Love of the Land: A portrait of the extremist mainstream in Great Britain, a man with a problem with Jewish names

A portrait of the extremist mainstream in Great Britain, a man with a problem with Jewish names

Robin Shepherd
Robinshepherdonline.com
28 March '10

Back in 2003, Richard Ingrams, one of Britain’s best known columnists and a co-founder of the satirical weekly Private Eye wrote in the Observer (sister newspaper on Sunday to the Guardian) the following gem about his attitude to Israel and the Jews:

“I have developed a habit,” he said, “when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it.”

As I have said on many occasions (see previous entry for example), there is now no price to be paid in mainstream Britain for such attitudes. They are taken as normal. Now consider his latest piece of writing, this time in the Independent, as an example of what happens when such “normal” attitudes are allowed to fester.

Ingrams writes his column in the form of a diary which then goes on to address other subjects. Yesterday, he opened his piece by reflecting on Britain’s decision last week to expel an Israeli diplomat over the Dubai assassination of a Hamas terrorist. Here is what he said, with my italics to highlight the tone he adopts:

“The expulsion of a Mossad man from London following the affair over the forged passports used by a gang of Israeli assassins in Dubai is welcome, if only to remind us that regardless of this single expulsion Mossad operates openly out of London with the full approval of the British Government.

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Love of the Land: A portrait of the extremist mainstream in Great Britain, a man with a problem with Jewish names

Love of the Land: Senior UK Liberal-Democrat fired after suggestions Israelis have been harvesting bodily organs in Haiti

Senior UK Liberal-Democrat fired after suggestions Israelis have been harvesting bodily organs in Haiti

Robin Shepherd
Robin Shepherd Online
14 February '10

In a rare piece of good news from the UK, Baroness Tonge has been dismissed as spokesperson for the Liberal Democrat Party in the House of Lords after suggesting that Israel should investigate claims that members of its relief team in Haiti had been harvesting bodily organs and selling them on the black market.

Tonge has a sordid record of anti-Israel extremism. In 2004, she even went on record as saying she might have become a suicide bomber had she been born a Palestinian.

In her latest outburst, she associated herself with a medieval-style blood libel which was started last year by Sweden’s top selling newspaper Aftonbladet. The paper claimed that Israeli soldiers were murdering Palestinian children in order to harvest their bodily organs and sell them on the black market, possibly in conjunction with Jews in the United States. After Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt refused to distance his country from the story it spread like wildfire across the Muslim world and beyond.

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Love of the Land: Senior UK Liberal-Democrat fired after suggestions Israelis have been harvesting bodily organs in Haiti

Love of the Land: From enlightenment into darkness at Oxford and Cambridge

From enlightenment into darkness at Oxford and Cambridge

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
09 February '10

From the blog of the Community Security Trust – the self-defence organisation of the British Jewish community:

Last night Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, spoke at the Oxford Union. A meeting that was frequently disrupted by members of the audience reached its low point when one person shouted “Kill the Jews” in Arabic, before being thrown out of the meeting.

... There is a detailed account of the meeting on The edge of where? blog, which has this revealing vignette about the attitude of at least one person in the audience:

Outside the debating chamber, all the while, protestors were shouting ‘free free Palestine from the river to the sea’. When Ayalon argued that this chant amounted to a call for Israel’s destruction, and asked where Israeli Jews would have to go for Palestine to be free ‘from the river to the sea’, the woman sitting next to me said ‘back to where they came from!’ I couldn’t resist and had to ask her where exactly it was that she expected Jews to go ‘back to’, to which she replied, ‘well you’re in England, you appear to be doing fine’. I didn’t think it worthwhile to point out that actually my grandparents ‘came from’ Poland and Czechoslovakia, and that the reason I am in England today is that in the 1930s they were not ‘doing fine’ in the countries they ‘came from’.

This follows the disinviting by Cambridge Israel Society of the Israeli historian Benny Morris, one-time darling of the left for his revisionist history of David Ben Gurion but now apparently a non-person because he tells the truth about the Arab threat to Israel.

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Related: 2 Press Releases: Oxford Union to take disciplinary action against students who disrupted Deputy FM Ayalon. Ayalon looking into possibility of pressing charges against student who shouted "Slaughter the Jews" at Oxford Union event

Love of the Land: From enlightenment into darkness at Oxford and Cambridge

Love of the Land: The Most Unethical Act: Losing a War

The Most Unethical Act: Losing a War

Jonathan S. Tobin
Commentary Magazine
07 February '10

(Excellent article. Y.)

Monday night, PBS’s American Experience series will broadcast a new documentary titled The Bombing of Germany, about the strategic-bombing campaign carried out against the Nazis by American forces in World War II. Coming from the liberal-leaning PBS and in an era where denunciations of American military actions — even in the “good war” against Nazi Germany — have become commonplace, it would have been no surprise if this film was yet another revisionist attempt to decry Allied tactics as immoral. This impression is reinforced by the introduction to the film on PBS’s website, which highlights the number of German civilian casualties incurred by Allied bombing and the “defining moments that led the U.S. across a moral divide” that would make it easier to drop a nuclear bomb on Japan. Indeed, the narration heard during the opening moments of The Bombing of Germany goes straight to this conclusion when it says that by the time the war ended, the bombing left “both German cities and America’s lofty ideals in ruins.”

But, fortunately, there is more to this documentary than the facile conclusion that the bombing of Germany was so immoral that it cannot be defended even in a war in which the future of civilization was at stake. By the time the 50-minute film is over, liberals expecting another trashing of America are left with some conclusions that not only reinforce the morality of American tactics during that war but also might affect the way we think about contemporary conflicts.

The story of the bombing offensive is complex. During the war, Britain’s Royal Air Force believed that the key to knocking German war industries was to burn down the cities where the factories existed. From their frame of reference, there was no moral distinction between the factories themselves and the homes of the defense workers who created the material that enabled the Nazi regime to commit the crimes against humanity that made the war a matter of life or death for the free world.

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Love of the Land: The Most Unethical Act: Losing a War