I did a brief canvass of my younger female friends and relatives, and the first cousin I asked told me that it was certainly a fact of life for women her age (mid 20s), and that she remembered an incident when a man leapt out from a group of young men and grabbed her friend’s breast as they were walking in a high street. The second, however, told me that she didn’t experience it, probably because she has a large number of male friends who protect her, and is of a stockier build than the first cousin in any case.

The suggestion that women take this kind of harassment as a compliment, and ignore the threatening aspects of it, seems to me to be typical of our current attitude towards offensive and hurtful “humour”. When the mother of a child with Down’s Syndrome complained about Frankie Boyle mocking such people in April last year, the comedian replied that his jokes were “all true” and when she persisted, he said that it was his last tour and he did not give a f***. The mother posted a blog (reproduced by the Daily Mail) and the response from the public (or, perhaps, from an organised contingent of Boyle’s fans or from some other gang of harassers such as Anonymous) was so vicious that she eventually pulled the blog down. As Terri (who seems to be the mother of a daughter with Down’s Syndrome) noted, the response amounted to various versions of “just shut up”.

People find these jokes funny, as noted when I posted on the Ricky Gervais ME routine (I also talked to the local radio station about it, after the host ran a show about the already mentioned Boyle episode), people were laughing. The video to the entry was a short clip, but having seen the whole routine, there is a slew of ignorant and racist jokes in between the stuff about ME. More recently, Boyle came out with the line that Katie Price (the socialite also known as the model Jordan) would need a prize-fighter to keep Harvey off her (sexually — he used an F-word for that purpose), Harvey being her blind and severely physically disabled child. There is a fondness for rape jokes among some comedians, and when I complained to the BBC about a joke about the possibility of George Michael being raped in the shower during his recent prison term, I was informed that “as the BBC is a public service financed by the licence fee it must provide programmes which cater for the whole range of tastes in humour”.

A lot of people find jokes at the expense of the disabled funny at the point of delivery, but if it’s acceptable for such jokes to be made on stage and on national TV, it becomes normal for them to be made in the playground and on the bus, which may well partly explain why those with intellectual disabilities find being on buses with school-children a miserable experience. Surveys of such people have found that pretty much all respondents experienced harassment on a regular basis, and would go home early from their drop-in centres to avoid it. I am sure these people don’t find this kind of humour funny when it is right in their faces.

However, there are some who will excuse a comedian for these kinds of outrages because they approve of his views about something else. In the past, the Palestinians had some fine talent on their side such as Alexei Sayle, but if he could not liberate the place, one despairs when their best hope is the abominable Frankie Boyle. As a Muslim, it is depressing to see Muslims excusing someone who makes his living by mocking the most vulnerable in society on the grounds that he also supports the Palestinian cause, both through his jokes and through letters to the BBC. But that is pretty much what 1st Ethical did this past week when Boyle got in trouble for a routine in which he used the N-word, and “paki”, in a supposed parody of news coverage of deaths in foreign wars. I wonder, given his prior record, whether he really wanted to satirise that or just have fun with a couple of nasty words.

If we are to oppose oppression abroad, we should not support it here, or defend those who do. If we are to complain when Palestinians experience harassment when going about their business in the West Bank, we should feel the same way about disabled people here in the UK being senselessly harassed on the streets of our cities. A joke from the British comedy Fawlty Towers springs to mind, in which the senile Major Gowen tells Polly, the waitress, that he hates Germans but loves women. Polly responds, “what about German women?”. (His response is, “good card players … but mind you, I wouldn’t give ‘em the time of day”.)

So if you love Palestinians so much but don’t care much for those with disabilities, what about disabled Palestinians?

How did this man manage to deceive an Israeli Jewish woman that he was Jewish?

Surely, as a native Arabic speaker, he would have an accent to match, even if he could speak good Hebrew (or English). The woman he slept with would have noticed, much as a native English speaker can usually tell someone who isn’t by a foreign accent. Maybe she was deaf, but that’s not mentioned in any of the news reports.

I’m not arguing that rape by deceit isn’t rape; it is, and even if the victim is prejudiced, that’s no excuse. But this case doesn’t make sense to me.

Gaza Freedom Flotilla Killings: FACT CHECK (Dispelling Myths as Israeli PR Moves into Full Swing)

I was at yesterday’s rally in Whitehall, and took a few photos which I uploaded to Facebook. The album is public and you can see it here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?id=687334032&aid=172934

(More later, in sha Allah.)

