Biden’s Pier Is a Gift to Hamas Terrorists

Biden’s Pier Is a Gift to Hamas Terrorists

There are mounting concerns that the Biden administration’s pier plan could ultimately boomerang, especially, as Netanyahu himself has warned, if the US aid and the port itself end up in the hands More »

Ubwami bw’Ubupersi na bamedi (Persian’s Kingdom and Med’s Kingdom)

Ubwami bw’Ubupersi na bamedi (Persian’s Kingdom and Med’s Kingdom)

‘Yoseri’ Museveni ari kumwe n’ababyeyi be, Kuki Museveni yanga u Rwanda akomokamo? Umugambi w’Abatutsi bo munzu (y’Abasinga, Abashambo. Abega, Abashingwe) mu karere kibiyaga bigari uhereye mu gihugu cy’Ubuperesi (Uganda) aho bafashe ubutegetsi More »

Hamas’s Industrial Murder: Why Is Senator Chuck Schumer Not Demanding a Change of Leadership in Hamas and Iran?

Hamas’s Industrial Murder: Why Is Senator Chuck Schumer Not Demanding a Change of Leadership in Hamas and Iran?

When the terrorist organization Hamas murders, tortures, rapes and abducts Jews in Israel, do not be surprised that the Jews of today will respond with the righteous might of a nation that More »

Israel’s Strategic Game of Survival

Israel’s Strategic Game of Survival

“They wanted Israel’s counterattack, and then they wanted to hold in the tunnels and use the hostages just to buy time for the international community namely, the United States to stop the More »

“Biden’s actions are a violation of Israel’s sovereignty.”

“Biden’s actions are a violation of Israel’s sovereignty.”

  Israel Betrayed? It seems clear that the Biden administration would like to see the rapid creation of a Palestinian state or at least a “Palestinian unity government” — unfortunately composed of More »

 

The Soviet-Palestinian Lie by Judith Bergman

  • “The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for ‘liberation’ organizations.” — Ion Mihai Pacepa, former chief of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Romania.

  • “First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.” — Ion Mihai Pacepa.
  • “[T]he Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep… We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews.” — Yuri Andropov, former KGB chairman.
  • As early as 1965, the USSR had formally proposed in the UN a resolution that would condemn Zionism as colonialism and racism. Although the Soviets did not succeed in their first attempt, the UN turned out to be an overwhelmingly grateful recipient of Soviet bigotry and propaganda; in November 1975, Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination” was finally passed.

The recent discovery that Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), was a KGB spy in Damascus in 1983, was discarded by many in the mainstream media as a “historical curiosity” — except that the news inconveniently came out at the time that President Vladimir Putin was trying to organize new talks between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Predictably, the Palestinian Authority immediately dismissed the news. Fatah official Nabil Shaath denied that Abbas was ever a KGB operative, and called the claim a “smear campaign.”

The discovery, far from being a “historical curiosity,” is an aspect of one of many pieces in the puzzle of the origins of 20th and 21st century Islamic terrorism. Those origins are almost always obfuscated and obscured in ill-concealed attempts at presenting a particular narrative about the causes of contemporary terrorism, while decrying all and any evidence to the contrary as “conspiracy theories.”

There is nothing conspiratorial about the latest revelation. It comes from a document in the Mitrokhin archives at the Churchill Archives Center at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Vasily Mitrokhin was a former senior officer of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence service, who was later demoted to KGB archivist. At immense risk to his own life, he spent 12 years diligently copying secret KGB files that would not otherwise have become available to the public (the KGB foreign intelligence archives remain sealed from the public, despite the demise of the Soviet Union). When Mitrokhin defected from the Russia in 1992, he brought the copied files with him to the UK. The declassified parts of the Mitrokhin archives were brought to the public eye in the writings of Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew, who co-wrote The Mitrokhin Archive (published in two volumes) together with the Soviet defector. Mitrokhin’s archives led, among other things, to the discovery of many KGB spies in the West and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the history of the full extent of the KGB’s influence and disinformation operations is not nearly as well-known as it should be, considering the immense influence that the KGB wielded on international affairs. The KGB conducted hostile operations against NATO as a whole, against democratic dissent within the Soviet bloc, and set in motion subversive events in Latin America and the Middle East, which resonate to this day.

The KGB, furthermore, was an extremely active player in the creation of so-called liberation movements in Latin America and in the Middle East, movements that went on to engage in lethal terrorism — as documented in, among other places, The Mitrokhin Archive, as well as in the books and writings of Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Communist official to defect from the former Soviet bloc.

Pacepa was chief of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Romania and a personal advisor to Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu before he defected to the United States in 1978. Pacepa worked with the CIA to bring down communism for more than 10 years; the agency described his cooperation as “an important and unique contribution to the United States.”

In a 2004 interview, FrontPage Magazine, Pacepa said:

The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for “liberation” organizations. There was the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the KGB in 1964 with help from Ernesto “Che” Guevara … the KGB also created the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which carried out numerous bombing attacks… In 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charter — a document that had been drafted in Moscow. The Palestinian National Covenant and the Palestinian Constitution were also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed Shuqairy, a KGB influence agent who became the first PLO chairman…

In the Wall Street Journal, Pacepa explained how the KGB built up Arafat — or in current parlance, how they constructed a narrative for him:

He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-operations school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.

As the late historian Robert S. Wistrich wrote in A Lethal Obsession, the Six-Day War unleashed a protracted, intensive campaign on the part of the Soviet Union to delegitimize Israel and the movement for Jewish self-determination, known as Zionism. This was done in order to rectify the damage to the Soviet Union’s prestige after Israel defeated its Arab allies:

After 1967, the USSR began to flood the world with a constant flow of anti-Zionist propaganda… Only the Nazis in their twelve years of power had ever succeeded in producing such a sustained flow of fabricated libels as an instrument of their domestic and foreign policy[1].

For this the USSR employed a host of Nazi trigger words to describe the Israeli defeat of the Arab 1967 aggression, several of which are still employed on the Western left today when it comes to Israel, such as “practitioners of genocide”, “racists”, “concentration camps”, and “Herrenvolk.”

Furthermore, the USSR engaged in an international smearing campaign in the Arab world. In 1972, the Soviet Union, launched operation “SIG” (Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Zionist Governments”), with the purpose of portraying the United States as an “arrogant and haughty Jewish fiefdom financed by Jewish money and run by Jewish politicians, whose aim was to subordinate the entire Islamic world”. Some 4,000 agents were sent from the Soviet Bloc into the Islamic world, armed with thousands of copies of the old czarist Russian forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. According to KGB chairman Yuri Andropov:

‘the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep… We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were “fascist, imperial-Zionist countries” bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels’ occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.

As early as 1965, the USSR had formally proposed in the UN a resolution that would condemn Zionism as colonialism and racism. Although the Soviets did not succeed in their first attempt, the UN turned out to be an overwhelmingly grateful recipient of Soviet bigotry and propaganda; in November 1975, Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination’ was finally passed. This followed nearly a decade of diligent Soviet propaganda directed at the Third World, depicting Israel as a Trojan Horse for Western imperialism and racism. This campaign was designed to build support for Soviet foreign policy in Africa and the Middle East.[2] Another tactic was constantly to draw visual and verbal comparisons in the Soviet media between Israel and South Africa (this is the origin of the canard of “Israeli apartheid”).

Not only the Third World, but also the Western Left ate all this Soviet propaganda raw. The latter continues to disseminate large parts of it to this day. In fact, slandering someone, whoever they are, as racist, became one of the Left’s primary weapons against those with whom it disagrees.

Part of the Soviet tactics in isolating Israel was making the PLO look “respectable.” According to Pacepa, this task was left to Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu, who had achieved the unlikely propaganda feat of portraying the ruthless Romanian police state to the West as a “moderate” Communist country. Nothing could have been farther from the truth, as was ultimately revealed in the 1989 trial against Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena, which ended with their executions.

Yasser Arafat (left) with Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu during a visit in Bucharest in 1974. (Image source: Romanian National History Museum)

Pacepa wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

In March 1978, I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. “You simply have to keep on pretending that you’ll break with terrorism and that you’ll recognize Israel — over, and over, and over,” Ceausescu told him [Arafat]… Ceausescu was euphoric over the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the olive branch.

… Ceausescu failed to get his Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1994 Arafat got his — all because he continued to play the role we had given him to perfection. He had transformed his terrorist PLO into a government-in-exile (the Palestinian Authority), always pretending to call a halt to Palestinian terrorism while letting it continue unabated. Two years after signing the Oslo Accords, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists had risen by 73%.

In his book, Red Horizons, Pacepa related what Arafat said at a meeting he had with him at PLO headquarters in Beirut around the time that Ceausescu was trying to make the PLO “respectable”:

I am a revolutionary. I have dedicated my whole life to the Palestinian cause and the destruction of Israel. I will not change or compromise. I will not agree with anything that recognizes Israel as a state. Never… But I am always willing to make the West think that I want what Brother Ceausescu wants me to do.[3]

The propaganda neatly paved the way for terrorism, Pacepa explained in National Review.

General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, who created Communist Romania’s intelligence structure and then rose to head up all of Soviet Russia’s foreign intelligence, often lectured me: “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.”

The Soviet general was not joking. In 1969 alone, there were 82 hijackings of planes worldwide. According to Pacepa, most of those hijackings were committed by the PLO or affiliated groups, all supported by the KGB. In 1971, when Pacepa visited Sakharovsky at his Lubyanka (KGB headquarters) office, the general boasted: “Airplane hijacking is my own invention”. Al Qaeda used airplane hijackings on September 11, when they used planes to blow up buildings.

So where does Mahmoud Abbas fit into all this? In 1982, Mahmoud Abbas studied in Moscow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. (In 1983 he went on to become a KGB spy). There he wrote his thesis, published in Arabic as The Other Side: The Secret Relations between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement. In it, he denied the existence of gas chambers in the concentration camps, and questioned the number of Holocaust victims by calling the six million Jews who had been killed “a fantastic lie,” while simultaneously blaming the Holocaust on the Jews themselves. His thesis supervisor was Yevgeny Primakov, who later went on to become foreign minister of Russia. Even after he had finished his thesis, Abbas maintained close ties with the Soviet leadership, the military and members of security services. In January 1989, he was appointed co-chairman of the Palestinian-Soviet (and then Russian-Palestinian) Working Committee on the Middle East.

