Monday, December 6, 2010
WHO PERSECUTED THE JEWS ?
87. Incidentally the persecution of the Jews has been almost entirely confined to the Christian nations of Europe, notably Poland, Russia, and of course Nazi Germany. Jews have lived for many centuries in the Middle East in complete peace and harmony with their Arab neighbors. They were always a small minority. When Spain was an Arab possession Jews developed freely and reached unprecedented importance. Syria, Iraq. Lebanon, Iran and other Arab centres have always contained prosperous Jewish colonies and have always received generous treatment (even under Saddam and Iran to-day) far and far better than in Christian Europe. Even after the Zionist creation of the colonial settlers state of Israel in 1948 the overwhelming majority of the Diaspora Jews did not return to 'The Promised Land', simply because they considered themselves nationals of the countries in which they happened to live. An American Jew sees himself as an American, nor an Israeli.
THE COLONIAL SETTLERS STATE
86. There can never be peace with he Islamic world as long as the US supports Israel and allows this country to violate international law and commit crimes against humanity. Indonesia (as far as I am aware and several other countries) has never recognised the State of Israel. The latter is seen by the majority of mankind as a colonial settlers state, same as eg Rhodesia, South Africa, Angola etecetera. It depends economically and military entirely on the United States (the surrogate mother country), where as far as foreign policy is concerned the Zionists lobby is in the drivers seat. Israel has become an increasingly heavy burden on the US and its citizens who at the end of the day are paying dearly for keeping this rogue state in existence, which same as Hitler's 'thousand years Reich' will not be for ever. One day you will be able to buy a book entitled:"the Rise and Fall of Israeli Zionism".
IRONY
85.The irony is that 20th century immigrant colonial settlers, mostly from eastern Europe, who had over time had converted to Judaism, are now killing the real original Jews most of whom converted to Islam when overrun by Arab forces some 1300 years ago. Arabs and REAL Palestinian Jews are both Semites, thy belong genetically to the same race, but worshipped different religions. In ancient times they tolerated each other well and used to live in peace and harmony together. Not so the foreign converted Jews, who genetically are related to the people of southern Russia. many of the remaining Palestinian Jews joined the Arab armies during their conquests round the Mediterranean and east of the Byzantine Empire into the Caucuses and became proselytizers for the Jewish religion. The original homeland of most to-days surrogate Israelis is situated in southern Russia, the former Kingdom of Khazaria. Israelis are worshipping the false Messiah, probably difficult to swallow for many of them.
THE WANDERING JEWS
84. I found the remarks of one of your correspondents rather hilarious when he mentioned 'The Wandering Jew', a piece of not so clever deception from Zionist mythology. If it was true and Palestine, according to the same mythology was an 'empty country', than one may wonder why it took some 2000 years before a Theodore Herzl exhorted Jews to return to this 'empty contry'. In 1939 the world Jewish population stood at 16.7 million. During the first half of the 20th century most Jews emigrated to the US, before it stopped any further immigration into the country. In 1920 Jewish population of the US already stood at 3.6 million. The 1947 Straton Bill would have allowed 400,000 holocaust survivors to enter the US, but was defeated by the strong powerful Zionist lobbies, who wanted them as manpower for their colonial settler state. European Jewry has always preferred America as their 'chosen country' and few American (and elsewhere) Jews are willing to swap America for Israel.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
EXERPTS FROM LITERATURE
82. 'Israeli Exeptionalism' by M. Shalid Alam; Professor of Economics at Northeastern University in Boston.
page 9 ......Over time, this growing emphasis on the "radical uniqueness" of Israel would give rise to racist tendencies. Since the Jews were the chosen instrument of God's intervention on earth, some Jewish thinkers took this to mean that Jews were no subject to the laws of nature and society. In other words, as long as the Jews believed that they were acting as instruments of God's will, they did not have to place themselves under the laws of Gentile nations.
page 26.....In general, the Zionists wanted to believe that the Palestinians were not a people; they had no attachment to their land, no national identity, no national aspirations. If they are not a people, then we can take away their land from them. The irony is palpable. The Jews - who were not yet a people, because they had no land they could call their own - asserted that the Palestinians, who had their own land, were not a people. This not so clever deception had only one end: so that people without a land could steal it from another people who had it.
