Opinion
Richard Ferrer

The Guardian versus the aggressive sourdough

In the newspaper's hall-of-mirrors moral universe, smashed windows and racist graffiti are merely “petty symbolism”. The real crime is the existence of a bakery

The Archway branch has been repeatedly vandalised, with its windows smashed and paint daubed on the walls.
The Archway branch has been repeatedly vandalised, with its windows smashed and paint daubed on the walls.

Once again, the Guardian has exposed the mould in its editorial loaf.

Its columnist Jonathan Liew wrote on Saturday about a Palestinian café in north London and a branch of the bakery chain Gail’s located a scone’s throw away.

According to Liew, the mere existence of this bakery “feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression”.

Let us pause on that sentence, because it deserves close scrutiny in the way a medical student might examine a malignant tumour in a jar.

A bakery. Selling sourdough. That has had its windows repeatedly smashed in and walls daubed with hate slogans. Existing. That existence, in the mind of a Guardian columnist and the editors who green-lit it, constitutes “aggression”.

The Guardian looked at a grotesque spectacle of naked, violent racism and concluded the problem is not the violent racists. It’s the colonial rosemary focaccia.

Jonathan Liew’s piece appeared in Saturday’s edition of the newspaper

Liew helpfully goes on to explain that when well-meaning folk simply cannot influence geopolitics, they may well resort to “small acts of petty symbolism”. A daubing here, a smashed window there. I mean, after all, what else are they supposed to do?

In the Guardian’s hall-of-mirrors morality, smashing up a shop because it was founded by Jews is just a touching little political tantrum. Adorable, really.

The Guardian looked at this grotesque spectacle of naked, violent racism and concluded the problem is not the violent racists. It’s the colonial rosemary focaccia

The violence is contextualised. Explained. Until the shards of broken glass strewn across Archway high street start to look like an inevitable outcome rather than the crimes of rampaging cretins. The croissants are the criminals.

This is the same Guardian that in 2024 quietly removed a reference to an Israeli whisky after complaints, before sheepishly restoring it when readers noticed. This is a newspaper so anxious about offending the sensibilities of Israel haters that even mentioning a bottle of Israeli booze was too controversial. Whisky one day. Bagels the next.

The problem is not simply Jonathan Liew. He’s just the kind of (l)oaf the Guardian bakes.

The views expressed are the author's own and not necessarily those of Jewish News.
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