Palestine Remembered 3CR

For a very long time I have avoided posting anything about this radio program on Jmedia because I have very little respect for this ignominious trio (Yousef Alreemawi, Nasser Mashni and Robert Martin), who are ostensibly in the business of peddling anti-Israel lies and propaganda. Yet from time to time their program goes beyond the pale.

For completeness I have decided to create a page for this program where every now and then I expose the lies and misinformation that this program produces.

Catalogue of Lies and Misinformation

6th May 2023: Palestine Remembered – Samidoun and Sheikh Khader Adnan

Nasser Mashni, who is president of APAN (Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network), is a brazen supporter of advocates for terror giving them free rein to spout Israelophobic lies and propaganada on a community radio station 3CR that doesn’t seem to care less that one of their presenters is endorsing terrorists.

Mashni’s guest this week was Charlotte Kates, who is affiliated with a designated foreign terrorist organization (FTO). Kates has glorified terrorists, shown support for terror groups and supported intifada violence. She has also spread hatred of Zionism and Israel.

In October 2022, Kates was banned from entering the European Union, along with her husband Khaled Barakat, who is a leader in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror group. The couple were deported back to Canada.

As of January 2023, Kates was listed as an “International Coordinator” co-chair at the anti-Israel NGO, Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network (Samidoun). According to Canadian government records, Kates is listed as the group’s “Director.”

Samidoun’s activism spreads awareness of terrorists, and at least three senior activists are members of the PFLP. In February 2021, Israel’s Ministry of Justice declared Samidoun to be a “terror organization,” accusing the NGO of operating “as an arm” of the PFLP.

10th September 2022: Palestine Remembered – Update on Palestine

At 26:39 min mark Nasser Mashni claims that Palestinians sending mail suffer the ‘injustice’ of licking stamps with the Israeli president on them. Is he ignorant of the fact that the Palestinian Authority began in 1994 to issue stamps and operate postal services as authorized by the Oslo Accords? Furthermore the use of the Israeli shekel as currency has nothing to do with apartheid; the Palestinian Authority can choose to end its currency union with Israel if it so wants.

At 28:38 min mark Nasser Mashni tells us about a Palestinian who had been dismissed by Deutsche Welle for antisemitic remarks. Nashni celebrates that a Palestinian, who has a track record of vicious antisemitic remarks has succeeded in her appeal against her dismissal – Berlin Labor Court Finds Against Deutsche Welle in Dismissal of Rabid Antisemite Farah Maraqa. Mashni seems to believe that if a Palestinian is anti-Israel that that excuses them from any remarks that might be construed as being antisemitic. There are technical reasons for the court decision and Maraqa is only one of six employees of Deutsche Welle has had her dismissal reversed; the remaining five cases are still pending.

2nd April 2021: Palestine Remembered – Rula from Al Haq

At 17:58 min mark Nasser Mashni marshalls his anti-Israel racist attitudes with this lie “That colonial, white power, supremacy mindset that sees Israel as white and deserving of being cared for”. Israel comprises 50% Mizrahi Jews who are far from being white but Mashni insists on libelling Israel as being this evil colour WHITE.

11th September 2021: Palestine Remembered – Vale Dr Shafeeq Al-Ghabra and the Jenin 6

At the 4:15 mark Yousef Alreemawi made the pronouncement: “The (Palestinian) prisoners who are predominantly from the West Bank are held in another territory in violation of human rights under international law. According to international law it is a crime for any occupying power to detain prisoners outside from their territories and Israel has been doing that since 1967. That’s number 1.”

Israel is perfectly entitled to imprison Palestinians who commit acts of terrorism against Israeli citizens. Alreemawi might not recognise Israel but the United Nations does and any state is totally within its rights to detain those who perpetrate murderous crimes against its own people. Alreemawi seems to be trying to exploit international law as prescribed by article 49 of the Geneva Convention, but in the context of this enduring occupation of disputed territories, over which Palestinians hold no official recognised sovereignty (Palestine is not a country), the provisions therein that do not apply.

