Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian President Bashar Assad (AP)
[G]iven such a vast palette of injustice and depredations, the British National Union of Journalists made a truly original move: It singled out Israel to boycott…What possessed the journalist union’s board — in a vote of 66 to 54 — to take such action? The question is worth posing because it followed a similar vote last year by British academics (later rescinded) to avoid… their Israeli colleagues. And, more important, it is yet another bleat, in Europe and in this country, from people and organizations that, for good reasons and bad, have simply had it with Israel. Why won’t the pushy Jewish state shape up?
In some sense, it is a fair enough question. The wrongful and counterproductive occupation of the West Bank is now in its 40th year. Settlements continue to go up, and the government of Ehud Olmert, weak and hapless, is unable or unwilling to contain them. The government proved its incompetence in the Lebanon war of the summer past, managing to enhance Hezbollah’s standing and not managing to retrieve the two captured soldiers in whose name the war was launched in the first place. For Israel — but really for Lebanese civilians most of all — the war was a disaster….
Some of it no doubt reflects frustration from the efforts of Jewish organizations to suffocate any criticism of Israel and to hurl the epithet "anti-Semite" at anyone with an odd bent to his thinking. But some of it, surely, is anti-Semitism itself, a rage at the impudent, pushy Jew and this state created in the midst of the Arab world. Forgotten, conveniently and appallingly, is history itself and the reason for Israel’s creation. This does not excuse injustice to Palestinians, it merely explains. But it is an explanation so soaked with the blood of Jews as to seem utterly concocted: It cannot be! But it was.
The British journalists, like the academics before them, dare to tread where an army of goons has gone before. If they do not recognize the ember of anti-Semitism still glowing within them, they ought to park themselves before a mirror and ask why, of all the nations, they single out Israel for reprimand and obloquy… Access full article >>