From Ian:
Brendan O’Neill: According to the left, Israeli citizens deserve to be murdered
Brendan O’Neill: According to the left, Israeli citizens deserve to be murdered
Leftists are far more alarmed by Israel’s response to the stabbings than they are by the stabbings themselves. They’ve castigated Israel for putting more soldiers on the streets and for making it easier for citizens to buy guns (nothing freaks out the left more than a Jew with a gun). They seem to expect Israel to leave its citizens open to attack.NGO Monitor: On Europe, terrorism and demonizing Israel: Time for a reset
Echoing Haaretz writer Rogel Alpher, who wrote a demented column expressing his surprise that a Palestinian has never grabbed “a saw or a hammer and murdered me”, some Western radicals are not only glorifying the stabbings but are condemning those who have the temerity to protect themselves from being stabbed. Why won’t Jews let themselves be killed?
It’s so depraved. Whatever you thought of the PLO’s guerrilla activity in the 1970s, these stabbings are clearly very different. It’s anti-Semitism. That some Westerners are trying to present it as something else — a natural outburst of despair — says more about their busted moral compasses than it does about what’s happening in the Middle East.
Strip away the euphemisms, pick apart the talk of a “knife intifada”, and there’s no escaping the fact — the horrific fact — that some Westerners are defending the stabbing to death of people for being Jewish.
This is such a sad day for the left. What happened to that left which was the heir to the warriors of Enlightenment who helped liberate Europe’s Jews from their ghettos? That left which railed against the anti-Semitic “socialism of fools”? That left which, even in the darkest moment in human history — the Holocaust — risked life and limb to help Jews? It is dead. And that is a tragedy of epic proportions.
The stabbings in Israel haven’t only exposed an ugly new Islamism in the Middle East. They have also exposed the moral disarray of those in the West who pose as progressive. The universalist, tolerant left that was sensitive to the scapegoating of Jews for the world’s problems is no more. And so it is left to Jews to defend Jews, bereft of left solidarity, the West merely shrugging its shoulders.
If nothing else, European officials at least get credit for consistency. For decades, in war and peace, terror and calm, they have not flagged in the belief that they can engineer their vision of peace for Israel.Petitions: MSNBC Must Fire ‘Terror Denier’ Reporter
Having failed in so many previous attempts, the European move is another step in the effort to impose its preferred policies, via the labeling of products from the post-1967 “occupied territories” in order to create economic pressure on Israel. The next step would be to ban these products, and then to single out all Israeli items. (As perpetual victims, Palestinians are deemed to be exempt from contributing to peace, real or imagined.)
In this context, the claim by the European Union’s ambassador in Tel Aviv that labeling Israeli goods from beyond the Green Line isn’t a big deal was disingenuous. “You seem to be very proud of your own settlement enterprise,” Lars Faaborg-Anderson said in an interview with journalist Raphael Ahrens, “so why is this such a big problem?” His condescension was, to put it mildly, out of line.
The marking of products from beyond the 1949 armistice lines goes far beyond another awkward EU attempt to impose its ideas on Israeli democracy. Product labeling is the embodiment of a strategy to delegitimize Israel and the right of the Jewish people to sovereign equality. It is central to the political war embodied in BDS — boycott, divestment and sanctions — whose stated objective is not peace, but rather “the complete international isolation of Israel.”
A day after MSNBC was forced to apologize for factual errors made during a controversial report about Israel, supporters of the Jewish state are demanding in a series of petitions that the cable news network’s longtime Middle East correspondent be fired as a result of several inaccurate and highly biased reports wrongly accusing Israel of murdering innocents.
Ayman Mohyeldin, an NBC News foreign correspondent and MSNBC anchor, has come under fire for claiming on the air last week that he saw Israeli authorities shoot an unarmed Palestinian individual.
This turned out to be incorrect. The terrorist was holding a knife in his hand and attempting to murder Israelis.
Mohyeldin, a former Al Jazeera reporter, has long faced criticism for what many say are his efforts to portray Israel as an aggressor and dismiss Palestinian terrorism. He also has given speeches before anti-Israel organizations.
MSNBC’s pattern of biased reporting about Israel has prompted multiple petitions demanding that Mohyeldin be removed from the Middle East beat and fired.








