There is no longer anything remarkable about a lop-sided, anti-Israeli polemic in the Guardian. It is a daily occurrence and forms what has clearly become a campaign of vilification and denigration. Journalism and the standards that are supposed to go with it have ceased to be the issue. This is political activism.

But it is noteworthy when the sheer desperation of the newspaper’s editorial team to get something, anything, on the page to smear the reputation of Israel reduces them to levels which make it impossible to deny that a campaign is precisely what they are engaged in.

To wit, today’s edition carries an extraordinary piece of writing which relies heavily on the reported (not quoted) views of a group of children to demonstrate Israeli perfidy in Jerusalem towards the Palestinians.

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The recent eruption of anti-Semitic bigotry in Sweden, amid lurid allegations published in the country’s top selling newspaper about Israeli soldiers conspiring with American Jews in harvesting the organs of Palestinian children, has now been pushed to the top of the European agenda. According to a report in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper today, Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini has brokered an agreement with his Swedish counterpart Carl Bildt that a statement will be issued condemning anti-Semitism at a European Union foreign ministers meeting later this week.

However, given the Swedish government’s dissembling on the affair what matters now is whether the statement is as clear and unambiguous as Frattini would like it to be or whether it will be watered down. Frattini told Haaretz that the allegations in Aftonbladet were: “terrible conclusions, lying and hurtful, and they have the power to assist all those who seek to incite against Jews or who oppose the existence of the State of Israel.” Sweden, by contrast, has adamantly refused to condemn the allegations.

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It is a sign of the corrosiveness of the anti-Zionist agenda that even some of the most admirable and well-regarded of international luminaries feel no compunction these days about using the greatest crime against the Jewish people as a convenient weapon against the Jewish state. Holocaust inversion has now entered the mainstream. No-one, it seems, is immune from its temptations.

Enter former anti-apartheid campaigner, Nobel laureate, and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu who has used an interview with the liberal-Left Israeli newspaper Haaretz today to make some typically ill considered remarks of his own:

“The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns,” he was quoted by the paper as saying. “…in South Africa, they tried to get security from the barrel of a gun. They never got it. They got security when the human rights of all were recognized and respected.”

This is crass even by Tutu’s standards when talking about Israel. But it was nothing compared to the truly disturbing comments made earlier this week by Virgin Atlantic boss and international NGO financier Richard Branson.

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In yet another story that tells you so much about the Middle East but just doesn’t seem to make it into the western press, the Palestinian Authority’s top Islamic judge, Sheikh Tayseer Rajab Tamimi, has now come out with the extraordinary statement that “Jerusalem is an Arab and Islamic city and it always has been so.”

The Jerusalem Post — an invaluable antidote to the half censored and half distorted news on the Israel-Palestine conflict that we in Europe are now used to — also reported that Tamimi had said that there was no evidence whatsoever that the Temple had ever existed or that Jews had even lived in Jerusalem prior to recent decades.

Tamimi is one of the Palestinian people’s most influential voices. His opinions both reflect and help perpetuate their political culture. This, in other words, is what Israel is up against. Apart from anything else, it illustrates the depths of the dishonesty, not to say lunacy, at the heart of the Palestinian narrative. Consider his statement that Jerusalem is and always has been Arab and Islamic.

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“Could it be,” asks columnist and writer Michael D. Evans in today’s Jerusalem Post, “that Jimmy Carter’s ideals are formulated by the number of zeros before the decimal on the contributions to the Carter Center by oil-rich Gulf States?”

That’s right. This is not going to be a hagiography of the former president, and his supporters would be advised to read no further. But just what has Jimmy Carter been playing at? I don’t just mean in the last couple of days where he has turned up in Israel with Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson to tell “apartheid” Israel to start behaving itself. He is visiting as part of a delegation of “The Elders”, a designation which is either ludicrously pompous or, in the Israeli context, just plain crass (Elders? Protocols? Zion?), according to your taste. Set up with funding from Virgin Atlantic boss Richard Branson, the Elders say that they “amplify the voices of those who work hard to be heard, challenge injustice, stimulate dialogue and debate and help others to work for positive change in their societies.”

In other words, it’s a UN talk-fest gone freelance. We know what to expect then. But back to Jimmy Carter and his record in the Middle East. Evans has a few gems to offer.

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