Stephen Fry’s ‘alternative’ Christmas message appeared to equate UK protests against the slaughter of Palestinians with ‘1930s Europe’. But fifteen years ago he was prepared to put his name to the most direct condemnation of the very founding of Israel
Stephen Fry has rightly been widely criticised for his supposedly ‘alternative’ Christmas message, produced by a pro-Israel production company, that has been described as minimising the horrific suffering of Palestinian women and children at the hands of the genocidal Israeli regime – and which appears to equate UK protests against the genocide with the rise of nazism in the 1930s.
Fry’s more than six-minute video builds to his claim that:
I’m glad [my Jewish grandparents] aren’t alive now to read newspaper stories that would have reminded them of the 1930s Europe that they left.
As one former ardent fan put it:
To hear him conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism has shocked me… Smashed windows vs carrying your dead child?
By contrast, Jewish comedian Alexei Sayle’s ‘alternative alternative’ Christmas video, standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide – and pointing out that he confidently and safely marches regularly for Palestinian human rights alongside thousands of other Jewish people – was watched millions of times and received overwhelmingly positive comment.
But Fry’s message in 2023 is starkly at odds with his position just fifteen years ago – when he was prepared to put his name to a letter, on the occasion of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary, that condemned the apartheid regime as one ‘founded on terrorism’, a reference to the 1948 ‘Nakba’ or catastrophe of the violent expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and the massacres that marked it.
The full letter read:
In May, Jewish organisations will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. This is understandable in the context of centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, we are Jews who will not be celebrating. Surely it is now time to acknowledge the narrative of the other, the price paid by another people for European anti-semitism and Hitler’s genocidal policies. As Edward Said emphasised, what the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians.
In April 1948, the same month as the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin and the mortar attack on Palestinian civilians in Haifa’s market square, Plan Dalet was put into operation. This authorised the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state. We will not be celebrating.
In July 1948, 70,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in Lydda and Ramleh in the heat of the summer with no food or water. Hundreds died. It was known as the Death March. We will not be celebrating.
In all, 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. Some 400 villages were wiped off the map. That did not end the ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Palestinians (Israeli citizens) were expelled from the Galilee in 1956. Many thousands more when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Under international law and sanctioned by UN resolution 194, refugees from war have a right to return or compensation. Israel has never accepted that right. We will not be celebrating.
We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.
We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.
Fry’s name appeared among more than one hundred Jewish signatories – many of whom have maintained to this day their principled opposition to Israeli apartheid, occupation, brutality and ethnic cleansing, such as Michael Rosen, Rica and Jo Bird, Diana Neslen, Sayle and many more.
Mr Fry, despite Israeli ministers’ boasts that they want their slaughter in Gaza to be a ‘Nakba 2023’, has not – and has now equated opposition to Zionism with antisemitism. What happened to him?
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You can watch the full video by Stephen Fry here
https://youtu.be/G7uUGJhiehM
🤔
What has happened to him? Quite possibly he has been got at. Israel is known to devote efforts to enlisting the propaganda help of prominent Jewish individuals abroad.
No possibly about it, John.
Fry’s been got atall right. Not to hard to work out how, neither.
What happened to him?
He’s a lifelong luvvie and has lived in a bubble for most of it, so he isn’t too sharp. I shouldn’t think this is the first time he’s been conned, but he really should’ve read the script & slept on it before signing up. I’m not saying he had a hand in writing it; only Zionists could be so tin-earred, self-obssessed and PLAIN FUCKING CRASS as to try to make Xmas a time to spare a thought for Jews who are in no particular threat in the UK at a time when Palestinians are being slaughtered in their thousands in their homeland.
I hope he disintegrated with embarrassment when he saw it.
So Channel 4 posted his so-called Christmas message on youtube and either turned off the Comments when they posted it, or shortly afterwards because most of them were condemning him (and deleted all of them). Most likely the former given the amount of flak he was getting on social media as soon as it was broadcast. And he doesn’t beat about the bush, and gets straight into the Jewish line within a minute, and given that most people (as with myself) had no idea he was Jewish, he explains about that initially, and even though he’s never identified as Jewish, he claims he’s been warned that he’s on some list of British Jews by ultra right-wing newspapers, but he doesn’t say who warned him, or why he was on such a list. And I have little doubt that it’s complete BS!
