No-win journalism

Melanie Phillips

When I saw today’s story about Shimon Peres in the Sunday Telegraph, I blanched. Under the headline

Fury as Israel president claims English are ‘anti-semitic’the story states:

Israel's president has accused the English of being anti-semitic and claimed that MPs pander to Muslim voters. Shimon Peres said England was ‘deeply pro-Arab ... and anti-Israeli’, adding: ‘They always worked against us.’ He added: ‘There is in England a saying that an anti-Semite is someone who hates the Jews more than is necessary.’ His remarks, made in an interview on a Jewish website, provoked anger from senior MPs and Jewish leaders who said the 87-year-old president had ‘got it wrong’.

I blanched for two reasons. First, although Jew-hatred is certainly part of the English historical story, so too is philosemitism, as well as just plain indifference towards Jews; and although Jew-hatred is undoubtedly a crucial, if itself complex, part of the mix, the anti-Israel bigotry currently consuming Britain is the product of a confluence of a number of factors. So such a blanket denunciation of the English themselves -- as opposed to the discourse, which is a different matter -- would be quite wrong. And second, it is a favourite device of the Israel-bashers to fend off criticism by falsely accusing all those who defend Israel of claiming in turn that its accusers are all ‘antisemites’. So to find Israel’s President saying something quite so false and damaging was dismaying.

But Peres did not say this in these bald terms at all. The Sunday Telegraph had picked up on an interview he had given on the on-line Jewish magazine Tablet with Israeli historian Benny Morris. This is the salient part of the interview in full (Morris’s questions are in bold type):

Our next big problem is England. There are several million Muslim voters. And for many members of parliament, that’s the difference between getting elected and not getting elected. And in England there has always been something deeply pro-Arab, of course, not among all Englishmen, and anti-Israeli, in the establishment. They abstained in the [pro-Zionist] 1947 U.N. Partition Resolution, despite [issuing the pro-Zionist] Balfour Declaration [in 1917]. They maintained an arms embargo against us [in the 1950s]; they had a defense treaty with Jordan; they always worked against us.

But England changed after the 1940s and 1950s. They supported us in 1967, there was Harold Brown and Mrs. Thatcher [who were pro-Israeli].

There is also support for Israel today [on the British right].

But in Labor there was always a deep pro-Israeli current.

But [the late 1940s prime minister and Labor leader Clement] Attlee was [anti-Israel].

Anyway, this [pro-Israeli current] vanished because they think the Palestinians are the underdog. In their eyes the Arabs are the underdog. Even though this is irrational. Take the Gaza Strip. We unilaterally evacuated the Gaza Strip [in 2005]. We evacuated 8,000 settlers and it was very difficult, after mobilizing 47,000 policemen [and soldiers]. It cost us $2.5 billion in compensation. We left the Gaza Strip completely. Why did they fire rockets at us, for years they fired rockets at us. Why?

Maybe because they don’t like us?

Peres: You fire rockets at everyone you don’t like? For eight years they fired and we refrained from retaliating. When they fired at us, the British didn’t say a word.

Maybe it is anti-Semitism?

Yes, there is also anti-Semitism. There is in England a saying that an anti-Semite is someone who hates the Jews more than is necessary. But with Germany relations are pretty good, as with Italy and France.

But there is erosion of public pro-Israel sentiment—at the universities, in the press. I’m not talking about the governments.

I’ll tell you why. On television there is an asymmetry that can’t be corrected. What the terrorists do is never broadcast. Only the response is broadcast. And then critics charge: “This is disproportionate.” You don’t see the terrorist act. When a lawful nation fights a lawless nation there is a problem in the media. When an open regime fights a secret regime there is a problem.

As can be seen from this, Peres first talked about the problem Israel has with England without referring to ‘antisemitism’ at all. When the question was raised, he agreed it played a part. But it is quite clear from his remarks that he ascribes anti-Israelism in England, which he says is not shared by all, to a range of factors – large numbers of Muslim voters, historic pro-Arab feeling, support for the underdog, distorted media coverage – with Jew-hatred included as an afterthought. So for the Sunday Telegraph to say

Israel president claims English are ‘anti-semitic’

and then further to whip up some

fury

over a distorted version of his remarks, and to put this whole inflammatory hype on the front page, no less, is pretty shoddy journalism.

For which there are two possible explanations: malice or sloppiness. It’s possible that this was a malicious attempt to whip up more anti-Israel feeling. But it’s surely more likely that the Daily Telegraph writers elided anti-Israel feeling with Jew-hatred because they themselves think that each flows into the other.

