by Melanie Phillips
Over the past few days, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feeling has been ratcheted up into an absolute frenzy. Every few hours seems to bring a fresh outrage.
In London, a prominent Jewish broadcaster was chased down the street by a man screaming “fascist Zionist scum”. A woman dining at a Jewish restaurant in the city was asked if she was a Jew and then had food thrown over her.
On the Greek island of Rhodes, a mob armed with knives attacked a group of Jewish teenagers. About 50 French Jewish children, returning from a summer camp in Spain, were thrown off a flight at Valencia airport after the children sang Hebrew songs, and their tour leader was arrested and thrown to the ground.
The BBC’s obsession with demonising and delegitimising Israel has reached pathological proportions. This week, it gave pride of place on its flagship radio show Today to ever-more twisted accusations and blood libels casting Israel as an evil and murderous state, including the claim by a British surgeon working in Gaza that the Israel Defence Forces were playing a game in shooting Gazan boys in the food queues by targeting a different part of their body every day.
The broadcasting behemoth could scarcely contain its excitement as reporters and interviewees joined in chorusing that “a reckoning was coming” with the imminent end of the war in Gaza, after which Israel’s “war crimes” would be revealed, and that the case for declaring a Palestine state was therefore now overwhelming.