Guardian writer hurls baseless smear at “pro-Israel voices”

Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi, who’s half  Palestinian, wrote a piece celebrating a new Netflix special featuring the Palestinian-American comic Mo Amer, a show she praises as both funny and “groundbreaking”.  Mahdawi, however, ignores the fact that, last year, Netflix announced a new Palestinian collection, titled “Palestinian Stories”, which consists of 32 award-winning films that are either directed by Palestinian filmmakers or tell Palestinian stories.

But, Mahdawi devotes most of her column (“For anyone with Palestinian roots like me, Netflix’s sitcom Mo is groundbreaking TV”, Aug. 30) complaining about what she characterises as a dearth of positive depictions of Palestianins in pouplar culure and the media.  For instance, she writes:

You can’t even say the P-word without it causing problems: an anchor on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation once had to apologise for using the word Palestine (instead of “Palestinian territories”), for God’s sake.

The CBC of course apologised becase Palestine is NOT a country.  That’s an uncontroversial fact.

Mahdawi then further complained about the putative ‘erasure’ of Palestinains by certain “voices”.

Being Palestinian means constantly being told you don’t exist or being accused by certain pro-Israel voices of being antisemitic simply because you assert that you do exist.

This is a smear, plain an simple.  Mahdawi doesn’t provide even one example of “pro-Israel” voices assusing Palestinians of antisemitism for asserting that they “exist”.  A competent Guardian editor would have called her out on this baseless accusation – one she used in a previous column – which is consistent with the Corbynista narrative that accusations of antisemitism are cynically used by Jews and others in order to silence Palestinains.

In fact, the Equality and Human Rights Commission report on antisemitism in the Labour Party denounced as racist a version of that very tactic used by former London Mayor Ken Livingstone.

Finally, someone should remind the intrepid columnist that she works at a global media company called the Guardian, arguably the MSM’s English language home of pro-Palestinian commentary and news, where she has a forum to publish her views.

Mahdawi isn’t being silenced – by “pro-Israel voices”, or anyone else.

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3 Comments

  1. says: Michael Zeffertt

    So interesting isn’t it that they complain that being Palestinian means “constantly being told you don’t exist…” Apparently, however, there is no problem in them telling Jews the same thing. Being told that you are simply a 14th century European cult or a descendant of a western Asian tribe and so forth is a regular mantra of the Palestinian ‘argument’. The thing is that Jews came into being 4000 years ago and Palestinians date back to about 1968 by way of a redefinition of their earlier nomenclature.

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