If you don't read The Guardian or - like me - have taken the decision to no longer do so, either as a result of what increasingly looks like its very dubious anti-Israeli stance or simply due to its rapidly declining standards then you've probably missed Seth Freedman's article on the Israeli aid efforts in Haiti. Note that the paper has been careful to publish it under the aegis of a Jewish journalist in order to escape accusations of anti-semitism.
Yesterday, I commented on an article on the same subject which appeared in the Daily Telegraph - also a paper I do not read because I am a lifelong Liberal Democrat - by Stephanie Gutmann, an superbly ironic piece in which she expertly crafted what at first appeared to be a damning verdict of Israel's aid effort accusing them of shamelessly seeking to utilise the Haitian tragedy for their own ends - ie; to draw attention away from Gaza. I have to come clean and confess I entirely missed the irony, not so much as a result of her considerable skills as a writer but due somewhat embarrassingly to my own assumption that any article in the Telegraph will be written from the opposite viewpoint to my own. JC blogger, vigilant defender of Israel and Board of Deputies member Jonathan Hoffman was, thankfully, on hand to alert me to my own stupidity - some quick-fire editing allowed me to salvage my post on the matter and I have now written one hundred times "I will in future read articles thoroughly and think about them before having a knee-jerk reaction to them." (Thanks, Mr. Hoffman!)
I'm taking some comfort from the fact that Mr. Freedman - who is, one assumes from the biography on his Journalisted entry, a proper journalist, and not simply part of the lumpenbloggertariat like myself - seems to have failed to spot the patently obvious irony too, because he appears to have used it as a set of instructions for his own article.
"Clever people the Jews… oops, I mean the Israelis. Look at the lengths to which they have gone to distract the world from their daily ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The latest trick is an Israeli field hospital, rushed into Haiti last Friday and erected in a soccer field" says Stephanie to start her article (oy vey! - how could I possibly have been so dim as to miss the irony with a first sentence such as that?).
Seth took that and ran with it. "Some," he says, "accused the country's leaders of trying to divert attention away from their behaviour towards the Palestinians." But then he uses the situation to make his own cheap shot - "...for all that Israel's sterling work overseas deserves to be praised, it highlights the lack of compassion shown by the country's leaders to those suffering on its own doorstep," he writes, though he makes sure he mentions Israel's relief projects in 140 nations around the world ands establishes his indignation and contempt for the ridiculous accusations that Israel is harvesting organs from earthquake victims. However, I don't really blame Freedman - he's entitled to his views, if these are indeed his views and not some he's temporarily adopted in order to persuade British newspapers to pay him, and since he lives in Israel we can assume he knows something of Hamas, the rocket attacks and the other terrorist acts carried out, supposedly, in the name of Palestinian liberation. He is, one imagines, familiar with the argument that Hamas is financed by Arab states keen to rid themselves of the Palestinian refugees that create such a drain on their national resources too.
It's The Guardian at which I am annoyed - the paper to which I paid an annual subscription for more than ten years and relied upon for intelligent and unbiased debate, the paper that whenever it printed an article with an overtly left-, right-, pro- or anti- article would always print an article on the same topic by somebody with the opposing point of view to achieve balance. By doing so, it never told me what to think or what opinion to have as do those papers which seem to exist only in order to instill their editors' views into their readership, be it for the relatively benign reasons that a paper such as The Sun - a paper for which I maintain a certain affection - does ("We realise that you can't be bothered to read an in-depth article on X, but we know who you are and that you are like us. This is what we think about the matter - you can think the same. Now, have a look at Katie, 18, from Leeds...") or the seemingly darker reasons of the Daily Mail ("This is bad. This will bring to an end all that we hold dear. Hate this."); instead, it gave facts and different opinions and it allowed me to make up my own mind. I appreciated it for that reason.
The Guardian knows about the rockets, because it printed an excellently knowledgeable and informative article less than a month ago in which author Shai Hermesh MK recounts what life in Sderot and other settlements close to Gaza is like for the Israelis that live there. I hope that it will once again commission Mr. Hermesh, this time to write a reply to Mr. Freedman's rather cheap and nasty article, because I hope that it will want to uphold the excellent standards that made it the great newspaper it until recently was. Unfortunately and as we all know, it has gradually revealed an ugly anti-Israel stance that, if not thinly-disguised anti-semitism, serves to fuel anti-semitic sentiments that can still be found just below the surface of left-wing beliefs.
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