AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS: Double Bigots
Aikman, David
"AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS" DAVID AIKMAN Double Bigots I believe that a group of young Muslims—we have already seen this in Brixton-based Richard Reid and Zaccarious...
...In the first few days of outrage in Britain over 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2005 what happened on July 7, the word "terrorist" did in fact return to BBC coverage...
...Writing last October in the Guardian—whose anti-American rants have prompted the British National Party, a right-wing group, to recommend its supporters to read the paper because of the paper's focus on Jewish influence in the British government—Gould described being on a double-decker bus in London when an elderly female American tourist apologized for apparently bumping into another passenger...
...Not to be outdone, fellow litterateur Sir David Hare wrote a play, which was performed by Britain's prestigious National Theatre in 2003, called Stuff Happens, in which the decision to invade Iraq is acted out by caricature neo-cons who have contrived to bamboozle the dimwitted American president and a wussy Tony Blair...
...But its drumbeat of anti-American, anti-Israel editorials prompted one of its writers, Julie Burchill, to leave and join the Times of London in protest...
...British intellectuals—often while dining off the largesse of American corporations and foundations that pay them generously to spread such drivel—have for many years nurtured a surly and resentful snobbery towards the U.S., perhaps because the U.S., despite the vulgarity of much of its mass culture, has been eminently more influential on the affairs of the world than the mother country...
...But when characterizing was done by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who said that it seemed "probable the attack was carried out by Islamist extremist terrorists, of the kind who over recent years have been responsible for so many innocent deaths in Madrid, Bali, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Kenya, Tanzania, Pakistan, Yemen, Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco, of course in New York on September 11, but in many other countries too," what did the BBC do...
...N FACT, IF ANY CENSORSHIP IS TAKING PLACE in Britain, it is at the BBC, whose reporting of events in Israelis relentlessly pro-Palestinian...
...I don't know any country this side of the Levant," wrote Michael Ledeen, of the American Enterprise Institute, in National Review Online, referring to Great Britain, DAVID A I K M A N "in which there has been so much anti-Semitism, so many complaints that `Zionists,''Likudniks,"Jewish hawks,' and—the single epithet that sums up all of the above—'neocons' had manipulated America and its poodle Blair into the ghastly blunder of Iraq...
...The bombers were softly described in news bulletins as "al Qaeda militants" and by BBC's World Affairs Editor John Simpson as "misguided criminals...
...Y MAKING A BEQUEST to The American B Spectator Foundation, you will be giving one of the most powerful gifts one can give—helping to ensure the future of The American Spectator for the next generation of conservative readers...
...has surfaced in past decades, of course, notably when President Eisenhower ordered the British government to cut short its military intervention against Egypt in 1956, or during that anti-Vietnam War era of the sixties...
...Some-times it seemed one was reading translations from the Saudi or Egyptian or Iranian press, so total was the hatred of the Jews...
...British hostility towards the U.S...
...In a speech in Glasgow in 2004, former BBC Middle East correspondent Tim The BBC had decided to do its own "characterizing" after all...
...When a cartoon in the strongly anti-Israeli newspaper the Independent depicted Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon devouring a child in 2003, the cartoon won Britain's Cartoon of the Year Award in 2003...
...Middle East envoy Dennis Ross was "hiding behind a lovely Anglo-Saxon name...
...The word `terrorist' itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding...
...featuring a Star of David as a dagger piercing the British Union Jack flag...
...Harold Pinter, the playwright much beloved byAmerican audiences who know nothing of his biases, fulminated in 2002 (and later reissued his remarks as a pamphlet) against "the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence: the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world...
...In early 2002, an establishment left-wing magazine, the New Statesman, ran a cover piece entitled "Kosher Conspiracy...
...Carol Gould, in her prescient musing about the probable effect of such sentiment, wrote in June, "I have met white, well-heeled citizens who have expressed enthusiasm for Hamas and who have said they wish more Jews and Americans would die in the next terror attacks...
...But Drabble, among the literary elite, is by no means alone...
...I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world...
...But the combination of anti-Americanism and a rising tide of European anti-Semitism is a cause of major concern, not least because it has already be-gun to surface in traditionally conservative locations in Britain...
...The author of the piece, Dennis Sewell, built his case around the proposition that pro-Zionist media barons were censoring news reports about Israel...
...David Aikman is the author of Jesus in Beijing (Regnery Publishing) and A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush (W Publishing...
...The BBC has devoted hours of radio and television to slanderous misrepresentations of places like the American Enterprise Institute, where I sit, and of such Jewish luminaries as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz...
