RUTHFULLY YOURS

A RESPONSE TO TERRY CRAWFORD- BROWNE:SOUTH AFRICA’S RUSSELL TRIBUNAL ON PALESTINE….”EXPOSING” ISRAEL….SEE NOTE PLEASE

Posted By Ruth King on August 19th, 2012

David Hersch SAIPAC
The South African Israel Public Affairs Committee
Cape Town

Business Day 17 August 2012.

David Hersch

I was living in Israel during 2009 and 2010 when Crawford-Browne was there with the World Council of Churches (WCC), not an organisation friendly to Israel’s either. He morphs from describing himself as an “international peace monitor”, being there on behalf of the United Nations, to admitting to being there with the WCC. At that time he was staying at the Augusta Victoria, a church-hospital complex located on the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem, not far from Mount Scopus. I was aware of his presence and his spuriously agendised dispatches from Israel.

Standing at a checkpoint near Bethlehem, he was no “peace monitor”, but rather a self-appointed irritation with no attempt or intention on his part to acquire real knowledge and balance on the situation.

To Israel’s credit and proof of how democratic it actually is, it allows the likes of Crawford-Browne to enter Israel with their nefarious agendas. Compare this to the South African Government not allowing the Dalai Lama to enter this country for a one day birthday bash for Desmond Tutu.

As for the so-called “apartheid wall”, which Crawford-Browne likes to repetitively rehash, I lived next to it at Mevaseret Zion, just outside Jerusalem, and it is the finest defence against rampant suicide bombers and attacks on Israelis. Think of this fence, 94% of it is wire except where sniping can or did take place, in the same way as the burglar bars and security doors on most of our homes. Why do we have burglar bars? Simply because we want to be safe in our homes, which is an inalienable human right. So what makes Israelis that different from the rest of the world in this regard? Absolutely nothing…. except in Crawford-Browne’s mind.

And the “apartheid roads”, another perennial rehash of his? Crawford-Browne neglects to tell us that the Israeli Supreme Court opened Route 443, a main highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to the Palestinians living near it. However, in the same way as South Africa has checkpoints at our borders, airports and harbours, so does Israel. The area controlled by the Palestinian Authority, Areas A & B in terms of the Oslo Agreements, which the Palestinians are a signatory to, are no different to Lesotho or Swaziland and if people pass from these countries to South Africa, they go through checkpoints. The roads in Lesotho and Swaziland all lead to checkpoints as do the roads under the Palestinian Authority.

Readers are reminded that the Arab attacks on Jews have been going on for more than a hundred years, long before there was a State of Israel and long before there was a 1967 war that forced Israel to take over the former illegally annexed Jordanian occupied area of the “West Bank”, an area originally allocated and technically still belonging to Israel in terms of the Mandate by the League of Nations, the San Remo Conference and later also adopted and confirmed by its successor, the United Nations and never rescinded

Crawford-Browne trots out his usual boring list of uncontextualised, selectively untruthful and unproven comparative analogies, sentimental claptrap and conspiracy theories. All irrelevant and repetitive. He didn’t leave one out this time as they rapidly ran into each other. What utter balderdash!

As for “the Zionist lobby loudly tries to divert attention to Syria” Mr Crawford-Browne, there is no need for any attention being diverted to Syria as Syria is doing a wonderful job doing so all by itself.

Crawford-Browne tries to put a spin on a “Zionist Lobby” and thereby imply a bad connotation. Lobbies are part of every day political life in most democratic countries and I would say the Arab/Muslim lobby is highly active in South Africa and elsewhere. Crawford-Browne, by divulging he is the Secretary, SA organising committee for the discredited Russell Tribunal on Palestine, reveals inadvertently that he too is a lobbyist. He is certainly earning his honours in Agitprop, which by definition is a way of conveying an extreme left-wing message via the media and other means. This is a term and technique that originated and was perfected in the unlamented USSR.

Crawford-Browne can glibly ignore what is going on in Syria. He takes no notice and is blind to the daily carnage and deaths which is there for all to see on TV News Channels every day. Over the past year the daily death toll has risen daily and is now reaching 14,000 people. No protests? No criticism? No boycotting of Syrian exports? No morality? Only blindness and bigotry. Not a care as it is fine in his mind for Arabs and Muslims to kill each other by the thousands in his highly selective view, as long as they are not Jewish. Is this just another inconvenient truth to ignore Mr Crawford-Browne?

Those who demonise and delegitimise Israel, who say the world would be better off without it, who hold it to standards of perfection no other country is held to, who extol or commiserate with its mortal enemies, who obscenely liken it to Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa, who make it the scapegoat not only for crimes it hasn’t committed, but for those of which it is a victim — yes, such people are anti-Semitic, whether they acknowledge it or not and when they are Jewish on top of it, they are simply traitors. You are such a person Mr Crawford-Browne. You are an anti-Semite which you hide in a cloud of righteousness and pretence.

I quote from Crawford-Browne’s own Lord, “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake”…. and He wasn’t talking about you Mr Crawford-Browne.

TERRY CRAWFORD-BROWN

THANK you for your prominent focus on the mislabelling of products from the occupied Palestinian territories as products made in Israel, and on Deputy Minister Ebrahim Ebrahim’s call on South Africans to limit their visits to Israel as tourists (Envoys, Jewish bodies livid as deputy minister “discourages” travel to Israel, August 15).

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