The Zionist Targeting
of Lebanon’s Dr. Ibrahim Mousawi
You’ve done enough. Have you
no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you
left no sense of decency?
– Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph
McCarthy, April 1954
In a US Senate hearing just over
fifty years ago, Boston lawyer Joseph Welch famously
rebuked Senator Joseph McCarthy with these now
immortal words. They have been immortalized because
they have helped furnish what we understand
McCarthyism to mean: extreme, mean and unreasonable
persecution of people by means of witch-hunts and
other tactics including guilt by association or
through simple prejudice. This is done in order to
achieve a political objective of silencing dissent
and preventing the public from learning inconvenient
truths.
In the human drama of Middle East
theaters and in the wider context of the current
Bush administration-spearheaded endless war, the New
McCarthyism involves the mobilization of the global
‘war on terror’, in which we see once again the
manipulation of fear and the corruption of public
discourse in pursuit of narrowly partisan gain –
chief among them, the Likudnik Israel-first hawks of
the neoconservatives in the US and Israel.
The foot-soldiers of the Likud lobby
around the world are applying pressure to stop
people from attending academic and activist
conferences. As with the McCarthyism of half a
century ago, today’s Middle East Studies McCarthyism
perpetrated by the Likud Lobby is also a threat to
our liberty, to academic freedom, and to basic,
fundamental democratic rights and responsibilities.
A network of right-wing Zionist
activists has intensified its online campaign based
on a melange of distorted or provably false charges
against critics of Israel. Zionist media ‘megaphone’
the charges, stoking the furor. When mainstream
media ultimately notices, it generally focuses its
coverage only on the furor rather than investigating
and reporting the truth about the false charges.
McCarthyism 2.0: The War On Terror
After the collapse of the USSR, there
were expectations in many quarters that there would
be a ‘peace dividend’. The military industrial
complex had burgeoned during the Cold war, and
vested interests therein were not going to give up
their power, privilege and profit from war so
readily, if at all.
Yet after the WTC attacks on Sept 11,
2001, a generalized ‘war on terror’ was sold to a
stupefied electorate. Right out of the Red Scare
playbook of the Cold War morphed the War on Terror
playbook, with ‘terrorist’ substituted for communist
as the new post cold war evil. With the scope
widened, the demonization of the Arab/Muslim as the
new monolithically conceptualized enemy commenced,
and extended to the criminalizing of dissent and
charity-giving: even social activists have been
called terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.
Cynical campaigns to confound and
confuse and whip up hysteria and ratchet up racism
have abounded. Israeli-financed websites like Act of
America, by their propagandist, the former Saad
Haddad and Antoine LaHood operative, the Maid of
Darkness, Bridgette Gabriel, spew obscene racist
hatred against Americans and others of Arab or
Muslim origin that would likely give even McCarthy
pause.
During the current administration,
Bush has amplified an explicitly anti-Muslim message
by repeatedly using the term “Islamic fascism” to
describe America’s purported enemies (including both
the Hezbollah-led resistance in Lebanon and that of
Hamas in Palestine).
The demonizing campaigns and venal
ideological assaults of the Likudniks have involved
bullying, intimidation and mistreatment of those who
dare to contest the Israeli hawk worldview and
version of the Middle East. In many cases they
involve active government and lobby harassment to
ensure a climate that is forcefully conducive to the
Israeli version of events.
One method of silencing involves the
all-purpose slander of the anti-Semitism accusation
that has been elasticized to non-sensicality. A new
‘working definition’ promoted by some Israel
lobbyists seeks to confuse anti-Semitism with
anti-Zionism, such that today it would also apply to
Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, and Albert Einstein. According
to Arthur Neslen in ‘When an anti-Semite is not an
anti-Semite’, the definition would even apply to
Israel’s own PM:
What do Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi,
Ehud Olmert and myself all have in common? We could
each be censured for racism according to the
European Union Monitoring Centre’s “working
definition of anti-Semitism” which was recently
adopted by the National Union of Students as
official policy.
Only recently, a Spanish forum
launched in July last year from the Madrid Social
Forum has been subject to a hijacking of its agenda
by underhanded means as a result of Zionist
pressuring of the Spanish government. Initially, the
Spanish Foreign Ministry pledged organizational and
financial support for Forum for a Just Peace, which
was to be held in Madrid from the 14-16th December,
enabling the participation of Spanish, Palestinian,
Lebanese, Jordanian, Iraqi and Israeli civil society
representatives who had endorsed the conference.
