The Islamophobic Chronicle – The war on Gaza and the weaponisation of antisemitism
An Exeter Palestine Action demonstration
Ilan Pappé writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 10 April 2024:
In recent weeks, the London-based weekly newspaper The Jewish Chronicle (JC) began to target Palestinian and Muslim students for their solidarity with the victims of the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip.
This campaign included a particularly vicious assault on our students and staff at the University of Exeter, which has relatively a large number of Palestinian students.
As British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called for extra vigilant policies against extremism and racism, he should have begun with the long Islamophobic tradition of JC.
This paper, and quite a few other right-wing and pro-Zionist press, tend to target Arab and Muslim activists accusing them of antisemitism.
In the case of our university, some of those defamed were young women who probably were deemed vulnerable enough to be affected by a toxic campaign of misinformation and slander.
If you think that accusing British Muslims of being terrorists, supposedly in the service of Hamas, only started after October 7, then you are wrong.
In 2018, a report by the Muslim Council of Britain exposed the JC as the most Islamophobic publication in Britain. A year later, the JC reacted through an article by Melanie Philips that claimed that Islamophobia was a bogus term and an anti-Jewish one.
Since November 2022, the JC has shown loyalty to the extremist government which was elected in Israel, parroting Netanyahu’s false equation between Islam, terrorism and antisemitism. This equation is called by Israel the ‘new antisemitism’. It includes anyone daring to criticize Israel and its policies.
With a front organization calling itself ‘Muslims against Antisemitism’, JC gave space for superficial and one dimensional representation of Islam in general, and its attitude towards Jews in particular.
The election of a Muslim as a leader of the Scottish National Party in March 2023, and hence as the first minister of Scotland (akin to the position of the prime minister) immediately triggered accusations by the JC, totally unfounded, of his connection to Hamas.