On Sherwood’s implosion

You can tell a lot about someone’s politics by what get’s them angry, and what moves them to rage and elicits highly emotive responses.  

Harriet Sherwood’s recent outburst at Stephen Pollard of The JC over Geoffrey Alderman’s criticism of  Vittorio Arrigoni, the ISM activist with a proclivity towards supporting Hamas and posting anti-Semitic images on his Facebook account, speaks volumes about the extremism which informs her “View from Jerusalem”, as well as the Guardian’s institutionalized animosity towards the Jewish state more broadly.

As we noted previously, while the Guardian saw fit to lionize the anti-Israel activist following his death at the hands of Islamists in Gaza in four separate pieces (here, here, here and here), several of which referred to Vittorio, comically, as a “peace activist”, there wasn’t even a brief mention of the death of Daniel Vilfic at the hands of a Hamas anti-tank missile fired at his yellow school bus.

Interestingly, back in 2006, when Sherwood was the Foreign Editor, she noted her aspiration to achieve objective reporting:

“The first thing we need to be absolutely sure of is the purpose of our news reporting from the region. Our correspondents are there to give our readers accurate information about Israel-Palestine. We are not there to bat for one side or the other, but to report on the situation on the ground as we find it.”

Sherwood, to be sure, has increasingly shown herself tempted by the most radical anti-Zionist voices and prone to advancing tropes about Israelis which assign maximum malice, liberally leveling accusations of racism against Israelis, using callous pejoratives when characterizing Israelis who live beyond the Green Line (even those who were victims of brutal terrorist attacks), and sanctioning the most unhinged charges against the Jewish state – such as her uncritical quoting of the notorious Richard Falk in accusing Israel of engaging in “ethnic cleansing”.  

And, indeed, an empirical analysis by Israelinurse in 2010 clearly documented her egregious bias against Israel.

Which brings us back to Sherwood’s highly unprofessional and, evidently, unintelligible outburst at Stephen Pollard over Geoffrey Alderman’s critical comments which were, rightly in my view, quite critical of the terrorist-abetting Arrigoni.  

I don’t know if Sherwood personally knew Arrigoni, but it’s utterly fascinating, not to mention exquisitely hypocritical, that she was able to find her moral voice in condemning Alderman but rendered mute over the Al Qaeda-linked Jihadist group who was evidently responsible for Arrigoni’s cold-blooded murder.

Like I said, you can tell a lot about someone by observing what elicits their political outrage.

As Pollard noted about Sherwood’s hysterical outburst:

“[It was] Utterly bizarre. Or maybe not, given what she writes in the Guardian.”

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