When the current leader of the Palestinian Arabs used to be an acolyte of the KGB — whose machinations have claimed the lives of thousands of people in the Middle East alone — this cannot be discarded as a “historical curiosity,” even if contemporary opinion-makers would prefer to ignore it by viewing it as such.

Although Pacepa and Mitrokhin sounded their warnings many years ago, few people bothered to listen to them. They should.

Judith Bergman is a writer, columnist, lawyer and political analyst.

The Shi’ite Leopard: Iran’s Religious Persecution by Denis MacEoin

  • Despite promises of amelioration from Iran’s current President, Hassan Rouhani, the situation for Christians has not improved at all.
  • Rouhani, came to power as a proponent of human rights and reform, and has been considered a reformer and moderate in the West ever since. He made countless declarations of his intention to pursue a human rights agenda and guarantee equal rights for all Iranians: Every one of those promises has been broken, yet the U.S. continues to put faith in Rouhani as an honest broker.

  • “Christians continue to be arbitrarily arrested… [They] disappear for weeks at a time… Detainees are sometimes told they must to convert to Islam or their families will be killed.” — Ruth Gledhill, journalist
  • Even though many Sufi Muslims are fervently pious in their devotion to the faith of the Shi’a, clerics in Qom declared Sufis to be apostates and attempted to expel them from the town and to take over their religious centre.
  • The document organized the methods of oppression used to persecute the Baha’is, and contained specific recommendations. When Iranian judges offer the Bahai’s life in exchange for abandonment of faith it is a clear admission of a purely religious motive.
  • Why do so many Western states and the UN condemn Israel while bending over backwards to accommodate every demand Iran makes in its bid to build nuclear weapons, expand its terrorist influence, and threaten the West?

In the wake of the infamous nuclear deal with the hard-line Iranian regime, countries around the world, led by U.S. President Barack Obama, are busy trying to bring the Islamic Republic, so long sanctioned and held at arm’s length by decent people, in from the cold. Business deals beckon, great claims are made of coming dialogue and a slackening of the tensions of the Middle East. We are told that war has been avoided.

But has the Shi’ite leopard, overnight, truly changed its spots? It still executes more people per capita than China, it still supports and conducts terrorist activities in several countries, its leaders still preach hatred for America, Israel, and the West. In reality, nothing has changed, yet the theocratic, human-rights-denying regime is now to be everybody’s best buddy.

An important indicator of Iran’s unfitness to be counted among the nations as a legitimate actor must be its treatment of its many minorities, above all its religious minorities. As with Saudi Arabia, the theocratic character of the state is most clearly exposed when it comes to its treatment of religions and sects that are not held by the majority. A strict interpretation and application of Islamic law unfailingly leads to disrespect for and harshness towards non-Muslims.

Iran’s current president, Hassan Rouhani, came to power as a proponent of human rights and reform, and has been considered a reformer and moderate in the West ever since. During his election campaign, he made countless declarations of his intention to pursue a human rights agenda. On April 11, 2013, he said: “All Iranian people should feel there is justice. Justice means equal opportunity. All ethnicities, all religions, even religious minorities, must feel justice.” In a Press TV interview that August, he repeated that his administration would guarantee equal rights for all Iranians: “no authority should differentiate between various ethnicities, religions, minorities and followers of different faiths.” Every one of those promises has been broken, yet the U.S administration continues to put faith in Rouhani as an honest broker.

Twelver Shi’ism, which has been the official faith of Iran since the 16th century, has itself been a persecuted religion wherever its adherents have lived under Sunni rule. It was imposed on the population of Iran by the Safavid dynasty (1502-1736), and during the nineteenth century, its clerical hierarchy grew steadily more powerful. Despite setbacks in the twentieth century, the clerical elite came to supreme power during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Since the Shi’a are a minority in the Islamic world overall, they are deeply conscious of a need to clamp down on any other religious movements that might threaten to destabilize their rule.

Ironically, Iran is also home to a variety of religious communities, the most notable being the Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Sufis, and the indigenous Baha’i religion. Jews, who had lived in Iran for some 2,500 years, numbered between 60,000 and 80,000 in 1978; after the revolution the following year, two-thirds of the community went abroad. The 2011 census showed less than 9000 Jews left in Iran. It has just been reported that the last synagogue in Borujerd, once home for a significant Jewish community, had to close because there was not a minyan, a minimum prayer quorum of ten men.

Iran’s regime has tried to portray itself as tolerant towards Jews, but its fanatical hatred for Israel and Zionism has often exposed the community to accusations of espionage, arrests, and executions. Outwardly, Iranian Jews are not particularly molested, and are represented by a single Member of Parliament. They operate synagogues and ritual baths, celebrate festivals, and are granted the status of dhimmi people: protected by an Islamic government in return for discriminatory debasing requirements. The tolerance, however, is apparently skin deep, with anti-Zionism lying near the surface.[1]

The second of Iran’s dhimmi faiths, Christianity, has not fared as well. The total number of Christians in Iran (of all denominations) has been estimated at between 200,000 and 250,000. Ninety percent of these belong to long-standing indigenous churches, for Armenians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans. They do not seek converts and are relatively unmolested. But churches that have links to foreign countries are treated harshly. According to Minority Rights International:

“The Protestants, and particularly evangelical groups, face the most difficulties from amongst the Christian communities in Iran. Human Rights Watch estimated their numbers at around 10,000-15,000 in 2002. Churches have been closed down, the use of Persian in sermons banned, the publishing of Bibles restricted and Muslims strictly prohibited from attending sermons, with previous converts from Islam being put under particular surveillance. A number of Christian leaders have been killed or found murdered since the early 1990s: Assemblies of God Minister Bishop Haik Hovsepian Mehr was found stabbed to death in 1994; Reverend Mehdi Dibaj, pastor of the Church of the Assemblies of God, a convert from Islam 41 years previously, was released from prison in January 1994 but found dead by the authorities on July 2 that year; Reverend Tateos Michaelian, found murdered in July 1994; pastor Mohammad Bagher Yusefi, disappeared and was found dead in 1996, and pastor Ghorban Dordi Tourani was found dead in 2005.

Respected religious affairs journalist Ruth Gledhill has argued that, despite promises of amelioration from the current President, Hasan Rouhani, the situation for Christians has not improved at all. By the end of 2014, over 90 Christians were behind bars. Gledhill writes:

“Christians continue to be arbitrarily arrested and interrogated because of their faith. Some face ‘severe physical and psychological torture’ during detention, and simple prayer or Bible study meetings are regarded as political activities that threaten the national security of Iran.

“Christians disappear for weeks at a time while they are interrogated. They are held in solitary and questioned nightly, for hours at a time, beginning just after midnight. A key goal of the security services is to find and remove any New Testaments from the homes of Christians. Detainees are sometimes told they must to convert to Islam or their families will be killed.”[2]

Despite such threats, it has been claimed by some missionary organizations that thousands of Iranian Muslims are converting to Christianity, resulting in a growth rate of 20% per annum. Mohammed Zamir, a church leader in the UK for expatriate Iranians, has stated that hundreds of thousands of Iranians are converting to Christianity, out of control of the authorities. These claims need to be taken with a pinch of salt. The longest-lasting and most indigenous faith in the country is, of course, the ancient Zoroastrian religion, founded by the Iranian prophet Zardosht (Zarathustra, Zoroaster) somewhere between 1700 and 500 BCE, but traditionally dated to around 600 BCE. Until modern times, the religion has remained largely confined to Iran and India (where Zoroastrians are known as Parsis, having moved to the sub-continent from Iran from the 8th to 10th centuries to avoid persecution by the Muslim newcomers).[3] Although the Qur’an mainly speaks of Jews and Christians when it refers to “the people of the book” (Ahl al-kitab), one verse (22:17) speaks of the Magis (al-Majus): “As for the believers [the Muslims], those who follow the Jewish religion, the Sabaeans, the Christians, the Magians, and the idol worshippers, God will decide between them on the Last Day.”

After the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran between 633 and 651 CE, it became a matter of urgency to define the status of the Zoroastrian population. Exegetes and jurists agreed that they should be treated as scriptuaries and not pagans, which led to a degree of toleration for them and their religious practices.

Under the Islamic regime, however, this toleration has been severely strained. In November 2005, Ayatollah Ahmed Jannati, chairman of the Council of Guardians of the Constitution, disparaged Zoroastrians and other religious minorities as “sinful animals who roam the earth and engage in corruption.” When the Zoroastrians’ solitary parliamentary representative protested, he was hauled before a revolutionary tribunal. There, mullahs threatened execution before sparing his life with a warning never to challenge their declarations again. A frightened community subsequently declined to re-elect him. Writing in 2011, Sanskrity Sinha commented that “Zoroastrianism in Iran is on the verge of dying an ignominious death, with only a few thousand living in a country where their rights are suppressed.”

Sufism is another indigenous community that has suffered greatly at the hands of the Islamic regime. Sufism is the mystical trend in Islam, and in the Sunni world, across North Africa, the Middle East, and far beyond. In some periods, the many Sufi brotherhoods (tariqat) were followed by as much as 90% of the population. Sufism has been attacked in modern times, especially by the Saudi Wahhabis, and its numbers have greatly fallen. In Iran (and in regions such as Tajikistan, Afghanistan and northern India, saturated with Persian influences), although there were few orders, the culture was deeply embedded with Sufi mysticism. Persian poetry, for example, is considered one of the greatest canons of verse in the world. [4]

The Islamic regime will never dare ban the works of these poets, considered the highest achievement of Persian culture. But in a bizarre move, it has clamped down hard on Iran’s best-known Sufi order, the Ne’matollahis.[5]

Today, even though members of it are fervently pious in their devotion to the faith of the Shi’a and their twelve holy imams, the Sufis, especially the Gonabadi branch, have been persecuted. In 2006, for instance, clerics in Qom (where the important Khomeinist seminary is situated) declared Sufis to be apostates and attempted to expel them from the town and to take over their Shi’i-style religious centre. Dervishes from across Iran travelled to Qom, held several days of protests around the centre, and declared their desire for peace, their commitment to the Shi’i faith, and their loyalty to the revolution.

In spite of this display of devotion, police suppressed the protest. Over 1,000 Sufis were arrested and the religious centre was burned to the ground. The anti-Sufi campaign then moved to other cities such as Bojnurd and Isfahan, where more centres were destroyed. In 2009, the shrine of Sufi poet and philosopher Dervish Naser ‘Ali, situated in a local cemetery in Isfahan, was looted and then destroyed. Protesters who gathered outside the Majlis (Iran’s parliament) were disrupted when police arrested sixty of them.

That same year, the Green Movement for democracy in Iran was violently suppressed. It had been supported by the Gonabadi Sufis. Since then, lawyers, website managers, and others have been imprisoned, tortured and killed. On September 10, four Gonabadi activists were arraigned in Shiraz for trying to appeal their earlier convictions. Their website describes this: “At the court hearing in the case of four dervishes, Mr. Saleheddin Moradi, Mr. Farzad Darviah, Mr. Behzad Nouri and Mrs. Farzaneh Nouri that was held in Branch 16 of the appeals court of Shiraz, the representative of the prosecution contemptuously emphasized the necessity of their penitence, to discontinue… website activities… and also the maximum punishment for the mentioned dervishes.”

The attack on the Sufis of Iran reveals something particularly dark about the Islamic regime. Sufi mysticism, with its close ties to the most central aspects of Persian culture — poetry, calligraphy, music, miniature painting, the rose, the nightingale, the garden — is vital to the healthy working of Iranian society, yet the regime that asserts its right to protect the people under its rule has turned on it.

Not far from that denial of Persian values stands the greatest persecution of all: the ongoing attack made on Iran’s largest indigenous religious minority, the Baha’is. “The Baha’is of Iran,” according to Payam Akhavan, Professor of International Law at McGill University, have long been the canary in the mineshaft as far as human rights are concerned. Their treatment is the litmus test of the direction the leadership intends to take the country.”

This is a subject that has resulted in a vast outpouring of articles, reports, government debates, websites, legal appeals, protests, speeches and encyclopaedia articles. Although there have been many executions, this is not a story like that of Islamists killing Christians in the Middle East. It is something more chilling than that. It’s best parallel is the persecution of Jews in Germany in the 1930s, before the move to a “Final Solution” — a slow, steady, calculated, often bureaucratic campaign of attrition.

Baha’ism (the Baha’i Faith) is a monotheistic religion that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century out of a Shi’ite sect known as Babism.[6]

Today, it is estimated that there are about five million Baha’is across the globe, with their largest numbers among Hindu converts in India and Western converts in Europe, North and South America. The Baha’i temple in New Delhi, with over 100 million visitors, is considered by UNESCO to be one of the most visited buildings in the world. Although small in numbers, the Baha’is are racially, nationally, and religiously diverse, well organized and well integrated.

Where Babism was militant and grew embroiled in clashes with state troops in several places, Baha’ Allah abrogated jihad, advocated world peace, equality of the sexes, world brotherhood and other teachings ultimately derived from Western sources. His religion, built on a mixture of Shi’i and Sufi beliefs, was nonetheless progressive in nature, at ease with modernity, and divorced from political intrigue. This combination of religious heresy and Western social themes brought it directly in conflict with the clergy of the day and through the twentieth century. Baha’is were martyred, imprisoned, and faced with daily suspicion and animosity. For all that, their stress on education and their openness to science and professional pursuits meant that they prospered as doctors, lawyers, teachers, academics, and technicians. Some even held positions at the Shah’s court. More complicated is that many Iranian Jews converted to Baha’ism, despite this exposing them to harsher treatment.[7]

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, things changed greatly for the worse. After the fall of the Shah, Dr. James Cockcroft interviewed Ayatollah Khomeini and asked specifically about the Baha’is:

Cockroft: Will there be either religious or political freedom for the Baha’is under the Islamic government?

Khomeini: They are a political faction; they are harmful. They will not be accepted.

Cockroft: How about their freedom of religion– religious practice?

Khomeini: No.[8]

So began the first major persecution in the Middle East in modern times.[9]

In the first ten years after the Revolution, over 200 Baha’is were murdered or executed, while hundreds more were tortured and imprisoned. Tens of thousands lost jobs, access to education, pensions, and other civil rights for no other reason than that they belonged to a religion that claimed there had been two new prophets after Muhammad. It was thought by many that the regime would finally carry out a genocide of the community, then numbering around 300,000.[10]

Among thousands of incidents, two stand out as indicative of the violent tactics underlying the Revolution, its institutions, and its laws. The single greatest example of violence towards Baha’is occurred in 1983 in the southern city of Shiraz. A few years earlier, in February 1979, the suburb of Sa’diyeh had been rocked by an anti-Baha’i pogrom that left over two hundred homes and businesses looted and burned. In 1981, five Baha’i leaders, and in 1982 another three, were executed. In October and November 1982, mass arrests were carried out by local members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The stage was set for further violence.[11]

After a prolonged persecution, at the beginning of June 1983, in accordance with Islamic tradition, the 22 remaining Baha’i detainees in prison were offered four last opportunities to convert to Islam and save their lives. They all declined.

Ten women who were hanged had been charged with the crime of teaching children’s classes. The classes, known as Dars-e Akhlaq, “Morality lessons,” are similar in nature to Christian Sunday schools or Jewish religious classes for children. They teach moral behaviour that could come straight from any Judaeo-Christian ethics curriculum. All ten had been tortured and interrogated for months before their execution. The youngest, Mona Mahmudnizhad, seventeen at the time of her death, has become a symbol of Baha’i martyrdom.

It is reported that while in prison Mona was bastinadoed on the soles of her feet with a cable and forced to walk while bleeding. One account states that she kissed the hand of her executioner and then the rope itself, before putting it around her own neck. Her father was arrested and executed at about the same time. During the trial of another young victim, 23-year-old Roya Eshraqi, a veterinary student, the judge said “You put yourselves through this agony only for one word: Just say you are not a Baha’i and I’ll see that… you are released…” Ms. Eshraqi is said to have responded, “I will not exchange my faith for the whole world.”

U.S. President Ronald Reagan asked the Iranian government to show clemency. He was ignored.

What is clear again is the purely religious character of the persecution. Khomeini’s claim that the Baha’is “are a political faction” and the frequent claims that they are spies could not be farther from the truth. Baha’is are forbidden by their own doctrines to take part in any form of politics and are even dissuaded from voting in elections. They do have teachings about a future world government and international economics, but have no interest in party politics and are commanded to be loyal to whatever country they may live in. Baha’is can be sanctioned by their own institutions for breaking these rules. The Iranian government knows this perfectly well, and when judges offer life in exchange for abandonment of faith it is a clear admission of a purely religious motive.

Although clerics have called for genocide, it has became official policy to suppress the Baha’is in a more careful fashion.[12] It is highly likely that the international protests about the fate of the Baha’is may have convinced the regime that a total liquidation of the community would produce a storm of condemnation that they might find hard to weather.

In February 1991, a confidential circular[13] was issued by the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, a body set up by Khomeini in Qom, whose members were at that time all appointees of Supreme Leader ‘Ali Khamene’i. The Council has extraordinary powers. Its rulings must be treated as laws and may not be overruled. Stamped “confidential,” the circular was signed by Hujjatu’l Islam Seyyed Mohammad Golpaygani, Secretary of the Council, and approved by Ayatollah Khamene’i, who added his signature. The circular addressed “the Baha’i question” and signalled an increase in efforts to suffocate the Iranian Baha’i community in a more “silent” fashion. The document organized the methods of oppression used to persecute the Baha’is, and contained specific recommendations on how to block the progress of the Baha’i communities both inside and outside Iran. The document stated that the most excessive types of persecutions should be avoided and instead, among other things recommended, that Baha’is be expelled from universities, “once it becomes known that they are Baha’is,” to “deny them employment if they identify themselves as Baha’is” and to “deny them any position of influence.”

The systematic exclusion of Baha’i professors and students from the universities started soon after the Revolution, but became clear by 1983. In response, the Baha’is themselves tried to remedy the situation by establishing in 1987 the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education, a clandestine university that operated underground and continues nowadays mainly through the internet. Its curriculum is broad; many graduates have been credited by American and European universities for higher studies. The teachers are generally made up of Baha’i lecturers and professors who have been dismissed from their posts in the regular Iranian universities. Over the years, the university has been closed down on several occasions, many teachers have been arrested, and many remain in Iran’s prisons, serving long sentences.[14] The Bahai Institute of Higher Education in Iran has, however, received considerable support from universities, academic institutes, governments, and other bodies (such as Amnesty International) around the world, which have repeatedly petitioned the Iranian government to legalize it and permit Baha’is to attend national universities.

The Baha’is, like the Jews, have always considered education to be a primary function of a healthy society. In 1973, when the national literacy rate for women under 40 in Iran stood at 15%, the figure for Baha’i women was 100%.[15] The first Girls school in Iran was opened by Baha’is in 1899, closed down, then re-opened in 1911 as the Tarbiyyat-e Banat in Tehran, with a secular curriculum and American Baha’i women teachers. It was immensely popular, and by the 1930s there were dozens of Baha’i schools for both girls and boys. They were the best schools in the country, the academies to which many of the middle and upper classes sent their children. But in 1934, the government under Reza Shah shut them down permanently.[16] Today, Baha’i children in regular schools, the dabestans and dabirestans, suffer ill treatment. According to the Baha’i International Community, “Baha’i school children at all levels continue to be monitored and slandered by administrators and teachers in schools. Secondary school students often face pressure and harassment, and some have been threatened with expulsion. Religious studies teachers are known to insult and ridicule Baha’i beliefs. In a few reported cases, when Baha’i students attempt to clarify matters at the request of their peers, they are summoned to the school authorities and threatened with expulsion if they continue to ‘teach’ their Faith.”