A refusal by the International
Committee to accept the Foreign Ministry stacking of
the Conference with ideological zionists was met
with the Spanish government response to shut down
the conference venue and to send the police to evict
the participants. This has effectively shut down the
Forum for a Just Peace.
Challenging censorship of Middle East
reality
Academia is an important and
potentially powerful sphere within which to
challenge power, and to posit alternatives.
Successful, effective and popular academics are
particularly targeted by the Israeli-hawk Likud
Lobby in the USA and Europe because they succeed
with bringing more people to ask why only one side
of the Middle East conflict is being presented as
the only side.
As Robert Fisk notes, the
scare-mongering conveniently justifies occupation
and feeds into war-mongering in service of resource
theft and land expropriation in the Middle East:
Because it’s really all about
shutting the reality of the Middle East off from us.
It’s to prevent the British and American people from
questioning the immoral and cruel and
internationally illegal occupation of Muslim lands.
And in the Land of the Free, this systematic
censorship of Middle East reality continues even in
the country’s schools.
Campaigns against academics are often coordinated or
facilitated through such groups as Campus Watch,
FrontPage, CAMERA and various think tanks
(tank-thinks) that validate the Likudnik-Zionist
doctrinal framing of the Middle East. They have been
mounted with mixed results against Professors Nadia
Abu El-Haj (she was granted tenure at Barnard
College this year), Joseph Massad, Debbie Almontaser,
Tariq Ramadan, Juan Cole, Rashid Khalidi, Norman
Finkelstein, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer,
Hamid Dabashi, Sami al-Arian and Israeli academics
Ilan Pappe and Tanya Reinhart, who both chose exile
from Israel in protest to their former country’s
policies.
“There certainly is a sense among
faculty and grad students that they’re being
watched, monitored,” says Zachary Lockman, president
of the Middle East Studies Association. “People are
always looking over their shoulder, feeling that
whatever they say–in accurate or, more likely,
distorted form–can end up on a website. It
definitely has a chilling effect.”
Campaigns have typically involved
intimidatory tactics and defamatory allegations,
demonstrably proved baseless. The scurrilous attacks
on Norman Finkelstein, for example, have laid bare
the desperate lengths the Likud Lobby and such
representatives as Alan Dershowitz are driven to
smear and slander challengers. Finkelstein was
ultimately denied tenure. Ultra-zionist Israel Lobby
groups are attempting to intimidate publishers of
Joel Kovel’s book Overcoming Zionism: Creating a
Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine and
to cripple its distribution. Tariq Ramadan, who Time
magazine listed as one of the 100 most likely
innovators of the 21st century, was repeatedly
denied a visa for entry to teach in the US on
spurious grounds.
Freedom of expression in media and
even academe does not apparently include the freedom
to duly and freely criticize Israeli policies.
Zionist hijacking of these spaces, like the McCarthy
trials, has all too often been dishonest and
abusive. In the past year, lobby groups such as
Campus Watch have been behind the so-called Islamo-Fascism
Awareness Week (IFAW) from October 22-26. Other
campaigns have included vitriolic smear campaigns
against the Khalil Gibran International Academy. The
slander and intimation ultimately worked: Debbie
Almontaser resigned, all on the flimsy accusation of
a t-shirt that had the Arabic word intifada on
it—worn by someone else.
The Targeting of Dr. Ibrahim Mousawi
Recently the Zionists have been
targeting Lebanon’s Ibrahim Mousawi, trying to
prevent him from speaking or traveling to other
countries.
Who is Dr. Ibrahim Mousawi?
Born in Lebanon’s picturesque and
fertile Bekaa Valley village of Nabysheet, Mousawi
is a student of Politics, English Literature and
Religion. A former school Headmaster,
Ibrahim received his MA in English
literature from The Lebanese University, his BA in
Journalism from The Lebanese University, and earned
his MA in Political Science from The American
University of Beirut in 2003. He earned his PhD in
Political Islam from Birmingham University-Britain
2007. The title of his dissertation was
Compatibility between Islam and
democracy; Shiism and democracy under Wilayat Al-Faqih,
Iran as a case study.
