Israel

"Oh my God, he's defending Israel now", sighed satirist Chris Morris during an impromptu debate with Martin Amis in 2007, to which the audience applauded rapturously and en cue, presumably feeling a sense of righteousness with each coming together of their hands. The ongoing rhetorical attacks directed at Israel, as highlighted most recently by the media commentary of the conflict on board the flotilla on its way to the Gaza strip, has become the hallmark of pathetic and sundry quasi-liberalism of the posturing intellectual elite in Britain and America. Like it or not, Israel is an extremely important ally in the Middle East, presenting a democracy with a working parliamentary system amidst surrounding theocracies, dictatorships, and monarchist states. For some reason it has become the object of an ever-increasing and developing campaign of slander throughout the Western media.

Israel unilaterally withdrew all military occupation from the Gaza strip and the West Bank in the Summer of 2005. The Israeli military respond to gunfire, mortar-fire, and rocket-fire from the Gaza strip on an almost daily basis. The elected government of the Gaza strip, Hamas is a proxy for the Muslim Brotherhood, and was founded upon the principles of Islamism and the goal of establishing an Islamic state. The name itself means 'Islamic Resistance Movement', and is recognized by the European Union and the United States as a terrorist organization.

Alarmingly, however, when the news broke that a flotilla supposedly carrying aid to the Gaza strip was boarded and seized by the Israeli military, the event was presented in the media as another example of Israeli aggression, and serious cause for concern among Human Rights activists and for Western governments. The left-wing apologism for Islamic promulgation has expanded to such an extent that not only, we're told, should the Palestinian population in Gaza be granted complete immunity from Israeli interference, but also that Israel represents an oppressive, almost fascistic state that supports the "illegal war" in Iraq and the extinguishing of all Muslim self-rule.

To the contrary, it was the election of Hamas that reinstated a climate of military violence and hostility, and categorically froze all peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian population in the Gaza strip. Why then has Israel become a dirty word in the West, muddied by wayward and lazy accusations of Human Rights abuses, regional expansionism, concealment of their Nuclear weapons arsenal, and various other deviations from what's acceptable?

For those of us who have been following the flotilla fiasco from the start will have noticed the strange and risible turn the media coverage has taken since Monday morning. What began as reports of outrageous Israeli conduct (yet another example thereof) have gradually been exposed as falsehoods. Slowly and painstakingly the truth is coming out. Michael Totten, the master of such situations, has covered this from the beginning and it would be wrong of me to try to condense the invaluable range of reportage that he has drawn from. I urge you to visit his blog, scroll down to the bottom and read you way to the present. You may be struck by the divorce between the media's representation of events and reality. Even from constitutionally non-bias outlets like the BBC the skew on the events is transparent, unpardonable, and very worrisome.