The latest bit of amusement provided by Owen Jones related to JK Rowling. After a brief social media spat in which she mocked his twitchy appearance on the Piers Morgan programme, he furiously condemned the Harry Potter author not for anything she has said or done, but for what she had failed to say and do.
In the world according to Jones, you see, JK Rowling is not sufficiently obsessed with the war in Gaza, the very worst conflict on Earth. Well, maybe not the worst. That would be Yemen, followed by Sudan. But Gaza has got to be in the top ten.
“The silence of JK Rowling on Israel’s mass slaughter, maiming, torture, abuse, dispossession, bereavement, sexual assault and rape of Palestinian women,” Jones frothed. That one post said it all.
Not satisfied with his own fantasy of Israeli evil, he demands that others get equally as obsessed. It’s a kind of sorcery. Did you know that “abracadabra” derives from the ancient Aramaic, “avra kedabera”, or “I create what I speak”? That’s a fair summary of Jones’s strategy on X.
Another example came this week when I had the dishonour of debating another internet shock-jock, Cenk Uygur. I hadn’t realised that he would be my opponent until shortly before we went live.
If you have the good fortune not to have heard of Uygur, I wouldn’t bother looking him up. He’s the brains, if that’s the right word, behind an emetic YouTube show called The Young Turks, which is hugely popular among people of a certain political persuasion.
Not having paid the man very much attention in the past, I was taken aback by the vileness of his comments. The whole gamut was present and correct: Israel was like the Nazis, Gaza was a concentration camp, the Israel lobby was controlling the United States, Israel was destabilising the Middle East and the world. You know the kind of thing.
One assertion in particular stood out. Israel, Uygur insisted, was “against Muslims” and would not allow any Islamic country to defend itself. This was so obviously untrue – after all, the Jewish state literally has peace deals with several – that I could not help but respond in some detail.
There are Muslim soldiers in the IDF, I pointed out. Muslim Israelis were both killed by Hamas on October 7 and put their lives on the line for their Jewish compatriots. Muslims supported the victims thereafter and spoke out in defence of Israel.
All this got me thinking about the things that Israel-haters ignore in their swivel-eyed obsession. Top of the list, I think, is those Muslims who are our friends.
Granted, there aren’t very many of them, especially as a proportion of the global Muslim population. But there are some, and they are significant. This week, a group of wonderful imams from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Britain visited Jerusalem to bring a message of peace.
Meeting President Isaac Herzog at his residence, the leader of the delegation, Imam Hassen Chalghoumi of Drancy in France, said: “My message to you is one of deep affection, for you and for your remarkable people.”
The President responded in kind. “We are all children of Abraham,” he said.
Quite obviously, anybody genuinely interested in peace would have gone out of their way to highlight this visit and support those brave imams who have stood so publicly against the Israelophobia in Europe to stretch out the hand of cordiality.
It says much about Uygur and Jones that both prefer to raise hell about the imagined crimes of Israel rather than acknowledge those courageous souls that work for a better world.