Putting aside the nuclear weapons issue, the quotes included in this feature will confirm what many already believe about the attitudes of Israel and why it made a ready ally of old South Africa:

For years after its birth, Israel was publicly critical of apartheid and sought to build alliances with the newly independent African states through the 1960s.

But after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, African governments increasingly came to look on the Jewish state as another colonialist power. The government in Jerusalem cast around for new allies and found one in Pretoria. For a start, South Africa was already providing the yellowcake essential for building a nuclear weapon.

By 1976, the relationship had changed so profoundly that South Africa’s prime minister, John Vorster, could not only make a visit to Jerusalem but accompany Israel’s two most important leaders, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, to the city’s Holocaust memorial to mourn the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.

Neither Israeli appears to have been disturbed by the fact that Vorster had been an open supporter of Hitler, a member of South Africa’s fascist and violently antisemitic Ossewabrandwag [“Ox-wagon guards”, a pro-German Afrikaner nationalist group of the 1940s] and that he was interned during the war as a Nazi sympathiser.

Rabin hailed Vorster as a force for freedom and at a banquet toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”.

A few months later, the South African government’s yearbook described the two countries having one thing in common above all else: “They are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”

Pro-Israeli Jews often express outrage when non-Jews compare Israeli treatment of Palestinians to Apartheid, and they often have excuses which are trivial facts whose significance they exaggerate, such as that Black South Africans were South African citizens while Palestinians are not Israeli citizens. (In fact, many Black South Africans were stripped of their citizenship and reassigned the citizenship of their “homelands”.) So much of Israeli policy in the West Bank in particular resembles Apartheid - the theft of the most fertile lands and water, for example, but some of it is their own invention, such as the wall to divide Palestinian villagers from their own farms and from each other, the Israelis-only highways and so on.

The last paragraph quoted demonstrates why the two countries were ready allies. Regardless of whether Vorster was an anti-Semite or even a Nazi, both countries were white settler colonies facing a determined, and well-justified, attempt to force them out by natives they oppressed, who they regarded as inferiors, whose land and water they stole and who they forced into impoverished enclaves. Zionists fantasised that “Israel” was a “land without people for people without land”, but when they found that there actually were people there, they resorted, as might be expected, to straightforward racism, as can be seen on many a pro-Zionist website (this was particularly true during the post-9/11 period), calling Palestinians “Palis” and “Arab squatters” among other things. The ease with which Israelis and white South Africans got along should surprise nobody.

As Muslims it’s been our recent experience that many of the voices raised loudest against Muslims in the west have connections to Israel, particularly in the United States but also in the UK; they include radical Zionists, secular Jews who like to police which types of Muslims the left, in particular, associates with, and Christian Zionists. Now, it’s the turn of the Jerusalem Post to basically tell the west how to deal with its Muslims: the “burka” cannot be tolerated because it is supposedly misogynistic, because it “undermines social cohesion”, and because it’s a security and crime risk. Do we really need them to tell us how to manage our own security?

In Israel, the problem is complicated by a small group of Jews who have decided that their women have to wear what they are calling a “burka” as well. There are said to be groups of Christians who adopt modes of dress nowadays associated with Islam, particularly in the USA, also. The problem is that Muslims, and for that matter Haredi Jews, living in the west do not attempt to impose their way of life on everyone else. When you travel through one of their districts in Jerusalem, the buses are segregated with men at the front and the women at the back. I have never heard of such things happening in London or any city in the Midlands or the North of England where there are areas with, if not a majority, then certainly a distinct Muslim character. (There is nowhere in London that has a Jewish majority, although the presence of Haredi Jews in places like Stamford Hill is certainly substantial.)

Their article clearly reveals their ignorance about Islam itself: they state that the niqaab, or “burka” as they insist on calling it, “is worn in more extremist Muslim traditions as part of a conscientious adherence to hijab”, before moving onto the issue of the “zealot sect” of Jews which has adopted it. Having come across a number of women who wear niqaab in my time as a Muslim, I can safely say that most are not extremists. It’s true that there are one or two groups whose members can be more reliably counted on to wear niqaab than others, but even this does not make them a threat to anyone, even if they tend to keep to their own kind. They are groups that can best be compared to the Plymouth Brethren, Jehovah’s Witnesses or some of the Haredi Jews, all of which keep themselves isolated (far more than any Muslim group does) and cause no great distress to society.

