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This essay, by Danny Ayalon, Israel’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, was published in The Wall Street Journal.

A Palestinian refugee collects metal and plastic objects at a garbage dump in the Palestinian refugee camp of Beddawi near Tripoli.
A couple of years ago, a Palestinian refugee camp was encircled and laid siege to by an army of tanks and Armored Personnel Carriers. Attacks initiated by Palestinian militants triggered an overwhelming response from the army that took the life of almost 500 people, including many civilians. International organizations struggled to send aid to the refugee camps, where the inhabitants were left without basic amenities like electricity and running water. During the conflict, six U.N. personnel were killed when their car was bombed.
Government ministers and spokesmen tried to explain to the international community that the Palestinian militants were backed by Syria and global jihadist elements. Al Qaeda condemned the government and the army, declaring that the attack was part of a “crusade” against their Palestinian brothers.
While most will assume that the events described above took place in the West Bank or Gaza, they actually took place in Lebanon in the summer of 2007, when Palestinian terrorists attacked the Lebanese Army, which struck back with deadly force. The scene of most of the fighting was the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Northern Lebanon, which was home to the Islamist Fatah al-Islam, a group that has links with al Qaeda.
Just Journalism released another one of their insightful media analyses yesterday comparing coverage of Iran’s acceptance into the UN Commission on the Status of Women with that of Israel’s acceptance into the OECD.
Last week, The UN Commission on the Status of Women accepted the membership of Iran, despite the Islamic regime’s poor record on women’s rights. Then, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) accepted Israel, a country with both a free-market economy and a stable, well-regulated financial services sector, into its ranks.
Importantly, Just Journalism observed that in the UK media, only Israel’s accession to the OECD was reported “including negative opinion pieces on the Guardian’s Comment is free website”. Commenting on the double standards at play, Just Journalism stated:
No other country’s political behaviour has been subject to such scrutiny, or been viewed as an impediment to joining an organisation that is primarily concerned with the development of economic policies. Indeed, when the OECD was formed in September 1961, one of the initial members was Turkey, which at that time was being ruled by a military junta following a coup earlier that year. While Turkey’s human and civil rights record remains a stumbling block to it joining the European Union, which is as much a political body as an economic one, it has never been raised in relation to its continued membership of the OECD.
I guess this is another fine example of the “fair and balanced” nature of “Comment is Free”.
Read the entire analysis here.





White Liberals and Politically Correct Racism
August 1, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: Comment is Free, Double Standards, Guardian, Racism | by Adam Levick | 9 comments
(This essay was posted by Harry’s Place and Edmund Standing. While a complete understanding of The Guardian’s obsessive anti-Israel bias could never be achieved in the space of one single essay, Standing’s piece acutely dissects the dark impulses which, to a large degree, inform the “progressive” media’s seemingly visceral hostility to the Jewish state, as well as the ideological perversions necessary to justify the violent acts, and hateful ideologies, of the most odious terrorist regimes.)
The white liberal is an unhealthy type of creature that you will undoubtedly have encountered, if not in real life, certainly via the media. By ‘liberal’, I do not mean simply someone who has a generally liberal outlook, in the sense of a ‘live and let live’ philosophy, nor do I mean liberals in the sense of the classical liberals of the conservative tradition. By ‘white liberal’, I mean a white Western individual who is likely to come from a middle class background and have a university education, considers him or herself to be both ‘left-wing’ and socially ‘liberal’, and almost certainly reads The Guardian or The Independent. White liberals espouse an artificial and pretentious form of ‘egalitarianism’, a patronising and hypocritical approach to ethnic minorities and non-Western cultures, and – in a re-hash of the notion of the ‘white man’s burden’ – devote themselves to a delusional Messianism in which they seek to ‘save the world’ through protesting against war (in real terms, protesting against non-white people having a chance at freedom and democracy), Israel (the one truly liberal society in the Middle East), globalisation (thereby opposing the one great vehicle by which poorer nations can develop), and so on, while making themselves feel and look ‘good’ by flaunting their pious support for campaigns to end poverty in the Third World (which will do no such thing, as Dambisa Moyo, Stephen Pollard, Marian L. Tupy, and others rightly point out ), and boasting about how ‘progressive’ they are by showing ‘solidarity’ with genocidal Islamists in Gaza.
White liberals, despite viewing themselves as intelligent and open-minded, are actually some of the most illiberal and narrow-minded people in society today. Their reactions to the idea that anyone might think differently to them range from gut-wrenching despair to pure hatred of the kind seen in the most fanatical of ‘true believers’. White liberals are, by and large, incapable of serious adult debate (preferring innuendo and accusations of bigotry), or of dealing with the fact that not everyone will agree with them (despite their supposed love of pluralism and a multiplicity of different ‘voices’), and tend to see any view which deviates from their cultic leftist script as a form of irredeemable moral evil. White liberals do not base their world-view on rational analysis and sensible argument, but instead on an almost religious faith that they possess the ‘truth’, and just as we see in so many fundamentalist religious cults and sects, the devotees of the white liberal faith burn with hatred for the ‘sin’ that surrounds them, and indeed, all too often for the ‘sinners’ themselves. White liberals, who are the intellectual equivalent of stroppy, rebellious teenagers, have sought to subvert and undermine Western civilisation, and some offer support for authoritarian and even terrorist movements as part of their attack on ‘racism’ and ‘colonialism’.
White liberals approach issues of race and racism from an essentially irrational, moralistic standpoint. White liberals do not simply judge racism to be based on bad thinking and criticise it for its illogical collectivism. Instead, white liberals make the issue of racism, as with other issues, all about them. White liberals have colonised the discourse of racism and anti-racism because it offers them an opportunity to boast of the superiority of their virtue and to demonstrate their purity and holiness through ostentatious and vacuous public displays of self-flagellation. Just as early Christianity imbued adherents with a deep sense of guilt and sinfulness, so the white liberal finds in reflecting on the history of white racism the opportunity to both revel in the guilt of the sinner and to make atonement through ‘anti-racist’ initiatives, thereby offering them the opportunity to further present themselves as a holy elite tasked with saving the world. And just as at various points in the history of Christianity an overarching sense of guilt derived from an intense awareness of, and obsession with, the supposedly inherent sinfulness of human beings and of the ‘world’ led ‘holy’ men and women to conclude that the path to holiness is found in the hatred of self, world, and the human condition, white liberals indulge in a form of self-hatred which is designed to project the image of penitence and sanctity, while actually being transparently pretentious, self-aggrandising, and destructive.
See the rest of the essay, here
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