Racism on Today

This morning I heard a shocking racist rant from an Israeli whose family were (allegedly) among those taken hostage by Hamas in last week’s raid on communities in the Gaza border region, on the BBC’s Today programme, broadcast on Radio 4 for three hours at 6pm every weekday. The feature was presented by Martha Kearney, formerly of Woman’s Hour, who was reporting from Jerusalem. The man told us that he feared a number of his relatives had been taken captive, including elderly people in fragile health with heart conditions and Parkinson’s disease, but as the interview continued he claimed that he had seen a film with a four-year-old child (presumably Israeli) being held a house in Gaza with other children around him and a father making a movie and enjoying the situation. He then opined (unchallenged by Kearney):
We’re not dealing with people. We’re not dealing with animals. It’s worse than animals; animals wouldn’t do the things they’re doing.
Asked by Kearney what “he thinks should happen now” in regard to ground troops being sent into Gaza, he said he was behind the government in whatever they wanted to do, that the rest of the world needed to stop judging Israel and blaming everything wrong in the Middle East on Israel:
For years, we’ve been missiled from Gaza, and for years we tried to make peace with them, to give them money, to give them things just to calm things down, and this is the time to stop it.
After an exchange with Kearney about prisoner swaps (“I don’t care about the Palestinian prisoners”), he offers (unprompted but unchallenged) this opinion:
It’s very important to everyone in the world to understand and to hear it: there is radical Muslim all over the world. There is radical Muslims inside all of Europe, the US, everywhere, and some of these days, it’s not so far as you think, you will wake up in the same scenario we’re experiencing right now in Israel. This will happen in London, in Paris, in Germany, everywhere. It’s OK to be nice people, it’s OK to try to hug everybody, to say that we want peace, but peace with who? You cannot make peace with somebody who wants to kill you.
You might say in response to this that he is talking about radicals or terrorists rather than Palestinians in general, but the remarks about “human animals” being made to justify the attacks on large numbers of civilian targets in Gaza (invariably justified by claiming that they are Hamas assets of one sort or another), I rather suspect otherwise. In any case, it is far in excess of what would be tolerated if said about Jews or Israelis, including the soldiers and settlers who are known for harassing and abusing Palestinians as they go about their daily lives, especially in the West Bank. Anyone defending Palestinians’ basic human rights has got used to measuring their words very carefully to avoid triggering someone’s ‘antisemitism’ detecting instinct, and even then they are still routinely accused of it, yet now we are hearing Israelis and their overseas allies use Nazi-like language, comparing Palestinians to animals and to savages, and the media relay it uncritically.
The claim about how generous Israel has been to the Palestinians over the years must also not go unchallenged. Israel maintains an occupation not really to protect Israel proper but to protect settlements in the West Bank, who are allowed to abuse and attack Palestinian civilians daily while Palestinians are punished for retaliating. Israel’s wall cuts Palestinians off from their own farms, the state and military allows settlers to destroy their crops, they invade Palestinians’ homes to use as military lookouts, it steals their water and destroys stores of rainwater, it punishes whole families (e.g. by demolishing their houses) for the deeds of one member, it obstructs them as they travel; Palestinians are subjected to military trials while Israelis enjoy a civil court system, and even juveniles are imprisoned for throwing stones at the soldiers who occupy their country. Israel has not offered a meaningful, acceptable peace plan but only ever a patchwork of autonomous territories, surrounded by Israeli occupied territory, without free access to any other country (the border with Jordan, for example, is somewhere Israel insists on retaining control of), yet Palestinians’ rejection of these plans are taken as proof of their unreasonableness.
I also dispute that the man’s personal grief (assuming that his personal story is genuine and not propaganda, as two of the widely-reported stories about Hamas atrocities this past weekend that have been parroted by gullible westerners have turned out to be) justifies his racist attitude. I know people who have suffered trauma, rape victims and abused wives, for example, who have not come to hate men in general or become prejudiced against the ethnic group the abuser came from, if it was not their own. If a woman went on a racist rant about Black men (or whatever race the man came from) when interviewed by the BBC or other respectable broadcaster about her ordeal after being raped, it would surely be cut out if it had been pre-recorded, and someone would be shouting “cut!” if it were live. His attitude reflects the culture which has been fostered in Israel by the government and media; that they are generous people who have dealt gently with repeated provocation and only now decided enough is enough, rather than a foreign invader that used terrorism when it was convenient and which has been doing most of the provoking. Let’s not delude ourselves that anything Hamas or any other Palestinian armed group do would be accepted as legitimate resistance by Israel or its slavish supporters. Israel does not want a just peace; it wants domination, and expects from the native people nothing other than total surrender to permanent Israeli overlordship.
The segment can be found here; it starts at 1hr 30mins, and the page for BBC editorial complaints is here. Let’s not forget that we pay the licence fee too, and we should not have to pay to subsidise this racist garbage, any more than we should have to subsidise the Sun newspaper to be allowed to read books or access a public library.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Elephant in the echo chamber
- Reflections on the fall of Bashar al-Assad
- The benefits of learning Jewish history
- There’s a genocide going on
- The Holocaust, Gaza and “how genocide happens”