Old Vs. New Testament

In the previous post I mentioned a column Geoffrey Alderman published at CiF Watch. Here's his column, in which he rebuts a television program by one Peter Oborne about the pernicious influence of the Israel Lobby in the UK. An English version of Walt-Mearsheimer, if you will. Yet professors Walt and Mearsheimer were respected scholars, if not broadly well-known, when they decided to trade stolid academia for notoriety by turning to the worn canard about how the Jews control the levers of power.

Not so Oborne.

Peter Oborne is not one of the Guardian stable of Lefty antisemites. He's a Righty antisemite, which goes to show that hatred of Jews is an equal opportunity affliction. Moreover, his antisemitism, while it uses anti-Israel terminology, doesn't try very hard to pretend that Israel is the problem.

Alderman's column rang a bell, and I went rummaging. Sure enough, and soon enough, I had found evidence for the prosecution. It was written a week after 9/11. In September 2001, for those who have forgotten, the Palestinians were ratcheting up their suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. The year earlier Israel had made a series of proposals for resolution of the conflict, and when they weren't deemed good enough they made further offers. The Palestinians had responded with violence, and by September 2001 they were convinced they were winning. The UN carnival of antisemitism at Durban, South Africa, reinforced their feeling that the world was supporting them. (It was only the following Spring that Israel finally disabused them of these mistakes, eventually leading to the relative calm we've had on the West Bank these past five years or so).

That's the context. Now, Oborne's take on it at the time:

Anyone who thinks that Arab terrorism can be defeated until the Palestine situation is resolved is dreaming. The thought of the West taking reprisals against bin Laden without demanding major concessions from Israel makes the blood run cold...
This war, if it is a war, is a conflict between Old and New Testament. It is between those who value human life and those who do not. If the West goes down the way of revenge, as Bush especially seems ready to do, than it will lose. Both the President and the Prime Minister affect to be Christians. They might care to contemplate, before they order troops into action, how Christ would have reacted.

Well, that's pretty clear, isn't it?