Al Jazeera has apologized for censoring Joseph Massad’s controversial piece equating Zionism with anti-Semitism, and put the piece back up. It was down for a couple of days, stirring a firestorm (to which Marc Ellis and David Shasha contributed). Here’s a portion of the unforthcoming apology:
During the past few days, people have speculated that Al Jazeera succumbed to various pressures, and censored its own pages.
Al Jazeera has always demanded transparency from the centres of power around the world, and we demand it from ourselves as well…
After publication, many questions arose about the article’s content. In addition, the article was deemed to be similar in argument to Massad’s previous column, ” Zionism, anti-Semitism and colonialism“, published on these pages in December.
We should have handled this better, and we have learned lessons that will enable us to maintain the highest standards of journalistic integrity…
Glenn Greenwald played an important part in the firestorm. He published a note from Massad saying that Al Jazeera censored the piece so as to mimic the “highly restrictive political line of the mainstream American media, especially on Israel” in order to gain a footing in the U.S. market:
When I criticized the Qatari Emir in the second article I wrote for them, I was not censored, and when I harshly criticized Qatari foreign policy since the Arab uprisings began, which I did in a number of articles, I was also not censored. It is ironic, though not shocking, that it was my criticisms of Israel and its Western allies that would be banned. . . . essentially neutralizing the remaining critical edge which made Al-Jazeera popular inside and outside the United States.
This is one of those potentially defining moments where a “fly on the wall” view would be so instructive. I hope Greenwald, etc. eventually ferret out and publish what happened here. It sure seems like a “price of entry” action by AJA.
But their reversal was also interesting, perhaps they weighed the fact that there already is an overwhelming, pablum-ized CNN/MSNBC/Fox/PBS presence in US media and actually did the math whereby they concluded that their success strategy/entré/niche was entirely dependent on the controversy and not on the acquiescence.
Al Jazeera writers can criticize Qatari monarch BUT NOT THE ZIONISTS (at least when they are trying to operate within America)
The raw power of Israeli Lobby intimidation is without precedent in the history of the human race.
‘NO HYPERBOLE ALERT’
This is terrific Al Jazeera finally managed to stand up to the Lobby – this is what it is going to take and there will be many careers destroyed before William Kristol is asked the two ‘golden BB’ followup questions on Meet the Press or a US president stands up and cuts off Israeli aid
What needs to be said about an essay that includes this pearl: “Jewish anti-Zionism across Europe and in the United States had the support of the majority of Jews who continued to view Zionism as an anti-Jewish movement well into the 1940s.” Maybe if Massad had changed it well into the 1930’s this may have been true, but I doubt it. The attitude of the Jewish world towards Zionism changed first in the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration, until then the majority of Jews considered it a pipe dream. The Balfour declaration and the British mandate changed many opinions regarding Zionism. This became especially true when America changed its attitude towards immigration, which coincided with the outbreak of harsh hatred of Yehudis in Poland after the yoke of the Czar was overthrown and they could express their own nationalism which coincided with xenophobia towards the Jews.
Attitudes that saw Zionism as anti Jewish because of theories of certain Zionist writers regarding common causes with Jew haters might have influenced the intelligentsia and the leftist idealists of the Bund, but by the 1920’s the hard core of the Jewish people considered Zionism either as useful for others, or as quixotic, but not as anti semitic.
Certainly the American Jewish powers and thinkers who saw the contradictions between their acclimation to America and Zionist theory would oppose Zionism, but even the masses of Jews in America by the 1930’s and Hitler’s rise and the closed doors, saw the need for some refuge for the Jews of Europe.
Massad might believe his own lies. I’m not sure. But he is certainly carried away by his own rhetoric or maybe his belief that reading Bundist writers indicates what the majority of Jews in 1938 really thought.
I agree with Shmuel and Yonah’s thrust. Brandeis converted to Zionism in 1912, it is cynically said, in order to be more representative of American Jewry, so that he could become the first Jew on the SC. And he was part of int’l lobby for the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
From Margaret Macmillan’s ‘Peacemakers’ p. 433 – (that nerdish urge to give references again!) –
‘The American government had quietly approved the Balfour Declaration and President Wilson himself was sympathetic to Zionism. ‘To think’ he told a leading NY rabbi, ‘that I the son of the manse should be able restore the Holy Land to its people’. ..On the other hand there was the sacred tenet of self-determination. Why should the wishes of a minority of Jews (and not all in Palestine were Zionists) prevail over those of a much larger number of Arabs? Balfour and Louis Brandeis, a Supreme Court justice and leading American Zionist, came up with an ingenious solution. It was wrong to use mere ‘numerical s-determination’; a great many potential inhabitants of the Jewish home in Palestine still lived outside its borders. ‘And Zionism’ said Balfour, ‘be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 ‘Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land’. O mi God.
My comments, as our friend Dickerson would say, would be that no one has ever come up with a coherent and plausible definition of self-determination and that I don’t agree with Messad that Balfour was anti-Semitic, though he was a near-fanatical Christian Zionist, as was Lloyd George. Wilson’s comment is pretty horrifying, though it doesn’t have that fanatical edge – it’s more an indication of how a form of Zionism, at that stage more an assumption or background thought than a conviction, had entered the thinking of many American and British Christians. The point that not all Palestinian Jewish people were Zionists is worth noting.
It’s been suggested that Messad defines anti-Semitism in an interesting way. In fact I think that like so many others he fails to define it, thus creating some confusion.