You do not understand my other comment re ‘Taliban hiding amongst the population’ and you are from a think tank..?? Really.

Robin Shepherd says: Yes, really. It makes no sense to me. On the other note, I repeat that you’re clutching at straws, very thin ones indeed. Opinion polls in the UK for example are usually conducted among 1,000 people or less. The UK population is 60 million. They’re usually correct to within plus or minus 3 percent.

4,000 out of a Jewish population of 270,000 or so is a massive sample, about 1.5 percent of the Jewish population. It would be like a UK-wide opinion poll with 900,000 respondents (1.5 percent of the UK population), which I think would be a record. You’ll just have to accept that the game’s up, I’m afraid…

Robin Shepherd says: You’re clutching at straws, and I suspect you know it. This report marks the end of any claim to credibility among anti-Zionist Jews. It proves they are eccentrics on the far fringes. And as to your other comment on the Taliban, it just didn’t make sense so I simply can’t respond…

joshua..
You epitomise the problem..
You really believe that nothing you and yours do can ever be wrong..
Logically, factually and actually that is ridiculously position.
Even an Israeli newspaper can’t cricise what jews do… Jeez!!!
How will you ever learn to be real people?

Robin Shepherd says: Your comments on the Taliban made no sense at all — at least not to me. But this is just stupidity, and smacks of desperation. A professional poll conducted by trained academics of more than 4,000 people is going to be very accurate indeed. Most opinion polls — usually of 500-1,000 — have a margin of error but in this case it’s going to be very small. These results may be very disconserting to you, but you’ll just have to deal with it. The truth hurts.

Some years ago, when Fisk was threatening to sue a number of people over this charge of anti-Semitism, he claimed that he couldn’t possibly be anti-Semitic because his mother helped man an anti-aircraft gun during World War II. Go figure.

You may well not be joking but I can assure you that you are completely wrong. Not only is this a misuse of the term, I can assure you that in terms of anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism Britain might not be a lot better than anywhere else in Europe but it is certainly no worse. As a Jew, I have certainly not felt real fear in Britain. I certainly cannot say the same about countries like Hungary, Poland and Lithuania. The results of a recent ADL poll on anti-Semitism in Europe certainly do not provide any comfort on this score (see link below).

Oh, and if you care to use Google, you’ll find articles much worse than Fisk’s from all over Europe over the last decade. In actual fact, quite possibly the most anti-Semitic article I have read this year at a mainstream news site was today at Israel’s Ynet:

The tragedy of arrogance

[Extracts]

1) ‘Arrogance is “built into” the people of Israel from its very inception. We are the chosen people. The whole world is against us. God is on our side. God willing. We forget how briefly we enjoyed independence throughout our history, despite our national arrogance and God’s support.

The Biblical arrogance gained momentum with the State of Israel’s inception, which gave rise to nationalism and turned security into a supreme value. Our Air Force is the best. The IDF is the world’s most moral army.’

2) ‘The religious and ethnic arrogance we see in Emmanuel and in Lithuanian yeshivas stems from the same source: Our arrogance towards the Arabs, and towards the gentiles in general. This arrogance threatens our existence to the same extent. It breeds wars, which are the gravest human tragedies: At times we see them in Lebanon or Gaza, and at times they take place in Emmanuel or Beit Shemesh.’

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3924014,00.html

If you wish to complain about the Ynet article these are the relevant e-mail addresses:

Ynetnews Editorial Department: news@ynetnews.com

Editor-in-chief, Ynet: editor-in-chief@y-i.co.il

http://my.ynet.co.il/englishynet2/

Source:

1) ADL – Attitude Toward Jews in Seven European Countries

http://www.adl.org/Public%20ADL%20Anti-Semitism%20Presentation%20February%202009%20_3_.pdf

Could this be just in time to avert further similar embarassment for Britain prior to the Pope’s visit, as Robin has previously discussed?

Is there any survey evidence that proves the statement that the non-Jewish population is hostile to Israel? I don’t remember anyone asking me!

It’s good news that people like Fisk and Oborn are abandoning all pretence and the anti-semitism that forms part of their worldview is now glaringly apparent. I previously doubted whether anti-semitism was a factor, but I appear to have been wrong. It doesn’t matter whether someone identifies themselves with the right, the left or the centre. Generic dislike of Jews is anti-semitism.

As is only to be expected, he does append the tiniest, weeniest of fig leaves in the incongruous statement that “the only good guys in this story are the courageous Jewish Americans who oppose the thieves in Netanyahu’s government”. Calling them ‘courageous American Jews’ would clearly stick in his craw. Note how by calling Netanyahu’s government ‘thieves’, he uses the terminology of radical Arabs who childishly name-call the Israelis as ‘criminal, Zionist aggressors’. He doesn’t discriminate between Likud and Labour in that name-calling.

Fisk is an extreme example of the intellectual sickness described in “A State Beyond the Pale. His hatred of Israel and its supporters, the scale of historical and factual distortion he employs and his utter self-righteousness, put him beyond the pale as far as I’m concerned. This is someone who would feel comfortable drinking tea with Nasrallah, Mashaal or Haniyeh, but would choke on his biscuits sitting with Netanyahu or Barak.

