The Guardian’s safe space for bigotry

The CiF commenter who uses the moniker Berchmans is one of the many Guardian readers who seem to spend their days hovering over the CiF site, just waiting to pounce on any post which is even tangentially related to Israel or the Israel/Jewish lobby.  Indeed, his vitriol often crosses the line (even for CiF moderators), and many of his posts get deleted.

Sure enough, Berchmans responded to John Whitbeck’s recent anti-Semitic diatribe in CiF titled,On Palestine, the US is a rogue state” (see CW posts, here & here).

Whitbeck – who has openly called for a world without Zionism, characterizing Israel as a “racial supremacist, colonial settler project” – evoked, in his CiF column, the ugly specter of the most powerful nation on earth being “slavishly subservient” to the Jewish state.

As we noted more recently, the Guardian, responding to criticism from Mark Gardner of the CST, deleted the word “slavish” and the phrase “Israeli-American global domination”, noting that such language was “inconsistent with the Guardian’s editorial policy.”

However, not only did Berchmans not find Whitbeck’s screed offensive, he characterized it as follows:

Note that Berchmans’ endorsement received 180 “recommends” – fellow CiF readers who found Whitbeck’s screed on the dangers of organized Jewry spot-on.

While you may have observed that we, on occasion, respond to CiF columnists or commenters who possess a palpable hostility towards Israel and Jews with sarcasm, the gallows humor we occasionally succumb to merely represents a veiled expression of our quite sober understanding of the very real danger posed by the Guardian’s continued legitimization of this antipathy.

Let it be clear: There is nothing even remotely funny about such viciousness, such malice.

Written By
More from Adam Levick
The Independent or Richard Silverstein? An internet rumor of rabbis, soy and sex
Yair Rosenberg writes the following in an Oct. 30 story for Tablet: Visit...
Read More
Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.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