January 2010
Rebuttal to National Post and CJC attacks on IJV and Diana Ralph
(Article orginially published on Independent Jewish Voices website - here - Not formatted for all browsers.)
by Diana Ralph
Since
its inception, IJV has worked in solidarity with the United Church of
Canada to promote justice and security for Palestinian and Israeli
people. We have worked with United Church congregations to help them
implement the UCC resolutions for peace and justice in the Middle East
which were passed in 2006 and 2009. Like the United Church, IJV has
opposed the Canadian government’s decision to slash funding to KAIROS because of its stand for justice for Palestinians, and the government’s plans to eliminate desperately needed UNRWA
funding for Palestinian refugees. As Jews, we challenge the claim by
the Canadian Jewish Congress to speak for “the Canadian Jewish
community.” IJV’s membership spans the spectrum from strongly Zionist
to strongly-anti-Zionist, and from Orthodox to secular.
All IJV members affirm the following 5 principles which we believe, are completely consistent with United Church policy.
The National Post published seven prominent articles defaming me and
Independent Jewish Voices, between September 17 and 30. In January,
2010 these allegations were repeated as fact by the Canadian Jewish Congress,
Canadian Jewish News, and the National Post,1 this time to serve the
CJC’s agenda of driving a wedge between IJV and the United Church of
Canada, and to pressure the United Church to sideline resolutions
critical of Israel which had been adopted at its 2006 and 2009 General
Council.
Last September, I had found there were no good options to contest these
damaging allegations. The National Post is not a member of the Ontario
or Quebec Press Councils, and therefore is not subject to its
discipline. The Human Rights Commission said libel issues don’t come
under their mandate. Lawyers advised me that the articles were probably
libellous. But they and others who had attempted legal action against
the media advised me that trying to sue would likely bankrupt me, that
a suit would take years, and, that the chances of success were slim
because the National Post has teams of lawyers expert in tying up libel
suits endlessly. Even if the National Post published a written
rebuttal, I was told, it would only have given them an excuse to
continue the controversy. So, aside from writing letters to the editor,
we decided to keep our focus on our good work, and ignore the attacks.
However, now that these malicious allegations are resurfacing to
undermine IJV’s and my own credibility, it is time to set the record
straight.
Jonathan Kay’s September editorial is the only one which purported to
present actual evidence. The others, by Kathryn Blaze Carlson, Barbara
Kay, Paul Lungen, and Dan Verbin, were restricted to malicious
name-calling (“anti-Israel,” “demented,” “tinfoil-hatted anti-Zionist,
anti-American conspiracy theorist,” “fringe group that spews vile
anti-Zionist rhetoric”). And so I will focus here on refuting Jonathan
Kay’s allegations.
Background and context
It’s important to put this attack into context. The U.N.
Goldstone report was released two days before the first article (Sept.
15 2009) . It meticulously documented Israel’s war crimes during the
assault on Gaza. We believe that the National Post, the Canadian
Jewish Congress, B’nai Brith etc. hoped to divert attention from (and
attack) the Goldstone report. Richard Falk, the U.N. Special
Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights, calls this strategy the
“politics of deflection, the tendency by Israel to attack the messenger
in order to avoid the message.”
In addition to attacking me, the National Post also libeled Naomi Klein
(quoting from her Bat Mitzvah speech!), Judy Rebick, and other
prominent Canadian Jews such as Toronto Star columnist Antonia
Zerbisias. The Kay editorial focused on events that were, at best, old
news. The United Church conference occurred in August and my
article that he slammed was first published in 2006. These attacks were
designed to de-legitimize IJV, the United Church, and me
personally. It was not honest journalism. Revealingly, no
other newspaper or television media has considered these allegations
newsworthy enough to report.
The National Post has little credibility as an accurate source of
information. It was created by Conrad Black in the late 1990’s “to
provide a voice for Canadian conservatives and to combat what he and
many Canadian conservatives considered to be a liberal bias in Canadian
newspapers.”2 In 2000 and 2001, Black sold the paper to CanWest Global
Communications, owned by hard-line Zionist Izzy Asper (who also
co-founded the Canadian Council on Israel and Jewish Advocacy). Under
his leadership, it focused on attacking the CBC and others whom he
considered left-wing and anti-Israel. “Since Izzy Asper’s acquisition
of the National Post, the paper has become a strong voice in support of
the state of Israel and its government. The Post was one of the few
Canadian papers to offer unreserved support to Israel during its
conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon during 2006.”3 As Warren Kinsella,
reputable columnist said on quitting at the National Post: “I don’t
mind being a minority voice – my views on human rights hopefully made
that clear enough, in recent weeks – but, sometimes, you can only
stomach so much. Being the father to an aboriginal child, for example,
I have been appalled by the paper’s positions on First Nations issues;
they were horrible. On racism, on human rights, on a lot of things. It
gets to you, after a while.”4
My article
Two years before IJV was formed, I published, “Islamophobia and the
‘war on terror’: The continuing pretext for imperial conquest” in an
issue of Research in Political Economy, entitled The Hidden History of
9-11-01.5 RPE is a scholarly journal. It commissioned this publication
to bring legitimate research (as opposed to the nonsensical conspiracy
theories including anti-Semitic ones then on the internet) to the
question of whether or not the official story about 9/11 was tenable.
