Willful malice in the Guardian letter section

This is a guest post by AKUS

The Guardian’s letter section, at least that portion of it that makes its way to the web, provides the Guardian with an opportunity to hide behind the most scurrilous attacks against Israel without taking actual responsibility for the content. In fact, if challenged, it would probably hold the letters up as an example of “free speech”, just as the homophobic monsters who demonstrate at funerals for gays in the USA do for their demonstrations and placards.

Under the banner of “News:From the Observer:The big issue” the Guardian headlined: We need democracy in the Middle East – and Israel.  Never mind that the “big issue” in the Middle East is not Israel but the revolts in the countries around it and that Israel is a democracy. The paper provided set of letters presented as alternative views to Nick Cohen’s eloquent article of February 27, 2011, “Our absurd obsession with Israel is laid bare“. Several letters included a mélange of false statements that compounded outright lies, breathtaking ignorance, and a lack of context into dehumanization of Israel and Israelis.

W. Williamson, Durham wrote:

Israel is, however, part of the equation of oppression in the Middle East. It denies human rights and democratic choices in Gaza, where it enforces an inhuman siege to compound the dreadful violence of Operation Cast Lead in 2008/9. It occupies the West Bank in violation of international law.

Never mind that Israel left the Gazans to themselves in 2005 and the denial of human rights is practiced by the government the Gazans elected when taking the only opportunity they were given by Hamas to make a “democratic choice”? That the “inhuman siege” that allows hundreds of tons of food and other supplies into Gaza daily is a blockade intended to slow the flow of materials for the manufacture of rockets that are still fired daily, but barely ever reported, into Israel? That Cast Lead was the response to “the dreadful violence” of 8,000 rockets fired by these democrats into Israel towns and settlements between 2005 and 2009? That the occupation of the West Bank is not “in violation of international law” but a consequence of Jordan’s attack on Israel in 1967, which was in violation of international law?

Not content with this reworking of history and facts, W. Williamson continued with sweeping statements about Israel and Israelis:

West Bank settlers are among the most incorrigible and dangerous racist bigots of our times. Israel prides itself as the only democracy in the Middle East. In Gaza and on the West Bank it acts like a fascist state. Europe should now, as Cohen argues, demand democratisation not only throughout the Arab world but also in Israel.

Mr. Williamson needs to get out of Durham more and see what “racist bigots” really look like in places around the world– even in England, caught between the EDL and the Muslim fanatics calling for an end to democracy in England and Europe.  Israel is not “in Gaza” and the “fascist state” is run by Hamas theocrats that the Gazans elected. The Palestinian Authority controls the majority of the Arab population on the West Bank in equally hard-line fashion.  He needs to learn to distinguish between Israel, a democratic country, and the West Bank, a non-country which yet has its own nominally democratic self-government.

When he calls for “democratization” of Israel, does he not understand that the West Bank Arabs and the Gazans are not part of the Israeli electorate and cannot participate in Israel elections any more than he can? That it is the PA and Hamas which refuse to hold elections among their own people? That “democracy” is not a synonym for “Israeli national suicide”?

From Watford, Ian Lowery contends that many Arab dictators and Western powers have supported Israel for years and that this support for Israel has prevented peace from breaking out:

Many of these dictators propped up Israel’s onslaught on Palestinian human rights for years, which, arguably, is why they are there in the first place supported by pro-Israel western governments.

Without this support for Israel, a genuine peace agreement would have been on the table years ago.

This bizarre conspiracy theory flies in the face of all statements by Arab leaders and EU representatives, the Obama administration’s obsequious crawl to the PA and the Saudi initiative and infers that: (a) Arab countries support the denial of human rights to Palestinians (by Israel) because somehow that improves their own situation; (b) The dictatorships were therefore created by and are now supported by “pro-Israel Western governments” despite the support for the revolts in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere (c) If the Arab dictators had not supported Israel, Israel would have been forced to make peace with the Palestinians for unexplained reasons (d) and it is all Israel’s fault anyway that Arab dictators and Western countries support Israel.

These letters which the Guardian and Observer so readily publish demonstrate how a bizarre mixture of lies and fantasies is used to attack Israel no matter what it does.  It is clear that we are dealing with a pathology that yields to neither to facts nor logic. Israel and Israelis have become Europe’s new Jews – a country and people to be held outside the bounds of humanity, as the lies pile up like a new edition of the “Protocols”.

Israel will have to deal with its Middle Eastern neighbors as it best knows how, and continue to expand its new alliances with the emerging Asian powerhouses of India and China who are equally alarmed by the Islamist threats they face. As the Jews once left Spain and Portugal when they fell under the influence of the Inquisition for the freedom of South then North America, Israel will need to leave the fanaticism of the declining Europeans and their burgeoning Muslim population behind and continue to move ahead with its natural allies in the new world order. Israel’s future lies with America, India and China.

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