I reminded them that, whatever people think of her political predilections and skills, Tsipi Livni is still an Israeli patriot.

I thought it odd that an establishment financial newspaper would disparage Netanyahu, an MIT MBA who had been a successful free-market finance minister, claiming that he was a Bourbon who never learns. But anti-Israel bigotry trumps all.

Also, the FT incorrectly claimed that Israeli peace offers would confine the Palestinian Arabs to 12% of colonial Palestine. I reminded them that colonial Palestine also included the current territory of Hashemite Jordan, which was split off by the British Colonial Office in 1922. And that, today, Jordan is a predominantly Palestinian state ruled by a Hashemite dynasty imported by the British from the Hejaz in western Arabia. Again, the FT had to rewrite history to fit its anti-Israel agenda.

http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=1&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=378&PID=0&IID=3345&TTL=A_Moral_Evaluation_of_the_Gaza_War_%E2%80%93_Operation_Cast_Lead

England’s not so pleasant aspect

Antisemitism, that paltry and vicious hatred, has much in it of English origin

By Anthony Julius, February 4, 2010

[Extract]

“This fourth kind of antisemitism is now more European than English but has a particularly English history, stemming from the intimacy of association between England and the Zionist project from the mid-19th century through to the mid-1950s. It denies to Jews the rights that it upholds for other, comparable peoples. It adheres to the principle of national self-determination, except in the Jews’ case. It affirms international law, except in Israel’s case. It does not understand that supporting the cause of Palestinian nationhood is one thing, while denying the right of Jews to live in their own state is quite another. It is outraged by the Jewish nature of the state of Israel, but is untroubled by, say, the Islamic nature of Iran or of Saudi Arabia. It regards as racist the social inequalities between Jew and Arab in Israel, while being indifferent to the legal inequalities between Muslim and non-Muslim in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other Muslim states.

It regards Zionism as uniquely pernicious, rather than as merely another nationalism, just as earlier generations of antisemites regarded Jewish capitalists as uniquely pernicious, rather than as heterogeneous members of a much larger capitalist class.

It writes out of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the massacres of Jews in Hebron (August 1929), Jerusalem (February 1948), and Kfar Etzion (May 1948), while treating the massacre of Arabs at Deir Yasin (April 1948) as proof of fundamental Zionist iniquity. It is reluctant to take a position on the Chinese occupation of Tibet, while holding the Israeli occupation of the West Bank an indefensible evil of global consequence. It is hostile to the United States, which it believes is dominated by Jews. It plays variations on well-established antisemitic tropes and deploys some new ones of its own — principally, that Israel may suitably be compared with Nazi Germany and/or Apartheid South Africa.

It treats UN, and UN committee and council, resolutions on Israel as if passed by impartial, apolitical bodies. It denies the existence of Islamic antisemitism, save perhaps as a Western import and of no practical consequence. While it excoriates racist sentiments found among Israelis, or in the complex history of Zionism, it refuses to acknowledge the racist themes towards Jews to be found in many currents of Arab nationalism. It overstates, on every occasion, and beyond reason, any case that could be made against Israel’s actions or policies, and wildly overstates the significance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in world affairs.

Longstanding antisemites now embrace “anti-Zionism” as a cover for their Jew-hatred. This is because, in relation to Israel, the antisemite finds a protected voice. The desire to destroy Jews is reconfigured as the desire to destroy or dismantle the Jewish state. The new anti-Zionism has become a cause for some English academics and political activists; it is commonly found in the universities and in student and university teacher associations. Anti-Zionism has renewed antisemitism, and given it a future.

These, then, are England’s gifts to Jew-hatred. The antisemitism of no other country has this density of history. The antisemitism of no other country is so continuously innovative. On many occasions in the history of antisemitism, England arrives first.”

http://tinyurl.com/y8klu8h

“Another epithet commonly applied to Netanyahu and Likud over 2009 is ‘irredentist’, used in seven editorials.” Ir-red-dentist; Just how many communist tooth wrenchers could there be in a party like Likud?