Khaled Diab is a “Belgian-Egyptian journalist and writer who currently lives in Jerusalem”. He is a prolific writer for the Guardian.
In yesterday’s piece, he has this to say on the subject of the Saudi web attacks on various Israeli institutions:
Some commentators went even further. “The Jewish state is pretty devastated by the idea that a bunch of ‘indigenous Arabs’ are far more technologically advanced than its own chosen cyber pirates,” Israeli jazz musician Gilad Atzmon observed wryly on his blog.
Two months ago, Guardian Readers’ Editor, Chris Elliott had this to say about the use of the mocking term “chosen“, in the context of its use by their columnist, Deborah Orr:
Two weeks ago a columnist used the term “the chosen” in an item on the release of Gilad Shalit, which brought more than 40 complaints to the Guardian, and an apology from the columnist the following week. “Chosenness”, in Jewish theology, tends to refer to the sense in which Jews are “burdened” by religious responsibilities; it has never meant that the Jews are better than anyone else. Historically it has been antisemites, not Jews, who have read “chosen” as code for Jewish supremacism.
One reader wrote of the column: “The despicable antisemitic tone of this rant is beyond reason or decency.”
The previous month, they’d published an article by Andy Newman on Gilad Atzmon’s antisemitism.
What does this demonstrate?
First of all, it is instructive to find out that Diab is a man who takes his information from the website of a racist promoter of Holocaust deniers, and who finds jokes about the Jews supposedly being “chosen”, wryly funny.
Secondly, as Tanya Gold put it in her piece on CiF: Antisemitic discourse is now mainstream. Even when the Guardian takes a formal position in opposition to such discourse, it cannot in practice keep it out of its pages.
(Also see CiFWatch)
UPDATE
CIFWatch reports:
Following our post, and official complaint, the essay was amended, and the entire passage (cited above) was removed.
While we would have preferred if they had acknowledged that citing Atzmon in a CiF or Guardian piece is, in any context, necessarily at odds with their community standards, we’re pleased that pejorative references to Jews as the ‘chosen’ are understood by Guardian editors as, by definition, antisemitic.
