During the notorious parliamentary debate on Israel this week, in which the foreign secretary announced that he was suspending trade talks with the sole democracy in the Middle East, the false claim that “14,000 babies could be dead in the next 48 hours” was repeated no fewer than 13 times, according to the record in Hansard.
The following day, a man shot dead two Israeli diplomats outside a Jewish Museum in Washington DC while allegedly crying “free Palestine”.
In the latest antisemitic outrage in 2,000 years of antisemitic outrages, a couple in their twenties, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, who were about to become engaged, were gunned down after an event, apparently by a brainwashed Gaza junkie.
Their portrait says it all. There they stand in formal attire, full of optimism and life, smiling at the camera as they look forward to making a home together, flanked by the flags of the United States and Israel, two of the best and freest countries in their respective regions.
Both are also nations that have, to very different extents, suffered the scourge of jihadi terror. The 9/11 attacks in New York were motivated largely by antisemitism, a trial of a surviving member of the terror cell in Hamburg later revealed.
To this coupling we can add other countries across the West, including our own. As it happened, the shooting in Washington took place on the eighth anniversary of the bombing of the Manchester Arena. Did Salman Abedi have “Palestine” in the back of his mind as he butchered 22 children and their relatives at the Ariana Grande concert? My money’s on yes.
The grim truth is that there is a common denominator between the affront to Western values and interests on display in parliament this week and the gruesome murders in Washington and elsewhere.
It is unlikely that anybody would carry out any form of jihadi murder without believing deeply in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Such as the claim that 14,000 Palestinian babies could be dead in the next 48 hours.
These conspiracy theories have been commonplace ever since the Cold War, when Soviet propagandists invented them and spread them around the world, where they were received with some glee by the Muslim world and the Western Left.
Foremost, of course, is the false claim that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza, despite the fact that if it had wished to do so, it could have obliterated the entire Strip from the air in about half-an-hour without risking the life of a single soldier.
There are many others, however: apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, white supremacy, Nazism. To these we may add false claims specific to Israel’s operations in Gaza. The IDF bombs hospitals for fun. Shoots civilians for fun. Kills infants for fun, just like the Jews have done since 1144 in Norwich.
But 14,000 babies? Surely that stretched the bounds of credulity. In the fever dream of Israelophobia, however, even the most Satanic behaviour is credible when we’re talking about the Middle East’s only democracy.
So it was that after a United Nations humanitarian chief made the claim on Radio 4’s Today, it travelled halfway round the world in a matter of minutes.
As the BBC established shortly afterwards, however, the assertion was false. It came from a recent UN report speculating that 14,000 children between the ages of four and six could be in danger of acute malnutrition in Gaza over the next year.
No babies. No 48 hours. No actual starvation, just a fear of it. Yet this was insufficient to prevent the lie from occupying centre stage in Parliament, riling up MPs from both sides of the aisle as they agitated for David Lammy to put the boot into the Jewish state.
It makes for an ugly picture. Every single one of those parliamentarians who defiled the chamber by so self-righteously repeating an obviously false allegation, made by a representative of an organisation – the UN – which has traded in antisemitic tropes for decades, should issue an immediate apology.
Lammy should correct the shamefully hostile stance that he has taken on behalf of the country towards the Jewish state. The suggestion in his opening remarks that Israel’s war of self-defence was “an affront to the values of the British people” could not have been more ironic, given the way he was trampling those values himself.
Because the true common denominator in all this is that Britain, the United States and Israel all face different heads of the hydra of jihadism. The greatest success of Hamas propagandists is to make us believe that their bloodlust is some form of “resistance” to Israeli “occupation” and “oppression”, something we should support. This is ahistorical garbage.
The Arab world launched two wars of annihilation against the Jewish state, in 1948 and 1967, before there was a single Israeli boot on the West Bank or in Gaza. The “apartheid slur” was being used before then, too. Hamas went on to derail the Oslo peace accords, which would have delivered a Palestinian state, with a campaign of suicide bombs.
It is disgraceful that the foreign secretary has allowed Hamas to blind him to the interests of Britain. It is disgraceful that he has shown himself to be as susceptible to propaganda as the next idiot in a keffiyeh. The shooting in Washington should serve as a well-needed reminder that we are witnessing a struggle between the West and the forces of jihad, and there can be no question about which side we must take.
