Guardian caves in to racist pressure on Gaza
In today’s Guardian there is a review by Stuart Jeffries of a Channel 4 documentary about the October 2003 Hamas attacks on Israel; it is a four-star review (out of five) which praises the programme for its interviews with the Israeli victims and their relatives, with the reservation that it really doesn’t delve into the historical context. The link above is to an archived copy, as the Guardian have removed the original from its website “pending review” after receiving a flood of complaints.
One Day in October is composed of heartbreaking survivor interviews along with disturbing footage from phones and security cameras. If you want insight into why Israel is doing what it is doing in Gaza and Lebanon, this film may help. It clearly demonstrates that the IDF and Mossad were caught napping on 7 October last year as those they were meant to protect were slaughtered. Never again, one might think.
If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians, though, One Day in October won’t help. Indeed, it does a good job of demonising Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters, asset-stripping the kibbutz while bodies lay in the street and the terrified living hid.
I heard the complaints about this programme on Twitter before I read the article. Former Guardian columnist, now at the reliably pro-Israel Times and Unherd, quipped “does the Guardian understand this was a documentary?” while Simon Sebag Montefiore posted a long tweet bemoaning what he calls the paper’s “final departure from the pluralistic liberal tradition that made it a great newspaper, thanks to its capture by … an activist, ideological, anti-Western and more than that, anti-factual front”. The Guardian, under the same editorship as now, printed whinges from Freeman, who had written for the paper for decades, about the so-called antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labour party, accusing anyone who disagreed with the accusations of ‘gaslighting’ them, along with similar moans from other Jewish writers, some of whom still write for them. It follows the familiar Zionist pattern of alleging bias (and often flooding newspapers, TV stations etc. with co-ordinated letters or emails of complaint) when the media print or transmit anything that is not biased in their favour, and fails to treat the Palestinian side of the story with other than the contempt they expect, a demand they are accustomed to seeing honoured, as we see with the BBC, whose presenters interrupt any guest who calls Israel’s Gaza genocide what it is. They are so used to it, in fact, that they respond with threatening overtures when argued with; we saw the Telegraph’s Zoe Strimpel warn another participant on a panel to “remember the optics of who you’re talking to” when challenged about her denial of Israeli atrocities on BBC’s Politics Live this week: in other words, your name can be blackened if you get on the wrong side of us.
The Zionist demand is that Israeli killings be regarded as always justifiable, even when they are plainly targeted at children, or at other manifestly innocent people, and likewise with the destruction of entire city blocks, schools, universities and the hospitals whose staff are trying to treat people injured by Israel’s missiles and bombs, while Palestinian ones are always to be portrayed as heinous, senseless and racist. Israeli attacks on Palestinians are always to be seen in context (in this case, of the October 2023 attacks) while Palestinian attacks on Israelis are always to be seen in isolation. If you mention the long history of Israeli oppression against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (real oppression, not the mild disadvantage this term is commonly used to mean in the west), they accuse you of being an apologist for terrorism. Again, they use veiled threats to ensure they get their way; we saw this on Channel 4 News a few months ago, where one of their correspondents was lectured by an Israeli representative to be “very wary of trying in any way to contextualise the atrocities of October 7th” when the presenter mentioned the prior occupation of Gaza (in fact, he’d have done better to remind him of the ongoing West Bank occupation and the relentless crimes of the settlers; Gaza’s formal occupation ended in 2005, though an “arm’s length” occupation remained in force). Back in 2004, I attended a rally in Trafalgar Square, London, in which a representative of a fanatical Zionist organisation called Betar issued a threat to British Muslims that we condemn terrorism unequivocally: “moral equivalences and partial condemnations will not be tolerated!”.
All the Zionists carping about the Stuart Jeffries article are collaborators in genocide, whether they are Jewish or not. Their aim is to shout down anyone who dares challenge their supremacy. It would be that much easier for those of us who sympathise with the Palestinians to condemn the killings of Israeli civilians by Hamas (much as Muslims living in the west mostly freely condemn terrorism against civilians by Al-Qa’ida or ISIS affiliates) if those demanding it would do the same when Israeli forces are the killers, but they never do. They deny, or they blame Hamas even when Hamas was not present. Politicians mouth platitudes about the need for a ceasefire and for “both sides” to abide by international law, but will not call it genocide, nor interrupt the flow of arms to the side currently engaged in a genocide of a trapped civilian population; people are arrested for having a picture of a glider stuck to their bags while on a demonstration, while arms are freely exported to Israel and the Israeli ambassador is allowed to speak at the Labour party’s conference, something that party would never have done for any Serb Chetnik or representative of the Hutu Interahamwe in the 1990s.
So, it’s a huge shame on the Guardian for giving in to these demands and pulling Stuart Jeffries’ article. The complaints were orchestrated, as such complaints always are, from a pro-genocide lobby which only has a problem with the killing of civilians when they are Israeli civilians. It would not have given in to the same demands from the supporters of one side in a conflict, let alone one as involved in heinous violence as Israel is now; it should not do the same for supporters of Israel.
Image source: Tiberias (@ecomarxi) on Twitter.
Possibly Related Posts:
- The benefits of learning Jewish history
- There’s a genocide going on
- The Holocaust, Gaza and “how genocide happens”
- The irrelevance of the Blood Libel
- They weren’t protests
