Attempts in Europe to portray Israel as the modern incarnation of Nazi Germany were once the preserve of the extremists. Islamists, fascists and communists — each acting for reasons of their own — have employed the technique to portray the Jewish state as the epitome of political evil with which no compromise can be made and for whom total eradication is the only acceptable outcome.

It is a sign of the times, however, that the Nazification of Israel as a technique of denigration has begun to invade the mainstream. In my forthcoming book — A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel — I provide an entire section on the Nazi analogy as well as some opinion poll evidence on just how widespread its usage has become. A commentary in today’s Guardian by the prominent Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek offers a perfect illustration of how the technique is now employed.

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The news about Human Right’s Watch (HRW) and its increasingly open bias against Israel just gets worse and worse. I wrote a few weeks back on the grisly revelations about an HRW delegation holding a fundraising dinner in Saudi Arabia in which ongoing clashes with pro-Israel groups were highlighted as a marketing device. In my previous posting I offered an analysis of the absurd claims (widely reported by the BBC and others) made by HRW about Israeli soldiers allegedly gunning down white-flag wielding Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Now it has been revealed that Joe Stork, the author of those allegations and the deputy director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa department, has the kind of past that would put a blush on the face of hardliners in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

An article by Noah Pollack in Commentary Magazine (see link below) draws on an expose in the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv.

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Ronald S. Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), has an important piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he offers a series of warnings and suggestions as the Obama administration works out its new Middle East policy.

This is an opportune time for the WJC president to set out his stall. Administration officials have said that a new plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians and wider Arab world could be published within weeks. Lauder hits all the right notes.

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I decided that I would wait a few days just to give the laggards in the western media a chance to catch up. Surely, the formalisation of the notoriously bloodthirsty Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade as the armed wing of the leading Palestinian Fatah faction would be a major story. It would be splashed across the foreign news pages; blasted across the airwaves; and then analysed to death in the comment sections.

Or, rather, not. On a search for “Fatah” and “Martyrs brigade” on my Factiva database, one of the most extensive such databases in the world, the only recent stories that came up were from the Miami Herald, the Guardian and Britain’s tabloid Daily Mirror — reporting not that Israel’s moderate Palestinian partner for peace had just embraced one of the most brutal terror units in the world but that Sacha Baron Cohen’s (gay Austrian fashionista) Bruno character had slandered a non-profit worker from Bethlehem by implying that he was a terrorist. Good to see the media has its priorities right.

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A fascinating report in Britain’s Daily Telegraph by Adrian Michaels highlights a series of studies showing dramatic growth in Europe’s Muslim population. This is due to a rapid rise in immigration combined with high birth rates. Just as interesting is the story about the story: “Britain and the rest of the European Union are ignoring a demographic time bomb,” the author notes, “…almost no policy-makers are talking about it.”

The report goes on to state:

“The numbers are startling. Only 3.2 per cent of Spain’s population was foreign-born in 1998. In 2007 it was 13.4 per cent. Europe’s Muslim population has more than doubled in the past 30 years and will have doubled again by 2015. In Brussels, the top seven baby boys’ names recently were Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine and Hamza.”

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