Caroline Glick and LATMA

Sheila Musaji

Posted Jan 6, 2012      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version
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Caroline Glick and LATMA:  Promoting the meme of Muslims as “the other”

by Sheila Musaji


Caroline Glick’s bio is interesting.  Some highlights:  She was born in Chicago, now lives in Israel,  was in the IDF and retired as a Captain.  She is also the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, and the Senior Middle East Fellow at Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy.  She is one of several co-authors of the Center’s latest book, War Footing. She has been a senior researcher at the IDF’s Operational Theory Research Institute (the Israel Defense establishment’s most prestigious think tank).  She has also worked as an adjunct lecturer in tactical warfare at the IDF’s Command and Staff College.  Glick is featured as a speaker in the documentaries Relentless: The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East and Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.  She is also on the Advisory Board of the Endowment for Middle East Truth.  She has been a speaker at David Horowitz’ Restoration Weekend events. 

One of Glick’s projects is a website called LATMA which produces a weekly satirical television program. Glick is the site’s editor.  The regular writers are Shuky Blass and Avishai Ivri. The site’s CEO is Shlomo Blass.  One of the regular features on this weekly program is called “tribal update” which is a parody news segment. 

LATMA has produced a series of videos that have been widely distributed on other sites.  Among them are:  - We con the world (on the Mavi Marmara incident).  - The Three Terrors.  - Palestinian Eskimos (Palestinians are an invented people).  - Christmas in “Eurabia (the Eurabia myth, Muslims raping white women).

In an article in 2010, I discussed the propoganda effort to characterize the Mavi Marmara incident as something other than what it was.  In that article I said about the We Con the World video:

This deeply racist music video WE CON THE WORLD is on Youtube, and being promoted on many far right sites.  It is a group that are meant to represent the activists on board the Gaza flotilla singing a song (to the tune of We Are the World).  I saw thevideo, and was saddened that people could actually think it was humorous to make fun of the dead, and belittle humanitarian aid activists.  However, the story of this video takes a darker turn.  Eileen Read reports

The press office of the Prime Minister of Israel sent this video around the world. Apparently inadvertently, according to spokesman Mark Regev. Regev notes nonetheless that ““I called my kids in to watch it because I thought it was funny. It’s what Israelis feel.”      Clearly not all Israelis, since thousands and thousands of them massed in Tel Aviv today to protest the mess their extreme right-wing government is making of their nation’s image abroad.      “It was not intended for general release,” said a statement from the press office. “The contents of the video in no way represent the official policy of either the Government Press Office or of the State of Israel.”  On her blog, the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, claims credit for the video. ...  6/5

  Jim Lobe reports “While the Israeli government is attempting to backtrack on their promotion of Caroline Glick’s tasteless video which makes light of the IDF’s killing of nine peace activists, the “the online public diplomacy platform of Israel” is working hard to make the video a viral success on social media websites.” 6/6

Ali Gharib reports that the We Con the World video was funded by “Frank Gaffney’s D.C.-based Center for Security Policy (CSP), a tax-exempt 501(c)3 charity (PDF), that came up with the bright idea of funding fellow venom-spitter Caroline Glick’s Hebrew-language satire site, Latma.”  This means that this was produced with the aid of American tax dollars.

Adam Horowitz has a good debunking of many of the propaganda attempts here

Farha Khaled wrote an article Fjordman Back at Gates of Vienna whose Tipsters Include Caroline Glick discussing Caroline Glick and her statements after the tragic Norway massacre.  Khaled notes that “In the aftermath of the Norway massacre, the Jerusalem Post published editorials that had tried to link the tragedy to Europe’s immigration policies. Norwegians took offence at sentiments expressed by Glick amongst others and voiced their objections to Israeli diplomats as to how the tragedy was being exploited. Some weeks later, the Jerusalem Post’s Editor in Chief published ‘Apology to Norway‘ an editorial in which he expressed remorse.”