JFC, he really HAS done a complete 180! I just did a search to see if I could find anything in respect of his claim that he was on a list of British Jews and, as such, came across the following Jewish Chronicle article from June 2021 entitled ‘Stephen Fry praises ‘brilliant’ essay suggesting Israel justifies ‘persecution and hate’’, in which it says the following:
Stephen Fry waded into the debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Thursday with a tweet praising a “brilliant” essay that compares Israel to a Jew who embarrasses other Jews in the eyes of gentiles and justifies their “persecution and hate”.
The Jewish actor and author, 63, tweeted a link to an essay by Jewish American writer Benjamin Moser recalling a trip to Hebron describing it as “the worst place in the world”.
The piece accuses Israel of committing “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank city…….
https://www.thejc.com/news/stephen-fry-praises-brilliant-essay-suggesting-israel-justifies-persecution-and-hate-hvz6vuof
Anyway, all I initially set out to say is that Fry is a patron of Humanists UK. Yeah, what a total fucking joke!
And shame on Channel 4 for churning out such blatant Zionist propaganda, and doing so via a Christmas message’.
Also came across this Guardian piece by Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, posted on December 24th in respect of Fry’s allaged Christmas Message and the response to it. I wonder if she’s had anything to say about the demonic hate-speech being churned out by Netanyahu and his fascist buddies during the past three months in relation to the Palestinians, or the glee of Israelis in general iin respect of the mass murder of tens of thousands of Gazans and the total destruction of Gaza. I very much doubt it! And ditto the Guardian itself!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/24/antisemitism-holocaust-denial-stephen-fry-alternative-christmas-message-channel-4-x-trolls
As for the glee (and sadistic pleasure), I posted the following in the thread before this one, so in case you didn’t see it:
Max Blumenthal takes a searing look at the societal sickness that exploded into the open after October 7, as Israelis of all walks of life took to social media to mock the suffering and torture of Palestinians, and proudly broadcasted grotesque war crimes to the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vKuB1su43c (13mins)
And please share far and wide and wake people up to the malignant evil that permeates Israel.
Genocide Denial
Apartheid Denial
Ethnic Cleansing Denial
Crimes Against Humanity Denial
Vexatious claims of Anti Semitism are hate crimes and should be prosecuted
The biggest threat to the Jewish Community the world over is the Jewish State
I just came across this Sky News Australia video on youtube (3mins 26secs) entitled ‘‘Absolutely bananas’: Stephen Fry attacked by ‘woke mob’ over Christmas message’. It was posted 17 hours ago (at the time of typing) and has been viewed nearly 110.000 times, and has 1,138 comments. Most of the media in Australia is owned and controlled by Murdoch, and is even more toxic than in the UK, and especially adept at hate-mongering. Check it out, and some of the comments. I just posted the following (as a reply to the top comment), but I doubt it will be on there for long. They never are!
Yes, as Stephen Fry says, we’re all brothers and sisters, and in Israel’s case, they stole Palestine from their Palestinian brothers and sisters and, as such, created an apartheid state in which the Palestinians are oppressed and subjugated, and from time to time killed and maimed en masse, and on this occasion killing them in the tens of thousands and totally destroying Gaza. How brotherly and sisterly is that. And the vast majority of Israelis are totally loving every moment of it. Check out Max Blumenthal’s recent video entitled ‘What is wrong with Israelis?’ for some examples of this brotherly/sisterly love.
Reply to Allan Howard
Unfortunately senior people in the Israeli government and military do not believe we are all brothers and sisters. Neither, as you have pointed out, do a sizable amount of Israelis/settler squatters. They say Palestinians are human animals and cockroaches and therefore it is OK to annialiate them and this is exactly what they are doing.
