But it is worth asking what lies behind this intense drive to criticise Israel, often in the most magnified and – many would argue – wildly inaccurate terms? Why not Syria, or Ethiopia, or Yemen, or Turkey? Or North Korea, or Venezuela, or Sudan?
Jones is neither Jewish nor Palestinian. To my knowledge, he has never set foot in Israel, not even for a holiday in Eilat or to attend Tel Aviv Pride, and he is not known for spending much time in the Arab world. Neither is there any reason to think he is on the payroll of the Iranian regime. What’s with the obsession? What is it about the Jewish state that so agitates him?
Jones would reply, of course, that he simply objects to “genocide”. In fact, he has argued this on X. “Yes, I’m obsessed with fighting a genocide being facilitated by my government,” he posted today. “Guilty! This is not something be ashamed of. It is the people who stayed silent, or who cheered on this abomination, who should be ashamed. They will never scrub the shame away.”
But all people of sound mind know that there is no genocide in Gaza. Nobody sensible takes these claims seriously, not even Keir Starmer. Not even, might I add, David Lammy.
The tunnel vision is inexplicable. It seems pretty hard to produce decent journalism when you’re in such a frame of mind. I think of the time, for instance, when Jones watched traumatic GoPro footage of the Hamas atrocities, took notes, and used them to create a video of his own claiming that there was “no conclusive evidence of rape”, in spite of the multiple eyewitnesses and the morgue worker (interviewed recently by Allison Pearson) who described treating female bodies that had been so brutally assaulted that their pelvises had been shattered.
British journalist Jake Wallis Simons, asking why fellow journalist Owen Jones has such an obsession with denouncing the State of Israel.
Jones' attempt to question or deny the fact that the Palestinians committed rapes and gang rapes on October 7 is morally grotesque. This is not what people like Owen Jones were claiming during the MeToo movement; instead, they insisted that all accusations had to be believed, and this included accusations of possible sexual harassment and/or bad sexual encounters that occurred years or even decades ago.
By contrast, the evidence of Palestinians raping Israelis is overwhelming-- and the Palestinians produced that evidence. Hamas terrorists wrote detailed instructions in Arabic and in Hebrew containing orders for rape. Palestinian photographer Mahmoud Abu Hamda boasted on X that very day about obtaining sexual slaves ("sabayas" in Arabic). Palestinians took photos and videos of women they had violated, including German-Israeli tattoo artist Shani Louk, stripped almost naked and paraded on a truck, with Palestinian men sitting on her body; they also filmed Naama Levy, aged 19, who was dragged from a truck bleeding heavily into her tracksuit, which is a clear indication of rape.
The only reason Owen Jones tries wriggling out of this with his "no conclusive evidence of rape" is because he is too afraid to acknowledge that the people he supports are barbaric monsters. Given how much energy Owen Jones has expended into denouncing the State of Israel, such an acknowledgement would be ruinous to his career and his fictitious aura of moral superiority, the latter of which appears more important to him than a modicum of restraint and balance in his reporting.
Its distrust of the Jewish State is bordering on pathological.
By: Jake Wallis Simons
Published: Nov 17, 2023
Never trust a Jew. That was one of the adages that we thought had mostly faded into history. But it has been back in vogue ever since 7 October, when 1,200 Jews in Israel had the temerity to be massacred in their homes and hundreds got themselves taken hostage.
For years, it has been common knowledge that Hamas’s subterranean command centre in Gaza lies underneath al-Shifa hospital. It even appeared in season two of the Netflix show, Fauda. Yet, as Israeli forces entered the hospital yesterday and then shared pictures of weapons and tunnels, the world was still sceptical.
The IDF’s images ‘have not proved the existence of the sprawling Hamas base that the Israeli military said the hospital had concealed, and which Hamas and the hospital leadership have denied’, insisted the New York Times. ‘That claim has been central to Israel’s justification for the death toll in Gaza… which has killed more than 11,000 people, according to Gazan health officials.’ Gazan health officials? You mean Hamas, the same lot that decapitated the babies? Great source.
Similarly, the BBC interviewed a woman this week who had previously worked at the hospital. She was asked whether Israel’s claims could possibly contain even a grain of truth. ‘Over the years we have never seen any evidence of any military activity in the hospital, period’, she said, adamantly, as if Hamas would surely have asked her down to the tunnels for a cup of tea by now. ‘This Israeli soldier who’s finding ammunitions, does this justify bombing a hospital?’, she then asks. ‘Does this justify raiding a hospital and interrogating patients and basically killing patients?’ Oh, the insinuation.
This journalism affects public opinion. In response to footage of a tunnel shaft just outside al-Shifa, one X / Twitter user wrote: ‘It’s Iraq and weapons of mass destruction all over again.’ No, it’s not. But you just can’t trust those Jews, you see. They’re shifty. They’re probably just the types who would invent a terror base to slake their appetite for the blood of hospital patients. Remember when they marked the Easter of 1144 by kidnapping, torturing and crucifying little William of Norwich? Remember, for that matter, when they manipulated the Allies to start the Second World War? With them, it’s all about the blood.
So let’s talk about the BBC. This week, Reuters accurately reported how Israel was agonising over the challenge of battling an enemy that was using hospital patients, including babies in incubators, as human shields. Rather than demolishing the hospital in an airstrike – as, say, Putin may have done – ground troops were risking their lives to deliver medical facilities to civilians and evacuate whomever they could. ‘IDF forces include medical teams and Arabic speakers… with the intent that no harm is caused to the civilians’, said Reuters, relaying an IDF statement. This followed the Israeli delivery of fuel and supplies.