Here are a few quotes from that apology:  ... “As Senior Contributing Editor Caroline B. Glick suggested in her column last Friday, the fact that Breivik’s warped mind cited a group of conservative thinkers including herself as having influenced his thinking in no way reflects on them.   
...  As a rule, liberal democracies reject the resort to violence as a means of winning an argument. This is why, for liberal democracies, terrorism in all forms is absolutely unacceptable,” she wrote. “Whether or not one agrees with the ideological self-justifications of a terrorist, as a member of a liberal democratic society, one is expected to abhor his act of terrorism. Because by resorting to violence to achieve his aims, the terrorist is acting in a manner that fundamentally undermines the liberal democratic order.
...  It later emerged that Breivik, a Christian radical, had posted on the Internet an extremely anti-Muslim manifesto that supported far-right nationalism and Zionism.’
...  This is certainly not the kind of support Israel needs. It is the type of Islamophobia that is all too reminiscent of the Nazis’ attitude toward the Jews. Jews, Muslims and Christians in Israel and around the world should be standing together against such hate crimes.”

Glick’s original article was reposted on the hate site “Gates of Vienna” and Khaled notes “Indeed! We have here one of Israel’s most ‘most important’ women and the Senior Contributing Editor of the Jerusalem Post giving permission to publish a translated version of her article at a hate site (that credits and links back to her) espousing views deemed repugnant by her editor-in-chief. One can recall the hue and cry when Octavia Nasr tweeted about a Hezbollah sheikh’s death that led to CNN firing her!”

Richard Silverstein also wrote about this incident in the article Caroline Glick Gets Down and Dirty With Gates of Vienna and Other Racist Anti-Jihadi Friends.

Phan Nguyen at Mondoweiss has done some investigating and turned up this information on LATMA:

Latma head director Shlomo Blass has worked on projects for the Likud party, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies. Earlier this year, Blass collaborated with StandWithUs to produce a propaganda video for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The video, starring Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, was a copy of a settler video for the YESHA Council, with virtually the same storyboard and script, and which was also produced by Blass. The message in both videos were the same: the West Bank belongs to Israel.

Blass was recently commissioned to create another video for the Ministry, again starring Danny Ayalon, and this time purporting to address the issue of Palestinian refugees (of which Ayalon is not one).

Blass also produced the video “Israel’s Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace”for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. This explained that in any future negotiations with the Palestinians, Israel would retain the Jordan Valley, would control the West Bank airspace and roadways, and would reshape the West Bank borders to Israel’s liking.

More prominent than Blass is Latma’s chief editor, Caroline Glick, who also serves as the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post.

Both Glick and Blass starred in Latma’s infamous “We Con the World” video, which ridiculed the Mavi Marmara massacre and portrayed the Gaza flotilla as an Arab/Muslim/Turkish plot to deceive the world into hating Israel.

The video link to “We Con the World” was distributed to foreign media via the Israeli government press office. After the video was criticized internationally for its racist content, its tasteless response to the killings of nine people, and its contradiction of Israel’s self-portrayal as reluctant killers, the Israeli government claimed that the link was distributed in error. However, press officer director Danny Seaman still insisted that the video was “fantastic,” and Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev said, “I thought it was funny…It is what Israelis feel. But the government has nothing to do with it.”

In 2010, Beit Hatfutsot, the Museum of the Jewish People, based in Tel Aviv University, presented Latma with the NADAV Peoplehood Award, claiming that the “We Con the World” video “made many Jews feel proud in a time of conflict and tension for our people.”

Earlier this year, Israeli Channel One partially funded Latma to film a pilot for aweekly TV program in the style of Latma’s offensive YouTube videos.

Latma’s funder: The Center for Security Policy

Although Latma operates in Israel, it acts as an initiative of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a 501(c)(3) and DC-based think tank, where Caroline Glick serves as the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs. The CSP motto is, no joke, “Peace through Strength.”

The CSP made waves at the start of the Iraq War as part of the neocon network that was planning for US wars in Iraq and elsewhere. Indeed the CSP National Security Advisory Council has at times included prominent Bush era neocons, such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, and Dov Zakheim, as well as Dick Cheney.

CSP’s founder and president is neocon lunatic Frank Gaffney, who accused Saddam Hussein of orchestrating the Oklahoma City bombing and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. More recently, Gaffney took up the “birther” cause and warned that Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.”

Gaffney also railed against “Obama’s pandering to the radical homosexual agenda” and the “Obama/homosexual agenda” (in an article strangely placed under a section of the website titled “The Shariah Threat”).