The editorial claims,

But while the objectification of women is wrong, it cannot be compared to the brutal erasing of their very presence. The burka deviates so radically from accepted Western norms that it cannot be permitted under the pretext of freedom of religious expression, just as full nudity can’t. That’s why the vast majority of moderate Muslims oppose the burka.

The niqaab does not “erase their very presence”; in my observation, many (though not all) combine the niqaab with overclothes which do not totally erase their femininity, much less their presence, and are often nicely decorated abayas and coloured scarves rather than single-coloured “tents”. Muslims did not come here on the condition that they obeyed western “norms”, only local laws, and generally laws do not enforce norms but forbid harms. As for “moderate Muslims”, if what is meant by this is the Melanie Phillips definition (which, judging by the talk of “social cohesion”, is what is meant) of Muslims who are pro-Israel, perhaps this is true! But no Muslim can fail to respect women who wear the niqaab because its religious merit is well-established.

They continue:

The burka also undermines social cohesion. Women who wear the burka in Western countries send out a strongly anti-integrationist message. It is part of a wider rejection of Western values by radical Islamists who insist on full communal autonomy and the official recognition of Sharia law, including the imposition of the niqab (full veiling of the female face), and sometimes the right to perform female genital mutilation.

Here we see them thrashing about looking for connections where there are none. The majority of Muslims in the UK are from north India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where the vast majority of women are not circumcised and never have been. It is just not an issue with them; it is an issue with Somalis and other Africans (not all of them Muslims). The niqaab has nothing to do with “radical Islamists” but with women who regard it as part of perfecting their religion, most of them not at all influenced by “radical Islamists”. Not all of the women associated with the radicals wear niqaab; before al-Muhajiroun became what it is today, it was rare to see women in niqaab at functions they organised. Mostly they wore the normal hijaab with a long dress coat. However, it is more common to find women in niqaab (and men in traditional attire) in areas where they feel safe doing so, meaning areas where Muslims are numerous.

They also mention that the niqaab “can be a security or crime risk”, hiding the identity of “a potential terrorist or criminal”. They should consider the experience of the UK, where women have been wearing niqaab in large numbers since at least the 1990s, and the fact remains that robbers who want to conceal their identities wear balaclavas, not niqaabs, and will no doubt continue doing so even if Muslim women are banned from wearing niqaab. Niqaab and the clothes commonly worn with it are best suited to walking around gracefully, not making quick get-aways from scenes of crimes. The best-known “incident” of a niqaab being used for such purposes has in fact never been proven to have happened, but involves a failed terrorist supposedly using his wife’s niqaab and passport to flee the country in 2005 — not to actually perpetrate an act of terrorism. This could have been averted by the security staff at the airport doing their jobs properly and pulling him (if that’s who it was) over to ask a few questions. If something is known to be used as a means of concealing a threat, then there is a case for restricting it, but in the twenty years that the niqaab has been commonly worn by some Muslim women in the UK, it hasn’t been. That somebody in Israel thinks it could be has no relevance to the UK.

Those who support such legislation realize that an easygoing multiculturalism works only when there are basic shared values and a willingness to integrate. But European multiculturalism has deteriorated into rudderless moral relativism and a pusillanimous reluctance to criticize radical Islamic customs for fear of being branded an Islamophobe.

This is a piece of nonsense which has been discredited many times before. The press in this country are certainly not shy of being called Islamophobic — why would some newspapers have printed front-page attacks on the niqaab if they had any such fear? Articles hostile to Islam and aspects of Muslim culture appear in the western press all the time. Where did they get this nonsense?

Sadly, some Jewish leaders, such as Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, chief rabbi of Moscow and leader of the Conference of European Rabbis, have helped foster such unfounded fears. “Sixty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz,” wrote Goldschmidt in the New York Times in February, in an op-ed opposing the idea of bans on the burka, “Europeans can permit themselves to be squeamish about how things start and how things, if left unabated, can end.” As a rabbi, he added, “I am made uncomfortable when any religious expression is restricted, not only my own.”

Goldschmidt has got it wrong. Europeans have a right to feel uncomfortable. But not, as Goldschmidt argues, because Europeans are being too hard on Muslims. Rather, because they are being too soft.

