The oldest obsession
The tsunami of indoctrination in anti-Israel lies and bigotry by the British media and intelligentsia has reached such a pitch that, as blogger Edgar Davidson reports, it is now warping the minds of even pro-Israel Jews. He writes:
My daughter, who goes to an orthodox Jewish school, tells me that, when the subject of Israel is discussed in their Jewish studies GCSE class, students routinely state things like ‘the Jews have no right to Israel because they stole the land from the Palestinians’.
In making statements like that, those regular 15-16 year old Jewish kids, are simply repeating what they are told relentlessly in every part of the media (as I have regularly reported on this web). In the midst of the big story of revolution across the entire Arab world (funny how the media is suddenly realising that these Arab countries were abusing their citizens for decades - they have been telling us all along that it is Israel that is the pariah state in the region) the BBC and Channel 4 has gone into overdrive ... to demonize Israel. Just a few examples of the anti-Israel tsunami engulfing British TV, in the last few days alone we have had:
- Scandalous BBC 'documentary' attacking Geert Wilders that also promoted the view that anybody supporting the State of Israel in any way was a criminal
- The Promise, on Channel 4, which Richard Millett sums up as ‘rich European Jews came to Palestine after the Holocaust, stole the Palestinians’ land and murdered British soldiers’.
- A film War Child, on Channel 4, about ‘Jews killing innocent Palestinians'
- The Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC Tuesday 15th Feb 2011 about 'the rights of children' given by the author Richard[sic: actually Michael; MP] Morpurgo which included a very strong political anti-Israel message plus the completely unsubstantiated and ridiculous claim that Israeli soldiers were shooting at Arab children in Gaza like in a computer game (yeah, like Arabs never lie about these things - just like they claimed a demonstrator was recently killed by tear gas).
The relentless propaganda seems to be affecting just about everybody I know. It has got to the stage where even strongly pro-Israeli friends are unwittingly accepting anti-Israel bias as perfectly acceptable.
What is truly extraordinary, as Davidson suggests, is the obsessional nature of this bigotry. It is not just the eye-popping double standard in singling out Israel for attack while ignoring the fact that it is the only democracy in the region. It is not just the egregious lies and smears and the comprehensive rewriting of history that has taken place that not only reverses victim and aggressor but blames the victim for being victimised and inspires hatred of Israel and Jews.
It is rather that, for the British media and intelligentsia, for the BBC and Channel Four executives and the serried ranks of lazy and malicious journalists in both print and broadcasting, for the supercilious academics and preening political progressives and precious know-nothing luvvies of stage and screen, Israel simply fills their vision. It eclipses in its enormity all other issues and causes; in their clouded eyes, it has become an evil of truly cosmic dimensions.
Of course, these are all the unique characteristics of classic anti-Jewish hatred throughout the ages. That is why it is grotesque and immoral to dismiss this phenomenon as merely ‘criticism of Israel’ and those who protest at it as ‘waving the shroud of the Holocaust’ to ‘sanitise Israel’s crimes’. This is indeed a contemporary mutation of ‘the oldest hatred’. The real crime is being committed by all those who are promulgating this, the true evil of our times. But just as with every other closed thought system, those in its grip are totally incapable of insight even into the most obvious signs that they have lost sight of reality.
They devote infinitely more attention to Israel than to any other country on earth – even now, when we can all see from the tumult in the Arab world that Israel is utterly irrelevant to the concerns of the Arab masses. The British educated classes are obsessed by Israel, can’t leave it alone, pick at it without remission. It defines and distorts their whole outlook on the world. They think of it when they are talking about something totally unrelated to the Middle East, such as children’s rights. It has truly become a disease of the British mind, a kind of geopolitical Tourette Syndrome, a pathologically uncontrollable spasm of hatred and lies.
Terrifying -- and tragic, for both British Jews and for the western civilisation of whose death-throes this sickness is such a potent and historically resonant symptom.
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