...We should let other people characterize while we report the facts as we know them...
...Carol Gould, JewishComment.com TRAGICALLY, THIS PREDICTION by a 29-year-old American resident of the United Kingdom, made in an article posted in June, came true on July 7, 2005...
...Because the Foundation is a non-profit organization, bequests are free of estate and inheritance tax and can reduce the amount of your estate which will be taxed by the government...
...The woman, who was English, whipped round and shouted at the hapless tourist, "I rejoice every time I hear of another American soldier dying...
...Still, having an Anglo-Saxon-sounding name is no protection either if your critic detects you are both American and Jewish...
...The Guardian, to its credit, ran Gould's piece...
...The prize was awarded by former British cabinet minister Claire Short (who resigned over Britain's participation in the Iraq war) in the headquarters of a magazine normally regarded as pro-American: the Economist...
...We should try to avoid the term, without attribution...
...Faisal Bodi, currently the news editor of an Islamic satellite TV service called the Islam Channel, and prior to that a producer for Al-Jazeera, wrote an editorial in the Guardian in January 2001 that stated flatly, "Israel simply has no right to exist...
...You people are destroying the world...
...You are scum...
...It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness...
...Gould, whose pieces have often been picked up by the astute British journalist and blogger Melanie Phillips, was bearing down on a problem that has metastasized from a nuisance to a genuine danger: anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in England...
...But by July 11 political correctness was again in force: the BBC had decided to do its own "characterizing" after all...
...On July 9 this year, two days after the London underground bombings, Bodi said that "the bloody trail of blame runs straight back to 10 Downing Street...
...The bombers were softly described in news bulletins as "al Qaeda militants" and by BBC's World Affairs Editor John Simpson as "misguided criminals...
...Making a lasting and significant contribution to The American Spectator Foundation is not just for the wealthy...
...Ledeen didn't exaggerate...
...It sanitized the comments to read, in its paraphrase, "Those responsible for killing 52 and injuring more than 700, probably Islamic extremists, would be hunted down...
...It has possessed me, like a disease...
...A M O N G T H E I N T E L L E C T U A L O I D S D A V I D A I K M A N Double Bigots I believe that a group of young Muslims—we have already seen this in Brixton-based Richard Reid and Zaccarious Moussaoui—being fed a daily dose of invective about Jews, Israelis and evil Americans will eventually commit acts to express their outrage...
...We must report acts of terror quickly, accurately, fully and responsibly," the Guidelines said...
...Rottenness, as the saying goes, often spreads upwards...
...Llewellyn complained that U.S...
...When Gould reported the incident to the bus driver and then went back to try and protect the tourist, the Englishwoman snarled, "Another bloody American...
...You can also name the Foundation as a contingent beneficiary in the event somebody named in the will is no longer living...
...It has "Producer Guidelines" that seem designed never to ascribe malevolent intent towards anyone who commits terrorist acts...
...In doing so, they are making a tremendous difference to the world today and the one they will leave behind...
...If so, I try not to read [their letter]," he said...
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...Drabble, of course, typifies "the chattering classes," public intellectuals who occasionally escape the corral of the merely inane into the open 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2005 field of the genuinely bigoted...
...For Llewellyn, Ross was "not just a Jew, he is a Zionist, a Zionist propagandist...
...A pocket of Britain's left has been resolutely anti-American since the October Revolution of 1917...
...Our donors come from all walks of life and are leaving charitable gifts in their wills...
...She then started shaking the American...
...Another newspaper that has at times been openly anti-American and anti-Semitic has been the Independent...
...In July 2003 columnist Richard IngInclude The American Spectator in your will...
...The horror was very nearly repeated two weeks later, and the fact that the would-be terrorists failed on this occasion was probably because they constituted the B Team: the A Team had graduated to paradise and those tireless teams of 72 virgins...
...The "characterization" of the bombers as "terrorists" by Britain's prime minister, apparently, didn't count as "characterization...
...Our credibility is undermined by the careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments...
...THE AMERICAN SPEC FAT0R FOUNDED 1967 SEPTEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53 A M O N G T H E I N T E L L E C T U A L O I D S rams opined in print that he had "developed a habit" of observing whether letter-writers to the editor had Jewish-sounding names...
...But Drabble, Pinter, and Hare are in some ways the droning noise in the background of a rising cacophony of not just anti-Americanism but anti-Semitism among the British...
...Perhaps the most quoted British anti-American comment came from novelist Margaret Drabble, who infamously wrote in May 2003, "My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable...
Vol. 38 • September 2005 • No. 7
