Scoop: KAIROS's smoking anti-Israel gun

A tech-savvy commenter to my previous blog entry has tracked down a key Facebook page and blog entry that KAIROS had recently deleted, in their panic to scrub their website of anti-Israel diatribes.

As I've noted in my series on the subject, KAIROS has deleted links to anti-Israel groups, added new disclaimers to other links, and outright scrubbed pages from their website and their Facebook page.

Trouble is, it's not as easy for KAIROS to delete a website as it is for them to shred confidential documents.

Here's a Facebook page that KAIROS recently deleted. It's interesting for three reasons:

1. It shows that KAIROS calls various anti-Israel groups their "partner" organizations. Since they were defunded, KAIROS has tried to pretend that they have nothing to do with these groups, even going so far as to add a new, fake disclaimer to their website.

2. It shows that instead of giving money to actual foreign aid, KAIROS spends its money on political junkets for its staff. Who wouldn't want to go to Israel to check things out? I would. But that's a key reason why KAIROS spends a meagre 3.7% of its budget on anti-poverty grants, according to its annual report.

3. It shows that KAIROS's political boss, Julie Graham, is a radical anti-Israel activist, with views so radical she set up a blog whose very name challenges Israel's right to exist: "Whose Holy Land?"

No wonder that Facebook entry and her blog were deleted in a hurry. It's one thing to be a principled anti-Israel bigot. It's another thing to miss out on $7 million in free money because of it!

Let's look a bit at that deleted blog. I'll let you read it for yourself and judge whether or not such a radical, anti-Israel viewpoint deserves $7 million tax dollars. I'm not saying anything in the blog is illegal, or even "hate speech" -- I don't believe in hate speech laws. I believe in KAIROS's right to be as anti-Israel and even as anti-Semitic as they want, and I don't think they should be charged with a crime for it.

I just don't want to have to pay for their crap -- they can ask the Saudis for the money, and I'm sure they'd get it.

Here are a few snippets:

1. KAIROS's campaign boss describes East Jerusalem -- the Arab neighbourhood with the most political freedom and the best social services in the Middle East -- and says: "I admit to feeling sick at this point, and the smell of burning garbage had nothing to do with it." Give that woman a grant!

2. It is a fact that Israeli Arabs can live anywhere in Israel. By contrast, Jews can live in very few places in the Arab world. And, paradoxically, several years ago the Israeli government forcibly removed Jews from Gaza and several West Bank towns as an act of appeasement to the PLO.

KAIROS tells a lie: that Israel is "building Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land." Sounds like ethnic cleansing, no? You wouldn't think, by reading that, that there are a million Arabs in Israel with all the rights of citizenship -- but without the obligation to serve in the army. You wouldn't know that there is an Arab on the Israeli Supreme Court, and that there are Arabs in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament). If you believed KAIROS's anti-Israel propaganda -- wait, they said "Jewish-only"; can you really just call that anti-Israel, or can we please drop the pretense now, and call it like it is, and admit that KAIROS is anti-Semitic, too? -- you would think that Israel is an Arab-free zone, ethnically cleansed.

No wonder KAIROS deleted her blog.

3. Who commits the violence in Israel, according to KAIROS? Any mention of the relentless terrorist attacks? The waves of Intifadas? The Palestinian children's TV shows promoting hatred against Jews and casting suicide bombers as heroes and role models? Not that I've seen so far. But there are plenty of unsubstantiated accusations that Jews are the violent ones -- religious Jews, especially:

By "settlers", Bat Shalom means (in this instance)the religion- and ideology-driven extreme nationalists who build outposts on Palestinian fields or take over buildings in Palestinian towns. Some harass their Palestinian neighbours. Such settlers are convinced all of biblical Israel belongs only to Jews, are sometimes violent, and totally protected by the Israeli army. Hence the "soldiers and settlers" combination.

Those damned Jews, those harassing Jews, those violent Jews, those Jews who bully with impunity. Gee, why would Jason Kenney imply even indirectly that these folks are anti-Semites?

4. In one of her first blog entries, KAIROS's anti-Israel boss lists their "partners" who they fund. Those are now precisely the groups that have had a fake disclaimer slapped on them in KAIROS's detoxified website.

What a bunch of liars.

I ask again what I asked the other week: if KAIROS aren't a bunch of anti-Semitic, anti-Israel bigots, then why have they scrubbed their website of this crap in the face of such allegations?

Don't shut KAIROS up. Let them shout their anti-Israel hostility with pride! I rather prefered their honest anti-Israel bigotry to their fake tolerance for Jews.

Just don't make me pay for it.