Why might the public not take this august journal seriously?
Why the Sun is intervening thus may be that the title, and its management, still believe that the Super Soaraway Currant Bun of yesteryear, with its daily circulation of over four million, is still out there, still capable of telling the population what to think, and still able to bend events to its will. On the weekend of the 25th and 26th November, it will discover the new reality.
That reality is a circulation of well below the one million mark, a credibility shot through by past episodes of falsehood and misinformation, and a public whose support for a ceasefire in Gaza remains unshaken by gaslighting, smearing, bad faith actors, propaganda, and the failure of a flailing and desperate media class to impose themselves on the proletariat.
Still, let’s consider what The Sun Says this morning: “Tommy Robinson and EDL are weaponising identity of British Jews - they’re as dangerous to us as leftie anti-semites”. Ah yes, that anti-Semitism on the left that is rather more talked about than discovered. Author Noa Hoffman talks of “an army of bad-faith actors weaponising my identity and tearing into its core”. Do go on.
“The devastating war in Israel has put my community, the British Jewish community, in the spotlight. With that has come a tidal wave of racist hatred so ferocious I’ve had to try hard not to lose my mind … On the Left, massive pro-Palestine rallies have been littered with some of the most dangerous people in the country”. What makes them so dangerous?
The flag of Palestine. Not of Hamas
Israel, the last time I looked, existed, and has a right to do so. No serious opinion is pretending otherwise. Ms Hoffman is also not doing her credibility any favours by claiming “Jewish people are removing any symbol of their identity to avoid physical harm and harassment” when there is a significant Jewish contingent at rallies in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Nor does she, and her paper, do their reputation any good by deploying headlines like “Thugs tracking me down” and then rowing back with “my boyfriend messaged me to check my address and phone number are sufficiently private … He worried about violent thugs tracking me down”. Nor is she helping her cause by talking, more than once, about the EDL.
Lennon disbanded the EDL some years ago. Granted, he keeps suggesting he might bring it back, but he hasn’t. And while she is sound with her response to him - “I want nothing to do with him … I don’t want his fake support, I detest it” - he and his pals will just feed on this kind of article to paint themselves as victims, brushing it off as an attack on their free speech.
Noa Hoffman, her paper, and those of like mind are between a rock and a hard place. The Sun spent years smearing anyone on the left as anti-Semites in order to get their preferred politician into Downing Street - someone who has used anti-Semitic caricatures in his written work - that the same left will likely ignore any pleading for support. The media class has shot its bolt.
Pro-Palestinian rallies are overwhelmingly peaceful. Smearing them will get the Sun nowhere. And the far right won’t take any notice. Sad, really.
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1 comment:
Does Ms Hoffman believe that her relationship with Israel, the country whose government is perpetrating this barbarism, consists of something over and beyond simply being a matter of a shared religion?
If not, why is she taking it upon herself to feel some sort of connection with what is being carried out there? She's not Israeli after all.
If so, would she not be in a priviliged position to better use her energies by speaking out against the horrors being perpetrated by that country's government? And would not this mitigate to some extent the imagined guilt-by-association she and her boyfriend seem to think is putting them in danger?
Whether it's a justified assumption or not, silence is often interpreted as consent or even complicity.
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