Melanie Phillips Column: The Hug of Hypocrisy

Antisemitism isn't just hatred or hostility towards the Jewish people and Israel. Especially since the October 7 massacre, it's been more like a pathological disorder where people are obsessed with Jews in a poisonous, diseased way that has become normalized. To blame Israel, the victim, for everything else since October 7 is not normal. I only hope these vile Jew-haters get their comeuppance in a major way.

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The hug of hypocrisy: The British state has lost its mind over Israel

By Melanie Phillips, 12/4/24 

Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy with Mandy Damari, whose daughter Emily is being held hostage in Gaza

"Recent developments suggest that something pathological is at work in the attitude to Israel of the British state.

"Mandy Damari is the mother of the sole British hostage incarcerated by Hamas in Gaza, 28 year-old Emily Damari. Mandy has been in Britain to ask the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, why he backed a UN Security Council resolution last month calling for a ceasefire in Gaza without making this conditional upon freeing the 101 hostages who are still being held.

"This effectively “signs a death warrant” for Emily and the other hostages, said Mandy. She was “extremely disappointed” given that both Starmer and the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, had personally promised to fight for her daughter. She told the Mail:

They said one thing to me, and then did another. Maybe they talk behind closed doors about her, but supporting this UN motion shows that when it comes down to it, they are not doing enough to get her home alive. This decision basically signs a death warrant for her if there is no demand for a hostage release at the same time as a ceasefire. My daughter should be returned home alive now before it’s too late for her and she comes back to me in a body bag.

"At a Labour Friends of Israel lunch, Mandy urged Starmer and Lammy to secure humanitarian aid to the hostages. After being pictured with his arm around her, however, Lammy tweeted this on X:

Together [the UK, France and Germany] have written to the Israeli government to urge action on the unacceptable humanitarian situation in Gaza. Israel must implement the UN’s winter plan now: send equipment to guard against cold & flooding, give access to fuel, repair vital infrastructure, and get aid in.

"So let’s get this straight. The mother of a hostage being held by Palestinian Arabs in Gaza asks Britain’s Foreign Secretary to secure the supply of humanitarian aid to the hostages who are being starved and otherwise ill-treated — and in reply, Britain’s Foreign Secretary demands instead that Israel provide humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza.

"Nothing about aid to the hostages. Aid instead to people some of whom themselves took part in the Hamas-led pogrom on October 7; some of whom helped brutalise and desecrate the hostages, both dead and alive, when they were dragged into Gaza during that pogrom; the vast majority of whom say that, even though they may hate Hamas for tyrannising them, they support the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel; and who are all complicit in the Israeli hostages’ 13-month incarceration, even now when Israel is offering a reward of $5 million for anyone who can assist in releasing them.

"Lammy’s message wasn’t merely a brutal slap in the face for Mandy Damari, who is in hell over the unthinkable plight of her daughter. It suggests that Starmer and Lammy have the same monstrously twisted attitude that’s been on display in Britain and the west ever since the October 7 pogrom — that Israel is viewed not as the victim of barbarity but as the perpetrator, for which it is victimised yet again by western politicians who grotesquely defame it for defending itself.

"Israel has not been restricting aid into Gaza and creating a humanitarian disaster. Where Gazans have been deprived of aid, this is because Hamas has been stealing it — and murdering Gazans who have been trying to access it. The allegation that Israel has not been allowing aid into Gaza is the opposite of the truth, a lie designed to aid Hamas and demonise Israel as part of the Palestinian Arabs’ global strategy of delegitimisation and dehumanisation.

"Even while Starmer and Lammy are mouthing platitudes about the hostages, they are writing the truth of Israeli victimisation out of the script and replacing it with the lie of Israeli victimisation of the Palestinian Arabs.

"This same twisted attitude lay behind Britain’s support for the UNSC resolution which, in its demand for an unconditional end to Israel’s war of self-defence, sought to remove the military pressure that’s the only way to get the hostages released — as Mandy Damari rightly said.

"Starmer said after Damari’s speech:

There is no ceasefire worthy of the name, which does not, as item number one include the return of all the hostages. That is what we are working for, day and night.

"But they aren’t. On the contrary, Starmer’s government actually voted for a ceasefire not worthy of the name: the UNSC resolution that threw the hostages under the bus, just as Mandy Damari said.

"This is all more than just unwarranted attacks on Israel. It suggests a truly sick refusal to acknowledge Israeli suffering because it gets in the way of the narrative — the totally false narrative of Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimisation that has plunged the entire progressive world into the moral sewer.

"This sick attitude has become an obsession — not just for the hate-mobs chanting on the streets every week for Israel’s destruction, not just for Labour politicians but also for the wider British state.

"How else to explain this, under “Business and Trade” in Starmer’s proposed policy reviews announced this week setting out his priorities for government?

"Top of the list is “Israeli compliance with humanitarian law review”. Quite apart from the false implication that Israel is breaching humanitarian law, by what conceivable metric is Israel’s behaviour deemed to be the top priority for Britain’s department of business and trade?

"And what about this at a British airport:

"There is no similar airport notice by the Metropolitan Police covering Syria or Gaza, the perpetrators of tens of thousands of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Only Israel, which is not only innocent of such things but the victim.

"Britain has descended into lunacy."