Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Balcony fall case update

Patrick Walsh, 56, who was arrested after the death of a suspected burglar in a fall from a window of his fourth-floor flat in South Manchester, will have no further action taken against him. Police said that “following an exchange of words” the suspect fell from the window on to the pavement. He died in hospital.

Source



Your government will protect you -- again

The mother of a 17-month-old boy and her boyfriend have been arrested on suspicion of murder after the child died from horrific injuries. It is understood that the boy was taken to a North London hospital with a broken back, fractured ribs and at least two fingernails missing. The child, who is believed to have been monitored by social services, died an hour after arriving at hospital. A police source described the case as horrific.

An investigation has begun into whether social services in Haringey could have prevented the death. The child was believed to have been on the council’s “at risk” register. The child’s death will once again raise crucial questions about Haringey council’s ability to protect children who are at risk from abusive parents or guardians. The council came in for fierce criticism four years ago after a report into the murder of Victoria Climbie highlighted serious social services failings in the monitoring of her welfare.

Yesterday officers from the Metropolitan Police Child Abuse Investigation Command arrested a 25-year old woman and 31-year old man on suspicion of murdering the boy. They are believed to be the child’s mother and her boyfriend. The child, who has not been named to protect the identity of his siblings, died at midday on August 3 at North Middlesex Hospital. Police were called because staff believed the death was suspicious. A postmortem examination, carried out at Great Ormond Street Hospital, proved inconclusive and further tests are being carried out to establish a cause of death.

Haringey council has ordered a serious case review involving police, the health service and social services after the latest death. A spokesman for the council said: “Police, health and social services and GPs will contribute to the review and it will examine the roll of those involved. This review is routine in suspicious deaths such as these.”

Victoria Climbie’s death seven years ago led to one of the biggest inquiries into child protection in Britain. Her great-aunt, Marie-Therese Kouao, and the woman’s boyfriend, Carl Manning, were jailed for life for murder in 2001. Lord Laming’s final report in 2003 identified major failings in all the agencies that had come into contact with Victoria during her short life in Haringey. The inquiry found that care workers missed at least 12 chances to save the girl. Despite their contact with her, staff knew no more about her when she died than when they first saw her. Victoria died from 128 injuries despite regular contact with social workers in four London boroughs, doctors at two hospitals and the police. Lord Laming said it was lamentable that “nothing more than basic good practice” would have saved her.

This year the council was criticised over allegations that its social workers were ignoring other child abuse cases. During an employment tribunal Nevres Kemal, a senior Haringey social worker, claimed that the council’s inaction exposed seven children to serious risk of abuse by their stepfather. Ms Kemal alleged that, when she raised these concerns with her superiors, she was victimised and suffered racial discrimination.

Source



ANTI-ISRAELISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM: COMMON CHARACTERISTICS AND MOTIFS

By Manfred Gerstenfeld

Abstract:

Anti-Semitism's core theme is that Jews embody absolute evil. It has been propagated intensely for many centuries. This extreme fallacy and its principal submotifs have remained largely the same over the ages. Their representation, however, has evolved according to circumstances. The three main permutations of the core theme are religious anti-Semitism-one might call it more precisely anti-Judaism, ethnic (racist) anti-Semitism, and anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism.

These three permutations have a number of common characteristics. There is an ongoing, powerful promotion of a discourse of Jew-hatred.The main motif of the Jew constituting absolute evil manifests itself according to the prevailing worldviews at a given time. Verbal or physical attacks are common against both Jews and Israelis. Jews and nowadays Israel are judged by standards applied to them but not to others. In its extreme form, the anti-Semitic process has three stages: demonization, isolation, and elimination.

The anti-Semitic character of anti-Israelism can be proved through the analysis of cartoons, opinion survey findings, statistical analysis, and semantics. During the summer 2006 war in Lebanon, further proof emerged that anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism go hand in hand.
The three main permutations of anti-Semitism have a number of common characteristics. These include:

1. There is an ongoing, powerful promotion of a discourse of Jew-hatred. This demonization has developed major subthemes over the years that recur in various disguises and gradually permeate society's narrative. With time the accusations become increasingly complex and difficult to disentangle. On this substrate the Jews' enemies build further when circumstances are suitable, when they wish to attack a specific person or group, or when they seek a scapegoat in a given situation.

2. The main motif of the Jew constituting absolute evil expresses itself according to the prevailing worldviews at a given time. The Jew is denounced as the quintessential other as perceived at that moment. When Christianity dominated the mindset, the Jew was presented as the killer of God, the Antichrist, and Satan. In periods of strong nationalism, Jews are portrayed as radically alien elements. When the societal emphasis is on race, Jews are depicted as an extremely inferior one. When ideological currents promote universalism, the state of Israel is demonized as nationalist, racist, and colonialist.

