Guardian reporting on Israel
This article was cross-posted on CiFWatch.
David Hearst, one of the Guardian’s “foreign leader writers” according to his bio, has never met a dictator or Israel-hater he didn’t love.
In his article in yesterday’s Commentisfree, in which he addressed the Russian and Chinese veto of a UN Security Council vote against Syrian President Bashar Assad, he correctly described the unpopularity of Putin’s decision to use his veto power and the strategic error in such a move.
But Hearst being Hearst, how could he leave Israel out of this issue? Even though Israel is not connected in any way to the uprising in Syria, the revolutions in the Arab world and the violence committed in these countries, Hearst managed to work Israel, in a negative light of course, right into his first sentence.
If anyone thinks the international opprobrium heaped on Russia and China for vetoing the UN resolution condemning Syria’s violent repression of its people is unusual, they should cast their minds back to 13 July 2006. George Bush and Tony Blair spent the best part of the following 33 days dismissing calls for an end to Israel’s bombardment of southern Lebanon in response to a cross-border raid by Hezbullah.
Note how Hearst compares Israel’s defensive war against Hezbollah’s terrorist bombardment of Israel’s northern cities with a dictator slaughtering his own civilians.
Hearst continues:
On 3 August Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former British ambassador to Moscow, wrote that Blair’s premiership had descended into “scandal and incoherence”. Nor were serving Foreign Office officials quick to leap to Blair’s defence. The government’s policy of resisting calls for a ceasefire was “driven by the prime minister alone”, they said.
Such a position is today occupied by Vladimir Putin
Now he compares Putin’s scandalous veto with Tony Blair’s courageous stand against political correctness. Blair preferred to back a democratic ally acting in self-defense, and withstood enormous political pressure rather than cave in to the “right-thinking” (or should we call it “left-thinking”) call to condemn Israel whenever it has the temerity to defend itself and its citizens.
One of the commenters on Hearst’s article, who calls him/herself “external”, remarked so acutely:
Wow ! You managed to mention Israel in the first paragraph. Good work, even by Guardian standards !
As I have said before, The man is execrable, but oh so suitable for the Guardian’s World View™.
Anne's Opinions 
Not good for the blood pressure!
Blogging about it helps ease the pressure. 🙂
I was just listening to the news and comparing the behaviour of Syrian and Israeli governments – I wonder why the Israel government is not castigated by the USA in the same way as the Syrian government when their behaviour is so similar.
You have not been reading my articles or my blog properly, otherwise you would never have asked such a stupid question why Israel has not been castigated by the USA, and you would never have come to the conclusion that Israel’s actions are similar to Syria’s.
Israel has not killed 6,000 civilians of any nation, certainly not its own people, as Assad has done. Israel has not bombed one city continuously as Assad is doing today in Homs. The number of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians killed in Israel’s defensive wars against Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2008-9 were greatly inflated for propaganda purposes, and in any event occurred because the terrorists took shelter and acted from within their own civilian population – in itself a war crime.
Perhaps the fact that Israel has not been castigated, and has even been defended by the US, the UK and other European countries, should tell you something – and that “something” is not that the Zionists/Jews rule the world, own the UN/banks/media etc..
If you cannot tell the difference between acts of self-defence as carried out by Israel, and acts of repression, including slaughter and torture of civilians, then there is simply no point in engaging with you.
Oh come off it, Anne, the two governments are practically identical… except for Israel’s regular elections and universal suffrage, free (and very combative) press, independent judiciary (that often rules against the government), training for its armed forces in how to minimize civilian casualties in asymmetrical combat situations, treatment in its hospitals for citizens of its sworn enemies… well, apart from that it’s hard to distinguish the two!
Duh! Yeah, (headslap) I should have thought of all those “crimes.
Game, set and match to cba.
Next time, perhaps we’ll have a more acute comment from Jack, assuming that he comprehends the accuracy (and partial facaetiousness) of cba’s missive.
/or to quote Bugs Bunny, a favourite of Jack: “What a maroon…”
Assuming people’s comprehension of irony is always a dangerous game unfortunately.