page 34.....The tragedy of Israel is not fortuitous. Driven by history, chance, and cunning, the Zionists wedged themselves between two historical adversaries, the West and Islam, and by harnassing the strength of the first against the second, they have produced a conflict that can only grow deeper over time. In this conflict. Israel's triumphs are temporary, are indeed illusionary, since they evoke deeper, wider response from the societies that suffer the devastation of its triumphs. In the long run, in the time scale of history, by relentlessly pressing its advantages, Israel only ensures that its adversaries will slowly build the defences that will eventually rise to match Israel's military might and its expansionist ambitions.
page 36 .....In addition, the humiliation of the Islamicate has also given rise to radical factions- their numbers still minuscule - who have decided to use violence to achieve their political ends. This destabilizing dialectic has now brought the West itself into direct confrontation against the Islamicate. We are now staring into the precipice. Yet, there is little appreciation in the West of the scale of this impending disaster: or the will to pull back from it.
page 39....... David Ben Gurion, 1956 (quote) "Why should the Arabs make peace ? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country"
page 51....."History does not support the presence of an irrisistible Jewish yearning for Palestine. "Why, during these thousands years have not the Jews really tried to return to this country ? Why was it necessary to wait until the end of the Nineteenth Century for Herzle to succeed in convincing them of this necessity ?
page 61 Moshe Dayan, April 1956 (quote): "We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or a house".
page 71.... David Ben-Gurion, 1938 (quote) "I support compulsory transfer. I do not see in it anything immoral"
..................Benny Morris, 2004 (quote) "Without uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here".
page 83.....The changes in the spatial distribution of the world's Jewish population between 1800 and 1930 were equally important in preparing the grounds for Zionist success.In 1700, only about 16 percent of the world's Jews lived in Western and Central Europe and its overseas extensions, regions that would become centers of global capitalism over the next two centuries. At this time, 49 percent of the world's Jewish population lived in Eastern Europe and 35.5 percent in the Islamicate. This demographic weakness was remedied substantially by the middle decades of the twentieth century, due primarily to the growing migration of Jews to destinations westward.. In 1939, Europe's share of the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa had increased substantially. Most importantly, British Jewish population had increased from an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 in the early 1800s to 300,000 by 1914, due mostly to immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe since the early 1800s. The growth of Jewish population in the United States was more dramatic, having increased from 2,500 in 1800 to one million in 1900 and 3,6 million in 1920".
page 85......The long centuries of Jewish exposure to finance, commerce, estate management, and the crafts had equiped them better than most Gentiles to succeeed as international traders, bankers, speculators, industrialists, and stockbrokers in Europe's emerging capitalist economies.
..............Already, in the early nineteenth century, Jewish families owned thirty of the fifty-two private banks in Berlin; in Vienna, by the end of the nineteenth century, "40 percent of the directors of public banks were Jews or of Jewish descent, and all banks but one was administered by Jews."
........"in an age when the press was the only mass medium, cultural or otherwise, the liberal press [in Europe] was largely a Jewish press"
page 88.....In addition to the internal migration of Jews in Europe - from small towns and rural centres to the cities, and from Eastern Europe to destinations in Central and Western Europe - there occurred a migration of similar magnitude from all over Europe, to the new world and especially the United States. The cross-Atlantic migration of Jews was pregnant with consequences for the Zionist movement. Because of these migrations, by the third decade of the twentieth century, the United States became home to the world's largest concentration of Jews.
page 91......Once Zionism began to draw substantial support from Jewish communities in the West, and from important centres of Jewish power - in finance, industry, politics, media and academia - we can expect that these Jewish communities would increasingly use their influence to mobilize the support of Western governments.
page 123....In the 1930's, the Nazis banned all Jewish organizations, except those with Zionist aims; they even allowed the Zionists to fly their blue-and-white flag with the Star of David at its centre. In violation of the Jewish boycott of the Nazi economy, the Zionists promissed cash and made concessions to Nazi Germany if they directed Jewish emigrants to Palestine......Brenner has documented several episodes of collaboration between Zionist mainstream Jewish organizations and fascist governments in Germany, Italy and Japan.
