Letter
from Sweden
By
Israel Shamir
The best place on earth
in the summer, Scandinavia. Here, one sees flowery meadows like in
the Highlands of Palestine in early spring. Rivers are full of
water, a blissful sight for a man from our parched land. Sun is kind
and gentle, like we have got in November. People are nice and
pleasant, children run around safely, and there are no tanks in
sight.
But here also the shadow
of Middle Eastern conflict lays on the land. The media market is
cornered, main newspapers belong to Mammonites, and they publish
their usual drivel, attacking Palestinians and their own Foreign
Minister, a very good and brave woman.
Last Friday the leading
Swedish daily DN published an inflammatory, hate-mongering piece
about Muslims and Palestinians, penned by a Polish Jew resident in
Sweden, Jackie Jacubowski. I wrote the following response; it was,
however, refused by the DN editors, compatriots of Mr Jacubowski.
Still, the only Left-wing paper, Stockholms Fria, published my
response, and I offer it to you as late-summer entertainment. The
original text of Jacubowski can be found on http://www.dn.se/
INNOCENT
ABROAD
By
Israel Shamir
(Response to Jackie
Jacubowski’s The double message of Yasser Arafat (Dagens Nyheter
August 9th 2002)
The medieval seafarers
were notorious for delivering home rather dubious titbits from
faraway lands. People with dog heads, mares impregnated by Easterly
wind, ferocity of natives were reported about, and duly recorded by
their land-bound contemporaries. Whenever one leafs through Isidor
of Seville or Adam of Bremen, one encounters a picture of the world
greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted due to innocence and
ignorance of writers. Since then, we learned that one should write
about things one knows first-hand. Coherent writing demands a
certain expertise.
It is probably not enough
to be a Swede to write intelligently about Swede root, or to have
dark skin to write a leader on African affairs. Are you still with
me? Then you will share my astonishment why DN decided to spare half
of its Culture page to splash a piece on Middle East and peoples of
Islamic world penned by Mr Jacubowski. From my personal acquaintance
with Jackie, this many-gifted man knows about the Middle East as
little as the next man. He speaks no Arabic, he never studied the
area, he is no expert on Islam. His only connection is that Mr
Jacubowski deeply loves Israel, as do many Polish Jews who preferred
to come to Sweden rather than to sweat it out in our hot and
beautiful country. As an Israeli, I approve and appreciate this
feeling. He could write a poem full of love to Israel and/or to
Jewish people, and it could be of interest to DN readers, or at
least to friends of Mr Jacubowski.
Instead, he chose to
write on subject he has no idea about. Jackie tells us what was
preached in a Gaza mosque. How could he know? He has no language, no
tools to understand what is said, and he is ten thousand miles away.
The answer is simple. Careful reading shows that Mr Jacubowski
lifted all his examples from a single publication by the Middle East
Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organisation ostensibly
supposed to bring westwards the Arab discourse. MEMRI sends around
its sets of quotes, always hostile to Islam and Arabs, to be picked
by the likes of Mr Jacubowski. How do I know it is his source? In
his essay, he repeated the MEMRI line calling ar-Riyadh “the Saudi
Government official newspaper”, while it is a small private-owned
paper.
As the respectable
British newspaper, the Guardian, reported, MEMRI is a secretive body
managed by Colonel Yigal Carmon of Israeli Military Intelligence.
Out of six members of MEMRI staff, three are working (or have been
working) for Israeli Intelligence, another one served in the Israeli
Army Northern Command, that ran the al-Khayam Torture Prison in
South Lebanon.
The non-Army member of
MEMRI staff, Brian Whitaker of the Guardian tells us, is an Israeli
right-winger Meyrav Wurmser, from the Likud ideological warfare body
in the US, the Hudson Institute. While Jackie quotes Amos Oz with
sympathy, his main source, Ms Wurmser, considers “leftwing Israeli
intellectuals” like Oz, - a threat to the state of
Israel.
Information and
disinformation coming from such biased sources has to be correctly
presented to the reader with full credits to its origin: the
hate-mongering right-wing elements within Israeli Intelligence. Mr
Jacubowski broke this rule and misinformed the Swedish reader. By
innocence or ignorance, he turned this newspaper into another
conduit of Israeli propaganda.
