I love it when independent U.K. leftie Julie Burchill gets mad at her fellow lefties. And here she is in extreme high dudgeon in Haaretz over the elite media’s insistence on tiptoing around radical-Islamic terrorism while demonizing the Israelis for having the temerity to defend their country(hat tip: Kathy Shaidle):
Later that night [a friend] and I were watching a TV news report of the beginnings of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. To say we were amazed when a news presenter solemnly intoned that there had been ‘two militants wounded’ with all the grieving gravitas of Richard Dimbleby reporting on the state funeral of the late Winston Churchill is to employ English understatement to an almost surreal degree.
“Militants” –that’s the media’s delicate way of putting it. Julie continues:
Even the women’s magazines have gotten in on the act, with lots of first-person eye-witness accounts of British citizens fleeing the Jewish jackboot. Then turn the page and you’ll often find a shocked article about honor-killing or forced marriage, Muslim-style. That Israel is fighting the frontline war, on behalf of the freedom and civilization of all of us, against the very real evils of shariía law never seems to occur to these bleeding-heart ignoramuses.
Over at Channel 4, Jon Snow interviewed an Israeli diplomat with all the finesse and objectivity of a neo-Nazi spraying a six-foot swastika on a wall. Of the rockets which murdered Israeli civilians in the town of Sderot, he said ‘Rockets, pretty pathetic things – nobody gets injured.’ This was gleefully picked up and proclaimed by The Guardian, the newspaper I left some years ago in protest at what I saw as its vile anti-Semitism.
All across the board, Lebanese civilians are referred to as ‘civilians’ where Israeli civilians are referred to as ‘Israelis’ –an eerie and sinister difference pointed out by the non-Jewish stand-up comic genius Natalie Haynes, and one which very few people appear to have noticed – even me, until then.
Julie calls the maintream media “snatched-body zombies who look like journalists but believe and say the most inhuman, evil things.” That’s probably too diplomatic a characterization.