Mondoweiss or David Duke? Raed Salah’s defenders reach a new low.

H/T to Adam Holland for braving the depths of pure, unbridled hatred towards Israel (and Jews who support the state) at Mondoweiss in order to reveal the site’s defense of the Guardian’s favorite radical Islamist preacher, Sheikh Raed Salah, in a post (by Jonathan Cook) which advanced a narrative about Israelis that, as Holland noted, is nearly indistinguishable from the anti-Semitic tropes employed by the American white supremacist, David Duke.

Notes Holland:

The blog Mondoweiss has published a column defending Palestinian Islamist leader Raed Salah and blaming his arrest on excessive Jewish influence in the U.K. (Read here: The real preachers of hate: Britain arrests respected Palestinian leader.)  Written by free-lance journalist Jonathan Cook, the column not only fails to mention Salah’s extensive history of anti-Jewish hate speech, it turns the facts on their head in a manner reminiscent of U.S. neo-Nazi leader David Duke.  Cook writes that the Israeli public “loathes” Salah not because of his bigotry and incitements of violence, but because his Islamic faith is “incompatible with the state ideology of Jewish supremacism“.  The phrase “Jewish supremacism” was coined by David Duke to counter his being labeled a white supremacist.  Duke came up with the term in writing (with editorial assistance from David Irving) a book called “My Awakening”, which described Duke’s “Aryan vision for America”.  (Read here.)

Cooke, it should be noted, was a Guardian contributor through 2007.

Added Holland:

” From David Duke they have learned that, when an anti-Jewish bigot is called out for having an extensive and indefensible record of hate speech, the best defense is to call the charge a manifestation of the intrinsic bigotry of any expression of Jewish political opinion.”

It’s hard to avoid contextualizing the Mondoweiss piece without noting the Guardian’s week-long defense of Salah, in 7 separate posts – which ignored incontrovertibly evidence of his extremism, ties to Hamas, and expressions of explicit anti-Semitism (and characterizations of his critics as merely “right-wing” Israelis).

No, the Guardian is not Mondoweiss.  But the ideological territory they both lay claim to do contain curious tendencies to, at least at times, overlap. 

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