ByMartin Bright, Martin Bright
Anti-Zionist activists are increasingly turning their attention to a web-based de-legitimisation campaign against Israel rather than high-profile public protests against individual politicians.
The Community Security Trust is particularly concerned about the organisation Redress, which highlights alleged injustice across the Middle East via its website and social networks Facebook and Twitter.
The editor of the site is not identified although it is thought to be Nureddin Sabir, and there is no information about how Redress is funded. But it provides regular stories hostile to Israel and acts as a conduit for well-known anti-Zionists including Israeli musician and activist Gilad Atzmon, who writes a significant proportion of the articles on the site.
There is considerable crossover of content with the Middle East Online website, another focus of anti-Zionist material.
The full name of the organisation is Redress Information & Analysis, which says it is “an independent, privately-funded, non-profit-making website dedicated to exposing injustice, disinformation and bigotry, and to providing thought-provoking interpretations of current affairs”. In one posting, Mr Atzmon criticises the appointment of Matthew Gould as Britain’s first Jewish ambassador to Israel, an appointment first revealed in the JC last week.
“What can we say, he is not only a Jew but a product of a typical Zionist upbringing,” he writes.
“Considering Israel’s crimes against humanity in general and Palestinians in particular, one would expect Britain to send an impartial ambassador to the Jewish state. Judaeo-centric by admission and Zionist by education, Gould is certainly not the man for the job.”
The article can be found under a heading marked “stooges”, which claims to expose individuals working to promote the Israeli state.
This includes a list of Israel’s so-called “agents of influence” in Britain, which essentially consists of politicians who are members of their party’s Friends of Israel group and prominent members of Christian Friends of Israel. It also identifies Anthony Julius (the lawyer who defended historian Deborah Lipstadt against the Holocaust denier David Irving) as a “notorious Zionist and Israel apologist”.
The CST believes the shift in anti-Zionist strategy opens up a new front alongside the direct campaigns against individual MPs, such as the one waged by the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) against Labour’s Lorna Fitzsimons in Rochdale in 2005.
“Fortunately most sensible people increasingly ignore MPAC’s obsession with finding Zionist conspiracies everywhere. However, the same conspiracy theories can be found on more mainstream websites like Redress, albeit in more moderate language,” said a CST spokesman.
The JC contacted Redress for comment, but received no response.