the Palmer report on the Israeli attack on the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla, expressing surprise at its finding regarding the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip. It charged that the report lacked “objectivity and professionalism”, which made it default on the siege and its “destructive consequences”, adding that the siege is one of the results of occupation. The report justified Israel’s “oppressive and illegal siege”, which most countries of the world deemed unacceptable and should be lifted, the ministry said, and expressed absolute rejection of such justifications that only allowed Israel to continue its blockade and aggression against the Gaza Strip. The ministry asked the UN to revise its position regarding the siege on Gaza since it owns specific reports on the degree of oppression and suffering that befell the Strip as a result of the siege. http://www.palestine-info.co.uk