If Alreemawi is referring to article 78 of the Geneva Convention, that clause only relates to people who have not been guilty of any infringement of the penal provisions enacted by Israel, but Israel may, for reasons of its own, consider them dangerous to its security and is consequently entitled to restrict their freedom of action by imprisonment. Such prisoners cannot be considered under a  proper interpretation of international law to be deportees.

28th August 2021: Palestine Remembered – Diana Sayed on Afghanistan

Listen in at the 24:43 mark when Diana Sayed, who is the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights and an international human rights lawyer with experience working in both Australia and the United States, does not appear to think with the logical mind of a lawyer.

“We’re all ethnic minorities in Afghanistan which is where people get a bit confused, who’s the majority, who are the minorities? Who’s the majority oppressing the minority? We are all ethnic minorities. There is just a majority that subscribe to Sunni Islam over the minority which are Shia, but that is across all ethnic groups. Like all Hazaras are not Shia but a majority of them are.
I don’t like to get too much into those sort of narratives because very much again it’s been weaponised as a divisive tool to divide Afghans along tribal lines, along sectarian lines, even along regional lines. Like you’re either from Herat, or you’re from Kunduz, or you’re from Kabul, or from Kandahar.
It’s like Australians love to pit Sydney and Melbourne against each other. …..  If that would become weaponised and used as a destabilising tool it could be really dangerous.”

Really?

It is absolutely incredulous that Sayed can draw any kind of an analogy between the friendly rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne and what has been going on in Afghanistan in particular and across the entire Muslim world for centuries. The bitter enmity that emerged following the death of the prophet Mohammed between Sunni and Shia has led to an internecine war that has seen the slaughter of so many in this long, violent history of the Shia-Sunni conflict.

Sayed finds the persecution of ethnic minorities like the Hazaras an inconvenient truth. Comprising between 10 to 20 percent of Afghanistan’s 38 million people, Hazaras have been marginalised for their faith in a country riven by deep divisions. … During the Taliban’s scorched-earth takeover of the country in the late 1990s, thousands of Hazaras were believed to have been slaughtered by the militants. Sayed wants to ignore this in order to depict Afghanistan as a sorry whole, a victim of some kind of confected western imperialism.

She accused the decorated Australian veteran Daniel Keighran, who was on the panel with her on the ABC Q&A program The Taliban Takeover and Afghanistan’s Future. of reductive thinking, when Keighran expressed serious concerns about bringing large numbers of Afghan refugees to Australia.

Her previous remarks comparing the ethnic rivalries in Afghanistan to the likes of friendly banter between Sydneyites and Melbournites clearly demonstrates reductive thinking BIG TIME!

21st March 2020: Palestine Remembered – Rachel Corrie

At 3:03 “(Gaza) without COVID-19 tests. I read a report earlier on this week that said that Israel has allocated 19 tests to go into Gaza.”  Why did Mashni say 19 tests? Another lie.

30th November 2019: PAL-vember

I had lately stopped my scrutiny of this program for the fact that that most of this program these days are nauseating repeats. It seems it has become too difficult for the presenters to find something to talk about every week.

But Nasser Mashni came out with so many bloopers in this particular program that I thought they should be highlighted.

At 5:30 Mashni quotes the widely cited phrase associated with the movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine during the 19th and 20th centuries, namely “A land without a people for a people without a land” branding it as a Zionist lie. Although usually assumed to have been a Zionist slogan, the phrase was actually used as early as 1843 by a Christian Restorationist clergyman and it continued to be used for almost a century by Christian Restorationists.

At 7:10 Mashni in response to Alreemawi’s anti-Israel sleight about Israeli leaders having to kill Palestinians to be popular says, ““it tells you how sick is a society that cheers and celebrates death and make you a hero when you kill more of the others that belong to the wrong type”. Wow here he uses the words that so aptly describe the Palestinian position!

At 15:28 Mashni and Alreemawi were extolling the supposed virtues of Antony Loewenstein who has been awarded their so-called Jerusalem (Al-Quds) Peace Prize suggesting that the Loewenstein family supported their son.  Maybe his parents did.  The truth is that many family members don’t talk to him and his parents have been snubbed by Jewish friends.