page 139.......Zionism was a grave assault on the history of the global resistance to imperialism that unfolded even as the Jewish colons in Palestine laid the foundations of their colonial settler state. The Zionists sought to abolish the ground realities in the Middle East established by Islam over the previous thirteen hundred years. They sought to overrun the demography of Palestine, to insert a European presence in the heart of the Islamicate, and to serve as the forward base for the Western powers intent on dominating the Middle East. The Zionist could succeed only by combining the forces of the Christian and Jewish West in an assault that would almost certainly be seen as the, latter-day Crusade to marginalize the Islamicate peoples in the Middle East. It was delusional to assume that the Zionist challenge to the Islamicate would go unanswered.
page 154........When all the advences of the Zionist movement are brought together - the dramatic growth in the cadre of activists, the mass mobilization of Jews, and the support of the American Jewish establishment, we begin to acquire a better estimate of the political influence that the Zionist movement could now exercise over the U.S. political system. The Zionists had now become a force in the elections to the Congress and the president, and they had built up a network for lobbying congressmen, senators, and the White House.
page 168.....Far from making concessions to Palestinians and Arabs to advance peace, Israel had an opposite interest in escalating its conflicts with the Arabs. American support for Israel could only increase as Israel succeeded in escalating its conflicts with its adversaries. Israel was free to deny the Palestinians the right of return, attack the Palestinians in the refugee camps in Gaza and Jordan, accelerate the influx of Jewish colonists into Israel, augment its military superiority over the Arabs, and engage in frequent attacks against Arab targets. Anything that provoked Arab belligerence would bring rich payment offs in higher levels of American support. (emphasize added)
page 193.....The value of annual economic and military assistance to Israel increased dramatically in 1970 and 1974, never dipped below $ 3 billion between 1985 and 2000, and has declined only trivially since then. Moreover, Israel has received this aid on terms that are not available to other recipients. For many years now, the Congress has approved aid commitments to Israel automatically, without any discussion or dissent. Israel has received all its aids in the form of grants since 1985, spends most of it on weapon systems, receives all of the assistance at the beginning of each year, bypasses the Department of Defence in making military purchases..............
page 200.....The equation of the Jewish lobby with a narrowly defined "pressure group" is misleading. We have argued - a position that is well supported by the evidence - that Jewish protagonists of Zionism have worked through many different channels to influence public opinion, the composition of political classes, and political decisions. They work through the institutions and media that shape public opinion to determine what Americans know about Israel, how they think about Israel, and what they can say about Israel. (emphasize added)
Once we recognize the scale of the financial resources the Israel lobby commands, the array of political forces it can mobilize, and the tools it commands to direct public opinion on the Middle East, we would shrink from calling it a lobby.
page 9 ......Over time, this growing emphasis on the "radical uniqueness" of Israel would give rise to racist tendencies. Since the Jews were the chosen instrument of God's intervention on earth, some Jewish thinkers took this to mean that Jews were no subject to the laws of nature and society. In other words, as long as the Jews believed that they were acting as instruments of God's will, they did not have to place themselves under the laws of Gentile nations.
page 26.....In general, the Zionists wanted to believe that the Palestinians were not a people; they had no attachment to their land, no national identity, no national aspirations. If they are not a people, then we can take away their land from them. The irony is palpable. The Jews - who were not yet a people, because they had no land they could call their own - asserted that the Palestinians, who had their own land, were not a people. This not so clever deception had only one end: so that people without a land could steal it from another people who had it.
page 34.....The tragedy of Israel is not fortuitous. Driven by history, chance, and cunning, the Zionists wedged themselves between two historical adversaries, the West and Islam, and by harnassing the strength of the first against the second, they have produced a conflict that can only grow deeper over time. In this conflict. Israel's triumphs are temporary, are indeed illusionary, since they evoke deeper, wider response from the societies that suffer the devastation of its triumphs. In the long run, in the time scale of history, by relentlessly pressing its advantages, Israel only ensures that its adversaries will slowly build the defences that will eventually rise to match Israel's military might and its expansionist ambitions.
page 36 .....In addition, the humiliation of the Islamicate has also given rise to radical factions- their numbers still minuscule - who have decided to use violence to achieve their political ends. This destabilizing dialectic has now brought the West itself into direct confrontation against the Islamicate. We are now staring into the precipice. Yet, there is little appreciation in the West of the scale of this impending disaster: or the will to pull back from it.
