Lara Marlowe, credited as the Irish Times’s Paris correspondent who also happens to be the ex-wife of anti-Israel journalist Robert Fisk, has written a series of anti-Israel articles since the beginning of September, including one accusing Israel of employing “secret weapons” against Gaza.
In her latest polemic, Marlowe “reviews” a selection of some of the most virulently anti-Israel books in publication today:
Israel still claims it has no choice but to continue the policies of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and extermination that started with its foundation, as becomes clear from books by Max Blumenthal, Jean-Pierre Filiu, Ilan Pappe, Rashid Khalidi, Alison Weir, Ari Shavit and Shlomo Sand
Let’s take a brief look at some of those authors and the demonizing language that Marlowe uses to demonstrate her obvious hostility towards Israel.
Max Blumenthal
His book “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,” was enough to earn Max Blumenthal ninth place on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 2013 top-10 list of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slurs. Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, Rabbi Marvin Hier of the SWC stated that Blumenthal had “crossed the line into outright anti-Semitism.”
According to the Wiesenthal list, Blumenthal uses chapter titles in his book Goliath to equate Israel with the Nazi regime. Chapters in his book are entitled “Summer Camp of Destruction,” “Date with the Devil,” “There Is No Dream,” “The Concentration Camp,” “The Night of Broken Glass” and “How to Kill Goyim and Influence People.” The center noted that “he quotes approvingly characterizations of Israelis soldiers as ‘Judeo-Nazis.’”
Dr. Eric Alterman, a prominent professor of English in New York City, wrote that Blumenthal’s “book could have been a selection of a hypothetical Hamas Book of the Month Club.” Alterman penned his critical review of Blumenthal’s book in the left-wing magazine The Nation, where he is a columnist.
Speaking from Washington with the Post, Josh Block, a former Clinton administration spokesman who is CEO of The Israel Project, said of Blumenthal: “I am sure his colleagues at the Hezbollah newspaper where he was a writer for years are pleased and not at all surprised to see their guy on this list… Turns out the anti-Semites of Al-Akhbar and Iran’s Press TV discovered this modern- day Jewish Father Coughlin before anyone else.”
Marlowe extrapolates from Blumenthal:
Israel still claims it has no choice but to continue the policies of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and extermination that started with the foundation of the state of Israel.
She refers to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as a means for Israel to “produce submissive bantustans” and speaks of the “racist rot in Israeli politics and society.”
Ilan Pappe
According to fellow historian Benny Morris:
At best, Ilan Pappe must be one of the world’s sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two.
. . .
In sum, Pappe is a retroactive poseur. But by the middle or late 1990s, after getting tenure, Pappe did shift gears into a full-blown radicalism, political and historiographical. By then he was advocating Israel’s elimination and the establishment in the territory of Mandatory Palestine of one state, consisting of Jews and Arabs. That it would have an Arab majority and, if democratic, be ruled by Arabs was to be assured by a mass return of Arab refugees, which Pappe also advocated, and still advocates. One of his books is dedicated to his two children, whom he hopes will live in a better “Palestine.” In Out of the Frame, Pappe defines Zionism as “a racist and quite evil philosophy of morality and life.” The language is fully as virulent as Hamas’s, or worse.
Referring to Pappe and Blumenthal, Lara Marlow talks about Israel’s “anti-democratic laws and apartheid laws.” She belittles Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman by virtue of his background and then falsely misrepresents his party Yisrael Beiteinu’s policies, which do not call for the mass deportation of Israel’s Arab citizens:
Avigdor Lieberman was a nightclub bouncer in his native Moldova, then a baggage handler at Ben Gurion airport. Today he is Israel’s foreign minister. His Yisrael Beiteinu party advocates the deportation of the survivors of 1948 and their progeny, 1.6 million Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship.