So, Goldschmidt should stop behaving like an downtrodden, self-hating diaspora Jew and treat Muslims like what that author considers Muslims to be: the enemy. Jews and Muslims living in the west have various things in common, such as being a religious minority with dietary customs in particular which aren’t shared by the majority population, and with differing dress codes in some cases and a well-founded fear of discrimination and persecution, particularly in Russia where there is a long history of anti-Semitism, of hostility to religion, of an aggressive dominant Christian church, and a recent upsurge of fascist and racist violence. It is an environment where religious minorities have to stick together, not fight each other in the interests of a foreign power. That is not the case in Israel, where Jews are dominant but the Muslim (and Christian) minority they have occupied are the enemy. Why does this writer not just do the honest thing and tell Goldschmidt to move to Israel?

It’s impossible to escape the feeling that this author simply wants Europeans to stick the boot into Muslims because he or she fears them as an Israeli Jew. Israel is reliant on America and Europe to support it by both buying its agricultural exports and by paying for its defence. It is a myth that Israel is some sort of vanguard for western interests in the Middle East; it is a subsidised armed encampment in hostile territory that the West could actually do without. As it happens, Israelis do not particularly welcome foreigners, including diaspora Jews, telling them how to run their country and how to deal with the Palestinians, so why on earth should they expect the west to change the way they deal with Muslims simply to suit their interests? Of course, an Israeli op-ed writer is not the only foreigner who could tell the west that he or she “knows all about the Muslims” — the leaders of the Indian BJP and its associated organisations, various Serbian religious figures, Peter Akinola and his fellow-travellers in the Church of England; would the west be taking their advice also? None of the arguments presented here stack up, and while it may be true that only a tiny percentage of women on the continent wear niqaab, the experience in the UK is of large numbers wearing it over a 20-year period without any significant problems.

He interviewed an elderly journalist at Yediot Aharonot, a major Israeli newspaper, who claimed that all the countries in Europe were anti-Semitic, including England, although some were noisier than others. This man was a Holocaust survivor, but what was much more frightening was the sight of Israeli schoolchildren, who were on an educational visit to Auschwitz, being protected with Secret Service agents (whose faces had to be obscured in the film) and being told there were anti-Semites and neo-Nazis everywhere in Poland. They couldn’t go out because there were anti-Semites who might attack them. They were told that three old men talking on a park bench were being anti-Semitic to them, when they were not.

After the scene with the old Israeli journalist, the programme then moved to New York, where the presenter tried to get the Anti-Defamation League to provide him with a case to feature in his film. They thought they might have one when a woman wrote in complaining of a policeman she overheard at a Jewish funeral talking about finishing “this Jewish sh**”, but in the end the woman accepted the policeman’s apology. They finally settled on an old case in which stones had been thrown at the window of a Jewish school bus. It turned out that the district - Crown Heights in Brooklyn - was one in which blacks and Haredi Jews lived together, but apart. A Jewish reporter claimed that Jews were weak and easy targets, and a black man would rob a Jew rather than another black person because they knew a Jew would be less able to fight back. The Blacks responded by saying that the Jews lived simply and had nothing to steal, that you would get less time for robbing a black man, and that Jews knew how to get every benefit the state offered. They also cited the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” a number of times.

A local rabbi alleged that anti-Semitism was used to cover incidents of random violence any time the victim happens to be Jewish, and predicted that Abe Foxman, the leader of the ADL, won’t be inviting him round his house, as if he was not too bothered by that. Later on in the programme, a Orthodox rabbi in Kiev (who spoke very good English) said that fighting anti-Semitism was a way for non-religious Jews to express their Jewish identity; religious Jews simply practise their religion and are less concerned about anti-Semitism than secular ones. Shamir also showed extensive interviews with Norman Finkelstein, who displayed obvious personal animosity for Foxman by saying that comparing him to Hitler was insulting to the latter (“at least Hitler didn’t do it for money”), but made the point that when Jews were the most successful and richest ethnic group in the USA, it was “just kind of shameful” to be talking about anti-Semitism, although he acknowledged that some people had a “queasy” feeling about Jews, which in his opinion had no real repercussions. Uri Avnery, an Israeli former parliamentarian and peace activist, said that anti-Semitism today was just an invention of the Israeli media, that Jews in America had never had it better, while other groups such as Blacks and Arabs did face prejudice, yet were “scared of their own shadows” and walking around with magnifying glasses trying to find anti-Semites.