The book was republished by Seven Stories Press in 2008.6 Other
chapters in this book focused on who did or didn’t carry out the 9/11
attacks or how they did it. Mine did not. I don’t have any direct
information on that, and I did not claim to.
My research focused on two related themes. The first described a
sequence of strategic documents between 1992 and 2000 designed to
secure the U.S. as the sole superpower which were prepared by a team of
neo-conservatives in Bush Sr. and later Bush Jr’s administrations, who
originally were called the Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) and later
renamed themselves The Project for the New American Century.7 These
documents argue that the U.S. needs to take military control of the
Middle East and Central Asia, starting with pre-emptive wars to conquer
Iraq and Afghanistan because of their geo-strategic position and their
oil and natural gas resources. The Project for the New American Century
study Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategy, forces and resources for
the New Century 8 (published one year before the 9/11 attacks) laid out
the core elements of the military policies which Bush Jr. implemented
under the rubric of the “war on terror” within days and months of the
9/11 attacks. These documents repeatedly note concerns that the
American public would not accept these imperial wars and infringements
on their civil liberties unless they were experienced a sudden attack
“like a new Pearl Harbor.”9 None of them gives more than passing
reference to terrorism, and instead they focus on achieving U.S.
imperial ambitions.
The second theme of my article was to examine the historical roots of
the concept of a “war on terror.” The concept was first proposed by
Benjamin Netanyahu in 1979 at a conference attended and supported by
George Bush Sr. The conference proposed terming as “international
terrorism” popular liberation struggles such as the PLO and the popular
resistance in El Salvador, because they received international aid
(from the Soviet Union and Lebanon). It laid out proposals for a “war
on terrorism” closely parallelling those which Bush Jr. implemented
after the 9/11 attacks. Key elements of this policy were to demonize
popular resistance movements as “terrorism,” to characterize state
violence against these movements as moral and necessary for public
safety, to slash civil liberties, to create a sophisticated spy
network, and to promote torture and pre-emptive wars. I describe how
Netanyahu, George Schultz, and George Bush Sr. conducted a successful
lobbying campaign under the Reagan administration to promote what
became “the Reagan doctrine” of a war against “international
terrorism,” and how Israel implemented these policies independently in
its1982 assault on Lebanon. Many of the U.S. neo-conservative leaders
under Reagan advised the Bush Jr. administration, and there is strong
evidence that the term “war on terror,” and its elements (racist
vilification of Muslims, attacks on civil liberties, creation of
“security states,” and pre-emptive wars in the name of attacking
“terrorists”) had their roots in the 1979 Jerusalem conference. I did
not, however, argue that Israel had anything to do with implementing
the 9/11 attack itself.
Jonathan Kay’s National Post article claimed falsely that I alleged
that “American and Israeli conservatives” or “Zionists plotting on
Israeli soil” planned the attacks, that “The Jews were responsible,”
and that I referred to “criminal Jews.” I have never accused Israelis
(or “Jews”) of having anything directly to do with the 9/11 attacks. I
have no evidence about it one way or the other. On the contrary, I have
written to strenuously object to the anti-Semitic blogs and web sites.
Not only do I find them offensive, but they discredit the valid
research that has been done to challenge the official 9/11 narrative.
To discredit my article, Jonathan Kay focused on two (out of 133)
citations in my article, claiming that they were by anti-Semites, and
that therefore I must agree with the anti-Semitic views of their
authors. Those two citations actually have no anti-Semitic content and
were appropriate and credible. One is an article by Jerry Steinberg
(likely a Jew) which was re-published in Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive
Intelligence Review. I cited it because it offered a concise
description of the plan by Dick Cheney’s DPG since 1990 to implement a
strategy of world conquest after the fall of the Soviet Union. I also
cited several other sources which confirm the details in this article.
Contrary to Kay’s claims, the article itself had nothing in it about
Jews or Israel or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I certainly do
not condone the anti-Semitic views of LaRouche.
