Al-Guardian puts the Jews in the back

Dennis MacShane, one of the authors of the report on British anti-Semitism, has an article in the Guardian’s Comment is Free section.

Already the emails are pouring into my parliamentary inbox denouncing Israel in terms that will be familiar to all readers of Cif and Guardian comment pages. (By the way, why was the Guardian’s coverage of our report quite as titchy as it was? The other broadsheets gave it full whack but it was a surprise to me that the Guardian reduced an important report based on a year’s parliamentary work to a tiny news story.)

But please, will those already gearing up to attack the report, read it? It is not about Israel and the Middle East. It is not about the behaviour of Israel in Lebanon. It is not about 1948, or 1967, or 1973. Nor is it about Hamas, Hizbollah, the intifadas.

What we did is what Parliament exists to do. We examined a problem. We heard witnesses. We read submissions. One MP, the West Midlands Labour MP, Bruce George told one witness : “You are describing a Britain that my constituents do not know exists.”

Precisely. There is a tiny slice of Britain – less than a quarter of a per cent of the population – who feel the quality of their lives, their right to their religion, their sense of history, the causes they support is being denied to them because they were born Jews, not Catholics, or Anglicans, or Muslims or Hindus.

I understand all the anger that people may feel about what happens overseas. Many hate America. But we do not throw bricks through schools for Americans in London or seek to desecrate the graves of Americans in Britain. My constituents of Kashmiri origin feel passionately about the behaviour of India in Kashmir. But this does not lead them to attack British Indians, or jostle a British Indian citizen who wears the marks of faith or community.

(Actually, the graves of American soldiers have been desecrated in Europe as a protest against American acts.) And by the way, Dennis is my new hero:

We make clear that criticism of Israel is to be expected. There is a double-standard at work, in that criticism of other regimes with terrible records of human rights abuses against Muslims (or whose planes have killed scores of children as Sri Lankan air force warplanes recently did in attacks on Tamil areas of the island) never get the same front-page coverage.

We are where we are with Israel. But we know of no mechanism that visits upon a community in Britain the responsibility for the actions that a sovereign state and UN member takes, however angry many are over Israel’s behaviour. Our universities should be as open to Jewish students to say what they want as they are to other faiths. Our newspapers should watch language and images so that there is not a crossing of a line into attacking Jewishness. In the 1930s, the language was of the Jewish “cabal.” Today, it is the Jewish “lobby” that is all-powerful. The demonisation of Jews was meant to have died in 1945. Alas it did not.

Instead we have to examine the acts against Jews and see them for what they are: racist attacks on individuals of a faith. We need to look at language and images especially those available on the internet, or via satellite and DVDs. Liberatarians will have no problem with copies of the hideously anti-semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion being on sale in Arab shops in London’s Edgware Road.

Naturally, the comments to this Guardian post bring out the anti-Semites, who obviously don’t understand irony in the least. Here’s one of them fisking the piece:

“You are describing a Britain that my constituents do not know exists.”

That’s right, I only knew about the city of London and how it was given to a powerful banking familly / syndicate.

“Today, it is the Jewish “lobby” that is all-powerful.”

In the states, yes. But it is more of a corporatist banking lobby than just a Jewish lobby. But it is rather helpful to just generalise that and leave out the details, leave those for those dumb grauniad readers..

Good luck in implanting apartheid in Britain, hope the plan to hand over Britain to the “Jews” will be a success. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a 5 year old patient who has arrived with a peculiar gunshot wound. It seems the bullet has fractured upon impact leaving thousands of microscopic pieces in her body. And we have a patient in serious condition after being stopped for an hour at the checkpoint. On top of that we are very busy because the IDF also bombed a hospital.

And all this knowing that no matter what we shall be held in poverty by the banking and corporate international syndicate. I mean they want a private central bank for the whole of the EU now… what next…

I rarely read the comments any more, because, well, I get enough Jew-hatred in my daily look at the world media, thank you. But I read far enough to find this one:

You didn’t need a commission of enquiry to find anti-semetism in Britain. Just go through any Guardian comment thread regarding Lebanon or Palestinians and it’s fairly obvious.

Read the rest, and there is a link to the report.