COMMENT: Truth, lies & the Jerusalem Prize ...

On the May 7 episode of ABC TV's Q&A show, there was an interesting exchange between author Randa Abdel Fattah and columnist Greg Sheridan.

GREG SHERIDAN: I don't believe criticism of Israel is generally labelled as anti-Semitism. I reject absolutely the proposition of the question. However, I do think anti-Semitism has swept back both into the western world and the Arab world. Many scholars have examined anti-Semitism in the Arab world. Notorious tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is meant to show Jewish conspiracy to control the world, figures prominently on Egyptian television, in Saudi Arabia and so forth. You Google the Hamas Charter, you'll see that the Jews control the Rotary Clubs and the Lions Clubs in order to enact their vicious conspiracies and so forth. It's perfectly legitimate to criticise Israel, as it is any other nation, when it does something wrong. But the insane, absolutely over the top emotional hostility towards Israel from people who couldn't care less about 300,000 Darfuries, aren't fussed about the status of women in Saudi Arabia, couldn't give a bugger about the 300,000 people in North Korean gulag, but Israel somehow is their enemy - there is something going on there which is psychological and very nasty.

TONY JONES: Randa?

RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH: I totally disagree with that. I know you've said before that being anti-Israel is fundamentally irrational and evidence of psychological and ideological dysfunction...

GREG SHERIDAN: I've never said that. No, I've never said that.

RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH: When you accepted the Jerusalem Prize for being a supporter of Israel...

GREG SHERIDAN: Yeah. Yeah. I never said that Randa. That's just untrue.

RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH: Well, I...

GREG SHERIDAN: That's a lie, Randa. That's a lie.

RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH: I've got it in print. I'll show you after the show.

GREG SHERIDAN: Yeah, well it may be in print, but I never said it, I can tell you that.

Mr Sheridan said that he never said these words. His column on 3 May 2007 must have been a figment of our collective imaginations. Here are some excerpts:

... recently I did get a remarkable piece of mail. It told me that if I would
accept, I would be awarded the Jerusalem Prize.

Sponsored jointly by the Israeli Government and the local Jewish community, it is awarded to people who have supported Israel conspicuously.

Since I believe that Israel is a democracy in good standing I was delighted to accept the award, which has been won by sundry heads of government, foreign ministers, social democrat and conservative European politicians and many others over the years ...

Anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment are all different, yet they are all intimately related. They draw from diverse sources, yet they are all, in their virulent forms, fundamentally irrational and evidence of psychological and ideological dysfunction rather than genuine analysis.

And so, as I look outside my window and admire the latest fleet of Qaantas pigs taking off, I cannot help but wonder why Randa could tell such clear and obvious lies on national television.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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COMMENT: Greg Sheridan's anti-Semitism?

I learned something new today. I learned that Amharic, the language of Ethiopia is actually a Semitic language. So it is directly related to other Semitic languages - Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic.

I also learned Foreign Editor for The Australian Greg Sheridan has this to say about a group of Semitic people.

Most Arab political cultures are awash in the most bizarre paranoia and conspiracy theories ... Much of the paranoia in Arab culture has a racial element.

On what basis can Mr Sheridan make such an extraordinary remark? Does he speak Arabic? Has he made a detailed study of Arab political cultures and/or the political content in Arabic literature, Arab cinema or Arab art? And just how paranoid is the Arab political culture? Would it share the same degree of paranoia as, say, Andrew Bolt's side of the blogosphere? Or how about Fox News?



This is an extraordinary claim for the foreign editor of a broadsheet newspaper to make. But then, Sheridan's other arguments in his column made little sense. For instance ...

But the real purpose of Obama's speech was his broader pitch to the Muslim world. Much as I love Indonesia, it probably is true that this had a greater resonance in the Arab world by being delivered in Turkey (not that Turks are Arabs) than it would have had if it had been delivered in Jakarta. The speech was carried live on al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya television networks.

Yes, and? Is Sheridan suggesting that Indonesians also don't have access to cable and satellite TV channels? Or don't Indonesians have access to the internet, where they could have watched the speech on the President's own channel on YouTube?

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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CRIKEY: Greg Sheridan catches up on Hamas.

What an extraordinary genius Greg Sheridan is!

On Saturday, he wrote in The Australian:

The failure to understand that Islamist terrorism is a religious, ideological movement, with a coherent if grotesque world view, is one of many failures of Western commentators. Reading the Islamists' documents would be a good place to start in remedying that so far abject failure.

He's right. But the thing is that the failure isn't of genuine commentators and scholars but of neo-Con pundits whose focus isn't on promoting an understanding of such groups but rather on generating as much hatred for them as possible.

HAMAS has been around since 1987. Even a novice like myself has known about the HAMAS Charter for over a decade, which I first read back in 1993 when its English translation was published in the Journal of Palestine Studies. The same journal in 1995 published a major study of HAMAS.

Now, in 2008, Sheridan has discovered the significance of the HAMAS charter.

He's also been chosen as one of our “best and brightest” to sit on his 2020 Summit committee to discuss "Australia's Future Security and Prosperity in a rapidly changing region and world".

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf