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New York, Friday, January 18, 2002
THE FEATHERMAN FILE
of Noteworthy Items in the Press
British Magazine Raising Specter of "Zionist Lobby"
By MIKHAIL KRUTIKOV
Forward correspondent
LONDON -- In what some see as a pattern since September 11, a leading
British weekly has raised the specter of Jewish control over the
media and government.
The cover story of the January 14 edition of the New Statesman, a
respected liberal weekly, is headlined "A Kosher Conspiracy?" and
features a gold Star of David appearing to pierce a Union Jack.
The story purports to investigate whether there is a "Zionist" plan
to sway the British press to the side of Israel and to minimize
Palestinian grievances. It also assesses the extent to which Jews
influence British politics.
"That there is a Zionist lobby and that it is rich, potent, and
effective goes largely unquestioned on the left," writes Dennis
Sewell. "Big Jewry, like big tobacco, is seen as one of life's
givens." Journalists who dare to speak out against the "Zionist
lobby," Mr. Sewell adds, are harassed, threatened and eventually
muted.
As an example, the article points to Robert Fisk, the pro-Arab
correspondent of the Independent, a left-leaning British daily.
According to the article, Mr. Fisk "complains that he has been the
victim of an anonymous smear campaign seeking to link him with the
notoriously anti- Semitic historian David Irving."
At the center of this "Zionist lobby," the article alleges, is a
network of individuals and organizations coordinated from the Israeli
embassy in London and "greased" by the profits made by a sinister
arms trader named Shlomo Zabludowicz, an Auschwitz survivor with a
Finnish passport who died in 1994. Key figures in the conspiracy,
according to the authors, include Conrad Black, the owner of the
conservative British publications Daily Telegraph and Spectator as
well as the Jerusalem Post, and his wife, "the enthusiastic Zionist
columnist" Barbara Amiel.
As for the Zionist effect on British politics, the New Statesman article reports that
a recent meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Yasser Arafat was "no
more than a public relations exercise designed to
placate the Arab world. It served to disguise Blair's support for the Zionist project
and his role as Ariel Sharon's closest ally in Europe. Little of this has been
reported in the mainstream media."
THE New Statesman article is only the latest example of what some say has become a
wide expression of anti-Semitism in Britain since September 11.
In December, Ms. Amiel told her Daily Telegraph readership about "the ambassador of a
major EU country" - - later reported to have been France's ambassador to London,
Daniel Bernard -- who "politely told a gathering at my
home that the current troubles in the world were all because of 'that shitty little
country Israel.'"
Ms. Amiel's disclosure, however, created trouble only for herself. Writing in the
left-leaning The Observer, Richard Ingrams said that Ms. Amiel "betrayed the
confidences of the dinner table" by revealing the diplomat's r
emarks. In the same paper, Euan Ferguson suggested that "Ms. Amiel is apparently as
welcome now in the chic salons of north London as a fatwa in a sauna."
In her January 14 column in The Daily Telegraph, Ms. Amiel repeated her first column's
assertion that there seemed to be a resurgence of permissible anti-Semitism in Europe.
"The ambassador would not have described the Je
wish state as a 'shitty little country' in different times, just as he would not use
the words 'nigger' or 'wog' in polite society today," she writes.
In November, meanwhile, The Observer seemed to lend an anti-Semitic spin to a debate
between geneticists. In an article published in the British journal Human Immunology,
a Spanish geneticist set out to prove the close ge
netic links between Palestinians and neighboring population groups, including Israeli
Jews. But when the article was retracted for factual errors in the historical
narrative, The Observer cried foul. It claimed that the r
etraction was a result of pressure from Jews who were angered because the authors'
scientific research "challenges claims that Jews are a special, chosen people and that
Judaism can only be inherited."
To be fair, Mr. Sewell acknowledges that some "younger correspondents" get carried
away, holding Israel "to account for every action and reaction, while excusing
Palestinian excesses on the grounds of poverty and a genera
l victim status."
