This post was a comment on another bloggers post; I thought I'd share it as a blog piece.

There are countless democracies, groups, organisations etc. across the globe who have 'declarations' of aspirations, intent, promises and probably all countries and many groups/ organisations fall woefully short of those 'declarations'. Israel is not the only democracy to fall short.

As such, I believe that if you point your camera and focus close up on a given country, group etc. you could make it look poverty stricken, riddled with crime, full of fanatics, war mongering, fascist, racist and so on. Pull your camera back and other aspects come into focus and hopefully more positive aspects come into view.
I watched the result of an exercise like this done to the UK, Belgium and Switzerland, (as an experiment), and the deliberately selective film made for tough viewing...guns, gangs, riots, anarchy, racists, poverty, malnutrition, torture and neglect of children, and so on.

I believe, that Israel is focussed on in 'close-up' by too many people, groups and organisations.
Everything is 'monstrous', 'nazi', 'murderous', 'disgusting', 'war mongers', 'dirty', 'zios', 'bankster', 'prison camp', 'ghettoes', 'callous', 'wicked', 'cruel f*ckers', 'controlled, 'neo-con', 'holocaust', 'lobbyist', 'conspiratorial', 'power hungry', 'apartheid', 'South African', 'boycotted', 'divested', 'illegal', 'anti-
'in human', 'in humane', 'concentration camp', 'ethnic cleansing', 'genocide', 'organ snatchers', 'poverty', 'child killers', 'women beaters', 'rapists', 'torturers', 'vindictive', 'psychopathic', 'sociopathic', 'deliberate targetting of...', 'should be squashed, smashed, ended, annihilated, pushed to the sea', 'shameful', 'nasty', 'vicious', 'Hitler', '9/11', 'terrorist'...the lists are endless, but can be found anywhere and everywhere and yet even if there are incidents of truth in any of this, just read this list again and this is a taster of what is levelled in one direction only, by a lot of so called peace makers, intelligensia and the like.

Can you think of any country that is so systematically undermined maligned in a complex, tragic and multi-faceted conflict by SOME - legal systems, groups, NGOs, charities, churches, mosques, meeting houses, unions, politcians, teachers, exibitions, journalists, comedians, actors, musicians, academics etc. when there is clear evidence staring them in the face that if the camera was pointed in the other direction with the same 'close-up', then we would see a more balanced view of the whole picture.

And G-d forbid we should pull the camera right back and see something beautiful, kind, compassionate on either side. The culprits on any side of conflict hog the limelight.

In Israel's particular political case, 'wide angle' simply isn't possible, nobody wants to 'pull back', because to pull back in wide focus would re-humanise the 'in human'.

Quite plainly, Israel is not all of these things and certainly not in the way that racist and anti-semitic vocabulary as become acceptable and casually levelled at 'her' , Israelis and Jews.

This close-up focus is not fair criticism, it is racist and in a lot of cases irrational, unfettered, uneducated, biased hatred and in most cases anti-semitic.

And so we return to the 'accepted close-up': The 'demon' Israel remains, the only 'hate ridden country' with no redeeming features in the Middle East which is singularly responsible for all Islamist terrorist activities throughout the globe, to blame for all the internal and external conflicts in the Middle East. Really?

Pull back that camera.