Guilty as Charged.
Peace Now Scotland's
"Concerned Citizens"
misled Community Newspaper.

About three months ago, a small group of Glasgow Peace Now Scotland malcontents, portraying themselves as concerned citizens, convinced the Jewish Telegraph to publish an amateurish journalistic attempt at an article entitled
“SFI driving community down dangerous road”, critical of the Israeli support group, Scottish Friends of Israel.

They claimed that they wanted to “set the record straight”, that their target for attack was being “dishonest” and that certain unnamed members of the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council Executive Committee were "failing in their moral duty".

Their article waxed lyrically about the “welfare of the community”, “values should not be compromised” and “how one maintains the moral fabric of this community”.

Their target, Scottish Friends of Israel (SFI), had previously upset some of these concerned folk, by criticising their bringing to Glasgow, Afif Safieh, the then mouthpiece for the notorious killer, Arafat, and other speakers whose sole aim in life appeared to be the pro-Palestinian cause

Their article claimed..

“SFI have driven the community down a very dangerous road where it is apparently acceptable to express attitudes which not long ago would have been unmentionable. Views that once would have been beyond normal reasonable argument are now being legitimised and put into the public domain”.

The views that apparently most annoyed were described as follows:

“If statements like the following taken from the SFI website had appeared on a Muslim, Palestinian or any non-Jewish website emanating from Scotland we would not have remained silent:

‘No Arab should feel comfortable living with Jews’,
‘the Jews are a manufactured people’ and
‘it is the duty of Jews to kill Palestinians’.

We as a community would find these views grossly offensive and we would expect our leaders to speak out forcefully”.

The one problem with all this hot air was that these statements as quoted above, never appeared on the SFI website or in a SFI publication of any kind.

The Jewish Telegraph, who subsequently re-examined the contents of the article, did not seem amused, and on June 3, 2005 published the following statement:

On February 25, 2005, we published an article by four “Concerned Citizens” entitled "SFI driving community down dangerous road". The article contained the following statements: "No Arab should feel comfortable living with Jews", "the Jews are a manufactured people" and "it is the duty of Jews to kill Palestinians", which were ascribed to the website of the Scottish Friends of Israel.

The Jewish Telegraph accepts that the statements, as they appear on the SFI website, are quotations originating from Yasser Arafat and other Palestinian spokespersons. Those statements were misquoted by the authors of the article, with the term 'Jew' replaced by 'Arabs' or 'Palestinians' and vice versa, and were inaccurately represented in our article as the views of the SFI.

We regret that we, and consequently our readers, were misled and apologise for embarrassment caused to members of the SFI.

The authors of the original article, Nigel Allon, Derek Livingston, Jeremy Stein and Tony Tankel who, by their own words, have insisted that

“We have to judge ourselves by the standard that we apply to others”

have now been condemned by the Jewish Telegraph for misquotation, inaccurate representation and misleading.

So much for the moral stance and concern of these upstanding citizens.

SG

Anti-Israel comments by Seymour Gordon, Jeremy Stein and Joseph Sanker, Peace Now Glasgow/Scotland activists, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and friends of Tony Tankel

"Please define and explain prior acts deliberately targeting innocent civilians by Israeli former Prime Minister Begin, and current Prime Minister Sharon. In what way are these acts less blameworthy/more justifiable than the Palestinian acts you condemn?"

"Please explain Masada, and the justification for glorifying the sacrifice of the Jewish children there?"

"You state that they[Palestinans] should not have any weapons at all. Are you saying that they should completely disarm and unreservedly trust the Israelis to grant them equal human rights, given Israel's systematic and official denial of such rights since 1967?

"settlers, protected to the hilt by the IDF, and their supporters behind the Green Line who have vowed to ethnically cleanse the Arabs who live in the West Bank and Gaza are somehow not 'The real enemy of the Palestinian people'?"

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