THE best ways to read the Guardian are either ironically or critically. However, there must be some people who read this benighted publication in all sincerity.
Imagine, dear reader, what their world-view must be like. An overcast of oppressions and undertow of conspiracies, romanticised by the mock heroism of self-appointed extremists into a struggle between their perverse interpretations of light and dark.
Every aspect of human existence permanently subjected to a dialectic resolvable only through destruction of whatever is defined as the enemy of the moment.
Contradictions such as cheerleading Iran’s hostility to the USA and condemning its practice of executing gay men accommodated through the use of Orwellian mental exercises or a plain refusal to even contemplate, or, if contemplated, to discuss.
What kind of person is the Sincere Guardian-Reader (SGR)? A bag of neuroses, constrained self-expression, self-policing their thoughts, permanently checking other people’s speech for the tiniest of infractions so they may be denounced as loudly as possible, SGRs have the mindset of already living in a mental dictatorship in which they are the enthusiastic participants while at the same time also believing they are living in an actual dictatorship because of the legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s government.
The absurd psychological exercises of the fully-conditioned SGR are reinforced by repetition, none more so than by attacking the State of Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, at every opportunity, while also relatively mildly decrying their Arab and Iranian opponents for very un-Guardian-like activity that does not occur in Israel.
A recent article demonstrates this. The ruling of an Islamic Court in Gaza now prohibits women from travelling outside Gaza without permission from a ‘male guardian’.
However, this is how the ‘paper’ Guardian reported it in the first paragraph of the news article: ‘A Hamas-run Islamic court in the Gaza Strip has ruled that women require the permission of a male guardian to travel, further restricting movement in and out of the territory that has been blockaded by Israel and Egypt since the militant group seized power.’
The news is actually about the Islamic court ruling, not the security measures taken by Egypt and Israel to curb terrorism on their borders. And yet the Guardian cannot help itself.
To its credit, it does acknowledge that movement of Palestinian Arabs from Gaza is restricted by both of the only two countries that border the territory and does not pile its traditional opprobrium exclusively on Israel as people such as Jeremy Corbyn (yes, him again, he just won’t go away) always do while avoiding certain inconvenient truths about the general unpleasantness of Hamas and their fellow-travellers.
The irony is that the court ruling takes place at the same time as Saudi Arabia is relaxing its own rules regarding the social restrictions on women. Gaza is moving in the opposite direction.
To be fair, the article was not written by a Guardian journalist; it was anonymously authored by a journalist working for the Associated Press (AP) who is apparently based in Gaza City.
The Guardian reproduced the AP article without any form of editing or rewriting on its website, and possibly in the print edition (I would not pay to find this out).
When the Independent used the same source material from the AP, it did have a named journalist rewrite it to remove the irrelevant reference to Egypt / Israel border security from the first paragraph, making mention of it further down.
The Guardian’s editors were capable of similar decision-making, but chose not to do so. The alternative is that the AP article was copied and pasted into the Guardian without any thought whatsoever. Either way, the Guardian does not look good. But then it never does to the unafflicted.
It is most likely that an editorial decision was made not to rewrite a piece authored to include an attack on Israel in its opening paragraph because it aligned with the world-view of the Guardian and the SGR community.
The fact that it forced yet another piece of doublethink, this time over life in Gaza, on to the already neurotic as a form of reinforcement was a boon. The conditioning continues.
Buy pharmaceutical shares. No head-pill company will go out of business before the Guardian does.