At 21:58 this ignominious pair deny the fact that seven Arab armies invaded the fledgling state of Israel after it declared its independence in 1948 claiming there was no self-defence on the Jewish side. Mashni says “120,000 Israeli soldiers battle-hardened from fighting all over the world in WWII were even aided by foreign soldiers sent by Stalin to aid the Zionists in 1947-48”. Mashni’s figures  are ludicrous and smell distinctly despicable – according to Wikipedia by the end of 1948, the Israel Defense Forces had 88,033 soldiers, including 60,000 combat soldiers. What is particularly noxious about the discussion here is that Mashni makes no mention of the fact that many Jews in Palestine at that time were Holocaust survivors, hardly a battle-hardened ethnic-cleansing brigade that Mashni considers the Jewish population of Palestine at the time to have been.

At 25:26 the statement is made that the Jews originally owned only 7% of Palestine and ended up owning 78% by stealing land from the Palestinians. This lie has been dispelled many times and I give this link to one resounding refutation.

At 27:58 following a discussion of the work of a troglodyte  Dr Salman Abu Sitta. who advocates the Palestinian Right Of Return that will never gain acceptance, Alreemawi utters another blooper, “The bottom line for the Zionists is get your facts right before you talk about and his side-kick Masni then chimes in with “we can’t let facts get in the way of a good story”. Their problem is that don’t have the facts on their side, having repeatedly to resort to lies and propaganda in whatever they say.

22nd June 2019: The rise of the “new” anti-Semitism
At 6:30 Gaza is referred to as the largest open air prison implying that people cannot leave Gaza. Mashni needs to do some reading as to educate himself as to what is really going on. In Gaza suffers from brain drain as young professionals look for better life it informs that 36,000 people left Gaza between May and September of 2018, in the first four months after the permanent opening of the Rafah border crossing between the Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. Of that number, however, just 17,000 returned. Moreover it appears, however, that the most problematic and controversial emigration from Gaza is that by doctors. The health system in the Strip is permanently on the verge of collapse, and there is a serious shortage of doctors and Hamas doesn’t want them to leave, making it difficult for them. The situation is being exacerbated as some doctors in the Strip choose to leave Gaza for the sake of their own future and that of their families.

At 14:35 Mashni embarks on an attack on Jews who support Israel for being responsible for the new anti-semitism. To blame the victims of anti-semitism for what is afflicting them is totally ludicrous.

At 20:10 Mashni once again demonstrated his ignorance by referring to the former director Peter Schäfer of the Berlin Jewish museum as being Jewish. In fact he is Catholic.

27th Apr 2019: Palestine remembered – federal election
The guest from Gaza kept maintaining that the Great Return March had been peaceful and non-violent.  To also suggest that Israel had something to gain politically by killing Palestinian protestors is also complete nonsense. The use of incendiary kites, the attempts by Gazans to breach the border fence are clear examples of violence. Given the insane backlash that Israel gets when Palestinians get killed it is hardly in Israel’s interests to kill Palestinians for any reason.

30th Mar 2019: Palestine remembered: Great Return March
What exactly is being commemorated on Palestinian Land Day that coincides with the anniversary of the Great Return March in Gaza? According to the ‘Palestine Remembered’ version, the unprovoked shooting on March 30, 1976, of six Arabs by the police. They are commemorating a lie.

Yosef Goell was present as a Jerusalem Post reporter collecting material for a series of articles on the Israeli Arabs, in central Galilee, for a number of days before that March 30 and on that day itself. Tension had been building up throughout many Arab communities in Galilee and the Little Triangle over the issue of the expropriation of Area Nine lands near Sakhnin. (In the mid-1980s those lands were returned to their original Arab owners).

What actually set off the rioting that led to the deaths was a wild attack by hundreds of inflamed young Arabs on an unsuspecting IDF convoy driving on the road by the villages of Sakhnin, Arrabe and Deir Hanna.

There was no prior provocation on the part of that IDF convoy, unless one insists on seeing a provocation in the very presence of an Israeli army unit in the heart of Israeli Galilee. Radical Israeli Arab political leaders, however, have for the past 25 years been promulgating the lie that the IDF had cold-bloodedly shot and killed “innocent” Arab demonstrators.

