An Arab View

by Khaled Abu Toameh
November 19, 2012

This hostility is the direct result of years of anti-Israel and anti-Western incitement in the Arab and Muslim world -- not only toward Israel but also toward the United States. In today's world of the Palestinians, anyone who talks about peace with Israel is a traitor and a collaborator; but anyone who calls for the destruction of Israel and fires rockets at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is a hero.

There is nothing more nauseating than watching people celebrate as rockets are being fired toward Israel from the Gaza Strip.

This is what happened last week when Hamas fired rockets at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

As soon as the sirens went off, many Palestinians took to the streets and rooftops, especially in Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods, to cheer Hamas. Sometimes they responded to the Hamas rockets by launching fireworks into the air as a sign of joy, and chanting, "We are all Hamas!" and, "O Jews, the army of Mohammed is coming after you!"

Scenes of jubilation over the rocket attacks on Israel were also reported in several Palestinian cities in the West Bank, including Ramallah, the center of Palestinian "pragmatism and moderation."

Later, upon learning that Hamas's rockets had failed to kill Israelis in the two cities, the Palestinians voiced disappointment.

Never mind that the rockets could have fallen on their heads. As far as these Palestinians are concerned, there is no problem if a number of Arabs are killed on the way to destroying Israel.

The celebrations reflect the strong hostility that many Palestinians continue to feel toward Israel despite 20 years of a peace process, and billions of dollars of Western aid. This hostility is the direct result of years of anti-Israel and anti-Western incitement in the Arab and Islamic world.

The hostility is directed not only toward Israel, but also its friends -- above all, the United States.

Similar outbursts of joy had erupted in many parts of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem immediately after Palestinians heard of the 9/11 terror attacks in the US.

And this was not the first time that Palestinians had expressed joy over the targeting of Israeli cities.

During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Palestinians and some Arab citizens of Israel took to rooftops to cheer Hizbullah's rocket attacks on northern cities in Israel.

During the second intifada, many Palestinians, particularly in the Gaza Strip, used to take to the streets to sing and dance and hand out candies after hearing about another suicide bombing inside Israel.

And when Saddam Hussein fired rockets at Israel in the early 1990's, Palestinians also took to the streets and rooftops, chanting, "O beloved Saddam, strike strike at Tel Aviv!"

Last week, by the way, many Palestinians in Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron were chanting: "O beloved Qassam [Hamas's armed wing], destroy, destroy Tel Aviv!" and "The people want the destruction of Israel!"

No one is expecting the Palestinians to express solidarity or sympathy with Israel in its confrontation with Hamas.

But when many Palestinians express their joy in public over the firing of rockets and missiles at Israeli cities, one is entitled to wonder whether there is a majority of Palestinians who would ever agree to any form of compromise with Israel.

In today's world of the Palestinians, anyone who talks about peace with Israel is a traitor and a collaborator; but anyone who calls for the destruction of Israel and fires rockets at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is a hero.

Anti-Israeli networks and activists to initiate propaganda events to challenge Israel.

Anti-Israeli networks and activists to initiate propaganda events to challenge Israel.
From the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/html/ipc_e241.htm

They are planning, among other events, an Islamic gathering near the Israeli-Jordanian border, dispatching more boats to the Gaza Strip, and a protest "fly-in" to Ben-Gurion International Airport.

Overview
1. Regardless of the last flotilla's failure to reach the Gaza Strip, anti-Israeli organizations and activists intend to continue challenging Israel with "awareness-raising" events, including flotillas, convoys and fly-ins. In some instances, the behind-the-scenes presence of international networks promoting the de legitimization of Israel can be felt, while in other instances local activists organize on their own to conduct ad hoc events. There is nothing new in the tactics they plan to use, however, in some of the events the organizers are planning to apply the lessons they learned from previous failures.

