The British press carries reports today of the fury and exasperation of British officials who rescued Kate Burton and her parents from their Palestinian kidnappers only to find that she refused to co-operate with them and would not be debriefed, thus potentially putting other innocent people in danger from similar activities. The Mail reports that she astonished officials by refusing to answer questions.

A security source said: ‘We had huge problems with Kate…she had to be debriefed — it’s standard procedure and for the very simple reason that other lives might one day depend on it. We’ve been trying to impress on her that she was kidnapped and she wasn’t just having long chats with her Palestinian friends’...Her aunt, Wendy Hagenbuch, told the Mail last night: ‘Kate will be very forgiving of these men because she believes they wouldn’t do this sort of thing without good reason. She has a very sympathetic nature’.

Her attitude is not surprising. It has been suggested that she is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, the term used to describe the unaccountable sympathy felt by the victim of a kidnapping for the kidnappers. In this case, however, the kidnap victim’s unaccountable sympathy with manipulative violence predated the kidnapping. With their customary cirumlocution and moral obfuscation, the British media have described al Mezan, the organisation Burton worked for in Gaza, as a ‘human rights’ charity’. It would be more accurate to describe it as a ‘human wrongs’ charity.

Its website reveals that it promulgates the usual vile libels and distortions, presenting Israel — the victim of Palestinian violence — as the aggressor and oppressor in terms guaranteed to incite hatred and violence against it. Thus it accuses Israel of killing Palestinian children, making no mention of the use by Palestinians of their own children as human bombs or human shields, pushed into harm’s way to blackmail Israel into paralysis or, worse still, to milk any subsequent casualties to provoke the outrage of people like Burton. It makes no mention, of course, of the Palestinians’ incitement of their children to mass murder, the hate-filled textbooks which teach them to detest Jews, or the pride of their parents when they are turned into human bombs. The abuse by Palestinians of their own children is of course the real abuse of human rights going on in Gaza and the West Bank.

The al Mezan website also egregiously sanitises the Palestinian mass murder of Israeli innocents by describing this merely as ‘protests’; by contrast, it vilifies Israel’s attempt to defend its citizens as ‘collective punishment’, thus demonising Israel for having the temerity to try to prevent further atrocities. It describes this as ‘crimes against Palestinian civilians and their property’ ‘which it claims have ‘increased since the outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifada.’ But of course these ‘crimes’, such as roadblocks, razing of orchards and so forth, only occurred because the Palestinians were systematically trying to wipe out Israelis — the process which has been continuing without interruption for the past half-century ever since Israel was created. This self-defence is called ‘outrageous’ and described as ‘violations of human rights’.

Having signed up to such mind-twisting moral inversion, it is not surprising that Burton appears unable to view her kidnappers as evil people. On the contrary, her family talks of the pleasant way they treated the Burtons in captivity, their charm and so forth.

From what has been published, the Burton family appears to furnish a perfect example of the truly shattering nature of Britain’s twisted mindset. For this is a nice family: decent, idealistic, given to Christian charitable good works. The Daily Telegraph reports:

Burton’s half-sister Seren Wildwood said: ‘As a family we have all been fairly politically active. I am a Quaker and get involved in Quaker campaigns. We have the same passion for human rights and the environment.’

Friends described the family as being ‘internationalist’. Mr Burton semi retired eight years ago. He now does voluntary work for the British Executive Service Overseas to help third world companies. His wife has worked for the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community, an umbrella group of Roman Catholic churches in Europe. Mrs Wildwood’s brother Jonathan works for the Water Aid charity in Nigeria.

And yet when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, this type of decent British person loses its moral compass altogether. The same people — or at least, Kate Burton — regard those practising genocidal terror as the vulnerable to be helped in the Middle East conflict, while viewing their actual victims as oppressors.

This is what is so distressing about what has happened to Britain. Nice people now turn out to have monstrous views. Decency itself has been kidnapped and brainwashed and turned into a diabolical mirror image of itself. The moment you meet one of these liberal, tolerant, well-educated, well-spoken, well-mannered, internationalist-minded folk for whom the third world is a synonym for global injustice, you know that they are going to despise or hate Israel and bestow their compassion on the promoters of genocide. One constantly meets such people who have compassion for the vulnerable and want to do good in the world: pillars of the community, admirable and delightful in every way — except that they side with people who happen to have a murderous hatred of Israel and the Jews.

Posted by melanie at January 2, 2006