Israeli Jews were shocked by rampaging local Arab youths shouting “Itbah el yehud!” (slaughter the Jews) as they attacked Jewish motorists driving by their towns, as in Umm el-Fahm, and organizing for pogrom-like raids on neighboring Jewish communities.

Arabs and Israeli Jewish liberals have justly been demanding that Jews be more aware of Israeli Arab sensibilities and their sense of dignity. But this argument cuts both ways. Arabs should be just as aware of Jewish sensibilities to the “itbah el yehud” battle cry.

It may be difficult for Israeli Arabs to believe, but many Israeli Jews have not forgotten being threatened and attacked as Diaspora minorities. What makes the situation so dangerous for the Israeli Arabs is that those Jews are no longer helpless but are in command of an army and police. It is sheer madness for a minority to seek to provoke such a majority.

16th Mar 2019: 25th anniversary of the brutal Al Ibrahimi Mosque massacre
At 1:39 Alreewami alleges that there were other settlers from the settlement of Kiryat Araba near Hebron who assisted Baruch Goldstein in carrying out Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in 1994.
“I accept that he did it alone,” said Mayor Mustafa Natshe of Hebron at the time, “but the atmosphere which was created by his colleagues, the settlers, has helped him commit his crime.”
At 19:29 unfounded Palestinian charges are touted that Israeli soldiers had impeded the transfer of the wounded to hospitals, thereby callously raising the death toll. At 20:00 it is claimed that the wilful murder by Israeli snipers of a further twelve “martyrs” was captured on camera – so where is the footage?

9th Mar 2019: Al Rahma Gate and Human Rights
At 29:00 hear Sara Saleh’s proudly announce her anti-white racism when she said, “I stopped performing for a white audience a long time ago.”  Muslims who are frequently indistinguishable by skin colour have confected the lie that they are the victims of black/brown taunting.

2nd Mar 2019: Palestine Remembered: Activism and Expulsion
At 2:42 Robert Martin announces the blatant lie that the “50th child has been killed” in the protests associated with the Great March of Return in Gaza.
At 15:30 we hear rank hypocrisy as they complain about a Jew hanging a picture of Baruch Goldstein in his home. Do they not know about the Palestinian Authority’s pay-to-slay policy and how martyrs (belying that they in fact terrorists) are extolled and honoured by Palestinian football teams.
At 19:28 Nasser Mashni refers to thousands of Palestinians who he claims have been killed seeking peacefully to return home.  The casualty figure associated with the Great March of Return in Gaza has been reported as 160 at the end of 2018.
At 29:12 Alreemawi says “There is no safe place for Palestinian in Palestine”. He should say that to the more than 20% of Israeli Arabs who live as full citizens in Israel proper who would be asking him what he means by ‘Palestine’.

23rd Feb 2019: Palestine Remembered: Activism and Expulsion
The remarks that there is a shrine celebrating Baruch Goldstein who murdered 29 Muslims inside the Mosque of Ibrahim in Hebron in 1994 constitute a lie. Attempts by supporters of Goldstein to establish a shrine were stopped by Israeli troops who tore down what was built at the grave of Baruch Goldstein. Goldstein’s father lay weeping on the gravestone as the troops moved in to enforce a court order.

The program guest insisted that Palestinians are the only occupied people on Earth. Bullshit! Check out this article about 8 countries around the world unable to celebrate their independence.

16th Feb 2019:  Huna Al Quds Radio, media and apartheid
Exploiting with total lack of dignity and respect the tragedy of Aiia Masaarwe for foul pro-Palestinian political purposes, here is a transcript of what was said starting at 27:10:

“Alreemawi: In January the tragedy of Aiia Masaarwe.

So now Palestine has become more of a well-known topic to Australians. Tell me about that.

Martin: I think it is. I have a bit of a disappointment with you know the young Israel Arab that they call her who got murdered. The fact that she was a Palestinian didn’t get in there enough, quite enough in the papers as far as I’m concerned. They mentioned Israeli plenty of times and as soon as it crossed over to the Palestinian father holding his flag they sort of dodged around it.

I think it’s becoming more palatable to talk about it. Definitely it seems to be getting in many more newspapers and articles and people are happy to speak about it and I think BDS is doing a fantastic job on having people talk about it.