During the July 2006 War with Israel,
Mousawi held the position of editor in chief of
Al-Intiqad (Criticism), a weekly Hezbollah
newspaper, and was much sought after by
international reporters for information and his
insights. He appeared widely in the international
media and was critical of the destruction of Lebanon
and the Bush administration providing Israel with a
green light to continue the slaughter while the
international community was calling for a ceasefire.
Following the cessation of
hostilities, the Irish Anti-War Movement (IAWM)
invited Mousawi to address peace activists in
Belfast, Dublin and Galway about the summer
conflict. This October he was invited back but was
refused a visa without explanation.
When Irish Justice Minister Brian
Lenihan denied Mousawi entry to Ireland, it followed
Lenihan’s meeting with a delegation from Ireland’s
zionist lobby. In addition, the Bush administration
had pressured Ireland into rejecting his visa
application, according to reports in the Irish
media.
The IAWM issued a statement last month denouncing
the decision as “an outrageous act of political
censorship” and a “disgraceful attack on the
anti-war movement” in Ireland.
“The ban makes nonsense of the
frequent claims by this [Irish] government that they
favor dialogue and international diplomacy to
resolve the problems of the Middle East,” Richard
Boyd Barret, the head of the IAWM, said at the time.
“Anyone even remotely concerned with
free speech and the right to engage in open
political debate in this country should be very
alarmed that the US government is now deciding what
viewpoints can and cannot be heard in Ireland,” he
added.
“I’m only involved in academia and
media,” Mousawi avers, adding that the only “crime”
he has ever committed is to openly express his
political views, which he insists remain within the
boundaries of legitimate intellectual discourse.
“We should allow for open debate,”
Mousawi told the Daily Star. “After all, I come and
I only say words. If my words are worth hearing,
people should give me the opportunity to speak. If
my words are rubbish, it’s worth the opportunity to
refute what I say, and to undermine my logic if what
I say is not logical.”
“I’m a staunch defender of political
freedoms and freedom of speech,” he adds.
In February 2005, just one week after
the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik
Hariri, he invited five Rabbis to a conference in
Beirut and hosted them as guests on his political
talk show.
He also points out that Hezbollah was
among the first to condemn the 9/11 attacks as
‘terrorism’ as well as to condemn the murder of
Lebanon’s PM Rafik Hariri.
“I believe governments and
politicians have failed to address the problems of
the people,” he explains. “I believe there is
another role that we have to play at the grassroots
level, as NGOs and as members of civil society.
There is a lot of diplomacy that could go on at this
level. We don’t have to wait for officials to take
the lead; we have seen what they have brought:
nothing but disasters. So I want to highlight the
need to interact at this level.”
Mousawi rejects the notion that there
is a ‘clash of civilization’. “I believe that all
over the world, people want the same things. We all
want to be with our families; we all want to come
back to our kids at the end of the day and bring
bread to their tables and give them a good
education, to live in harmony and peace.” Addressing
the World Against War International Peace Conference
in London last December, Mousawi told the 1200
delegates from 26 countries that he had a two month
old son named Issa (Jesus), and one named Muhammad.
“If I have another one I will name him Moses”, he
added.
Mousawi occasionally writes for
Beirut’s English language Daily Star and has
been a commentator for CNN, ABC, and CBS. For many
years, Mousawi has also worked extensively with
Americans and Europeans arranging and interpreting
interviews and is considered one of the
best-informed people on political events in Lebanon
and Palestine.
“I would say that we are in the midst
of a war of terminology,” Dr. Mousawi asserts. “It
is a war of definitions that we should pay attention
to.”
The Lobby next moved to bar Mousawi
from England, with Henry Grunwald, president of the
Board of Deputies of British Jews as point man to
lead the attack. Following the Zionist Lobby’s
advisory to its affiliates, apparently without
bothering with fact checking, Grunwald repeated the
error that went out internationally to pro-Zionist
media outlets that Mousawi is ‘Director of Al Manar,
the Hezbollah News Service’, or as the Jerusalem
Post claimed, “a senior official of the Al Manar
Channel”. He in fact was never in that position and
ceased working in the English language office nearly
two years ago.
The Lobby also lined up Baroness
Neville-Jones, the Shadow Security Minister and
former Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
The Baroness, who has yet to criticize any of the
atrocities committed by Israel in Palestine or
Lebanon, apparently knows a threat to England when
she is told by the Lobby about one–never mind the
quality of her supplied facts.
