On the Engage site, Mark Gardner has written an excellent response to David Clark’s defence of his own article in the Guardian, in which he branded accusations of anti-Jewish hatred on the left ‘poisonous intellectual thuggery’. Gardner, who is gracious about Clark’s second piece, nevertheless hones in on the ‘it’s not antisemitism but anti-Zionism’ canard as well as drawing attention to the anti-Jewish hate-fest being facilitated by the Guardian’s new ‘Comment is Free’ website as well as its Comment pages:
‘Zionist sympathisers are nothing more than devil worshippers, they like to suck your blood dry’, stated a posting on the Guardian’s new blog site on Wednesday 15th March 2006. The posting was removed after I contacted a journalist on the paper and asked how much more ‘shit’ the Guardian would facilitate. I had already emailed the ‘report this comment’ blog moderator to no avail, perhaps because I’d already sent two ‘report this comment’ emails about comments further up the blog thread stating that Zionism and Nazism were indistinguishable.
David Clark is to be warmly thanked for the constructive sincerity of his explanation of his Guardian article: but his paper’s blog illustrates how embedded the problem has become in Farringdon, as well as nearby Islington. The Guardian does not simply ‘criticise’ Israel, rather it facilitates, and part shares, an increasingly hateful mythology against ‘Zionism’ that is now endemic in far left and Islamist circles...
The Guardian’s criticisms of Israel have...been given the most malicious of spins in a Comments section that often panders to the evocative notion that a Zionist conspiracy is driving US foreign policy. The charge is given global urgency by 9/11; the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq; and the looming military actions or nuclear stand off with Iran. This takes the Guardian beyond criticism of Israel, a nation state, and into an anti-Zionist mythology premised upon many traditional anti-Semitic themes codified within the notorious Tsarist forgery, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. This alleges that a global Jewish conspiracy secretly controls the destiny of the world by manufacturing wars and revolutions, in order to divide and rule, and gain further riches and empowerment. The conspiracy is orchestrated via compliant politicians; and the populace is dumbed into accepting it by controlled media.
Gardner lists the tropes of ‘it’s not antisemitism but anti-Zionism’ thus:
• Swapping 'Zionist' for 'Jew' makes you kosher
• 'Zionist pressure' on the global superpower has the same mechanism and importance as that implied by Jewish conspiracy power motifs – it is global, hidden, manipulative and effective.
• Zionists lay traps around the charge of anti-Semitism.
• Don’t believe what you hear about antisemitism.
• Israel is an imperialist and racist state.
• All Jews around the world are to be judged by their attitude to Israel. The best Jews are those who actively oppose the rest of mainstream Jewry.
The warning about where such attitudes can end up was sounded by Barry Kosmin and Paul Iganski, in their International Herald Tribune article ‘Israel in the British press: crossing the line from criticism to bigotry.’ This was, ironically, prompted by events at Guardian stable-mate, the Observer, where Richard Ingrams had stated that he usually ignored letters from Jews about Israel. Kosmin and Iganski termed this as ‘institutional Judeophobia’ and stated:
'It is important to be clear: Judeophobia is not the old Nazi style antisemitism. It is an institutional process in which the Jewish community suffers discrimination because of editorial misjudgement, omission and oversight... Institutional Judeophobia does not mean that every Observer journalist or even a majority of them is hostile toward Jews. Nor does it signal an active anti-Jewish conspiracy. It does mean, however, that the outcome of editorial decisions is nevertheless damaging and hurtful to Jews. It is a systematic bias that runs through other liberal media...It is equally important to point out that criticism of Israel’s defence policy per se is not Judeophobia...'.
It cannot be stated too often that no-one is claiming that criticism of Israel is in itself an expression of anti-Jewish hatred. This charge is a straw man. The point is rather that Israel is being singled out for a campaign based on lies, libels, falsehoods, misrepresentations, distortions and deliberate omissions which is designed to demonise it and thus delegitimise its very existence. This is a treatment which is meted out to no other country or people on the planet, and one therefore has to ask what is driving it – particularly when so many of its tropes are drawn directly from anti-Jewish calumnies throughout the centuries.
