CATCHING UP - Durban & Incitement

this brings me up to date... as far as catching-up goes.

The case for 'incitement'

It's no secret that stories critical of government polices that appear in the Israeli media become fodder for those abroad with an anti-Israel agenda. Indeed, foreign critics can honestly claim that they are "echoing" what media outlets or prominent journalists here are asserting.

But while there are often disturbing aspects to the populist and ideological bent of much of the media - which sometimes lapses into dangerous irresponsibility - our robust press is integral to civil liberties.

"Hasbara" - Israel's public diplomacy - is self-evidently problematic because the country does not speak with one voice. Israeli officials may be vexed by what they read in the morning papers or watch on the evening news. But they rightly have no control over news and opinion.

A free press is a "handicap" this and any democracy willingly embraces.

NOT SO in much of the Muslim and Arab world. Recently, Arab extremists learned that the Israel Foreign Ministry had been translating and posting articles on its website from the Arab media. This material highlighted the ideological divide between writers associated with the rejectionist camp (Syria, for example) and relative moderates (Egypt and Saudi Arabia). As reported by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a number of media outlets aligned with the rejectionists then published a blacklist of "moderate" writers who, they claimed were paid Zionist agents since their criticism of Arab affairs was picked up by Israel.

To which one blacklisted "moderate" retorted: "Israel is winning the wars because it has mechanisms for [self-] criticism [even] in times of war… The resistance and jihad movements must be divested of their aura of sanctity and subjected to a cost-benefit assessment."

Of course, the main reason differing views among the Arabs are aired at all is that opposing voices toe the line of the respective regimes under which they live; or because they work and publish in the West.

THE ISSUE of press freedom is very much on the agenda at the Durban II conference in Geneva even though Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's pathetic Monday performance hogged the media spotlight.

At stake is the question of whether Muslim and Arab delegates will succeed in imposing their free press "standards" on other civilizations. The conference will be voting on whether to include in its closing policy statement an innocuous-sounding clause prohibiting "incitement."

As anyone who has strolled down the streets of, say, Cairo, or picked up an Arabic newspaper knows, incitement to Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism is perfectly acceptable.

But the Muslim delegations would use the incitement clause of the final Durban II statement to ban all criticism of Islam, Shari'a law, the prophet Muhammad and controversial tenets of Islam.

Muslims point to the controversial 2005 cartoon depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turban which was published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten as precisely the kind of "incitement" their Durban II efforts are intended to head off. That cartoon, and 11 others simultaneously published by that newspaper, sparked Muslim riots worldwide.

Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned and published the cartoons, said he did so because he had noticed a disturbing trend of self-censorship. Writers, artists, museum curators and translators had all been intimidated into avoiding involvement with projects critical of Muslim extremism.

Rose, currently in Israel to deliver a series of lectures under the auspices of Hebrew University's Shasha Center for Strategic Studies run by Efraim Halevy, says he ran the cartoons to draw a line against this encroaching self-censorship, and to hammer home the idea that criticism of Islam - actually of those who hijack it for extremist purposes - is not synonymous with insulting the religion.

If Durban II supports the anti-incitement clause, the Muslim and Arab world will have succeeded in insinuating its illiberal attitude toward the press on the international community.

And if the West compromises on press freedom to placate Muslims, the capitulation will be seen, correctly, as a sign not of respect, but of submission.

CATCHING UP - A bad word about the Swiss

Morality in neutral


Switzerland is situated in the heart of Europe, surrounded by Germany, France, Austria and Italy. But unlike these EU-member countries, the Swiss are neutral in international affairs.

And under cover of neutrality, Swiss President Hans Rudolf Merz, who is both chief of state and head of government, met Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last night over dinner in Geneva. The Iranian leader is in town to attend the Durban II "anti-racism conference," which opens today.

Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told Army Radio that the Merz-Ahmadinejad meeting "caught us by surprise." It shouldn't have.

The Swiss have their interests. Swiss businessmen with ties to Pakistan's A.Q. Khan have been implicated in selling, on the black market, blueprints for a compact nuclear weapon. The Swiss trading company EGL is doing billions of dollars' worth of (technically legal) business with Iran.

When Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey was granted an audience with Ahmadinejad last year, the feminist politician, eager not to offend, donned a head-scarf.

THE SWISS Foreign Ministry explains that Berne has a "long-term strategic rationale" for its actions. Some of that rationale was already on display during World War II, in Switzerland's erratic policies toward Jewish asylum seekers.

When it looked like Germany would win the war, Switzerland, for the most part, kept Jewish refugees out; but when it appeared the Allies might win, the Swiss reversed course. In the final weeks of the war, they even demanded that the Nazis stop deportations altogether.

Back in 1938, when Berlin was ascendant, the Swiss requested that Germany and Austria mark the passports of their Jewish citizens with a "J" so that Berne could distinguish between "genuine political refugees" and fleeing Jews. A Swiss police captain named Paul Gruninger who allowed thousands of Jews to cross the border illegally was thrown off the force.