After meeting with leaders of the
British Chamber of Deputies, she felt “Mousawi’s
presence is not conducive to the public good,” and
that he might “preach hate” if he were allowed in.
Yet the Baroness claimed not to know much about
Mousawi except that he was (once again!) the fantasy
non-Director of Al Manar Television—hardly a
promising basis for an informed decision to bar
someone from a country!
Unwilling to correct her
misinformation, the Baroness’ press release cascaded
into headlines for other Zionist outlets
internationally who were quite prepared to repeat
it.
The Jerusalem Post ran a
headline which blared ‘Hezbollah television station
editor’s entry into Britain angers Jewish leaders’
and the Jewish Chronicle and Forward followed suit
with the Jewish Chronicle of 11/16/07 headlining
‘Ban Hezbollah man from UK!’
The Baroness is known in Britain for
her persistence. She enlisted her fellow Zionist
Conservative Party Chairman David Cameron, who was
already under Zionist pressure, to ask England’s new
Prime Minister Gordon Brown to deny Mousawi entry to
Britain, apparently because he did “not trust the
‘Arabists’ in the Home Office to do a proper job”.
“Are you aware that the Irish
government recently refused entry to Ibrahim Mousawi,
head of Hezbollah’s viciously anti-Semitic TV
station, Al-Manar?”, Cameron tsk tsked to the
British premier during Question Time in the House of
Commons.
“And just what approach will Her
Majesty’s government take when Mr. Mousawi attempts
to enter the UK to speak at a conference?” Cameron
demanded. Brown demurred, apparently sensing that
Cameron, not for the first time, had his facts
wrong.
In 2002 AIPAC member and advisor
Jeffrey Goldberg appeared in Beirut and interviewed
Mousawi among others. Cloaking his extreme Zionism,
Goldberg posed as a journalist and wrote a
substantially false article for the New Yorker
issue of October 14, 2002, implying that Mousawi was
anti-Semitic. Caught in his lies, the record was
clarified and Mousawi vindicated but the New
Yorker never did apologize nor retract
Goldberg’s allegations.
Answering the Lobby charges of
anti-Semitism, Mousawi categorically denies the
accusation that he has even thought of promoting
“anti-Semitic” views. “I would challenge anyone to
provide evidence of any word that I have said that
is hateful or anti-Semitic,” he says, adding that he
himself has been a victim of discrimination and has
therefore made a special effort to eschew any form
of prejudice.
“I have nothing against Jews. I have
nothing against any human being, whether because of
religion, gender or political affiliation,” he
explains. “I’m a human being who believes in
dignity, independence and freedom. I’m a
bridge-builder and I’ve always been an advocate of
dialogue and discussion.”
Mousawi affirms the view that in the
Middle East the struggle is not with Judaism but
with Zionism. Zionism is understood in much of the
Middle East as an ideology that is the enemy of
Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and an ideology
that informed the theft of Palestine from its
rightful inhabitants who are overwhelmingly
Christians and Muslims.
And what of the views Cameron and his
Zionist marionettes so strongly felt would not be
conducive to the public good?
Mousawi at the London Conference, as
reported by the Daily Star:
Yes, we believe in religion, but this
does not bring us to a place where we do not respect
others or we do not recognize others If religion is
not going to make me a better human being who cares
for any human being, I don’t need it. … [Religion]
is not to make me fanatic, irresponsible, or feel
that I’m deemed to salvation while others are going
to hell. No, this is not what we want. If you are
really a true believer, you should care for any
human being, whoever he is, wherever he lives.
During his speech, Mousawi also had a
response for those who would question the idea of
inviting a Hezbollah media man to an anti-war event.
Who can talk about [the need to] stop
the wars and [achieve] peace more than those who are
suffering from the occupation and the atrocities and
the massacres and the aggressions? We want genuine
peace. We don’t want compromises and we don’t want
to go again and again to the same vicious cycle
every 10 years or five years, where you make a
temporary settlement and you end up with another war
coming. The roots of the problem, the roots of the
cause of the problem, should be addressed.
Affirming Hezbollah’s right to resist
occupation and denying that the group engages in
terrorism, Mousawi argues:
Hezbollah is a legitimate resistance
group that is fighting to regain occupied land like
the Shebaa Farms and to secure the return of
prisoners held by Israel.
Many people try to demonize the
resistance, but resistance is the right of people
under occupation.
If there wasn’t an occupation, there
wouldn’t be resistance. I would support any nation
or people if they were occupied and exercising their
right to resist an occupying force.
