Where the Elite Meet to Bleat Damaging Lies About Israel: The London Review of Books

Daphne Anson
20 November '10

Not being a member of the metropolitan (or, for that matter, non-metropolitan) left-liberal chattering classes, my taste in newspapers and journals excludes, most emphatically, The Guardian, The Independent, and the London Review of Books. I'm more at home with the London Daily Telegraph but, boy, do I mourn the demise of its previous proprietorship, when regular columnists included the splendidly realistic and pro-Israel Barbara Amiel and Mark Steyn The Australian (arguably Australia's most consistently pro-Israel newspaper, and home to the admirable foreign affairs specialist Greg Sheridan), and Standpoint magazine.

Barbara Amiel, in December 2001, revealed that at a private dinner party at the London home she shared with her husband, Conrad Black (Lord Black of Coldharbour), the French ambassador, Daniel Bernard, has blamed the insecure state of the world on what he termed that shitty little country, Israel. Indeed, far from stoking sympathy for Israel given all of its horrendous experiences at the hands in terrorists, 9/11 has produced a similar reaction to Bernard's among the chattering classes of the Western world.

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