My post from Saturday night and yesterdays rebuttal video have gone viral. I woke up to an avalanche of tweets, from either side of the great divide. Plenty of the hate that flowed my way was actually the result of an errant link in a tweet: I mistakenly tweeted out a link to a hate site called “Middle East Monitor” and their glowing praise for Leanne Mohamad. This was then sent round to the hate-Israel masses by “certified self-hating Jew” Benny:
https://twitter.com/bendykoval/status/736928638667460608
Which leads me to the main charge hurled at me (in many inventive ways) why did I attack a little school girl? Obviously there wasn’t any direct assault on the substance of my video because the other side doesn’t do truth or facts.
But to the charge of attacking a schoolgirl: I specifically addressed my video to the Headmaster of her school and the other adults who not only failed to stop this but rewarded it up through a chain of review. Those are the people to whom my video is directed. I’m told, however, that she was only involved on Twitter after she herself started interacting with Edgar and very quickly thereafter she blocked him.
I specifically didn’t even look for any of Leanne Mohamad’s social media accounts and it never occurred to me to tag her on Twitter for example. Nobody should be directly attacking her, except on points of substantive debate and never with personal attacks.
However, Edgar Davidson did look at her Twitter account (more pictures at the end of the post) and it isn’t very pretty. Her feed is a hotchpotch of retweets and posts from the worst Jew haters and Israel haters on the planet. She’s looking at and retweeting the kinds of Pallywood lies we fight here at Israellycool day in, day out. Just yesterday Dave wrote about a report full of lies submitted to the World Health Organisation.
I write about this only with a sense of dread and pity. There is only one purpose served by allowing a child to wallow in the this hateful anti-Israel propaganda. There is no real distinction between Israelis and Jews for her and anyone fed this diet. There is no way to react to this but with revulsion for Jewish Israel. I pity her and those around her who she infects with this disease.
Prevent Duty
There’s another point which is the UK’s laws on inciting religious or racial hatred. I’m pretty clear (which is why I put it in the title) that a speech such as this incites people to hate Jews. Just look at the growing avalanche of Jew hatred across Europe, the rate at which Jews are fleeing countries like France and join the dots. This is where the hatred is coming from.
Specifically the UK has something called the “Prevent Duty” program that’s designed to “protect children from radicalisation”.
You can read the advice here, but it could be that this school needs to look very closely at what some of the children under their duty of care are looking at online and the attitudes they have. It might be that the staff need to be looked at too.
This “Prevent Duty” was the reason police investigated the home and family of a child who wrote that he lived in a “terrorist house”. At first it was pretended that he’d made a spelling mistake and meant to write that he lived in a “terraced house”. After quite a bit of attention, once it was clear that this was not just a spelling mistake, it moved off the front pages.
In general I’m not a fan of hate speech laws, to a certain point I’m more libertarian than most regulation in the UK and Europe. However if you have them on the books then it’s incumbent for them to be applied blindly. You can’t just arrest anyone who is perceived to insult someone else’s dead prophet and then ignore adults who take part in preparing this hateful speech. An investigation is at least warranted.
Censorship
Sometime yesterday evening both the page where Leanne Mohamad’s win was announced by the “Speak Out” Challenge organisation and the original YouTube clip were removed from the internet by the organisers of the event.
I understand why they did this but I want to make it clear: I don’t believe covering up this event or pretending it didn’t happen will help. What is needed is an absolutely clear public statement of what was wrong with her speech, who helped prepare it, who allowed it to progress in the competition and what steps are being taken to re-educate those people or discipline them.
It’s also clear that this will lead to long term damage: here’s a tweet from a virulently Israel hating UK University Lecturer.
Blood Libel
Another charge I want to address is whether or not this is a blood libel. It is a blood libel for two main reasons:
- she intimates that the Jewish State of Israel has an absolute policy of bombing and killing children deliberately and she provides a vastly inflated number of times she thinks we’ve done this. In fact, because there are to my knowledge no times the Israeli State has taken a collective decision to kill children (for no other purpose and not in the course of carrying out legitimate acts of self defence or war), she’s inflated numbers from 0 to 30,000;
- the second blood libel is saying her cousin died specifically because Israel doesn’t provide adequate health care to Palestinians on the grounds of their race. There’s even a specific charity, Save a Child’s Heart, which brings children from P.A. areas and all over the world to be treated in our Israeli hospitals.
Those are both libels (defamatory lies) and they involve blood (death).
This is bigger than one school girl and her presentation in a competition. This cuts to the heart of whether the UK is fatally infected with the new anti-Israel strain of Jew hatred and if this is being spread far and wide within the UK’s schools.