We’re facing a problem of language here. Old terms no longer suffice. In Western societies, the old political spectrum stretching from socialist left to fascist right belongs to the last century and is now too outdated. Real socialists and fascists are now just nutters on the fringe. Likewise the scale stretching from libertarianism to total state control is largely irrelevant. Only a handful of bods call themselves ‘anarchists’ and monolithic state control has been discredited by history. And yet to me, Fisk is clearly at the far end of a spectrum which is difficult to describe using existing language. So what is he ?

Let’s assume that Israel did not exist. What conflict or perceived injustice in the world would then become the obsessive focus of people like Fisk ? The suffering of the Pashtuns under US and allied bombardment in Afghanistan ? Doubt it. Too remote, too dangerous. The suffering in various parts of Africa ? Not really, they don’t make much fuss at the moment, so why should that change. Again it’s remote and tribal. Ditto the oppression of the Kurds, who’ve never been a fashionable cause. Oppression by Iran, Syria and Iraq just doesn’t register with people like Fisk. The scale of these issues is every bit as important as the Israel / Palestinian conflict, if not more so.

This angle of analysis leads me to conclude that Fisk’s obsessive anti-Israel hatred can only be anti-semitism in modern packaging and indeed, this latest article makes it abundantly clear. For want of a better word, he and Peter Oborn are neo-fascists.

They won’t think of themselves as such, because people with distorted, dangerous ideologies and prejudices never ascribe pejorative terms to themselves. Words only acquire pejorative connotations over time. Germans and Italians in the 1930s will have happily described themselves as Nazis and Fascists respectively. Fisk takes pride in being an anti-Zionist. Hopefully that term will acquire a thick covering of muck as time moves on.

Another angle is to look at the defective logic employed by Fisk in his analysis of history and events. Fisk makes no serious attempt to understand the historical circumstances that have led to Israel being the type of society that it is with the cultural, political and attitudinal characteristics that it has. People like him will dismiss or disregard the centuries of oppression in Europe and Muslim lands. They will dismiss the profound imprint left by the Holocaust. They will dismiss or rationalise away the Arab and Palestinian rejectionism that led to the wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973. For Fisk, Israel is ‘colonialist’, end of story. Its citizens were born in sin and should therefore pay the price.

But the United States, Canada, Australia and the countries of South America are amongst many countries that have arisen as a result of colonialism. These countries do not cause the likes of Fisk any particular qualms. At least the people of Israel have a longstanding historical connection to the Land of Israel / Palestine going back over two thousand years. Unlike the other colonial nations, the Jews have re-colonised their ancient homeland. And they did it in circumstances when they had little choice in the matter, given the pogroms, discrimination and eventual mass slaughter in Europe. So Fisk’s depiction of Israel as an artificial colonialist implant on ‘Arab land’ is highly faulty. And his accompanying hatred brings me back to the only immediate explanation, which is anti-semitism.

A third angle is to ask how would someone like Fisk behave if Israel were somehow able to withdraw from the West Bank and a Palestinian state were established. Would the hatred stop ? This would depend largely on who’s in charge of that state. If due to corruption and the lack of a new generation of leaders, Fatah were displaced by Hamas, then there would be a real problem. Any peace agreement will stipulate that the future West Bank state be demilitarised. The Jordanians would insist on that just as much as the Israelis. Assuming that it remains an Iranian client, Hamas would inevitably try to break that part of the agreement. Any security actions taken by Israel to enforce it would be jumped on by the likes of Fisk. Any Israeli responses to sporadic acts of terror from Palestinian factions would also be jumped on.

So although I believe the hatred would be considerably dampened, I think the bias and the bigotry would still lurk in the background. Even more so if the Israeli economy continues to flourish. The obsessive focus would probably turn towards the situation of Israel’s Arabs. I just can’t imagine the Independent going a fortnight without a massive front-page splash condemning the iniquities of Israel. It would have lost its raison d’être as a newspaper.

Anyway, back to my search for new terminology. In addition to the anti-semitism, there is a wider philosophical base which underpins Fisk’s rationalising and effectively justifying the 9/11 terror attacks. It would also account for his vituperative opposition to the wars against Saddam Hussein, Al-Qaida and the Taliban, although I’m sure he would blame ‘neo-cons’ and American Jews for those wars. It has to be an ‘–ism’ to register with journalists, academics and politicos. (As an aside, I enjoyed the way Fisk stupidly invented the word ‘Likudist’ in his article. Hasn’t he heard the term ‘Likudnik’ ? Plonker.)

How about ‘inversionist’ ? Someone who inverts facts and morality to come out with a philosophy in which backwardness and stupidity is praised, whereas modernity, democracy and liberalism are condemned. Further suggestions gratefully received.

His article, a masterpiece of spin, obfuscation and selective quoting, is here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/16/survey-jews-britain-israel-attitude