JustASC

Recently I linked to a ludicrous and hateful story from an Iranian “news agency” alleging a Jewish plot to kidnap Algerian children, traffic them thru Morocco,  and harvest their organs.

Now Hassan Masiky, a reporter for a Moroccan-American news service in Washington DC, has shown how baseless the story is, calling it a “dangerous…work of fantasy” and part of a “pointless anti-Semitic campaign” by Iran that targets Jews AND Arabs:

Fiction and fantasy are two words to describe this awfully sick story. Khayatti [the story's only quoted source] is probably a typical Algerian low graded Government civil employee, sitting in a small bare and windowless office, making up imaginary tales to distract the Algerian people from their daily struggles. Al-khabar [an Algerian daily], a shameless paper, is planting more seeds of hatred between the Algerian and Moroccan brothers and sisters. For Press TV, it feeds its audience any story that would make the Iranian Mullahs looks good, and reinforces their anti-Semitic (Arab and Jewish) editorial line.

Jane Fonda has a longer response to her critics on her blog.  She lays out her pro-Israel bona fides (which are quite impressive, I have to admit), says she never joined or called for a boycott of the Toronto film festival, and that the letter she signed did not “call into question the legitimacy of Tel Aviv.”

Her beef with the Tel Aviv segment of the festival was that it appeared “celebratory” of Israel following the “terrible war in Gaza” and that it seemed to enlist the festival in a pro-Israel propaganda campaign engineered by the Israeli Consul General.

We understand that by doing this the festival has become, whether knowingly or not, a participant in a cynical PR campaign to improve Israel’s image, make her appear less war-like. [Emphasis added.] The Israeli Consul General said a year ago that Toronto would be the launch site of an extensive “Brand Israel” campaign. Artists and others of us who love Israel do not want art to be used to whitewash the tragedies committed against Palestinians, most recently in last winter’s terrible war in Gaza (1400 Palestinians dead, mostly civilians, many more wounded, and there are documented human rights violations) and the ongoing blockade of Gaza that is deepening a serious humanitarian crisis, wreaking havoc on the lives of innocent people, and preventing reconstruction in the aftermath of the attack.

I’m intrigued by the phrase “knowingly or not.” The festival programmer denies any “pressure from any outside source.” Assuming he’s telling the truth, that takes care of “knowingly.” 

But what might they mean by “or not”? That the organizers were duped by some mysterious unknown force? That someone sent tractor beams into the programmers’ heads, with the message “Pick Tel Aviv, pick Tel Aviv”? Maybe it was the old subliminal seduction trick, and someone flashed a picture of a naked Bibi Netanyahu in the middle of a feature film.

Seriously, the allegation that the organizers “unknowingly” served the “Israeli propaganda machine” sounds just creepy. 

Here’s what I think she really means: “We artists have reached a consensus on Israel in the wake of the war in Gaza, and that consensus is that Israel is war-like. A series of works by other artists that suggests the picture in Israel might be more complicated than that violates this consensus, and thus does not deserve to be seen by a public that is not as discerning as we. It may be true that the festival’s goal was only to present a multi-dimensional view of a subject often represented as one-dimensional. However, because a multi-dimensional view of Israel meshes, intentionally or not, with the communications aims of the Israeli government, it must be resisted and suppressed.  We stand for artistic integrity, but only when its aims agree with ours.”

As to whether or not she called into question the legitimacy of Tel Aviv, I refer you to the letter’s paragraph on that subject. I’m not sure there is any ambiguity there:

Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and … the city of Jaffa, Palestine’s main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population. This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories or who have been dispersed to other countries, including Canada.

The controversy over the boycott of the Toronto film festival will undoubtedly play out as “See, you can’t criticize Israel without the pro-Israel Right accusing you of anti-Semitism.”

That’s why the pro-Israel Left needs to step up and join in criticizing the Fonda Letter, and help establish the parameters for talking about Israel critically but constructively. Thankfully, J Street did just that. See here:

J Street applauds the Toronto International Film Festival for choosing Tel Aviv for its inaugural City-to-City spotlight.

Israel’s growing and internationally recognized film industry, centered in Tel Aviv, is rightly a source of pride for many Israelis and Americans. Through their art, Israeli filmmakers are presenting the world with a rich picture of Israel’s complex and layered society that goes deeper than simplistic headlines.

We find protests and criticism of the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to showcase Tel Aviv’s film industry shameful and shortsighted.

The cause of peace will not be served by demonizing Israeli film and filmmakers as being part of the “Israeli propaganda campaign.” In fact, anyone who actually watches popular Israeli films would know that the films are often vigorously critical of Israeli government policy.

Some critics say their objection is to the Israeli government’s role in promoting the films and not the films themselves. Israel, like many other European governments, supports its film industry financially and does not employ any political litmus test to determine which films receive funding. It is almost as if critics would have us believe that Benjamin Netanyahu personally selected these films for maximum propaganda effect. That, of course, is false and absurd.

