Into the darkness

Melanie Phillips

On and on it goes, this deranged vendetta against Israel and the Jews that we are not allowed to call by its proper name, on and on with obsessional intensity into ever-more alarming and astonishing bigotry and violence that is even now passing virtually without comment in wider British society.

Last night Richard Millett, an Israel supporter who tirelessly records and thus brings to light the venomous anti-Israel bigotry coursing through campuses and elsewhere, was assaulted and racially abused at a meeting of the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

The pretext for this assault was that he refused to stop filming -- even though this was a public meeting, and according to him there were others present who were also filming. You can view his footage here.

Last year, another Israel supporter was attacked at SOAS when his cheek was bitten by an anti-Israel demonstrator – an incident which was also filmed. At the subsequent trial, however, the individual being prosecuted was acquitted.

This latest outrage at SOAS occurred a few days after a jaw-dropping edition of HardTalk on BBC TV, in which Sarah Montague interviewed the rabid Israel-hater, the Jewish American Lord Haw-Haw Norman Finkelstein.

Giving a platform to this noxious individual was bad enough. But to introduce him, Montague stated the following:

‘American Presidents have long been criticized for being too in thrall to the Jewish lobby. The American Jews influence US foreign policy and that explains Washington’s unwavering support for Israel.’

Now it is possible that she was not asserting this as fact but merely representing the views of such critics in order to introduce the discussion. But she went on to say:

‘So what happens if American Jews fall out of love with Israel? That’s what the Jewish American academic Norman Finkelstein claims is happening ... Could he be right? And if he is, what does that mean for Middle East policy?’

So looking at her introduction in the round, there was nothing to suggest that she was merely reporting the views of those who claim the ‘Jewish Lobby’ controls US foreign policy. It seems that she was stating this as fact.

In other words, the BBC is now peddling the ancient racial libel that the Jews exercise a unique control over the levers of power. And that is unvarnished Judeophobia. On the BBC. Paid for by the British public. The BBC won’t report the Muslim element of paedophile gangs in northern towns, but they will libel the Jewish people by stating a notorious bigoted trope as fact.

The terrifying thing is that the BBC really does seem to believe American Jews control the Presidency. That’s why they treat as a legitimate contributor to public debate an individual whose record is summed up by CAMERA thus:

‘Finkelstein has called for solidarity with Hezbollah, mocked Israel as a "lunatic state," "an insane state," and "a Satanic state" bent on war. He labels Jewish leaders involved in Holocaust restitution "gangsters" and "crooks," terms Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel "the resident clown of the Holocaust circus." He calls Israelis "Satanic, narcissistic people" and claims Israel committed a "slaughter, a massacre" in Gaza and "wants war, war and war."’

With the BBC giving airtime to the kind of anti-Jewish venom that was once confined to neo-Nazis and their ilk, the demons of irrationality about the Jews are once again terrifyingly brainwashing the credulous. And just as in the 1930s, it is the high-minded and the highly educated who are leading Britain into this darkness -- under the camouflage of hating the Jewish homeland.

In March, a bunch of luvvies including Emma Thompson, Richard Wilson and Alexei Sayle called for a boycott of Israel’s Habima theatre which has been performing Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (oh the irony of it!) in Hebrew at the Globe in London. This was on account of what they described as Israel’s ‘policies of exclusion’ against the Palestinians and its ‘human rights violations and the illegal colonisation of occupied land’.

Dear oh dear -- does one laugh or cry at such mindless parroting of demonstrable untruths? Quite apart from the fact that Habima is totally apolitical and a call for such a cultural boycott is, as the author Howard Jacobson put it, Kafkaesque, have these high-minded souls called for a boycott of Lebanon where Palestinians are excluded from citizenship? Have they called for a boycott of Syria where countless thousands have been slaughtered? Have they called for a boycott of Iran for threatening a second genocide of the Jews and jailing, torturing, stoning and hanging its own dissidents, women and gays?

Have they indeed called for a boycott of the Palestinian Authority for censoring and intimidating Palestinian and western journalists, and for brainwashing Palestinian children with Nazi-style propaganda in order to raise them to hate and murder Jews and Israelis?

No, of course not. The only country they want to boycott is the one country in the whole of the Middle East that is a true democracy, that affords human rights to all its citizens, that allows freedom of worship to all religions, that treats women as equals and safeguards the welfare and liberties of gay people – and treats in its own hospitals, alongside its own citizens, Palestinians from these ‘excluded’ territories including those who are trying to murder as many Israeli citizens as possible.

This irrational obsession is madness. It is terrifying. And no-one in the wider community  is saying anything about it.

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., President

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East