In one of the cruellest phases of this persecution, the Islamic government has behaved in an identical fashion to the Islamic State terrorist organization. Across Iraq and Syria, IS has destroyed churches, shrines, ancient monuments, and cultural artefacts of deep significance in human history. The Iranian regime has demolished all the holy places of the Baha’i faith in Iran, shrines and buildings associated with their prophets, martyrs, and early followers. In Shiraz, a charming early 19th-century dwelling known as the House of the Bab, where the first of the two Baha’i prophets revealed his mission to his first followers, was summarily bulldozed shortly after the Revolution, and a mosque built on the site. This little house, which the author visited several times while living in Shiraz in the 1970s, was of historical and religious significance, with its exquisite Persian carpets, stained glass windows, and genial atmosphere.

The regime has not stopped at shrines. Over the years, many Baha’i cemeteries have been dug up and the corpses in them disinterred and scattered. As recently as April 2014, Shiraz’s Revolutionary Guards commenced the destruction of a historic Baha’i cemetery. International pressure halted this destruction for a while, but a few months later, in August, the work of demolition began again, and a concrete foundation was laid for a complex of recreational buildings. Among the 950 Baha’is who had been buried there were the ten women hanged in 1983. Incidentally, Baha’i law prohibits burial more than an hour’s distance from the place of death. (This is in conscious contradiction of the Shi’i practice of keeping corpses for months or years before sending them to be buried at one of the shrine centres in Iraq.)

The destruction of a historic Baha’i cemetery in Shiraz, Iran, by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp. (Image source: Baha’i World News Service)

This insidious process of attrition operates across the board. Baha’is face the monitoring of their movements, activities and bank accounts; the denial of their pensions and inheritances; exclusion from employment in most sectors; the closure of their shops and businesses; the prohibition of their access to publishing or copying facilities for the printing of Baha’i sacred and general literature; and the confiscation of property. Muslims who associate with Baha’is are intimidated. Anti-Baha’i writings and broadcasts are common. From January 2014 through May 2015, the Baha’i International Community documented more than 6,300 items of anti-Baha’i propaganda in Iran’s official or semi-official media. A report on the media campaign to demonize Baha’is is available here.

A particular injustice that has received considerable comment around the world is the current imprisonment of seven Baha’i leaders. They were arrested in 2008 and given to a twenty-year prison sentence in 2010. Their sentence was passed by Mohammad Moghiseh, head of Branch 28 of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court. Moghiseh is one of six regime judges accused of being behind recent crackdowns on dissidents, journalists and others. According to Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, an Iranian human rights activist in Norway, “This group is among the most notorious judges in Iran. They are known for their politicised verdicts, unfair trials [and] sentencing prisoners based on confessions made under duress.” Gissou Nia, of the US-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre (IHRDC), said: “It seems that in the courtrooms of Salavati, Moghiseh and Pirabbasi, there is [something] counter-intuitive at play — that is, the shorter the hearing, the longer the sentence.” She added: “Those cases that have made their way before this trio of revolutionary court judges, and have resulted in long terms of imprisonment or, even worse, death, read like a who’s who of the most high-profile miscarriages of justice in the Iranian legal system.”

The condemned, five men and two women, were elected members of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Iran. The Baha’i religion has no priesthood and a very limited clerical class. All the main Baha’i institutions at local, national and international level are created through open elections (without electioneering), and individuals take on their responsibilities as a religious duty. In other words, these seven Baha’is are volunteers who took on administrative functions in a time of very great danger for their faith and themselves. Known as the Yaran (Friends), they embody the injustice, irrationality, and cruelty of the Iranian regime.

Writing on the day of their final trial in Canada’s Globe and Mail, Howard Adelman (professor emeritus of philosophy at York University and founder of the Centre for Refugee Studies) lists the seven and provides short but pertinent information on who they are:

Fariba Kamalabadi, 46, whose physician father was arrested in the 1980s, tortured and imprisoned, was an honours student denied entry to university but who became a developmental psychologist while raising three children. On the first anniversary of Ms. Kamalabadi’s arrest, her youngest, Alhan, wrote an open letter expressing the “mountain load of pain and sorrow” she carried during “a year of being far from a mother.”

Jamaloddin Khanjani is a 75-year old industrialist, a father of four and a grandfather of six.

Afif Naeimi, 47, is a brilliant student who was denied entry to medical school but who became a successful industrialist. He is a father of two.

Saeid Rezaie, 51, is a Baha’i scholar and an agricultural engineer with a farming equipment business. He has three children.

Mahvash Sabet, 55, is a teacher and principal who was dismissed from public education for being a Baha’i. She served as director of the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education for 15 years. She has two children.

Behrouz Tavakkoli, 57, is a former lieutenant in the Iranian army and social worker who specialized in the care of people with disabilities. He lost his government job after the Islamic Revolution because he was a Baha’i. He has spent previous time under arrest in solitary confinement. He has two sons, one a student and the other an engineer living in Canada.

Vahid Tizfahm, 35, is an optometrist and a former member of the Baha’i National Youth Committee. He has one son.

The head of their legal team, Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi, has stated that her clients have been convicted of “spying for America and Israel, acting against national security and [engaging in] propaganda against the [Islamic Republic’s] system”, adding: “I read the dossier and fortunately or unfortunately, found in it no cause or evidence to sustain the criminal charges upheld by the prosecutor.” In an interview with Washington TV, she described the difficulties she and her fellow lawyers faced:

“When I and my colleagues accepted to act as their defense lawyers, they had not been allowed to see their families for over a year. And for some time too, they were not allowed to meet with us. After a year and a half when the investigation ended, I and the rest of the lawyers were permitted to read the dossier and we met them on one occasion in prison.”

The seven leaders are confined in Section 209 in Evin, Iran’s most notorious prison. The campaign for their release continues. A detailed summary of the injustices meted out to them has been penned by American jurist Dr. Christopher Buck J.D., and is available here. In it, Buck argues with detailed use of quotations that the trial and sentencing were in contradiction of Iran’s constitution, but argues that the protections offered in that document are always suspended if anything is deemed contrary to “Islamic criteria”.

All of the above could be expanded on over a dozen articles or more. But I would like to end on a positive note. Iran, a country whose clerical leadership has for decades instructed the population to chant “Death to Israel” in its mosques and on its streets, terrorizes its religious minorities and threatens its Baha’i population with slow extinction. Israel, on the other hand, the one country in the world that almost every other country condemns as an evil Zionist entity, is the only country in the Middle East that offers full-time protection to its own religious minorities, be they Christians, Muslims, or Baha’is. Israel hosts the two holiest Baha’i shrines, the seat of the supreme Baha’i legislative body, the Universal House of Justice, gardens, a cemetery, their international archives, and other foundations. One day, a Baha’i temple as original in design as the other temples on five continents will be built atop Mount Carmel. Every year, thousands of Baha’i pilgrims from around the world come to perform visitation at the shrines. The Baha’i World Center has been designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site and is today one of the most popular destinations for tourists to Israel.

This single fact alone is the clearest evidence of how wholly different Iran is from Israel: Iran is a murderous theocracy while Israel is a thoroughly tolerant democracy. Why, then, do so many Western states and the UN, condemn Israel while bending over backwards to accommodate every demand Iran makes in its bid to build nuclear weapons, expand its terrorist influence, and threaten the West?

The Iranian leadership must now feel invulnerable; it seems that no matter what they do, the Western powers will let them get away with it. This sense of invulnerability, if not checked, will mean even harsher treatment of religious minorities and quite possibility a fast-track impetus towards a genocide of the Baha’i population, as well as the accelerated murder of others.

Denis MacEoin has a PhD in Persian Studies from King’s College, Cambrdge. He has written many books, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries about the Baha’is and their predecessors.


[1] Dr. Esther Webman, director of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, has said the tolerance is a mere façade.

[2] Citing a 2015 report, The Persecution of Christians in Iran, from the UK all-party Christians in Parliament group.

[3] Regarding Iran, in a 2009 report, the U.S. State Department declared that “the [Iranian] Government estimates there are 30,000 to 35,000 Zoroastrians, a primarily ethnic Persian minority; however, Zoroastrian groups claim to have 60,000 adherents.”

[4] The majority of these great poets – whose work has been translated into many languages – were Sufi mystics: Rumi (1207-1273, today known as America’s favourite poet), Hafez (1325-1389), Sa’di (1210-1291), Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), Attar (1110-1221), Sana’i (d. 1131/41), and dozens more. Every Iranian home has a copy of Hafez’s Divan alongside a copy of the Qur’an. Iranians, even peasants, will quote at length from this mystical poetry. Traditional singers use poetry for their lyrics. That most exquisite of all Persian arts, calligraphy, is seen everywhere in renditions of famous poems. In the famous city of Shiraz, the tombs of Hafez and Sa’di are daily visited by pilgrims from around the country. A series of radio programmes without parallel in the West, Barnama-ye Golha (The Flowers Programme), was broadcast in Iran for twenty-three years, from 1956 to 1979 (when the regime imposed a general ban on music), discussing the links between Persian poetry and musical traditions.

[5] The Ne’matollahis, and specifically on its chief branch, the Gonabadi-Ne’matollahis. The Ne’matollahi order was founded by Shah Ne’matollah Vali (1330-1431), an Iranian Sufi shaykh and poet. Soon after the establishment of the Shi’ite Safavid dynasty in 1501, the order declared itself Shi’i. Today, the Gonabadi branch, which emerged in 1861 following the death of the last overall Ne’matollahi shaykh, is fervently pious in its devotion to the faith of the Shi’a and their twelve holy imams.

[6] The fullest account of this movement is to be found in Denis MacEoin, The Messiah of Shiraz: Studies in Early and Middle Babism, 738 pp., Brill, Leyden, 2009. Readers should also consult, Abbas Amanat, Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844-1850, 477 pp., Cornell U.P., Ithaca, N.Y., 1989. Its two prophet-founders, Sayyid ‘Ali Muhammad Shirazi, the Bab [the Gate] (1819-1850) and Mirza Husayn-‘Ali Nuri, Baha’ Allah (Baha’u’llah) (1817-1892) were born Shi’i Iranians. The Bab, shot by a firing squad in Tabriz in 1850, is buried in the famous golden-domed shrine on the slopes of Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel. Baha’ Allah, exiled to Ottoman Syria, is buried in a shrine outside the city of Acco.

