During the same war, the Guardian published a cartoon
depicting a huge fist, armed with brass knuckles shaped like Stars of
David, hammering a bloody child while a wasp representing Hezbollah
buzzed around ineffectually. The image suggested that Israel was a
gigantic oppressor, slaughtering children in brutal overreaction to
Hezbollah, a minor irritant. It was reminiscent of an earlier cartoon
in the Independent that showed a monstrous Ariel Sharon biting
the head off a Palestinian baby, which won first prize in the British
Political Cartoon Society’s annual competition for 2003. By showing
Jews killing children, both cartoons employed the imagery of the blood
libel—the medieval European calumny that sparked many massacres of Jews
by claiming that they murdered Gentile children and used their blood
for religious rituals.
The BBC, despite its claims of fairness and honesty, is just as
marked by hatred of Israel, and much more influential. It reported the
Lebanon war by focusing almost entirely on the Israeli assault upon
Lebanon, with scarcely a nod at the Hezbollah rocket barrage against
Israel.
...
And earlier this year, the Catholic weekly The Tablet revealed
that almost 80 percent of British Christians polled did not believe
that Israel was fighting enemies that were pledged to destroy it.
...
In 2005, London’s far-left mayor, Ken Livingstone, illustrated this
unholy alliance by publicly embracing Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the cleric
who endorses suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq. In the same year, he
asked a Jewish reporter who approached him after a party, “What did you
do before? Were you a German war criminal?” When the reporter said that
he was Jewish and that the remark offended him, Livingstone likened him
to a “concentration camp guard.”
...
One of the most conspicuous features of
British anti-Semitism is that the British deny its existence. The
Parliamentary inquiry received only a muted response. Both Mann and
Richard Littlejohn, a journalist whose TV program on the subject aired
in July 2007, encountered people who, when discovering their concern
about anti-Semitism, said: “Oh, I didn’t know you were Jewish.” But
Mann and Littlejohn aren’t Jewish. As Littlejohn noted, the implication
was that no non-Jew would ever identify anti-Semitism, and therefore
that anti-Semitism was generally a figment of the Jewish imagination.
When I proposed to write a book about it, I was turned down by every
mainstream publishing house. “No British publisher will touch this,”
one editorial director told me. “Claiming there is anti-Semitism in
Britain is simply unsayable.”
...
Further, people across the political spectrum became increasingly
unable to make moral distinctions based on behavior. This erasing of
the line between right and wrong produced a tendency to equate, and
then invert, the roles of terrorists and of their victims, and to
regard self-defense as aggression and the original violence as
understandable and even justified. That attitude is, of course,
inherently antagonistic to Israel, which was founded on the
determination never to allow another genocide of Jews, to defend itself
when attacked, and to destroy those who would destroy it. But for the
Left, powerlessness is virtue; better for Jews to die than to kill,
because only as dead victims can they be moral.
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