Imagine if right-wing, anti-DEI protesters were marching in Washington, DC, and some in the crowd had erected racist depictions of Black people, or, say, carried a Confederate Flag. Is there any doubt that Guardian coverage of the demo would comment on the racist nature of the imagery? Indeed, the Guardian published an article in 2022 titled “Signs of hate: Parental guide to far-right codes, symbols and acronyms“, which included the Confederate Flag as an example of what’s used by ‘far-right extremists’ to promote their racist cause, and which, the author warned, could represent a warning sign of potential ‘radicalisation’.
However, as we’ve been documenting for 15 years, when it comes to antisemitism at ‘pro-Palestinian’ protests, the outlet refuses to hold activists accountable for the anti-Jewish racism that infects their movement.
An entry today on the Guardian’s Middle East Live blog, with the simple introduction “Here are some of the latest images on the newswires today“, and sandwiched between a photo of Israeli protesters outside the US embassy calling to complete the hostage deal, and a photo showing Palestinians gathering outside a destroyed building in Khan Younis, is a case in point:
The street theatre in response to Donald Trump’s comments on the future of Gaza, as you can see, depicts the US, represented by the Statue of Liberty, being dragged in chains by Israeli soldiers. The poster in the foreground isn’t completely visible, but we found another site which shows what’s next to the words “Ask What Your Country Can Do For Israel?“, which is inspired by the John F. Kennedy inauguration quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country“.
As you can see, it’s the Statue of Liberty portrayed as a tool of the Jewish state.
The narrative that Israel controls the United States – that Jerusalem forces Washington to bend to its will – represents one of more common Israel-related racist tropes in the anti-Semites’ arsenal, and is a subset of the antisemitic calumny that ‘Jews control Washington’.
The fact that the Guardian editor who published this photo, evidently without any concern over the lethal history of the Jews as puppet masters theme, is not surprising given the outlet’s coverage of anti-Israel protests following the Oct. 7th Hamas massacre, which has consistently ignored or erased antisemitic banners, as well as support for terrorism in general and the Hamas massacre in particular. (Indeed, we’re not aware of any speeches during the weekly anti-Israel demos in London – since they began a couple of days after Oct. 7th – that included a condemnation of the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust – save one or two that, tellingly, elicited boos from the crowd.)
The fact that the Guardian simply can not, even in the aftermath one of the most barbaric and savage spasms of anti-Jewish violence in history, call out and hold accountable the naked antisemitism of anti-Israel activists and pogrom supporters in the West is another example the institution’s hostility to both Israel and the Jewish community.
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