We were also dismayed by the Toronto International Film Festival’s co-director’s statement that Tel Aviv is “contested ground.” Anyone that questions Tel Aviv’s legitimacy as an Israeli city either needs a geography lesson or doesn’t believe in the two-state solution, which is the only way to secure Israel as a Jewish democracy and provide the Palestinians with a state of their own.

We urge those protesting Tel Aviv’s selection to reconsider their actions. We also call upon the Toronto International Film Festival to hold strong with their selection and not be drawn into a political fight.

Jane Fonda, responding to Marvin Hier’s charge that by joining the Toronto FIlm Festival boycott she supports the “complete destruction of Israel, tells TMZ:

“I, in no way, support the destruction of Israel. I am for the two-state solution. I have been to Israel many times and love the country and its people.”

Ok, maybe she doesn’t want to destroy Isrel. But if she “loves” it, why would she sign a letter challenging the legitimacy of its largest and least controversial city? Which part of the country does she love, exactly? Not Tel Aviv, apparently. She supports a “two-state” solution, but the letter suggests that Tel Aviv is built on stolen land. How does that advance progress toward a “two-state solution”? If Palestinians accept her narrative, or assume the world does, why would (and should) they settle for less than a Palestine from sea to sea?

To understand the radical rhetorical leap made in the boycott letter, it’s useful to imagine a letter of protest that could have been written and even supported by someone on the pro-Israel left.

What would such a letter say? For example, one could criticize the films selected for the Tel Aviv portion of the festival as insufficiently reflective of the political ferment and dissent among Israeli Jewish and Israeli Arab filmmakers and artists (as I wrote in my piece, the average Jewish film festival often shows films more critical of the Israeli military and the occupation than appear in the Toronto fest [although, as I also write, the festival choices hardly shy away from the difficult issues]).

Not tough enough? I can also imagine the pro-Israel Left signing a letter that regrets the choice of Tel Aviv films at a time when Israel and the Palestinians are wrestling with existential issues about their respective and intertwined futures. Such a letter might acknowledge that Tel Aviv indeed has produced artists of conscience who deal forthrightly with Israel’s domestic and national dilemmas, including the plight of the Palestinians, and that the festival missed an opportunity to be fully relevant by failing to focus on the most important questions facing the two peoples.

Two interesting points, no? Instead, the letter went nuclear — denying the legitmacy of Tel Aviv, comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa, endorsing a boycott, and accusing the festival, without proof, of bowing to the “Israeli propaganda machine.”

With “lovers” like these, Jane, Israel doesn’t need enemies.

It’s rare and a little weird when the ZOA and I end up on the same side of an issue, but here you go:  Morton Klein is condemning Jane Fonda, Danny Glover, Alice Walker, and others for their letter protesting a Toronto film festival’s decision to highlight Israeli films about Tel Aviv.

According to the ZOA release:  

“These Israel bashers are also deeply ignorant. They have been so thoroughly duped by poisonous Palestinian propaganda against Israel that they claim that Tel Aviv was built on violence. In point of fact, Tel Aviv was built on sand dunes north of Jaffa in 1909. Its development involved no violence or suffering of former residents. It had no former residents. (The predominantly Arab-populated port of Jaffa was only municipally joined to Tel Aviv after Israel was founded and many of its residents fled as a result of a war launched against Israel that went badly for the aggressors). 

The news release isn’t on line yet, but the full text appears after the jump. (more…)

Word of the day: “chiliastic.”

chil⋅i⋅asm [kil-ee-az-uhm] Noun, Theology: the doctrine of Christ’s expected return to reign on earth for 1000 years; millennialism.

As in:

The GOP benefits from the zeal of its foot soldiers, from their chiliastic, by-any-means necessary approach to politics. But the party is also limited by the extremism of its base, which has decimated it in large swaths of the country. It’s worth remembering that even in this season of furious right-wing obstruction, the Republican Party is more powerless than it’s been in a generation.

Press TV, the English-language “news” site funded by the Iranian government, takes a nasty stab at invoking the blood libel in an “exclusive”. It quotes an Algerian health official saying “New York city police have arrested members of a Jewish gang who abducted Algerian children for their organs.”

See here how this garbage spreads wings on the Internet.

Dr. Mendy Ganchrow, the former president of the Orthodox Union, is objecting to an article by syndicated columnist Douglas Bloomfield that appeared in the New Jersey Jewish News and other papers last week.

In the original article, an appreciation of Ted Kennedy, Bloomfiled wrote the following:

That view wasn’t shared by some on the far right like the OU’s former president, Mendy Ganchrow, who blogged on the eve of Kennedy’s death, “Rarely in America has a more unworthy person been accorded such deep respect as is regularly heaped upon Kennedy.” Ganchrow, a retired proctologist, opposed Kennedy’s health care proposals and said instead of “being treated with expensive modalities” the ailing “idiot” senator from “the People’s Republic of Massachusetts” should “go into Hospice, take an Asparin (sic) and say his daily prayers.”