But is it the writers or their editors? A recent test case came up in the article and
broadcast of journalist Sandra Jordan, whose eyewitness account of Hamas in Gaza was
published in the New Statesman and aired on Britis
h television January 11.
The magazine article focuses primarily on the suicide bombers and their cult following
among the Arab population. The broadcast, by contrast, investigates the more complex
issue of the rivalry between Hamas and Fatah and
its subsequent casualties. The broadcast makes it clear that the Arafat administration
wants to hide its internal problems behind the uniform picture of Arab desperation.
The editing of the same story in the New Statesman
is more sympathetic to Mr. Arafat's aims.
"The denial of British racism goes so deep that many in England seem not even to
realize what anti-Semitism is," writes Tom Gross in the January 10 issue of the
conservative American magazine National Review. "There have
been one or two admirable exceptions to this pattern, notably Andrew Sullivan (a
British commentator who has been based in the U.S. for over two decades) and the
Anglo-Jewish writer Melanie Phillips." (Ms. Phillips explor
ed the new acceptance of anti-Semitism in the December 24 issue of the Wall Street
Journal Europe, in an article titled "British Polite Society Has Found a Not-So-New
Target.")
"For every Sullivan or Phillips, there seem to be many among London's
'chattering classes' that actually find attacks on Jews rather
amusing," continues Mr. Gross. "Since Bernard's remarks were
reported, there have been over a dozen fresh anti-Semitic incidents
in France. Only last weekend, attackers firebombed a synagogue in the
northern Paris suburb of Goussainville. A few days before that,
gasoline bombs were hurled into a Jewish school in the southeastern
Paris suburb of Creteil, setting a classroom on fire. On the same
day, another synagogue was torched.
"Fortunately, no one was injured in these particular incidents. But
it can only be a matter of time before someone is. Have the French
and English learned nothing from the 20th century?"
End<{{{
2}}}>Begin
Cover story - A kosher conspiracy?
Cover story
Dennis Sewell
Monday 14th January 2002
Dennis Sewell investigates the Zionist lobby and finds that, despite
a sometimes virulent tone, it owes more to Woody Allen than to
Alastair Campbell
In his plutocratic prime, Shlomo Zabludowicz could easily have
stepped out of one novel by Graham Greene and straight into another
by Ian Fleming. The freebooting Scandinavian arms billionaire could
count among his cronies the Shah of Iran, Indira Gandhi and the
mysterious Dr Goh, then Singapore's defence minister. Mortars were
Shlomo's stock-in-trade. He sold them all around the world: to the
Malaysians, the Indonesians, the Iranians, the Americans and oddly
(for he was a Holocaust survivor) even to the Germans.
After his release from Auschwitz at the age of 30, Shlomo settled
first in Sweden and later in Finland, going on to found the weapons
conglomerate Soltam, one of the pillars of Tel Aviv's military-
industrial complex. But for Zabludowicz's Finnish passport and his
knack for skirting arms embargoes, the Israeli army would probably
never have developed into the unbeatable fighting force it became by
Yom Kippur in 1973.
But eventually, as the cold war waned, and perhaps anticipating a
quieter life for his beloved Israel, Zabludowicz began to diversify,
if not into ploughshares exactly, then at least into saucepans. By
the time of his death in 1994, he was one of Scandinavia's premier
exporters of cooking utensils. He had also built up a worldwide
portfolio of real estate to keep him in his retirement. Land for
peace, you might say.
Today, the family fortune is managed by Shlomo's son Poju, who has
kept a finger in the arms pie through the munitions manufacturer
Pocal. Like his father before him, Poju remains wired into the US
national-security apparatus. At one time, the Zabludowiczes even had
Richard Perle, the former US assistant secretary of defence, on their
payroll.
Poju's main interest, however, lies in his London-based business,
Ivory Gate. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to call a property
investment company by that name. Either that, or a tin ear for
classical allusions. Maybe its founder was misled by Rudyard
Kipling's description of the Taj Mahal as "the Ivory Gate through
which all good dreams come . . . the embodiment of all things pure".