[7] See Mehrdad Amanat, Jewish Identities in Iran: Resistance and Conversion to Islam and the Baha’i Faith, I. B. Tauris, London, 2011.

[8] James Cockcroft, “Iran’s Khomeini,” an exclusive interview by Jim Cockcroft, SEVEN DAYS, February 23, 1979, Volume III, Number 1, pp. 17-24.

[9] The most comprehensive accounts of this phenomenon are three major reports by the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, a non-profit organization based in New Haven, funded by the US State Department as well as the Canadian government, private foundations and other donors. The reports are available online: “A Faith Denied“, “Crimes Against Humanity“, and “Community Under Siege“. Their work has been reinforced by Dr. Nabila Ghanea’s 2003 book, Human Rights, the U.N. and the Baha’is in Iran, a 640-page report by an experienced human rights expert.

[10] In a 1982 study of the persecution, Iran’s Secret Pogrom, British author Geoffrey Nash predicted such an outcome.

[11] In its Executive Report at the heads of its lengthy report on these incidents, the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center provides this summary: In February 1983, the Revolutionary Court in Shiraz accidentally sent an internal circular intended for distribution within the Revolutionary Guard Corps to the offices of a local newspaper, Khabar-i Junub. The circular stated that the Court had issued an order for the execution of twenty-two members of the local Baha’i community. The victims were not named. The newspaper published this information following it up with an interview with the Head of the Revolutionary Court, Hojjatolislam Qaza’i, ominously headlined: “I Warn the Baha’is to come to the Bosom of Islam.” At the time one detainee had already been executed in January. Three more prominent Baha’i detainees were executed in March 1983.

The Khabar-i Junub article provoked an international outcry. The Islamic Republic regime responded by exploiting the foreign pressure as evidence to support its narrative that the Baha’i Faith was the artificial creation of the superpowers with the aim of undermining Iranian society. In a widely reported speech in May 1983, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, dismissed international protests with the comment: “Were these people not spies, you would not be raising your voices.”

Six male detainees were executed on June 16. Ten female detainees were hanged in Shiraz’s Chawgun Square on June 18. Of the two remaining male detainees who died in 1983, one was executed at the end of June and the other died while in prison custody.

Although the Iranian authorities have never explicitly named the Shiraz twenty-two, the IHRDC has identified twenty-two Baha’i detainees who died in 1983 in the custody of the Shiraz authorities. Twenty-one were executed and one victim died in prison after months of abuse. We believe that it is reasonable to conclude from the existing evidence that it was the original intention of the Shiraz Revolutionary Court that all twenty-two be executed for their refusal to recant their faith.

[12] Moojan Momen, “The Babi and Baha’i community of Iran: a case of ‘suspended genocide’?“, Journal of Genocide Studies, volume 7, number 2, June 2005, pp. 221-241, available at:

[13] UN Doc. E/CN.4/1993/41, Commission on Human Rights, 49th session, 28 January 1993, Final report on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran by the Special Representative of the Commission on Human Rights, Mr. Reynaldo Galindo Pohl, paragraph 310. See also “Iran’s secret blueprint for the destruction of the Baha’i community.”

[14] Friedrich W. Affolter, “Resisting Educational Exclusion: The Bahai Institute of Higher Education in Iran“, International Journal of Diaspora, Indigenous and Minority Education 1 (1) 2007: 65–77.

[15] See Tahirih Tahririha-Danesh, “The Right to Education: The Case of the Bahá’ís in Iran“, in Tahririha-Danesh, Bahá’í-Inspired Perspectives on Human Rights, Juxta Publishing Co., 2001, pp. 216–230.

[16] See Soli Shahvar (Haifa University), The Forgotten Schools: The Baha’is and Modern Education in Iran 1899-1934, I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2009.

The Self-Contradictory Liberals by Denis MacEoin

  • Many liberals — not least the large numbers of students involved in campus demonizations of Israel, Jews, white people and other supposed public enemies — are morally and politically confused, not to say profoundly selective and bigoted, often in direct contradiction to their own expressed principles of peace, tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism.

  • These liberals repeatedly contradict their own ideals, not least when it comes to free speech, Israel, the Middle East, Islam, and the rights of Muslim women. Many self-declared liberals behave much as did the Nazis of the early years of the Third Reich.
  • It would appear that, whatever Israelis and their government do may be dismissed as mere “whitewashing” to cover Israel’s original “sin” of being Jewish.
  • Using an abusive form of political correctness and insisting on an absolutist version of multiculturalism, many devotees of liberalism often betray the ideals for which earlier human rights activists, feminists, anti-racists, and freedom fighters fought and even gave their lives.
  • Amnesty International, a left-wing non-governmental organization (NGO) put its pro-Muslim politics above women’s rights — a remarkable step for the world’s best-known human rights agency.

It is no secret that politicians on both the “right” and “left” lie, dissemble, equivocate, misrepresent, misinform, falsify, whitewash and cover up. Not even the noble and honest Cicero was immune to fudging and shifting sides. It is the nature of politics. For much of the time we put up with it until it grows so far-fetched, we can no longer shut our eyes and let ourselves be lulled into further acquiescence. We all put up with this, do our best to spot the lies, or rely on investigative journalists to dig beneath the surface of what governments claim or their opponents hide.

But something strange has been happening to people calling themselves liberals. (Note: The term “liberal” differs enormously between the U.S. and the UK. Americans use it to describe anyone from the Democratic Party through to those even farther to the left. But the British use it for people from the political centre towards the right, and it has no connotations of far left extremism. It is used here in the American sense.) The far left — the Marxists, Trotskyites etc. — the campus extremists, even the new leadership of Britain’s Labour Party have started to contradicting their own ideals, not least when it comes to free speech, Israel, the Middle East, Islam, and the rights of Muslim women.

All sides of the political spectrum share many ideals in their original form: advocacy of human rights, equal justice under the law; the rights of racial and religious minorities, homosexuals, workers, women. They also share an opposition to racism, anti-Semitism, fascism, and religious fundamentalism. These are ideals in any democratic nation — views demonstrated by modern legislation across a host of democratic parliaments.

But many liberals appear to distort all this. They take extreme positions, guided by three linked but often confused issues: political correctness, cultural relativism and moral relativism. There seems to be a deep-seated belief, not only that all cultures possess and practice different values (the original premise of neutral cultural relativism in anthropology); or that, God forbid!, Western values are better than non-Western ones. Many liberals appear, instead, to think, that non-Western values are better or certainly no worse, than Western ones.

The idea that Western states, heirs to imperialism and still practitioners of indirect colonialism, have imposed their values on the rest of the world, makes the values of the “victim” — the “oppressed” and the “occupied” — superior to those of the West. But it is precisely Western values and laws that have been responsible for the very concept of human rights, for efforts to free former colonies, to bring aid to Third World countries, to grant rights to minorities, to introduce high-quality education, to advocate for women’s rights, and more.

No other former imperialists, not least those of the many Muslim empires throughout history, have acted in this way towards the subjects of their former colonies. Unfortunately, many self-proclaimed liberals have responded to this commitment to human rights by charging the West with some form of original sin requiring Europeans and Americans to carry a heavy weight of guilt (as documented so well by the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner in books such as The Tyranny of Guilt).

One of the greatest examples of the excessive focus on the West is universal condemnation of the transatlantic slave trade, supposedly divorced from the Muslim/Arab slave trades, which continues without protest from these liberals in some places to this day. This, even though the Islamic trade was larger and longer-lasting than the Western one. Mauritania today holds anti-slavery protestors in prison, despite slavery there having been outlawed since 1981.

It is not hard to see why so many liberals– not least the large numbers of students involved in campus demonizations of Israel, Jews, whites and other supposed public enemies — are morally and politically confused, not to say profoundly selective and bigoted, in direct contradiction to their own expressed principles of peace, toleration, diversity, and multiculturalism.

If this sounds a little abstract, here are some examples to show this confusion at its worst.

As a telling example of hypocritical behaviour, for many years now, a range of LGBT (Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgenders) organizations have campaigned against the state of Israel. They have marched, carrying rainbow banners, alongside far-left extremists and far-right Muslims, shouting abuse against Israel and calling for an end to the “occupation” of the West Bank.

The annual National Conference on LGBT Equality, Creating Change, is an event held by the US National LGBTQ Task Force, based in Washington D.C., one of the most important bodies in the struggle for gay rights. The 2016 Creating Change conference was held in the Hilton Chicago between 20 and 24 of January.

Writing about this event, leading human rights and pro-LGBT activist and lawyer Melanie Nathan declared that, “This week will go down in history as one of the saddest and most destructive, ever, in the lives of LGBTQ Jews. We became the target of antisemitism disguised as protesting alleged ‘Israeli oppression.’ Anyone who truly understands the history, the context and milieu will clearly access the bottom line and that came in the form of the chant that served to helm the onslaught by LGBTQ protesters at the Creating Change 2016 Conference, who yelled: ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’.” As is well known, the river is the Jordan and the sea is the Mediterranean, meaning that Israel will be replaced by a large Palestinian state from which Jews will have been ethnically cleansed.

A pro-Israel LGBT organization, A Wider Bridge, had planned to host an all-inclusive Shabbat reception on Friday 22nd, with the aim of introducing delegates to visiting Israeli LGBT guests. On the 18th, however, conference organizers caved in to anti-Israel demands and banned the reception. Many people strongly objected to this divisive move; on the following day the banning decision was reversed. Clearly, trouble lay ahead, and, true to form, an enormous band of Anti-Israel demonstrators from the LGBT community disrupted the reception, chanting the rhyming slogan above while carrying printed and home-made posters saying “Zionism sucks,” “No Pride in Apartheid”.