The other citation which Kay ridiculed was a book by Eric Hufschmid,
Painful questions: An analysis of the September 11 attack, which was
published (and which I bought) in 2002. I cited it only once to
summarize concerns raised by others about the official 9/11 story. His
book is a good summary of the many inconsistencies in the official 9/11
story which he had culled from many other sources. In my next
paragraph, I explained that my focus would be elsewhere—on the roots of
the “war on terror.” I recently carefully reviewed the contents of
Hufschmid’s 2002 book and, as far as I can see, there is nothing about
Jews or Israel in it. In the on-line version of the book, Hufschmid NOW
has added an offensive anti-Semitic introduction. But when I was
writing my article, I did not know he was anti-Semitic. I certainly
don’t endorse his wacko, anti-Semitic views.
While credible research has exposed serious flaws in the official 9/11
narrative, I understand well that the 9/11 Truth movement is corrupted
with crackpots, some of them anti-Semitic. I hope I have demonstrated
that I am neither a crackpot, nor anti-Semitic. I have not done any
further research on this topic since 2005, and do not consider myself a
“9/11 truther.”
Independent Jewish Voices does not take any position on 9/11 and
considers it irrelevant to its mandate. We do not believe that it is
appropriate to engage in character assassination, or to judge an entire
organization simply because a leader’s reputation has been defamed.
Jonathan Kay’s other defamatory allegations about me
My support for Hassan Almrei: In the on-line version of his article10
Kay invokes homophobia and Islamophobia to ridicule the support my wife
and I have given to Hassan Almrei, one of the five Muslim Security
Certificate detainees. Here is what he said:
“For those of you who find Ms. Ralph’s name familiar, here’s why: She
and her lesbian partner attempted to adopt an alleged Islamist
terrorist out of detention in 2007. (They actually wanted the guy to
live in their house with them—a premise for a reality show, or bad
sitcom, if I ever heard one.) I guess this is what being an
“independent” Jewish voice means today: Bringing Islamists into your
home, cribbing from anti-Semites, spreading blood libels against Jews,
cheering on the destruction of the Jewish state. These Jews seem to
have made genocidal self-destruction their greatest goal. But hey, I
guess that just proves how “independent” they are.”
My wife and I did indeed offer bail surety and to allow Hassan Almrei
to live in our basement apartment, if necessary, as a way to get him
released from solitary confinement where he had been held in inhumane
conditions for two years without ever being charged. As I explained to
the Crown, my father was a Jewish lawyer who worked on the Nuremberg
War Crimes trials, and he emphasized that we each have an obligation to
stand up for the rights of any group of people who are being targeted
for persecution. I believe that the security certificate legislation
contravenes core elements of due process, and based on my research into
the history of the U.S. backed mujahadeen campaign against Soviets in
Afghanistan, I felt that there was little chance that Mr. Almrei could
have been a member of Al Qaeda (which was barely present at the time he
was in Afghanistan). My opinion was recently vindicated: Judge Mosely
ruled in December 2009 that the Crown had no credible evidence against
Mr. Almrei and quashed his security certificate. On January 2, 2010 he
was freed after over 8 years of unjust imprisonment.
My academic credentials: Kay questioned whether I am indeed an
Associate Professor of Social Work. I have been a university professor
since 1980, and have been on disability leave from Carleton University
since 1998.
Allegations about IJV
Jonathan Kay characterized IJV as “an extremist group whose leaders
support a total economic boycott of Israel, defend the UN’s original
anti-Semitic Durban conference, support the destruction of the Jewish
character of Israel through the influx of millions of Palestinians,
spread conspiracy theories about the “Israeli lobby,” promote the blood
libel that Israel deliberately targeted “children playing on roofs”
during the Gaza conflict, and cheered on the illegal occupation of the
Israeli consulate in Toronto earlier this year.”11 I will discuss each
of these points:
- “An extremist group” IJV is a
respected national organization which is far from “extremist.” Our
members include the full range of Jews from strongly Zionist to
strongly anti-Zionist. All its members support human rights and
international law for all people.
- "support a
total economic boycott of Israel” At its June 14, 2009 Annual General
Meeting, IJV passed a motion to “support the Palestinian call for a
campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions until Israel meets its
obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s right to
self-determination and complies with the precepts of international law,
including the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes
and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.
- This movement has been adopted by the UN
International Civil Society Conference on July 13, 2005, by the Kairos
Palestine document, and on Nov. 25, 2008 by UN General Assembly
President Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua. Many Israeli
and Jewish peace organizations worldwide have now joined the call for
BDS.
