Anti-Semitism in the Muslim world is not something that western media are fond of talking about. As I have noted many times, the BBC has an extensive profile of Hamas on its website which, amazingly, manages to say nothing of the group’s deep seated hatred of Jews let alone its Protocols of Zion style propaganda about Jewish conspiracies. To understand the way in which Jews are talked about by mainstream Muslim leaders is, of course, to understand the nature of the political cultures Israel confronts on a daily basis. These are inconvenient truths.

The media monitoring organisation MEMRI is, therefore, an invaluable counterpoint to what amounts to a policy of censorship. Anyone who wants a rounded understanding of what is really going on in Israel’s conflict with the Muslim world should refer to it regularly.

The latest example comes from Sudan, where a senior cleric was given a prime time slot on television to push one of the greatest anti-Semitic slurs of modern times: that the Jews carried out the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

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The Guardian campaign against Israel continues. And before proceeding, let us now be clear. This is not journalism. This does not arise out of the great tradition of British or American political commentary. The tradition in which it stands is the tradition of political propaganda. This is a clearly coordinated, carefully planned, institutionalised campaign of deligitimisation and denigration. In simple terms, it is a hate campaign. It is a hate campaign waged by the Guardian newspaper — the newspaper of Britain’s political cultural establishment – against the Middle East’s only liberal democracy, the world’s only Jewish state.

Unless I missed something (I was travelling), Tuesday provided a rare instance of a day when the Guardian failed to produce an anti-Israeli commentary. The following two days have provided ample opportunity to make amends with a piece on Wednesday by Seth Freedman condemning the security barrier and a piece today addressing (read ‘distorting’) key events associated with Israel’s founding.

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Readers will have to excuse me for a little self-promotion today. In my defence, though, my op-ed in today’s Jerusalem Post (see link at the bottom of this entry) is an attempt to pull back from the subject matter I have been focusing on here in the last few weeks and talk about the bigger picture. Why has Israel been taking such a beating from Great Britain in recent months? Things have been bad for years. But why precisely has it suddenly become so much worse?

I offer five suggestions which, when taken together, should, I believe, provide some pointers.

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I know that it is no laughing matter, but one could be forgiven for falling on the floor in hysterics over this one. It’s the sheer opportunism: the abandonment of all pretence that this is anything other than a systematic and carefully coordinated campaign of demonisation.

The Guardian’s latest screed against Israel is on the subject of a cell phone advertisement on Israeli TV. The advert, put out by the Israeli mobile phone company Cellcom, uses the security barrier between Israel proper and the West Bank as its setting. In the words of, Seth Freedman, the commentary’s author:

“The advert begins with a football sailing over the barrier and landing on a military jeep on the Israeli side of the de facto border, prompting a brief moment of panic among the troops, before they realise it is a harmless object. They decide to kick it back over the wall, then – when the ball flies back over to them once more – realise they have a game on their hands, and call up reinforcements to join in the kickabout.”

Freedman’s objection is predictable:

“Their 50-second long commercial debuted on Israeli screens in the same week that the fifth anniversary of the [International Court of Justice] ruling declaring the wall illegal was reached, adding insult to the injury caused by the content of the commercial itself.”

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The charge that major non-governmental organisations have a reflexively anti-Israel bias is not one that should be levelled lightly. I was once a member of Amnesty International and remember being proud of the work they did around the world to highlight human rights abuses. Amnesty and other groups such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) have only one weapon at their disposal: the weapon of publicity. And they only have one claim to be taken seriously: that they are meticulous in protecting their reputation for impartiality. As a journalist I cited studies from both organisations, particularly while working in Russia and reporting on Chechnya. It always gave a story credibility. If HRW or Amnesty produced a report both journalist and reader would assume it to be true.

It is all the more tragic, therefore, that both organisations now stand accused of jumping on the anti-Israeli bandwagon and of issuing statements and reports which cast doubt on their objectivity. The latest revelations — almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media — about HRW in particular make for depressing reading.

The story concerns a recent visit by a delegation from HRW to Saudi Arabia. The delegation was headed by the group’s senior Middle East officer Sarah Leah Whitson. The central charge is that the delegation sought to raise funds from prominent Saudis — one a member of the Shura Council, Saudia Arabia’s state sanctioned religious leadership organisation — by highlighting HRW’s ongoing battles with pro-Israel groups.

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