That Palestinians sometimes beat and kill gay men is irrelevant to their way of thinking, as is the moral inconvenience that homosexuality is illegal in all Muslim states, and punished there by imprisonment, execution, or mob violence. These facts are of no apparent interest to those determined to slander Israel at all costs.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East — and most of Africa and Asia — where gay rights are guaranteed by law, where Gay Pride parades are held, and where gay tourism is encouraged. Yet, surprisingly, LGBT groups in the West never march or demonstrate to condemn countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and others where gay men are hanged from cranes, beheaded, stoned or thrown from high buildings.

LGBT attacks on Israel and the distortion of gay rights as “pinkwashing” — claiming that the state of Israel uses its freedoms for all its gay inhabitants in order to whitewash its supposedly evil persecution of the Palestinian people — represent something psychologically troubling. Israel should be a major source of pride and admiration for LGBT people. Yet the very idea of rights for the LGBT community is simply cast aside in favour of deeply distasteful, profoundly misguided, and frequently anti-Semitic agitation that calls for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. Liberal politics, post-colonialism, and a staggering inverted moral relativism work together to cancel out all the good that Israel does and all the safety it offers to all its citizens.

The charge of “pinkwashing” carries an even broader message. It would appear that, whatever Israelis and their government do may be dismissed as mere “whitewashing” to cover Israel’s original “sin” of being Jewish — whether it be the remarkable international aid it provides in disaster-stricken regions or even the work of Israeli volunteers rescuing and feeding refugees in the enemy state of Syria, the 17 field hospitals and surgical centres Israel runs to help Syrians, its many advances in life-saving medical treatment, or the protection it affords to many persecuted minority religious communities from Christians to Baha’is. This blanket condemnation of Israel also carries another message: that whatever crimes other nations commit — from Iran to Saudi Arabia to Sudan, or whatever acts of terror Muslim groups or Palestinians carry out — these may be passed over in silence or even supported. And they are. There is even another clear message: that even the most positive side of the people we hate is really just a cover for sinister conspiracies. This view falls in line with the conspiracy theories familiar from Tsarist Russia, the Third Reich, Soviet Russia, the Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq. Those are never healthy models to follow, above all for those who think of themselves as moral or enlightened.

Supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the Palestinians, members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, member states of the UN, and hundreds of other anti-Israel and anti-Zionist campaigners, supposed intellectuals, and politicians repeatedly argue that Israel is an illegal colonial entity, and that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is illegal under international law. In fact, Israel’s presence in the West Bank is perfectly legal.[1]

If there are allegations that Israel has taken land by force and claimed sovereignty contrary to international law, it has not. All Israel’s wars have so far been defensive. Either Israel was attacked first or has responded to a legitimate casus belli (legal cause for war) such as the closure by Egypt of the Strait of Tiran in 1967). There are allegations that Israel carries out “ethnic cleansing;” it does not — and much more.[2]

But when Israel’s supporters point out that its opponents are referring to lies that have no relevance to Israel — and when these supporters list UN resolutions (notably resolutions 181, 242, and 338), League of Nations rulings establishing the Palestine Mandate, and a host of other documents designed to enforce international law — Israel’s opponents shout and declare all these legal instruments to be invalid — for no apparent legal reason, but presumably that they demonstrate the falsity of their own claims. In other words, they show themselves to be not in the least respectful of international law. International law seems respected by them only if it can be distorted to be used as a weapon against Israel.

On the face of it, liberals often claim to share values that the rest of us hold, too. They declare themselves to be anti-racist, they call for rights for women, for sexually anomalous people, for the restoration of rights for people living in former colonies, for the rights of formerly oppressed people to self-determination, and much else that is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But they seem never satisfied by the straightforward promotion of these rights through democratic processes. They appear to prefer angry demonstrations, occasional rioting, and even sometimes terrorism.[3] Using an abusive form of political correctness and insisting on an absolutist version of multiculturalism, many devotees of liberalism often betray the ideals for which earlier human rights activists, feminists, anti-racists, and freedom fighters fought.

Take racism: Liberals rightly work against discriminating against people of colour. But when it comes to the Jewish people, history’s most abused and persecuted ethnic and religious community, the pretence of being anti-racist is dropped and hardline liberals explode into racist fury, adopting all the techniques of far-right anti-Semites. In Europe, large numbers of liberal activists have joined forces with ultra-conservative Muslims to march through the streets of Britain, the Netherlands and elsewhere chanting “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas,” or listening as their terror-supporting Muslim allies sing “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud: Jaysh Muhammad sa ya-ud” (which loosely translates as “Remember the Battle of Khaybar, O you Jews: the army of Muhammad is coming back.” Khaybar refers to the 629 A.D. assault led by Muhammad against the last Jewish tribe in Arabia.

July 2014: Demonstrators in The Hague, Netherlands chant “Death to the Jews”, while flying the black flag of jihad. (Image source: Twitter/@SamRaalte)

Were these left-wing demonstrators to chant and march and threaten to exterminate any other race, they would be known for the racist thugs they really are. But Jews are apparently fair game. Many self-declared liberals behave much as did the Nazis of the early years of the Third Reich.

This clear anti-Semitism by the liberal-Islamist alliance is given another ironic twist that seeks to cover its racism by placing the argument on what appears to be a purely political footing. Although the UN Charter and other mainstream instruments call for the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination, as in Ireland, Turkey, South Africa, India, Pakistan and elsewhere liberal support for self-determination is betrayed by an almost total refusal to recognize the rights of one ethnic (and ultimately indigenous) people: the Jews. Of the post-imperialist states, one alone is singled out for opprobrium: Israel. Rhetoric about Israelis being imperialists, colonizers or fascists, leads one to think that Israel’s enemies know nothing about the vast Ottoman empire that was the last legitimate regime to control the territories from which Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the disputed territories all spring. The “Palestine will be free” marchers evidently know nothing much about history. Israelis — just like citizens in their neighbouring states — are a people freed from the tyranny of the Muslim Ottomans and awarded a new destiny precisely because Europe’s imperial powers, the League of Nations, and the United Nations, relinquished their right to rule in favour of Jewish sovereignty.

Today’s new anti-Semites ignore or are wholly ignorant of the long and unprecedented history of the Jewish diaspora.[4] No other people has longed for self-determination for so long or with such sustained intensity.

To leave Israel for a moment, we can find an important anomaly among liberal feminists who actively support the wearing of the Muslim veil and even choose to turn a blind eye to the misogyny of Islamic law, forced marriages, child marriages, female genital mutilation, honour killings and the stoning of women accused of adultery. This is, perhaps, the most hideous example of hypocrisy and double standards — finding fault with even the most trivial of Western attitudes to women while doing nothing to protect Muslim women simply because it supposedly is “racist” to condemn Muslims. It appears that the fear of being called racist is more important to many than a genuine concern for the human rights of a group that is clearly oppressed. A Western man calling women “chicks” may expect the full force of feminist wrath, but a Muslim man who beats his wife because the Qur’an advises him to, is exonerated because wife-beating is part of his different and purportedly inviolable culture.

Writing in Tablet magazine last year, Heather Rogers relates how she at first dismissed criticism of misogyny within Muslims communities because “Westerners have no right to tell Muslims how to live” and downplayed arguments about the rate of Islamic honour killings. It was only on later reflection, she said, that she began to pose questions such as, “Why aren’t more non-Muslim feminists speaking up about violence against women in Muslim-majority countries?” She then gives an example of how liberal feminists distort matters. “In searching the Internet,” she writes, “I begin to find the vestiges of a discussion of the subject among Leftists, which suggests some reasons why many non-Muslim feminists choose to stay silent. One controversy is to do with an essay Adele Wilde-Blavatsky wrote in 2012 for The Feminist Wire, an online women’s studies journal. Her piece says the hijab is a symbol of male oppression. A storm ensued. One response, signed by 77 academics, writers, and activists, said the essay was an assertion of Wilde-Blavatsky’s “white feminist privilege and power.” Instead of facilitating a discussion, however, The Feminist Wire editorial collective took down the comments, pulling the essay along with them.”

Rogers then cites the 2010 case when Amnesty International fired the head of its Gender Unit, Gita Sahgal, who had protested the charity’s alliance with a former Taliban fighter and misogynist, Moazzem Begg, an extremist who still refuses to condemn the stoning to death of women. Sahgal’s credentials as a secular Asian woman defending the rights of Muslim women in general were and are undeniable. But Amnesty International, a left-wing non-governmental organization (NGO) put its pro-Muslim politics above women’s rights — a remarkable step for the world’s best-known human rights agency.

It is surprising, yet all too predictable, to find pro-peace organizations and political leaders supporting violent and intolerant opinions and groups. The simplest example is the current leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn regards war as a last resort and has been active in a number of anti-war movements, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the hyper-pacifist Stop the War Coalition, which informs his current position in parliament. He continues to oppose renewing Trident, Britain’s nuclear missile capacity. We have to assume that Corbyn is, in principle, opposed to the use of violence except in extreme circumstances. How, then, is it that he has described the brutal terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah — the latter declared on 11 March to be a terrorist state by the Arab League — both of which have an open agenda of committing genocide against Jews, as “my friends”? He explains this as “diplomatic language in the context of dialogue.” Dialogue? This answer confirms that Corbyn has read neither the Hamas Covenant nor Hezbollah’s Risala maftuha (Open Letter). How does a man of peace enter into dialogue with Hamas? Here are two sentences from its Covenant/Charter:

“Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement… There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.” [Author’s emphasis]

I have an Arabic copy of the Covenant in front of me: the translation is perfectly correct.

Here, from the Hizbullah Open Letter, is much the same thing:

Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.