If so, it is really very telling. For the Israel-bashers tell us ad nauseam that to be anti-Israel is not the same as being anti-Jew. Yet when the Israeli President talks about anti-Israel hatred, he is said to be talking about anti-Jewish hatred pure and simple, with no other factors acknowledged.

Thus Israel’s defenders get it in the neck either way. It's what might be called 'no-win' journalism. And only one country is treated to it.
Another crucial point about Turkey further underlines the sheer amoral perversity of David Cameron’s gushing endorsement of that country, analysed below. As Martin Packard, a former UN mediating officer in Cyprus points out in a letter to the Times (£) today, for the past 36 years Turkey has been illegally occupying part of Cyprus:

In advocating Turkish membership of the EU Mr Cameron should remember that Turkey is an invader and illegal occupier of Commonwealth and EU territory, in contravention of numerous UN and EU resolutions. The aim of bringing Turkey into the EU is a sensible and commendable one, but Mr Cameron might best advance Turkey’s cause by persuading it to withdraw its troops from Cyprus.

But all Cameron said about this in his speech was

...we want you to continue to work towards a solution in Cyprus

to help

...convince the doubters

that the case for Turkey's membership of the EU was

indisputable.

It’s also striking, isn’t it, how there are never any Unison or university boycotts of Turkey, or angry demonstrations outside Turkish airline offices, or denunciations of Turkey’s illegal occupation by NGOs or the UN.

For as Leo Rennert observes on American Thinker, noting an ad in the New York Times against the Turkish occupation:

In these 36 years, the ad asserts, Turkey ethnically cleansed from their homes 200,000 Greek Cypriots, killed 6,500 of them, deployed 43,000 occupation troops, brought in 160,000 Turks to cement its occupation, destroyed churches, synagogues and cemeteries, while it continued to oppress Kurds in Turkey.

The ad contrasts these horrors with a pro-Western, anti-terrorism record of the other half of the island where a Greek-Cypriot government recently confiscated Syrian arms destined for Hamas, refused use of Cyprus ports to the Turkish flotilla, while partnering with Greece to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, and worked closely with the U.S. on terrorism issues.

But now Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister has placed himself firmly on the side of the destroyers of human rights and against those who resist tyranny. Some have speculated that he has done so at the behest of Obama, who is keen (of course) for Turkey to join the EU. If so, it would add bitterly ironic reinforcement to the impression that Cameron is a mirror image of his role-model Tony Blair. Blair was styled ‘Bush’s poodle’ for yoking Britain to the White House in the defence of the west. Cameron may have volunteered to be Obama’s poodle, yoking Britain to the White House in the cause of surrendering the west.
When David Cameron became Britain’s Prime Minister, I warned that he would turn out to be even worse than Labour on the related issues of Israel and the global threat from Islamism to Britain and the west. This was because Cameron had no knowledge of or interest in foreign affairs, and so was always likely merely to reflect the most politically expedient views he encountered – which, given the current poisonous attitude within the British establishment and intelligentsia, were likely to push him into appeasing Britain’s mortal enemies in the Islamic world and dumping on Israel, Britain’s strategic ally in that great struggle.

But even I did not foresee just how cynical Cameron would turn out to be -- and how dangerous therefore to the British national interest. Today’s truly shocking and quite astoundingly stupid speech in Turkey has now laid bare the fathomless shallowness and frightening ignorance and idiocy of Britain’s new Prime Minister.

Declaring himself a fervent supporter of Turkey’s bid to join the EU, Cameron declared that those who opposed this bid fell into one of three categories: protectionists; those who believed wrongly in a ‘clash of civilisations’ between east and west, whereas in fact

Turkey can be a great unifier, because instead of choosing between East and West, Turkey has chosen both;

or

those who wilfully misunderstand Islam

because they

... see no difference between real Islam and the distorted version peddled by the extremists.

Astonishingly, Cameron thus totally ignored the fact that Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Erdogan, is no secular Ataturk but an Islamic extremist; and as a result Turkey is changing from a secular state and strategic ally of the west into an Islamist tyranny and a new strategic enemy of the west. Here is what Turkish political economy professor Dani Rodrik wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal (£):

I no longer recognize Turkey, the country where I was raised and spend most of my time when I am not teaching in the U.S. It wasn't so long ago that the country seemed to be taking significant strides in the direction of human rights and democracy... But more recently, the same government has been responsible for a politics of deception, dirty tricks, fear, and intimidation... It's clear now that Turkey is no longer the liberalizing, emerging democracy under the AKP that it was only a few years ago. It's time the U.S. and Europe stopped treating it as such—both for their own sakes, and for the sake of the Turkish people.

