One might expect a Left-leaning, liberal newspaper which purports to include an anti-racist stance among its credentials to take notice of a well-planned and well-advertised demonstration by supporters of a fascist, terror-supporting and enabling regime held practically under its own nose on the streets of the city in which its main offices are situated.
One might presume that the presence of a supposedly Left-wing MP and a representative of the country’s official church (of which the monarch is head) at such an event would provide material for an editorial or at least a critical article, particularly when participants were engaged in glorifying terror (an offence under British law) and promoting the eradication of a nation-state under the orchestration of a registered charity.
Photo credit – Peter Marshall, Demotix.
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One could perhaps even expect some sort of discussion of the subject of how the unchecked dehumanization of an entire nation (on the streets of a supposedly civilised country) by means of the description of its members as a “disease” should be viewed in light of studies on the process of genocide.
If, however, these are the sort of standards one perhaps still expects from the Guardian, one would be sorely disappointed because nowhere on its UK news pages for August 17th or the two following days did that paper cover the Al Quds Day demonstration held in London last Friday.
One glaringly uncritical article on the subject of the sister demonstration held in Tehran did appear – on the Guardian’s pages for Israel and Iran.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, of course. Fascists – even just a thousand or so of them – were not supposed to have a free rein on London’s streets a mere 67 years after the defeat of the last regime which sought to ‘cleanse’ itself from the ‘contamination’ of Jews living in the ‘wrong’ place. Lessons were supposed to be learned after millions were exterminated simply because of their ethnic belonging. The terrible cost of that world war was supposed to have immunised us forever against blindness when confronted by the toxic mix of racism and political ideology.
It hasn’t. And that of course should worry us all.
But the fact that the self-proclaimed leading Left-liberal voice in the UK media choses to completely ignore such a naked display of racist hatred and incitement simply because of the specific affiliations of the offenders should also be a cause of concern to anyone who still assumes that the Guardian has any sort of legitimate claim to the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘Left’.
