The pro-Assad activists at Electronic Intifada, in an article entitled ‘What we know about Elizabeth Tsurkov’ are trying their feeble best to get a Jewish woman currently held in Iraq murdered.

I’m not going to link to their site, so if you want to see the piece in full, you’ll need to head there yourself. But re. the substance of their claims, they imply that Tsurkov is a spy in the pay of the Israeli government (of which she is in fact a bitter opponent). It is difficult to see why anyone would seek to spread rumors of this kind except if their intention was to do all in their power to cause harm to Tsurkov, and if the claim sticks, to place her in yet greater physical peril than she already finds herself. I suppose it would be mistaken to seek even the most elementary level of moral development among supporters of the murderous Assad regime. Saying that an Assad supporter lacks a moral framework is kind of a tautology. I do find it astonishing tho that taking positions and actions of this kind apparently has no cost in terms of access to a certain part of the mainstream in media and research circles.

I want to focus on a slightly different aspect, tho. Tsurkov’s gleeful tormentors at EI apparently think that Jewish and Israeli researchers and journalists should meekly accept the pronunciation by Arab nationalist and Islamist dictatorships and movements, that our right to pursue our profession in their countries is forbidden – at the same time that anti-Israel and anti-Jewish outlets like al-Jazeera and al-Mayadeen are freely permitted to operate in Israel.

No deal. For a decade and a half, as those who know my work will be aware, I ignored their efforts to shut down the pursuit of news – and worked up close and very deep into their countries and organizations, from every front and every side. Thanks, I think, to a somewhat more meticulous attitude than Elizabeth Tsurkov’s to op-sec, a quite developed ability to read situations and, not least, a great deal of luck, I was never caught by the dictatorships that Electronic Intifada supports.

The ethical questions regarding protection of sources in these situations are real and substantive. Without going into detail, (and you can assume that where shills for Assad may be reading, I certainly wont be having a discussion re. sources and methods), journalists and researchers of our ilk take meticulous care in this regard. I regard myself as having stumbled in this area only once, In Baghdad in 2015, in a situation I regret but which did not result in tragedy, only some worry for a person who did not deserve this. But in this regard, again, those who profess concern should address their concerns to the regimes that try and stop us from pursuing our profession on grounds of our nationality/ethnicity. Ultimately, they are the ones responsible.

Try and imagine, if you will, if, say, the white minority regime in Rhodesia had tried to ban foreign black African journalists from researching or writing on its conflict. Would people of conscience have instructed such journalists to meekly concede to such an edict? or would they, rightly, have encouraged them to defy such an outrageous demand in all ways possible? This is a direct parallel to the situation vis a vis Israeli Jewish journalists and work in such countries as Syria and Iraq.

I agree with Elizabeth Tsurkov on very little, and have some reservations re her work. I think her research on Israel’s support of militias in south west Syria, nevertheless was ground breaking and among the most valuable of such work in the Syrian context. Regardless, I wish for her safe return from captivity to her home and homeland in the shortest possible time. As for the ghouls at ‘Electronic Intifada’, their moral level as evidenced by their latest activity makes them truly worthy and suitable servants of the blood-soaked Assad dictatorship, the Iraqi Shia militias and their backers in Teheran.

They and Tsurkov largely agree on the Israel-Palestinian conflict (both EI and Tsurkov are strongly anti-Zionist and anti-Israel). The reasons for their extreme hostility to her, I think, are a combination of two factors: 1. the fact that she is an Israeli-Jewish woman, and they are motivated by a violent hatred of Israeli Jews which applies regardless of the opinions or preferences of the Israeli Jew in question, and 2. Tsurkov was in her work a strong critic of the Assad dictatorship, and the people at EI are among its supporters. The Assad dictatorship, probably not coincidentally in this regard in terms of the habits of thought of its supporters, is a regime based consciously and directly on European fascism.