Well you, sir, are a racist!

Argument: Protesters whine about Israel, but ignore other examples of large-scale bloodshed. Implication: anti-Israeli demos are anti-Semitic.

Oh yeah, well I dropped my toast butter-side down this morning – where was your protest then! #hypocrite.

Since the recent strife in Gaza kicked off, those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause have been taking to the streets. Not everyone agrees with these protester's demands. Let's explore some of the responses to Israeli criticism by way of two of the most treasured darlings of the right, Douglas Murray and Melanie Phillips, and a few others.

Douglas Murray's article in the Spectator most neatly summed up the right-wing grievance with pro-Palestine protesters. He first states that they were a 'non-diverse crowd', with women in burkas and headscarves. This off-topic jolly into passive-aggressive Islamophobia neatly reminds the reader what they are supposed to think about Muslims. The pics on this pro-Israel blog, which also labelled the protest anti-Semitic, show a pretty diverse crowd, much like London itself. Anyway, Murray returns to the meat of the problem – hypocrisy and anti-Semitism. It's a two-pronged accusation that is levelled energetically by those that support Israel, used gleefully by journalists and netizens alike. Here it is in action... 

1. #hypocrites!

In his article, Doug spake thus: 'These are the people who stayed at home throughout the Syrian civil war, stayed at home when ISIS rampaged across Iraq, stayed at home when Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab carried out their atrocities across central Africa and showed no concern whatsoever when the Muslim Brotherhood was running Egypt into the ground. Yet they pretend to care about Muslims.' That guy from ConservativeHome agrees...

Even Stan Collymore got put in his place!

The joke being that there is no protest against Assad!

This is my personal favourite.

2. #Anti-Semites! 

Doug: 'I suppose some of the people in London today might still try to pretend that they don’t hate Jews.'

And introducing... Melanie Phillips! Compared to Murray's sweeping accusations, Phillips is a little more measured, giving the illusion that she's thought about it. The caveat she provides is that the protesters are 'accessories' to anti-Semitism.

Mel in this article says: 'When London demonstrators and British intellectuals declare that Israelis are the new Nazis, colonizing land to which they have no historic connection and which they have stolen from the Palestinians, they make themselves accessories to an infernal creed which is inciting violence and murder against Jews.'

Bonus Bigot basher! 

Daniel Greenfield's article, 'It's Another "Death to the Jews" Weekend', is one big impassioned declaration that pro-Palestinian protesters are anti-Semites. It's a full-steam-ahead veritable parade of left-wing and Islamic stereotypes. Here are some randomly selected fragments... 

'At the Israeli embassy, the hipsters imagine that they’re guerrilla fighters. They scream themselves hoarse about oppression, duck into a Starbucks, come out with a few cinnamon lattes and then begin screaming again.'

'Bored Yemeni teenagers peel off to throw stones at a synagogue. The Marxists get into an argument over the Fourth International. Someone begins loudly reading their own self-published poetry through an unauthorized megaphone. ISIS sympathizers fly the black flag of the Jihad over the crowd where it tangles with a Hezbollah flag.'

'Max Blumenthal shows up to lead a Students for Justice in Palestine protest while shouting about colonialism. Then he tags himself on Instagram.'

'Khaybar Khaybar Ya Yahood,' cry the Muslims. 'Down with Zionist Supremacism,' scream the Marxists. 'Death to the Jews," shouts everyone else.'

Beyond this relentless hyperbole, this imaginary 'Day in the Life of critics of Israel', the article says nothing.

Who are you people?

Murray is a devout neoconservative. Neoconservatives believe that Western liberal democracy, such as it is, is by definition superior to all other forms of governance. It takes this position as morally absolute, and evokes notions of freedom, liberty and justice of which the west is supposed to be exemplary. It seeks to radically encourage parts of the world which do not share this view to adopt it. It does this with neoliberal economics and war. For a neoconservative, the fact that the Iraq war was based on lies is irrelevant, for it is the West's role to spread democracy; the fact that this magical democracy didn't arrive, and Iraq has plunged into deeper problems is also irrelevant because the West has its duty and that is that.

Neoconservatives in America are the people who preach libertarian values and despise socialist values. Then they endorse protectionism for their own agriculture, state funding for the military, and you can bet they were the first to propose bailing out the banks. It is hence a double-standards nationalistic ideology with its interests favouring capitalist leaders over the ordinary Western folk in who's interest they claim to be acting. 'Foreigners' are little more than dangerous and simple-minded scum until they can be made to work for the benefit of Western corporations.

Murray is the Associate Director of the Henry Jackson Society, the people who came up with the oxymoronic Inclusive Capitalism love-in a couple of months ago.

In this article, Murray bewilderingly puts Occupy London to rights by pointing out that the Church of England is much older than Occupy. Take that, anti-capitalists! He also paints them as having a sense of 'entitlement', seemingly because they take an issue with economic hegemony, and selfishly point out social problems such as '"youth unemployment," "women's unemployment," "police racism," "racism" in general, an alleged rise in "Islamophobia," the failure of the market economy, insufficient freedom for sex workers and terror suspects..."'

Occupy London, for Murray, wasn't a heterogeneous group of disaffected citizens with different concerns and different ideas attempting to engage in the national debate from which they are so often excluded. Oh no, they were apparently part of a culture 'of all sorts of narcissisms, special-interests groups and organizations actively devoted to the destruction of our society.'

