I had hoped that our efforts at mockery, along with those of our comrades at Engage and some others, would have rendered it simply too embarrassing for anyone to use the phrase “as a Jew” in the course of Israel-bashing.
Not yet, it seems– judging from a Sunday Times piece about London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers:
“The most sensitive area,” says Ross McKibbin, an Oxford don who writes on politics for the paper, “is undoubtedly the Middle East, where you couldn’t say there is much balance.” Wilmers herself says that her customary ambivalence doesn’t extend to Israel: “I’m unambiguously hostile to Israel because it’s a mendacious state. They do things that are just so immoral and counterproductive and, as a Jew, especially as a Jew, you can’t justify that.”
“My people”, as she calls fellow Jews, “have a responsibility”: “I feel a particular right to speak out on this because of my background.” In August she ran an essay headlined “Zionist Terrorism”. What about Palestinian terrorism: does that get a look-in? “Everyone knows about that,” she counters. “I just think we get worked up about the wrong things, and there is more wrong on one side. What Cherie Blair said about being a suicide bomber if she’d been brought up in Gaza, I can absolutely see that point.”
(Hat tip: Normblog)
