ANT KATZ

Opinion & Comment

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Crawford-Browne is a retired banker who seemingly can’t lead any sort of life without hearing his own voice – loudly, on national platforms and issues. After years of pursuing the government over the Arms Deal (to no avail) he joined the Palestine Support Committee and has been instrumental in writing and selling the most awful and untrue parables about the Middle East.

A recent rant on the DailyMaverick.co.za entitled “Israel IS an Apartheid state” pretty much sums up just how Crawford Browne feels about Israel and Jewry in general.

This past Tuesday, 17 March, Crawford-Browne ended up with egg on his face (once again) after his long and boring piece, “End of ‘error’ may be about to dawn,” appeared in the CAPE TIMES.

“Will today’s election signal the end of the ‘Jewish’ State of Israel?” asked Crawford-Browne. “Opinions polls indicate that the outcome is neck-and-neck. Given Israel’s fractious electoral system of proportional representation, it may be weeks before a new government coalition can be negotiated.”

Crawford-Browne continued that: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent address to a joint sitting of the US Congress and his challenges to President Barack Obama over Iran have patently backfired. The vast majority of American Jews have been grievously offended, and insist that they are Americans and not Israelis. For them, Judaism is a religion not a nationality or race.”

Displaying, as he is wont, his lack of understanding of facts (or, maybe, malicious dissemination of what he knows to be untruths), Crawford-Browne proceeded to blame Israel for everything that’s wrong in the world.

The US’s  “disastrous consequences of (their) entanglements in the Middle East vigorously promoted by the Israeli lobby with the lies back in 2003” and of “Netanyahu’s equally discredited lies about Iranian nuclear weapons.”

He rants on, blaming Lord Balfour and his declaration almost a century ago, for purportedly giving “legitimacy to a Jewish homeland in Palestine.”

David Hersch wasn’t having any of it

In a letter addressed to the editor of the Cape Times and several thousand local and overseas recipients of his mailers, Hersch proclaims: “The finest response to Terry Crawford-Browne’s chicanery and bigotry was provided by the Israeli electorate. Crawford-Browne is an imaginative advocate of unconvincing Palestinian/Arab propaganda, a bundle of prejudices, intuitions, ignorance, half-sciences and distorted history.

LEFT: David Hersch

“He takes an aspect of truth, detaches it from its circumstances, inflates it, twists and remodels it, until its old likeness and its new likeness together are unrecognisable.

These pseudo ‘insights’ are his triumph,” wrote David Hersch. “He is a caricaturist. Never trust him.”

Needless to say the Cape Times didn’t print Hersch’s letter.

They had no problem printing Crawford-Browne’s rant, as always, which continued to remind us how “politicians misuse and pervert religion and theology away from the emphasis on Peace!”

Crawford-Browne then conveniently quotes an unnamed American ambassador as having said: “Israel has become the promised land for organised crime,” and goes on to give us a history lesson distorted to suit his needs. The Ashkenazi community, he claims, “numbers only about 10 percent of the population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and about 20 percent within ‘Israel proper’,” he says. Go figure?

Again, Herch has C-Browne squarely in his sights: “It has been proven painstakingly over and over again that Crawford-Browne’s writings and opinions are distinguished by factual errors, a pervasive use of double standards in argumentation, a rich array of logical fallacies, and above all the distortions, malignant insinuations, and outright falsehoods, both about the historical conduct of Israel and about the historical conduct of Jews, at its heart.”

Crawford-Browne, says Hersch, is an “obsessive compulsive when it comes to Israel.”

A case in point…

Crawford-Browne wrote of the rife discrimination “against Arab Jews (the Mizrahim) brought under false pretences to Israel in the 1940s to 60s as cannon fodder for the Israeli army and cheap labour on farms confiscated from Palestinians.”

Brought under false pretences? I think not, Mr C-B. Hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Arab states at this time were evicted, sir, and dispatched to Israel where they were happily absorbed as equals. Many of those same States who evicted their Jews, invited Muslims in Israel to move to their countries. Many stayed in Israel – others moved of their own free will to neighbouring Arab countries.

They were not absorbed. They were placed in refugee camps and, several generations later, still live without citizenship or rights and in refugee camps.

Atrocities not dissimilar to those of the Nazis

Crawford-Browne goes on to talk about the glaring tragedy of Israelis being brainwashed from childhood to believe that they are uniquely victims, and of having “become the perpetrators of human rights atrocities not dissimilar to what happened in Europe 70 years ago.”

Retort’s David Hersch, who is chair of The South African Israel Public Affairs Committee: “Crawford-Browne should be shunned by intellectual and academic circles and anyone with the meanest intelligence following his foray once more into the land of chicanery and bigotry. But far from being shunned, Crawford-Browne has become the Cape Times’ anti-Israel superstar.”

Hersch also laments that: “It is disgraceful that a once great newspaper with a wonderful and brave history has fallen so rapidly since being taken over. Good and balanced journalism would have juxtaposed a pro-Israel article by a real expert who knew what he was talking about on the same page.”