Tuesday, January 16, 2024
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: ‘Footballing While Jewish’ and Other Crimes
Seth Mandel: ‘Footballing While Jewish’ and Other Crimes
You’d be surprised how sensitive people can be about the possibility they or their family will accidentally see or hear a Jewish person. Last month the Telegraph reported that British Airways had decided to “pause” a plan to include the Jewish sitcom Hapless in its in-flight entertainment offerings just after Oct. 7. The airline didn’t want to “take sides.” The Telegraph had seen the internal messages confirming the airline’s decision.Brendan O'Neill: Gary Lineker and the bigotry of the virtue-signallers
The series they chose not to show is about a Jewish newspaper in London. I don’t know how to pretend this decision isn’t completely insane.
“Pause” is a word that comes up a lot these days in the post-Oct. 7 entertainment industry. Haaretz reports that “Netflix has hit the pause button on broadcasting several Israeli series. One of them is the action drama ‘Border Patrol,’ which it acquired in September following its premiere on the Hot cable TV channel. Another is the original Israeli comedy drama ‘Through Fire and Water,’ created by Hanan Savion and Guy Amir, which was scheduled to premiere on Netflix in early November but was postponed.” A third series was put on ice by Netflix shortly after.
Producers told Haaretz that European companies were more easily spooked by their association with Israel than American ones were. Some told Israeli producers, “we have to stop and wait for better days.”
Perhaps after some time has gone by, everyone will be more comfortable watching actors portray Jewish characters, or playing hockey or soccer or cricket with Jewish athletes. I don’t think we have much to worry about, though: No one seems particularly bothered by it all, at all.
Let’s be clear about BDS: it is sectarian intolerance masquerading as social justice. It invites the middle classes – those most inclined to cultural boycotts – to obsessively avoid any foodstuff, book, idea or person that originates from the evil state of Israel. It makes a virtue of being ‘Israel-free’. Protect your pristine life and pristine self from the moral pollution of the Jewish State – that, in a nutshell, is what the cult of BDS says to the right-thinking sections of society. The fast track to moral glory in leafy, right-on Britain is to foreswear all things made by Those People.Melanie Phillips: Anti-western ideology is infecting public sector
The impact of BDS has been horrible. We’ve seen violinists booed and jeered at the Proms for the crime of being Israeli. Israeli dance troupes have faced furious protests in the UK. A theatre in London pulled the plug on a Jewish Film Festival. Authors like Alice Walker and Sally Rooney have declined requests for their books to be published in Israel (I guess that’s one upside of BDS for Israelis). Israeli produce is ostentatiously shunned and sometimes even destroyed. A few years ago, ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters in Birmingham stormed a Tesco and hurled Israeli food products on to the floor – proof of the irrational dread of all things Israeli that BDS stirs up in its supporters.
The hypocrisy of the BDS cult is extraordinary. These people will go to mad lengths to dodge oranges grown in Israel and films part-funded by the Israeli government, but they’ll happily buy their kids toys made in China and go on holiday in Turkey. The plight of the Uighurs and Kurds make not a dent in their conscience. The double standards of the BDS mentality can be glimpsed in Lineker himself. He retweets the suggestion that Israel should be kicked out of football yet he’s happy to watch Iran play football. In fact, he’s happy to commentate on Iran playing football.
During the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Lineker anchored the England-Iran match for the BBC. This was at the precise time the Iranian authorities were slaughtering hundreds of their own citizens, young women and men, who had dared to rise up against the law of mandatory hijab-wearing and against theocratic tyranny more broadly. No red card for Iran? Why not? Is the killing of young Iranian women who want to show their hair in public less bothersome to the virtue-signallers than the killing of Gazan civilians in the Israel-Hamas war? Lineker’s cant should be treated with the contempt it deserves. This is a man happy to host matches from a misogynistic, homophobic regime (Qatar) featuring a nation that murders its own citizens (Iran), and yet he thinks Israel should be kicked out? What a tosser.
Banning Jewish film festivals, boycotting shops with links to the Jewish State, screaming in fury when a musician from the Jewish nation starts to play… does this remind Mr Lineker of anything? How striking that Lineker hears echoes of the 1930s in so many things – including in Suella Braverman’s comments about immigration – but not in this noisy, feverish boycotting of all Jewish State stuff. That he’s happy to swan around in Qatar, a nation that funds Hamas, the terror group that carried out the worst attack on the Jews since the Holocaust, and then get on his social-media soapbox about Israel is not only preposterous – it’s sick-making.
I would wager that many Brits with dual Israeli citizenship, or just British Jews who have an affinity with Israel, now feel even more isolated from the public broadcaster following Lineker’s promotion of BDS bigotry. Seriously, Gary – do you have no shame?
The term “far right” is routinely used to smear anyone whose attitudes challenge progressive dogma. The loudmouth and undeniably offensive Joe Rogan was more accurately described by CNN as “libertarian-leaning”.Tom Tugendhat orders review of Left-wing civil servant training over ‘indoctrination’ fear
Murray’s own thought-crime is to be a passionate and articulate supporter of Israel and a clear-sighted analyst of Islamist extremism. The similarly robust Shawcross had to fight a determined attempt by Home Office civil servants, who subscribed to the “Islamist extremism is exaggerated” mindset, to prevent his government-ordered report from ever seeing the light of day.
Shawcross and Murray play a courageous role in the struggle to defend Britain and the civilised world against its enemies. For lecturers in counterterrorism to dismiss, smear or try to cancel them in this way shows how deeply the rot in society has penetrated.
Stanley resigned from the Foreign Office and has emigrated to Israel in despair at what she perceives as the institutionalised dogma fuelling epidemic Jew-hatred and wildly distorting Britain’s foreign policy by helping forces hostile to the West.
The universities and other institutions are riddled by anti-western thinking. But these tropes are also being used to service the agenda of Islamists intent upon undermining the free world. King’s enjoys close links with Qatar, which funds the university’s centre for global banking and finance. A decade ago, King’s had a four-year teaching contract with the Qatari government worth £26 million. Professor Denise Lievesley, the dean of the university’s faculty of social sciences and public policy, called Qatar “comparatively liberal” for the region.
But Qatar funds Hamas and supports the Muslim Brotherhood, as was laid out in a 2022 Policy Exchange report by Sir John Jenkins, formerly the Foreign Office’s senior Arabist. He said that although both Conservative and Labour ministers had hailed Qatar as a “friend and partner”, it had often pursued a foreign policy at odds with British and western interests.
Significant and often disguised funding by Qatar, said the report, had been used to support Islamist groups in the US, Britain and Europe over the previous two decades. Such funding had openly supported university departments and think tanks studying “highly contested regional issues,” including King’s, Bristol University and St Antony’s College, Oxford, and built influence within parliamentary and other official circles.
Questions in parliament perhaps should go further than merely this disturbing course at King’s. Britain not only refuses to heed the warnings of people like Jenkins, but has spawned a culture that is actively helping promote the enemies of civilisation.
Just yesterday Home Secretary James Cleverly announced he is to add Hizb ut-Tahrir to the list of proscribed terrorist groups, a group he described as an “antisemitic organisation that actively promotes and encourages terrorism, including praising and celebrating the appalling 7 October attacks”.
The same civil servant training course that downplayed Islamic terrorism also described Spectator journalist Douglas Murray, and US podcaster Joe Rogan, as “far-right”.
The lecturer invited those in attendance to deliberate “to what extent should Joe Rogan and Douglas Murray be suppressed”, and argued “society needs to find other ways to suppress them”.
Following the deeply concerning reports, Mr Tugendhat is demanding answers and action.
Speaking in the Commons yesterday, he told MPs: “If courses aren’t high quality and politically neutral then civil servants shouldn’t be attending them.”
Addressing the debate held at the training day, around whether they could define terrorism, Mr Tugendhat provided the left-wing lecturers with a straightforward answer.
He said: “We know what a terrorist is, the law knows what a terrorist is and this government knows what a terrorist is - that’s exactly why we’ve just proscribed Hizb ut-Tahrir.”
A King’s College London spokesman argued the training course was “taught by eminent experts using impartial and evidence-based resources in an environment where different theories, concepts and questions are shared to prompt discussion”.
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