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By Melanie Phillips
(AUGUST 27, 2023 / SUBSTACK.COM) For years, the doctrine of “equality” has been synonymous with conscience and morality in the west. Anyone who dissents from this dogma is tarred and feathered as a knuckle-dragging troglodyte. In fact, this interpretation of “equality” dissolves morality as surely as acid dissolves limestone. This “equality” creates injustice and leads to bullying and intimidation.
Worse still, it enables terrorism and mass murder. Worse again, this is being actively promoted by western politicians and “liberals”. Thus it dominates and poisons public discourse.
Israel’s controversial National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, provoked yet another tsunami of condemnation when, discussing on TV whether more stringent measures were needed to curb the current surge of Palestinian Arab terrorism against Israelis, he declared:
My right, the right of my wife and my children to move around Judea and Samaria is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs. The right to life comes before freedom of movement.
Cue instant meltdown — and instant distortion and defamation. Most media sources quoted the first sentence but not the last. They thus decontextualised what Ben-Gvir had said, falsely and maliciously misrepresenting his observation as the quintessence of racism by placing Israeli interests above Palestinian Arab interests.
Does one really need to point out that, however much one may revile a public figure, demonisation through distortion and malice turns such finger-pointers themselves into promoters of malicious hatred?
In fact, what Ben-Gvir was actually saying was that the right of innocent citizens to live their lives free of attack should be given precedence over the right of Palestinian Arabs to enjoy the freedom that allows them to murder Israelis. Those who have called him a racist for these remarks must therefore be presumed to believe that freedom of movement for Palestinian Arabs should be given a higher priority than preventing Israelis being murdered by them. And this is supposed to be the voice of western principle?
Well, it’s certainly the voice of the Biden administration. Last Friday, it duly piled in. The State Department said:
We strongly condemn Minister Ben-Gvir’s inflammatory comments on the freedom of movement of Palestinian residents of the West Bank. We condemn all racist rhetoric; as such messages are particularly damaging when amplified by those in leadership positions and are incongruent with advancing respect for human rights for all.
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