I suppose everyone is aware by now of the story in Sweden’s top selling Aftonbladet newspaper in which a Jewish conspiracy was alleged over charges of harvesting the bodily organs of Palestinian children. The refusal of the Swedish authorities to condemn the article led to a diplomatic rift with Israel. For details see various entries on this site.

But perhaps it is now time for some light relief. This new Israeli video on youtube is starting to do the rounds:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22CGlF7l5MI

The Press Association wrote of “lengthy talks”. The Jewish Chronicle spoke of “hours of wrangling”. Yes, that’s right. With unemployment soaring, wages struggling to keep up with inflation and the economy teetering on the brink of a double-dip recession the Trades Union Congress (TUC) toiled and sweated this week to pass a motion, er, boycotting Israel. Well, needs must when the devil drives I suppose.

No one of any degree of seriousness could conceivably be surprised by such events in modern Britain. Bigotry against the Jewish state has taken deep roots in mainstream institutions all across the country. It has become an obsession. And with so few people willing to stand up in the public domain to oppose it, with the Jewish community in Great Britain divided about what to do, and with a growing Muslim population whose leadership incites hatred against Israel daily, the situation seems certain to get worse, the final destination uncertain.

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Good sense, intelligent analysis, reason, balance and principled perspective are rare commodities indeed when European newspapers engage with Israel and its predicament in the Middle East these days. So, when a candle is lit in the darkness we should applaud.

Hats off, therefore, to the Times of London. Today’s editorial pegs off the ugly spectacle at the Trades Union Congress this week of some of Britain’s biggest unions banding together to call for a consumer boycott of Israel in the wake of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and amid a more general hostility to the Jewish state which often seems all pervasive. At the time of writing, no decision on the boycott calls had been made. The Times, however, has put the whole sordid situation into some useful perspective.

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Alan Dershowitz, the eminent professor of law at Harvard University, has frequently compared Israel’s predicament when faced with the institutions of international law to all white courts in the American south of the 1930s. In cases involving two white people they could be trusted to make a decent fist of a fair trial. In cases involving two black people their insoucience and arrogance would introduce doubt, though a fair trial might still be possible. But pit a white man against a black man and the latter never stood a chance. The result had been pre-ordained by the weight of the prejudices against him.

So it is with Israel in most international institutions, the United Nations in particular. So let us waste no time at all in gracing the latest UN report into Gaza with anything other than the contempt it deserves. Instead, let us focus on how one of the world’s most powerful media outlets has seized upon the report and in so doing has opened a window into the anti-Israeli mindset we are dealing with. For its sheer stupidity, the latest BBC “analysis” on the report is simply astonishing.

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Well that’s not the kind of headline you’d have seen a few years ago. But the times they are a changing. Contemporary Europe is not merely competing with anti-Semitic bigotry in the countries of the Muslim world, it is now exporting it to them.

In the wake of the story in Sweden’s Aftonbladet newspaper last month which suggested that Israeli soldiers were involved in an international conspiracy to harvest the bodily organs of Palestinian children, it now appears that stories are rife across the Middle East that Jews and Israelis are harvesting the organs of Algerian children too.

The Jerusalem Post reports today that the story surfaced in Algeria’s Al-Khabar newspaper. According to the report, gangs of Moroccans and Algerians have been sweeping through the streets of Algerian cities and hunting down children who are then slaughtered and dismembered so their bodily organs can be sold to American Jews and Israelis.

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