Unfortunately, the old imperialist got it wrong. According to Plato
and Virgil, true dreams enter via the Gate of Horn, while the Ivory
Gate ushers in only lies and delusions. The irony becomes all the
more delicious when one learns that the boss of Ivory Gate is also
the Mr Moneybags behind Bicom (the Britain Israel Communications and
Research Centre), the semi-public face of Britain's Zionist lobby,
charged with spinning Israel's case to the media.
That there is a Zionist lobby and that it is rich, potent and
effective goes largely unquestioned on the left. Big Jewry, like big
tobacco, is seen as one of life's givens. According to this view,
Israel has the British media pretty well sewn up. Wealthy Jewish
business leaders, acting in concert with establishment types and co-
ordinated by the Israeli embassy, have supposedly nobbled newspaper
editors and proprietors, and ensured that the pro- Palestinian
position is marginalised both in news reporting and on the comment
pages. As one well-known foreign affairs specialist puts it: "The
sheer scale of the activity is awesome. It operates at every level.
By comparison, the disparate, underfunded and shambolic pro-
Palestinian organisations don't stand a chance." He insists that
these words remain unattributable because, he claims, "the fact is
that journalists put their careers in jeopardy by speaking up for the
Palestinians. That's ultimately the Zionist lobby's most powerful
weapon."
Nevertheless, many journalists have spoken out against the Zionist
lobby over the past 12 months. Last spring, there was a spat in the
Spectator between Lord Black of Crossharbour, the magazine's
proprietor, and three well- known contributors to his newspapers.
William Dalrymple, A N Wilson and Piers Paul Read wrote a letter
complaining that "under Black's proprietorship, serious, critical
reporting of Israel is no longer tolerated in the Telegraph Group".
Conrad Black (who also owns the Jerusalem Post and is married to
Barbara Amiel, the enthusiastic Zionist columnist) promptly returned
fire. The troublesome trio, he alleged, illustrated "the depths of
the problem of anti- Semitism in the British media".
A few months later, Sam Kiley, a foreign correspondent for the Times,
resigned after a row with his editors. Kiley had succeeded in
tracking down and interviewing the Israeli soldiers who had shot dead
Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old boy who had become, posthumously,
an icon of the intifada. Middle managers at Wapping, Kiley claims,
know that Rupert Murdoch has business interests in Israel and would
"fly into hysterical terror every time a pro-Israel lobbying group
wrote in with a quibble". The instruction Kiley received to file his
piece "without mentioning the dead kid" was the last straw.
Just before Christmas, Deborah Orr, who writes a column for the
Independent, complained that she was "fed up with being called an
anti-Semite". A tendency to equate anti-Zionism - indeed, any
criticism of Israel - with anti- Semitism is a persistent vice of
Zionist campaigners. Time was when the worst a commentator could
expect if he or she had written critically about Israel was a
telephone call from the publisher Lord Weidenfeld, registering his
anguish and disappointment. Weidenfeld, at one time chef de cabinet
to Israel's founding president, Chaim Weizmann, was and remains a
serious operator at the level of government, editors and media
proprietors. His name figures in ministerial diaries published by the
Foreign Office (breakfast 8am with Peter Hain and so on), but his
media interventions have always been discreet. Today, however,
critics of Israeli policy are guaranteed to receive thousands of
vituperative letters and e-mails. These correspondents take their cue
from organisations such as the Zionist Federation's Media Response
Unit, run by the former Labour MP for Basildon Eric Moonman; or from
the web-based HonestReporting.com, set up by two students at the
University of London who felt that Israel was getting a bum deal in
the press.
Robert Fisk, Orr's colleague at the Independent, complains that he
has been the victim of an anonymous smear campaign seeking to link
him with the notoriously anti-Semitic historian David Irving. Another
frequent target is Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian, who was named
Journalist of the Year at Granada's What the Papers Say Awards last
month for her "dedication to truthful reporting". She has been
bombarded with insulting mail, some of it denouncing her as a "self-
hating Jew".