The CSP helped organize the campaign against the Park51 Islamic Center and has been prominent in pushing the “shar‘ia law” scare in the US. Last year, the CSP published a report, Shariah: The Threat to America, co-authored by David Yerushalmi, who has been paid over $270,000 as CSP’s general counsel.

Yerushalmi, who also serves as the attorney for Pamela Geller and Gaffney, is an Orthodox Jew with a penchant for making the most blatantly offensive statements. In an essay entitled “On Race: A Tentative Discussion,” Yerushalmi attempted to justify addressing “blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City)” and explained that “there is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote,” since these founders had an “understanding of human nature and its affect on political society.”

On his own website, Yerushalmi stated that

The Jews it seems are the bane of Western society… the Jewish problem for conservatives is a…quite interesting affair. It is most interesting because so much of what drives it is true and accurate… The conservative variety simply professes to uncover the many and varied ways Jews destroy their host nations like a fatal parasite, especially when the host is a Western nation-state… In response, one must admit readily that the radical liberal Jew is a fact of the West and a destructive one.

And when Mel Gibson made his famous anti-Semitic remarks, Yerushalmi defended him by saying

That Gibson sees Jews in an unfavorable light is only irrational if one wishes to make the argument that secular liberal Jews are not in fact the leading proponents of all forms of anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Christian movements, campaigns, and ideologies.

Yerushalmi also campaigned against the Park51 Islamic Center by forming the Freedom Defense Initiative with Pamela Geller and John Joseph Jay, a fellow “counter-jihadist” who advocates killing Muslims and members of the Service Employees International Union(!).

As the Center for American Progress demonstrated, Yerushalmi prepared an “anti-shari‘a” draft legislation that has served as the model for proposed legislation in many states.

Such a congregation of Islamophobic, homophobic, racist whackjobs would be easily dismissed if the CSP and its affiliated network of Islamophobes did not have such immediate access to the media and to government officials, along with access to a multimillion dollar budget. It’s through CSP that Latma’s videos are realized.

It is thus no surprise that Frank Gaffney, the CSP, and Caroline Glick are all cited and quoted as authorities in Breivik’s manifesto.

Is Caroline Glick a Nazi according to the Jerusalem Post?

On July 24, two days after the Anders Breivik killings, the Jerusalem Post issued an editorial warning that the massacre should not be allowed to be “manipulated” by the Left in such a way as to raise public concern that right-wing extremism was a “real danger facing contemporary Europe,” since the “real underlying problems faced not only by Norway, but by many Western European nations” was the “abject failure of multiculturalism.” That is, the real danger to Europe was the danger Anders Breivik warned about, and over which Breivik committed his killing spree. An outcry against the editorial was inevitable, and so was the subsequent apology, which the Post issued on August 4. ...

Yet the “Muslim colonization” of the West is exactly what the “Christmas in Eurabia” video is about and is the focal obsession of Eurabists and the so-called “counter-jihadist” movement that includes Caroline Glick and the Center for Security Policy.

Thus, if we are to take the Post’s apology at face value, we would have to accept that Glick’s sentiments, along with Latma’s, are “the type of Islamophobia that is all too reminiscent of the Nazis’ attitude toward the Jews.”

On August 8, Glick responded in the Jerusalem Post with a piece entitled“Norway’s Jewish Problem.” Regarding the Post’s apology editorial, Glick stated, “I was not consulted about this editorial ahead of time, and the editorial does not reflect my views,” implying that the earlier July 24 editorial did reflect and still reflected her views.

Glick refused to apologize, instead labeling her critics anti-Semites and attacking Norway for its pervasive “climate of hatred towards Israel and Jews.” She reminded her readers that Norway was invaded and occupied by the Nazis, and thus Norwegian officials may still be Nazi collaborators. She produced names of Norwegians she didn’t like, such as the humanitarian doctors Erik Fosse and Mads Gilbert. Glick also claimed that “Judaism [is] the only religion that cannot be freely practiced in Norway.”

In a strange expression of moral superiority, she condemned Breivik’s actions, she said, even though Breivik’s victims “had obvious animosity towards Israel and sympathy for genocidal, Jew hating Hamas terrorists.” She concluded by stating that Norway owed her an apology but that no apology from Norway would be enough for her.

