Gaza Truths: Deborah Maccoby answers her critics in the JC

Well this is a real turn up.  The Jewish Chronicle has published another letter from Deborah Maccoby, this time answering the critics of her previous letter which was taking Melanie Phillips to task.

Here's the letter:

Gaza truths

A few points in response to Melvyn Lipitch and Alan Miller (Letters, September 2):

1.  Despite the evacuation of Israeli settlers in 2005, Gaza is under siege and threat of onslaught.

2.  Hamas rocket attacks are provoked by Israel to provide a pretext for massively disproportionate operations against Gaza.

In 2008, Israel broke the ceasefire; in 2014, Israel targeted Hamas, though its leadership had nothing to do with the murder of three Israeli teenagers.

3. In 2013, el-Sisi sealed over a thousand tunnels between Gaza and Egypt without needing to devastate Gaza.   In 2014, the majority of Gaza tunnels did not go under the border into Israel.

 Even the minority that did were used only for military attacks (UNHRC Report 2015, para. 108).

4.  Mr Miller’s last point is a classic example of “whataboutery”.  His own level of ignorance explains why I needed to address some of Melanie Phillips’s misrepresentations.


Deborah Maccoby
Leeds LS17J

Really good stuff.  I particularly like the way she takes another opportunity to condemn "Melanie Phillips's misrepresentations".

A response to Melanie Phillips's "Tunnel Vision"

Melanie Phillips had a typically extreme piece in last week's Jewish Chronicle denouncing aid to Gaza as the funding of "mass murder".  To its rare credit, the JC has published a response by Deborah Maccoby.  The JC doesn't publish letters on line so here's the letter which Deborah copied to me:

Tunnel Vision

Melanie Phillips (JC, August 19) writes: "Israeli officials have claimed that every month, Hamas builds another six miles of tunnels whose sole purpose is to deliver killers and weapons to wipe out as many Israelis as possible."

Does it ever occur to her that Hamas builds tunnels as self-defence, in preparation for yet another murderous onslaught on Gaza by the Israeli Army?

Phillips goes on: "A Hamas operative captured by the Israelis last June revealed that terrorists can travel underground throughout the whole of Gaza".

In July 2014, when Israeli launched Operation Protective Edge, which killed 1,400 Gazan civilians, including 500 children, only 12 of the tunnels passed under the border into Israel and these could easily have been sealed off on the Israeli side. The tunnels are built so that Hamas militants can emerge within Gaza and engage with invading Israeli soldiers.


Deborah Maccoby
Leeds

We're not sure who the JC is suggesting is tunnel visioned but Mel does seem to spend more time on hasbara than Deborah does on debunking the same.

Melanie Phillips plumbs the depths of "depravity"

She's utterly bonkers. I first noticed this in The Independent today:

What desperate moments for all among us who revere Melanie Phillips and the rigorous self-restraint she brings to her work. In the coming days, the Metropolitan Police must decide whether to prosecute her over a classically thoughtful posting on her Spectator-hosted blog.

No one could argue with Melanie's outrage at the brutal murder of a family of West Bank settlers. What roused Muslim lobby group Engage to write to the Press Complaints Commission and Trevor Phillips, as well as the law, was her wontedly subtle extrapolation from the specific to the general... the extension of one horrendous crime to "the moral depravity of the Arabs"; one reference to Arabs as "savages"; and another to "the moral depravity of the Arabs".

So I hurried home to do a quick post but first I checked Mad Mel's blog at The Spectator for the quotes in context.

1. Today the massacred Fogel family was buried in Jerusalem. And as anticipated, the moral depravity of the Arabs is finding a grotesque echo in the moral bankruptcy and worse of the British and American ‘liberal’ media
2. So to the New York Times, it’s not the Arab massacre of a Jewish family which has jeopardised ‘peace prospects’ -- because the Israelis will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages -- but instead Israeli policy on building more homes, on land to which it is legally and morally entitled, which is responsible instead for making peace elusive. Twisted, and sick.
3. Graphic pictures of the bodies of the slain Fogel family are circulating on the net and on YouTube. The relatives of the massacre victims have made them publicly available in order to show the world the full horror of the Arab barbarism in Itamar.  

It looks like The Spectator is going to tough this out for now. The editor, Fraser Nelson, is trying to make out that the references were only to the unidentified killer or killers. I think most reports assume that one person acted alone but here's Nelson:

It’s a funny old world. I have now been contacted by two journalists informing me that Bedfordshire Police are investigating The Spectator. Why? Because of the Melanie Philips blog where she referred to the “moral depravity” of “the Arabs” who killed the Fogel family in Israel.

She cannot possibly have been referring only to whoever killed the people at Itamar. This looks like a Kilroy-Silk moment for Mad Mel and let's see if she/they get away with it.

But, back to The Independent:

Some will wonder about the public reaction were a parodist to rework this piece by substituting "Arabs" with "Jews", and perhaps they have a point. 

But then of course, they'd never get away with it.