One day in October – a review censored
JVL Introduction
Something peculiar is going on at the Guardian.
On the one hand, its website carries a piece by Howard Jacobson arguing that reporting Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian children (as the Guardian has done itself over recent months) is equivalent to peddling the Medieval “blood libel” myth, accusing Jews of killing Christian children and using their blood in Passover rituals. Jonathan Cook has already exposed the vile genocide apologism this displays. Never mind the thousands of dead children and mounting evidence that Israeli forces are targeting them deliberately. Jacobson’s article was illustrated with a photo of blood-smeared baby doll carried on a ceasefire protest. Because obviously, it’s only “anti-Jewish hate marchers” who believe Israel would ever kill real, flesh-and-blood infants.
On the other hand, a review by veteran feature writer Stuart Jeffries of a TV documentary about October 7, 2023, disappeared from the Guardian/Observer website after barely 24 hours. The Jewish News reported with satisfaction: Guardian deletes online review that criticises the ‘demonisation’ of Hamas. It quoted pro-Israel zealot Simon Myerson KC, condemning the review as an example of “groupthink Guardian, which lacks morality because all those involved regarded Jews as in some way deserving of death.”
Thanks to the efforts of investigative journalist Paddy French, Jeffries’ review is available for you to read, below, and assess for yourself. See if you can fathom why Jacobson stays up, allbeit with a mild-mannered response from former publisher Louise Adler, while Jeffries gets erased.
NWI
This article was originally published by Press Gang on Fri 11 Oct 2024. Read the original here.
The Guardian: Free Speech?
IT TOOK the Guardian less than 24 hours to take down a review of Channel 4’s documentary about the Hamas attack on October 7 last year.
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Interesting introduction which refers to Howard Jacobson once again trying to suggest that British critics of Israeli crimes against humanity, are motivated by or invoking a ‘blood libel’. Officially Britain has never been more secular. It almost impossible to find anyone that remember the names of the 12 apostles, yet Jacobson tries to suggest obscure 12th C bigotries – unsupported by current institutional or economic power – are uppermost in the general public’s mind? Not for the first time too – here particularly with regard to child victimisation – the lobby either claims a form of discrimination that has affected many groups is exclusively Jewish, or culturally appropriates other race’s experience of oppression.
Israel tried to suppress revelations of its Yemeni Children Affair scandal – where Yemini Jews were subject to human experimentation and their babies stolen, to be given to childless western settler couples – claiming child victimisation was a traditional anti-Semitic slur. But put ‘ethnic child theft’ into any search engine and you’ll inevitably find forms of Gypsy identity invoked. In the recent past children used to be teased about staying out late. in case ‘the Gypsies get you’.
Racist cultural appropriation regularly occurs from the lobby. When the slur ‘court Jew’ was allegedly directed at Jackie Walker, it was clearly a derivative of Malcolm X’s ‘house slave’. In pro-Israel victim narratives, there are examples of ‘uppity n*gg** being changed to ‘pushy Jew’, and of course top of a long list, is the example of David Baddiel’s ridiculously insulting appropriation of ‘Blackface’ into ‘Jewface’.
Fundamentally, there are problems in specific white groups always claiming to always be the most oppressed around, not least the issue of visibility in western light/dark ethnic hierarchies, also the particular nature of some conflicts. For example, during the troubles in Northern Ireland, who would most likely end up dead a local Jew or Catholic?
The way the reviewer criticises the film’s failings as the reviewer sees them, is not the best., I understand his point, but I don’t feel comfortable with the way he expresses it. It’s a bit like people who say ‘what Hitler did to the Jews was wrong, but he must have had his reasons’. He could have pointed out the lack of coverage on C4 or other UK media into why Gaza exploded in rage, the background oppression. And the last sentence is really not for him to say, even if he wondered it. It’s a film about real human beings, not a fiction.
On the issue of cultural appropriation Howard Jacobson has form. The expression ‘only Black people know what racism is like’ (or ‘feels like’) was changed in support of the pro-Israel moral panic in his article here – see link below. The same theme was then followed-up on the letters page.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/07/howard-jacobson-jews-know-what-antisemitism-is-and-what-it-isnt-to-invent-it-would-be-a-sacrilege
&
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/13/antisemitism-and-criticism-of-israel
Does it never end, demonization of the victims in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon … by the very people who never stop shouting that they are the victims alone!!! No good will come of this for Israel, ever. Where is self regulation and honor? It’s obscene.
