Reading a couple of @theguardian articles in a last few days, I feel we may be seeing its final departure from the pluralistic liberal tradition that made it a great newspaper, thanks to its capture by – or its morally fuddled editorial cadre - surrender to, an activist, ideological, anti-Western and more than that, anti-factual front. Our liberal democracy needs institutions of pluralistic discourse like this once-hallowed paper but it also requires a respect for facts and some sense of morals. Facts were once the essential ingredients of the coverage of a paper like the Guardian. However at least there are comedic sides to this. Two recent articles exemplify the Guardian’s embrace of illiberal anti democratic, anti fact forces and at the same time represent “a bonfire of the vanities” (an appropriate quotation from Savonarola who used the phrase to launch a bloodspattered but absurdly self-righteous purge of Florence that ended with his own execution.) Today’s was a truly creepy review of the One Day in October documentary, by a comedy-writer Stuart Jeffries, on the October 7 Hamas massacres who seemed irritated and uneasy that the real record of the atrocities by Hamas and some Gazan civilians, gleefully documented by the killers themselves on GoPros and smart-phones, did not accord with his and the Guardian’s political prejudices. How could these impertinent film-makers present these killers, decapitators, rapists, body-mutilators, corpse-abusers, kidnappers and looters as baddies? That is against the simplistic, rigid, flimsy framework of the ideology of anti-Israeli decolonization and must be wrong! This uncomfortable fact must be corrected! The result: a piece of unintentional, amoral gallows comedy at the Guardian's expense. The other was equally embarrassing and morally tone-deaf: a comically self-important and self-reverential but ugly and historically ignorant essay claiming the Israelis were guilty of memoralizing their October 7 fallen (so unlike every society, ever, in history from the 300 of the Spartans to the West with WW1 Armistice Day, the West and Russia with WW2, The Holodomor by Ukrainians, the Holocaust by the Jews, the Nakba by Palestinians, 9/11 by Americans and so on) by the clumsy Canadian provocateur Naomi Klein, all but indistinguishable from her alter-ego and fellow solipsist the other Naomi. As I posted this amidst general contempt for these pieces across the X platform, the paper may have taken one of them down 'pending review.' The fact is the paper has lost its heart and soul and sense of moral judgement but these preposterous pieces at least provide a sort of bleak, EndDays comedy amidst the heartbreaking civilian losses of Middle Eastern conflicts... @theguardian @KathViner 📷