Guardian falsely claims Israel is first country since Holocaust to shoot asylum seekers.

New book by Suketu Mehta extracted in The Guardian this week,
So this Guardian piece downplays the Holocaust, attempts to turn Jews within Israel against each other and, in my opinion, compares Israeli policy to the Nazis
New book by Suketu Mehta extracted in The Guardian this week,

By Richard Millett

The Guardian has published a long extract from This Land Is Our Land, a new book by author Suketu Mehta. It’s basically a criticism of white civilisation’s fear of “brown and black people reproducing”. Mehta praises Trudeau, Macron and Merkel but attacks Obama, Clinton, Trump, Orban, Poland, Austria and….Israel.

On Israel Mehta writes:

“Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe were the harbinger of today’s global migrants; many of today’s covenants that protect refugees came into existence in response to their predicament. So it is particularly painful to hear that the first army in our time to shoot at people crossing the border looking for asylum was the Israeli army. In 2015, Israeli soldiers fired on African migrants crossing the Egyptian border, wounding a number of them. In December 2017, the Knesset passed a law under which the 40,000 asylum seekers in Israel “will have the option to be imprisoned or leave the country”.”

Mehta is referring to an incident in August 2015 when the IDF shot warnings into the air when a group of Sudanese migrants were trying to cross from Egypt into Israel. One of the potential migrants (who didn’t end up crossing into Israel) had a gun which he was firing at the Egyptian army. When the other migrants still didn’t desist from entering Israel three were shot in the leg, survived and were taken to hospital immediately. The IDF admitted the firing was unjustified and the incident was being investigated by Israel’s military advocate general.

A quick search reveals that in 2010 the UN condemned Egypt for killing 60 migrants at that same border since 2007.

As for the 2017 Knesset law Israel tries to differentiate between economic migrants and asylum seekers like all countries do, tries to return migrants to safe havens if their original countries are deemed unsafe and gives them a deportation grant of $3500.

Meanwhile, at least 34,361 migrants have died in various tragic ways due to the restrictive policies of “Fortress Europe” since 1993 according to a study. My country, the UK, even deported a terminally ill cancer patient back to Africa in 2008.

And the comparison of the Israeli army to Nazis is antisemitic (according to IHRA).

Mehta continues:

“Every majority is composed of a set of discrete minorities. When you go after Palestinians and Africans in Israel, the Reform Jews are next. When you go after Muslims in India, the Christians are next. When you go after Muslims and Mexicans in America, the Jews and gays are next.”

There are political tensions in Israel between reform and orthodoxy but this statement is absurd. Israel absorbs Jews irrespective of their level of religious observance. It’s its raison d’etre for existing!

Mehta invokes the Holocaust again by quoting a David Glosser who wrote on Facebook:

“If in the early 20th century the USA had built a wall against poor desperate ignorant immigrants of a different religion, like the Glossers, all of us would have gone up the crematoria chimneys with the other 6 million kinsmen whom we can never know.’”

This relativises the Holocaust to the extent that the Holocaust will eventually become devalued, which is very dangerous for future generations who won’t be able to notice the unique signs of a future genocide.

So this Guardian piece downplays the Holocaust, attempts to turn Jews within Israel against each other and, in my opinion, compares Israeli policy to the Nazis (why mention the two in the same paragraph otherwise?).

The Guardian should retract the false claim that the Israeli army is “the first army in our time to shoot at people crossing the border looking for asylum”. At the very least the full context should be supplied.

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