page 39....... David Ben Gurion, 1956 (quote) "Why should the Arabs make peace ? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country"
page 51....."History does not support the presence of an irrisistible Jewish yearning for Palestine. "Why, during these thousands years have not the Jews really tried to return to this country ? Why was it necessary to wait until the end of the Nineteenth Century for Herzle to succeed in convincing them of this necessity ?
page 61 Moshe Dayan, April 1956 (quote): "We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or a house".
page 71.... David Ben-Gurion, 1938 (quote) "I support compulsory transfer. I do not see in it anything immoral"
..................Benny Morris, 2004 (quote) "Without uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here".
page 83.....The changes in the spatial distribution of the world's Jewish population between 1800 and 1930 were equally important in preparing the grounds for Zionist success.In 1700, only about 16 percent of the world's Jews lived in Western and Central Europe and its overseas extensions, regions that would become centers of global capitalism over the next two centuries. At this time, 49 percent of the world's Jewish population lived in Eastern Europe and 35.5 percent in the Islamicate. This demographic weakness was remedied substantially by the middle decades of the twentieth century, due primarily to the growing migration of Jews to destinations westward.. In 1939, Europe's share of the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa had increased substantially. Most importantly, British Jewish population had increased from an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 in the early 1800s to 300,000 by 1914, due mostly to immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe since the early 1800s. The growth of Jewish population in the United States was more dramatic, having increased from 2,500 in 1800 to one million in 1900 and 3,6 million in 1920".
page 85......The long centuries of Jewish exposure to finance, commerce, estate management, and the crafts had equiped them better than most Gentiles to succeeed as international traders, bankers, speculators, industrialists, and stockbrokers in Europe's emerging capitalist economies.
..............Already, in the early nineteenth century, Jewish families owned thirty of the fifty-two private banks in Berlin; in Vienna, by the end of the nineteenth century, "40 percent of the directors of public banks were Jews or of Jewish descent, and all banks but one was administered by Jews."
........"in an age when the press was the only mass medium, cultural or otherwise, the liberal press [in Europe] was largely a Jewish press"
page 88.....In addition to the internal migration of Jews in Europe - from small towns and rural centres to the cities, and from Eastern Europe to destinations in Central and Western Europe - there occurred a migration of similar magnitude from all over Europe, to the new world and especially the United States. The cross-Atlantic migration of Jews was pregnant with consequences for the Zionist movement. Because of these migrations, by the third decade of the twentieth century, the United States became home to the world's largest concentration of Jews.
page 91......Once Zionism began to draw substantial support from Jewish communities in the West, and from important centres of Jewish power - in finance, industry, politics, media and academia - we can expect that these Jewish communities would increasingly use their influence to mobilize the support of Western governments.
page 123....In the 1930's, the Nazis banned all Jewish organizations, except those with Zionist aims; they even allowed the Zionists to fly their blue-and-white flag with the Star of David at its centre. In violation of the Jewish boycott of the Nazi economy, the Zionists promissed cash and made concessions to Nazi Germany if they directed Jewish emigrants to Palestine......Brenner has documented several episodes of collaboration between Zionist mainstream Jewish organizations and fascist governments in Germany, Italy and Japan.
page 139.......Zionism was a grave assault on the history of the global resistance to imperialism that unfolded even as the Jewish colons in Palestine laid the foundations of their colonial settler state. The Zionists sought to abolish the ground realities in the Middle East established by Islam over the previous thirteen hundred years. They sought to overrun the demography of Palestine, to insert a European presence in the heart of the Islamicate, and to serve as the forward base for the Western powers intent on dominating the Middle East. The Zionist could succeed only by combining the forces of the Christian and Jewish West in an assault that would almost certainly be seen as the, latter-day Crusade to marginalize the Islamicate peoples in the Middle East. It was delusional to assume that the Zionist challenge to the Islamicate would go unanswered.
page 154........When all the advences of the Zionist movement are brought together - the dramatic growth in the cadre of activists, the mass mobilization of Jews, and the support of the American Jewish establishment, we begin to acquire a better estimate of the political influence that the Zionist movement could now exercise over the U.S. political system. The Zionists had now become a force in the elections to the Congress and the president, and they had built up a network for lobbying congressmen, senators, and the White House.