Ganchrow points out that the part where Kennedy is called an “idiot” from the “People’s Republic of Massachusetts” and the quote about him being an “unworthy person” were actually written by Elli Ganchrow, Dr. Ganchrow’s son, who was guest-blogging in Dr. Ganchrow’s stead at the time. (The blog is called “Ganchrow World View.”)

As for the second half of Bloomfield’s paragraph, Dr. Ganchrow says he was referring to Obama’s health care plan, not Kennedy’s. Here’s Ganchrow’s original post, from Aug. 16:

Notice that when charges are made within the health debate, the administration doensn’t answer the charges,but attack the motives of the questioners.
I have not heard how you can add 45 million new individuals,and yet have no corresponding rise in the number of doctors etc, not add additional funding and yet wind up without rationing.
Nor have I heard a rational answer( or even irrational one) to the fact that Sen. Kennedy who is obviously in the terminal stage of his disease,is aged and yet insists on being treated with expensive modalities.He should lead by example,go into Hospice, take an Asparin and say his daily prayers.Isn’t that on tap for mere mortals under Obamacare?

Finally, Ganchrow says Bloomfield brought no proof that “because I am a conservative, I am part of the far right.”

I’m reading Adam Garfinkle’s book Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Just About Everything. Garfinkle sets out to explain at least four brands of Jewish exceptionalism: Non-Jews who hate Jews beyond reason, non-Jews who love Jews beyond reason, Jews who overstate their own importance, and Jews whose obsession with Jews turns into self-hatred. 

It’s a great topic, and I opened it right away to the chapter on “professional Jews,” since I’m one of them. And right away there’s a problem: a paragraph on the “main mass-membership advocacy organizations” that’s riddled with errors of fact.

 He refers to “Bnai B’rith and its Anti-Defamation League” (the two severed ties in the 1990s), the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds (which changed its name in 1932 to the Council of Jewish Federations, and stopped existing as a separate organization in 1999 when it merged with the United Israel Appeal and United Jewish Appeal to form United Jewish Communities); the National Conference of Jewish Federations (probably the same as CJF above, but no such organization currently exists); and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (the word “American” goes before Jewish in its title).

Later he refers to the Hebrew Immigrant and Aid Society (no “and”) and Friends of Hadassah (it’s Hadassah: the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, or plain Hadassah).

I’m nit-picking, I know, but how hard is it to google these things (I just did — it took about 10 minutes)? More to the point , it makes me look more skeptically at things in the book with which I am less familiar, and question his authority on assertions that I know to be debatable, like this one about the membership organizations:

[T]heir leaderships are composed mainly of people who are not religious or religiously learned Jews.

This assertion is important to Garfinkle’s thesis that the Jewish organizations represent a “post-Napoleonic” distinction between Judaism as a people, and Judaism as an ethnic group. The thing is, it’s simply not true. Two of the most powerful of the groups he mentions, ADL and the Conference of Presidents, are headed by Orthodox Jews. While the membership organizations were proudly secular at their founding, almost all have increased the importance they place on Jewish “learning,” and have made learning part of their training and certainly part of their hiring. As J.J. Goldberg noted  a few years back, the center of gravity, especially of the Zionist organizations, has shifted in recent years from the mostly secular Labor Zionists to, like Conference of Presidents head Malcolm Hoenlein, the Religious Zionists.

Garfinkle also asks an important question about the continuing relevance of the ADL, and whether ADL distorts reality to claim high rates of anti-Semitism and thus justify its existence. But the case against ADL is not to be made in the isolated mistakes of judgment cited by Garfinkle (calling Harry Truman an anti-Semite, for example), but in the debate over whether a Jewish organization is needed to provide pluralism and tolerance programs for police forces and schoolchildren, or to maintain legal staffs to examine church-state violations, or to provide an address for individual Jews who do face anti-Semitic incidents and need advice and action. If ADL went out of business tomorrow, to whom would this kind of responsibility fall? (And don’t say the Simon Weisenthal Center — the redundancy of Jewish organizations is a ripe and fair target of criticism. SWC, by the way, is also headed by an Orthodox Jew.)

Anyway, I’m going to stick with Garfinkle’s book, and blog about it. But I hope the rest of the book is better informed than this chapter seemed to be — it’s too good a topic to be hampered by poor research or argumentation.

Spent a nice day yesterday at the U.S. Open with one of my sons. One of the highlights was a doubles match featuring Israeli Dudi Sela and his Taiwanese partner Yen-Hsun Lu. The two were down a set to American Travis Parrott and Slovak Filip Possak, but came back 7-6, 6-2 to advance to the second round.

The match was on an outer court — and by outer I mean I’ve had worse seats at high school matches. The little bleachers were filled with Sela’s Israeli fans and a few American kippah-wearers — after the match he wandered over and accepted hugs from the contingent, including his beaming mom.