Rashid Khalidi
According to Discover the Networks, Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi‘s
involvement with the Palestinian cause goes beyond mere support. News reports — including a 1982 dispatch from Thomas Friedman of the New York Times — suggest that he once served as Director of the Palestinian press agency, Wikalat al-Anba al-Filastinija. Khalidi’s wife, Mona, was reportedly the agency’s main English-language editor between 1976 and 1982. Khalidi so strongly identified with the aims of the PLO, which was designated as a terrorist group by the State Department during Khalidi’s affiliation with it in the 1980s, that he repeatedly referred to himself as “we” when expounding on the PLO’s agenda. Additional evidence of Khalidi’s intimacy with the PLO can be seen in his involvement with the organization’s so-called “guidance committee” in the early 1990s.
Referring to Khalidi’s latest book, Marlowe turns her attention to the role of the U.S. in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “how successive US governments have aided Israeli territorial expansion and oppression of Palestinians.” She calls President Obama’s speech at the UN vetoing Palestinian statehood as “craven.”
Alison Weir
Marlowe then goes on to reference Alison Weir’s book, stating that “Israel exercises more influence over the US than the US holds over Israel.”
According to the Anti-Defamation League:
Alison Weir has established herself as a prominent voice in the anti-Israel movement. She frames the Jewish State as a violent aggressor in the region and charges that the United States, through its aid, is the driving force behind this aggression. Weir claims that not only does Israel brutalize the Palestinians, but through its intimidation tactics, it corrupts the American political system and prevents criticism of its conduct from being voiced by the mainstream media. As a result, she contends, Americans are kept in the dark about how their taxes fund Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians.
In her discussions of Israel’s influence, Weir employs anti-Semitic imagery and portrays Israel and its agents as ruthless forces that control American policy through brutal intimidation and deception. Weir views herself and her organization, If Americans Knew, as part of a growing movement to promote U.S. interests by educating Americans about the vast conspiracy to keep the truth about Israeli practices hidden from them.
Shlomo Sand
Marlowe continues by promoting the work of Shlomo Sand, an academic with no background in history who has now published two books postulating that there is no such thing as the Jewish people and no such thing as a Jewish nation. Unsurprisingly, his books have become required reading for anti-Semites, turning Sand from a marginal figure into a bestselling author. A Fathom magazine review of his latest book states:
In sum, Sand’s book illuminates the metamorphoses of the Zionist struggle to impress on members of an ancient people a renewed and revolutionary connection with a homeland, the memory of which had been maintained for generations in collections of books, festival rituals and prayerbooks. Alongside that sits the author’s seething hatred of Zionism, and everything associated with it, and this prompts him to present the struggle of the Jewish national movement as a set of falsehoods, distortions and prejudices.
Ari Shavit
The only book that Marlowe “reviews” that could be considered mainstream is Ari Shavit’s “My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel.” So it is demonstrative of where Marlowe is on the political spectrum that she denigrates Shavit for being mainstream:
Shavit is a faux leftist, faux liberal Zionist who says he’d like the colonisation of the West Bank to stop. Yet he supports Israel’s wars and buys into Netanyahu’s fearmongering over a nuclear holocaust provoked by Iran. He praises the “stupefying success” of Israel’s nuclear-weapons programme. Shavit’s obsession with his own angst inhibits empathy for Palestinians and his desire for justice.
* * *
Lara Marlowe’s one-sided series of reports from Gaza for the Irish Times demonstrated her lack of objectivity. Her article bringing together some of the most virulently anti-Israel books of recent years written by some of the most ideologically anti-Israel authors (aside from Ari Shavit) merely reinforces the sense that Marlowe, like her ex-husband Robert Fisk, is less of a journalist and more of a polemicist when it comes to Israel.
Marlowe’s “review” also continues the hateful attitude of the Irish Times towards Israel.
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Image: CC BY-NC flickr/Rachel
“Max Blumenthal on RT America” by RT America – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQHDJn6VOhM&feature=plcp. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
“NLN Rashid Khalidi” by Thomas Good – Next Left Notes (Photo Credit: Thomas Good / NLN). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
“Shlomo Sand“(Transferred by Matanya/ Licensed under Attribution via Wikimedia Commons.
