Regular HonestReporting readers are familiar with our critiques of London’s Guardian — one of the most virulently anti-Israel publications around. Guardian columnist Julie Burchill has published an open letter, explaining that she is leaving the Guardian because its anti-semitism (a “dirty little secret masquerading as a moral stance”) has simply gone overboard:

[I]f there is one issue that has made me feel less loyal to my newspaper over the past year, it has been what I, as a non-Jew, perceive to be a quite striking bias against the state of Israel. Which, for all its faults, is the only country in that barren region that you or I, or any feminist, atheist, homosexual or trade unionist, could bear to live under.

I find this hard to accept because, crucially, I don’t swallow the modern liberal line that anti-Zionism is entirely different from anti-semitism; the first good, the other bad…If you take into account the theory that Jews are responsible for everything nasty in the history of the world, and also the recent EU survey that found 60% of Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat to peace in the world today (hmm, I must have missed all those rabbis telling their flocks to go out with bombs strapped to their bodies and blow up the nearest mosque), it’s a short jump to reckoning that it was obviously a bloody good thing that the Nazis got rid of six million of the buggers. Perhaps this is why sales of Mein Kampf are so buoyant, from the Middle Eastern bazaars unto the Edgware Road, and why The Protocols of The Elders of Zion could be found for sale at the recent Anti-racism Congress in Durban.

Read the whole article.

UPDATE: The Guardian had another article as well today about how anti-Zionism is often thinly veiled anti-semitism, by an Oxford scholar named Emanuele Ottolenghi. Read it here.

The Israeli Attorney General has instructed the police to launch an investigation against Arutz-7′s internet site for incitement to political violence. This is the article that raised the complaint of MK Zahava Gal’on (Meretz) – an op-ed piece by Gil Ronen that called for a popular movement to encourage Palestinians to flee over the Jordan river. This section in particular was cited by Gal’on as incitement:

Transfer is “cold” expulsion. What we need to set in motion is a more hot-blooded version of this: something that is obviously the result of great rage, a temporarily semi-crazed state of a tortured nation that simply cannot bear to suffer any longer. The only way to throw the Palestinians out is to be as crazy as they are – almost…Unlike the Palestinian’s mass madness, which is purposely created by brainwashing from above, our “craziness” will be a temporary state that we enter into deliberately, and it will not be suicidal in nature. The only ones getting killed will be the Palestinians, and whoever doesn’t want to die will have to run.

Arutz 7 responds to the accusation:

Though Arutz-7 does not endorse the opinions it publishes in its op-ed section, it should be noted that the sentence in question was taken out of context, and does not incite to murder. In fact, the author, Gil Ronen, writes in the article, “no one will have to take the law into his own hands.”

This raises a whole host of issues, among them the legal relationship between a news outlet and its op-ed contributors, and defining prosecutable incitement. But one thing’s for certain: if such standards were applied to the Palestinian press, every PA-sponsored newspaper would have been shut down long ago.

Earlier this week, NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd presented a position that’s often conveyed in news reports on Israel’s anti-terror effort: the elimination of terrorist leaders actually worsens the terrorist threat, since it breeds more members of terrorist organizations.

Military analyst Elliot Chodoff has a response to Dowd:

Two points need to be emphasized: first, that it is perfectly legitimate to target, hunt and eliminate terrorists, leaders and followers alike. Second, that the policy is an effective component in an overall strategy of fighting terrorism…True, eliminating terrorist leaders will bring new ones to the fore. But the new ones will certainly be less experienced than those they replace, and with a rapid enough turnover surviving the experience will become their primary if not exclusive goal…The war against terrorists is going to be long and drawn out. More pressure on them, not less, is the only way to shorten it and reduce the number of the inevitable innocent casualties that will be sustained while it lasts.

* Charles Krauthammer on the Geneva Agreement:

On the Palestinian side, the negotiator is former information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, who at least is said to have Yasser Arafat’s ear. The Israeli side, however, is led by Yossi Beilin, a man whose political standing in his own country is so low that he failed to make it into Parliament. After helping bring his Labor Party to ruin, Beilin abandoned it for the far-left Meretz Party, which then did so badly in the last election that Beilin is now a private citizen…

This is scandalous. Israel is a democracy, and this agreement was negotiated in defiance of the democratically (and overwhelmingly) elected government of Israel. If a private U.S. citizen negotiated a treaty on his own, he could go to jail under the Logan Act. If an Israeli does it, he gets a pat on the back from the secretary of state.

* Israel was forced to withdraw its UN resolution calling for the protection of Israeli children from terrorism.

* Caroline Glick weighs in on Netanyahu’s economic plan, arguing that “peace is required to bring economic prosperity” is a falsity perpetuated by the Israeli left:

Netanyahu is doing yeoman’s work in convincing us to reject the Labor party’s lies about our economic impotence. But these positive changes cannot stand on their own. Until we free ourselves of the canard that we cannot remain a Jewish democracy unless we enable the establishment of a terror state that will undermine both, our leaders will continue to delude themselves, and most of us, that fences and unilateral surrenders will save our lives and our state.

* Yoel Esteron on Tony Judt’s outrageous New York Review of Books article last month (where Judt claimed the State of Israel is an “anachronism”).

* Bret Stephens on Turkey and “the real Mideast mystery” — “Is Islamic religious radicalism separable from terrorism, practically speaking?”