Enter stage left the hapless BBC newsreader, Monica Miller. Examining the Reuters story earlier this week, she told viewers: ‘[Israel is] targeting people including medical teams as well as Arab speakers.’ In Miller’s world, rather than trying to protect civilians, the Israelis were ‘targeting’ them. Rather than providing Arabic speakers to liaise with medics, they were hunting down anybody who spoke ‘Arab’. This was a display of such spectacular idiocy and incompetence that it makes one wonder how the woman got her job in the first place.
As the BBC, the New York Times and other outlets vacate the playing field of impartiality, audiences are driven into the dark arms of social media. This hasn’t been going well, either. Six weeks on from the jihadi massacre of innocents, many now believe that Israel used Hamas’s attacks – which they also seem to think were hardly all that serious – as a pretext to indulge its instinct for ‘genocide’. The war in Gaza isn’t about self-defence, apparently. It is about ‘ethnic cleansing’, they say. Some go even further: according to Piers Corbyn, 7 October was a ‘false flag’ operation orchestrated by Israel itself.
Yes, they’re slippery, those Jews. They claim they are trying to avoid hitting civilians when the decapitators of Hamas have confirmed that tens of thousands have been killed. Plus, we’ve seen clips of the dead on television. Those Jews. They say they didn’t bomb a hospital last month, but there’s a big crater in the car park. They tell the world their babies were beheaded, but where’s the proof? They don’t even have the decency to parade the severed heads for us.
Anti-Semitism runs deep. In Medieval times, the eternal manipulators and bloodsuckers were blamed for killing Christian children by way of deceit. In the 20th century, they were held responsible for all the wars, misfortune and malignancy in the world – Die Juden sind unser Unglück! – even as they were dispossessed, marginalised, starved and herded into ghettos. One common Jewish joke from the period, beloved by Christopher Hitchens, has a Jew reading the Nazi propaganda paper, Der Stürmer. When asked why, he explains: ‘I read Der Stürmer, and there’s finally some good news. It seems that we Jews own and control the whole world!’
Nobody can look into a BBC newsreader’s heart and divine her true motivations. But it is undeniable that Miller’s mistake is part of a pattern. When an Islamic Jihad rocket fell short on al-Ahli Arab hospital last month, the BBC – along with most of the world’s media – blamed it on Israel. In the aftermath of the strike, the reporter Jon Donnison offered a freewheeling burst of speculation on live television, concluding in his wisdom: ‘It’s hard to see what else this could be really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike.’ As the Jewish Chronicle later revealed, Donnison had form. In 2012, the BBC man had shared a picture of an injured girl in Syria while claiming that it was a ‘heartbreaking’ example of Israeli brutality in Gaza. He later apologised.
Look, under pressure, we all make mistakes. No BBC journalist sets out to bin impartiality. I know from my own experience how dealing with breaking news when you’re on the ground is a high-stakes balancing act. But there does appear to be something of a pattern here, and not just in the corporation’s English output.
Take BBC Arabic. Between January 2021 and July this year, the broadcaster was forced to issue more than 130 corrections on the channel, averaging more than one a week. Errors, if that’s what they were, included using inflammatory anti-Israel terminology and parroting Hamas narratives. On one memorable occasion last year, a lifestyle programme hosted a man playing songs on an oud that openly glorified terrorism. ‘Don’t leave your weapon in its sheath’, he warbled. ‘From the Jerusalem mountains and from the plain, your blood, should it be shed on the earth, would make red freedom bloom.’
Although complaints to the BBC are supposed to be addressed within 10 working days, analysis last year revealed that it had taken the corporation an average of four months when it came to its Arabic service, with half of complaints simply ignored.
Executives at the BBC have told me that these are symptoms of the challenges of running a sprawling network, in many languages, under the relentless pressure of the 24-hour news cycle. I get that. But if it’s not fit for purpose, what’s the point? And if that is the whole story, why doesn’t the BBC occasionally make mistakes in the other direction, painting the Israelis in too positive a light or wrongly ascribing deaths to Hamas?
It is hard to escape the conclusion that the problem is cultural. The BBC may champion diversity, but not when it comes to the politics of its staff. As at the BBC, so on the left more broadly, what’s at work here is an assumption so deeply held that reality is often upended to conform to it. They see Israelis as the ones who target medical teams, not provide them. As the ones who bomb medical centres. As the ones who lie about terror tunnels under hospitals. They are the colonialists, the imperialists, the Nazis. After 2,000 years, it seems everyone knows as much, and to claim otherwise is disingenuous. In other words, never trust a Jew.
Jake Wallis Simons is a journalist and the author of Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What To Do About It.
The Editor of the London based Jewish Chronicle (JC), Jake Wallis Simons, has been slammed and accused of inciting hatred against Muslims an
The Editor of the London based Jewish Chronicle (JC), Jake Wallis Simons, has been slammed and accused of inciting hatred against Muslims and Islam for posting a tweet propagating the false news that Palestinian Muslims had launched an attack on a Church near Bethlehem.
"Palestinian Muslims launch Ramadan attack on Church of the Annunciation in Beit Jala near Bethlehem," said Simons in a tweet, which he later deleted. Screenshots of the tweet was shared on social media, where many asked Simons if he had issued a correction and an apology to Muslims for spreading misinformation.
