Israel

In this week’s Spectator, Melanie Phillips suggests that anti-Semitism is on the rise, fueled by the events in the Middle East. Douglas Murray and Ben Soffa, Secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, discuss whether this is the case in this week’s View from 22 video special. Here’s an extract from Melanie’s piece. The full article will be available tomorrow: The mask has been torn away. Supposedly anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. In Paris, predominantly Muslim mobs screaming ‘death to the Jews’ have repeatedly tried to storm synagogues, torched cars and burnt Jewish-owned shops to the ground.

I suppose viewers of Jon Snow’s Channel 4 News don’t expect impartial journalism, any more than viewers of Fox in the States expect their political opponents to get a particularly fair hearing. This is, after all, a journalist whose first reaction when the Malaysian airline plane was shot down over Ukraine was to express concern that the deaths might distract attention from Israel’s war with Hamas. Awful danger that the shooting down of flight MH17 will provide cover for an intensification of Israel’s ground war in Gaza — Jon Snow (@jonsnowC4) July 18, 2014   But what an extraordinary way to present the situation in the Middle East: Hamas as

  Gaza The main entrance to Al-Shifa Hospital was crowded with what seemed to be journalists. This wasn’t unusual. They wait here most days for ambulances ferrying in the dead and wounded from Israeli air strikes; but this time there seemed to be more of them. Getting nearer, I saw that what I had taken to be microphones in their hands were in fact slippers. These weren’t hacks, they were angry Gazans, come to fling shoes (the ultimate insult in the Middle East) at Jawad Awad, the minister of health of the Palestinian Authority, paying a visit from Ramallah. This was an important day in the current round of bloodletting between

Is Israel drifting away from the West? That was Hugo Rifkind’s claim in his column in the magazine last week. Hugo wrote: ‘Israel drifting away. Never mind whose fault it is; that’s a whole other point. But it’s happening. It’s off. No longer does it exist in the popular imagination as our sort of place. Once, I suppose, foes and friends alike regarded it as a North Atlantic nation, but elsewhere. Then a western European one, then, briefly, a southern European one. When was it, do you think, that Israel stopped being regarded as fundamentally a bit like Spain? Early 1990s? Then they shot Yitzhak Rabin, and Oslo didn’t happen, and

CNN recently came across a video of Hamas officials calling on civilians in Gaza to volunteer to become ‘human shields’ so that Palestinian civilian casualties can be maximised. Fascinatingly a CNN news anchor has put this fact to a Palestinian ‘spokeswoman’ in a live interview. And what was the response of this ‘spokeswoman’ to the Hamas video?  Well, among other things she said that the idea that Hamas promote a culture of death is ‘offensive’. And best of all she said that ‘the idea that Palestinians use children as human shields is racist’.

Home Theresa May, the Home Secretary, ordered a review, taking perhaps ten weeks, by Peter Wanless, the head of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, of how her department, the police and prosecutors handled historical child sex-abuse allegations. There would also be a large-scale inquiry by the retired judge Lady Butler-Sloss. These came in response to a ferment of speculation into what the late Geoffrey Dickens had alleged in 1984 in a folder of information he gave to Leon Brittan, then Home Secretary. In 2013 the folder was found not to have been kept. Rolf Harris, the entertainer, aged 84, was jailed for five years and nine