Israel

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Why is the SNP endorsing Israel haters?

Regular readers will have noticed that I don’t like Islamic fundamentalists. Nor — though this is perhaps less often on display — do I much like Scottish Nationalists. Not just because their primary cause is to break up one of the two most successful political unions in history, but because so many of their secondary causes are so rancid as well. Take this poster advertising a ‘Women for Gaza’ rally in Glasgow this Saturday. The headline speaker is Nicola Sturgeon MSP. She is the Deputy First Minister of Scotland and leading light of the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP). And one of the two other scheduled speakers is Yvonne Ridley —

Tuesday

Steerpike

How far do the Lib Dems want to go over Gaza?

Well, well, well. What’s all this then? Uncle Vince has announced the suspension of 12 export licenses to Israel. Here’s what he said: ‘We welcome the current ceasefire in Gaza and hope that it will lead to a peaceful resolution. However the UK Government has not been able to clarify if the export licence criteria are being met. In light of that uncertainty we have taken the decision to suspend these existing export licences in the event of a resumption of significant hostilities. ‘No new licences of military equipment have been issued for use by the Israeli Defence Force during the review period and as a precautionary measure this approach

Monday

Douglas Murray

Owen Jones is lying about Israel. Plain and simple.

Owen Jones’s column in the Guardian is headlined ‘Anti-Jewish hatred is rising – we must see it for what it is.’ Sadly the article falls well short of that headline’s aspiration. At one point in the piece Owen singles me out for criticism: ‘Take Douglas Murray, a writer with a particular obsession with Islam.’ (I suppose ‘obsession’, rather than ‘interest’, say, is intended to suggest something untoward. But I confess that I am indeed especially interested in one of the major stories of our day.) Owen goes on to say of me: ‘“Thousands of anti-Semites have today succeeded in bringing central London to an almost total standstill” was his reprehensible

Steerpike Steerpike

Up yours George

The most uplifting news of the weekend? Israeli tourists defied George Galloway’s decree that Bradford become an ‘Israeli-free zone’. Better even that: plenty of locals came out in sympathy with the touring Israelis. Guido has the details and pictures. #realhopenothate.

Friday

Ed West

Anti-Semitism in Britain makes me feel ashamed

As silly seasons go, this August has been pretty rubbish, I have to say. Iraq heads the list of gloomy subjects, obviously, as 100,000 Christians and many more Yazidis flee from the genocidal maniacs of the Islamic State. And before anyone asks, yes I do support intervention there: this is not like other conflicts in the region, between two heavily-armed militias both hostile to the West, as in Syria; it is an unprovoked attacked by our enemies against defenceless civilians simply because of their religion, the very thing the post-1945 order was supposed to prevent. Gaza is also deeply depressing; obviously it’s existential to the people of Israel and Palestine,

Douglas Murray

The black flag of ISIS is flying in London

There is a phrase used of, and by, jihadists: ‘First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.’ Well there’s a fine example of this on display at the moment in East London. Even the Guardian has picked up on it. At the entrance to a council estate near Canary Wharf, amid the banners of the hilariously misnamed ‘Stop the War coalition’ (‘End the Siege on Gaza’) the Black flag of Jihad is flying. Yes, that’s right, at a major council estate in the East End of London the black flag of ISIS is flying. Here is an excerpt from what one might hope is the Guardian’s learning curve: ‘When the

Thursday

David Frum

David Frum’s diary: When Hamas shoots at Israel, they’re shooting at my kid

 Wellington, Ontario A British visitor to this village might be disoriented by the flags. They look almost exactly like the Union Jack, but not quite. These banners omit the Cross of St Patrick, which was bundled into the flag of the United Kingdom only in 1801: this is the earlier version, carried north to Canada by the losers of the American revolution. My wife and I and our three children have been spending summers in Wellington since the late 1980s, when her parents bought a disused tomato farm with a vast view of Lake Ontario. Back then, this part of Ontario was bypassed by modern development. In the years since,

The Spectator

Podcast: Boris is back, Baroness Warsi’s resignation and the demise of the ‘nice girl’

Here comes Boris! After he announced yesterday that he will stand as an MP in 2015, the next Tory leadership fight has just begun. Now that Boris is back in the fray, and making Eurosceptic noises, he has an excellent chance of making it to No. 10 – to assume what he believes is his rightful destiny — the position of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Freddy Gray presents this week’s podcast, and talks to Harry Mount about how Boris’s parliamentary campaign might play out. Isabel Hardman also examines the possible constituencies he might pick. The other major political story this week was Baroness Warsi’s shock resignation. But was it

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

You’ll mock me, but I have to ask: why don’t any of my friends have holiday homes?

This is to be one of those columns that makes the writer faintly wish there wasn’t an internet. It would be one thing merely in print — ephemeral, swiftly forgotten, to be stumbled across only by like-minded individuals en route from Charles Moore to Taki — but online I fear there may be sniggering. ‘What planet is he on?’ they will be asking on Twitter, but then, I suppose, they always are. The fact is, there’s been a question preying on my mind these last few weeks and I’m going to be bold, and ask it. You may snigger, you may mock and you may sneer, but that won’t make

Wednesday

Nick Cohen

Anti-Semitic double standards: the arts and the Jews

‘Would you force anyone else to behave like this?’ the promoters of the UK Jewish Film Festival asked the artistic director of London’s Tricycle Theatre. Indhu Rubasingham and her colleagues dodged and hummed. They didn’t like the question and did not want to reply to it. The silence was an answer in itself. Of course the theatre would not hold others to the same standard: just Jews. Accusations of racism are made so often it is hard to see the real thing when it looks you in the eye. Let me spell it out for you. Racism consists of demanding behaviour from a minority you would never dream of demanding

Sunday

Douglas Murray

Hamas censors British journalists. Why don’t we care?