page 168.....Far from making concessions to Palestinians and Arabs to advance peace, Israel had an opposite interest in escalating its conflicts with the Arabs. American support for Israel could only increase as Israel succeeded in escalating its conflicts with its adversaries. Israel was free to deny the Palestinians the right of return, attack the Palestinians in the refugee camps in Gaza and Jordan, accelerate the influx of Jewish colonists into Israel, augment its military superiority over the Arabs, and engage in frequent attacks against Arab targets. Anything that provoked Arab belligerence would bring rich payment offs in higher levels of American support. (emphasize added)
page 193.....The value of annual economic and military assistance to Israel increased dramatically in 1970 and 1974, never dipped below $ 3 billion between 1985 and 2000, and has declined only trivially since then. Moreover, Israel has received this aid on terms that are not available to other recipients. For many years now, the Congress has approved aid commitments to Israel automatically, without any discussion or dissent. Israel has received all its aids in the form of grants since 1985, spends most of it on weapon systems, receives all of the assistance at the beginning of each year, bypasses the Department of Defence in making military purchases..............
page 200.....The equation of the Jewish lobby with a narrowly defined "pressure group" is misleading. We have argued - a position that is well supported by the evidence - that Jewish protagonists of Zionism have worked through many different channels to influence public opinion, the composition of political classes, and political decisions. They work through the institutions and media that shape public opinion to determine what Americans know about Israel, how they think about Israel, and what they can say about Israel. (emphasize added)
Once we recognize the scale of the financial resources the Israel lobby commands, the array of political forces it can mobilize, and the tools it commands to direct public opinion on the Middle East, we would shrink from calling it a lobby.
Friday, October 1, 2010
EDITING OR CENSORING ?
81. "Zionist propaganda is active, well organised and widespread at any rate in the democracies of the West, is largely amenable to it, it commands many of the channels for the dissemination of news, and more particular those in the English speaking world"
George Antonius (historian)
"Many of you are uninformed about the conflict in the Middle East not because you don't want to know, but because you have been misinformed by the "Israeli-occupied" media......Just how many would die and how much global environment would be polluted and destroyed by the fallout in the event of an apocalyptic endgame in and over Palestine are matters for speculation. But that it could happen is reason enough for every man, women and child on planet earth to be aware that they have a stake in what is happening in the Middle East."
Alan Hart (Former ITN and BBC 'Panorama' correspondent author of 'Zionism The real Enemy of the Jews; Vol. One: The false Messiah."
Question: Could the editing of letters on certain politically sensitive subjects such as the Middle East conflict be a form of disguised censorship ? Here is my story, so judge for yourself.
Those readers who have followed my blog from the beginning know that the blog was 'born' as a result of a controversy that developed over time with one of our national, also our local news paper The Christchurch Press, for short 'The Press'. Over the years I have been a prolific contributor, not only to The Press, but already during the sixties and seventies while still living in the Dunedin area. I wrote numerous letters on the Vietnam War to the Otago Daily Times (ODT). I never had any problems getting my very often lengthy letters (in small print) published (with references) and I am still grateful to the editors making the necessary corrections in spelling and style. Sometimes they were edited or abridged a little, but never were references to sources of information removed, which is as one can see from Post 60 my concern with the editing rules of The Press. After an absence from New Zealand for several years when we lived in The Netherlands and in the Irish Republic, I returned to this country as a retiree and settled in Christchurch. After the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003 I took up the pen again and resumed writing letters to the editor, this time to the The Press.. Again from 2003 to 2009 I had numerous letters published, on an average one a month, with little or no problems. In January 2009 I was even awarded for the 'best letter of the week'. Sure, some letters were rejected and somewhat edited, as happened with other the letters of other contributors as well. I never had any problem with that whatever. I think I am a reasonable and tolerant person and fully appreciate the problems an editor has to cope with when making his selections from the deluge of letters submitted.