2. The following is an initial report of the main events planned for the near future:
1) An Islamic display called the "Million Man Worldwide Caravan" to be held near the Israeli-Jordanian border is planned for November 25, 2011: The participants will gather in the Jordanian valley north of the Dead Sea. They are liable to try to march to the Israeli border, even though in such a case they may be halted by the Jordanian security forces. Their main stated goal is to emphasize the Islamic nature of Jerusalem. In addition, towards the end of November, close to the 29th (the day the UN voted in favor of the Partition Plan), there may be rallies, demonstrations and other events in various locations in the Middle East and around the globe.
2) Sending isolated vessels to the Gaza Strip (no specific date known as yet): Applying the lessons learned from the failure of the July 2011 flotilla to reach the Gaza Strip, the flotilla organizers have announced that they plan to use a new strategy of sending isolated vessels from various ports instead of large flotillas with extensive media coverage, like the two vessels which set sail on November 2 and approached the Gaza Strip on November 4. Their objective is to exhaust Israel and exert continuous media and operative pressure. In addition, convoys routinely enter the Gaza Strip through the Rafah crossing after coordinating with the Egyptian authorities.
3) In April 2012 protest fly-in of pro-Palestinian activists is scheduled to arrive at Ben-Gurion Airport, who will proceed to the Palestinian Authority territories: The objective of the fly-in, according to its website, is to "again challenge the Israeli policy of isolating the West Bank." The activists will reenact their (unsuccessful) July 2011 arrival by air. It can be assumed that this time the organizers will attempt to bring a larger number of activists and will apply the lessons learned from the previous fly-in in an attempt to overcome the preventive steps taken by Israel, other countries and international airlines.
4) Plans made by various anti-Israeli networks around the globe whose objective is to breach the borders of the State of Israel in March 2012 to reach Jerusalem: Anti-Israeli activists plan to arrive in the Arab states bordering on Israel in convoys from countries in Asia, North Africa and Europe. Such events can take place only if the governments of the relevant Arab countries agree, which at this stage is not entirely certain.

3. Some of the events involve networks and activists familiar from their participation in previous anti-Israeli events. In general, in planning the events they are torn between their desire for broad media coverage to recruit as many activists as possible for impact, and the need for secrecy and keeping a low profile (as manifested by the last flotilla) to make it difficult for Israel to deploy and prevent them.

4. The fact that Israel prevented the last flotilla from reaching the Gaza Strip and the number of flotilla failures during 2011 notwithstanding,1 the organizers do not intend to resign themselves to failure and are planning to continue their efforts to challenge Israel in various ways, including flotillas, convoys and fly-ins. As in the past, there may be a discrepancy between the intentions of organizers and their realization. Their main weak points are raising money (especially for purchasing ships), the international acceptance of Israel's closure of the Gaza Strip as legal (The Palmer Report), international reservations concerning the flotillas, the objections of the Arab states to potentially violent activities along their borders and Israel's early deployment. However, in our assessment, the networks and activists are implementing the lessons learned from previous failures and are looking for ways to overcome the weak points.
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1 For further information see the September 14, 2011 bulletin "Analysis of four propaganda displays in May – July 2011: background, analysis and conclusions" at http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/pdf/ipc_e223.pdf
2 For further information see the November 4, 2011 bulletin "Another Flotilla to the Gaza Strip" at http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/pdf/ipc_e238.pdf.
4 For further information see the August 3, 2011 bulletin "Senior [figure]s in Interpal, a British fund that supports Hamas, play a major role in sending aid convoys to Gaza. South African organizations belonging to the Union of Good are also involved. It is our assessment that convoys portrayed as a humanitarian project are also a means of transferring money to Hamas" at http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/pdf/hamas_e148.pdf.

Syria's True Objectives - Not in your papers!!

Why have the media ignored the following report by RPS (The Syrian Reform Party)?
Whether or not the opinion makers agree with RPS, its existence and activities are highly relevant to understanding the news.

RPS reports that the Assad regime has paid hundreds of farmers $1,000 each to show-up in the attempts to breach the Israel border and $10,000 to their families should any of them succumb to Israeli fire.