I don’t believe anyone wants to have
wars. But in this part of the world, we have for
decades been the victims of occupation and war.”
A durable peace, Mousawi argues,
“cannot happen unless the core issues are addressed
in a just way.” This is the same message Mousawi has
presented to journalists and conferences all over
the world.
More than a decade ago at an
international conference in Stuttgart, Germany in
1997, Mousawi demonstrated a grasp of the essence of
the major religions and drew applause from the
international audience when he spoke about what
being a Muslim meant to him:
When I say that I am a Muslim, I am
saying that I am a Christian and I am saying that I
am a Jew, for we all believe in the same God, we are
all the sons and daughters of Abraham and we are all
of the Book and revere the wisdom of all the
Prophets.
Mousawi tells his audiences that war
is the biggest terrorism and that the central
teachings of the three Abrahamic religions admonish
all to build bridges not walls. His ideas are in the
tradition of a long line of Shia scholars and human
rights advocates including the Shia clerics Mohammad
Mahdi Shamseddine, Imam Musa Sadr, and Sayeed
Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah — all known for their
life’s work for social welfare and their calls for
dialogue and ecumenism work with Christians and all
sects.
Challenging the bias (at best) and
disinformation of the presented univocality of the
Zionist narrative serves justice. In 1954 the
tipping point came with Welch’s rebuke. In our own
era, Zionism is increasingly being criticized and
spurned even by former adherents, with more Israelis
questioning its ideological underpinnings. As has
often been noted, debate is often freer in Israel
than it is in the United States. Most notably, some
of the children of the high-profile Zionist founders
of the state of Israel have turned their backs on
this legacy, including the grandson of the
right-wing PM Menachem Begin, 32 year-old Avinadav
Begin, seen regularly protesting at the West Bank
side of the Apartheid Wall over the past few years.
In addition to Menachem Begin’s grandson, we also
have no less than the Irgun-steeped Ehud Olmert’s
daughter Dana attending a rally during the war on
Lebanon.
Avrum Burg, a former Knesset speaker, Shimon Peres’
protégé, and Israel Agency director has also
recently had his bombshell book released, Defeating
Hitler, and left the country to take up French
citizenship. Burg is in favor of abrogating the Law
of Return, compares Israel to Germany and sees the
end of the Zionist enterprise.
Many prominent international figures
outside of Israel have been moved to speak up for
Palestine and argue for sanctions. South Africans
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ronnie Kasrils and British
doctor Colin Green, for example, cogently make the
case for boycotting apartheid and supporting justice
for all who live in the land of Canaan.
Yet this free debate among advocates
of peace and justice in the Middle East such as
Mousawi is being muzzled. While European law keep
some Israeli generals and Ministers from visiting or
grounded on runways lest they be arrested for war
crimes upon alighting, visiting Lebanese,
Palestinian and other scholars from the Arab and
Muslim world are being denied entry, their voices
stifled.
Howard Zinn has recently lent his
support to set up The Committee for Open Discussion
of Zionism
http://www.codz.org/,
formed in response to the active stifling and
suppression of alternative views on Israel/Palestine
and Zionism in the United States and beyond. CODZ
sees the IFAW as:
… a well-organized campaign to
silence dissent on campus and to get people to look
at all Muslims as “Islamo-Fascists,” creating a
dangerous atmosphere for Muslim students who have
sustained so much hate and abuse since 9/11. IFAW
seeks to solidify the “you’re either with us or
you’re against us” call of the Bush administration,
to equate any questioning of Zionism with support
for terrorism, and to further beat the drums for war
on Iran.
The Zionist
attack on Mousawi in part of the general Zionist
campaign against Hezbollah and its supporters,
institutions, staff, as well as anyone who seeks
discussions with the movement. It is not only about
Dr. Mousawi. Many scholars who work for Hezbollah
affiliated institutions has been subjected to
harassment and campaigns to deny them the right to
speak at Conferences, to hold interviews, engage in
dialogue and to travel to the US and sometimes
England and parts of Europe.
In the
pursuit of justice, the growing debate on Zionism,
both in the Middle East and beyond, is a much
needed, urgent and legitimate one.”
All people of good will should
support Dr. Mousawi’s right to free speech, not
least so that, in the words of John Berger, “Never
again will a single story be told as though it’s the
only one.”
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