During the notorious parliamentary debate on Israel this week, in which the foreign secretary announced that he was suspending trade talks with the sole democracy in the Middle East, the false claim that “14,000 babies could be dead in the next 48 hours” was repeated no fewer than 13 times, according to the record in Hansard.
The following day, a man shot dead two Israeli diplomats outside a Jewish Museum in Washington DC while allegedly crying “free Palestine”.
In the latest antisemitic outrage in 2,000 years of antisemitic outrages, a couple in their twenties, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, who were about to become engaged, were gunned down after an event, apparently by a brainwashed Gaza junkie.
Their portrait says it all. There they stand in formal attire, full of optimism and life, smiling at the camera as they look forward to making a home together, flanked by the flags of the United States and Israel, two of the best and freest countries in their respective regions.
Both are also nations that have, to very different extents, suffered the scourge of jihadi terror. The 9/11 attacks in New York were motivated largely by antisemitism, a trial of a surviving member of the terror cell in Hamburg later revealed.
To this coupling we can add other countries across the West, including our own. As it happened, the shooting in Washington took place on the eighth anniversary of the bombing of the Manchester Arena. Did Salman Abedi have “Palestine” in the back of his mind as he butchered 22 children and their relatives at the Ariana Grande concert? My money’s on yes.
The grim truth is that there is a common denominator between the affront to Western values and interests on display in parliament this week and the gruesome murders in Washington and elsewhere.
It is unlikely that anybody would carry out any form of jihadi murder without believing deeply in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Such as the claim that 14,000 Palestinian babies could be dead in the next 48 hours.
These conspiracy theories have been commonplace ever since the Cold War, when Soviet propagandists invented them and spread them around the world, where they were received with some glee by the Muslim world and the Western Left.
Foremost, of course, is the false claim that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza, despite the fact that if it had wished to do so, it could have obliterated the entire Strip from the air in about half-an-hour without risking the life of a single soldier.
There are many others, however: apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, white supremacy, Nazism. To these we may add false claims specific to Israel’s operations in Gaza. The IDF bombs hospitals for fun. Shoots civilians for fun. Kills infants for fun, just like the Jews have done since 1144 in Norwich.
But 14,000 babies? Surely that stretched the bounds of credulity. In the fever dream of Israelophobia, however, even the most Satanic behaviour is credible when we’re talking about the Middle East’s only democracy.
So it was that after a United Nations humanitarian chief made the claim on Radio 4’s Today, it travelled halfway round the world in a matter of minutes.
As the BBC established shortly afterwards, however, the assertion was false. It came from a recent UN report speculating that 14,000 children between the ages of four and six could be in danger of acute malnutrition in Gaza over the next year.
No babies. No 48 hours. No actual starvation, just a fear of it. Yet this was insufficient to prevent the lie from occupying centre stage in Parliament, riling up MPs from both sides of the aisle as they agitated for David Lammy to put the boot into the Jewish state.
It makes for an ugly picture. Every single one of those parliamentarians who defiled the chamber by so self-righteously repeating an obviously false allegation, made by a representative of an organisation – the UN – which has traded in antisemitic tropes for decades, should issue an immediate apology.
Lammy should correct the shamefully hostile stance that he has taken on behalf of the country towards the Jewish state. The suggestion in his opening remarks that Israel’s war of self-defence was “an affront to the values of the British people” could not have been more ironic, given the way he was trampling those values himself.
Because the true common denominator in all this is that Britain, the United States and Israel all face different heads of the hydra of jihadism. The greatest success of Hamas propagandists is to make us believe that their bloodlust is some form of “resistance” to Israeli “occupation” and “oppression”, something we should support. This is ahistorical garbage.
The Arab world launched two wars of annihilation against the Jewish state, in 1948 and 1967, before there was a single Israeli boot on the West Bank or in Gaza. The “apartheid slur” was being used before then, too. Hamas went on to derail the Oslo peace accords, which would have delivered a Palestinian state, with a campaign of suicide bombs.
It is disgraceful that the foreign secretary has allowed Hamas to blind him to the interests of Britain. It is disgraceful that he has shown himself to be as susceptible to propaganda as the next idiot in a keffiyeh. The shooting in Washington should serve as a well-needed reminder that we are witnessing a struggle between the West and the forces of jihad, and there can be no question about which side we must take.