Destruction, no less! Of our society. Who is this 'we'? one wonders. What mostly comes through from Eton and Oxford-educated Murray's articles is his derision for the uneducated, i.e. ordinary, citizen, whom he assumes is ill-positioned to have an opinion on anything beyond primetime TV and cinnamon lattes. He speaks for the elite, and his unquestioning conviction of the superiority of the West is matched only by his unquestioning conviction of the superiority of himself.

Melanie Phillips writes for the Times, but still has the Daily Mail flowing through her veins. People from all political stripes will know her because she appears to make ridiculous statements simply to irritate the left – '[The traditional family] has been relentlessly attacked by an alliance of feminists, gay rights activists, divorce lawyers, and "cultural Marxists" who grasped that this was the surest way to destroy Western society' – and exploit the prejudices of the right – 'the potential for tipping into outright calamity what is an already socially disruptive situation — with illegal Romanian shanty encampments even in the middle of London’s Mayfair, for heaven’s sake — is very high.'

Her Jewish faith is something she refers to frequently in her articles, and whilst being Jewish doesn't make anyone a Zionist, Phillips is an avid one. King David having built the Old City in Jerusalem in the 11th century BC (in Biblical history) is reason enough for all Jews to have claim to Jerusalem. Elsewhere, I'm sure she supports Mexican's claiming Texas or New Mexico, or Native American wishes to expel the newcomers from the Old World, and if I went to Scandinavia and chucked some family out of a house where I'm sure my Viking relatives lived, I assume she'd support that too. Hey, why don't we all go back to where our ancestors lived!

Phillips wrote a book called Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within, a hysterical rant which is happy to allow its readers to assume that Islamic extremism is Islam's default condition. We hope she's proud of her fascist spawn, Britain First, who have been threatening mosques and facing down curry restaurants in Brick Lane.

Melanie Phillips cares little for those who take to the streets, like those pesky teachers and their damned union representatives. How dare they demand pensions and stuff, while 'the harm the striking teachers will cause children by disrupting their education is, of course, not acknowledged'? For a day off school is second only to a thorough beating on the child abuse scale. 

She also deplores 'greedy' doctors who went on strike, stating that the 'public' will never trust them again. Or perhaps she was telling the public not to trust them again... Needless-to-say, all other professions who strike, or go on anti-cut demos, Occupy London – they're all idiots who you should hate. Phillips's poisonous diatribes routinely seek to condemn ordinary people by way of cajoling other ordinary people into despising them. How can she sleep at night? you might ask – well all that hatred must be exhausting!

And, as with all of Phillips' outpours, it comes back to the shocking demise of the country – in terms of moral clarity and absolute power – at the hands of conspiratorial leftie ideologues who've infected the political class with their sick relativism. Nothing, apparently, can't be solved with a good old time machine.

So...

The offending accusation is that the pro-Palestinian protests are singling out one aggressor (Israel) while ignoring others (Boko Haram, ISIS, Assad, etc.) As Mehdi Hassan points out in an article addressing this very argument, it's strange that supporters of Israel would categorise themselves amongst the likes of explicitly murderous groups, just to take a pop at anti-war protesters.

If Mehdi's aricle is a little too polemic, this article by Brian Whitaker also seeks to explain the reasons for the appearance of a 'singling out' of Israel by western critics. In it, Brian opines that the central reason is that the standards that Israel is supposed to uphold, as a Liberal Democracy vehemently supported by the West, are higher than those of Putin, Boko Haram, ISIS, Assad, etc. I would add, and this is the thrust of Hassan's argument, that a large scale protest in the UK is intended to draw the attention of our own elected leaders, to hold them to account, and to make demands for change. One suspects that Douglas Murray and his reactionary bandits of neoconservative privilege have never quite understood why anyone might need to protest, and I guess that's where the confusion lies.

If hypocrisy wasn't enough, the critic of Israel is also charged as an anti-Semite. Some brainless individuals just hate Jews, sometimes for religious or cultural reasons, sometimes because they're simply Nazis. Laura Penny, who is half-Jewish, no friend of the right and no Zionist, made the worrying observation...  

But for some every criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, as Penny argues in this article today. It's not just simple-minded everyday citizens on Twitter who level this accusation, but also right-wing journalists who, alas, command influence. This sweeping argument is not unlike when criticism of a black person is said to be simply racist, or when criticism of a woman is assumed to be simply sexist. Sometimes they are racist, sexist or anti-Semitic, but not by definition. This is the 'finger in your ears shout "prejudice!"' argument, both sides do it to shut down debate, and it's lazy and stupid.

When critics of Israel evoke the upsetting memories of the Holocaust, Hitler or swastikas they do so to (crassly) point out a grim irony, an irony that should make a Jewish state pause for thought – Israel, founded as it recovered from such horrors, was founded on the principles of racial prejudice and religious intolerance. The fact that these principles underline the Israeli raison d'etre means that Netanyahu's claims of pragmatism and proportionality in attacking Gaza are treated with a hefty dose of suspicion. Indeed, if the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, the stranglehold on Gaza, and the regular deaths of Palestinians is anything to go by, a Zionist drive to expand trumps any logic of self-defence. 

Opposition to Zionism is also assumed to be support of Hamas, which is to see things in a very binary fashion. Hamas is a complicated organisation born of a complicated situation, but most pro-Palestinians would see its position as a voice for Palestinians as unfortunate at best. When they rightly point out that Hamas are Islamic fundamentalists, Zionists show themselves to have a massive blind spot. Such attitudes expose the truth of the overriding aim for fundamentalists on both sides, the unquestionable superiority of their own faith, land, people and blood.