Love of the Land: BBC Newsnight Plumbs New Depths Of Bigotry

BBC Newsnight Plumbs New Depths Of Bigotry

Melanie Phillips

The Spectator

10 September 09

I have just caught up with a quite disgusting item by Katya Adler, transmitted on Monday evening's Newsnight, on military rabbis in the Israel Defence Force. She presented as deeply shocking the fact that these rabbis are trained officers who carry arms and are now deployed in the front line of combat. Worse still, they actually seek to inspire and fortify Israeli soldiers by using the Jewish religion and the words of the Hebrew Bible! How shocking is that?! No mention of the fact that the British army has military chaplains who are also officers. True, they don’t bear arms – although some chaplains in Afghanistan are now saying they think that should change because it is too dangerous not to when on a battlefield that is far more lethal to them than any other on which they have served: the sole reason the IDF rabbis are armed.

But the really disgraceful element was Adler’s suggestion that that these rabbis were somehow the equivalent of Islamic jihadi fanatics who were transforming the mission of the IDF into ‘holy war’. Jewish religious belief, she implied, was the equivalent of the jihad. This appalling equation of course ignored the crucial difference between the jihad and the wars waged by the Israel Defence Force: that the jihad is aggressive and seeks to conquer, colonise, murder and enslave while the sole rationale for the IDF is to defend Israel against precisely such aggression.

Adler made this leap because to her, all orthodox Jewish religious observance is extreme, right-wing and aggressive; all settlers are orthodox and therefore extreme, right-wing and aggressive; thus all orthodox Jewish soldiers are settlers and therefore they are all extreme, right-wing and aggressive. Every aspect of that is tendentious, distorted, ignorant and bigoted.

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Love of the Land: BBC Newsnight Plumbs New Depths Of Bigotry