So, I’m only new to this industry, if we call it an industry or the human rights path but I listen to what Nasser says and you both say. It does seem to be getting into many more places and a lot easier for people to discuss. Still a long way to go. Still a long way to go.”

There you have it. Not a word of sympathy or concern for the poor woman and of course no acknowledgement of what one of their own kind did in allegedly raping, stabbing multiple times and beheading 19 year old Ori Ansbacher in a park in Jerusalem. But of course she was a Jewish Israeli and thus deserves no sympathy according to their perverse values.

2nd Feb 2019: Latest BDS news, World Paralympics ban, Irish parliamentary bans, Amnesty campaign against hotel booking sites
The pro-Palestine movement has apparently invented a term called ‘anti-Palestinianism’ and Mashni touts this nonsense in this episode. Borrowing from the annals of anti-semitism he spouts an assemblage of claims that ‘Palestinians’ are being denied this and that. Then he shoots himself in the foot when he says that  anti-Palestinianism is only 71 years old. This takes us back to 1948 when the word ‘Palestine’ was more connected with Jewish institutions than the so-called ‘Palestinians’.

One can remember the blue-and-white Jewish National Fund collection box that stood in Jewish kitchens in 1947-48,  On it, across a map of the Jewish homeland, was written in flowing letters: “Fight for a Free Palestine!” The ‘Palestine Post’ which became ‘The Jerusalem Post’ in 1950 was the publication that supported the struggle for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and openly opposed British policy restricting Jewish immigration during the Mandate period. It is generally accepted that it was only in 1964 when the Palestinian National Convenant was adopted with the complicity of the KGB.

Therefore ‘Palestinianism’ really only originated in 1964 and anti-Palestinianism is actually just 55 years old. Moreover the appropriation of the name ‘Palestinian’ is only a relatively recent phenomenon and the historical roots of the Arabs from that region are as Arabs with no identification as being ‘Palestinian’ having existed in any meaningful form before that time.

Alreemawi (24:30) jumps suddenly to the trope that Israel is a colonialist enterprise making a statement that makes no sense whatsoever “therefore we’re talking about a colonial institution that does not discriminate against anyone including Jews”, following on by extolling the fact that the music scene in Iraq before Israel’s independence was dominated by Jews. The point of this remark is unclear; it appears to be for the purpose of illustrating that Arab Jews were more Arab than Jewish, but it is a deceptive ploy that can be used to suggest that Jews were well off and widely accepted in Arab societies.

Mashni chimes in on this story with the perverse suggestions that the Israeli army put Sephardi Jews into the front lines so they would be killed first instead of the ‘racist’ Ashkenazi Jews. To top things off he suggests from hearsay that the Arab Jews after 1967 were delighted to ransack the music shops in the captured Arab areas of Jerusalem and steal music tapes that contained Arabic music.

One of the most deprived aspects of this show is how the presenters ally themselves to Jewish Voices for Peace, a reviled assemblage of self-hating Jews that deny the validity of Zionism that is fundamental tenet of mainstream Judaism. This appears to be a veiled attempt to protect the presenters from charges of anti-semitism. Notwithstanding the fact that most of the lies and propaganda that pour from the hate-filled minds of Alreemawi and Mashni are the common utterances of anti-semites they think no doubt that they are protecting themselves from such accusations by quoting Jews that speak vilely like they do.

26th Jan 2019:  Israeli elections, the murder of Aya al Maasarwe
In completely hypocritical fashion the Alreemawi and Mashni suggest that they don’t want to politicise the tragic death of Aiia Maasarwe and then they go ahead and do just that as they try to foist upon their listeners the notion that Maasarwe was Palestinian. Most Israeli Arabs don’t subscribe to this  Palestinian narrative of negating their Israeli identity as Only 14% of Israeli Arabs Identify as ‘Palestinians’, Study Finds.

Criticising the fact that no members of the non-Arab members of the Knesset attended the funeral of Maasarwe also further demonstrates the hypocrisy of the two presenters. Would any Jewish members of the Knesset be even welcome? Certainly there were many Jews in attendance.  Tossing this riposte back to the presenters I would ask how many members of the Muslim community attend Holocaust commemorations each year when not just one person was killed but many millions.