Why Is Britain the “Center Point” of Anti-Semitism?
“Britain has become the center point for the meeting of anti-Semitic trends in Europe,” says Hebrew University historian Prof. Robert S. Wistrich.
Why? Wistrich cites a number of reasons, which are discussed in a recent Jerusalem Post article. Not surprisingly, one of the causes mentioned is the British media’s notorious hostility toward Israel:
British media had taken an almost universally anti-Israel bias, especially but not exclusively on the BBC, with context removed from description of Israeli military actions, and Islamic jihadist activity such as suicide bombing never connected to ideology.
“Under no circumstance will a Palestinian act of terrorism be referred to as terrorist, They are militants similar to the floor-shop dispute in Liverpool whose workers have decided to go on strike,” he said.
“Palestinian terrorism is portrayed as a minor pin-prick compared to ‘massive’ retaliation of this ‘rogue’ state [Israel],” he said.
“You cannot read a British newspaper without encountering a variant of the libel that Zionism is racism or Zionism is Nazism,” he said, describing a culture of “barely disguised hatred” when the subject of Zionism of British Jewry or Anglo-Israel relations is broached, unless they are “the good anti-Zionists.”
With the media and the elites skewed against Israel – aided by former Israeli academics who routinely condemn the Jewish state and who have attained “historic dissident status and are listened to as the authentic voice of Israel” – the whole discussion of anti-Semitism had become distorted in Britain, with the accuser becoming the accused, he said.
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