Why was Lady Ashton’s Reference to Sderot Removed?

By Published On: March 21, 2012

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There has been much criticism of Lady Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, for her comments about the massacre of Jewish students and a rabbi in Toulouse, France by a Muslim extremist. In particular many were outraged that in the context of this massacre, she chose to connect it to the predicament of children in Gaza, implicitly condemning Israel.

The Gaza reference generated widespread criticism and a follow-up statement by Lady Ashton. However, her inclusion of children in Gaza obscured the other outrageous component of the controversy over her comments. In her televised remarks, Lady Ashton included the children of the Israeli border town of Sderot as an example of children suffering. Yet in the official released version of her comments the reference to Sderot is removed.

There are two possibilities; one is that Lady Ashton did not include Sderot in her official response and only added it impromptu in front of the camera; the other is that the sympathetic reference to Sderot was intentionally removed from the official public version of her comments.

The first possibility speaks to Lady Ashton’s mindset that only remembers the suffering of Israeli children targeted by Hamas rockets as an afterthought. But the second possibility is worse, it suggests a dogmatic insensitivity to Jewish suffering.

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