I am barraged on twitter by folks challenging me to watch a video that shows that Israel is a nation of black hating racists and then to defend the Jewish State. I do so willingly because this is a crude and manipulative piece of propaganda which will be used by those who loathe Israel if not just all the Jews. It needs to be exposed.
The video appears on a website (The Electronic Intifada) which purports to give you “all the news from Palestine every day”. Hmmmm. So I see plenty of stories about what the wicked frigging Jews are up to. What about the 155,000 tonnes of aid sent by Israel into Gaza last month? What about the rockets fired onto Israeli schools? What about the gays buried alive in concrete by Hamas in Gaza? I guess it was a busy news day/week/year so not time to give us that news.
So we start with the FACT that the website relaying this video is not exactly 100% balanced in its coverage. You can link to the website and that video HERE
The website then bleats about how the New York Times refused to run the video. It “did not dare”. Hmmm. Is that all part of a global Jewish conspiracy or perhaps just because it is grotesquely misleading? Those bloody Jews they control everything don’t they? Come on, I am sure you know that the frigging Jews run all the media. And the banks.
Well done the NY Times for not running a video which is, at best , crap journalism and, at worst, vile propoganda.
The video tells the story of the 60,000 Africans who since 2006 have fled all the undoubted miseries that lie in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, etc. and “with the European Union having closed its doors to illegal immigrants have gone to the next best place, Israel.” Jump forward and the next scenes show Israeli politicians saying they will deal with the “infiltrators” and some Israelis making openly racist remarks about the Africans. We see Africans in camps. Natural conclusion: Israel hates the blacks. Those frigging Jews they have learned nothing from the Holocaust and just hate darkies don’t they?
Except that this is not actually the whole picture. Rewind to the 1980s when war, famine and religious persecution threatened the Falasha. Do those various twitterati who bombard me know about the Falasha? They are the lost tribe of the Jews. Black Jews who had existed as a wholly distinct community for millennia since the original diaspora.
In Britain we sent money to our fellow Christians in Ethiopia so that the folks could stay in Ethiopia. In Israel they sent aircraft and ( by 2010) had brought the entire community to Israel where they would not starve and would never again face persecution for being frigging Jews because they were safe in the Jewish state. Around 80,000 folks were airlifted which at the time was equivalent to an increase in the population of just under 2%.
Can you imagine any European country saying “wow let’s increase our population by 2% overnight and by the way all the new folks are black.?” What would the Daily Mail say if Mr Cameron announced that he was airlifting 1.3 million folks in from in from Sudan next week?
The Falasha were put up in camps where they were taught Hebrew, about Israeli history and helped to adapt to live in a modern Western society. And then they went out and were given cheap Government loans to buy housing across Israel. There would be no ghettos. Today 120,000 Falasha are Israelis. They serve in the army and are a full part of Israeli society.
So FACT: Israel does not hate black people.
The word infiltrator is a crude word spat out in the same way the Daily Mail spits out the words “illegal immigrant” - the abuse towards Africans is not directed at the Falasha who arrived in Israel legitimately it is directed solely at folks who have arrived without papers, cannot speak English, let alone Hebrew and are thus from day one a burden on the state.
Of course illegal immigrants have no rights to work legally. They are illegally there. In adopting such a policy Israel is not exactly unique is it? Moreover the language and cultural issues (the folks are generally trained only as peasant farmers) means that they CANNOT find work which they are capable of doing. So why exactly should Israeli taxpayers have to fund a life on benefits for such people?
The makers of this video think it outrageous that Israeli’s have exactly the same objections to illegal immigrants pitching up for a life on welfare as every other Western nation has. How odd. Do they honestly think that the frigging Jews have to open their arms to illegal immigrants just because no-one else will and that if they don’t they are automatically ALL classed as black hating racists?
As to the camps? PM Netanyahu attempted to put the illegals into camps awaiting deportation. I believe we also have detention centres in the UK that fulfil the same role. Only in Israel the uber-liberal Supreme Court struck this measure out and stopped it in 2012. A country born as Israel was after the holocaust must find another way to deal with the issue. Well done Isarel for showing such humanity. Oddly that was not mentioned in the video.
In the video we see some Israelis making openly racist comments. My twitter friends seem to think that if you can get footage which (in total shows) a few hundred folks engaged in racist abuse/demonstrations that damns an entire nation of (now) 6 million. I am sure you can see the elementary logical flaw in this thinking. These folks are not representative of Israel as a whole.
Are their racists in Israel? Yes of course there are.
I think it was Ben Gurion who said that Israel would not be a proper country until it had both prostitutes and Fascists. Its electoral system (pure party list PR) means that if 0.9% of voters support a party it gets a seat in the Knesset. Thus in the 1980s Meir Kahane’s Kach party gained a seat. He was without doubt a total fascist, a racist and a bigot. He was a disgusting piece of work.
So are there black hating racists in Israel? Yes. And such folks spout the same ghastly rhetoric one hears from the BNP in the UK, from Golden Dawn in Greece and from fascists across Europe. Israel is a liberal democracy and, regrettably, in all liberal democracies today there are those who dislike people of colour and will say so openly.
But by its actions Israel has shown that it is not a black African hating country.
It has a problem with illegal immigrants. That is because as a prosperous, liberal, democratic and welcoming place it is a desirable place to live. We have a problem across the West with this issue.
My own solution is to abandon border controls altogether. All forms of prohibition including prohibition on the free movement of labour always fail, only burdening the taxpayer with huge policing costs and making money for criminal gangs. But at the same time I’d change welfare rules: no welfare of any sort unless you pay taxes for five years. That applies to white Jeremy Kyle style “true Brit” chavs as well as to folks from Sudan.
The hard fact is that you cannot have BOTH free immigration and a generous welfare system for all. If you are set up in such a way the consequences are obvious and unsustainable.
There is an issue for Israel in how it deals with illegal immigrants. We all face that issue across the West. But this video seems to imply that because Europe won’t take these folk (actually it does) Israel has a moral duty to do so and its failure to take on that burden marks it out as uniquely racist. Finding a few actual racists gives the conclusion Israel IS racist.
The Falasha Aliyah shows nothing could be further from the truth. This video is crude propaganda which has been seized upon by those who hate Israel, those who loathe the frigging Jews or both.
Look at the real facts, put events into a global and historic context and there can be no other conclusion.