Silencing Criticism of Israel in Britain
by Ian Mosley
Britain is a strange land. I’ve reported on their Orwellian practices including the ubiquitous closed circuit television cameras and the proposed “license to smoke.” And yet in the British media it is possible to talk about Jews and Israel in a way which would simply never see the light of day at all in the United States. Individuals still go to prison under the notorious Race Relations Act for criticizing people with brown skins, but (and I may be wrong on this) I can’t recall that anyone has been imprisoned recently for so-called “anti-Semitism;” even the Irving trial was years ago, and that was a civil lawsuit pointlessly initiated by Irving himself.
The Guardian newspaper recently ran an article entitled “How Labour Used The Law to Keep Criticism of Israel Secret.” That headline alone would never have seen the light of day in the United States, and anyone who wrote it at any newspaper would simply have been fired before the day was out. The article begins, “The full extent of government anxiety about the state of British-Israel relations can be exposed for the first time today in a secret document seen by the Guardian. The document reveals how the Foreign Office successfully fought to keep secret any mention of Israel contained on the first draft of the controversial, now discredited Iraq weapons dossier. At the heart of it was nervousness at the top of government about any mention of Israel’s nuclear arsenal in an official paper accusing Iraq of flouting the UN’s authority on weapons of mass destruction.”
In other words, Jews get to have all the WMDs they want, while Israel’s Muslim neighbors are denied any. (more…)