Bartholomew's Notes

Here’s one I missed from a couple of weeks ago – a report for WorldNetDaily by Aaron Klein (who currently glowers strangely at readers from a advert for his new book) attacking Jacqui Smith tags a paragraph on the end about Mike Guzofsky, the far-right Israeli activist ncluded on Smith’s exclusion list:

Making the list was well is Mike Guzofsky, a leader of the ultra-nationalist Kahane movement, which seeks to ensure that Israel retains biblically-rich territories, such as the West Bank and Jerusalem. A BBC profile falsely claims Guzofsky is “actively involved with military training camps.” The only camps Guzofsky currently runs are to train dogs to protect Jewish communities in the West Bank. Dogs trained at Guzofky’s northern West Bank kennels recently prevented several terrorist attacks. Guzofsky previously was involved in leading workshops to teach self-defense to Jews. He has also pushed for Jews in the West Bank to cede from Israel and create their own state in the event the Israeli government seeks to evacuate that territory in a deal with the Palestinians.

As Terry Krepel noticed recently, a WND story by another author which referred in passing to Guzofsky as an “extremist” (a description lifted from other reports) was quickly amended to “nationalist”. I’ve chronicled Klein’s support for Guzofsky since 2006; usually Klein refers to him by his Israeli name of Yekutel Ben Yaacov, which obscures his Kahanist background. Klein doesn’t tell his readers that Kahanists want to see Palestinians expelled, and that Guzofsky has some sanguinary views which have been documented by the ADL. Early in in 1994 Guzofsky suggested that  Yitzhak Rabin was a traitor and suggested that violence might be needed to get rid of him; he has also opined that the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein had acted out of “love”, and he gave implicit support for bombs targeting progressive Jewish groups in the USA. If a Palestinian radical had made similar comments there would be an outcry against such barbarism; yet WND is more than happy for the Israeli far-right to declare war on civil society in the USA and in Israel.

WND‘s target audience, of course, consists of right-wing Christian Zionists; many adherents of this doctrine love to wrap themselves in the Israeli flag and to identify vicariously with God’s Chosen People at war against the Muslims, but there is less willingness to engage with the socio-political complexities of life in Israel. Instead, they end up giving support to extremist fringe groups who hate Israeli modernity but who promise to create the revived Biblical Israel of Christian Zionist fantasy. Klein’s whitewash is not the only example of this; Hal Lindsey, for instance, has used WND to promote the far-right and theocratic self-styled “Sanhedrin”.

Meanwhile, Max Blumenthal has just posted two parts of a video he made while in the West Bank; they include details of settler violence.

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