Confronting The Guardian ideology

Adam Levick
CiF Watch
21 February '11

“It’s the economy, stupid” is a phrase in American politics made famous during the 1992 U.S. Presidential Election campaign. Bill Clinton’s campaign manager had a sign with this phrase at their headquarters to stress to the candidate that, regardless of the issue being discussed, success in the election depended on making the conversation about the economy – which was in bad shape at the time, and represented former President Bush’s greatest political liability.

I sometimes wonder if Guardian editorial offices has something akin to Clinton’s campaign mantra – a note, not based on political calculations but, rather, maintaining an ideological edifice, reminding them where any conversation about the Middle East must preferably lead: “It’s about Israel, stupid.”

While such a scenario is, of course, meant in jest, I am at a loss to account for how, in the course of a new Guardian editorial (“The Middle East: People, Power, Politics“) on Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal and deadly crackdown against Libyan protesters, and the broader political upheavals in the region, they somehow managed to throw in this line:

“the Libyan leader may still be considered too valuable to lose, as US influence in the region decreases. Nowhere is that truer than in the cockpit of the crisis, Palestine.

“Israel Derangement Syndrome” may adequately, albeit cheekily, describe the dynamic whereby otherwise reasonable people can attribute the cause of nearly any political crisis in the world to the behavior of the Jewish state, but doesn’t seem nearly strong enough of a term to characterize the Guardian’s obsession with Israel.

(Read full "Confronting The Guardian ideology")

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