We vigorously condemn all plans for negotiation with Israel, and regard all negotiators as enemies, for the reason that such negotiation is nothing but the recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Therefore we oppose and reject the Camp David Agreements, the proposals of King Fahd, the Fez and Reagan plan, Brezhnev’s and the French-Egyptian proposals, and all other programs that include the recognition (even the implied recognition) of the Zionist entity. [Author’s emphases]

Dialogue, anyone? In his obsession with dialogue, Corbyn has gone further. In a notorious interview with Stephen Nolan on Radio Ulster last year, Corbyn was asked six times, “Are you prepared to condemn what the IRA did?” — referring to their use of terrorist violence. Each time he refused to give a straight answer. As Nolan himself put it at the beginning of the interview, quoting from a Daily Telegraph article in June: “This is a man who sympathised with violent Irish republicanism in the 80s, invited IRA representatives to the Commons a fortnight after the Brighton bombing in 1984 and at a Troops Out meeting in 1987 he stood for a moment’s silence for eight IRA terrorists killed in an SAS ambush.” He is also a man who invited Hamas and Hezbollah representatives into the UK parliament. Even The Guardian, regarded by many as anti-Israeli, has castigated Corbyn for this and his other associations with terrorists and anti-Semites.

It does not stop there. During an interview with one of Britain’s most eminent political journalists, Andrew Marr, Corbyn called for dialogue with Islamic State. A week later, in The Spectator, Toby Young wrote an article entitled, “Jeremy Corbyn and the hard left are wilfully blind to the evils of Islamist Nazis.” Of course, Corbyn himself did not volunteer to fly out to Raqqa to have a cosy chat with Islamic State’s self-proclaimed leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in a spirit of dialogue.

What is the reason for this staggering naïveté? You can find some of the answer by looking at again at the Hamas Covenant and Hizbullah’s Open Letter. Here are some sentences from the former:

The Islamic Resistance Movement [i.e. Hamas] found itself at a time when Islam has disappeared from life. Thus rules shook, concepts were upset, values changed and evil people took control, oppression and darkness prevailed, cowards became like tigers: homelands were usurped, people were scattered and were caused to wander all over the world, the state of justice disappeared and the state of falsehood replaced it. Nothing remained in its right place.

Here is a single statement from the latter:

As for our friends, they are all the world’s oppressed peoples.

In other words, both Hamas and Hizbullah supposedly exist to fight for the rights of the oppressed, Franz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth,” the victims of Western imperialism and colonialism, of American arrogance, of a worldwide Jewish/Zionist/Masonic conspiracy. What socialist would not reach out to condemn his own people and his own culture, would not repudiate his own history, merely to reach out to these victims? If Hamas, Hizbullah, Islamic State, al-Qa’ida, the Iranian regime, and all the other promoters of violence proclaim themselves to be the champions of the downtrodden masses, are they then to be applauded, rewarded and financed?

It is not just the “hard left” that does this. The broad liberal press, newspapers — such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Independent, Haaretz — together with a broad consensus of politicians and church leaders, are always happy to tell us that when terrorist groups maim and kill innocent civilians it is not their fault, for the conditions of oppression under which they live have purportedly given them no choice other than to fight back; that the Palestinians have given up hope, that they and their children have no other choice but to shoot and stab their way to yet more years of failure, despair and security measures.

Most of us in the West have much to thank many real liberals for: the abolition of slavery, the cause of civil rights and anti-racism, recognition of the rights of homosexuals, empathy for the disabled, free education, the campaign against religious intolerance, and much more. Liberals share these achievements with many others from the “right” and centre, with Jewish and Christian ethical standards, with a growing sense of a shared humanity as set out in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But many pseudo-liberals have betrayed these same values and proven themselves unworthy of the work of their own ancestors — men and women who would never have sat side by side with terrorists, lied about Israel, fostered anti-Semitism or tolerated the abuse of women and children.[5] In all likelihood they would never have denounced the values of Western civilization, or valued the monstrous over the humane.

Dr. Denis MacEoin is an academic and journalist specializing in Islam and the Middle East.

The Secret War of Agence France Presse against Israel by Yves Mamou

  • Biased information about Israel in the French press is not an episodic occurrence. It is a systematic one. The main engine of this biased information industry is blatantly the Agence France Presse.

  • It is so thoroughly a “pro-Palestinian news agency” that this French institution does not see anything unethical about hiring Palestinian activists as reporters: “Nasser Abu Baker, the chairman of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, the leading force for the boycott of Israeli journalists and media, also writes for the influential French news agency.”
  • The same bias appears in the media and news agencies all over the developed world, including Reuters, the BBC and the AP. Why, when it comes to Israel, is such a misinterpretation of reality so generalized in the press? The only answer is that a war is in progress: a war of delegitimization.

On July 15, 2016, after the truck ramming that killed 84 people in Nice, France, Agence France Presse (AFP) released a report entitled, “When Vehicles Become Weapons”. It is the duty of a large news agency such as AFP to list, for its customers, examples of countries that are suffering from vehicular terrorism.

Concerning Israel, we can read in the third paragraph: “In Israel and the Palestinian territories, car-ramming attacks have featured heavily in a wave of violence that has killed at least 215 Palestinians, 34 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese since October last year”.

A naïve reader might understand that in Israel and Palestinian territories, Jews and Muslims — or Israelis and Palestinians — find it amusing to use their vehicles to kill innocent passersby. He might think also that Jews are far better players of this gamer than are Muslims, because they killed “215 Palestinians” against only “34 Israelis.”

As the website Honest Reporting noticed:

“In fact, the total number of Israelis who have committed car ramming attacks against Palestinians is exactly zero, but a reader would have no way of knowing that. To the contrary, the AFP’s language gives the incorrect appearance that more Palestinians are targeted by car ramming attacks than Israelis.”

Biased information about Israel in the French press is not an episodic occurrence. It is a systematic one. The main engine of this biased information industry is blatantly the Agence France Presse.

AFP — like Reuters, Associated Press or Bloomberg — is a news agency with offices all over the world (150 countries and 200 bureaus). But it is not a private company; it is supposed to be a cooperative owned by customers (newspapers, radios and TV channels), but it is actually a state-owned company, heavily subsidized due to the large number of subscriptions from different French government ministries — especially the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The managing director of AFP is appointed by the government. AFP is a tool of French diplomacy and is considered an arm of France’s cultural international influence.

AFP has a large “bureau” in Jerusalem and its journalists have an enormous influence on the European and Middle Eastern press. This influence is enormous because its reports are literally copied-and-pasted by newspapers and countless websites in France and Europe.

The terrorist attack on June 8, 2016 at the Sarona Market in Tel Aviv is a good example of the systematically biased headlines sent by AFP to its customers.

Three types of biased headlines can be documented.

  • If You Do Not Like the Reality, Change the Narrative of the Reality. Example: In Le Figaro, the headline was, “Tel Aviv, Four Dead after a Gunfight [fusillade].” The word fusillade means “gunfight” or “exchange of fire.” But what happened at the Sarona Market was not a “fusillade” it was a cold-blooded mass murder committed by two armed Palestinians against unarmed Israeli citizens. What happened in Tel Aviv was the same as what happened in Paris on November 13, 2015, when 130 people sitting in a concert hall, cafés and restaurants were shot dead by extremist Muslim terrorists. But no parallel of this type has been reported in the French media.
  • In Israel, Islamist Terrorism Does Not Exist. It is a War of “National Liberation.” Example: For media such as L’Express, or BFMTV (news channel), a “bloody attack (happened) close to the headquarters of the army.” In reality, the closeness of Sarona Market to the army headquarters is irrelevant. But the goal of this headline is to reinforce the illusion that the terrorists were targeting the Israeli Defense Forces. For the media, Palestinians are at war against “the occupation”: Palestinian army against Israeli army
  • The Only Victim is the Palestinian. The third type of headlines tries to reverse the perception of who is the murderer and who is the victim. For Le Monde and Le Parisien, “After a murderous gunfight [fusillade], Israel suspends 83,000 visas for Palestinians.” This implies that Israel is practicing a collective punishment against innocent people. For the French press, as usual, the “real” victims of Palestinian terrorism are the Palestinians themselves. The same media, by the way, failed to acknowledge multiple Palestinian celebrations that broke out in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and eastern Jerusalem after news of the murders in Tel Aviv, or place them in context of the incitement to violence which has fueled the current wave of Palestinian attacks against Israelis.

The “pro-Palestinian” bias is so glaring that many people in France call now AFP, “Agence France Palestine.”

It is so thoroughly a “pro-Palestinian news agency” that this French institution does not see anything unethical about hiring Palestinian activists as reporters. According to the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA):

“Nasser Abu Baker, the chairman of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, the leading force for the boycott of Israeli journalists and media, also writes for the influential French news agency… for more than a decade, Abu Baker has also worked as a reporter for AFP covering Israeli-Palestinian affairs. Two Israeli journalists who cover the Palestinians confirmed to CAMERA that Abu Baker continues to work for the news agency. One of those reporters checked his information with three Palestinian journalists, who also confirmed that Abu Baker still reports for AFP while he serves as a senior official at the PJS. Abu Baker’s Facebook account also indicates that he works for AFP”.

The Reader Must Never Forget Who is the “Victim” and Who is “Oppressor”. News from AFP also has another characteristic. It systematically – yes, systematically – qualifies the West Bank as “Palestinian occupied territory”. When news is about East Jerusalem, the AFP systematically mentions “annexed and occupied by Israel.” Is this maniacal precision neutral information? It would be neutral if AFP were doing the same for Tibet “annexed and occupied by the Chinese”; for Cyprus, “annexed and occupied by Turkey”; and for Crimea, “annexed and occupied by Russia.” Around the world, there are dozens of “annexed and occupied territories.” But AFP applies this formulation only for Jerusalem. The same is true for the West Bank: it is always referred to with the slogan, “occupied by Israel.”

What is the goal of this obsessive repetition? It is probably to ensure the reader never forgets that Israel has no legitimacy in the West Bank and that any Palestinian killer is not an Islamic extremist but a freedom fighter busy “liberating” supposedly “occupied” territory. But since the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964, and the “occupied territories” came under Israel’s control only in 1967, what was the PLO “liberating”? To the AFP, the murderer is the real victim, and the Jews murdered in Tel Aviv are only meant to be seen as dead symbols of an “occupation.”

In every wave of violence, AFP reports usually mention, at the end of almost each news item about Israel, that “Israel, Jerusalem and the Palestinians territories are embroiled in internal violence, in which 207 Palestinians, 32 Israelis, 2 Americans, 1 Eritrean and 1 Sudanese have been killed since October 1st, according to a counting made by AFP.”