So, the programme did demonstrate that some anti-Semitism did exist, with men openly citing the Protocols and calling the Jews “part of the mind control machine”, but there was also a lot of ADL politicking and rubbing in the tragedies of the past to enhance loyalty to Israel. Some of the young Israelis who went on the trip to Poland acknowledged that this preoccupation with past Jewish sufferings made Israelis indifferent to others’ sufferings, such as when they see Arab homes being destroyed on the news; towards the end, one of them reflected that the Israelis will not become a “normal people” because they talk too much about death and perpetuate death (before being moved on because he was sitting on a spot where twenty people were killed by the Nazis). An important aspect of this programme was that the Holocaust itself could still cause a huge emotional reaction even in young Israelis, which perhaps explains why anti-Semitism is such a ready explanation for any violent incident with a Jewish victim elsewhere. Some viewers, of course, will simply be sickened by seeing Israel, of all countries, cultivating a victim mentality in their youth when they themselves are likely to become perpetrators of persecution and violence. However, the programme did a good job of showing the diversity of Jewish opinion on the subject, even among those who are pro-Israel or at least not entirely anti-Israel.

This is a story about Romanian workers who were tricked into coming to the UK to sell cosmetics on a “commission-only”, “self-employed” basis. This involved selling the products in a department store and being paid only for what they sold, not for the time they spent trying to sell them. The result was that on some days, the workers might receive only £4 for the whole day. However, they were also charged above market rates for accommodation, which one worker has described as “very dirty”.

The brand, “Ever Since”, is a ‘luxury’ brand and the products contain minerals sourced from the Dead Sea. Here is the website of the company that runs their website. Yep, they’re Israeli. (I didn’t realise this when I first noticed this story.) I wonder what the name “Ever Since” actually refers to? Not a name you’d readily think of when trying to come up with a name for cosmetics. It has a sort of ring a bit like “time immemorial”.

Regardless of Ever Since’s origins, self-employment is a common scam and it’s an easy way for companies to get around responsibilities of handling employees’ tax and National Insurance and even paying them a decent wage. It’s one thing to use commission-only and self-employment when someone is out of supervision and when it’s up to them to go out and drum up business, but quite another when someone is working eight hours a day in a department store.

Antony Lerman in today’s Guardian on the ongoing smear campaign against human rights activists who criticise the state of Israel, particularly in regard to the Israeli army campaign against Gaza last winter. Among the people smeared has been Marc Garlasco, the military analyst at Human Rights Watch, who has a hobby of collecting military memorabilia from both sides in WW2, and most recently the South African judge Richard Goldstone, who is heading a UN Human Rights Council inquiry into the bombing of Gaza; Israel accuses him of anti-Israel bias even though he is Jewish and refused to accept his role unless its mandate was extended to include investigation of Palestinian groups as well as Israel.

(Garlasco has been suspended from his post pending an investigation, but HRW say he has never expressed pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic sentiments.)

Revealing how money raised from a casino frequented mostly by Latinos in California is funding Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank and Jerusalem:

Over the past 20 years, the bingo hall has funnelled tens of millions of dollars in to what its opponents — including rabbis serving the Hawaiian Gardens area — describe as an ideologically-driven strategy to grab land for Israel, as well as contributing to influential American groups and thinktanks backing Israel’s more hawkish governments.

But the bingo operation, owned by an American Jewish doctor and millionaire, Irving Moskowitz, has taken on added significance in recent weeks as President Barack Obama has laid down a marker to Israel in demanding an end to settlement construction, which the White House regards as a major obstacle to peace. “Moskowitz is taking millions from the poorest town in California and sending it to the settlements,” said Haim Dov Beliak, a rabbi serving Hawaiian Gardens and one of the Jewish religious leaders in California who have campaigned to block the flow of funds to the settlers.

“The money Moskowitz puts in to the settlements has changed the game. Moskowitz has helped build a hardcore of the settler movement that may number 50-70,000.

Moskowitz is on record as defending Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the 1994 Hebron mosque massacre, calling him “a lone Jewish man, overwhelmed by his grief over Arab terrorism”; some of his grants went to that settlement, which is notorious for violent attacks on local Palestinians, thousands of whom have been moved out by the Israeli army, ostensibly for their own safety.

Local rabbis in California are among the opponents of Moskowitz’s bingo-for-Israel racket, pointing out that Muslims have been jailed for directing charitable donations to welfare projects in Gaza that “indirectly helps Hamas”, while ignoring obvious donations which clearly go to violent settlers.