Are there any red lines at the Guardian on antisemitism?

(Trigger Warning. This post contains a photo which is highly disturbing)

While footage of the antisemitic violence by mobs of mostly Arab and Muslim youths against Israeli football fans in Amsterdam last week was circulating on X, the Guardian’s Owen Jones published a series of posts on the platform defending the perpetrators, while accusing the Jews of provoking the violence.

Here’s just one of many examples of the horrific anti-Jewish violence on Friday.

Jones’ response to the preplanned beating of Jews, which was strongly denounced by the Dutch Prime Minister and King, as well as local Amsterdam authorities, as “antisemitic”, wouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with his Guardian columns and social media activity.

Jones, a propagandist who cheer-led for Jeremy Corbyn and, much like his pal Jezza, appears to loathe the West, is arguably the columnist at the outlet who most consistently gaslights Jews about antisemitism, while framing the Jewish state as something akin to a cosmic evil.

His visceral antipathy towards Israel, and contempt for diaspora Jews who aren’t anti-Zionists, has been full display in the aftermath of Oct. 7th, 2023, when thousands of bloodthirsty Hamas pogromists carried out the deadliest and most (Trigger Warning) barbaric antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust.

A mere eleven days after the massacre, Jones was already kicking Jews while they were down, accusing Israel of war crimes and “ethnic cleansing” before the IDF even launched their ground invasion. So, you can say that Jones was ahead of the curve within the clique of effectively pro-Hamas commentating by peddling a variation of the ‘genocide’ libel before it became fashionable.

Over the past 13 months, he’s ignored Hamas, while continuing to engage in Soviet-style anti-Zionist propaganda.

So, nothing much shocks us about Jones. However, given the dangerous rise of anti-Jewish racism in the UK, and elsewhere in the West, since Oct. 7th, it’s important to highlight the fact that his latest column promotes and legitmises a lethal trope about Jews that’s redolent of classic antisemitism.

The op-ed (“Is there any red line that Israel will be held to? Biden has just confirmed the answer is no“, Nov. 13) includes the following strap line:

While we’ve refuted the starvation libel previously, and even international bodies have walked back those charges, his use of the word “butchering” is taken from this sentence:

Starvation, butchering children, ethnic cleansing, violently erasing a healthcare system: all done deliberately by a state whose leaders have not even pretended not to believe in the collective guilt of a civilian population.

Jones’ “butchering children” libel is based on the unverified claims – dutifully reported by the BBC – of one doctor who didn’t actually see the attacks he described, but saw injuries to children, and accepted Palestinian claims at face value. The doctor didn’t of course take into the account that the injuries were more likely the unintended result of attacks on Hamas terrorists, who use hospitals and other protected areas illegally for military purposes.

Jones, thus, reached the conclusion that “Palestinian children were deliberately being shot in the head” by Israeli drones.

He doesn’t of course mention the actual butchering of children and babies by Hamas on Oct. 7th.

While it’s unclear if Jones has an understanding of the dangerous history of the ancient blood libel, and how modern variations of that medieval superstition have incited antisemitism, and antisemitic violence, in both Muslim and Arab world and the West, the harm of columns like his – published in putatively respectable outlets – is hard to overstate.

As we argued in a response to a similar libel by another Guardian journalist, such unhinged accusations, representing the continuity of ancient antisemitic motifs concerning Jewish bloodlust, should be seen as one piece in a pattern of content at the outlet about Israel and Jews that creates a permission structure for antisemitism. The Guardian’s malign obsession with the Jewish state not only, at times, crosses over to antisemitism. It also – by imagining a state that is cruel, oppressive, racist, illegitimate and, as Robert S. Wistrich termed it, represents “an organic obstacle to peace and progress” – affirms the darkest and most delusional beliefs of genuine Jew haters.

It is clearly lost on the Guardian, which recently announced it was leaving X over concerns about “content on the platform” promoting “far-right conspiracy theories and racism“, that its editors allow their platform to be used for far-left and Islamist anti-Jewish racism and conspiracy theories – the kind of which you’d expect to see peddled by extremists.

As Jones’ latest screed against shows, there are clearly no red lines at the outlet when it comes to demonising Israel and inciting antisemitism.

Editor’s Note: On Nov. 19th, we published a rebuttal to the claims made by the surgeon which were promoted by Owen Jones.