RPS states that it "strongly believes in ownership and title of the Golan Heights. But unlike a regime bred on the use of violence, the Syrian people, demonstrating how peaceful they are as they endure one massacre after another, believe in peaceful negotiations to repatriate our land"

Who and what is RPS? Their mission statement includes inter alia the following worthy objectives

a) to build a true democracy in a New Syria where multiple parties are represented and elections are held free from fear, intimidation, and repressive measures.

b) to help pass laws to prohibit the establishments, in a New Syria, of any political parties whose charter calls for violence against other countries or people and to disassociate itself from any other group whose aim, through violence or otherwise, is to impose their ideologies unto others.

c) moderate, in the “New Syria”, our armed forces to protect rather than threaten and to educate our internal police force to safeguard human rights and to respect human dignity.

to vacate from Lebanon and repair the damage done from years of occupation by supporting and helping all Lebanese willing to espouse transparency and accountability and to do so in an environment free from pressure.

Help Us to Help You

By HASAN AFZAL 04/27/2011

It’s time for a hasbara rethink, says the director of British Muslims for Israel.


In Europe, hasbara is nothing more than a theory that friends of Israel allude to at interfaith events, and the occasional objection to a boycott motion through the student union. Yet among the countless threats with which the Jewish state must deal, it is indisputable that one of them is perpetual delegitimization, to the point where the state’s very existence is now up for debate.

It is not easy to fight this phenomenon when grassroots hasbara in the UK is almost solely a Jewish endeavor. If a non-Jewish student on campus wishes to campaign against Hezbollah, oppose a university’s attempt to twin with a Hamas-controlled university or run an event with a pro-Israeli speaker, who does he turn to? He certainly can’t go to the “human rights” societies that work with Islamist speakers. Nor can he turn to the somewhat exclusive Jewish society which is entrusted as the sole steward of hasbara on campus.

The pro-Palestinian movements are successful because they are diverse. Islamists, socialists and middle-class white women all wave the Hamas flag quite happily at anti- Israel protests .It is imperative that those of us who are Christian, Muslim or Hindu be given a chance to help.

Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. It guarantees minority rights and political pluralism, holds its politicians to account both in and out of office, and is the only country in the Middle East that provides equality under the law for homosexuals and women. Despite these trophies of liberty, the state is relentlessly demonized by the Western world using the language of human rights.

Sadly, too few people in the United Kingdom are aware of the facts. When well-meaning Europeans are informed of the realities in Israel and the neighboring states, their reaction is often complimentary. With the right kind of advocacy, those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian can be persuaded to rethink their position.

“The only democracy? The only place with legal equality for homosexuals and women?” they query. With the right sort of advocacy from the right sort of person, self-styled Palestinian activists can be encouraged to confront the increasingly extreme “student leaders” and radical Islamists that manage and exploit the Palestinian solidarity movements. Those who become aware that they have been ill-informed are, of course, left wanting answers.

Recently, I was invited to give an interview to Israel’s Channel 10, and I highlighted this exact point. When one moves Israeli advocacy from a reactionary approach to proactively focusing on the human rights situation in the Middle East, it immediately invites people to reconsider their position. Islamists can no longer shroud themselves in the sanitizing perspective that Israel is an “oppressor” - an excuse that legitimizes the Islamists’ real agenda. Rightfully reclaiming the human rights agenda is the type of hasbara we assume is happening, but shockingly, in reality it is rarely practiced in Europe.

No rational observer doubts that Israel has an excellent army, but now the Jewish state must beef up its public diplomacy to defend its image. Israel must hold those to account who, in the Western media, academia and political sphere, attempt to rationalize the terror attacks perpetrated by Hamas by calling them “strikes” – painting them as somehow morally acceptable. We must challenge those who consistently demonize Israel, and expose their visceral hatred and double standards.

Urgent action is required. People in Europe are no longer thinking about how a two-state solution may be implemented, but have begun asking nonsense questions such as, “Should Israel exist?” The faculty and student societies in universities regularly invite speakers who offer a one-sided, anti-Israel point of view. Islamist groups frequently parade openly anti-Semitic speakers, who enjoy the very freedom of expression they seek to destroy. Hasbara cannot be merely reactive – a manifestly failed method still employed by a large majority of British Jewish leadership. It must be proactive. It is all very well to splutter that boycotts are bad, but what use is that when there is no one to say Israel is good?

