The Guardian has published an editorial to coincide with International Holocaust Memorial Day. It gives an insight into The Guardian’s particular ideological brand.
In reference to Holocaust survivors:
They are speaking now because soon they will not be able to speak. They are speaking, also, to a Europe where minorities once again feel themselves at risk: Jewish communities gripped by a new insecurity, Muslim communities that sense the slow swell of hostility in the wake of jihadist outrages like the massacre at Charlie Hebdo. True, a sprinkling of far-right parties, from Golden Dawn in Greece to Svoboda in Ukraine, is far from constituting a fascist revival. We are not on the road to another Auschwitz. But that is, in part, because we remember what happened there.
It is only European synagogues that have been forced to close for security reasons. It is only Jewish communal buildings, schools and kindergartens that require the tightest of security. Mosques have remained open and save for a few minor incidents of property damage, it is not Muslims who have been murdered on European soil.
Yet The Guardian treats both Jews and Muslims as the victims in a false moral equivalence.
And what about the “sprinkling of far-right parties?” The Guardian fails to recognize that it is not the threat of neo-Nazis or fascists that represent the greatest threat to Jewish communities in Europe but the convergence of radical leftists and Islamist extremists who couch their hatred of Jews in the language of anti-Zionism of the sort given a platform by The Guardian itself.
As if to illustrate this point, the editorial states:
Israel itself, coming late to its own reckoning with what happened in Europe, has sometimes been led by those ready to exploit its vulnerability, but that does not mean the vulnerability is not viscerally felt: a people who came close to extinction cannot be blamed for not wanting to put their fate ever again in other hands. The Arabs, meanwhile, cannot be blamed for feeling that Europe’s blood debt to the Jews was paid with what they see as their territory.
So The Guardian infers that Israeli leaders have sometimes abused and exploited the Holocaust to excuse Israeli actions. The Guardian then excuses the Arab refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East by inferring that the creation of the modern State of Israel was a result of European guilt over the Holocaust rather than the inevitable self-determination of an indigenous people in their homeland.
For all the lip service paid to Jewish suffering, The Guardian cannot disguise its anti-Israel dogma and its role in promoting the very conditions of vulnerability that Jews in Europe today find themselves in.
Award-winning author Howard Jacobson writes this very week in The Independent on the way that the “But Brigade” concede that something may constitute an atrocity “but”… and here insert whichever qualifier takes their fancy. And so The Guardian has done – the Holocaust was an atrocity “but” Israel’s actions and legitimacy should still be questioned.
