Led By Donkeys
Roofer
On first glance, it looked like a favourable review. The Guardian had awarded four stars to a new documentary about the horror Israel suffered on October 7, 2023. But then, half way through, readers encountered the following.
“If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians, though, One Day in October won’t help,” wrote The Guardian’s critic. “Indeed, it does a good job of demonising Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters, asset-stripping the kibbutz while bodies lay in the street and the terrified living hid.”
Perhaps this passage was intended to placate those Guardian readers who regularly take part in anti-Israel marches. All the same, I would gently query certain aspects of it. If the critic is unsure “why Hamas murdered civilians”, for example, I can inform him that it’s because Hamas is an Islamist terrorist group whose founding charter explicitly committed it to the mass slaughter of Jews. And, as One Day in October is not a work of fiction, but a documentary that uses real footage of Hamas’s attacks, I can’t help but feel that “demonising” is not quite the mot juste. One doesn’t “demonise” people by broadcasting incontrovertible evidence of what they actually did.
I must have a look in the archives, to see how The Guardian reviewed The Nazis: A Warning From History. Did it deplore the “demonising” of the Gestapo, and the “othering” of ordinary, decent Treblinka commandants?
Anyway, after considerable uproar over its One Day in October review, The Guardian removed the article from its website, on the grounds that it “did not meet our editorial standards”. This statement, however, overlooks an awkward truth. Which is that the review simply reflected how countless Western progressives think. Their knee-jerk sympathy for Israel’s enemies blinds them to their own moral depravity.
“If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians, though, One Day in October won’t help,” wrote The Guardian’s critic. “Indeed, it does a good job of demonising Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters, asset-stripping the kibbutz while bodies lay in the street and the terrified living hid.”
Perhaps this passage was intended to placate those Guardian readers who regularly take part in anti-Israel marches. All the same, I would gently query certain aspects of it. If the critic is unsure “why Hamas murdered civilians”, for example, I can inform him that it’s because Hamas is an Islamist terrorist group whose founding charter explicitly committed it to the mass slaughter of Jews. And, as One Day in October is not a work of fiction, but a documentary that uses real footage of Hamas’s attacks, I can’t help but feel that “demonising” is not quite the mot juste. One doesn’t “demonise” people by broadcasting incontrovertible evidence of what they actually did.
I must have a look in the archives, to see how The Guardian reviewed The Nazis: A Warning From History. Did it deplore the “demonising” of the Gestapo, and the “othering” of ordinary, decent Treblinka commandants?
Anyway, after considerable uproar over its One Day in October review, The Guardian removed the article from its website, on the grounds that it “did not meet our editorial standards”. This statement, however, overlooks an awkward truth. Which is that the review simply reflected how countless Western progressives think. Their knee-jerk sympathy for Israel’s enemies blinds them to their own moral depravity.
Brendan O’Neill