MSN has a beta version up of its choose-your-own-news video service. (requires a broadband connection, registration, Windows Media Player 9.0, and watching a 30 sec. ad)

The idea: you select what news items you want to view, then only receive those (bye-bye Michael Jackson updates). Sort of like a video blog. Perhaps in the not-so-distant future, we can select also what news outlet we want to see covering that story…

Right now, there’s a mini-story there about the Israeli confiscation of dancing Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein dolls. The anchorwoman can’t stop laughing at the gyrating terror duo long enough to finish her text!

FoxNews has background on Israeli doctors working to save the life of an Iraqi baby who was born with a congenital heart defect, and the fine Israeli charity that made this possible.

William Safire critiques the newfangled peace proposals, concluding that movement toward peace “will [only] have meaning when the Palestinian majority takes charge of its enemy within.”

Israel’s ambassador to the US, Danny Ayalon, was in Denver and was interviewed by the Rocky Mt. News editorial staff. Good questions, good answers.

The LA Times reports on an activist who brought a blown-up Egged Bus to the U.S. and plans to take it around North America as part of an anti-terror campaign.

The Boston Globe gave Israeli consul general Meir Shlomo op-ed space to write about the security fence. Shlomo has a refreshing, plain sense style:

IT TAKES about 10 minutes to walk from Coolidge Corner in Brookline to Kenmore Square in Boston. Why is this important? Because it takes the same amount of time for a Palestinian terrorist to walk from Kalkilya in the West Bank to Kfar Saba in Israel. Nothing can stop one from walking from Brookline to Boston; so too, nothing can stop a Palestinian terrorist from walking from the West Bank to Israel. Unfortunately, it’s as easy as it sounds.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution gave op-ed space to Avraham Burg, who literally begs President Bush to take a more active role in the peace process.

BBC reports that Iraq has banned the Al-Arabiya network because its reports incite violence against US troops.

The Montreal Gazette published a commentary by a Canadian-Ukrainian community official who pours scorn on the Pulitzer committee, which recently decided that Walter Duranty’s 1932 Pulitzer stands.

Duranty knew but didn’t care that millions were deliberately starved. This Pulitzer committee didn’t care either. Instead they worried over setting a precedent that might require reviewing whether other awards were as ill-deserved as Duranty’s.
Are there more like him in the ranks of the Pulitzer winners? And what would be wrong with establishing such a model? If Joseph Goebbels had secured a Pulitzer in 1932 for eloquent prose about the New Order in Europe, does anyone believe his prize would still stand? Why this reluctance to do what’s right?

The LA Times has a similar opinion piece, decrying modern-day “Durantyism” among dictator-friendly reporters.

NY Times picked up on the Indiana CANDLES (Holocaust museum) rebuilding effort.

In 1819, Francesco de Goya painted the grotesque “Saturn Devouring One of His Children” :

In January, 2003 editorial cartoonist Dave Brown of Britain’s Independent penned this horrible allusion to the Goya painting, with Ariel Sharon eating a Palestinian child:

The Brown cartoon was then adopted by radical Islamic groups in India this summer as part of their vicious anti-America and anti-Israel campaign:

And now…the UK’s Political Cartoon Society has given the Brown cartoon first prize in its annual “Cartoon of the Year” competition, winning out over 34 other entries!

From the pages of a paper, to the global political realm, to professional approbation – has the “Demonize Israel” campaign gotten so out of hand?!

Contact the Political Cartoon Society here.

UPDATE: Here’s Israel’s real attitude toward Arab babies: “A week-old Iraqi infant has arrived in Israel to undergo an operation to correct a congenital heart defect,” the Associated Press reports. An Israeli organization called Save a Child’s Heart brought Bayan Jassem to the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, south of Tel Aviv, whose director, Moshe Mashiah, came to Israel as a refugee from Iraq in 1951.

UPDATE: The founder of the Political Cartoon Society has written to us with this statement:

You have all taken this award completely out of perspective and context. Shame on you! We do so much good. If only you looked at our website properly you would have noticed that in fact we promote anti-facism and educate about the dangers of extremism.

Dr Tim Benson
Founder PCS

It’s hard to learn anything from the PCS site (it’s poorly done), but let’s assume Dr. Benson is right and the organization has done “so much good” to fight facism. If so, we have here a prime example of how the European left has warped its moral compass when it comes to Israel, falsely ascribing to Israeli democracy the most horrific characteristics of totalitarianism, while downplaying the greatest threat to all liberal societies today: radical Islam.

These toy hand grenades were on sale yesterday in Gaza, to share with kids on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr:

Just the latest from a culture that encourages children to blow themselves up. Where are the media reports on this terrible form of child abuse?

UPDATE: StrategyPage has a picture of another Gaza toy:

Does it give Americans pause when their tax dollars fund the PA, which is doing nothing to discourage this?

UPDATE: Some of these dolls have been confiscated by the Israeli authorities.

Blogger Stefan Sharkansky translated an interview that the German paper Die Welt did with Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas head who is often referred to in the press as Hamas’ “spiritual leader.” (The original report in German is here.)

We’ve copied the translated interview and Sharkansky’s commentary below. One lowlight: Sheik Yassin hadn’t even heard about last week’s terror attacks in Istanbul.

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The Independent has a follow up on Yvonne Ridley — the UK reporter held hostage by the Taliban, who then converted to Islam and subsequently was hired and fired by the terrorist-friendly Al-Jazeera network. Ridley hasn’t received an exit visa to leave Dubai. The Independent’s spin is that the US objected to Ridley’s coverage for Al-Jazeera, somehow pressured al-Jazeera to fire her, and now won’t let her go.

Is the Independent following Ridley’s lead, right off the deep end?