Life & Work is the Church of Scotland’s magazine. In its December issue, the highly loaded and inappropriate title “Israel’s Inhumanity” (PDF dowloadable) is an accurate pointer to the contents of a shockingly one-sided feature interview with extremist anti-Israel activist Jeff Halper.
Halper is presented as a friendly “Santa Claus” figure visiting Scotland to raise awareness of the “inhumanity of Israel’s policies in Gaza.” Writer Jackie Mcadam appears to take this as a given. Nowhere in the article is there any mention of Hamas, Palestinian terrorism, the captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit or the continuous rocket and mortar fire from Gaza that has forced Israel to respond.
Instead, Halper is given carte blanche to promote his radical agenda. According to Halper, due to Israel, Palestinian Christians are:
being driven out, very systematically. Targeted perhaps. If you eliminate this population, then you will weaken the Palestinian society. So they are being forced out, out of their homes, off their land and out of the country completely.
HonestReporting has regularly rebutted false accusations that Israel is directly responsible for the decline of the Palestinian Christian community, particularly each year as journalists rush to report on Christmas in Bethlehem. For, as Michael Gove has written:
The truth is very different. The parlous position of Palestinian Christians, indeed the difficult position of most Christians across the Arab world, is a consequence not of Israeli aggression but of growing Islamist influence. Israel goes out of its way to honour sites and traditions sacred to other faiths while the radicals who are driving Palestinian politics seek to create an Islamist state in which other faiths, if they survive at all, do so with the explicit subject status of dhimmis. But when it comes to Israel’s position in these matters it’s still a case of O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see them lie.
Please click here, here and here for many more resources on the real story behind the decline of the Palestinian Christian community.
According to the writer, “Jeff feels the only ‘solution’ in the end, will be one land, with everyone living together“. This demonstrates, at best, Jackie Mcadam’s gross naivety or at worst, an extreme agenda. For what she (and Halper) fails to contextualise is the ultimate goal of a one-state solution – the end of Israel as a Jewish state and the denial of Jewish self-determination. This is a particularly dangerous and highly sensitive policy to promote in a Christian magazine and further demonstrates Macadam’s apparent lack of knowledge or willingness to research the wider subject on which she is writing.
See here for more on why the one-state solution is effectively advocating the destruction of the State of Israel.
Halper’s promotion of a one-state solution is in direct contradiction to the EU’s official policy, which promotes a two-state solution. This and Halper’s anti-Israel political agenda, including routinely referring to Israel as an ‘apartheid state’, have recently seen the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), which Halper heads, lose its EU funding.
Referring in the article to Israeli “ethnic cleansing”, Halper also appeals directly to the magazine’s Christian readers drawing upon the false analogy of Israel with apartheid:
Once upon a time, the whole international community was so outraged about apartheid, that they worked together to defeat the affront to Christian values that was the apartheid system. Churches united to defeat it.
Jackie Macadam’s sugar-coated and one-sided profile of Jeff Halper has given a platform to spread his extremist and radical agenda to a Christian audience.
For more on Jeff Halper and ICAHD’s anti-Israel activities, including demonising Israel, promoting boycotts and divestment, partnering with extremist anti-Israel non-governmental organisations, and Halper’s role in the Free Gaza Movement’s publicity seeking ships to Gaza, see NGO Monitor.
Please send your considered comments to Life & Work – [email protected]
ISRAELI EMBASSY TAKES ON GUARDIAN
We weren’t the only ones who took issue with The Guardian’s op-ed by known Hamas supporter Azzam Tamimi. According to the Jewish Chronicle:
The Guardian has refused to publish a letter from the press counsellor of the Israeli Embassy complaining that the writer of a comment article had not been properly identified as Hamas’ de facto London representative. The newspaper called the Israeli diplomat’s description “highly defamatory”.
Instead, The Guardian chose to ignore the catalogued evidence of Tamimi’s extremism:
Elisabeth Ribbans, managing editor of the Guardian, said: “The letters editor receives hundreds of submissions every day and is not obliged to publish any letter, nor in fact give any reasons for not doing so.
“The bottom line is that the descriptions of Azzam Tamimi were defamatory and we think that it’s clear to any journalist why that is.
“That’s why we didn’t publish them. We wrote that he was an adviser for Hamas, but we don’t really say what the writer advocates, we simply described his relationship to Hamas.”
Read the full article here.
