Guardian’s duty to Jews on Yom HaShoah? Don’t publish accusations that we’re “supremacists”!

While you should read Hadar Sela’s superb take down of the reprehensible decision by Comment is Free editors to provide a forum, on Holocaust Heroism and Remembrance Day, to the recently released Islamist Raed Salah, (Britain’s duty to the Palestinian people, April 19) one particular passage in Salah’s claim of moral vindication deserves scrutiny.

Here’s the relevant passage:

After a 10-month legal battle, I have now been cleared on “all grounds” by a senior immigration tribunal judge, who ruled that May’s decision to deport me was “entirely unnecessary” and that she had been “misled”. The evidence she relied on (which included a poem of mine which had been doctored to make it appear anti-Jewish) was not, he concluded, a fair portrayal of my views. In reality, I reject any and every form of racism, including antisemitism. [emphasis added]

Here’s the version of the poem as cited in the recent UK Immigration Tribunal ruling:

“We are not a nation that is based on values of envy.  We are not a nation that is based on values of vengeance.  We have never allowed ourselves, and listen carefully; we have never allowed ourselves to knead the bread for the breaking [of] fasting during the blessed month of Ramadan with the blood of the children.  And if someone wants a wider explanation, then he should ask what used to happen to some of the children of Europe, when their blood used to be mixed in the dough of the holy bread.  God almighty, is this religion?  Is this what God wants?  Allah’s curse be on you: how you are deluded away from the Truth.  How dare you to lie to God?  How dare you to fabricate things on God?” [emphasis added]

However, contrary to Salah’s claim in CiF, the UK Immigration Tribunal did not vindicate the poem at all.

Here’s the text from the ruling, regarding the poem:

we do not find this [poem] could be taken to be anything other than a reference to the blood libel against Jews and nothing said by the appellant or Professor Pappe explains why it would be interpreted otherwise from the original Arabic text or in the English text before us. 

Finally, perhaps the most risible claim in Salah’s CiF essay is that he rejects antisemitism.

While we’ve commented on his undeniable record of Jew hatred on many occasions, a later passage in his own CiF essay further demonstrates how absurd his claim is.

Salah writes

Despite the Israeli policy of “transfer” – another term for ethnic cleansing – the Palestinians will not go away. The Israeli state can occupy our lands, demolish our homes, drill tunnels under the old city of Jerusalem – but we will not disappear. Instead, we now aspire to a directly elected leadership for Palestinians in Israel; one that would truly represent our interests. We seek only the legal rights guaranteed to us by international conventions and laws.

The Palestinian issue can only be resolved if Israel and its supporters in Britain abandon the dogmas of supremacy and truly adhere to the universal values of justice and fairness. [emphasis added]

As we’ve noted several times in the context of commenting on Gilad Atzmon, imputing “supremacist” ideology to Zionists and Jews is a morally hideous idea which was, unsurprisingly, popularized by David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

And, yes, when Salah refers to “Israel and its supporters in Britain“, the supporters he’s talking about are Jews.

Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott, in his quasi mea culpa, “On Averting Accusations of antisemitism“, in Nov., wrote:

Three times in the last nine months I have upheld complaints against language within articles that I agreed could be read as antisemitic…Two weeks ago a columnist used the term “the chosen” in an item on the release of Gilad Shalit, which brought more than 40 complaints to the Guardian, and an apology from the columnist the following week.“Chosenness”, in Jewish theology, tends to refer to the sense in which Jews are “burdened” by religious responsibilities; it has never meant that the Jews are better than anyone else. Historically it has been antisemites, not Jews, who have read “chosen” as code for Jewish supremacism. [emphasis added]

Evidently Salah didn’t feel the need to even use such a code word for Jewish supremacism.

And, evidently, Guardian editors have not gotten Elliott’s memo, and continue to show themselves either incapable of recognizing, or indifferent to, even such explicit anti–Jewish racism – on Yom HaShoah, and each day the broadsheet continues in their simply comical mission of being the “liberal” paper of record.   

Written By
More from Adam Levick
Times of London again suggests that Tel Aviv is Israel’s capital (Update)
In 2014, we prompted a correction to a Times of London print...
Read More
Leave a comment

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