In UK they blame the Jews for Palestinian wickedness

Melanie Phillips:

The hatred of Israel that now courses through Britain’s veins has now erupted in yet another frenzy whose irrationality and spite are scarcely credible. One now gets a whiff of what it must have been like during the witch-hunts of the Middle Ages; one now begins to understand just what Kafka was describing. British Jews are being swept up in a psychic maelstrom targeted at their right to peoplehood. As the violence against Israel increases with more than 300 rockets fired on Sderot and the western Negev since May, killing two Israeli civilians, wounding many others and traumatising untold numbers in addition; as Hamas threatens Israel with an endless war of annihilation; as Iran races towards the nuclear bomb to finish Israel off, Britain’s industrialised and professional classes are deciding once again to take the high ground of moral nihilism and punish not the instigators of this genocidal onslaught but the nation that is their victim.

Delegates at the first conference of the new University and College Union in Bournemouth voted by 158 to 99 to recommend to its branches’ a comprehensive and consistent boycott’ of all Israeli academic institutions. The Alan Johnston video was clearly made under duress but the British licence-fee payer might must have wondered why Fatah al Islam bothered to kidnap him for eleven weeks in order to get him to blame Israel for everything — and blame Britain for Israel as well as for Iraq and Afghanistan — when such views are transmitted by the BBC virtually every day of the week. The Hamas/al Qaeda script on Israel is now the British orthodoxy. And this week’s 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War will usher in a wave of hate-fuelled demonstrations by people supporting those who are working on that same script towards the destruction of Israel, Jewish peoplehood and Jews worldwide.

There are, it must be said, many good people in Britain who are horrified by the boycott and its implications for the fight to defend the free world....

Those obsessions, which are built upon lies, have never been challenged. They are the result of a world-wide Arab propaganda campaign shrewdly targeted to manipulate and exploit the preoccupations of the liberal west, which is all too eagerly disposed to take at face value any third world narrative of ‘colonial’ dispossession by western interests, even when this is demonstrably and verifiably untrue in every detail. This has been no mere propaganda campaign but a carefully calibrated strategic inversion of history and reality in order to turn the Arab aggressors into victims and the Israeli victims into aggressors in the western mind. It is a military strategy of systematic deception, dissimulation, fabrication and falsification. And it has surely succeeded – thanks to the intellectual and moral evisceration of British and western intellectuals – beyond the Arabs’ wildest expectations.

...

This goes back to the ridiculous Zionism equals apartheid nonsense that the Soviets helped the Arabs perpetrate in the 1970s. The inversion is best demonstrated by how many Jews are now in Gaza--zero, while in Israel there are more than a million Arabs with voting rights. The point of view of the proponents of this boycott is too convoluted to comprehend.