But when it suited Swiss "rationale," Jews were allowed in - from The Netherlands and Belgium in 1941; from Italy in 1943. And in 1944, 1,684 Jews were permitted to enter from Bergen Belson as part of the Rudolf Kastner-Adolf Eichmann deal.

All told, perhaps 30,000 Jews managed to reach Switzerland during the Shoah.

All along, Eduard Von Steiger, who was in charge of Switzerland's refugee policies, claimed that "the boat is full." He would later explain that had he known the Nazis were systematically slaughtering Europe's Jews on the other side of the Swiss border, "we might have widened the bound (sic) of what was possible."

That alibi has more holes than a piece of Emmental cheese. By May 1942, Swiss army intelligence had photos of Jews who had been asphyxiated by the Nazis at the Russian front.

In fact, the Swiss leadership knew exactly what the Nazis were doing - from their own diplomats and businessmen, from the Brazilian ambassador and from German sources.

Hugo Remuad, of the Swiss Red Cross, argued that genocidal anti-Semitism was simply a consequence of there being too many Jews. Or as Swiss judge Eugen Von Hasler put it: "It is also in our own interest that the greatest thing of all [the destruction of Europe's Jews] is coming to pass, and our hearts beat as one with the young white men who, dog-tired, forge onward to the East as [defenders] of European culture."

Meanwhile, Swiss banks raked in their spoils both by collaborating with the Nazis over pilfered Jewish cash and gold, and - later - by retaining some 36,000 bank accounts, valued at $1 billion, belonging to murdered Jews. This wealth lay dormant until 2004, when a class-action suit (and the resultant Volker Committee) forced Swiss banks to begin returning the money to the estates of the murdered.

IN 1995, former Swiss president Kaspar Villiger apologized for his country's treatment of the Jews.

And yet his successor, Merz, met last night with Ahmadinejad even as the Iranian leader puts the finishing touches on his atom bomb, swears that the Holocaust never happened, and calls for the extermination of of the "filthy [Zionist] bacteria."

While Swiss leaders shamelessly fete Ahmadinejad, we Israelis are heartened by the decision of the United States, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and Italy to boycott the Durban II circus, along with its various sideshows.

CATCHING UP - too slick to deny the Holocaust outright

The new deniers


It is Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day - Yom Hashoah. Here in Israel, the sirens will sound at 10 a.m. and for two minutes work will come to a halt, vehicles will idle, and Israelis will stand in silent memory of the six million victims of Hitler's war against the Jews.

The opening ceremony of Holocaust Remembrance Day was broadcast live from Yad Vashem in Jerusalem last night on television and radio. In the presence of President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Rabbi Meir Lau, chairman of the Yad Vashem Council and himself a child survivor, six torches were lit by six men and women who lived through the war as children. About 1.5 million of the murdered were children.

Today, therefore, is a time to reflect on the greatest tragedy to befall the Jewish people in modern times and to think about how anti-Semitism has morphed into anti-Zionism. It is also a day for soul-searching about the state of Holocaust remembrance.

Sixty-four years after the defeat of the Nazis, the memory and the meaning of the catastrophe they wrought is being chipped away, sometimes unintentionally, but mostly in a cynical, premeditated manner.

Holocaust denial dates back to the late 1960s and takes various forms. Some try to denigrate the Shoah by claiming that Hiroshima and Dresden prove that the allies were as heartless at the Nazis. Denial is propagated on the radical right, the radical left and by many in the Muslim and Arab world.

ON THE eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world's preeminent Holocaust-denier and leading anti-Zionist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was granted a platform at Durban II, the UN's so-called anti-racism conference in Geneva yesterday. He promptly called for the destruction of Israel: "Governments must be encouraged and supported in their fights at eradicating this barbaric racism. Efforts must be made to put an end to Zionism," he said.

We watched in distress as many in the audience and galleries applauded. Such barefaced anti-Zionism is, however, offensive to Western governments and we were gratified that dozens of EU delegates - including those from France, Finland and the UK - walked out as Ahmadinejad spewed forth his venom. Of course, the real heartbreak was that these countries were represented in the hall in the first place.

Yesterday's farce in Geneva proved again how the charge of "racism" has been cheapened to the point of having lost much of its meaning. The same holds true for the words "genocide," "war crimes," "apartheid" and "ghetto." Those who distort - willfully or through ignorance - the meanings of the dreadful vocabulary of hate for tawdry political purposes commit an unpardonable injustice.

EQUALLY pernicious are those who are too slick to deny the Holocaust outright but instead claim that Israel inoculates itself with the memory of the six million in order to kill or oppress innocent Palestinians with impunity.

A variation on the theme that Israel uses the Holocaust as a battering ram against the Palestinians is the disingenuous argument that it's time for us Israelis to move on: We need "closure," runs this line of more subtle attack, because Zionism's guiding principle of "Never Again" supposedly deludes us into thinking that we face existential threats (from Iran, Hamas, Hizbullah) or demographic threats (posed by the Palestinian demand for the "right of return"). None of these factors, these manipulators would have the world believe, really threatens our existence.

