MELANIE PHILLIPS: THE LONDON REVIEW OF BIGOTRY
The London Review of Bigotry
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6475300/the-london-review-of-bigotry.thtml
Melanie Phillips
The ever-more impressive Just Journalism has published an important critique of the London Review of Books, one of the most poisonously Judeophobic periodicals in western society. It is important because the LRB plays a key role in defining the terms of debate for the British intelligentsia, influencing beyond them the so-called thinking classes in the rest of the English-speaking world. For many years under its current editor Mary-Kay Wilmers – herself surely a prime example of Howard Jacobson’s ‘Ashamed Jews’ — it has been helping turn that debate into a verbal pogrom against Israel through an unbroken stream of hate-fuelled articles. And it receives British taxpayers’ money to do so. As the report’s executive summary states:
A Freedom of Information request revealed that since its inception the LRB has received over £767,000 from Arts Council England, funded by the public purse. Between 2000 and 2010, over £188,000 was received by the LRB specifically for the purpose of paying contributing writers.
In this period 92 articles on Israel-Palestine were produced by contributors. More than one third (36%) of articles were written by Jewish Israelis and more than half (53%) of all articles were written by people known to be Jewish. On only one occasion was a mainstream Jewish and Israeli perspective on the conflict showcased by this (or any) contingent
The LRB consistently portrayed Israel as a bloodthirsty and genocidal regime out of all proportion to reality, while sympathetic portraits abounded of groups designated as terrorist organisations by the Britishgovernment such as Hamas and Hezbollah. While the Palestinian narrative was fully represented, Israel’s narrative on its legitimate security concerns, Arab rejectionism and terrorism was near absent.
The report explains the stance of the LRB editor in her own words:
‘I’m unambiguously hostile to Israel because it’s a mendacious state. They do things that are just so immoral and counterproductive and, as a Jew, especially as a Jew, you can’t justify that.’
This unambiguous hostility is borne out unswervingly in the pages of the LRB over the 17 years since Wilmers took the helm. Despite the sheer volume of coverage devoted to the conflict, with each article running to several thousand words, there are two notable and wholesale omissions: any insight from the mainstream of Israeli society into the policies adopted by their country; and any attribution of responsibility for the conflict to the other parties involved, namely the various Palestinian groups, including Palestinian Hamas, as well as the Lebanese Hezbollah. Instead, Israel’s actions alone have been consistently denigrated, its leaders maligned, and its concerns ignored.
Until now, Wilmers and the LRB have never been held to account. All credit to Just Journalism for understanding that the peddlers of hatre towards Israel – including the Jewish peddlers of such calumnies — have to be publicly exposed and shamed; and their discourse of obsessive and bigoted moral and intellectual inversion, both symbol and cause of the west’s suicidal pattern of attacking its allies while sucking up to its enemies, must be called by its proper name.
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