I agree with Paul Seligman – I think the review was peculiarly clumsy. (For one thing, if he didn’t want Hamas’s fighters reduced to a “generalised menace”, I wonder that he insisted on referring to them as “terrorists” throughout.)
The good point that the reviewer didn’t make – or at least didn’t make explicit – is that Einat’s sentiments were maybe not much different to those of the young men from Gaza: “I feel no empathy for any of them, because of what some of them have done to us.”
Jacobson’s article was absolutely unconscionable. The fact that he is otherwise such a wise and witty man just makes it all the more deplorable.
He certainly does have form. This piece, published originally (I think) in the Observer is still up on the New York Times website. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/labour-jeremy-corbym-anti-semitism.html
It claims that ‘a motion to question the truth of the Holocaust was proposed at the Labour Party conference under Corbyn’s leadership.
I wrote a letter to the Guardian in reply to the Howard Jacobson article. It wasn’t published. Here it is:
‘Dear Editor
Howard Jacobson writes, ‘I don’t accuse the BBC and other news outlets of wilfully stirring race-memory of the child-killing Jew of the middle ages’, and yet, he suggests, this is indeed what these news outlets are doing by showing those who are, in his words, the ‘innocent victims of war’. Rich in suggestion as Jacobson’s article is, it’s short on suggestions as to what he thinks might be a way of solving this problem. Fortunately, the Israeli authorities have done all they can to help: they keep the world’s press photographers out of Gaza, but more work is needed. Surely, it should be to ban all images of dead and maimed Palestinian children, for only then can we western Jews be safe.
Yours
Michael Rosen’
I apologise for submitting yet another comment but this ‘Fyi’ might be helpful for Paul Seligman regarding his point about Stuart Jeffries using the same analytical model for fiction and documentary.
For many years in academia, it’s been deemed appropriate to consider the ideological work of narrative both fiction or non-fiction via inherent binary oppositions, such as assertive v passive, good v bad, male v female, white v Black, west v non-west, clean v dirty, health v diseased, rational v irrational, technology v nature. The consumer of the narrative is then pushed in one ideological direction by the supposedly positive halves of the binaries. The so-called negative characteristics construct a process of othering. I imagine this type of education is colouring Jeffries thinking.
As I have not seen the documentary, I can’t say how skilfully or not he’s using the model. But it is true Israeli authorities & lobby, have a long history of othering Palestinians, Muslims and even Jewish people-of-colour. Hope this is useful. Apologies again for taking up more space.
I also responded to Howard Jacobson’s article (unpublished letter to the Observer, copied below).
There are too many dubious assertions/assumptions contained in Howard Jacobson’s article to attempt to address in full (Tales of infanticide have stoked hatred of Jews for centuries. They echo still today, 6 Oct.).
The tenor of his piece is that of Jewish permanent victimhood backed up by centuries-old cast-iron dogma, an unattractive trait in more than one religion.
Jacobson is devastated that “night after night our televisions have told the story of the war in Gaza through the death of Palestinian children. Night after night, a recital of the numbers dead”, however not as devastated as the people of Gaza over the deaths of 42,000 of their family members and friends, nor of the indescribable horror lived out by those left. It would appear that your correspondent finds the unacceptable aspect of the killing of thousands of Palestinian children, not the deaths themselves, but the reportage of their deaths. His straw-men include denying non-existent claims, “Ask how Israel is able to target innocent children with such deadly accuracy…” and “Ask why they would want to target innocent children…..” who on earth makes those claims? What is claimed, with good reason, is that Israel does not care who and how many children, women and men they kill in their mission to eliminate Hamas. And the number of deaths only points this way.
For someone whose beliefs are shaped by history going back Millenia he should acknowledge that 7th Oct 2024, however brutal and callous the attack was carried out, was not the origin of the latest episode in the Palestinian/Israeli tragedy. The event which has that honour was the setting up of a Jewish homeland some seven decades ago in the then British administered Palestine, accompanied by forcible displacement of the indigenous population. Ensuring that this instability continued, the new settlers set about expanding their allotted areas, often violently, which still continues…
[cut to our limit of 300 words – admin]