During his April 11 LBC show, presenter Lewis Goodall responded to a pro-Israel caller by employing one of the most risible clichés within the broader Western canon of terror rationalizations.
Goodall, of course, didn’t offer an alternative nonviolent solution to dealing with Iran’s illegal implant in Lebanon of Hezbollah, a proscribed terror group that’s committed to Israel’s annihilation and the murder of Jews abroad, and which, at least before September of 2024, had the largest rocket arsenal of any non-state actor in the world.
But, even leaving Goodall’s strategic incoherence aside, his narrative that killing Hezbollah terrorists will only make them hate us more erases the agency of the extremists who rain rockets down on Israeli towns, representing an alibi for antisemitism in the Middle East by framing the pathological hatred of Jews and the Jewish state by Iran’s “axis of resistance” as a legitimate grievance.
Is it even conceivable that he would have made a similar argument about the US-led global coalition which went to war in 2014 to defeat the Islamic State? Did that campaign, which largely destroyed the barbaric group’s territorial “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, only radicalize ISIS jihadists more?
With both Hezbollah and ISIS, their all-consuming, fanatical animosity toward Jews and the West is ideologically and religiously driven – not an understandable response to Jewish or Western aggression.
Now, here’s the clip from a different and even more disturbing monologue by Goodall – about the Iran war – during the same episode:
Goodall’s complaint that “The fate and stability of the world is constantly driven by the actions of Israel” evinces the monomaniacal nature of the anti-Zionist mind. This cognitive orientation resists context and all other possible explanations, while instead reducing complex global issues to a single national root cause – a tiny country that’s the only one with a Jewish majority, the only free country in the region, and that is home to 0.12% of the total world population.
He then asks, “Are we destined in the world…are we powerless, in the West, in Britain, in Europe, in the United States, increasingly to determine our own fate and the stability of the world? Because, increasingly, Israel is in the driver’s seat.”
As we’ve stressed previously, it’s important to avoid accusations that journalists whose work we critique are personally antisemitic, as we can never see inside their souls.
However, that extremely important caveat notwithstanding, it’s impossible not to see within Goodall’s caricature of an all-powerful Israel nefariously determining the fate of the world an evocation of toxic conspiratorial tropes about Jewish or Israeli power – a cabal of bad actors representing an organic obstacle to peace and progress.
It’s extremely disappointing that, in an era where antisemitic incidents (including violence) in the UK and around the globe are at near record highs, otherwise sober voices continue to be seduced by those whom Walter Russell Mead, in an essay about antisemites, referred to as the “weak-minded.. baffled, frustrated and…bewildered” who “seek a grand, simplifying hypothesis that can bring some kind of ordered explanation to a confusing world.”
This post originally appeared at CAMERA UK.