The strangest thing about The Guardian’s news-review piece about Boy George’s pro-Jewish song is not its politics but its panic — the sheer panic that a pop song might let Israelis or Jews appear human for three minutes. When a newspaper feels compelled to immediately correct a pop lyric about a massacre, something has gone very wrong — not with the singer or song, but with the newspaper.

That panic is on full display in Nadeine Asinari’s July 27 article, which treats Boy George’s small, heartfelt ditty as a geopolitical threat requiring immediate containment. Instead of reporting on a cultural moment, Asinari transforms the song into a Gaza‑Israel battleground, contesting the lyrics, correcting them, and counter‑balancing them with Guardian‑approved “facts” drawn from sources that responsible journalism should treat with caution, not reverence.

The compulsion is unmistakable. Boy George references the October 7 Hamas massacre at the Nova music festival, where civilians were, in his words, “murder[ed] … for the crime of dancing.” Asinari immediately counters the lyric with a minimizing statistical assertion: “A total of 344 civilians and 34 security personnel were killed and 44 people were taken hostage.” This is not journalism. It is DARVO‑ing a pop lyric, as though Boy George had articulated the final, definitive version of October 7 history rather than singing a three‑minute song.

It would actually have been unsurprising if Asinari had been more honest and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)