Israel’s Lefty Rag Haaretz Defends Treason and Espionage
The partial lifting of the gag order on the Anat Kam espionage affair, which had already been exposed to the world media in March by Judith Miller, is stirring up a storm in Israel. The charge sheet accuses Kam of “divulging secret information with the intent to harm the security of the state,” which falls under “serious espionage” and carries a maximum life term. Haaretz, Israel’s left-wing daily, is at the center of the storm — and tying itself in knots to defend Kam, its journalist Uri Blau, and itself.
First, to recap: Kam, born in Jerusalem in 1987 and a gifted student, served as an office clerk under the then head of Central Command, Yair Naveh, from 2005 to 2007. She’s charged with illicitly copying about 2000 computer documents — 700 of them classified secret or top secret — and taking them with her when she left the army. The charge sheet says the documents contained, among other things, “plans of military operations, summaries of discussions within the IDF, deployment and order of battle … of IDF forces … , IDF situation estimates, IDF targets, and so on.” Security sources say they could have cost soldiers’ lives and posed a grave danger.
In 2008 Kam, then a student at Tel Aviv University and a journalist for the Walla news site, delivered a large amount of the documents to Blau. He, in turn, published in Haaretz some stories based on them that were cleared with the military censor. The stories involved assassinations of terrorists in the West Bank who, allegedly, could have been arrested; the Israeli Supreme Court had ruled that in such cases, the terrorist has to be arrested rather than killed. (Meanwhile, on Sunday the IDF spokesperson said Blau’s claims in these articles were “upsetting and distorted.”)
When sources in the defense establishment saw the stories, they worried about where they could have come from. The Israel Security Agency, better known as Shin Bet, eventually worked out a deal with Blau where he returned his documents and was promised they wouldn’t be used to incriminate him or his sources. A few months later, in December 2009, the Shin Bet identified Kam as the source of the documents — but the problem was that she admitted to giving Blau far more documents than he had turned over.
Kam was put under house arrest; Blau fled the country and is now in London. The Shin Bet negotiated with Blau’s lawyers in an attempt to retrieve the documents. It was when they concluded this was futile that the gag order was lifted.
As things now stand, Kam has been indicted and the trial is supposed to begin in May; the head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, has warned that Blau is endangering himself and the country by holding onto his documents in a foreign location, but Blau still has not agreed to return to Israel and give them up.
Haaretz is rattled, and a sense of shock is said to hang over its editorial offices. It’s not only that Kam acted out of what the charge sheet called “ideological motivations” arising from the extreme left — an outlook given much voice in Haaretz (what she was doing in such a sensitive post, and how she could have gotten away with so much, is another unhappy dimension to this story). It’s also that Haaretz’s own journalist, Blau, is involved — and people are good and mad.
Meanwhile another Knesset member has demanded to close down Haaretz unless it shapes up.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/136974
The comments section of Haaretz, as usual, tells the tale of the publication.
Haaretz, huffpo et al: write a reasoned opinion not radical left; forget about seeing posted in the comments = (equals) never click the rag again.
So, what is the goal of the Israeli “far left”? Is it kill me last?
In reply to No. 3–more like–don’t kill me, I’m one of the good ones.
Let me as a Tel Avivian give my five cents worth, the rot is deep at Ha’Aretz and among the Israeli far Left and not just the far Left, none of this surprised me when the story broke. When Dave Landau was editor at that rag, he infamously remarked that Israel deserved to be raped by America, a self-loathing Jewish masochistic fantasy if ever there was one. He got his wish, hope he’s happy. Shortly after the Gaza War just over a year ago, there was the infamous Danny Zammir affair, when the male version of Anat Kamm, also serving in the IDF accused the IDF of war crimes in that war, which it turned out were completely bogus. Ha’Aretz published his bogus claims on their front page, the only newspaper here that took him seriously, without bothering to investigate any further or check his background. Ha’Aretz made a retraction when his charges totally unravelled on this front but the damage had been done. And the paper remained in business, it is still in business not inspite of this but because people here don’t care. They don’t even notice, they are apathetic, they are busy trying to pay the bills and raise their families. So the far Left remain removed from the common man and the common experience in Israel, a navel-gazing clique with no accountability (because they never pay for the consequences of their actions) to anybody but themselves, and living in a parallel reality. The rot is in the Israeli universities, Kamm was a student of the anti-Zionist prof Shlomi Sand at TAU, it is in the schools where they are not taught anything substantial and relevant on this front. I have told anybody who will listen to boycott the rag for over a year now.