But however vile these letter-writing campaigns may be for the
journalists concerned, is there the slightest evidence that they
affect what appears in the press? When one looks at the array of pro-
Israel organisations in Britain, one is struck not by their cohesion
so much as their fragmentation. Few (including Bicom) are much more
than a two-men-and-a-dog operation located above a shop, or out in
cyberspace. The only Jewish stereotype they reinforce is the one
portrayed in Woody Allen films, where a dozen members of a family sit
around the dinner table, all shouting different things at the same
time. Some clearly believe that Ariel Sharon can do no wrong, others
that he can do no good. In this, they reflect the pluralist cast of
Israel's polity. And that Israel is the only fully functioning
democracy in the Middle East is something they constantly invite the
rest of us to remember.
Bicom deals directly with the press, arranging visits and "interview
opportunities". It does not, it says, directly pressurise individual
journalists even when it believes they write untruths. Recently, the
organisation tried to hire Tim Luckhurst, a former editor of the
Scotsman, to sharpen its techniques. Luckhurst, a non-Jew who is
broadly sympathetic to Israel's dilemmas, was tempted, but eventually
turned the organisation down, preferring to continue the struggle
under his own byline.
The task of making formal complaints about supposed media
misrepresentations increasingly falls to the Board of Deputies of
British Jews, a solemn, rather bureaucratic organisation. Its
remonstrations are hardly strong-arm stuff, their register always
more in sorrow than in anger. The board has turned to another non-Jew
to put its case, the Scottish National Party activist Fiona Macaulay,
recruited in July from the Scottish Parliament.
A steelier edge to perception management is provided by the Israeli
embassy in the form of its press attache, David "DJ" Schneeweiss. The
pro-Palestinian camp credits DJ, an Australian who emigrated to
Israel 15 years ago, with almost supernatural powers. Allegedly, he
can be on the phone to every news editor at once, while
simultaneously schmoozing their proprietors. His opponents accuse him
of peddling the "big lies" of Israeli propaganda, such as the line
that the Palestinians deliberately put their children up front to
draw Israeli sniper fire, hoping a few infant deaths will help the
cause. But most journalists who have been fed that line source it
from Jerusalem. DJ is more of a close textual analyst, pointing out
that when Hamas uses the phrase "end the occupation" in a communique,
it does not mean, as the PLO does, the occupation of parts of the
West Bank and Gaza; it means the end of the existence of Israel.
The campaign against Goldenberg nicely illustrates the perils of
crude lobbying. Last June, after months of being pestered by Zionist
organisations, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, travelled
to Israel and the occupied territories to judge the situation for
himself. Shortly afterwards, he sent his foreign editor on a similar
fact-finding mission. The result has been that Israeli policies have
been brought into sharper critical focus in the Guardian than ever
before. Hardly the outcome the Zionist lobby desired. Nor has Simon
Kelner, the editor of the Independent, muzzled Robert Fisk, despite
an attempt by the Israeli embassy to persuade him to do so. In fact,
given that Black and Murdoch need no nobbling, it is hard to find an
instance where any senior figure in the media has been successfully
nobbled in recent years.
Read the liberal press almost any day of the week, and you will find
that Israel comes off worst. Many younger correspondents appear to
have forgotten that the UN was instrumental in bringing Israel into
existence; that the Israelis have had to fight off three invasions
from neighbouring Arab states; and that UN Resolution 242 is a more
nuanced document than the reflexive attachment of the epithet
"illegal" to the occupation of the West Bank suggests. Palestinian
acceptance of Israel's right to exist behind secure borders is often
reported uncritically, sometimes implying that this position is
shared by Hamas. And a creeping cultural and moral relativism holds
Israel to account for every action and reaction, while excusing
Palestinian excesses on the grounds of poverty and a general victim
status.
I could go on, but only at the risk of being thought to have been
nobbled myself. The truth is that the "Zionist lobby" does exist, but
is a clueless bunch. After all, how media-savvy can such lobbyists
really be if they allow their operations to be greased by the profits
made from Shlomo Zabludowicz's mortars and bombs? Could any funding
arrangement be better contrived to confirm left- liberal prejudices
about Israel?
© The Author © New Statesman Ltd. 2001. All rights reserved
End<{{{
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