The Banal Evil of the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood

A guest post by AKUS

The Guardian consistently posts Sherwood’s columns without allowing comments.

This is sensible from their point of view since, more than almost anyone, her ignorance and viciously anti-Israeli bias bring out furious comments pointing out her errors from all those who know anything at all about Israel and genuinely care for the country.

However, occasionally, her blog, View from Jerusalem with Harriet Sherwood, does allow for reader comments.

Her latest effort is a typical Guardian piece, full of unsubstantiated anti-Israeli throw-away lines – a weepy piece about   “Palestinian children” being arrested at night.  Quite characteristically, all we are told is that the sleeping “children”, perhaps exhausted after a day’s fun throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers, were older than 10 years of age.  The full “horror” of the event is captured in the line:

“They wrote down the numbers and took pictures of the boys. Then they said they could go back to sleep.”

Why was this done? Well, Sherwood quotes an indignant B’Tselem report, as if rock-throwing Arab teenagers (and younger children) or teenage suicide bombers were something unknown:

“The photos were taken for what the army calls ‘mapping’: the army did not have any basis for suspecting any particular minor they awoke to photograph, but they wanted to build a reservoir of pictures they could later use for identification purposes, should the minor be involved in stone-throwing or other violent activity”.

In fact, that is rather reminiscent of the police in England using photo identification to prosecute teenage rioters. However, unlike the British police who have covered England with CCTV cameras, the IDF does not install CCTV cameras on every street corner on the West Bank to monitor the activities of every teenager, and is resorting to other means to achieve a similar objective.

But it was actually in response to comments below the line that the full banality of this unutterably stupid and evil reporter was revealed. 

In response to the column, londonae wrote the following, pointing out the difference between Sherwood’s indignation about waking up children in the middle of the night and her silence over the murder of an Israeli father and child by rock-throwing Arabs:

To which, Sherwood casually responded that, indeed, she had not allowed their deaths to go “unnoticed”:

Frequent commenter SantaMoniker pointed out just how callous Sherwood’s comment was. Sherwood wrote an entire column mourning the death of a rock-throwing West Bank Arab, while “noticing” the deaths of Asher Palmer and son in passing in an article that once again made the ridiculous claim that apartments in Jerusalem are “settlements”:

It is a mystery to me why Israel allows the Guardian to maintain any reporter in Israel, and Sherwood in particular. 

She is a walking example of the banality of evil – those who care little for the death of Jews while sanctimoniously condemning every slight or indignity suffered by Arabs, even terrorists openly committed to the Jewish state’s destruction.

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