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 on Spectator: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/tala-halawa-and-the-progressive-media-s-anti-semitism-blindspot