Wherever Hamas apologists lurk in the media, a carefully chosen story with selective quotes and violent pictures will do their cause wonders. In other words, the other side realizes that though it can never defeat Israel militarily, if it can define the conflict, rewrite its history and put up a convincing story, then although Israel may have won the military battle, it will lose the real war – the war of ideas.

Even more scandalous is the state of affairs in the Palestinian territories. Palestinian nationhood is increasingly being defined by extreme violence and a culture of victimization. Gaza is now a breeding ground for Islamists willing to kill their own people as Gaza descends into a culture of wanton violence far more terrifying than under the Arab nationalism of the PLO. We should be asking the world, how can you stand by and allow the Palestinian people to be represented like this? We must ask how the world, in all seriousness, can attack the way Israel defends its peoples and their democratic values against the tyranny of Islamism, especially while Islamists perpetually and overtly demonstrate that when their ideology is left to reach its logical conclusion, the effects are always violent and fatal.

Israel must empower and equip its friends in Europe to rightfully reclaim the human rights agenda from the anti-Israel mobs.It must ensure that hasbara activists can make the case that Israel is under attack from an enemy that wishes to replace our civilization with a society run by clerical fascists. The conflict is not solely taking place in the Middle East, but in Western television studios, radio stations, blogs and social media. As religious and community institutions, whether intentionally or not, finance the murderous ideals of Palestinian terror groups, we need your support – help us help you.

The writer is director of British Muslims for Israel, a pro-Israeli advocacy group fighting the delegitimization of Israel in the British Muslim community and beyond. British Muslims for Israel is under the umbrella of The Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy.

*Anti-Israel Bias Infects Medical Journals*

*Anti-Israel Bias Infects Medical Journals* Barbara Kay, February 4, 2010

As all doctors know, untreated gangrene in a single limb can spread quickly through the body and lead to death. The most effective way to halt the progress of gangrene is to cut off the corrupting limb, a necessary sacrifice for the greater good.

As with bodies, so with scientific credibility.

As Phyllis Chesler informed us [1] in these pages on January 24, Lancet, once an impeccable source for authoritative medical research, has in recent years become more and more “Palestinianized.” In the just-published article she cites, “Association between exposure to political violence and intimate-partner violence in the occupied Palestinian territory: a cross-sectional study,” Palestinian husbands were found to be more violent towards their wives as a function of the Israeli “occupation” — “and … the violence increases significantly when the husbands are ‘directly’ as opposed to ‘indirectly’ exposed to political violence.”
Very clever. Being a Palestinian means you get to beat your wife without having to say you’re sorry, because, hey, it’s too bad about all those bruises, but the Israelis made me do it! That the statistics were gathered and the study was funded by the Palestinian Authority should have been a clue to its lack of objectivity. This is propaganda, not research.

It isn’t only Lancet, though. Editorial views in the prestigious British Medical Journal [2] and the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians [3] (recently renamed Clinical Medicine) have revealed a similar pattern of anti-Israel bias.

In the February 2009 issue of Commentary [4] (requires a login), an official organ of the Royal College of Physicians of London, for example, an inflammatory “special” article erroneously claims, amongst other falsehoods, that Palestinian physicians were prevented from traveling abroad for training and conferences. This was especially galling to Israeli medical professionals because, as Hebrew University Professor Oded Abramsky wrote in an open letter to the Royal College of Physicians [5]: “The level of cooperation between Israeli and Gazan hospitals and medical personnel and the cross-border treatment of the ill and wounded is without question greater than between any two other entities in the world who are nominally (and sometimes actively) at war. Therefore, please keep medicine and politics separate, for the good of all, as we try to do in Israel.” An apology by the journal was later (grudgingly) issued.

To prove that bias amongst British medical research elites is systemic rather than random, a group of Israeli medical academics, led by Prof. Yehuda Shoenfeld, editor-in-chief of the Israeli Medical Association Journal [6], assessed coverage of conflict-related deaths around the world.

