Posted: 4/14/2013 11:42:00 PM
Author: Giulio Meotti
Source: This Op-Ed first appeared on the Arutz 7 website on April 15, 2013.
Op-Ed: British Writers Say "Death to Israel"
by Giulio Meotti
Only 65 years since the British Mandate was responsible for so many Jewish deaths, It is impossible to keep an accurate record of all the British writers and poets who have actually endorsed Israel's elimination.
British intellectuals have gone anti-Semitic. Today you won't find a single Quixotic writer in the UK who would openly defend the State of Israel and its people. It is the debacle of the entire British cultural elite, a kind of ideological conformism like that in the Soviet Union, which Czeslaw Milosz called "the Captive Mind".
Famous UK author Iain Banks just announced that his novels would no longer be published in Israel. “I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign because, especially in our instantly connected world, an injustice committed against one, or against one group of people, is an injustice against all, against every one of us; a collective injury,” Banks stated in The Guardian daily.
“My particular reason for participating in the cultural boycott of 'Israel' is that, first of all, I can; I’m a writer, a novelist, and I produce works that are, as a rule, presented to the international market,” underlined the best selling novelist.
Banks belongs to a long list of British writers who proclaim the sentence to death on the Jewish State and its people. It is impossible to keep a list of writers and poets who have endorsed Israel's elimination: Kevin Cadwallender, Jimmy Powdrell Campbell, Jenny Diski, Alison Fell, Naomi Foyle, Ian Gregson, Sarah Irving, Fred Johnstone, Wendy Klein, Diane Langford, Tom Leonard, Catherine Lupton...
These opinion makers and entertainers who speak from journals, essays, reviews, poems and novels have been instrumental in feeding the public opinion with lies and hatred against Israel and the Jews. These "chattering classes” have passed from parlor anti-Semitism to having called into question Israel’s very right to exist. No other country in the world has been treated in this barbaric way.
John Berger, a Booker Prize winner, called for artists to decline being published by mainstream Israeli publishers and to undertake a boycott of the Jewish State.
Harold Pinter, the Nobel Laureate playwright, signed a boycott of Israeli products and tourism. The self-hating Jew Pinter has gone so far as to declare Israel "the central factor in world unrest.”
Eric Hobsbawm, one of the most famous historians of the XX century, supported the Second Intifada, endorsing the "the cause of liberation".
From Tariq Ali to Seni Seneviratne, there are dozens of British foreign writers who support the boycott of Israel as "a moral imperative".
George Steiner, famous cultural critic based in Cambridge (I have written a philosophical dissertation on his works and I held a correspondance with Steiner during the last ten years after having broken with him about Israel), questioned whether the Jewish State should have come into being at all. He also said that for two-thousand years Jews did not torture people, but that now they torture.
The British author Ian McEwan launched an arrogant attack on Israeli government policies in his speech accepting the Jerusalem Prize for Literature, saying "a great and self-evident injustice hangs in the air". And this is the same McEwan whom the Israeli press lauded for having visited Jerusalem despite the boycott calls.
The late Christopher Hitchens, the most celebrated British atheist in the world, depicted Israel as “stupid, messianic and superstitious” and he published an article entitled “Israel’s Shabbos Goy”, evoking the canard of a Jewish conspiracy manipulating US policy. He also described both Judaism and Israel as “genocidal”.
Tom Paulin, poet, essayist and academic at Oxford, said Jewish "settlers" in Israel "should be shot dead". The Observer also published — a few months after the start of the second Palestinian intifada — Paulin's poem "Killed in the Crossfire" which refers to the IDF as the "Zionist SS" that guns down "little Palestinian boys."
The novelist Christine Odone defended Gretta Duisenberg, wife of the president of the European Central Bank, who when asked how many signatures she had gathered for her pro-Palestinian petition, she allegedly replied, "six million".
The plot of celebrated British playwright Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children,” which got much acclaim at London’s Royal Court Theater, spreads the Jewish obsession. Churchill’s play unfolds over seven scenes, beginning sometime during the Holocaust and concluding with Israel’s wars. Characters appear as parents of an offstage child, and the dialogue revolves around what the girl should know about her political circumstances as they unfold over the decades. “Tell her”, says one of the play’s Zionist elders, “I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out . . . tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people.”
British dramatist David Hare, in a primitive diatribe against Israel that smacks of medieval-style anti-Semitic blood libels, demonizing the Jews for “dispossessing” and “polluting” a fabricated, “archetypical Palestine”, wrote that the Jews have “polluted” the Promised Land and “do not belong here.”
As the British writer Paul Johnson observed: '"Violence has always exercised a strong appeal to some intellectuals. It goes hand in hand with the desire for radical absolutist solutions". The new British writers' absolutist solution to the existence of the West is the eradication of Israel.
Why not effect the launching of a counter-boycott of this judeophobic cultural system? This sanctimonious British intelligentsia will not rest until the Jewish people is destroyed. And millions of idiots hang on every word that comes out of their corrupted lips.
Giulio Meotti
The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary. He is at work on a book about the Vatican and Israel.