Into which category of prejudice would Cameron place the horrified Professor Rodrik – Turkish protectionist, Turkish culture warrior or Turkish Islamophobe?

Or what about the alliances Erdogan has been forging with Islamic terror regimes such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran – and not forgetting his warm overtures to Russia? Is this what Cameron regards as evidence that Turkey is playing the role of ‘great unifier’ between east and west?

Indeed, Cameron does not see Turkey’s recent meeting with Iran and Brazil as a sinister development. Instead he thinks it furnishes evidence that

It is Turkey that can help us to stop Iran from getting the bomb

and that

We hope that the meeting held in Istanbul between the Turkish, Brazilian and Iranian Foreign Ministers will see Iran move in the right direction.

Please will someone tell me that this is merely the Foreign and Commonwealth Office indulging its sardonic sense of humour?

Alas, clearly not. For on Cameron ploughed into the familiar terrain of Planet Appeasement. Out it came again, the British government line that Islam is a Religion of Peace and that those who are, er, trying to destroy the west are guilty of a

distorted version

of Islam.

So maybe Cameron can enlighten us whether his hero Erdogan -- ally of Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran, and who has himself vowed that

Kurdish rebels who seek autonomy from Turkey will ‘drown in their own blood’

-- represents the ‘distorted’ version of Islam, or the ’religion of peace’?

Or perhaps he can tell us whether the Muslim Brotherhood, committed to taking over the non-Islamic and not-Islamic-enough domains through both mass murder and cultural conquest, and whose jurists and scholars are the pre-eminent religious authorities throughout the Islamic world, are propounding a ‘distorted’ version of Islam or the Religion of Peace?

It is of course Cameron himself who is distorting the reality of Islam. For he said:

Third, let me turn to the prejudiced – those who don’t differentiate between real Islam and the extremist version. They don’t understand the values that Islam shares with other religions like Christianity and Judaism that all of these are inherently peaceful religions.

This is just grotesque. Despite the fact that many ordinary Muslims want only to live in peace and prosperity, Islam is a religion of conquest. Its history – with some exceptions -- is overwhelmingly one of violent expansionism, a characteristic suppressed only by colonialism. For Cameron to ignore and even sanitise the persecution by Islam today of Christians, with the burning of churches, ethnic cleansing and killing or forced conversion of Christians across the developing world, is really quite obscene. Does Cameron really think that all these Muslims are peddling a ‘distorted’ version of their religion? (A propos, Christianity too has a history of violence since like Islam it is inherently committed to the conversion of unbelievers. Of the three religions, it is only Judaism which has never sought to convert anyone else and thus never posed a threat to other religious -- or anti-religious -- believers.)

But then, Cameron doesn’t even appear to understand the basis of the civilisation he is supposedly in office to help defend. For he said:

I will always argue that the values of real Islam are not incompatible with the values of Europe, that Europe is defined not by religion, but by values.

Does he really think that Europe's ‘values’ emerged in an act of spontaneous cultural generation? Does he really not grasp that core European ‘values’ – individual freedom, commitment to truth, duty to others, equality of all human beings and so forth – derived from the Bible, the cultural foundation-stone of western society?

Having run up the white flag to the jihad, Cameron then proceeded to deliver a viciously unjust kicking to Israel. It was against Israel -- the front line of the defence of the west against the Islamic onslaught – that Cameron suddenly ratcheted up the aggression:

Let me be clear: the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla was completely unacceptable. And I have told Prime Minister Netanyahu we will expect the Israeli inquiry to be swift, transparent and rigorous. Let me also be clear that the situation in Gaza has to change. Humanitarian goods and people must flow in both directions. Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp.

Cameron did not condemn the flotilla, whose lead ship the Mavi Marmara was run by Turkish-backed terrorists who set out -- according to the evidence from their own mouths -- to commit an act of jihadi terrorist aggression against Israel.

He did not condemn those Turkish-backed terrorists on the Mavi Marmara who attempted to lynch and kidnap the Israeli commandos who boarded the boat and who employed no violence at all until they themselves were set upon.