Apart from the fact that her long list of things to hate about Norway includes no mention of Norwegian black metal, the main thing that stands out in Glick’s opinion piece is this religious paradox: Glick is more concerned about Christmas being banned in a hypothetical Muslim Norway than she is concerned about Judaism already being banned in a non-Muslim Norway. This indicates either misplaced priorities or an inability to keep her fear mongering “facts” straight. That is, when she wants to criticize Norway, she warns that Jews are unsafe in Norway; when she wants to criticize Muslims, she warns that Christians are unsafe in Norway. Or else, she wants to protect the Jew-hating Norwegians from the Christian-hating Muslims.

Complicated? It’s simply a matter of who Caroline Glick hates most at the moment.

“Christmas in Jewrabia”

For an Israeli group that purports to satirize current events, Latma seems to have overlooked the irony of producing a video about a Muslim war on Christmas while their own government expresses hostility toward Christmas in the name of Jewish nationalism.

Take the case of Nazareth Illit, a suburb of the Nazareth that was the childhood home of Jesus. This year, when Palestinian Christians asked the mayor of Nazareth Illit to permit the placement of festive Christmas trees, similar to the enormous menorahs already on display in the town, the mayor refused. His reasoning:

The request of the Arabs to put Christmas trees in the squares in the Arab quarter of Nazareth Illit is provocative…Nazareth Illit is a Jewish city and it will not happen—not this year and not next year, so long as I am a mayor.

The mayor’s stance was supported by the town’s chief rabbi, Isaiah Herzl, who said that Christmas trees were “offensive to Jewish eyes.”

Never mind that the area of Nazareth was Palestinian Arab and largely Christian before Israel seized the land. In fact, during the imposition of the State of Israel in 1948, Nazareth was slated for ethnic cleansing, saved only when an Israeli officer refused to follow orders and instead decided to honor the agreement made with the town’s inhabitants during their capitulation. Nazareth Illit was constructed in the following decade in order to Judaize the area and offset the Palestinian majority.

In 1954, IDF Planning Department Director Yuval Ne’eman explained that the purpose of Nazareth Illit was to “emphasize and safeguard the Jewish character of the Galilee as a whole, and … demonstrate state sovereignty to the Arab population more than any other settlement operation.” Northern Military Governor Colonel Mikhael Mikhael elaborated that Nazareth Illit would “swallow up” Nazareth proper through the “growth of the Jewish population around a hard-core group” and “the transfer of the center of gravity of life from Nazareth to the Jewish neighborhood.”

And let’s not forget the Israeli Ministry of Absorption’s own war on Christmas, when it recently produced a video warning Jewish Israeli expatriates in the US to return home, lest their children end up wishing a merry Christmas to the grandparents.

Even Muslim camels are racially inferior

There’s one final thing to be said about the “Christmas in Eurabia” video. At one point, a camel can be seen walking through the Islamized streets of Norway. The connotation is that Muslim immigration will bring backwardness to European civilization, as represented by the orientalist trope of the Middle Eastern camel.

The irony here is that to diaspora Zionists in the west, the camel has positive connotations associated with the Jewish homeland, as evidenced in these pictures from this year’s “Celebrate Israel” parade in New York.

This can also be seen in Birthright trips, where the camel ride is a staple of the program to induce an emotional attachment to Israel:

How do we reconcile the contradictory connotations? Camels associated with Muslims/Arabs—as in the “Eurabia” video—are a symbol of oriental backwardness, to be contrasted with the technically advanced western Israeli civilization. It is an Israeli rejection of geographical realities, as Israel is seen to have more in common with Europe than with the Middle East.

However, camels associated with Israel—as seen through the idealized eyes of Zionists in the West—are a symbol of exotic wonder, rooting the Western diaspora Jew in a place that is magical and historically profound, symbolizing a deep yet constructed heritage. Here, the camel is part of Israel’s geography, as the camel, like the land, has been conquered by the Ashkenazi pioneers, and so too have the native Bedouins been conquered and thus now prepare the camel rides for the Birthright tourists as part of the contrived Bedouin experience.

