Richard Silverstein throws a tantrum

To the credit of JVP, they are allowing a full range of opinions to be presented in the coments section of the "Muzzlewatch" forum. Unfortunately, not everyone is too happy with this. Richard Silverstein, credited as the researcher for JVP, has started to flame other particitants and act as though he is having an online temper tantrum.

What set him off? Revelations of truth and exposure of hypocrisy, of course! This is just one of his attacks:

http://www.muzzlewatch.com/?p=76#comment-171

Oh, Dan, you’re just a little irked that they don’t like yr pro-Israel
ideolgoical slagging at StandWithUs half as much as they like the independent
thinking they’re reading in Muzzlewatch.
If you stopped yelling & screaming at yr “enemies” Jewish or Muslim, people might pay you more attention.

The "independent thinking" to which he refers is the repeated claims of censorship and standard straw man arguments that seem remarkably similar throughout the anti-Israel movement for the past several months and incompatible with fact. The "they" to which he refers is the news media who are eagerly writing about this latest rehash of the "Zionist Controlled Media" argument and printing columns by a wide range of anti-Israel activists.

The above comment was in reponse to our comment pointing out the obvious -- if the media is so keen to cover operations like "Muzzlewatch," how can these operations call themselves "muzzled?"

http://www.muzzlewatch.com/?p=76#comment-165

We will be keeping an eye on Mr. Silverstein. We will also be countering, not "yelling & screaming," false and misleading statements of our opponents, be they Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Arab, Israeli or any other religion or ethnicity. Here at BlueTruth, we judge based on the content of the speech, not the ethnicity of the speaker.

Those who claim they are silenced were asked to speak!

At the Walid Shoebat talk on February 5th at UC Davis, a group of students stood in silent protest within the event, red tape over their mouths, and claimed they were being silenced.



In reality, when the Q&A period arrived, those with the red tape were brought to the front of the line. Naturally, this was because Shoebat was eager to refute their arguments and expose their naiveté. When the students rose to walk out en masse, Shoebat even urged them to stay and voice their positions.


When push came to shove, the anti-Israel forces choose to claim persecution rather than give their views a true vetting. What scares them most is the exposure of their lies and the house of cards on which they have built their campaign agenda.


This is especially true in the current environment where there is a coordinated campaign to spread the obviously false message that anti-Israel viewpoints are suppressed.

Joel Beinin and Muzzlewatch “expose” exposed!

The JVP project “Muzzlewatch” claims it “broke” the story of anti-Israel former Standford professor Joel Beinin being “muzzled” by the Jewish Community Relations Council and being prevented from giving a talk at a private school. At the time, they referred to the JCRC as an “outside advocacy organization.”

They then stated:

Professor Joel Beinin being booted at the last minute from a Harker School speaking engagement due to pressure from a parents group, with some kind of involvement by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Silicon Valley (though they have not responded to a request for a statement), that was no doubt, fulfilling its mission as a “protector of Israel.”

Turns out this is the classic example of a lie upon a half truth.

Here is the real story from an anonymous source within JCRC.

The Harker School wanted a discussion of the Arab-Isareli conflict. To that end, they brought in an anti-Israel Arab to speak. To balance the discussion, they wanted to bring a Jewish voice to the table. Unfortunately, according to my source, a person with “malicious intent” suggested the Jewish voice be Joel Beinin. The organizers of the event did not know that Beinin, despite being Jewish, is notoriously anti-Israel.

The organizers may have not have known, but they found out. The school’s parents also found out and protested loudly over this obvious mistake. Realizing that the planning committee has erred, the principal cancelled Beinin’s invitation. By the time the Silicon Valley JCRC called the principal, the principal had already made his decision.

This was another classic case of the anti-Israel forces trying to put on what they call a “balanced” presentation – that is “balanced” between an anti-Israel Arab and an anti-Israel Jew. When the duplicity was discovered, Beinin was rightly booted from the panel.

JVP suffers a severe credibility problem which, more than their political agenda keeps them out of mainstream discourse. This case is yet one more nail in the coffin of JVP’s credibility.

The Absurdity Extends to The UK

Possibly feeling left out by their American counteparts, UK anti-Zionist Jews under the banner of "Independent Jewish Voices" are trying to claim they are being muzzled as well. It is bad enough that Americans are writing in major newspapers and speaking at major universities that they are being muzzled but now the British are trying to get in on the act! This is all the more bizarre since the legitimacy of Israel's existence and expressions of anti-Semitism are a time honored tradition in the UK.

The British anti-anti-Semitism group Engage has a lot of information about this on their website.

Jonathan Spyer also takes aim at this insanity in Israel's Haaretz:

If we take, as an example, contributors to the Guardian, which published the IJV's founding statement, Jews who have successfully found the courage to resist the Board of Deputies and its anxiety-inducing unwritten laws include Daphna Baram, who wrote in a recent op-ed that Israel is an "apartheid state"; Jacqueline Rose, whose book, as her Guardian interviewer reminded us, "draws tentative analogies between Israel's treatment of Palestinians and Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews," and Ilan Pappe, the Israeli academic who recently wrote in support of a boycott of Israeli academia.

These opinions fit comfortably into parts of the British debate, in which denial of the right of Israel to exist and allegations of conspiracy theory are accepted within the parameters of polite discussion. British-born Jew Tony Judt, for example, was able to promote his thesis advocating the dismantling of the Jewish state in the London Review of Books.