Melanie Phillips on the new anti-semitism...

Melanie has written a very good article on the new anti-semitism. Please read the whole article...

But neither I nor anyone else says Israel shouldn’t be criticised, even strongly. What I’m talking about goes far beyond legitimate criticism and turns instead into irrational and malevolent hatred. What we’re seeing now is a new mutation of the virus of Jew-hatred. Whereas previously the aim was to eradicate the Jews, now it is to eradicate the Jewish state. Instead of Jews being demonised, the Jewish state is demonised. Israel, the one democracy in the Middle East, is now viewed with a loathing that is never applied to Arab dictatorships. Anti-Israelism and, in particular, anti-Sharonism are being used as a fig-leaf for hatred of the Jews. And this twisting of the narrative of Jewish victimhood into one of Israeli oppression has legitimised an eruption of explicit prejudice against Jews, which has resulted in a grotesque tacit alliance between progressives, the far-right and the Islamic jihad.

Presentation of Israel in public discourse is pathologically unbalanced, and morphs seamlessly into classic anti-Jewish stereotypes. I am talking here about a wholesale moral inversion, in which the very worst is automatically believed of people who normally tell the truth, while claims made by those who have told demonstrable lies are reported as proven fact; in which victims are treated as victimisers, and vice versa; in which respectable British people say openly that they sympathise with the mass murder of Jews by Palestinians because they are ‘fighting for their freedom’; and in which Israel is being systematically delegitimised and dehumanised.

Media coverage of Israel has become an unstoppable torrent of lies, distortions, libels, abandonment of objectivity for malice and hatred, and obsessional vilification and demonisation. It ignores or downplays the fact that Israel conducts military operations only in self-defence. Israel’s history is routinely denied or ignored, so its attempts to protect life are falsely represented as acts of murder. Doubtless, as with all military occupations it is committing some human rights abuses, which should be condemned. But all its military actions are seen as human rights abuses, even where -- as in the notorious massacre-that-never-was in Jenin -- it suffered a relatively severe death toll because its tactics aimed to minimise the loss of innocent life. Intrinsic to this misrepresentation is the prejudice that the Jews do revenge and punishment. The result is that it seems the Jews alone are obliged not to defend themselves but to submit passively to mass murder.