I’ve a piece in the Jewish Chronicle about how there was a great story in Tunisia that no one reported. As I
say,
‘Every morning I read The Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Financial Times and the Independent. I stay with the Today programme until Radio 4 drives me away by insulting my intelligence with Thought for the Day and look at the Economist and the New York Times if I have a moment. But I knew nothing about Tunisia. No journalist thought it worthwhile to tell readers about the grotesque figure of Leila Trabelsi, an Imelda Marcos and Marie Antoinette rolled into one, who was looting a country millions of western tourists knew well. No one looked at how she hoarded gold on the one hand, while keeping her dirty old man of a husband sweet on the other. No one bothered to look at her equally ghastly and rapacious children, who, along with the wider clan, formed a Mafia state that forced businesses to pay off the ruling crime family. I would have liked have to read about the brutality of the secret police, as well, and to have had a little advance notice that the subject people was preparing to revolt. Leaving all political considerations aside, Tunisia was in journalistic terms a great story from the Middle East that virtually sat up and begged journalists to take notice, but because it did not involve Israel, foreign desks looked the other way.’
You can read the whole thing here. My wider point is that the Israel-obsession, the near permanent state of Jews on the brain, which afflicts so many, harms the Arab world as much as Israel. Arab sufferings are not reported and the kleptomania and abuses of power of secular and theocratic dictators are not covered. If you want a working definition of Islamophobia that rises above the special pleading of religious reactionaries my suggestion would be: “Islamophobia is a prejudice that dominates western political and media elites and the confused and faintly sinister mind of the Chairwoman of the British Conservative Party. It holds that Muslim women want to be oppressed, that Muslim gays want to be murdered, that Muslims want to have their rights to speak and vote denied, and that Muslim dominated countries want to be ruled by sleazy, life-denying and vicious dictators.”
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