As a follow up to my posting yesterday, please see this excellent piece by Emanuele Ottolenghi ripping apart the Guardian over the leaks on peace talks:

Game over. No way back. An entire edifice of anti-Israeli demonisation definitively consigned to the scrap heap, never to be recycled again. This is the uncompromising message that comes out of yesterday’s revelations on Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. To the horror of a European political intelligentsia which has been steadfast to the point of fanatical in its opposition to Israeli “settlements” in east Jerusalem, the Palestinian leadership itself, we now know, has long accepted that the vast majority of Israeli settlements can be considered legitimate and would become part of Israel under any reasonable peace agreement.

This is utterly devastating since it simultaneously shows that everyone from the British Foreign Office and the BBC to the European Commission and the continent’s passionately anti-Israeli NGO community have been adopting a position which was significantly more uncompromising on “settlements” than the Palestinian leadership itself, and also that that same Palestinian leadership had accepted that the so called 1967 “borders” — the gold standard for practically every anti-Israeli polemic around — are irrelevant to the prospects of a lasting peace.

In one of its most resentful leader columns for years, the Guardian was nothing short of apoplectic: not so much with Israel, but with a Palestinian leadership which has effectively blown the credibility of the Guardian’s very own mantras on the MidEast straight out of the water. The Palestinian leadership, the paper declaimed, had been shown to be “weak” and “craven”. Their concessions amounted to “surrender of land Palestinians have lived on for centuries”. And, in words that look alarmingly close to the position adopted by Hamas, “The Palestinian Authority may continue as an employer but, as of today, its legitimacy as negotiators will have all but ended on the Palestinian street.” This is sheer spite.

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If you thought there were some standards too low even for the Guardian newspaper group you might well have missed the latest eulogy to one of post-war Europe’s most cruel and repressive dictatorships. That’s right, as the civilised among us this week celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — one of modern history’s most momentous and uplifting expressions of the human spirit’s yearning for freedom and dignity — the Guardian has pulled from its voluminous list of apologists for totalitarianism to grace us with a piece of fulsome praise for the workers paradise that was communist East Germany.

One would have thought that fresh from its attempted whitewash of the massacre at Fort Hood last week (see previous entry) and after the post-Gaza hate campaign against a state which (by complete coincidence we are asked to believe) happens to be populated by Jews, the moral and civilisation cess pit that is the Guardian no longer has the power to surprise us.

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