3. The core accusation of the Jew being evil splits up into submotifs. A central one is desire for power. This is seen first and foremost in the promotion of conspiracy theories-the prime one being The Protocols of the Elders of Zion -but also in many other variants. Other permutations include thirst for blood, infanticide, having a subhuman nature, and lust for money. These originated in the worlds of Christian or racist anti-Semitism. Many have been rejected and discredited but have not disappeared in the West, or are now recurring with respect to Israel.

4. One recurring fundamental accusation is that Jews have a severe genetic deficiency. Christian teachings said the Jew was born guilty because the forefathers of some Jews were reputedly responsible for the death of their religion's originator. Christian anti-Semitism, however, had an escape clause: Jews could convert and thereby, if all went well, rid themselves of the birth defect.

Yet when Jews converted massively in medieval Spain, a new genetic criterion to discriminate against the converts and their children was introduced: the purity of blood. Nazism went further and said the - supposed - severe genetic defects of the Jewish race, which made them pathologically dangerous, could not be repaired. The logical conclusion of this hate propaganda was that Jews had to be eliminated. The "Final Solution" envisioned the mass murder of all Jews, as implemented to a substantial extent in the Holocaust.

In our days the genetic motif has mutated further. Mainly in Arab and Western left-wing circles, one hears the anti-Semitic accusation that Israel was born in sin, that is, by driving out the Palestinians. This is not the sole attack on Israel's original legitimacy. The Holocaust denial by Iranian president Ahmadinejad is based on the fallacy that Israel's establishment was the direct result of the Holocaust. He thus thinks that if one could undermine the European narrative about the mass murder of Jews by saying it was a fabrication, then the basis on which the state of Israel was created would disappear.

Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri remarked ironically about Israel's birth in sin: "This is in contrast to the Arab states having been immaculately conceived."[6] The anti-Semitic character of the accusation becomes clearer when one considers that if a second Palestinian state should arise in addition to Jordan, its origins will be in genocidal propaganda, terrorism, war crimes, and corruption.

Another regularly recurring motif is that some Jews or Israelis can escape condemnation provided they publicly oppose Israeli policies. This sometimes happens in selective academic and similar boycott campaigns against Israel where those Israelis who are willing to denounce their government are sometimes excluded from the boycott.[7]

An example of the latter occurred when in March 2006 a British dance magazine, Dance Europe, refused to publish an article on Israeli choreographer Sally Ann Freeland. The editor said she would publish the piece only if Freeland condemned "the occupation." She refused and the article was dropped.[8] Economic boycott campaigns against Israel, on the other hand, leave no room for exceptions.

5. As circumstances changed over the centuries, the main anti-Semitic motifs were dressed up in different ways, often according to the local situation. As time passes, the central subthemes fragment and mutate, though rarely are major new ones added. In postmodern times, anti-Semitic mutations and fragmentations increase rapidly. This is what makes contemporary anti-Semitism such a many-sided, complicated challenge.

6. Verbal or physical attacks are often against both Jews and Israelis. This merging of targets is the strongest among many current proofs of the substantial overlap between anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism. It again emerged in many European reactions to the summer 2006 war in Lebanon.

7. Jews and nowadays Israel are judged by standards applied to them but not to others. As former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler observed: "Traditional anti-Semitism denied Jews the right to live as equal members of society, but the new anti-Jewishness denies the right of the Jewish people to live as an equal member of the family of nations."[9]

Former Swedish deputy prime minister Per Ahlmark pointed out: Anti-Zionism today has become very similar to anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionists accept the right of other peoples to national feelings and a defensible state. But they reject the right of the Jewish people to have its national consciousness expressed in the State of Israel and to make that state secure. Thus, they are not judging Israel with the values used to judge other countries. Such discrimination against Jews is called anti-Semitism.[10]

A typical, more recent example of such double standards is the new UN Human Rights Council, which, according to the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Itzhak Levanon, "has focused on Israel to the exclusion of other pressing human rights needs."[11] The council, for instance, has not passed a resolution condemning the over two hundred thousand deaths in Darfur, nor dealt with major human rights violations in countries such as China, for example.

8. Although current demonization of Israel and the Jews comes mainly from the Arab and Muslim world, the same sorts of motifs and semantics are also expressed in extreme left- and right-wing Western circles. This also pertains, be it of lower intensity, to the Western mainstream. This can best be demonstrated by analyzing anti-Semitic cartoons, which rely on familiar and immediately grasped stereotypes for their effectiveness.

9. In its extreme form, the anti-Semitic process has three stages:

Demonization

Isolation

Elimination

The latter can be implemented by expulsion or destruction.