He did not condemn the Turkish-backed terrorists on the Mavi Marmara who, I am reliably informed, slit open the stomach of one of those Israeli commandos and pulled out his guts before throwing him into the sea.

Instead he condemned the Israelis for defending themselves against this barbaric savagery. He backed this up by misrepresenting this self-defence as an attack -- even though the Israelis boarded the Mavi Marmara, as they did the rest of the flotilla with no untoward incident occurring, merely in order to escort it to an Israeli port to search its cargo for weapons.

Cameron then high-handedly declared that

... we will expect the Israeli inquiry to be swift, transparent and rigorous.

Just who does he think he is? Mighty Mouse, or what?

And then Cameron attacked Israel over Gaza, which he called a ‘prison camp’. This is vile rhetoric, of the kind associated with those attempting to bring Israel down through a process of delegitimisation.

Why did Cameron ignore the evidence of the markets full of produce in Gaza, the restaurants, the Olympic-size swimming pool? Was this ignorance or malice? Why did he ignore the fact that Israel allows hundreds of tons of supplies across its border with Gaza every week?

Has Cameron even looked at a map? Does he not know that Egypt has a border with Gaza which it keeps far more tightly sealed than does Israel? If Gaza is a prison camp, why did he not condemn Egypt for making it so but singled out only Israel?

Why didn’t he condemn the severe travel restrictions on Palestinians imposed by Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon? Why didn’t he condemn Lebanon for denying Palestinians living there the right to own property, qualify for health care, or work in a large number of jobs? And while we’re asking, what about Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, who reportedly begged Obama not to lift the Gaza blockade? Why didn’t Cameron condemn him too for seeking to maintain Gaza as a ‘prison camp’?

Why did Cameron utter no word of condemnation of Hamas for its exterminatory rocket and human bomb attacks on Israelis? Or does he think that to condemn Hamas is also to show prejudice towards the Religion of Peace? Why, if he really thinks Gaza is a prison camp, did he make no condemnation of the Hamas for throwing Gazans off the tops of buildings, using Gazan civilians as human shields and burning their children’s holiday camps down to the ground?

I have said it before: Israel is the litmus test of decency in political discourse. Those who attack Israel are invariably on the wrong side of the global fight to defend civilisation against its destroyers. Not just because of Israel’s place on the geopolitical map. It is because the animus against Israel is based on a wholesale repudiation of reason and the embrace instead of irrationality, bigotry, lies and moral inversion. Defence becomes attack, victim becomes victimiser, right becomes wrong; and vice versa. It is the deranged discourse of Islamic fanaticism and of the Israel-bashing left that marches beneath its black banners. And now it is Cameron’s discourse too.

It is astounding to hear a Conservative Prime Minister mouth such infantile leftism. If it weren’t for Obama’s example, it would be unbelievable that any serious politician could spout such drivel. But here surely is the key to all this. Recently, Cameron declared that Britain was

the junior partner [to America] in 1940 when we were fighting the Nazis.

In 1940, of course, America had not yet even entered the war and Britain alone held fascism at bay. So how could Cameron have said something so unbelievably ignorant? Can he really be that stupid?

Hardly, with his Etonian schooling and Oxford First. This was surely not stupidity but cynical callowness of the most extreme and disturbing kind. He wanted to suck up to Obama – and he was prepared even to traduce his own country to do so, by misrepresenting its most iconic and heroic moment of modern times.

I would guess that something similar was at work in his Turkish speech. He doesn’t care about upholding truth over lies, justice over injustice, right over wrong; he will play to any populist gallery. And the appeasement of Islamic aggression and the corresponding demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel play to the ugly mood of bigotry and ignorance now rampant in Britain. As the UK Titanic steadily goes down, Cameron is now on the bridge choosing to conduct the orchestra of hate.

For let’s get this clear: Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister has lauded a Turkish Islamist regime which sponsored an act of terrorism which came close to a declaration of war, while he condemned its victims for defending themselves against the attack. And this from the leader of a country which itself is the Islamists’ principal target and recruiting ground in the west. Far from defending Britain and the west, Cameron is on his knees to their enemies while unleashing the furies upon their strategic ally.

And those furies are raging at home too. As I have previously observed, there is now in Britain a pre-pogrom atmosphere against Israel. Never mind the Guardian -- just look at the comments on Conservative Home to see the hideous face of British bigotry, a hysteria that Cameron’s inflammatory remarks will have done much to stoke even further.

1940 this most definitely is not. Weep for Britain. It has just become even more unsafe – and British politics a lot more disgusting.