I hope someone has stored for posterity Dawn French’s haughty, mewling moan about Israel. For when future historians come to study the sewer of sanctimony daft celebs gaily waded in in the early 21st century, they could do a lot worse than watch this clip. Nothing will sharpen their analysis of the pomposity of our times better than checking out this 40-second vid in which a past-it comic famous for playing a horny vicar holds forth on a foreign war for the clicks and likes of strangers on the internet.
Yes, at last, the former Vicar of Dibley, one half of French and Saunders, the voice of those annoying M&S ads, has given her thoughts on the Gaza war. We’ve heard from the pope, from presidents and now from the woman whose job is tickling the ribs of Radio 4 listeners by saying the word ‘twat’ a lot. You won’t believe what she thinks. Brace yourselves: Israel is bad. ‘NO’, she says to Israel about its war in Gaza. One envisions IDF soldiers laying down their guns. ‘Guys, call off the war against the fascist scum who raped and murdered our people – Lenny Henry’s ex-wife says no!’
The conceit of her selfie sermon is to reel off what she imagines to be Israel’s justifications for its war and then say a firm ‘NO’ to each of them. Israel, she says, will say Hamas did a ‘bad thing’ to us, or that Israelis have a God-given right to the land of Gaza, or that Palestinians ‘aren’t even really people’, and each time she lets the errant little fucker of a nation know what she thinks: ‘NO.’ Strikingly, she adopts an irksome baby voice when mimicking whiny Israel but says ‘NO’ in her own dulcet, national-treasure tones. The imperiousness is off the scale: a self-styled adult of the British cultural establishment chiding the capricious infant that is the State of Israel. This is not just self-importance – this is M&S self-importance.
It’s her use of the term ‘bad thing’ that has caused a stink. Or ‘bad fing’, as she says, because remember she’s doing Israel as the irascible brat of world affairs that can’t even speak proper. She’s referring to Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. ‘Bad thing’, Dawn? Are you for real? The bloodiest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust? The rape of young Jewish women at a music festival? The burning alive of Jewish families? Writing that off as a ‘bad thing’ – worse, a ‘bad fing’ – is as gross a minimisation of Jewish suffering as I have seen in the 20 months since that darkest of days.
How sick to ‘minimise’ the ‘severity’ of 7 October, said Heidi Bachram, whose husband lost family in Hamas’s carnival of anti-Semitic violence. Actress Tracy-Ann Oberman lamented French’s ‘mocking’ tone. It is hard to imagine the moral pretenders of the faux-virtuous elite describing any other act of racist butchery as a ‘bad fing’. Imagine if someone said that about the anti-Muslim savagery at the Christchurch mosques in 2019 or about any of Boko Haram’s ferocious assaults on Christian girls. It is a testament to the lazy, bleak animus for Israel that has taken hold in cultural circles that someone like French could even think this about 7 October, never mind film herself saying it out loud.
It’s her weary air of exhaustion that really sticks in the craw. Oh I’m sorry that the Jewish State’s fight for survival against the army of anti-Semites that wishes to destroy it is spoiling your Cornwall brunches. ‘NO’ is easy for French to say – she doesn’t live next door to an army of racists that murdered her friends and dreams of murdering her, too. Her vain tirade is as mad as if some famous arse in the 1940s had berated Britain for pushing back against the Nazis on the basis that the London and Coventry Blitzes were just bad fings, no big deal.
French has now deleted her video. Her intention, she said, was never to ‘mock, or dismiss, or diminish the horror’ of 7 October. She just wanted to say ‘NO’ to ‘BOTH sides’. Okay. But you didn’t. You didn’t tell Hamas to lay down its arms, release the hostages and give up on its twisted genocidal dream of a Jew-free Middle East. You just told Israel to stop. In my view, French was less making an anti-war statement than she was signalling her moral fitness for high society, where being anti-Israel is now all but mandatory. Natch she has the Palestine flag, the Pride flag and the Be Kind blue heart in her X bio – the digital mating cries of the virtuous rich.
This debacle confirms how scarily mainstream anti-Israel sentiment has become. It isn’t only depressed Corbynistas in keffiyehs and radical Islamists who are noisily raging against Israel. The entire wankerati is at it. From finger-wagging imams to the Vicar of Dibley, from posh pretend Marxists to their parents who love Richard Curtis films, they’re all telling Israel to stop. They’re all minimising 7 October. They’re all being disgustingly blasé about the Jewish State’s pursuit of the religious hysterics who butchered more than a thousand Jews less than two years ago. French’s last tour was called ‘Dawn French is a Huge Twat’. You said it, sister. You’re all huge twats.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
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