A newspaper called the Palestine Times caught my eye at Wits University the other day. It’s a wretched newspaper published in London, and students are seemingly distributing it at Wits University. I can’t claim any expertise on the legalities of distributing material like this on university campuses, but having examined 3 issues, there are certainly no stamps permitting the distribution.
It’s not actually the right to distribute the papers on campus that I wish to examine. It’s the content of this newspaper and what it says about the pro-Palestinian crowd at the university that worries me. At a time when student leaders could be conditioning their groups for the concessions that need to be made at Annapolis, it’s rather sad to see a publication of this standard being dished around.
I have since grabbed three different editions.
The content of the publication is sour, hateful and overwhelmingly childish. Really, really childish. The contributors can’t even bring themselves to mention the IDF by its proper name, instead resorting to chants like “Israeli Occupation Army” or the “trigger-happy Nazi Gestapo.” Zionism is “Zio-Nazism” and the settlers are “Judeo-Nazi settlers.” How very prekindergarten.
The allegation that Israel is a Nazi state is a constant theme in the issues I perused. One article entitled “More on the Israeli-Nazi analogy,” challenged the “Zionists and their supporters and apologists to prove that Israel doesn’t harbour a final solution for the Palestinians.” The author then claims that Israeli leaders openly admit that they wish to see all of the Palestinians dead.
Is this what naïve students should be reading on campus? That Israel is planning to do as the Nazis did and attempt to wipe out an entire people! What will these students then think about Jewish students who support Israel?
The publication is littered with ghoulish lies supporting the Nazi vituperation. Here’s an example
| “The Nazis imprinted serial numbers on the forearms of Jewish internees, and the Israelis have done the same to the Palestinians.” |
Really? You can't respond to that. It's like someone recently said in the comments of this blog -that in the battle for public opinion it is difficult to fight lies with truth because truth is limited but falsehood can be accommodated to match any argument.
Moving on...it’s not just Israelis or Zionists that are caricatured as Nazis.
| “I saw face to face the obscene sadistic acts practiced by Jews against their helpless victims. These are not isolated behaviours. This is the norm, not the exception.” |
Another article attacks Ashkenazi (European) Jewry.
| “Today Israel and the US want Palestinians to lower the ceiling of their expectations. And for those who don’t know, this is a euphemism for surrender and capitulation to Ashkenazi Nazism.” |
The Nazi libel goes on and on and on.
| “The Nazi like occupation of Palestine by Israel is not the act of a few Israeli Jews. It is not even the act of a military establishment alone. It is the collective act of a morally desensitised society that has nearly lost its humanity and succumbed to a collective psychosis that is not unlike the moral blindness that struck the German people more than 60 years ago." |
The publication weaves a tapestry whose every thread is designed to prolong the conflict, igniting the fierce anger of young energised students. The editor leads the way writing that the Palestinians should never recognise Israel’s right to exist. “Israel is an enduring crime against humanity,” he writes, “just as Nazi Germany was a crime against humanity.”
Is it reasonable to compare Jews to Nazis? I recently reviewed a UN report by the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism. The report, adopted by the UN in August this year, is entitled “Racism, Racial discrimination and related forms of intolerance: follow-up to and implementation of the Durban declaration and programme of action.” The report will get an blog entry of its own, but briefly, let’s take a look at what the report says about anti-Semitism.
There is a crucial need to identify when anti-Zionism is tainted by anti-Semitism. Experts’ analysis point to the following cases of such superimposition:
(a) When language, images and character traits attributed to Israel are imbued with recognizable anti-Semitic stereotypes;
(b) When Israelis and Jews are represented as cosmic devils, blamed for global disasters and compared with Nazis; - check
(c) When Israelis and Jews who support the State of Israel are singled out, attacked, and treated in a manner that is out of proportion to the issue at hand and in comparison with the actions of other countries; - check
(d) When the legitimate right of Israel as a Jewish State to exist is questioned. - check |
Hmm…if it walks like a duck, acts like a duck and quacks like a duck, then...it’s a duck. I’m not saying it, the UN report, adopted by the General Assembly, is saying it.
And so I ask you, should this incitement be allowed on a university campus? My bet is that it’s not allowed, hence the absence of a stamp permitting its distribution. But I don’t think we can expect anything to be done and sadly, I don’t think we have anything to gain in complaining to the university chancellor. So no, I can't be bothered to even look up the chancellor's email address. The predictable response would be accusations that we are trying to control the debate by stifling freedom of expression. Ho hum.
I just hope that the local distributors at Wits end up sending the reverse signal. I hope that they have overplayed their hand and that this evangelism of hate ends up exposing them for what they really are.
Interestingly, one of the recent issues sports an article by our very own voice of Palestine, Mr Iqbal Jassat, from the South African Media Review Network.
