ZGram - 12/26/2001 - "Anti-Semitism English Style?"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

December 26, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Here is a Wall Street Journal article that speaks for itself.  As you read
it, please remember that the writer is Jewish and writes from the Jewish
point of view.

[START]

December 24, 2001

International Commentary

British Polite Society Has Found a Not-So-New Target

By Melanie Phillips, a columnist with the Daily Mail in London.

 SINCE the war against terror started, polite British society has found an
enemy to target. It's neither the Taliban nor al Qaeda, however -- it's the
state of Israel and Jews in general.

 That's because a common belief has suddenly emerged in Britain that the
Middle East is the cause of world terror and that Israel is to blame for
the impasse there. This leads to anti-Zionism, which is consequently used
as a thin disguise for anti-Semitism. People now make remarks that would
have been inconceivable just a few months previously.

 In an article in the Spectator magazine, the writer Petronella Wyatt
recounted that she had been asked recently whether she thought there was an
international Jewish conspiracy. She also reported on a member of the House
of Lords of impeccable liberal credentials saying, "Well, the Jews have
been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last."

 These are not isolated incidents. I came up against the phenomenon when I
was a panel member on the BBC's flagship current affairs program Question
Time. On the panel with me was the writer Will Self, the Labour backbencher
Diane Abbott, the Tory politician Ken Clarke and the Liberal Democrat MP Ed
Davey.

'Terrorism on Both Sides'

 An Israeli member of the audience asked why the Americans could go halfway
round the world to root out terror when the Israelis were condemned for
doing the same in their own back yard. The other panel members seemed to
subscribe to precisely that double standard. Mr. Davey said Yasser Arafat
couldn't be expected to deal with the terrorists in his midst. Ms. Abbott
implied that Israel was inflicting emotionally incontinent brutality and
vengeance on the Palestinians. And Ken Clarke deplored the "terrorism on
both sides" (he later remembered that there was a distinction between
terrorism and the reaction to it).

 The audience was clearly hostile to Israel and America. One man said the
Palestinians were the victims of Israeli injustice. Another said Mr. Sharon
was a war criminal. A woman said that if terrorism was the indiscriminate
bombing of innocent people, we need look no further than what George W.
Bush was doing in Afghanistan, to great applause. I took a very different
line. Yes, I said, there definitely was a double standard; I wondered why
people were sympathetic when Israelis died but not sympathetic when they
tried to prevent themselves from dying. I added that the Palestinian
Authority was a sponsor of terror and incited violence daily against
Israelis and Jews across the world.

 As I spoke, I was aware of a low hissing from the audience. I looked at
their faces and saw disbelief and hostility. I glanced at the woman who had
made the George Bush point; her face was contorted with what can only be
described as hatred.

 Then Will Self asked the question that had clearly formed in his mind
after he read through a selection of my articles on the train from London
to Bristol, where the show was being taped, as he told me later he had.
Where, he demanded, did my own loyalties lie? If Britain declared war on
Israel, whose side would I be on? I could scarcely believe what I had
heard. Will Self (who claimed to be Jewish himself) was seeking to make the
wider world aware of two things: first, that I was a Jew, and second, that
therefore my views on Israel could be disregarded since Jews had double
loyalties. I replied that British Jews were immensely patriotic. It was
also inconceivable that Britain should attack Israel since Israel was a
salient of democracy in the Middle East. But if the inconceivable were ever
to happen, this would represent such a turning against Jews that some of us
British Jews might feel we had no alternative but to live in Israel. That
of course was entirely different from being a traitor to one's own country.

 When I said, however, that Israel was a democracy, there was an
astonishing reaction from the audience. They laughed. That incredulous
laugh was more shocking even than Will Self's attack. It revealed that
however many Israeli teenagers are blown to smithereens by suicide bombers,
the British have seen the pictures of Israel's tanks demolishing
Palestinian houses and above all seen the pictures of those Palestinian
children being killed by Israeli soldiers, and they have formed the view
that Israel is a tyranny and the Jews are the real terrorists.

 The program discussion lurched from bad to worse. From the audience came
the considered view that Israel was the source of terror in the Middle
East, that what it was doing was as bad as what was done to it, and that it
was responsible for ethnic cleansing.

 Just a show? I believe that the visceral hostility towards Israel and Jews
displayed by both the panel and the audience are indicative now of much
mainstream British opinion. Indeed, the British government appears to
believe that if only the United States would put pressure on Israel, there
would be peace in the Middle East.

 Such opinions are marked by such blatant double standards and an inverted
sense of right and wrong that one has to ask the reason for such
perversity. Why is Israel portrayed as murderous when it is clearly
attempting -- however misguidedly -- to defend itself against terror? Why
do these upstanding British citizens omit to mention that the Palestinian
Authority daily pumps out through its mass media Nazi-style anti-Jewish
libels and incitements to murder and martyrdom? There are several likely
explanations. The British instinctively side with the underdog. At home,
they resent the fact that the Jews punch well above their numerical weight
by being overrepresented in the professions. In Israel, they see the Jews,
with the might of America behind them, pulverizing Palestinians armed only
with stones.

Self-Loathing

 Then there is the fact that the establishment, that is, Labour MPs, the
liberal broadsheet newspapers and in particular the BBC -- are also
dominated by the thinking of the New Left, the Marxist revisionism that
that replaced the class struggle by the culture war. The New Left is
characterized by an abiding hatred of Israel, America and a self-loathing
about Western values. The result is that the British intellectual classes
are an all-too willing conduit for anti-Jewish and anti-Israel poison and
propaganda. In the face of all this, British Jews are astonishingly silent,
probably because they are hardly less horrified by the scenes of
Palestinian misery that unfold daily across their TV screens.

 But one does not have to be a fan of Ariel Sharon to see that criticisms
of Israeli tactics are almost beside the point. For Israel's very existence
is threatened. The Palestine Authority makes it abundantly clear in all it
says for internal consumption that it regards the whole of "Palestine" as
occupied and will be satisfied with nothing less than the destruction of
the Jewish state.

 Israel has never troubled to make its case effectively to a world which it
assumes will always be hostile or indifferent. But it never foresaw that
Palestinian terror--whose purpose was to provoke a counter-reaction that
would turn the world against Israel and destroy the Jewish state's very
soul -- would be financed by the Western world. But this is what has
happened. The West, especially in Europe, has fallen for the propaganda of
victim culture. The EU, of which Britain is a member, is the largest
supplier of funds to the PA. The result is that the British, far from
making common cause against global terror, have succumbed to the very
prejudices that lie behind it.

[END]

  =====

Source:  http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB1009141696142194720.htm

 =====

Thought for the Day:

"Sired by a hurricane, damned by an earthquake."

(Mark Twain in "The Child of Calamity")