Anti-semitism on the rise

Wednesday December 18, 2002 01:19

by Dave D

The bombing of children in Israel sees the return of latent anti-Semitism. Indymedia's coverage of the conflict in the Middle East highlighted.

Indymedia's biased coverage of the conflict in the Middle East was rightly alluded to by Henry McDonalds at the weekend.

Anti-semitism briefly raised its head and exposed itself in tooth and claw last month when the Pat Kenny Show discussed a suicide bomb that killed 11 schoolchildren in Israel. Despite harrowing reports of young girls and boys crying 'Mama! Mama!' from the bombed bus, no sympathy was expressed by those who took the time to call into Kenny's weekday radio show. Instead, he was met with gales of 'whataboutery' as callers ignored the slaughter on the bus, preferring to focus on the deaths of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories at the hands of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).

Even an experienced broadcaster such as Kenny was shocked at the callers' lack of compassion for Israeli children. Part of this, to be fair, is due to the Irish association with the underdog; a by-product of our own colonial past. But throughout Irish history in the 20th century there has been a deep mistrust, at times hostility, towards the Jews and later Israel. During and after the Second World War official Irish policy was to keep Jewish refugees out of the Free State. The reasoning at the Department of Foreign Affairs was that anti-Semitism was widespread and deep throughout the State.

When you raise the question of anti-Semitism with the left in Ireland you are immediately hit in the face with this counter-argument. The Palestinian struggle, they protest, is not directed at the Jewish people but rather the pro-Imperialist Zionist oppressors. Arafat's Palestinian Authority wants to create a paradise in which Arab, Jew and Christian can live as equals.

At the heart of the apologias for Palestinian terror or Israeli oppression is a denial of the facts. A large section of the Palestinian populace back movements that are murderously anti-Semitic. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are dedicated to the total destruction of the Israeli State, and consequently its people, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. Even Egypt - the only Arab country that signed a peace treaty with Israel - is currently broadcasting a soap opera which repeats historically discredited Tsarist lies about the Jewish plot to take over the world, the notorious 'Protocols of the elders of Zion'.

Amos Elon, the Israeli writer and proponent of a Palestinian state, was deeply shocked during a tour of Arab capitals in the mid 1990s by the extent of anti-Semitic propaganda besmirching public discourse. Yet you will read none of this in the journals, websites and newspapers of the Irish far left. The Irish groupies who flock to the West Bank and Gaza in the hope of becoming the Florence Nightingales of Third World Liberation choose to ignore these indisputable facts.

By Henry McDonald, Summary Provided
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