- "defend the UN’s original anti-Semitic Durban
conference” IJV did, indeed, support the World Conference Against
Racism and the WCAR Review Conference against false allegations that
they were anti-Semitic. We felt ethically compelled to stand in
solidarity with the racially oppressed around the world, whose concerns
were betrayed by a combination of Zionist organizations determined that
Palestinian rights not be recognized and by U.S. interests determined
to defeat the campaign to have the Transatlantic Slave Trade declared a
crime against humanity and therefore subject to reparations. We
prepared position papers outlining the reality which contradicts the
defamatory multi-million dollar propaganda spread by the International
Jewish Caucus, World Zionist Congress, UN Watch, the Magenta
Foundation, Human Rights First, and the Hudson Institute.
- “support the destruction of the Jewish character of
Israel through the influx of millions of Palestinians”: IJV does indeed
support the right of Palestinian refugees, like all other refugees, to
return to their homes or to receive compensation for their losses.
There are many ways to do this which protect Israelis. The Israeli
government and its supporters vehemently deny this right, resulting in
the largest and longest lasting population of refugees in the world.
- “spread conspiracy theories about the “Israeli
lobby”: IJV has directly experienced and witnessed a well-coordinated
pro-Israel lobby in Canada and world-wide. For example, while attending
the 2009 Review of the World Conference Against Racism, we saw over
1,000 delegates which the International Jewish Caucus and other Zionist
groups had transported to Geneva to conduct a heavy-handed lobby
campaign to discredit and shut down the conference. In Canada, the
Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA) coordinates a
well-funded lobby machine which provides free trips to Israel for
politicians, police chiefs, and aboriginal leaders, and which monitors
and intimidates politicians, journalists, and faculty who dare to
criticize Israel. Many MPs, Foreign Affairs officials, and other policy
makers have told us that they do not dare to criticize Israeli policies
out of a well-justified threat that CIJA-linked organizations will kill
their careers. The coordinated attack on IJV and me is just one more
example of the existence of a pro-Israel lobby. This is not a “Jewish”
lobby, both because it includes many non-Jews (Christian evangelist
groups, arms producers, neo-conservative politicians and media, etc.)
and because its makes no pretence of representing the diversity of
Jewish perspectives.
- “promote the blood libel that Israel deliberately
targeted “children playing on roofs” during the Gaza conflict”: The
term, “blood libel” is an emotionally charged reference to anti-Semitic
libel used to stir up retribution against Jews, for example, the false
claim that Jews kill Christian babies and use their blood to make
matzo. The term “blood libel” has often been used by pro-Israel forces
to dismiss valid reporting of Israeli war crimes. For example, Eye on
the UN, (a pro-Israel lobby group) has a web page entitled, “The
Goldstone Inquiry: the UN blood libel.” 12 In an interview as an IJV
spokesperson, I referred to a study by Amnesty International which
documented and condemned Israeli “aerial bombardments” on “children
playing on the roofs of their homes” during Operation Cast Lead.13 This
is clearly not “blood libel.”
- “cheered on the illegal occupation of the Israeli
consulate in Toronto earlier this year”: IJV did indeed issue a press
release supporting the illegal occupation of the Israeli Consulate by
Jewish women during Operation Cast Lead, as an important act of
non-violent resistance to draw attention to Jewish opposition to this
atrocity.
I hope that this has helped to set the record straight.
*******************
1 Paul Lungen (Jan 20, 2010) “CJC,United Church ties remain strained”
Canadian Jewish News. ; Kathryn Blaze Carlson (Jan 29, 2010) “United
Church, Jewish group try to reconcile” National Post ; Dan Verbin (Feb.
1, 2010) “CJC and United Church Resolve differences” Canadian Jewish Congress
2 National_Post
3 National_Post
4 Warren Kinsella (Feb. 10, 2008) “So long, National Post”
5 Diana Ralph (2006) “Islamophobia and the ‘war on terror’: The
continuing pretext for imperial conquest” in Paul Zarembka (Editor) The
Hidden History of 9-11-01. Research in Political Economy, Elsevier;
Mo.;
6 Diana Ralph (2008) “Islamophobia and the ‘war on terror’: The
continuing pretext for imperial conquest” in Paul Zarembka (Editor) The
Hidden History of 9-11-01. (2nd edition) N.Y.: Seven Stories Press
7 New American Century.org
8 Rebuilding Americas Defenses
9 Donnelly, Thomas (Sept. 2000) Rebuilding America’s Defenses:
Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. Washington, D.C.:
Project for the New American Century. P. 51
10 Jonathan Kay (Sept. 17, 2009) “Meet Diana Ralph: The bizarre anti-Israeli conspiracy theorist who charmed the United Church” National Post
11 Ibid.
12 www.eyeontheun.org
13 Amnesty International (2009) Israel/Gaza: Operation ‘Cast Lead’: 22 days of death and destruction. p. 1
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