Regarding Frys Nazi comment , he has got that wrong. People marching for peace and freedom for the beseiged Palestinians are not Nazis . On the conrtrary it is the Israelis who are using the tactics straight out of the Nazi playbook to destroy the bodies souls and spirits of Palestinians- the mass murder and associated terror, the starvation and denial of fuel and drinking water, the creation of degrading insanitary conditions leading to disease, the mass round ups and the humiliation and stripping of those rounded up, the dehumanisation of prisioners by using numbers to identify them,the sexual degradation of men women and children ,the desecration of mosques, the denial of decent burial to the dead ,the mass graves and the excavation of these graves so that dead left lying exposed and denied dignity, the imposition of vicious petty restrictions e.g. families were permitted to celebrate the release of Palestinian captives from Israeli jails. There can be no valid reason for this – it was just clearly to show who is boss and is exactly the kind of thing the Nazis routinely did.
The whole world can now see this and Zionists/ Israeli apologists will never again be able to exploit the suffering of Jews in pre war Germany and in occupied countries during the second world war to literally get away with murder.
Also what has happened in Gaza has laid bare the whole Antisemitism scam as it is abundantly clear that anybody (including Jewish people) who dares to call out Israel for anything whether it be its apartheid regime or the genocide and ethic cleansing it is currently perpetrating is accused by the Israeli propagandists of antisemitism/Jew hate -the UN, international aid agencies, whole countries such as South Africa, Spain and Ireland and decent right minded people everywhere.have been accused of antisemitism. We are all ” antisemites” now so the term is no longer a slur – it is a badge of honour.
However those accused of antisemitism who are engaged in the entertainment industry, academia or in any Zionist backed organisation are likely to be sacked and rendered unemployable so we need to fully support BDS and let them, like Starbucks, realise that they are not imune from the consequences of their actions.
Apologies for the error above – families were NOT permitted to celebrate prisoner releases
First they came for the Palestinians……..
I just came across the following on the website of Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, dated November 6 and entitled ‘The Letter that Outraged Us: The Physicians’ Letter Calling for the Destruction of Shifa Hospital in Gaza’, with the sub-headline:
Dozens of Israeli physicians signed a letter urging the military to destroy the “hornet nests and the hospitals shielding them” in the Gaza Strip.
Here are some passages from it:
Following their appeal, we drafted the response letter below, undersigned by physicians and health professionals working in hospitals and in the community:
We, physicians and health professionals working in hospitals and the community, are currently coping with the daily overload resulting from the war in Gaza, including the many physical and mental injuries, missing staff, and team members who themselves have been deeply traumatized and whose friends and family were murdered and abducted. What keeps us going even in these awful times is our primary mission of saving lives and maintaining civilians and medical facilities outside the conflict zone. Therefore, we consider it necessary to address the physicians’ letter calling for the destruction of Al Shifa Hospital.
No person with a conscience can remain indifferent to the massacre of civilians, including men, women, and children, carried out on October 7, 2023, by Hamas militants – the scale of which has yet to be fully revealed. However, our deep outrage must not be transformed into a carte blanche for killing civilians in the Gaza Strip, where residents are also counting the wounded and dead – certainly not when physicians are the ones demanding this. Fortunately, the letter’s signatories represent only a small minority of the health community, while the vast majority remains busy saving lives – no matter whose lives it may be.
The physicians who signed the letter use annihilation rhetoric not only toward Hamas militants but also toward the men, women, and children inhabiting the buildings in which Hamas is allegedly hiding, even if these are hospitals……
The authors of the letter do not only blame Hamas; they blame all Gazan residents “who saw fit to turn hospitals into terror nests” and, therefore, they claim, ” brought their annihilation upon themselves.” This is not the logic of physicians; it is not even the logic of human beings. It is the logic of annihilation.
The citizens of Israel can and must be protected through various means. Annihilating civilians in Gaza is not one of them.
These dreadful recent weeks have cost many lives, and humane values are being shattered amid this violent reality. The medical community will withstand this dark breach in history without allowing its core values to be destroyed.
https://www.phr.org.il/en/physicians-call-eng/?pr=17303