I wonder if any readers have an answer to this question: Has anybody, throughout this whole conflict around Gaza, heard any reporter inside Gaza, at any time, preface or conclude their remarks with ‘reporting from Gaza, under Hamas government reporting restrictions’?  I don’t watch television news all the time and so may have missed it, but I don’t think I have heard this said even once. Which is strange. When reporting from a dictatorship like Gaza it used to be the norm that reporters would preface or conclude any report with some variant of this formula.  Doing so was a neat way to send the warning to viewers that you

Melanie Phillips

If Miliband really cared about defending British Jews, here’s what he would say

In this week’s Spectator, Melanie Phillips argued that supposedly anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. The most appalling aspect is the silence in the face of all this of the political class. Here’s her suggestion for what Ed Miliband should say if he really cared about the rise of anti-semitism in Britain: ‘I am horrified, not just because of the resurgence of the madness from which my own family so grievously suffered in the Holocaust, but also because we on the left bear no small responsibility for this current obscenity. ‘Hamas has placed its rocket arsenals below hospitals,

Saturday

Melanie Phillips

Here’s what Cameron should say if he really cares about defending Britain’s Jews

In this week’s Spectator, Melanie Phillips argued that supposedly anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. Even more appalling is the silence in the face of all this of the political class. Here’s her suggestion for what David Cameron should say if he really cared about the rise of anti-semitism in Britain: ‘I am utterly appalled by the attacks on the Jewish people on the streets of Britain and in our public discourse. This hatred and bigotry is being fuelled by warped and distorted reporting about the Gaza war. ‘Newspapers and broadcasters are uncritically treating Hamas propaganda as fact.

Thursday

Taki

Even Switzerland is turning lefty. Am I going to have to move to Wyoming?

 Gstaad I am looking out of my window at the green landscape and forested mountains rising beyond, as peaceful a scene as there is in this troubled world, but this is Switzerland, a country that hasn’t fought a war in 700 years, resisting both Napoleon and Hitler through friendly persuasion and by having banks that don’t talk. No longer. The new big bully on the block, Uncle Sam, in cahoots with the vermin that is the EU, is forcing the Swiss to open up and spill the beans. What I don’t get is why the Swiss are lying down and playing dead. Sure, they have all sorts of referendums, but

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

If the Edinburgh Fringe thinks it’s fine to give in to bigots, I might have to give up on the Edinburgh Fringe

When is a great international arts festival not a great international arts festival? When it can’t uphold even the most basic principles of free speech. Last night a play by an Israeli theatre company was forced to cancel its run at the Edinburgh Fringe as the result of the barracking of a group of anti-Israeli thugs. The show, The City, is now homeless and on the hunt for a new venue. Where exactly would they like these Israelis to perform, I wondered? Outside the walls of the city possibly? Would that be more conducive to their medieval vision of the world? Owing simply to their nationality – owing simply to their race

The Spectator

Podcast: The lure of the crowd, anti-Semitism and Cameron’s uncertain future

Hell, as one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s characters said, is other people. Unless, that is, you happen to be British and born after about 1980, in which case hell is the opposite: being alone for more than about five minutes. In this week’s View from 22 podcast, Ross Clark looks at the rise of crowd culture. We have succumbed to the lure of the crowd, he says. Lara Prendergast suggests social media is to blame. In this week’s Spectator, Melanie Phillips argues that anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. The silence from the political class in the face

Melanie Phillips

What our leaders would say if they really cared about defending Britain’s Jews

The mask has been torn away. Supposedly anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. In Paris, predominantly Muslim mobs screaming ‘death to the Jews’ have repeatedly tried to storm synagogues, torched cars and burnt Jewish-owned shops to the ground. In Berlin, demonstrators shouted ‘Gas the Jews’ while an imam beseeched Allah to ‘count and kill Zionist Jews to the very last one’. In Britain, physical and verbal attacks on Jews have doubled. One woman was assaulted by a group of 50 protestors who heard her discussing Gaza on her mobile phone. Shouting ‘get her’ they surrounded and pushed

Wednesday

The Spectator

Watch: Douglas Murray and Ben Soffa from Palestinian Solidarity Campaign discuss anti-Semitism

In this week’s Spectator, Melanie Phillips suggests that anti-Semitism is on the rise, fueled by the events in the Middle East. Douglas Murray and Ben Soffa, Secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, discuss whether this is the case in this week’s View from 22 video special. Here’s an extract from Melanie’s piece. The full article will be available tomorrow: The mask has been torn away. Supposedly anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. In Paris, predominantly Muslim mobs screaming ‘death to the Jews’ have repeatedly tried to storm synagogues, torched cars and burnt Jewish-owned shops to the ground.

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Moeen Ali reminds us that sometimes sport is the only place for politics

Moeen Ali, the England cricketer, faces a possible reprimand after the International Cricket Council (ICC), the game’s governing body, censured him for wearing two wristbands, one saying ‘Save Gaza’, the other ‘Free Palestine’. International cricketers are, you see, prohibited from making political statements on the field. The English Cricket Board, which is not above making political statements (as its various boycotts of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe suggest), dissents from the ICC’s view, and says that Moeen’s stance is ‘humanitarian not political’. What, then, of ‘Save Gaza’ and ‘Free Palestine’? There is politics here. And, yes, it is partial. The ECB is disingenuous to suggest that this is a merely ‘humanitarian’ sentiment. But