Joshua Trachtenberg summed up in one sentence how medieval Christendom demonized the Jew. It "saw him-sorcerer, murderer, cannibal, poisoner, blasphemer, the devil's disciple in all truth."[12]

How far today's demonizers have already succeeded emerged in a report on Israel's international image by the Anholt Nation Brand Index. The report concluded that: "Israel's brand is, by a considerable margin, the most negative we have ever measured in the NBI, and comes in at the bottom of the ranking on almost every question."[13]

10. In recent decades, improvements in communications have accelerated the spread of anti-Semitism worldwide in all its permutations. The internet has added a new, rapid means of transmitting prejudice, including anti-Semitism.[14] This is termed "cyberhate," and it plays a major role in the postmodern global war against Israel and the Jews.[15] Nazism used mass media effectively to demonize the Jews. The internet plays a similar role and is much faster.

In its September 2006 report, the British All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Anti-Semitism recognized the impact of today's communication technologies: "Anti-Semitism can now [be] disseminated faster and further than ever before. Egyptian and Syrian state television broadcast anti-Jewish propaganda to millions of homes, including in the UK, and far right and radical Islamist organizations are using the internet as a key component in their campaigns of hatred."[16]

Anti-Israelism

The late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century explosion of anti-Israelism, a hate phenomenon that had existed for decades at much lower levels, caught the Jewish world and Israel by surprise. Certain authors, however, had already described several aspects of the anti-Zionist permutation of anti-Semitism.

In 1979, in the original French version of his book The Anti-Zionist Complex, Jacques Givet wrote: "The anti-Zionist becomes an overt anti-Semite as soon as he goes beyond criticism of the policies of the Jerusalem government (a favorite activity of the Israelis themselves) and challenges the very existence of the State of Israel."[17]

In France-where new mutations of anti-Semitism are frequently pioneered-the overlap of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism occurred at an early stage. It was partly linked to the large number of communist intellectuals. This came to the fore, for instance, during the so-called doctors' plot in 1953. Jewish doctors in the Soviet Union were accused of having caused the deaths of leading political figures by incorrect diagnosis and treatment. This was accompanied by a campaign against "cosmopolitanism" and Zionism.

French communist intellectuals organized a major solidarity meeting in Paris. Many of the speakers explained that it was normal practice to suspect doctors of poisoning people, as Mengele had done in Auschwitz. A Jewish physician publicly stated, adducing German behavior during World War II, that one could not rule out that Jews or Zionists had decided to poison Soviet personalities.[18]

A retired Israeli diplomat, stationed in the early 1980s at the Israeli embassy in Oslo, told how he had been invited to speak at the General Headquarters of the Norwegian army on Israel's military strategy. During question time, one of the generals asked why the Jews had "crucified our Lord." The Israeli diplomat asked the questioner what that had to do with the topic. The general replied that he had taken this opportunity for the question because the diplomat was the first Jew he had ever met and presumably could give an answer, since his ancestors were probably responsible. The diplomat then suggested that he call upon the ambassador of Italy as he was likely to be a descendant of the Romans who had pronounced the verdict.[19]

It took many years until it was more widely accepted, with many provisos, that anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism overlap. Human rights expert Jean-Christophe Ruffin, in a 2004 report he prepared for the French interior minister, explicitly linked anti-Semitism to the anti-Israeli mood prevailing in the country: "It is not conceivable today to fight actively in France against anti-Semitism in its new mutations without going all-out to try and balance anew the public's view of the situation in the Middle East."[20]

In a 2006 report titled "Campus Anti-Semitism," the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found, among other things, that: "Anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist propaganda has been disseminated on many campuses that include traditional anti-Semitic elements, including age-old anti-Jewish stereotypes and defamation." A second finding was that "anti-Semitic bigotry is no less morally deplorable when camouflaged as anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism." The report also stated: "substantial evidence suggests that many university departments of Middle East studies provide one-sided, highly polemical academic presentations and some may repress legitimate debate concerning Israel."[21]

The abovementioned Report of the British All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Anti-Semitism also observed: Anti-Zionist discourse can be polluted with anti-Semitic themes in different ways and with different levels of intent. It can be used deliberately as a way to mask or articulate prejudice against Jews. It is difficult to counter because one must first identify and explain the anti-Semitism behind the language and imagery. For instance, a far right party may use the terms of "Zionist" and "Zionism" instead of "Jews" and "Jewish."[22]

A major handicap in exposing the racist anti-Zionist permutation of anti-Semitism was the lack of a generally accepted contemporary definition of anti-Semitism. An important attempt to define the "new" anti-Semitism was made by Cotler. He already drew attention to several of the points later included in the definition of the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), such as calling for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people, "Nazifying" Israel, and discriminatory treatment of Israel by denying it equality before the law.[23]

More here

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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