Pop superstar Madonna isn’t a likely topic of conversation for HonestReporting. Nonetheless we can only appreciate her willingness to raise the serious issue of anti-Semitism in France while visiting the country.
Clearly Madonna is no expert on the subject and one can agree or disagree with her comments, which were somewhat over-stated. The Independent’s Jenn Selby makes it quite clear where she stands in her report:
Madonna was born in 1958 in Michigan, USA.
But that hasn’t prevented her from likening the feeling in France right now to that of Nazi Germany, of which the German Reich presided with Adolf Hitler as the helm between 1933 and 1945.
Speaking to a Parisian radio station last week, she claimed anti-Semitism was at a record high in the country she doesn’t live in but occasionally passes through.
During the Second World War, more than 90,000 French Jews were rounded up and deported to concentration camps.
“We’re living in crazy times,” she said. “It feels like Nazi Germany.
What is striking here is The Independent’s gross hypocrisy for a number of reasons.
- Did Jenn Selby, the journalist responsible for the Madonna story, adopt the same critical tone when reporting American singer Jon Legend’s anti-Israel comments? No.
- Did The Independent have a problem giving a soapbox to musician Brian Eno to attack Israel? No, even though Eno was also commenting on a country that, like Madonna, he doesn’t live in and never passes through, presumably by choice.
- Indeed, when was commenting on a country that one doesn’t live in ever pose a problem for The Independent? HonestReporting has seen biased stories about Israel written by Independent “online journalists” such as Lizzie Dearden who gather news from the internet and not from the actual location of the story.
Only when a celebrity happens to be openly pro-Israel and comments about anti-Semitism does The Independent take a critical and condescending tone.
And since when was living in the location of the story a prerequisite for criticizing a country?
UPDATE
Independent journalist Jenn Selby has tweeted the following response to HonestReporting Managing Editor Simon Plosker:
@SimonPlosker Hi Simon, thanks for your defamatory blog post. I am actually of Jewish heritage with family in/from Israel/Palestine.
— Jenn Selby (@JennSelby) March 2, 2015
UPDATE 2
Jenn Selby has deleted her tweet, presumably after she was asked what her personal heritage had to do with the story. We still have a screenshot of the Twitter conversation however:
Image credit: Madonna’s Instagram account.