His second major source
gets full credits. It is the Islam scholar Bernard Lewis, who
provides Jackie with some especially virulent conclusions. I must
admit this choice shows even more the innocence, or ignorance of Mr
Jacubowski. Lewis was tried and found guilty of “hate crime” in
France, and was branded as a Holocaust denier. Could such a person
serve as reputable source for judging one billion Muslims? Probably
not without informing the reader of his very particular views.
Surely, Lewis denied the Armenian holocaust, not the Jewish one, but
I hope even very devoted to Israel Mr Jacubowski would not
distinguish between blood and blood, genocide and genocide. Or would
he?.. Astonishingly, this holocaust denier is very popular with
Jewish extreme nationalists.
Jacubowski quotes words
of an Egyptian preacher against peace. This preacher could compare
his notes with the late Lubawitcher Rebbe, one of the most
authoritative Rabbinic authorities of modern Judaism, who forbade to
sign the ‘godless’ peace treaty with Egypt.
This is the ‘theological’
discourse of the Middle East; in this context Mr Jacubowski could
explain to the DN readers the unpleasant sayings of our neighbours.
But he preferred to quote out of context, and misled the
reader.
One can understand why.
It is easier to reject the medieval accusation of Jews killing
Christian children, than to deal with horrible amount of real
Christian and Muslim children murdered by the soldiers of the Jewish
state. But for us, Israelis, it is the fact we should confront:
hundreds of Palestinian children, from age of three months to
sixteen years, were shot by Israeli soldiers before the first
suicide bomber left his base. And we are painfully aware of it. The
head of Shabak, the feared Israeli counter-intelligence, a harsh old
soldier, not a soft left-wing humanist, expressed his astonishment
and horror, speaking on TV News, about ease the Israeli soldiers
kill Palestinian children. “Why don’t they refuse such an order?”,
said Ami Ayalon. But for Jacubowski, it is preferable to speak about
medieval accusations.
As in passim, Mr
Jacubowski ‘explains’ to his readers what is al-Nakba. This instant
expert says it is “Arabic for the Catastrophe, i.e. the foundation
of Israel”. I am at loss, is it an attempt of al-Nakba denial, a
disease Jackie got from the Holocaust denier Lewis, or just plain
innocence, akin to dog heads in Adam of Bremen chronics? If
al-Nakba, in his enlightened opinion, means “the foundation of
Israel”, why we do not translate it always in such way? Naturally,
al-Nakba is not “the foundation of Israel”, but the horrific ethnic
cleansing perpetuated by Zionists in 1948, when 90 per cent of
non-Jews (native Palestinians, Armenians, Circassians, Germans,
Russians, Greeks) were forcibly expelled, and their property
confiscated by the emerging Jewish state. As the publisher of
Judiska Kronika, Mr Jacubowski could translate and print in the next
issue one of the best known Israeli short stories, Khirbet Khize, by
S. Yizhar, “the Israeli James Joyce”. There he would find a
blood-curdling description of al-Nakba, never to be forgotten.
Jackie thinks that the Swedish foreign minister does not understand
the true meaning of Arabs. Alas, as we have seen, he understands it
even worse.
However, his lack of
understanding can bring grievous consequences. He, and other active
“friends” of Israel reinforce the feeling of one-billion-strong
Muslim world that it is not only us Israelis, but all the Jews stand
against them. Publication of his biased essay entrenches the myth of
omnipotent Jews who are able to print such biased stuff in important
newspapers from New York to Stockholm.
Presentation of our
Palestinian neighbours as “untrustworthy Arabs, full of anti-Semitic
hate” is not only wrong. It implies we have no place, no future in
the Middle East. A ghetto, even an extremely well armed ghetto can
not survive the hostility of neighbours, while Jackie’s message
reinforces the ghetto mentality of our people. We, Israelis, are not
seeking a new Masada, a new Warsaw Ghetto or the nuclear holocaust.
Unlike Jackie, we live there and we would like to stick around. Our
Palestinian neighbours are wonderful people, not haters and
monsters. Advices of Bernard Lewis and other right-wing hate-mongers
already brought us to the most severe crisis of present days. We,
people of the Holy Land, should turn to understanding, mutual love
and respect, full equality for a Jew and Gentile, as in Sweden. Try
and support it, instead of hate-mongering.