Spectator's Absent Friends

I suppose any spectator can miss a lot of a game but The Spectator's Brendan O'Neill seems to have missed a whole team and a lot of the action in Palestine.  He had a dire article in last week's Spectator which I'm guessing elicited many adverse responses, only one (short one) or which was published:

Sir: Brendan O’Neill (‘Absent friends’, 15 March) wonders at length why Israel is so disliked, and he variously ascribes its unpopularity to fashion, bigotry or anti-Semitism. Perhaps there is another explanation. I read his article without once coming across any of the following words: settlement, Palestine or Palestinian.
John Hatt
Firbank, Sedbergh

He wonders why Israel is held in disdain but didn't mention the Palestinians. As I said, he didn't see a whole team. And he didn't mention Palestine itself.  Was he even at the ground at all?

In the interests of balance, The Spectator did publish a much longer letter from a zionist praising O'Neill's effort and promoting the plucky little Israel myth.  I won't reproduce it here. I just wouldn't want anyone thinking that The Spectator has gone soft on racist war criminals. It supports them as fervently this week as it did last week.

Brendan O'Neill asks, What's not to like about Israel's "military antics"?

I heard The Spectator was pretty dire so I could never have known about this ludicrous piece by Brendan O'Neill if my friend hadn't insisted on reading large chunks of it out to me.  She capped off the excerpts by saying the guy hadn't even mentioned the occupation.

Even the title's dodgy.  Look:

Israelis don’t care that we hate them. But they’d like to know why

I won't bother setting out the whole sorry thing here.  I was going to but I just checked back to see if there were any responses to a comment I made.  There were none and my comment had been removed. I didn't save it but I just hastily tapped out another.  Here it is:

This article is simply wrong from the headline all the way through the content.  It assumes that it is Israelis who are hated, not the racist system that has established and maintained a Jewish majority through colonial settlement, ethnic cleansing and segregationist laws.  It also fails to mention the occupation.  All of Israel's systematic and racist war crimes have been reduced to two words, "military antics".

It mentions Israel's enforcement of borders but fails to mention that, uniquely, Israel fails to declare what it believes its borders to be. It also fails to mention that Israel is a state, not for the people it rules but for the world's Jews, most of whom neither live there nor appear to want to. And of course, most of the people who actually come from there are barred from there.

Deeply dishonest piece from a newbie Israel advocate just learning the ropes.

A scan of the comments suggests to me that in order to remain on the board the comment has to be from a zionist or an anti-Jewish racist so since I'm neither I'm guessing this comment will go the way of my previous one which got deleted.  I'm guessing that happened because I pointed out that Israel is an illegitimate entity.

Ah well, let's see how it goes....