Love of the Land: The intolerable provocation of the truth at the Guardian

The intolerable provocation of the truth at the Guardian

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
22 October 09

The Guardian yesterday carried an excellent piece about Israel on its Comment is Free website.

Yes, you read that right. It was by Harold Evans, the legendary ex-editor of the Sunday Times. Evans concluded his piece about the ‘moral atrocity’ of the Goldstone report thus:

The rockets [from Gaza] were war crimes and ought to have been universally condemned as such. While new rockets hit Israel over many months there was no rush by the world’s moralisers – including Britain – to censure Hamas, no urgency as there was in ‘world opinion’ when Israel finally responded. Then Israel was immediately accused of a ‘disproportionate’ response without anyone thinking: ‘What is a “proportionate”attack against an enemy dedicated to exterminating your people?’ A dedication to exterminating all of his?

Israel risked its own forces by imposing unprecedented restraint. In testimony volunteered to the human rights council (and ignored),Colonel Richard Kemp, a British commander in Bosnia and Afghanistan, stated: ‘The Israeli Defence Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.’ The ‘collateral damage’ was less than the Nato allies inflicted on the Bosnians in the conflict with Yugoslavia.

No doubt there were blunders. A defensive war is still a war with all its suffering and destruction. But Hamas compounded its original war crime with another. It held its own people hostage. It used them as human shields. It regarded every (accidental) death as another bullet in the propaganda war. The Goldstone report won the gold standard of moral equivalence between the killer and the victim. Now Britain wins the silver. Who’s cheering?

Well, the readers of CiF, for sure. Actually, they were erupting into a human lava flow of bile and bigotry in outrage that the Guardian had actually run an article about Israel that was truthful and fair. You can see samples of this reaction on the excellent CiFWatch site -- which is devoted entirely to monitoring and recording the institutionalised intellectual and moral depravity of CiF.

Talk about a public service.

Love of the Land: The intolerable provocation of the truth at the Guardian