David Rose at the JC on the increasingly strident anti-Israel output from the media:
As hostility to Israel has grown, things are being said on “respectable” outlets that would once have been inconceivable. On Thursday, the former Tory MP Sir Alan Duncan went full ‘Jewish conspiracy’ Monty as a guest on Nick Ferrari’s LBC show, accusing Lord Polak and Lord Pickles of Conservative Friends of Israel of “doing the bidding of Netanyahu, bypassing all proper processes to exercise undue influence at the top of government” and demanding they be “flushed out” of the House of Lords for “exercising the interests of another country”.
It was a busy day for Ferrari, who also interviewed the Russian Ambassador, Andrei Kelin. With apparent respect, he asked him what was his “message to Israel” after the deaths of the aid workers. “Israel should stop doing these things,” replied Kelin, “everybody is calling for that. It is a Security Council resolution… Israel should immediately stop doing and continuing this war in Gaza.”
Given that he was interviewing a man whose government’s continuing war against Ukraine has already led to more than half a million casualties, Russian massacres of civilians, the well-documented torture of thousands of prisoners and threats to unleash nuclear weapons if the West should intervene, Ferrari’s next question – which can be watched on YouTube – beggared belief: “So they [Israel] have gone beyond the right to defend themselves?”
Supplied with this interrogatory underarm lob, Kelin replied: “They’ve gone far beyond the right to defend themselves. Everybody, including the UK and the others are calling them to immediate cessation of fire and also proceeding to the peace plan.”…
Meanwhile, Guardian columnist Owen Jones said on Sky TV – also on Thursday – that Germany was supporting Israel because this enabled it to overcome its Holocaust guilt, and it had “decided to force the Palestinian people to pay for its own heinous crimes”. (Jones was strongly criticised for this, but insisted there “nothing offensive” about it.)
Before October 7, the kind of discourse outlined above wasn’t much in evidence, at least not on mainstream outlets, but was confined to the online chatrooms of the extreme right and left. It is now becoming normalised, and in so doing it reflects and fosters the deepening chill towards Israel in the chancelleries of the democratic West.
The past week has arguably been Israel’s worst since this conflict started. My fear is that the outlook is still more bleak.
Mick Hartley 
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