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The Guardian Zaps Israel
Last uploaded : Friday 30th Oct 2009 at 00:07
Contributed by : Carol Gould

 

You can join a discussion of a version of this article at:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-guardian-wipes-israel-off-the-nobel-prize-map/ .

London

In January 2001 the British 'Guardian' newspaper ran an editorial entitled 'Israel Simply Has no Right to Exist' by Faisal Bodi. The author, one of a long list of anti-Israel journalists employed by the paper, has been ubiquitous over the years in his relentless attacks on the Jewish State and in his complaints about rampant Islamophobia. Among the more memorable nuggets from his missive were : “There is no moral case for the existence of Israel;” “Israel has no right to exist.. It’s a fact that I have always considered central to any genuine peace formula.” Bodi reminds us that a few years before the 2001 article he had incurred the wrath of the Anglo-Jewish community by saying in his student union newsletter, “the sympathy evoked by the Holocaust was a very handy cover for Israeli atrocities.”

Like many Israel-haters around the world he continues to write with frequency and uses the mantra that the Untied Nations Security Council did not quite sign, seal and deliver Israel as a legitimate state and that its very birth was an outrage unprecedented in world history. He asserts that by 1949 the Jews controlled 80% of Palestine and had expelled 700,000 non-Jews from their country; he never mentions the Jews expelled from Arab lands. In his 2001 diatribe Bodi finishes off his sweeping condemnation of Israel by announcing that if it will repent for its very existence, give up the legitimacy of its statehood and retreat into the wilderness the Palestinians will be “forgiving and magnanimous in return.”

Like Inayat Bunglawala, who in April 2003 as deputy chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain wrote to the Jewish Chronicle that the creation of Israel was a ‘terrible mistake,’ Bodi has over the years been ubiquitous in the pages of the Guardian. He warns us that the alternative to Israel’s continuing existence is “perpetual war.” Okay -- so imagine if I wrote in a mainstream British broadsheet newspaper that if Pakistan is not dismantled and given back to India there will be blood, guys. I think I would not be seen in print all that soon again. Bodi in 2001 was essentially asking for a country to be put out of business. He continues to flourish.

AN Wilson, though not a Guardian scribe, has suggested in recent years that Israel be “dismantled” and caused the Evening Standard to have to apologize for a column he had written that was full of invective against the Jewish State.

In the past year I have noticed that my very occasional sojourns into the Guardian‘s “Comment is Free” discussion have been deleted by the Moderator when saying something as innocuous as “The Palestinians, perennially complaining about lack of opportunity, have had next door to them for sixty-one years an example of a people who rose from oppression and created a high-tech democracy where gays can march and women do as they please without fear of being stoned to death..” Obviously it is not in the Guardian’s house style to laud the achievements of tiny, oil-impoverished Israel.

So, hey presto! In October 2009 Simon Rogers of the Guardian finally granted Faisal Bodi his wish and eradicated Israel. How did he do this?

On the day Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the Guardian decided to publish a chart showing the nations and people who had won the prize in the past century. To the utter disbelief of those who saw it, the list omitted the Israeli names. There was Yasser Arafat in 1994, clearly listed as a winner from a country that does not actually exist, “Palestine.” Harry’s Place -- specifically “Lucy Lips,” and Melanie Phillips in the Spectator picked it up, as did the Jewish Chronicle. What I liked about this staggering omission is that it corroborated my belief that there is an inordinate amount of Israel-hatred in the liberal press. It corroborates Julie Burchill’s courageous journalism protesting the “vile anti-Semitism” around her during her departure from the Guardian-Observer. People who have scoffed that Julie Burchill and I see an anti-Semite and Israel-hater in every corner can now please be silent. In National Review Online Tom Gross reported that the Guardian “has wiped Israel off the Nobel Prize map, much as Iranian despot Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would like to wipe Israel off the real map.”

In the Daily Telegraph a polite but bemused Tim Collard, a retired British diplomat, penned a short editorial about “the Jewish names missing from a Guardian list of Nobel Prize winners.” (Note he says “Jewish,” not Israeli or Zionist. There is a growing school of thought that folks who spurn Israelis don’t have much love for Jews either.) Tongue in cheek, he suggests that the vermillionion-faced Rogers quickly rectified the “oversight” but one blogger wrote: “Quite right. Editorial slip… I’m well aware that, if you omitted all the Jews from a list of Nobel Prize winners, it would be a fairly threadbare list..” As so many bloggers observed in the days after the Guardian’s spectacular omission, the Left is happy to bestow self-determination on every oppressed minority group in the universe but when Jews make a country, get tough and outshine everyone else in their neighborhood they are just brutal Zionist imperialists.

The Guardian incident is disturbing. Notwithstanding its dismissal by Tom Gross as a Left-wing rag the episode has left me feeling uncomfortable. It is worrying enough that the huge British Trades Union Congress has voted to support the Israel boycott movement, but that a mainstream newspaper would set about removing the names of Israeli Nobel Prize winners indicates to me that Britain is moving in a direction that ought to inspire Anglo-Jewish youth to depart the shores of Eurabia and the streets of what Melanie Phillips so aptly calls Londonistan.

I leave the last word to a Harry’s Place blogger, Augie:

“Does anyone need any more proof that The Guardian is antisemitic?”

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