Our friend Tom Gross notes the disgusting publication of an openly anti-Semitic article by the star columnist in The Independent, one of Britain’s leading newspapers:

 Last Thursday Johann Hari, the leading political columnist for the British daily The Independent, received the (previously) highly prestigious Orwell Prize for political writing. The 29-year-old Hari “celebrated” by writing a vicious attack on Israel.

In his column in The Independent this week, he writes: “Whenever I try to mouth these words [of reassurance for Israel], a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit.”

In a modern day “poisoning of the wells” blood libel, Hari accuses Israel of deliberately polluting West Bank groundwater supplies.

Continuing his sewage analogy, Hari’s concludes his piece: “Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.”

Hari has a track record of slanderous anti-Israel opinion pieces. For example, he referred to the Virgin Mary (who was, of course, Jewish) as a “Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem”.

(In 2007, Hari was also named “Newspaper Journalist of the Year” by Amnesty International. He has also written for The New York Times and Le Monde.)

Hari’s “shit” piece this week is apparently considered so brilliant by other news editors that in the last two days it has been reproduced in The Canberra Times (in Australia) and The Irish Independent, as well on dozens of extreme left and extreme-right anti-Israel websites.

One would be tempted to ignore The Guardian and The Independent but they are overwhelmingly the papers of choice subscribed to by other journalists, particularly staff at the BBC and Reuters in London, and also by school teachers and university professors in the UK and elsewhere.