Are quotes being fraudulently attributed to Israeli ministers (as NMT’s indignant Israeli PR visitors are insisting)? We decided to look into the Ariel Sharon “fabrication” about who controls of America. Let’s just say our hasbara critics are going to wish they’d tempered their indignation. In the process, we found more indecorous pronouncements, which we’ve included with direct attributions from the Israeli press. Tokhis oyfn tish.
Did Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon say “I control America,” or words to such effect? It turns out this has been made a bone of contention since the alleged rebuke to Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in October 2001.
The Israeli PR website CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) has been accusing Arab-sympathetic Washington Report, (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs -WRMEA) of orchestrating this story. The quote was picked up by the international press from Chicago Tribune syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, who had attributed it to having been reported on Israeli radio station Kol Yisrael.
CAMERA claimed that Kol Yisrael denied having aired the quote. But Geyer could not discount the veracity of her multiple Israeli sources, whether or not they heard it on the radio or at the meeting, but the veteran journalist stood by her longstanding contacts. Under a coordinated barrage of LTE complaints by CAMERA, the Chicago Tribune issued this clarification on June 14, 2002:
“[the quote was] widely reported in the Palestinian press but cannot be confirmed in independent sources. Geyer and Universal Press Syndicate regret not having attributed the quote more specifically.”
Hardly an admission of “fabrication,” as CAMERA and this site’s hasbara propagandists are lauding.
And whether Sharon said it or not, Senator Fullbright, or Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had already spelled that notion out for posterity.
Perhaps Prime Minister Olmert’s recent claim to have interrupted George Bush mid-speech, to command Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to stand down on a United Nations vote condemning the recent Gaza attack, proves Israel’s influence, more loudly than pronouncing it.
But a statement about who claims to control whom, pales in comparison to what some Israeli ministers have voiced about their military objectives in Gaza. They remind me of American commanders, utterly oblivious to the Geneva Conventions.
Matan Vilnai
Here’s what Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai famously told Army Radio last year:
“The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger ‘Shoah’ because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”
SHOAH is the Hebrew word for Holocaust; itself a word zealously trademarked by Zionists internationally to mean only the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews.
Israeli PR damage-control immediately jumped in to assert that by ‘Shoah,’ Vilnai had meant ‘disaster,’ the word’s original definition. (Would that be like asking Americans to believe that when Rudy Giuliani brings up 911, he’s talking about dialing emergency?)
Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter
at weekly cabinet meeting Sunday, Jan 20, 2008:
“the government must instruct the IDF to eliminate the rocket fire from Gaza entirely. These attacks need not be minimized or managed, but stopped completely irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians.”
Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit:
“any other country would have already gone in and leveled the area, which is exactly what I think the IDF should do – decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it.”
“We should let them know ‘you have to leave, this area will be taken down tomorrow’ and just take it down – that will show them we mean business. Sporadic actions are good, but they’re not good enough.”
(At the same meeting, according to Haaretz: legal experts were requested to prepare an opinion on a “gradual evacuation of the population” in Gaza from areas of fighting.)
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
at the annual Herzliya Conference Jan 23, 2008
“But there is no justification for demanding we allow residents of Gaza to live normal lives while shells and rockets are fired from their streets and courtyards at Sderot and other communities in the south.”
“Does anyone seriously think that our children will wet their beds at night in fear and be afraid to go out of the house and they [Gazans] will live in quiet normality?”
So, in the end, the Sharon quote that was posted on your site cannot be substantiated to American journalistic standards. Ms. Geyer did not hear them with her own ears and the alleged original source denies the quote. To borrow from John Cleese in the famous Parrot skit on Monty Python, what we have is a dead quote, no matter how others try to spin it. And, thanks to CAMERA, backed up by the Wall St. Journal, for having shown the quote to have no reliable corroboration. Nor, has any legitimate substantiation been provided for the alleged Ben Gurion quote about how he would never do business with Israel were he not Israeli. The original of that statement deserves some kind of award for creative writing.
Nonsense. This is how you deny torture, when the victim can’t produce a witness.
No, Eric, that is not the case. In most states with strong legal systems, there is a presumption of innocence not the other way around. If one is making allegations, one must prove that those allegations are credible and not the other way around.
I know that you feel that you are the lawyer for the entire ‘Jewish State’, ‘Don’, but political opinion does not work from a legalistic mind set where the legalities are actually set to defend the elite and jail the non-elite for the elites’ benefit. So you may take your ‘presumption of innocence’ crap and shove it back up the ‘Jewish State’ s rear end for all we are concerned.
You are trying to use the overly legalistic and obtuse lawyer style when international law has been totally turned on its head anyway by the Israeli and US Torture and Occupation Machines. Get real, Machine Guy.
“Nonsense. This is how you deny torture, when the victim can’t produce a witness.”
I thought I was speaing of the bogus Sharon quote, appearing on every wacko anti-Israel website and but not reported by even one reliable news source. As for torture, to be quite upfront, torture in Israel, to whatever degree it’s happening, really isn’t high on my list of things that keep me up at night, given the honor killings, executions without trials and just ordinary mutilations that are a daily occurence elsewhere in the Middle East. When it comes to human rights, Israel, while not perfect, is still light years away from any Arab states.
Ronald, don’t worry. We wouldn’t want your sleep to be interrupted by worries about Jews torturing people of another nationality, culture, and religion.
Another point that should be made is that in Israel inquiries can be requested into allegations of torture,war crimes, whatever. Israel is the only state in the ME with a formal judicial sytem, in which appeals can be made up through the Supreme Court. Incidentally, Arab judges have been judges on Israel’s hghest court. Nowhere in the Arab world is there such a legal system in place, and, nowhere is there the level of self-introspection, self-criticism and transparency as in Israel.
Another thing for you to remember, ‘Ron’, is that Palestinians do not torture Jewish prisoners, but Jews torture Palestinian prisoners routinely. Don’t lose any sleep over it though!
Holocaust is not a term exclusive for the jews, we in australia include the serbians etcs so I’m not sure that is correct.
tony – Your not seeing the difference between jews and Israelies. How can Jews torture Palestinian prisoners??? Can I blame all muslims for the attacks around the world?
I meant Jewish Israelis, Simon.
I doubt that anybody thought I was referring to American Jews torturing Palestinians. They’re more likely torturing Iraqis or Afghans, or they not?
Jewish Israelis rather than Israelis ?
so I shouldnt call them iranians but just muslims? Now I have that clear its quite easy to see why the world is in such a mess
Simon-
25% of Israelis are non-Jews, and live as second class citizens in Israel. They do not have the right to vote, and have to abide discriminatory treatment.
“25% of Israelis are non-Jews, and live as second class citizens in Israel. They do not have the right to vote, and have to abide discriminatory treatment.”
Do you just make this up as you go along? Arabs in Israel are free to vote. They also have the right to free expression, including the right to protest, a right they had been exercising in great numbers when Israel was in Gaza. In the Arab states, your tongue is cut out if you dare criticize the dictators in power. If Arabs in Israel feel they are treated like second-class citizens, they can always move to Saudi Arabia where women are forbidden to drive cars or any other modernistic, forward-thinking Arab state. Funny how those Arabs aren’t lining up to leave Israel.