Is Israel really the demon in the Middle East?

In May, Rod Liddle wrote an excellent piece in The Sunday Times criticising Stephen Hawking for his boycott of a scientific conference in Israel, after Prof. Hawking had been persuaded to do so by Palestinian colleagues.

The article draws attention to Hamas's oppression of its own citizens in Gaza, where homosexuality can be punished with ten years in jail, and Semtex is strapped to the bodies of women, children, and people with learning difficulties, to send them on suicide bombing missions. 

Liddle writes: "And why boycott Israel and not Iran, or North Korea, or Saudi Arabia, or Zimbabwe? Why persecute Israeli academics who may well themselves object to their government’s policies in the West Bank?"

 
It was so heartening to read an insightful and sane contribution like Rod Liddle's, that reminds the knee-jerk anti-Israel bandwagon about Hamas's and militant Islamists' appalling abuse in Gaza of gay and lesbian people, of women, of children, and of people with special educational needs.

All liberal, democratic, progressive states like Israel need constructive criticism in order to improve: but a wholesale condemnation of the complete nation, while turning a blind eye to the atrocities and injustices committed against its own citizens and those of its neighbours by Hamas and the aggressive Islamists running other terrorist states, is morally indefensible. 

Toby Young's recent article in the Jewish Chronicle on the Loneliness of Defending Israel provides further evidence of the irrational and anti-Israel bias in the media. Indeed, the bias extends deep into the faux-progressive community as a whole: one that is very selective in its use of evidence and logic in order not to violate the mantra of received left-wing orthodoxy and thereby incur the disapproval and censure of the unforgiving Progressariat. It is the same irrational and oppressive state of affairs that prevails with regard to the significant risk of any criticism of violent Islamism or of fundamentalist Islam being met with an accusation of "Islamophobia", backed up by arguments from the accomplished Sophistical Philosophers of Useful Idiocy.

It takes courage to challenge a dishonest and unjust status quo; and Israel, as well as all victims of religious fundamentalism and of their opportunistic appeasing propagandists, deserve our courage. To remain silent in the face of this absurd travesty only serves to avoid the disapproval of people whose opinions we should regard with contempt. Regardless of the dishonesty, cowardice and stupidity that surround us, and of the menacing and intolerant environment they have created for those who dissent, progress is never made by keeping silent in the face of dishonesty and injustice. 

We must stand up for Israel.


© Gary Powell, 2013