UK: Channel 4 persists with its pathological antipathy toward the State of Israel

Archbishop Cranmer, a Christian blog, writes:

If you didn’t see Channel 4′s over-hyped docu-drama Ukip: The First 100 Days, don’t bother dashing for C4 On Demand. It is a tedious effort, dramatic dullsville, full of factual economic errors and replete with political clichés of how Prime Minister Farage would set himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God, and then the End will come. [...]

But there was one scene which really cannot pass without comment. As the policies pursued by a Ukip government lead to protests, riots and social breakdown, the narrator turns our attention to a group of “Far-Right demonstrators”, while the above image is being broadcast to represent said group. Note that there are no BNP flags and no EDL banners; not even a Nazi swastika or a placard screaming ‘No more mosques’. No, when Channel 4 berates the Far Right, they choose to convey to the nation and inculcate in the minds of viewers that Israel = Far Right, or Far Right = Israel. No doubt you will find the odd Star of David being brandished by the EDL, but the point is that there isn’t a Cross of St George or Union Jack to be seen. It is a very particular smeary denigration. To support the Jewish people in their right to self-determination is ‘far-right’ and ‘extremist’. Such puerile prejudice comes straight out of the Jon Snow Channel 4 News handbook of popular anti-Israelism.

And thence we segue into anti-Zionism, and thence to anti-Semitism. A German court recently ruled that ‘Anti-Zionism is code for anti-Semitism‘. Judge Sastry is quoted as saying: “‘Zionist’ is the language of anti-Semites, the code for ‘Jew.’” And choosing to associate the flag of Israel alone with the Far Right is a consonant defamation: if shouting ‘Zionist’ can be an expression of hatred toward Jews, flying the Zionist flag may be a discriminatory incitement to hatred.

It is extraordinary, as Europe’s Jews are being spat on in the streets, shot in kosher delicatessens and slaughtered in their synagogues, that Channel 4 persists with its pathological antipathy toward the State of Israel. Do they not understand that it is the only democracy in the Middle East? Do they not appreciate that Israel is the only country in the entire region where women are equal; adulterers aren’t stoned; children aren’t sold into slavery; Christians aren’t beheaded; gays aren’t thrown from tall buildings; and prisoners aren’t caged like animals and burned alive?

It is not ‘far right’ to support Israel: the real fascists are those who routinely disparage its national symbols, denigrate its religion and discriminate against its people, and such discrimination includes holding them to higher standards or judging them by different criteria to the way we discern and appraise other nations. Ukip: The First 100 Days was only a crass fantasy docu-drama broadcast in a liberal democracy where the worst that might happen now is the odd swastika might be daubed on a few tombstones. But in some parts of the world, more Jews will now die, and not even Prime Minister Farage can prevent that.