Our bogus fears, goes the claim, are as "corrosive" as they are delusionary. They make us think we are vulnerable when we - a nuclear power - are stronger than all our enemies combined. Moreover, say the anti-Zionists proponents of "closure" - Israelis have "walled, fenced, blockaded and road-blocked" millions of Palestinians "into a pitiful archipelago of helplessness" all because of our exaggerated sense of fear. We've taken our unfounded fears of annihilation and used them to inflate the nature of the threats against us. And this "retreat into the victimhood" has made us think that our violent ways are nothing more than "self-defense."

It's hard to decide which is worse - outright Holocaust-denial of the Ahmadinejad variety, or insidious assertions by Euro-leftists and anti-Zionists that would lull Israelis into letting down our guard and robbing us of the will to fight for our survival.

CATCHING UP - Meeting Flemming Rose

I've been too busy to post lately. Here are three piece back-to-back.

An Islamist 'new world order'

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) member-states at the Durban II gathering in Geneva is pushing for "a new world order" that would expand and impose "nondemocratic and illiberal values on the West," says the Danish editor who in 2005 commissioned and published a series of cartoons, one of which depicted the prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban that led to worldwide Muslim rioting.

Flemming Rose, editor of Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's largest-circulation newspaper, is visiting Israel under the auspices of the Hebrew University's Shasha Center for Strategic Studies, headed by former Mossad director Efraim Halevy. He's here to lecture on how nations need to find the right balance between religious sensitivities and freedom of expression.

Rose says the OIC is trying to use Durban II to rewrite the rules of human rights and international law in a way that undermines the values of liberty enshrined in the Western canon - including the US Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It's all part of an ongoing Muslim campaign that has been making significant strides, says Rose.

European liberal values, which dominated United Nations voting following the fall of the Soviet Union, are now in retreat. Muslim states attending Durban II are pushing the conference to say that criticizing Islam is a form of incitement.

"We're seeing an erosion of support in the West for freedom of expression in the guise of preventing incitement against Islam," says Rose.

He wants the West to stop being so defensive, pointing out that "Muslims in Demark enjoy far more civil and political rights than they would have in their home countries."

Rose would distinguish between criticizing Islam as a theological and political idea and insulting its adherents.

"I spent many years in the former Soviet Union as a foreign correspondent and married a Russian woman. I am a strong anti-communist, but my late Russian father-in-law was a staunch Stalinist. I abhorred his convictions, but felt love and tenderness for him as an individual."

His experience in the Soviet Union gave him a "very strong antagonism against self-censorship and intimidation of people because of what they are saying."

In Muslim society, he notes, the rights of the dominant religion and culture are paramount. In the West, it is the rights of the individual that reign supreme.

Rose argues that in a globalized world, the idea that Westerners conduct their lives according to Western values while Muslims conduct theirs according to Muslim values simply does not work - because globalization involves both technology and human migration.

"When you publish in Denmark, you can read it within minutes in a totally different political and cultural context. At the same time, every European society is getting more complicated culturally and ethnically. Different taboos and moral codes are forced to live together."

Within their own world, says Rose, Muslims "do not see their own minorities. And when they come to the West, they continue to behave as if they were in the majority."

In this context, the West has no choice but to stand firm on its values - because Muslims are constantly pushing theirs. In our interconnected world, the old model of live and let live simply doesn't make sense.

What Rose would really like to see is reciprocity. He dreams of challenging Muslims: "Accept my taboos, and I will accept yours. If it is a crime to build a church in Saudi Arabia, then it should be illegal to build a mosque in Europe."

But such an approach, he readily admits, is unacceptable because it would lead to an intolerable decrease in freedom.

He talks about "sleeper" blasphemy laws - statutes that have long been on the books in European countries, and that Muslims are trying to reinvigorate. He argues for a "redefinition" of the concept of blasphemy so that it is not exclusively about religion but includes values, classical liberal ones as well.

Were it up to Rose, the only free speech restrictions he'd allow are those that prevent incitement to violence, and discourage libel and infringement on privacy.

"All other restrictions - like blasphemy laws, some of which date back to the 1930s - I'd get rid of."

The key, says Rose, is for the West to continue to emphasize individual rights and not, as in Muslim society, collective rights.

That leads him to make the controversial case for repealing legislation that makes Holocaust denial a crime - even though he feels strongly that the Shoah was a unique event in history, "without precedence. But I think it is a question of morality that you deal with through education and debate; it is not something you legislate. I would only leave [the Holocaust denial law] on the books if you could prove that repealing it would lead to violence. That is not a danger in today's Europe."

"Let's be consistent," he says. "We don't want Jews to have a law based on them as a group if we're arguing that Muslims living in the West should equally not have special group privileges."

Moreover, he says, holding firmly to preserving Western values at home makes it easier for the West to defend human rights in the Muslim world and elsewhere.

Rose wants Israelis to understand that Durban II is part of a broader trend of non-democratic societies trying to hijack international law, thereby instituting a new set of values.

How ingenious, he notes, that having coined the term "Islamophobia," Muslim countries are insinuating that criticizing Islam - as distinct from discriminating against individual Muslims - "is a disease, a sick fantasy that needs to be cured."