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

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society