In the Boston Herald, Clifford May describes his participation in a debate hosted by the Trinity College of Dublin’s Philosophical Society. Though the topic of debate was the Bush presidency, the discussion degenerated into a bash-Israel affair. May went on to call participant Tim Llewellyn, who once worked for the BBC, an anti-Semite.
Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East bureau chief, announced: “George Bush is a threat to world peace on so many levels we can’t begin to discuss it.”
So he didn’t try. Instead, he turned to the topic that really fires him up: Israel. Yasser Arafat, he said, had been correct to reject the offer of Palestinian statehood made at Camp David in 2000 because it was “a pro-Zionist type of approach.” It would have allowed the Jewish state to survive. He found that a distasteful prospect.
I was not surprised. Before the debate, he’d noted that he had heard a BBC host cut off a caller who wanted to discuss Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to “wipe Israel off the map.” The caller didn’t see what was so terrible about this idea. Llewellyn lamented that there now seems to be a taboo against expressing such opinions….
I told Llewellyn – politely, but to his face – that he was an anti-Semite. That term, I explained, used to mean those who wanted a Europe with no Jewish population; today, it means those who want a world with no Jewish state.
This is not the first time Llewellyn’s hostility to Israel was expressed so openly.
