Saturday, November 29, 2003
Julie Burchill responds to the general air of celebration that surrounded news of her leaving the Guardian with typical good grace, then proceeds to demonstrate why she and The Times will be ideally suited by a barking rant about anyone that's nasty about the Israeli state. Her premise is wildly unoriginal, because it's used by everyone that seeks to defend Israel, and is roughly thus:
1) You disapprove/dislike the Israeli policy towards Palestinians and Palestine.
2) You therefore hate all Israelis and Jews (despite those terms not being synonymous).
3) Therefore you're a Nazi who obviously supported the Final Solution.
Oh Julie, you came and you spoke without thinking...
Even better is the joke about how only ugly people are Anti-Semitic.
It doesn't seem to occur to her that people might not be against the foreign policy of Israel because the Jews are hook-nosed blood-drinking monsters who were responsible for the death of Our Lord Jesus Christ and we polish our copies of Mein Kampf every night before we go to bed, but because we are concerned by their peacemeal destruction of the Palestinian state and how scores of innocent Palestinian men, women and children get killed every time they go after a terrorist. We're concerned by the fact that, without America to back them up in the UN, they'd be one of the states with the most motions of condemnation passed against them. We're concerned that they have weapons of mass destruction and that their intentions towards neighbouring states may be hostile. But it would be awkward for Julie Burchill to acknowledge that there are Israelis that feel the same way.
1) You disapprove/dislike the Israeli policy towards Palestinians and Palestine.
2) You therefore hate all Israelis and Jews (despite those terms not being synonymous).
3) Therefore you're a Nazi who obviously supported the Final Solution.
Oh Julie, you came and you spoke without thinking...
Even better is the joke about how only ugly people are Anti-Semitic.
It doesn't seem to occur to her that people might not be against the foreign policy of Israel because the Jews are hook-nosed blood-drinking monsters who were responsible for the death of Our Lord Jesus Christ and we polish our copies of Mein Kampf every night before we go to bed, but because we are concerned by their peacemeal destruction of the Palestinian state and how scores of innocent Palestinian men, women and children get killed every time they go after a terrorist. We're concerned by the fact that, without America to back them up in the UN, they'd be one of the states with the most motions of condemnation passed against them. We're concerned that they have weapons of mass destruction and that their intentions towards neighbouring states may be hostile. But it would be awkward for Julie Burchill to acknowledge that there are Israelis that feel the same way.