But apparently times had changed. Problems were beginning to surface after I had filed a complaint with the NZ Press Council (adjudication 2094 November 2009. Complaint not upheld) and letters dealing with the Israeli/ Palestine conflict specifically. Very often essential passages and references to sources of information were carefully excised from letters. Initially I did not think much of it, but as times passed by it became more or less sort of a regular pattern. I emphasize 'specifically', because previously there had never been real problems. Also letters on different subjects and more notable for instance on the subject of 'Climate Change', a subject probably deemed more 'neutral' , letter writers were frequently referring to sources of information, such as
websites and articles in scientific magazines.
When I discussed this with other contributors to the letter pages, it emerged that they often encountered similar problems when writing letters dealing with the ME conflict. From my blog one can see that I am very well versed on the subject of the ME conflict, at least much better than the average person and probably better than editors and politician as well. The editors of the The Press are well aware of my blog, because on several occasions attempts were made to have the blog mentioned in my letters. I have read numerous books on this immensely important protracted conflict, written by reputable and well known historians (Benny Morris, Martin Gilbert to mention only a few) as well as publications from several independent investigate journalists, correspondents and the like. I also - alas to no avail - had drawn attention to The Press books review editor on new book releases worth mentioning in the section of the weekly book reviews. Once I alerted one of The Press reporters to a talk that was to be given in Christchurch by Antony Loewenstein, the Australian Jewish author of the book entitled: 'My Israel Question'. Loewenstein is an outspoken critic of the Zionist lobbies also denoted as the 'Zionist Power Configuration', aggressively and actively
operating all over the 'western' world and their huge influence on the western corporate media. Although the reporter initially responded to my call and enquired about the venue, he never turned up. Did his boss prevented him from attending ? There was no response when I called him later. Once a contributor wrongly quoted one of the U.N. Resolutions. I responded by quoting the correct text, which could easily be verified by visiting Googles. My letter was promptly rejected. When I requested the editor to rectify the erroneously quoted text in the rubric 'Putting it right' the reply was that the rubric was 'not a forum for a squabble between two correspondents'. The Press maintains that it is devoted to accuracy and correctness.
From all this one cannot dismiss the impression that there is a tendency to suppress and misinform the general public, which becomes evident from editorials, as well as the very one sided, selective and scanty information the reading public is being offered. So my convictions are based not on just on a casually, fleeting, unfounded remark, but on a virtual consensus of views of many eminent historians, independent correspondents, journalists and further substantiated by personal observations and experiences when dealing with the corporate media and their self-appointed guardians, in this country such as the NZ Press Council. These convictions and experiences are shared by other letter writers to The Press, with whom I have regular contacts. The NZ Press Council established in 1972 according to its own information is funded by newspaper publishers. In the Council's Statement of Principles it maintains that (quote): "The Print media is jealous in guarding freedom of expression ('sic' my emphasize) not just for the publishers' sake, but, more importantly, in the public interest. In complaint resolutions by the Council freedom of expression and public interest will play dominant roles"
The decision of the Chief Editor of The Press to exclude me from contributing to the letter pages was a direct response to a letter to the Editor, in which I queried the Editor's editing rules. In my letter I simply expressed an opinion on those rules, which should never have been a reason to exclude a person from access to the letter pages. If I had been in breach of their editing rules, I would have accepted that as indeed I have done on several occasions before. However there is a huge difference between accepting editing rules, or criticising them, which should be everybody's civil right in a genuine democratic society. So when looking at the NZ Press Council's stated Principles it becomes abundantly clear that the Council is not adhering to its own guidelines. So the underlying reasons for excluding me from the letter pages may therefore well have been for very different reasons . The editors are well aware of my political views and convictions concerning the quite dubious role of the by now from various sources emerging well documented evidence that western corporate media are profoundly Zionist infested and 'editing' is often no more than a self imposed form of censorship. The editors are also aware of this webblog. In the absence of any credible explanation for denying me access to the letter pages this could well be the real underlying motives from barring me from their opinion pages. The editor once became very angry when I suggested to him that The Press, as part of the Australian Fairfax media group and subsequently part of the western mainstream corporate news media, is also likely to be Zionist infested. Of course this is merely an opinion, though a well founded opinion as elaborately explained in the foregoing. The question however is, should one be 'punished' for entertaining and expressing such an opinion by exclusion ? If the answer to that question is in the affirmative than we are dealing here with 'bully boy' tactics.
