The Guardian again provides a platform to an extremist opposed to Israel’s very existence

Matthew Cassel’s CiF piece today, “Palestinians in Lebanon, at the lonlely end of the Arab uprisings“, which quoted notorious “historian” Ilan Pappe in describing Israel’s founding as an act of “ethnic cleansing”, and calls for the effective end of Jewish sovereignty through the return of millions of Palestinian “refugees”, and their descendents, to Israel, didn’t break any new ideological ground for the Guardian –  a paper which, for instance, during the Palestine Papers series, saw fit to publish a piece by a member of Hamas as well as letter by a philosophy professor which morally justified acts of Palestinian terrorism against Israeli men, women, and children.

Nor is it surprsing that an implicit call for the end of Israel was uttered by Cassel, who wrote a CiF piece in 2010 openly supporting Hezbollah.

But, as it is the mission of this blog to expose and combat anti-Semitism and the assault on Israel’s legitimacy at the Guardian and Comment is Free, it is important to note the viciousness of Cassel’s prose, commentary approved by Guardian editors.

While some of his assertions were simply abusrd – for instance, his claim that “Never is a refugee’s right to return brought into question…except when that refugee is a Palestinian” is utterly bizarre, contradicted by the history of millions of refugees, including 900,00 Jewish refugees from Arab lands, since the end of WWII who never returned to their former land – it was the following line which seemed like something issued in a propaganda statement of a radical Islamist movement rather than in a publications which aims, albeit comically, to be a “liberal voice”.

Referring to the Palestinians in Lebanon who marched to the border on “Nakba Day”, Cassel notes:

“For most, it was their first time even seeing the land that they’ve grown up hearing described in precise detail through the popular stories of elders old enough to remember life in what is today considered Israel.” [emphasis mine]

Robin Shepherd’s recent characterization of the Guardian’s animosity towards Israel as nothing short of “fanatical” is the only idea which seems sufficient to adequately describe their editors’ decision to sanction an essay which employs language  hauntingly similar to the most hateful, radical, reactionary ideologies in the world – those who refer to Israel as the “Zionist entity” and similar invectives in the service of suggesting that the state of Israel is unnatural, hideous, something which should be assigned to the dustbin of history.

Let it be noted far and wide that the Guardian, in their utterly perverse view of progressive thought, finds the moral negation of the Jewish state, at the very least, to be worthy of debate.