[Reader-list] Strange alliances

[Ravi Sundaram]

This is the full article of Robert Fisk on the alliances between the 
Christian right and the Israel's supporters in the US....there is a 
reference to the far-right new york post (yazad jal,   has, as usual, 
posted a grotesque apology for Israel's bombing of Gaza - from an article 
from the Post!)

A strange kind of freedom

By Robert Fisk

Inside the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, the Californian 
audience had been struck silent. Dennis Bernstein, the Jewish host of KPFA 
Radio's Flashpoint current affairs programme, was reading some recent 
e-mails that he had received from Israel's supporters in America. Each one 
left the people in the church  Muslims, Jews, Christians  in a state of 
shock. "You mother-fucking-asshole-self-hating Jewish piece of shit. Hitler 
killed the wrong Jews. He should have killed your parents, so a piece of 
Jewish shit like you would not have been born. God willing, Arab terrorists 
will cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl-style, AMEN!!!"
Bernstein's sin was to have covered the story of Israel's invasion of Jenin 
in April and to have interviewed journalists who investigated the killings 
that took place there  including Phil Reeves and Justin Huggler of The 
Independent  for his Flashpoint programme. Bernstein's grandfather was a 
revered Orthodox Rabbi of international prominence but neither his family 
history nor his origins spared him. "Read this and weep, you mother-fucker 
self-hating Jew boy!!!" another e-mail told Bernstein. "God willing a 
Palestinian will murder you, rape your wife and slash your kids' throats." 
Yet another: "I hope that you, Barbara Lubin and all other Jewish Marxist 
Communist traitors anti-American cop haters will die a violent and cruel 
death just like the victims of suicide bombers in Israel." Lubin is also 
Jewish, the executive director of the Middle East Children's Alliance, a 
one-time committed Zionist but now one of Israel's fiercest critics. Her 
e-mails are even worse.

Indeed, you have to come to America to realise just how brave this small 
but vocal Jewish community is. Bernstein is the first to acknowledge that a 
combination of Israeli lobbyists and conservative Christian fundamentalists 
have in effect censored all free discussion of Israel and the Middle East 
out of the public domain in the US. "Everyone else is terrified," Bernstein 
says. "The only ones who begin to open their mouths are the Jews in this 
country. You know, as a kid, I sent money to plant trees in Israel. But now 
we are horrified by a government representing a country that we grew up 
loving and cherishing. Israel's defenders have a special vengeance for Jews 
who don't fall in line behind Sharon's scorched-earth policy because they 
give the lie to the charge that Israel's critics are simply anti-Semite."

Adam Shapiro is among those who have paid a price for their beliefs. He is 
a Jew engaged to an American-born Palestinian, a volunteer with the 
International Solidarity Movement who was trapped in Yasser Arafat's 
headquarters in the spring while administering medical aid. After telling 
CNN that the Sharon government was acting like "terrorists" while receiving 
$3bn a year in US military aid, Shapiro and his family were savaged in the 
New York Post. The paper slandered Shapiro as the "Jewish Taliban" and 
demeaned his family as "traitors". Israeli supporters publicised his 
family's address and his parents were forced to flee their Brooklyn home 
and seek police protection. Shapiro's father, a New York public high-school 
teacher and a part-time Yeshiva (Jewish day school) teacher, was fired from 
his job. His brother receives regular death threats.

Israel's supporters have no qualms about their alliance with the Christian 
right. Indeed, the fundamentalists can campaign on their own in Israel's 
favour, as I discovered for myself at Stanford recently when I was about to 
give a lecture on the media and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, part of a 
series of talks arranged largely by Jewish Americans. A right-wing 
Christian "Free Republic" outfit posted my name on its website, and 
described me as a "PLO butt-kisser" and asked its supporters to "freep" my 
lecture. A few demonstrators turned up outside the First United Methodist 
Church in Sacramento where I was to speak, waving American and Israeli 
flags. "Jew haters!" they screamed at the organisers, a dark irony since 
these were non-Jews shrieking their abuse at Jews.

They were also handing out crudely printed flyers. "Nothing to worry about, 
Bob," one of my Jewish hosts remarked. "They can't even spell your name 
right." True. But also false. "Stop the Lies!" the leaflet read. "There was 
no massacre in Jenin. Fiske [sic] is paid big bucks to spin [lie] for the 
Arabs..." But the real lie was in that last sentence. I never take any 
payment for lectures  so that no one can ever claim that I'm paid to give 
the views of others. But the truth didn't matter to these people. Nor did 
the content of my talk  which began, by chance, with the words "There was 
no massacre"  in which I described Arafat as a "corrupt, vain little 
despot" and suicide bombings as "a fearful, evil weapon". None of this was 
relevant. The aim was to shut me up.

Dennis Bernstein sums it up quite simply: "Any US journalist, columnist, 
editor, college professor, student-activist, public official or clergy 
member who dares to speak critically of Israel or accurately report the 
brutalities of its illegal occupation will be vilified as an anti-Semite." 
In fact, no sooner had Bernstein made these remarks than pro-Israeli groups 
initiated an extraordinary campaign against some of the most pro-Israeli 
newspapers in America, all claiming that The New York Times, the Los 
Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle were biased in their coverage 
of the Middle-East conflict. Just how The New York Times  which boasts 
William Safire and Charles Krauthammer, those giants of pro-Israeli bias, 
among its writers  could be anti-Israeli is difficult to see, although it 
is just possible that, amid its reports on Israel's destruction in the West 
Bank and Gaza, some mildly critical comments found their way into print. 
The New York Times, for example, did report that Israeli soldiers used 
civilians as human shields  though only in the very last paragraph of a 
dispatch from Jenin.