Their study [7] analyzed citations in the British Medical Journal, a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Medical Association, finding that: for Europeans killing Europeans (Bosnia), there was one citation for every 2,000 deaths; for Africans killing Africans (Rwanda), one citation for every 4,000 deaths; for Arabs killing black Africans (Darfur), one citation for every 7,000 deaths; for Arab Muslims killing Kurds, no citation whatsoever; yet, for Israelis killing Palestinians, one citation for every 13 deaths.

The Brits aren’t alone in their politicization of science. But because of the long ancestry of their journals and the reflexive respect they command, the British organs are looked up to as role models; when they allow ideology to trump accuracy and objectivity, they give encouragement to insalubrious elements in other research entities.

And so now the gangrene is everywhere, even in my own backyard. Canadian scientific scholarship is generally widely respected and used to be entirely credible. But as early as 2004 the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry [8] published an article, “Prevalence of Psychological Morbidity in West Bank Palestinian Children [9],” whose thrust is to blame the Israeli occupation for the psychological problems of Palestinian children. The methodology is transparently shoddy and no attempt is made to obscure the partisanship governing the focus. Any objective study would have sought to compare data about the suffering of Israeli children under constant threat of (and actual) terrorism. Worse, from a scientific point of view, not a single one of the authors is academically accredited in psychology or psychiatry. It took months before a letter of rebuttal was accepted for publication. By then the damage was done.

It’s too bad these medical journals don’t choose to highlight the amazing medical benefits Israel has brought to Palestinians. As detailed in a May 30, 2009, study [10] by U.S. medical researchers Ted H. Tulchinsky et al., Palestinians in the territories boast the lowest age- and sex-standardized mortality rate per 100,000 of all Middle Eastern Arab populations. Since 1972 immunization coverage in the territories has reached 99%. Polio and measles have been eradicated. Life expectancy rose from 54 in 1970 to 73 in 2007. Major sanitation and disease-control projects have reduced morbidity and hospital admissions.

And of Israeli and North American doctors giving of their time and expertise to improve the medical lot of Palestinians, there seems to be no end. Some Toronto heart surgeons, to cite but one shining example, 10 years ago founded a strictly non-political, non-sectarian group called Save a Child’s Heart [11] (SACH), whose motto is “mending hearts, building bridges.” Headquartered at Woolfson Hospital in Tel Aviv, with satellite offices in the U.S., the UK, and Germany, SACH has operated on 2,100 children from 35 different countries at a cost of about $10,000 per child. Almost half of them are from neighboring Arab countries, including the West Bank, of course. Money raised by SACH also goes to train foreign medical teams. During the Gazan conflict, an infant nephew of the Hamas minister of defense was brought in for urgent heart surgery.

Why don’t Lancet and the others choose to write the good medical news about Israel? They could start with Israel’s stellar performance following the recent earthquake in Haiti, where by all accounts the Israeli field hospital and human and material resources rose head and shoulders over every other country’s.
If the medical profession were a human body, any objective doctor would issue the obvious warning that if it wants to thrive — in academic terms, to be taken seriously by real scholars — it must cut off the gangrenous anti-Israel limb that has already turned black and stinks to high heaven.
Time is running out. Physicians, heal thyselves.

Article printed from Pajamas Media:

http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/anti-israel-bias-infects-medical-journals/
URLs in this post:
[1] informed us: http://pajamasmedia.com../../../../../phyllischesler/2010/01/24/lance...

[2] British Medical Journal: http://www.bmj.com/

[3] Journal of the Royal College of Physicians: http://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/pubs/clinicalmedicine/

[4] Commentary: http://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/PUBLICATIONS/Pages/Commentary.aspx

[5] open letter to the Royal College of Physicians: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19697581?itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntr...

[6] Israeli Medical Association Journal: http://old.library.georgetown.edu/newjour/i/msg03449.html

[7] study: http://www.ima.org.il/imaj/ar09jun-01.pdf

[8] Canadian Journal of Psychiatry: http://publications.cpa-apc.org/browse/sections/0

[9] Prevalence of Psychological Morbidity in West Bank Palestinian Children: https://ww1.cpa-apc.org/Publications/Archives/CJP/2004/January/zakris...

[10] study: http://spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=5544

[11] Save a Child’s Heart: http://www.sach.co.in/