Levick - Guardian’s Middle East Editor, Ian Black, equates Gilad Shalit with Palestinian terrorists

Adam Levick
CiF Watch
12 October '11

I’ll never forget the heated debate on Facebook about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict I had with a left-wing Jewish acquaintance back in Philadelphia several years ago. Upon attempting to confirm that, regardless of how critical she may have been towards the Israeli government, she wasn’t suggesting anything resembling a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, she wrote:

“That question is a red herring.”

What my friend was saying, in effect, was that the question I was posing wasn’t relevant and/or was merely meant to divert attention from the particular issue we were discussing.

Of course, what this really meant was that she wasn’t prepared to concede my argument that democratic Israel (whatever its imperfections) was inherently morally superior (by even the most rudimentary liberal standards) to the reactionary, Iranian backed Islamist terrorist group who rules Gaza.

My friend’s post-modern rejection of the modest proposition that Western-style liberal democracy is inherently superior to Islamism – an idea which more than a few far left Jews have succumbed to – also represents, to be sure, an intellectual paradigm which characterizes the Guardian-style left.

The Guardian’s Middle East editor, Ian Black, wrote the following, upon news that a deal for Gilad Shalit’s release may be near, in “Gilad Shalit exchange deal could boost both Hamas and Israeli government“, Oct. 11:

Shalit’s lonely, five-year plight has moved and angered Israelis who, by and large, still accept the burden and risks of compulsory national service.

Palestinians face the problem on a far larger scale: they count some 11,000 security prisoners in Israeli jails, the admiring Arabic label “factories for men” masking the toll this takes on families. [emphasis mine]

No, it’s not surprising that the Guardian’s Middle East editor equates Gilad Shalit with Palestinians who have either planned or carried out murderous terrorist attacks against innocent Israeli civilians.

But, the fact that such moral comparisons are routine at the Guardian doesn’t render them any less abhorrent.

(Read full "Ian Black, equates Gilad Shalit with Palestinian terrorists")

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