The Blindspot That Led the BBC to Hire a Hitler-Praising Journalist to Cover the Israel-Palestinian Conflict

Playing a leading role in the BBC’s coverage of recent events in Israel has been the “Palestine specialist” Tala Halawa, who, it turns out, has made such statements on social media as “ur media is controlled by ur zionist government,” “Zionists can’t get enough of our blood,” and—lest we mistake her anti-Semitism for mere hostility toward Israel—“Hitler was right.” Stephen Daisley observes:

Halawa, it emerges, did not make these comments during her current employment with the BBC—she made them before being recruited. . . . The BBC says it’s investigating, and it has pretty serious questions to answer about how it came to hire a Hitler sympathizer and allow her to cover the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But, . . . while the BBC has a lot of questions to answer, progressive media outlets have just one.

Since the start of the year, the Guardian has published 154 articles about the far right, [but] not one word about Tala Halawa. . . . The Huffington Post has dedicated itself to challenging what it sees as racism in the British media. . . . The New York Times has spent the past several years presenting Britain to its readers as a racist backwater, yet it appears to be in no rush to bring them news of a racism scandal at one of the UK’s most important institutions. Why?

Because when progressives talk about racism, anti-Semitism isn’t what they have in mind. When they talk about the far-right, they cannot conceive of a Palestinian as “far-right,” even when she is bigging up Hitler in between railing against Zionist control of the media. (If we can discern anything from the BBC’s hiring of Halawa and the progressive media’s radio silence on the matter, it’s that Zionists most definitely do not control the media.) And when a member of another ethnic minority engages in anti-Semitism, progressive minds deploy their own Iron Dome to deflect uncomfortable facts that threaten the catechisms of critical race theory and privilege. People who believe that their political views are a product of their superior sense of empathy display a profound lack of empathy when it comes to Jews.

Read more at Spectator

More about: Anti-Semitism, BBC, Media

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023