All the must-read, trendy liberal lefty news outlets that have done their utmost to harm Israel are now hand-wringing about the massive spike in world antisemitism. Strange isn't it?
Funny, that it's all happened after Israel began to pull its ground troops out of Gaza following Operation Protective Edge. Weird that the world’s bravest, best war and defence correspondents with their accompanying cameramen were too timid to tell the truth while the war was at its height.
Peculiar that we were treated to clip after clip of killed and maimed Palestinian women and children but of no dead or injured IDF troops – let alone any of terrified Israeli civilians running for their lives from the constant barrage of rockets on their homes in towns like Sederot and Be’er Sheva.
But don’t worry! This sort of fauxtography has a fine history, starting as far back as World War 1 with the con artistry of US-born RAF pilot, Wesley D Archer.
There’s also huge competition for the best definition of chutzpa – the Yiddish word for brazen cheek. This time the gong goes jointly to all the major international news outlets, which together and apart allow themselves to be continually coerced, corrupted and otherwise manipulated by Hamas and the sheiks who fund them.
Despite the phraseology generally employed, members of Hamas (Arabic for ‘resistance’) are not heroic freedom-fighting ‘militants’ but a bunch of snivelling toe rag terrorists who scavenge like rats in underground tunnels, exploit innocent children to help build them and hide behind tea-towel masks so as to appear as frightening as possible.
For more years than I care to recall, newspapers like The Guardian and The Independent with broadcast media led by BBC News and latterly Sky News have done their utmost to portray Israel as the prime pantomime villain of the M.E. Now Jews worldwide – even and especially those who profess to distance themselves from Israel – are reaping the poison that they sowed.
How dare The Guardian, the great anti-Israel manipulator pen this? “Attacks on (U.K.) synagogues, Jewish shops and individuals – even children – are rising. They are inexcusable”.
How could Rod Liddle, as a columnist for The Sunday Times, write solemnly about the UK Jewish Film Festival-Tricycle Theatre row : “As I see it, it is an act of antisemitism and may well be breaking the law, under section 29 of the Equality Act. Most of those involved in this grotesque act of discrimination are not really antisemitic. They are instead infantile, metro-liberal, radical chic narcissists …”
Only the previous week, Times Newspapers had rejected anti-Hamas advertising featuring Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, because those making the decision feared the strong wording would offend readers! However, with customary bare-faced audacity, The Guardian picked up the gauntlet and was due to run the advertisement on Tuesday 11 August.
I could go on, mention an erudite feature by The Telegraph’s Charles Moore or the personal article by Hilary Freeman, one of the Mail Online’s Jewish reporters. I am sure both individuals are sincere. But as I wrote in October last year, I worry about the Mail’s ambivalent attitude to Jewish matters. When it surfaces like it did during a campaign to destroy Ed Miliband’s credibility as Labour leader by impugning his late father, Ralph’s loyalty to Britain, it leaves the stench of stale Nazism hanging in the air. Alas, I have too many similar examples to include here.
All of which brings me to the sudden resignation of Sayeeda Baroness Warsi, who until early August was serving as Foreign Office Minister in Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet.
There may be many reasons why Baroness Warsi resigned, but like other people (please see pro-Israel commentator, Douglas Murray’s views above) I suggest her policy about Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza comes some way down the list.
Understandably, she is less pro-community cohesion than anti-Islamophobia; more concerned about her precarious position at Westminster than in inventive Holocaust remembrance.
However her response to Chancellor George Osborne, who claimed her resignation was ‘unnecessary’, was noteworthy:
“My actions”, she retorted with a thinly veiled reference to IDF Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, “would not have been necessary if he had done what he should have done, which is pick up the phone to people he is incredibly close to and say, ‘It’s unnecessary for you to meet your ends by taking out power stations, taking out homes, taking out schools and killing kids on beaches’.
This is the same Lord Ahmed who has been imprisoned for dangerous driving and later resigned from the Labour Party over allegations of antisemitism.
Principles are as principles do. I rest my case.
© Natalie Wood (27 August 2014)
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