The figures vary, but at the end of each report about acts of terrorism, the AFP adds: “Most of Palestinians killed are perpetrators or presumed perpetrators of attacks.” (AFP. 10/06/2016 – 14:42:04). This maniacal breakdown by ethnic group is done only for Israel. There is no such counting for Syria. There is no such counting for Tibet. There is no such counting for Nigeria. What is the goal? To make the reader notice the imbalance that more Palestinians are killed, which supposedly means a “disproportionate” number, even though in the Geneva conventions, “disproportionality” has nothing to do with an equal body count.[1] But go try to parse that to an impatient and confused public.

AFP appears to be trying to lure you into nurturing the suspicion that many of the Palestinians were shot in cold blood.

You will notice also the phrase “Israel, Jerusalem and the Palestinians territories,” a distinction repeated day after day to remind people that Israel’s international legitimacy and claim to the holy city of Jerusalem might be under dispute.

Palestinians are not Islamists like other Islamists. News from AFP never mentions that the Palestinian murderers shout “Allahu Akbar” [“Allah is the Greatest”] while they are stabbing, shooting, and ramming into Israelis. They never say that the terrorists who survived, explained that they wanted to become “shahids” [martyrs] in order to have 72 virgins who await them in gardens of Allah. This simple truth would destroy the system of lies built by the AFP, which portrays Palestinians not as Islamists like other terrorists, but as “activists” fighting for the “liberation” of their country.

A Denial of Palestinian Islamist Terrorism. AFP keeps systematically refusing to call an Islamic terrorist a “terrorist,” especially if this terrorist is a Palestinian. All of them are “activists,” “militants” or “attackers.” In AFP news, the word terrorist appears only within quotation marks when the police or government officials speak about a “terrorist.” The AFP says this is the proof that the agency refuses any value judgement. For AFP, the words “terrorism” and “terrorist” would imply a moral judgement (it is bad) and not a designation for a type of political fight. This rule, however, is applied systematically only to Israel. In the item entitled, “When Vehicles Become Weapons,” mentioned above, the first sentence is: “Transforming a vehicle into a simple but deadly weapon of terror…,” showing that for the truck-ramming in France, the word “terror” is not emphatic or connected to a moral judgment.

When Palestinians murder Israelis in vehicle-ramming attacks, Agence France Press never labels the murderer a “terrorist.” All of them are “activists,” “militants” or “attackers.” But when a Tunisian-born Islamist terrorist murdered 84 people in Nice, France in July 2016, by ramming a truck into a crowd of people (pictured above), the AFP called that “terror.” (Image source: Sky News video screenshot)

In 2015, the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF), a federation of around sixty Jewish organizations in France, ordered a group of professional journalists to look into how the AFP produces its news on Israel. The report, called “The AFP Faces Palestinian Propaganda: October-November 2014,” has — not out of shyness — never been published; instead it was sent to the managing director of AFP.

What do we find in this report? A survey of many value judgements!

  • Abusive of terms, or intemperate comments: Moshe Feiglin, a member of Israel’s Knesset, for example, was labeled “a sulfurous MK from Likud” (AFP, 13 October 2014, 12:22). Avigdor Lieberman who was at that date foreign minister (he is now minister of defense) is an “ultra-nationalist hawk”(AFP, 18 October 2014. 21:52). On the Palestinian side, however, Ismail Radwan is just a “leader of Hamas,” and Hamas itself (a movement listed as an international terrorist organization by all Western countries), is chastely presented as a “radical Islamist organization.”
  • For AFP, the only “Extremists” are Jews: Members of the Netanyahu government, or settlers. Young “Muslims” or young “Palestinians” are never qualified as “extremists,” even when they throw stones, stab pilgrims or shout threats at Jewish visitors of Temple Mount.

In conclusion, one might ask: Why criticize only the AFP? The same bias appears in the media and news agencies all over the developed world, including Reuters, the BBC and the AP. But this situation leads to another, more frightening question: Why, when it comes to Israel, is such a misinterpretation of reality so generalized in the press? The only answer is that a war is in progress: a war of delegitimization. Historians have shown that each time a group is targeted as “bad” — sub-human because of its religion, ethnicity, country or skin-color the desire for genocide is not far behind.

Yves Mamou, based in France, worked for two decades as a journalist for Le Monde.

The Secret Awfulness of Saudi Arabia by Douglas Murray

  • Ali Mohammed Al-Nimr, arrested in Saudi Arabia at the age of seventeen, has been sentenced to beheading and crucifixion.


  • Last week, two Saudi human rights activists were sentenced to jail for illegally establishing a human rights organization, questioning the credibility and objectivity of the judiciary, interfering with the Saudi Human Rights Commission (one can imagine what that is like), and describing Saudi Arabia as a police state.

  • Karl Andree, a 74-year-old British grandfather and a UK citizen who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for the last year, is due to receive 350 lashes for unpardonable crime of being caught with some homemade wine.

  • British Justice Minister Michael Gove has now reportedly insisted that the UK could not possibly enter into a contract to train Saudi prison guards.

  • The naïve Western leaders are those who expect our countries to carry on with “business as usual” with a regime that sentences our citizens to flogging, and that beheads and crucifies political dissidents.

  • The naïve politicians are those who think the publics of the West do not know what a human rights sewer Saudi Arabia is, or think that we will put up with it. If that were ever the case, that time is over.

Is international opinion on Saudi Arabia finally shifting? For years, one of the great embarrassments and contradictions of Western diplomacy has been the intimacy of the West’s relationship with the House of Saud. Of course, both Britain and America have some responsibility for installing and then maintaining the Saudi royal family in their position. Were it not for this circumstance, in addition to the world’s largest oil reserves, the people we now call the Saudi royal family would be neither richer nor any more famous than any other group of goat-herders in the region.

For decades now, the Saudi royal family has been a continuing embarrassment for the civilized world. Their brand of extreme Wahhabi Islam is not only — against some very stiff competition — one of the worst interpretations of the Islamic faith. It is the basis of a religious and judicial system that they have not been content to keep within their borders, but rather regard as such a success that they have sponsored it around the world, while promoting violence abroad to keep it from exploding at home.

From the mosques of North Africa to the schools of Europe, these abusive and retrograde Wahhabi teachings can be found everywhere. Ten years ago, the Saudi-sponsored King Fahad Academy in West London was found to be using Saudi Ministry of Education textbooks that, among much else, taught their young students that Christians and Jews are apes and monkeys. But even while such teachings have been pushed into our countries, they have been swallowed by Western leaders. The possibility that whatever regime follows the House of Saud in Arabia could be even worse could have been one reason for this, at least in recent years. Another reason, probably much more likely, was the simple desire for a slice of the desert kingdom’s cash. So, even while Saudi Arabia practices and exports a brand of Islam essentially indistinguishable from that of ISIS, the alliance has gone on. Until now.

In March of this year, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, Margot Wallstrom, spoke out against Saudi Arabia’s brutalizing repression of 50% of its population: women. She also objected to the Saudi regime’s sentencing of blogger Raif Badawi to a thousand lashes for the crime of writing a mild blog regarding the wish for a bit more speech. The sentence was, said Wallstrom, “medieval” and a “cruel attempt to silence modern forms of expression.”

The Saudi propaganda regime promptly attacked the Swedish minister for “unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of Saudi Arabia.” The Saudi propaganda machine has had to issue similar statements quite a lot as of late, most recently when worldwide attention finally focussed in the past few weeks on the case of Ali Mohammed Al-Nimr, arrested at the age of seventeen, who has been sentenced to beheading and crucifixion. The international uproar that this unspeakable sentence has finally triggered suggests that the House of Saud may – in the media Information Age — not only have overstretched itself, but come to the end of a road.

This past week, another two Saudi human rights activists — Abdelrahman Al-Hamid and Abdelaziz Al-Sinedi — were sentenced to jail for, among other similar charges, illegally establishing a human rights organization, questioning the credibility and objectivity of the judiciary, interfering with the Saudi Human Rights Commission (one can imagine what that is like), and describing Saudi Arabia as a police state.

These cases are, finally, being noticed in a significant way, and being picked up in mainstream newspapers and media outlets. Now, there is a British case that has caught international attention. In recent days, Karl Andree, a 74-year-old grandfather and British citizen, who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for the last year, is due to receive 350 lashes after being found guilty of the unpardonable crime of being caught with some homemade wine.

As his family back home in Britain have said in an appeal to Prime Minister David Cameron, it is likely that this sentence will kill Mr. Andree, who has already been weakened by cancer.

British citizen Karl Andree, a 74-year-old grandfather and cancer survivor, has been in a Saudi Arabian prison for the last year and is due to receive 350 lashes — all for the crime of possessing homemade wine.

It is significant that cases such as this, of routine Saudi barbarism, are finally causing a reaction. The UK and Saudi Arabia had agreed on a contract worth £5.9 million (USD $9.1 million) for the UK to train Saudi prison guards, but in recent days the UK government withdrew from this contract. The cause was a cabinet discussion in which the new British Justice Minister, Michael Gove, reportedly insisted that the UK could not possibly have such an agreement with Saudi Arabia. The two specific cases he is said to have highlighted were the case of Mr Andree and the case of Ali Mohammed Al-Nimr.

The Foreign Secretary is alleged to have disagreed with Mr. Gove, describing his views as “naïve.” But the Justice Minister, appropriately enough, prevailed. It is not Michael Gove, of course, who is naïve. The naïve Western leaders are those who expect our countries to carry on with “business as usual” with a regime that sentences our citizens — or anyone — to flogging, and that beheads and crucifies political dissidents.

The days of the secret awfulness of Saudi Arabia are long over. Now the routine abuses and atrocities of Saudi Arabia are rapidly moving from the blogosphere to the newspapers to the tables of cabinet with an unstoppable momentum. The naïve politicians are the ones who think the publics of the West do not know what a human rights sewer Saudi Arabia is, or think that, while knowing this, we in the West will all sit back and put up with it. If there were ever a time when this was the case, that time is over.

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