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Ron Radosh

by Ron Radosh

The Huffington Post Censors AJC’s David Harris, for Telling the Truth about the New Flotilla

June 25th, 2011 - 9:07 am

Writing on his blog at the American Jewish Committee’s website, its director David Harris informs his readers of the following:

Nearly two years ago, I was invited by The Huffington Post (HuffPo) to become a blogger on their site. I was honored. It is one of the most heavily trafficked news sites anywhere, and it reaches an influential audience. Since September 2009, I have published nearly 50 articles there, and look forward to publishing many more. This week, for the first time, I was told by HuffPo that an article submitted was “not for us.” It’s below. I ask you to read it and decide for yourself. Apropos, the same article was published on my Jerusalem Post blog earlier this week.

The article that the quickly becoming anti-Israel website, beloved to the left and liberals, rejected was Harris’ hard-edged critique of the forthcoming flotilla, particularly of those Americans who are participating in their own ship, which they have named, as an affront to the President, “The Audacity of Hope.”

Comparing the sponsors of the event’s propaganda to that used by George Orwell in his novel 1984, Harris suggests that the rationale for it must have been composed by the group’s own “Ministry of Truth.”  They have the nerve to make an obscene comparison of their effort with the anti-segregation “Freedom Riders” of the 1960s civil rights movement in our own country, a comparison used by the best-selling African-American author Alice Walker, who is going on the U.S. ship and has written about it herself in various venues. Writes Harris: “George Orwell, where are you? You could have a field day with this story.”

He would have even been angrier had he read Walker’s own article, which appeared on CNN’s much traveled website. Comparing herself to Ghandi, Walker says she is “paying off a debt” to the Jewish supporters of the 60s movement who martyred themselves, especially Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.  In other words, by seeking to delitigimize Israel and by supporting Hamas, which is pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state as well as the murder of Jews, she thinks she is somehow honoring the memory of the Jewish civil rights workers who came to the aid of American blacks decades ago.

Walker was answered brilliantly by British novelist Howard Jacobson, author of the prize-winning novel, The Finkler Question. Dissecting Walker’s arguments, he writes:

“If the Israeli military attacks us, it will be as if they attacked the mailman,” she says. Wrong on a thousand counts. As a writer, Alice Walker must understand the symbolic significance of words. The cargo is a cargo of intention. It is freighted with political sympathy and attitude. It means to blunder into where it isn’t safe, clothed in the make-believe garments of the unworldly, speaking of children and speaking like children, half inviting a violence which can then be presented as a slaughter of the innocents.

The flotilla, he argues, is meant by its sponsors to be a provocation. As he explains, “Whatever its cargo, by luring the Israeli military into action which can be represented as brutal, the flotilla is engaged in an entirely political act. To call it by any other name is the grossest hypocrisy.”

The truth, which Walker, Leslie Cagan,  Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Michael Ratner and the other far left participants and sponsors of the American flotilla are really aware, is that, as Harris says,  its actual purpose is “to prop up the Hamas regime in Gaza and delegitimize Israel.” Since the 1967 war, if not earlier, the pro-Communist left-wing, of which all its leaders are part, have aligned themselves at that time with the Soviet Union and its Arab clients,  and after its demise, with reactionary Arab nationalism.  Years ago, I participated in a PBS television debate opposite Cagan, who, at the time, was voicing the views of the Communist front U.S. Peace Council, and backing Moscow’s position on all nuclear and foreign policy issues.

Hamas, Harris writes, “celebrates violence. It joyously speaks of jihad, martyrdom, conflict, and the ultimate destruction of Israel. It has matched its fiery rhetoric with a sustained effort to import weapons, courtesy of Iran, smugglers in the Sinai, and tunnels from the Egyptian side of the border. In recent years, literally thousands of rockets and missiles have been fired from Gaza at Israel.” This is what the flotilla supports, not the Ghandian principles of non-violence and the morality of Martin Luther King, Jr., who always emphasized that he was a supporter of Israel.

Harris tells the truth. He writes: “The flotilla participants, whether they acknowledge it or not, are handmaidens of a terrorist regime. That regime, not Israel, is responsible for the conditions in Gaza, which may not be enviable, but are a far cry from the dire picture of starvation and stunted growth painted by the hyperbolic spokesmen.”

Walker and company do the opposite — and propagate the lies and anti-Semitism of Hamas. I do not think her late Jewish husband would be proud of her (unless he was a leftist self-hating Jew). They, as Harris puts it, serve “the interests of a regime that espouses terrorism, peddles anti-Semitism, and praises the memory of Osama Bin Laden. To portray themselves as the new wave of Freedom Riders is to trample grotesquely on the legacy of America’s civil rights struggle and rewrite history. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth is back.”

Not only is it back, but its handmaidens evidently include the editors of The Huffington Post, which is too cowardly to print a tough-minded rebuke to the Hamas supporters in America. Shame on them, and on the would-be new freedom riders who in truth are supporters of the worst proponents of oppression and terror.

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