In @AliAbunimah's world, photos of smiling Arabs are hate speech and Pinocchio is antisemitic ~ EoZ

Thursday, March 3, 2016

In @AliAbunimah's world, photos of smiling Arabs are hate speech and Pinocchio is antisemitic

Electronic Intifada has an article that is so stupid, so inane, and so laughably false that the article alone should discredit the site forever.

Written by Ali Abunimah himself, its headline is "Students say pro-Israel group spreads hate at Columbia University."

And more:

Most of the article is spent trying to draw lines between pro-Israel students at Columbia and a variety of imagined crimes, like supporting Jabotinsky's Zionism, singing while in the IDF or having photos taken with Sheldon Adelson. That's stupid enough, but let's just look at what these specific Columbia students (and one professor), not to mention Ali Abunimah himself, calls "hate" and "racist" and, unbelievably, "anti-Semitic."

Shezza Abboushi Dallal, a member of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), told The Electronic Intifada that her group wrote to Melinda Aquino, the associate dean for multicultural affairs, to express concern at Students Supporting Israel’s display of “heavily racist and reductive imagery” in a prominent campus location.

“This is not free exercise of political speech, but blatant incitement – not only against Palestinians, but Arabs and Muslims,” Abboushi Dallal, a fourth-year student at Barnard College, Columbia’s sister institution, added.

OK...let's see what she is referring to.

Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad saw the Students Supporting Israel displays on Tuesday and described them to The Electronic Intifada.

“As I was walking to class, I spotted two large placards on College Walk facing Columbia’s Low Library – the university’s administration building where the president’s and the provost’s offices are located,” Massad said.

“One had the headline ‘Jewish Refugees’ printed on it in large letters with a large picture under it showing what appeared to be Jewish refugees from the mid or late 1940s, and next to it another placard with the heading ‘Palestinians’ under which appeared two hooded men getting ready to execute a third.”

“I was shocked by these racist depictions,” Massad stated. “There seemed to be other smaller script and smaller photographs below the large pictures on both placards, but I could not make them out.”

Massad believes the juxtaposed displays were supposed to send a message that Jews are always only sympathetic victims while Palestinians are murderous savages.

“Imagine if a pro-Palestinian group on campus would put up a poster with the heading ‘Jews’ and under it would show two Israeli soldiers killing, torturing and beating up Palestinian children, as the only visible picture and text from a distance,” Massad said.

“Such a poster would be rightfully condemned as an outright anti-Semitic picture of Jews who would be reduced to the criminal Israeli soldiers in the picture,” he added. “I am shocked that such racism can be depicted on campus by pro-Israel groups without a swift official response.”

Here are the placards Massad was talking about.

There is a large photo on top of the "Palestinians" poster that Massad could not possibly have missed - showing Palestinian kids smiling and happy! And it says "Palestinians deserve better from their leadership."

Then again, Joseph Massad is known to be a liar. Which makes him a great person for Ali Abunimah to quote for the article - even though a photo of the same "Palestinians" poster is shown on the top of the EI article with the smiling children clearly visible!

I bet Massad did read signs and chose to criticize how they supposedly look from a distance just to find something negative to say. The truth is that the sign was not in the least anti-Palestinian - it was pro-Palestinian.

Oh, and Ali Abunimah knows this. Because his photo of the Zionist display that heads his article came from the same source that my photo above came from.

OK, what's next?

This photo and caption:

Smiling Israeli soldiers are hate speech, according to Electronic Intifada!

There must be more though, right?

Massad said that as he walked – at a distance – past the other side of the Students Supporting Israel stand, he could see many other smaller placards and another large one, headlined “Israeli Arabs.”

It depicted “a large picture of an old Palestinian peasant man with his keffiyeh [traditional checkered scarf] on his head grinning, which immediately brought to my mind racist depictions of happy African American slaves in pro-Ku Klux Klan propaganda.”

Not only are smiling Israelis hate speech, but smiling Arabs are hate speech as well!

One can only imagine the pain that BDSers were forced to endure to see such examples of happy Israelis of all colors and backgrounds!

One of the posters compares Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionism, the most violent and radical school of Zionism, today followed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, with Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Panther Party.

Not an analogy I would make, but this isn't hate speech, except in the bizarre minds of people whose entire existence is based on hate.

Any other examples of hate spread by the evil Zionists?

Ah, one more:

The largest and perhaps most bizarre element of the Students Supporting Israel display was a large blow-up doll of Pinocchio.

Massad said that the doll “struck me as most odd given the anti-Semitic echoes of the Pinocchio figure.”

“As a Jewish person I’ve been brought up with the idea that Pinocchio is an anti-Semitic trope,” JVP’s Kalikoff said.

“This idea of a character whose nose grows with the lies he speaks uses an anti-Semitic caricature,” she added, noting that anti-Semitic propaganda has historically depicted Jews as liars with grotesquely large noses. “I would say it’s an explicitly and overtly anti-Semitic image to parade on College Walk.”

As a Jewish person who is sensitive to antisemitism, a friendly and naive marionette whose nose grows when he tells a lie does not strike me as antisemitic.

I actually looked this up to see if any major writer seriously considered Pinocchio to be an antisemitic stereotype. No one does. However, the character of Stromboli, who captures Pinocchio - money hungry, big nose, and evil - is often assumed to be a caricature of a Jew.

Joseph Massad needs to say this because he actually claims that Zionists are antisemites. Which is rich coming from someone who equates Jewish nationalism - and only Jewish nationalism - with racism.

Which is de facto antisemitic.

There were other placards there like this one, but they weren't mentioned in the article:

Awful, I know.

To sum it up, here is every example of "racism" and "hate" that the Electronic Intifada crowd found at Columbia's Zionist display:

A large sign that has a prominent, impossible-to-miss photo of happy Palestinian kids that says they deserve better than having leaders like Hamas.
Photos of happy Israeli citizens, including soldiers.
Photos of happy Israeli Arab citizens.

And Pinocchio is antisemitic, so their objection to his presence was to protect the poor defenseless Jews from hate speech by the evil Zionists.

This is on a site that gets quoted by the media as if it has an ounce of credibility.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.