On 18 August 2010 I filed another complaint to the NZ Pres Council on the aforementioned grounds. The complaint was dismissed. SUMMARY:
From my personal experiences with the NZ media and in particular The Christchurch Press and the media funded NZ Press Council I have come to the conclusion that as far as my personal experiences with The Christchurch Press there exist a complete absence of any accountability, there is no transparency, no balance or fairness whatever. Selection and frequency of publication of letters is very personal and biased and judged on political opinions and views. There is complete contempt for the rights of inividuals wanting to participate in open debate. Editing in my experience has indeed become a form of disguised censorship. Editors are free to manipulate letters at will and weaken the message the author of the letter is trying to convey.
There are numerous ways in which he can do that while at the same time projecting a faked semblance of 'balance'. For a short while The Press published a list of rejected letters, which to some extent somewhat enhanced transparency, fairness and balance. This practice, unfortunately was very short lived and abandoned. I come to the final conclusion that the NZ Press Council, as we have seen before has a mere window dressing function.
George Antonius (historian)
"Many of you are uninformed about the conflict in the Middle East not because you don't want to know, but because you have been misinformed by the "Israeli-occupied" media......Just how many would die and how much global environment would be polluted and destroyed by the fallout in the event of an apocalyptic endgame in and over Palestine are matters for speculation. But that it could happen is reason enough for every man, women and child on planet earth to be aware that they have a stake in what is happening in the Middle East."
Alan Hart (Former ITN and BBC 'Panorama' correspondent author of 'Zionism The real Enemy of the Jews; Vol. One: The false Messiah."
Question: Could the editing of letters on certain politically sensitive subjects such as the Middle East conflict be a form of disguised censorship ? Here is my story, so judge for yourself.
Those readers who have followed my blog from the beginning know that the blog was 'born' as a result of a controversy that developed over time with one of our national, also our local news paper The Christchurch Press, for short 'The Press'. Over the years I have been a prolific contributor, not only to The Press, but already during the sixties and seventies while still living in the Dunedin area. I wrote numerous letters on the Vietnam War to the Otago Daily Times (ODT). I never had any problems getting my very often lengthy letters (in small print) published (with references) and I am still grateful to the editors making the necessary corrections in spelling and style. Sometimes they were edited or abridged a little, but never were references to sources of information removed, which is as one can see from Post 60 my concern with the editing rules of The Press. After an absence from New Zealand for several years when we lived in The Netherlands and in the Irish Republic, I returned to this country as a retiree and settled in Christchurch. After the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003 I took up the pen again and resumed writing letters to the editor, this time to the The Press.. Again from 2003 to 2009 I had numerous letters published, on an average one a month, with little or no problems. In January 2009 I was even awarded for the 'best letter of the week'. Sure, some letters were rejected and somewhat edited, as happened with other the letters of other contributors as well. I never had any problem with that whatever. I think I am a reasonable and tolerant person and fully appreciate the problems an editor has to cope with when making his selections from the deluge of letters submitted.
But apparently times had changed. Problems were beginning to surface after I had filed a complaint with the NZ Press Council (adjudication 2094 November 2009. Complaint not upheld) and letters dealing with the Israeli/ Palestine conflict specifically. Very often essential passages and references to sources of information were carefully excised from letters. Initially I did not think much of it, but as times passed by it became more or less sort of a regular pattern. I emphasize 'specifically', because previously there had never been real problems. Also letters on different subjects and more notable for instance on the subject of 'Climate Change', a subject probably deemed more 'neutral' , letter writers were frequently referring to sources of information, such as
websites and articles in scientific magazines.
