A man from Royston in Hertfordshire has been in the news recently after his attempted citizen's arrest of a teenager who had allegedly pelted his house with apples resulted in a charge of assault (http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/cn_news_home/displayarticle.asp?id=45152...).
Cue widespread cries of "Political correctness gone mad," "The law's an ass" and all the other knee-jerk chants of the so-called moral majority, the Mail readers, the Home Counties chatterers. Teenagers, of course, are public enemy number one in the UK right now - people are more concerned about children out and about on Britain's streets than terrorists and pitbulls, even discarded chewing gum made sticky and hazardous to clothes and shoes by the wamrth of the sun; and this is seen as a case where the State attacks a decent, law-abiding citizen who sought only to defend his home from the evil yobs.
Now, I fully accept that this is a bit of a leap of the imagination, but there's something about this story that reminds me of Israel and Hamas. Replace the Hertfordshire house with a settlement somewhere dangerously near one of Israel's borders, and replace the apples with home-made rockets. But when Israel tries to defend itself, do the moral majority step up and support its right to a peaceful existence?
Well, we all know the answer to that question. What remains to be asked is why? Is it a simple case of double standards, no more than an expression of the deep-seated belief that an Englishman's home is his castle, or is it something darker than that? Are the moral majority once again taking the side of those who in their opinion are in the right and opposing another folk enemy - the Jews? In their widespread condemnation of Israel's attempts to protect her citizens from those who seek to destroy them, a worryingly high percentage of the population may well have revealed that anti-semitism is still far more alive than many of us have suspected.
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