-♻RetweetCrude Zionist Propaganda
Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 1:07:29 pm PDT
Michael B. Oren’s book Six Days of War has been universally acclaimed by reviewers as an exhaustively researched and definitive history of the 1967 Arab-Israel war. Former ambassador to Lebanon Richard B. Parker wrote:
This is a fascinating, comprehensive, and readable study of one of the major turning points in the history of the modern Middle East. The author is to be congratulated for the myriad details, many of them new, that he brings together and makes understandable. It is particularly useful for the insights it gives into attitudes and decisions of the parties, and it will become the standard work on the subject.
But there’s no fooling the laser-like intellect of Arab News editor John R. Bradley, who sees through this so-called “scholarly work,” this so-called “masterpiece,” revealing it for what it is: crude Zionist propaganda.
As Bradley reminded us when last he shared his wisdom with the “white trash” of LGF, he is the most enlightened, non-anti-Semitic British journalist ever to write for an Arab government-controlled newspaper. And the beginning of his pathetic attack on Oren’s book lets us know again that not only is he non-anti-Semitic, he has actually known Jewish people:
When I was an undergraduate I struck up a friendship with an American-Israeli who’d written asking if he could contribute articles to the London Quarterly, a cultural magazine I was editor of at the time. As well as subsequently publishing a number of his essays — on an emotional visit he’d made to Israel following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, for example, and the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said’s Reith lectures — I settled into a weekly lunch routine with him.
I haven’t seen him for years, but I was recently reminded of Gur when reading the Israeli academic Michael B. Oren’s new book “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” In particular, I recalled Gur’s perspective — or rather, his lack thereof — on the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Yes, even though “Gur” basked for a brief shining moment in the halo of John R. Bradley’s penetrating brilliance, he remained intransigent.
I was happy to publish Gur as a Jewish writer whose background was American-Israeli. What he had to say generally was intellectually and morally legitimate, and clever to boot. But the more I got to know him, and the more deeply we discussed Israel, the more I realized that, although generally a sensitive, intelligent and compassionate individual who could never be described as hawkish or hateful, he was simply incapable of criticizing the mythical Zionist version of Israel’s coming into existence in 1948. It was as though he became lost in a kind of ideological haze.
I think what Bradley is trying to say, if I may put words into his mouth, is that Jews have a fundamental flaw in their character that renders them irrational, even though they can sometimes appear clever. Yes, even his “old friend” and fellow writer “Gur” suffers from this flaw, a friend so close that Bradley doesn’t even mention his last name. (Wouldn’t want to leave any facts out there that could be, uh, checked.)
The purpose of this touching personal anecdote is to illustrate that Michael B. Oren, as a “Zionist” (that’s non-anti-Semitic talk for “Jew”) suffers from the same flaw.
Michael B. Oren’s “Six Days of War” has been massively reviewed and praised in the Western media and the author himself made an appearance on the Al-Jazeera satellite news channel. While Oren acknowledged in another interview with The Atlantic Monthly how, as “a Zionist”, he might lack objectivity, he added that he nevertheless “set out to write a thoroughly honest and dispassionate book.”
“Hah!” laughs John R. Bradley. “You’re all the same!”
In fact, Oren is rather like my old friend Gur, and like almost all other committed Zionists, in that his love for Israel is unconditional, blind and absolute. From the opening pages of “Six Days of War”, it’s obvious that this is little more than thinly veiled Zionist propaganda. The kind of ideological haze I observed engulfing my old friend Gur, whenever the events surrounding Israel’s founding came up, similarly chokes Oren.
By the way, as I write this I’m about halfway through Oren’s book, and it really is an impressive work—with sources and notes documenting every last detail. If the best type of propaganda is simple truth, well-researched and meticulously documented, then Bradley has a point. Six Days of War is great propaganda.
Bradley then engages in a frantic little bout of historical revisionism and outright fantasy, seasoned with slightly feverish anti-Zionism.
He claims the Arab Army in 1967 consisted of only about “20,000 men,” so the Israeli victory over them was “no big deal.” (According to Chaim Herzog’s 1982 book The Arab-Israeli Wars the Arab Army was approximately 250,000 strong, including 2,000 tanks and 700 aircraft.)
It isn’t long before the favorite equation of the non-anti-Semite makes an appearance: Zionism = Nazism.
...Zionism’s founder had famously declared long before settling on Israel that this “mere idea” led to him pondering whether even Argentina would serve as a base to establish a Jewish state. The Biblical context was dragged in later, when the early Zionists realized “Israel” could serve as a Western colonialist outpost. The Biblical myth was then successfully confused with the terrible consequences for Jews of the Holocaust, just when the Zionists themselves — we should remember — were behaving like fully-trained Nazis.
Yes, well, we should remember that, shouldn’t we?
Israel is a state that was born of terror. Not that you’d guess this from Oren’s account.
Are you getting the feeling that Bradley would only be happy if Oren changed the full title of his book to Six Days of War: Perpetrated by a Fully-Trained Nazi-Like State Born of Terror, Against Blameless Peaceful Arabs?
It just gets worse from there; here’s how he describes the events of 1948:
Actually, many if not most Arabs were forcibly driven off their historic land. Some 800,000 of the approximately 900,000 Palestinians who originally lived in the area that became Israel were forced to flee as a result of a systematic campaign of intimidation, massacres and internationally recognized ethnically-motivated mass expulsions. When the Jewish state was created, approximately 400 Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated by Jewish armed groups under the cover of the war, and were razed to the ground.
Oh yes! That pesky war—you mean the one that the Palestinian Arabs started the day after the Jewish state was recognized? The one that ended with Arabs having much less land than if they had agreed to the partition plan? You mean that war?
There’s not much meat in the rest of this pathetic hack job. He trots out the same old hackneyed quotes the non-anti-Semites always regurgitate to explain that Israel is hated for good reasons, and that Oren should have featured this point prominently in his book.
Oren’s intention, here as elsewhere, is clear: to show that Arabs hated Israel primarily because it represented a kind of “democratic, civilized ideal” that threatened the Arab world’s autocratic order. Arabs in fact hated, and still hate, Israel not because of anti-Semitism or because they can’t bring themselves to appreciate the virtues of democracy but because Israel has murdered their fellow Arabs in the tens of thousands and pillaged their villages and occupied their countries and later their Muslim and Christian holy sites.
What’s that, John? Arabs hate Israel? Do tell.
Before further exposure to this inane drivel rots my IQ, let’s skip to the end, where Bradley winds up with a helluva wacky one-two punch. First, the United Nations is soft on Israel:
Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Oren is well-trained in insidiously subverting the truth for ideological ends as former adviser to the Israeli delegation to the United Nations, an organization that has done its utmost over the past 50 years, at the behest of the United States, to ensure Israel gets away with its perpetual war crimes.
Amazing how, even while choking and lost in an ideological haze, well-trained Zionists like Oren can still focus on insidiously subverting the truth.
And I’m sure the editors of the New Republic will be rather surprised to see where the evanescent John R. Bradley places them on the American political spectrum:
Another quotation is from Martin Peretz, publisher of The New Republic, an ultra-right campaigning American political journal that has long been defined by its crude Zionist agenda.
Bradley, by the way, is still erroneously claiming authorship of The Lonely Planet Guide to Saudi Arabia, a book which does not exist. In truth, he wrote one chapter of a Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East. But playing fast and loose with the truth is a Bradley trademark.
Frank says:
