Where can hateful anti-Israel comments be elicited even by a travel & leisure style post about Israeli wine? Only at the Guardian

As you well know, CiF Watch is not part of the Harriet Sherwood fan club.  However, today’s post, about an Israeli wine which has won international praise, is actually consistent with the stated objectives of her new blog, View from Jerusalem with Harriet Sherwood.

Her inaugural post stated her desire to,

“look at life beyond [the conflict]: books, films, environmental issues, food, leisure activities, maybe even sport.”

She stated further:

[Israel] is a place about which opinions are fiercely held and promoted – but this blog and its comment thread is not the forum for them. I hope that readers will want to engage in reasonable discussion with each other and with me, too.

Even if we take Sherwood at face value, the naiveté of such a desire – which assumes that Guardian readers will engage in a civil debate about even the most mundane topics relating to Israel – is simply staggering.

Sure enough, her account of a recent visit to a boutique winery called Domaine du Castel, near Jerusalem, produced this:

And then there was this disgusting remark from a serial Israel hater known as sidster:

While there were also some supportive remarks, its important to note that, while the post has received a meager 35 comments thus far, the bile above has received the recommendation of 57 readers.

If Sherwood sincerely dreamed of a blog about Israel which would encourage “reasonable discussion” she must  have inexplicably failed to make the connection between the ugly caricatures about Israel her reporting routinely evokes and the vitriol that such rhetoric inevitably elicits.

Written By
More from Adam Levick
Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *