Guardian descends into bizarre anti-Israeli dreamland…literally

Cross posted from The Commentator

By way of a perverse kind of optimism, there have been those among us who have predicted that at some point the anti-Israel brigade in Britain would eventually run out of steam. After all, once you’ve flung totally false charges of racism, imperialism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, Nazism, war crimes etc for long enough, surely you’ll just get bored and move on. But where?

If the latest preposterous offering from the Guardian is anything to go by, you go into dreamland, literally. Think I’m making this up? Try this from Dr. Giles Fraser, whose author byline describes him as “priest-in-charge at St Mary’s Newington in south London and the former canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral.”

Dr Fraser’s article is headlined, Little wonder that my dreams in Nablus are so disturbing, and it begins with him waking up at 3am in his hotel in Nablus after dreaming about a ginger cat and some animal described as a cross between a mouse and a spider. After a short while, he goes to sleep again:

“But dreams return. I am walking down the street with a woman, next to a large concrete wall. I can hear panicked shouts, the sound of a large number of young people on the other side. Suddenly, one of the panels of the wall rotates, like a revolving door.

“Through the opening I glimpse people running away from something, but the source of the panic is unclear. She goes through the concrete door. I do not. The door closes. I hear more shouting. I don’t know if I should have gone through with her. All I know is that we are separated. I wake again, sweating, confused, frightened.”

Blimey. Just before he goes on to wax lyrical about “grand apartheid” in the West Bank, he goes on to say, without the slightest hint of irony:

“You don’t need to be Freud to figure all this out. Two dreams: one of domination, another of separation.”

You certainly don’t need to be Freud to believe that this guy might need some professional help.

Apparently, Fraser came to Nablus for the Palestine Festival of Literature. But it is his dreams that occupy his mind.

He concludes thus:

“Who can be surprised that people dream in this ancient land? And who can be surprised that these dreams are so disturbing? Only later I recall, somewhat freakily, that it was here, around Nablus (called Shechem in the Bible), that Joseph dreamed about the domination of his brothers in the book of Genesis:

“He said to them, ‘Please hear this dream which I have dreamed: for behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and also stood upright; and behold, your sheaves came around, and bowed down to my sheaf.’ His brothers said to him, ‘Will you indeed reign over us? Or will you indeed have dominion over us?’

“They hated him all the more for his dreams and for his words.” Joseph was exiled into slavery. Later, returning to dominate his brothers and their tribes. And Joseph’s dream has become a reality.”

And this might also be the moment that the anti-Israel crowd finally and definitively lost the plot.

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• Guardian columnist Giles Fraser smears Israel with the charge of ‘apartheid’ in Hebron (ukmediawatch.org)