by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
The cultural elite’s minimisation of Hamas’s pogrom is truly repulsive.
I hope someone has stored for posterity Dawn French’s haughty, mewling moan about Israel. For when future historians come to study the sewer of sanctimony daft celebs gaily waded in in the early 21st century, they could do a lot worse than watch this clip. Nothing will sharpen their analysis of the pomposity of our times better than checking out this 40-second vid in which a past-it comic famous for playing a horny vicar holds forth on a foreign war for the clicks and likes of strangers on the internet.
Yes, at last, the former Vicar of Dibley, one half of French and Saunders, the voice of those annoying M&S ads, has given her thoughts on the Gaza war. We’ve heard from the pope, from presidents and now from the woman whose job is tickling the ribs of Radio 4 listeners by saying the word ‘twat’ a lot. You won’t believe what she thinks. Brace yourselves: Israel is bad. ‘NO’, she says to Israel about its war in Gaza. One envisions IDF soldiers laying down their guns. ‘Guys, call off the war against the fascist scum who raped and murdered our people – Lenny Henry’s ex-wife says no!’
[…] It’s her use of the term ‘bad thing’ that has caused a stink. Or ‘bad fing’, as she says, because remember she’s doing Israel as the irascible brat of world affairs that can’t even speak proper. She’s referring to Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. ‘Bad thing’, Dawn? Are you for real? The bloodiest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust? The rape of young Jewish women at a music festival? The burning alive of Jewish families? Writing that off as a ‘bad thing’ – worse, a ‘bad fing’ – is as gross a minimisation of Jewish suffering as I have seen in the 20 months since that darkest of days.