The UK commentariat today is positively operatic in condemning Israel for the shelling of the Jabalaya UN school.
Here's some extracts from Mary Liddell, in the Daily Telegraph, in full cry, recycling some hoary anti-semitic resentments and assumptions about supposed Israeli power over the US, and making gratuitous reference to David Miliband's ethnic Jewish roots as she goes :
Israel has attracted much sympathy from those who don't buy the argument that there is anything disproportionate in its response to Hamas aggression. Some westerners have gazed at images of limp bodies as if they are the mortal remains of some lesser breed of child.....
In the dying days of his presidency, Mr Bush stuck to his guns, condoning Israel's attack on Hamas. Most consider his orthodoxy discredited: they're right. The danger is that the pendulum may swing towards a world that uses Bush's tainted absolutism as an excuse to abstain ever from saying what is right and wrong. At least we knew where Mr Bush was coming from. Behind Barack Obama's silence lies the suspicion that the incoming president will be almost as much in hock as his predecessor to the powerful Israeli lobby.
This is not quite fair. Mr Brown has called repeatedly for a ceasefire. He has worked with the French and Egyptians to halt hostilities and secure an end to the blockade that has strangled Gaza. The PM has come close to expressing the revulsion he must feel at watching families annihilated. He can fairly claim not to have sat on the fence, as Tony Blair did when Israel attacked Lebanon.
Mr Brown, who has (limited) form on getting tough, told the Knesset last July that Israel must pursue peace with its neighbours. David Miliband, the grandson of Jews who escaped the Holocaust, recently infuriated Israel by demanding, rightly, that food and cosmetics imported by Britain from illegal Israeli settlements should be labelled accordingly....
Bring back the politics of denunciation. Yes, Hamas is a vicious neighbour. And yes, the West also has dubious warfare on its conscience. But nothing excuses acts so sickening that, if perpetrated by a less-blessed state, they would be reviled throughout the world as war crimes. Once again, the world has declined to tell Israel, in terms, that it has no divine mandate for destruction.
As you'll have noticed, there's a passing reference to Hamas as--"a vicious neighbour". Is that all? Road rage over parking habits, perhaps? Planting Leylandii hedges? The odd bit of nasty name calling? The idea that years of Hamas war crimes including suicide bombings and 8,000 rocket attacks, quite apart from firing from the heart of civilian Gaza might be behind the reason for the Israeli military action is not on her horizon. Limp bodies on the Israeli side of the border don't seem to have existed.
Today, her column, in the course of raging condemnation of Israel, waxes on about how the Hamas rockets were all the fault of Israel's blockading Gaza. Only, as
this beautiful bit of fisking by Marcus at Harry's Place demonstrates, they can't have been. Because Hamas has been committing the war crimes of suicide bombing and rocketing Israel in quantity long before the blockade was established in the wake of the Hamas coup over the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority in Gaza.
None of that information is going to stop the tide of anti-Israel statement from the self-righteous of the UK. The prize, though, has to go to another chap with form, Chris Davies, Liberal MEP for North West England, and formerly a leader of the Liberal European Parliament group, until he was
sacked for writing anti-semitic emails to one of his Jewish constituents who wrote to complain about his one-sided attacks on Israel.
Kudos to
The Spectator for picking up Davies'
raving response to Israel's bombing campaign against Hamas, in which he repeatedly plays down Hamas' rocket attacks whilst branding Israel as having "fundamentally racist" policies. The irony is that he builds this round his own profoundly demeaning perception of the Palestinian side as a donkey on a rope, which he then defines without a shred of evidence as the view of the Palestinians held by the Israelis:
Those of us who are horrified by the killing in Gaza are forced to criticise its grossly disproportionate nature rather than condemn it outright.
The reality that this obscures is that the Israelis have the Palestinians tied like a donkey on a rope. They deny the animal much that it needs, they poke it and humiliate it. From time to time the donkey kicks out. The Israeli response is then to shout ¨Bad Donkey,¨ and to hit it, and hit it, until it is cowed and subdued. The failure of the West is to bring in the police and make an arrest for mistreatment of an animal!
The racism that goes to the heart of the Israeli approach is to assume that the Palestinians can be beaten and beaten until they are subdued and will then do what they are told. It fails to recognise that the Palestinians might respond to such treatment in exactly the same way as Israelis would – with defiance.......
It is time for Liberal Democrats to call a halt to the attempt to ride two horses and to try not to upset the Israeli lobby. Our support for the Palestinian cause is well enough known amongst those (by no means all!) in the Jewish community who will not countenance criticism of Israel. It is not well enough known amongst the majority who are appalled by Israel´s behaviour.
We should make clear that we will campaign tooth and nail for a viable and independent Palestinian state and will demand an end to deals with an Israeli government that bases its policy approach on a stance that is fundamentally racist.
Positively heroic, Mr Davies! Perhaps you know quite a few donkeys who fire rockets and mortars from the middle of cities and indoctrinate and send youngsters off to Tel-Aviv as suicide bombers. But I expect Baroness Tonge will step up and outdo you any day now.
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