More “Mote-and-Beamery” at the Guardian

The Guardian shows itself at its hyperbolic worst when it warns (or, threatens) that the Israeli Knesset’s treatment of Haneen Zoabi, a Knesset Member who joined the Gaza flotilla, “could ignite a third intifada.”

To remind the reader, Zoabi is the Israeli MK who voluntarily joined the Gaza “aid” flotilla, thus choosing to associate herself with IHH – a group with a radical Islamic anti-Western orientation, and one which supports Hamas and, at least in the past, even global jihad elements.

It is safe to say that many other nations would have charged Zoabi with treason for openly aiding and abetting their enemies.  However, as a citizen of the democratic Israeli state, Zoabi kept her seat in the Knesset and was merely stripped of three parliamentary privileges– a fact that didn’t stop The Guardian from framing the issue as “symptomatic of a broader campaign to undermine [the Arab] community.”

The Guardian uncritically quotes Zoabi: “We accepted a democratic, liberal state, we voted for the Knesset. But …we are the litmus test of the whole problem. If Israel does not recognise this, conditions will deteriorate towards a third intifada.”

Yet, in the next sentence, we are told that Zoabi rejects any suggestion that Israel’s Arab citizens supported violence and that she opposes the suggestion by jailed Hamas leader Mohammed Arman, in a book smuggled out of his Israeli jail, that the role of Palestinian citizens of Israel would be to “harass the occupiers, disrupt their daily routine and undermine their confidence”.

Also, in a classic example of The Guardian’mote-and-beamerythe article uncritically repeats Zoabi’s charge that Israel’s democratic legislature, where she (to this day) reserves the right to participate in votes on every serious issue facing the nation, is itself “anti-democratic.” Naturally, the Guardian carefully ignores the inherent contradiction of Zoabi’s stance – her criticism of Israel’s democracy in the context of the inherently totalitarian and theocratic (not to mention, misogynistic) orientation of the Islamist groups which she tacitly endorsed by her involvement with the flotilla.

Guardian readers are coolly, and quite nonchalantly, informed of Zoabi’s accusation – or, it would seem, “professional diagnosis” – that Israel suffers from “collective psychosis” and that the Israeli “regime….trades on fear and paranoia.”

Of course, characterizing a citizen who openly identifies and cooperates with the enemies of her own state into a victim of discrimination – and hyperbolically repeating irresponsible and dangerous threats of an impending violent uprising would seem pretty consistent with an institution which trades “on fear and paranoia.”

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