What is the motto of Ha’Aretz and their ilk here? Honestly I can’t say, a few guesses, ‘reality is what we say it is’, ‘the enemies of my enemies, conservative Zionists, are my friends and that would therefore include jihadists’ perhaps? Liberalism is a mental disorder, Ha’Aretz is proof of that. Think about this, the only reason these self-loathing afuch (cappucinno in Hebrew, kind of) drinkers in TA’s coffee shops can lounge around enjoying themselves in relative safety, is because twenty year old boys are risking their lives every day guarding checkpoints, borders and making arrests of dangerous terrorists, which these self-same loony leftists look down upon as “oppressive” actions. Without the IDF, these loony leftists would not see out the year, make that the month before some jihadist slit their throats. So why should young men risk their lives for Ha’Aretz staffers, crazy TAU profs and the loony Left as a whole? This is why I boycott the rag, it is an insult to the boys who risk their lives every day and those of course who have been killed and wounded, to support such a newspaper. It spits on the graves of our killed soldiers, our killed civilians, to support a newspaper that sells deceitful propaganda on behalf of our enemies who make no secret of the fact that they want us all dead.
In a sane or even semi-sane society such loony liberals, Anat Kamm included would be institutionalised and be under 24 hour care and observation. Paranoid schizophrenics and those hospitalised here suffering from Jerusalem Syndrome have nothing on these guys, I am not even saying this in jest. Instead these crazies are in charge of our “paper of record”, they are our leading “intellectuals” and they dominate the university campuses. Reality means nothing to them. Kafkaesque doesn’t begin to cover it. The lunatics are in charge of the asylum, it’s not just the USA with the abominable Obamination.
Larry in Tel Aviv.
Thanks for an excellent post, I couldn’t agree more.
First, I am bothered by the fact that the legislation is threatening a newspaper. How would people here feel if Obama threatened to shut down fox. There would be a nonstop hissy fit, and appropriately so. T Even just empty political rhetoric by legislators creates the danger of chilled free speech. “The stories involved assassinations of terrorists in the West Bank who, allegedly, could have been arrested; the Israeli Supreme Court had ruled that in such cases, the terrorist has to be arrested rather than killed.” So the Lefty provided documents showing the military was conducting illegal assassinations and she is the bad guy? What about the fact that the military was embarking on illegal actions.
Do the universities in Israel teach the kids to hate their countries too?
Haaretz does great damage to Israel. People like Gideon Levy and Hess write blatant lies which most Israelis recognize as such, but Israelis laugh it off unaware that these stories are believed all around the world by gullible people. Last year Levy wrote a tear jerker article about how Palestinian kids are so deprived of water that they don’t even have a single swimming pool in the entire West Bank. An Israeli colleague published numerous photos of olympic sized municipal pools throughout the West Bank filled with playing Palestinian children. Of course Haaretz did not correct Levy’s story, because if Haaretz corrected errors, the list would be longer than the paper itself.
Every ideology is based on information that it chooses to ignore. The Left ignores Jewish history and its accumulated wisdom. It ignores the very concept of “truth,” seeing no value in it. There are no facts that don’t comport with Leftist ideological constructs. If a “fact” is not in accord with preconceived notions, then it cannot be useful and must be jettisoned. Even human life itself is unimportant in the face of Leftist dogma. In that sense Leftists are no different than medieval Christianity that insisted upon complete confession of the faith even if extracted under torture. To wit, the unity of the common man will be accomplished even if that entails the deaths of millions.
In the case of Anat Kam, she believed falsely that the Jews needed to be disarmed by her and those who agreed with her in light of their planning to protect themselves and their society with whatever means was available to them. She sought the humane treatment of those who would harm her and her family if given the chance. She denied the Jewish truth that those who are kind to their enemies will in the end be cruel to those who meant them no harm. She fell for dogma, poor dear.
Perhaps the word got out at Haaretz that to get along you had to go along.
From the Sept.2006 issue of The Atlantic Times, a monthly newspaper from Germany -
” The Ideal Partner. Cologne’s DuMont publishing house buys into Ha’aretz in Israel. By Rainer Burchardt
Sixty years after the Holocaust, it is a German publishing house that has bought shares in the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz. This has caused no waves among the Israeli public.
A wealthy man of the world. The Cologne publisher Alfred Neven DuMont, one of the hundred richest people in Germany, has just landed yet another coup. Barely six months have passed since public accusations that the family business profited from “Aryanization” during the Nazi period, and now the liberal-minded but vanity-stricken lion of Rhenish high society has announced a partnership with the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz. Only a scoundrel would see a link between the two events. ”
I guess Im a scoundrel.
I happened across this article while searching for something else and got involved in reading it. Unlike the other comments here, which I gather are made by people who agree with the writer and therefore read him, I can’t help but comment on the manipulative and totalitarian style and content here. Obviouisely the writer and his fans here wish Israel to become a totalitarian state where there is no free press and no criticism of policy. Haaretz certainly has the right to defend and hold it’s position and Anat Cam’s attempt to expose what appear to be illegal and undemocratic policies in the army.
The fact that the writer and knesset members have the audacity to link this with the Holocaust and refer to political criticism as anti semitism is downright sickening, and I say this as a child of holocaust survivors.
It’s this sort of writing and opinion that make it difficult of decent people to remain faithful to Israel and the forces that now support it, and I say this as an Israeli.