“The Tribal Update”

When “Eurabia” becomes a reality, who knows what those nefarious Muslims will do? Once they outlaw Christmas, what will follow? Will they ban church bells?Demolish non-Muslim homes? Flatten complete villagesEvict non-Muslim residents for Muslim ones? Impose mass population transfers? Eliminate civil marriages? View non-Muslims in Europe as a “demographic threat”? Establishsegregated roads? Enact laws that favor Muslims? Require loyalty oaths to Europe as a “Muslim and democratic” continent? The possibilities that Latma can take their “Eurabia” scenario are endless, and they just need to look at home for inspiration.

But “Christmas in Eurabia” and “We Con the World” are only samples in the Latma YouTube video series known as “The Tribal Update.”  One video mocks the notion that Palestinians are indigenous to the land.  In a skit entitled “Palestinian Eskimos,” the denial of the existence of the Palestinian people turns into a gratuitous joke at the expense of another oppressed indigenous population, the Inuit.  Another video depicts the UN as filled with incompetent Third Worlders such as an African ambassador who is so uneducated he can’t find Israel on the map.  In other episodes, there is a slant-eyed ambassador eating rice, Rahm Emanuel is depicted as a Jew-traitor, Barack Obama is depicted as a Muslim anti-Semite.  In one skit, “Obama” sings of the “hate in his heart” for the “dirty Jews”, his hope that the Koran will rule the world, and his wish to see the Jews thrown into the sea and bombed by Iran.

If Obamain blackface is too subtle, here’s Noam Jacobson playing “Kazabubu the Jewish Cannibal,”  in a skit that ridicules black African “Jews” making aliyah.

In case you don’t understand Latma’s sense of humor, you’re supposed to laugh as Kazabubu babbles in his stupid African gibberish: “Bu ta le bo bo bi de bbbbbbbbb”—thus demonstrating that he is of inferior stock to the real Jews such as Noam Jacobson and Caroline Glick.

Most of the videos are Israeli talking points expressed by critics of Israel (and semi-critics of Israel) in racist caricature. The humor relies on an elitist nationalist perspective that can be boiled down to this: The world hates Israel, but the world outside of Israel is just a bunch of ignorant Africans, rice-eating chinks, bloodthirsty Muslims, self-hating Jews, and white multiculturalists asking to be raped. Ha ha.

The sheer racism of Noam Jacobson is matched only by his cluelessness, as he fails to understand why his offensive “comedy” skits elicit such hatred—concluding that he is a victim of the world’s hatred against Israel and the Jews. The fact that people would hurl anti-Semitic slurs—unjustified yet unsurprising—against him after watching his racist videos somehow proves that he is doing the right thing. As Jacobson explained to a reporter, “When you see the talkbacks, you know what you’re fighting for.”

Such a remark, made without irony, and published in an article with the incredulous headline, “Fighting the New Blood Libel”—against the backdrop of blatantly racist videos such as “Kazabubu the Jewish Cannibal”—just goes to show what anyone who has sat through a video produced by Noam Jacobson and his Latma colleagues already understands: they have no sense of humor.

TAM has published extensively on all of the players in Glick’s Islamophobic world. 

SEE ALSO:

A Who’s Who of the Anti-Muslim/Anti-Arab/Islamophobia Industry http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/a_whos_who_of_the_anti-muslimanti-arabislamophobia_industry

Frank Gaffney’s Obsession with Sharia http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/frank_gaffneys_obsession_with_sharia/

Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy Sharia Reports a Threat to American Ideals http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/center_for_security_policy_sharia_report_a_threat_to_american_ideals/

Pamela Geller Attempts to Make a Point, Muslims Shrug (SIOA/AFDI/Atlas Shrugs)  http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/pamela_geller_attempts_to_make_a_point/

Geller and Spencer Fantasize About “Muslim Rapists” in Norway http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/geller_and_spencer

Caroline Glick Backgrounder http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Glick_Caroline

Caroline Glick’s Jihad http://www.jewsonfirst.org/obsession/glick.html

History of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War With the West http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/history_of_obsession_radical_islams_war_with_the_west

Islamophobia:  Real or Imagined http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/islamophobia_real_or_imagined

Mapping Sharia Project Goes Beyond Islamophobia to Raving, Paranoid, In(SANE)ity!  http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/mapping_sharia_sheila

Who is behind Relentless, Obsession and The Third Jihad?  http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/who_is_behind_relentless_obsession_and_the_third_jihad1/0016736

David Yerushalmi and (in)SANE http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/david_yerushalmi_and_insane/

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