It is hard to be shocked these days at reading blatantly one-sided, distorted or outright deceptive reportage on Israel in the European press. But for sheer stupidity at least, today’s offering on the Guardian website from Matt Kennard and Wilson Dizard takes the biscuit. Writing about the West Bank village of Bil’in and the struggle of its beleaguered Palestinian residents against the evil Israeli oppressor, the authors can’t even be bothered to make the centre piece of their argument internally consistent.

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This one has been doing the rounds in the UK for a few days now but it is possible that people outside Britain might not have seen it. Since it is such good fun, I’m putting it up now. It is a video of British far-Left MP George Galloway interviewing a documentary maker who had uncovered extreme anti-Semitism and homophobia in British Mosques. Galloway’s attempts to explain the bigotry away are mercilessly ripped apart on Iran’s English language television station, Press TV. Priceless.

To see the interview, click here:

http://thejc.com/video/george-galloway-ripped-shreds

When it comes to meddling in other countries’ affairs, I’m an enthusiast. I just don’t buy the line that nations and commentators should mind their own business. The world is too interconnected and, anyway, the practice is too much fun. So, I have no real explanation as to why I found Michael Freund’s gently sardonic commentary in today’s Jerusalem Post so congenial. His piece comes amid another unfolding spat between France and Israel over the status of Jerusalem. Last Friday, the French scolded Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for supporting the idea of a united Jerusalem under Israeli control. This, the French foreign ministry said, was: “unacceptable and contrary to international law.”

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It is so rare to see a western political leader displaying moral and intellectual clarity on modern-day hostility to Israel that when it happens it should not pass without applause. Israel’s (liberal-Left) Haaretz newspaper reports today on the words of Canada’s minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, following a four-day trip to Israel which ended on Sunday.

The paper reported Kenney as saying that the daily existential threat faced by the Jewish state simultaneously represented a “threat to the broader Western civilization”. He argued that this new anti-Semitism was potentially more dangerous than the European anti-Semitism of old. And, he was quoted as saying:

“…so much of the criticism Israel faces is motivated by a dangerous form of anti-Semitism that tries to hide behind anti-Zionism and is represented by a coalition of the far left in the West with extreme currents of jihadi Islam that seek the destruction of the Jewish nation. They seem to believe that the Jewish people are the only people in the world that don’t have a right to a homeland.”

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This weekend’s meeting of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) featured the usual fun and games. Apart from “spot the democracy” — rumour has it that the Arab states suggested hide and seek as an alternative variant — it was an old favourite that dominated proceedings: baiting the Jewish state. Among the assembled foreign ministers from the 57 member OIC it was Iran’s Manuchehr Mottaki who stole the show with his description of Israel as a “cancerous tumour” which must be removed.

It is easy to understand, therefore, why his Syrian counterpart Walid al-Muallim should have introduced a new term to describe the Israeli concerns about Iran. Apparently this is all “Iranophobia”. Well, of course. You’d have to be nothing short of paranoid to be even remotely troubled by a regime like Iran, even as it moves to within a hair’s breadth of acquiring nuclear weapons.

In all seriousness, though, a western media which was truly interested in understanding the regional context in which Israel operates should be covering such events in detail. Aside from the news agencies there has been practically nothing. I found the “cancerous tumour” reference through the BBC Monitoring Service which was quoting Iran’s IRNA news agency. Apart from that, there was nothing.

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