When I discussed this with other contributors to the letter pages, it emerged that they often encountered similar problems when writing letters dealing with the ME conflict. From my blog one can see that I am very well versed on the subject of the ME conflict, at least much better than the average person and probably better than editors and politician as well. The editors of the The Press are well aware of my blog, because on several occasions attempts were made to have the blog mentioned in my letters. I have read numerous books on this immensely important protracted conflict, written by reputable and well known historians (Benny Morris, Martin Gilbert to mention only a few) as well as publications from several independent investigate journalists, correspondents and the like. I also - alas to no avail - had drawn attention to The Press books review editor on new book releases worth mentioning in the section of the weekly book reviews. Once I alerted one of The Press reporters to a talk that was to be given in Christchurch by Antony Loewenstein, the Australian Jewish author of the book entitled: 'My Israel Question'. Loewenstein is an outspoken critic of the Zionist lobbies also denoted as the 'Zionist Power Configuration', aggressively and actively
operating all over the 'western' world and their huge influence on the western corporate media. Although the reporter initially responded to my call and enquired about the venue, he never turned up. Did his boss prevented him from attending ? There was no response when I called him later. Once a contributor wrongly quoted one of the U.N. Resolutions. I responded by quoting the correct text, which could easily be verified by visiting Googles. My letter was promptly rejected. When I requested the editor to rectify the erroneously quoted text in the rubric 'Putting it right' the reply was that the rubric was 'not a forum for a squabble between two correspondents'. The Press maintains that it is devoted to accuracy and correctness.
From all this one cannot dismiss the impression that there is a tendency to suppress and misinform the general public, which becomes evident from editorials, as well as the very one sided, selective and scanty information the reading public is being offered. So my convictions are based not on just on a casually, fleeting, unfounded remark, but on a virtual consensus of views of many eminent historians, independent correspondents, journalists and further substantiated by personal observations and experiences when dealing with the corporate media and their self-appointed guardians, in this country such as the NZ Press Council. These convictions and experiences are shared by other letter writers to The Press, with whom I have regular contacts. The NZ Press Council established in 1972 according to its own information is funded by newspaper publishers. In the Council's Statement of Principles it maintains that (quote): "The Print media is jealous in guarding freedom of expression ('sic' my emphasize) not just for the publishers' sake, but, more importantly, in the public interest. In complaint resolutions by the Council freedom of expression and public interest will play dominant roles"
The decision of the Chief Editor of The Press to exclude me from contributing to the letter pages was a direct response to a letter to the Editor, in which I queried the Editor's editing rules. In my letter I simply expressed an opinion on those rules, which should never have been a reason to exclude a person from access to the letter pages. If I had been in breach of their editing rules, I would have accepted that as indeed I have done on several occasions before. However there is a huge difference between accepting editing rules, or criticising them, which should be everybody's civil right in a genuine democratic society. So when looking at the NZ Press Council's stated Principles it becomes abundantly clear that the Council is not adhering to its own guidelines. So the underlying reasons for excluding me from the letter pages may therefore well have been for very different reasons . The editors are well aware of my political views and convictions concerning the quite dubious role of the by now from various sources emerging well documented evidence that western corporate media are profoundly Zionist infested and 'editing' is often no more than a self imposed form of censorship. The editors are also aware of this webblog. In the absence of any credible explanation for denying me access to the letter pages this could well be the real underlying motives from barring me from their opinion pages. The editor once became very angry when I suggested to him that The Press, as part of the Australian Fairfax media group and subsequently part of the western mainstream corporate news media, is also likely to be Zionist infested. Of course this is merely an opinion, though a well founded opinion as elaborately explained in the foregoing. The question however is, should one be 'punished' for entertaining and expressing such an opinion by exclusion ? If the answer to that question is in the affirmative than we are dealing here with 'bully boy' tactics.
On 18 August 2010 I filed another complaint to the NZ Pres Council on the aforementioned grounds. The complaint was dismissed. SUMMARY:
From my personal experiences with the NZ media and in particular The Christchurch Press and the media funded NZ Press Council I have come to the conclusion that as far as my personal experiences with The Christchurch Press there exist a complete absence of any accountability, there is no transparency, no balance or fairness whatever. Selection and frequency of publication of letters is very personal and biased and judged on political opinions and views. There is complete contempt for the rights of inividuals wanting to participate in open debate. Editing in my experience has indeed become a form of disguised censorship. Editors are free to manipulate letters at will and weaken the message the author of the letter is trying to convey.
There are numerous ways in which he can do that while at the same time projecting a faked semblance of 'balance'. For a short while The Press published a list of rejected letters, which to some extent somewhat enhanced transparency, fairness and balance. This practice, unfortunately was very short lived and abandoned. I come to the final conclusion that the NZ Press Council, as we have seen before has a mere window dressing function.
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