UPDATE 9/3/2014: A reader sent us a link to a cached version of Mira Bar Hillel’s column that includes the now-deleted “multi-tentacle” reference.
* * *
Mira Bar Hillel’s obsessive campaign against Israel in column after column for The Independent continues. Bar Hillel, to recall, is an expatriate Israeli who hates the country of her birth so much that she wrote about how she is on the brink of burning her Israeli passport. She has even admitted that she is prejudiced against Jews.
In her latest piece, she launches an attack on a so-called “Israel lobby” in the UK in a virtual repeat of a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation in 2009 that uncovered nothing untoward beyond Angl0-Jewry exercising its democratic right to advocate for Israel.
The MediaGuido blog got a screenshot of The Independent’s original headline before it was quietly changed:
While The Independent may have realized that it had crossed a line with a headline referring to “powerful Jewish lobbies,” Mira Bar Hillel was less bothered, as she demonstrated on Twitter:
We are also informed that the words “multi-tentacled” were removed from the text, presumably to avoid associations with anti-Semitic tropes. (Unfortunately the original version was not cached so we are unable to provide a screenshot.)
Ultimately, Mira Bar Hillel’s latest slur and The Independent’s willingness to publish such tripe merely demonstrates an obsession with Israel bordering on the neurotic.
