Last week, British journalist and director Katie Hopkins, an ardent supporter of Israel, visited Israel. Hopkins is unusual: despite credible death threats from terrorist organizations and the radical Left, she documents and presents the hushed-up reality around phenomena such as the ethnic purge of white South Africans or Islamist terrorism in Belgium. She is admired by hundreds of millions who feel that she is giving them a voice, and hated by the members of the "liberal" Left's cult of political correctness.
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Hopkins was in Israel for a screening of her documentary film "Homelands." The film exposes the anti-Semitic persecution that the Jews of Europe are experiencing because of mass immigration from Muslim nations. Among other things, it portrays a French family who moved to Israel because of threats from their new neighbors. The police advised them and another 18 Jewish families to leave because they could not provide them with protection. The film shows how local residents are consistently being pushed out of their neighborhoods, which are changing unrecognizably, and calls on other countries to learn from Britain's experience. The film concludes in Israel with a heartwarming statement that while the Jews have a homeland where they will be welcomed, Hopkins, a British citizen, has nowhere to flee.
To someone in Israel, such support crosses the bounds of good taste. A tweet directed to the mayor of Raanana, where the film was slated to be screened at the local Yad Labanim center, says that Hopkins is considered a member of the British radical Right and accuses her of having attended "at least one" conference along with a Holocaust denier. The tweet went viral and was reported by Channel 13 reporter Nadav Eyal, which resulted in increased pressure on the Raanana mayor to cancel the screening. It worked: Without even watching the film, the municipality was panicked and rushed to ax the screening only two days before its scheduled date.
Kate did not lose heart, and the screening was moved to a venue in Jerusalem. Invitations went out, but the next day someone told the venue manager that the "radical" Hopkins had been kicked out of Raanana. The management panicked and the screening was moved yet again. After three cancellations, the film was eventually screened at Beit Uri Zvi Greenberg in Jerusalem.
After this farces, Eyal found it appropriate to take pleasure in being blamed for involvement in the pressure that led to the canceled screenings, and said: "The protest raised here … was about an appearance by a person so controversial that Beit Yad Labanim [would have been] splattered with hatred. She is a marginal figure, let her appear in Israel. But not at a place dedicated to the memory of the fallen."
In other words: "I'm not involved in the cancellation, and besides … I intervened with justification."
Hopkins is not racist. She simply objects to foreign cultural migration. The Left, of course, sees that as racism. How dare she say that members of a foreign culture are "at taking over and changing the character of the neighborhood, and lowering home values"? That is truly a blunt claim, but it wasn't Hopkins who said it – it was Nitzan Horowitz, a former MK with the far-left Meretz party. Horowitz was speaking in 2009 about haredim moving into Ramat Aviv. Like Horowitz, Hopkins wanted to preserve the character of her native land.
But the cult of liberalism has a short memory, and great contempt for the intelligence of the public: it accuses Hopkins of embracing Holocaust deniers on one hand while forcibly quashing her warnings about the dangerous rise in anti-Semitism and hatred in Europe on the other.
