Yad Vashem is Israel’s living memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Many of my readers will have visited it. If you have I’m fairly sure you will agree that when you exit the harrowing main hall and see the beautiful hills of Jerusalem it is an experience that defies description.

I remember when I visited, as I reached some of the most harrowing parts of the hall I saw a young American orthodox boy burst into tears and ask his father: “But how could the world let this happen, Daddy?” His father merely hugged him. Well, what would you have said?

You can visit the Yad Vashem website here and their YouTube channel here.

I’ve written before about some of the loons who leave comments on my blog. I never approve for publication any antisemitic or anti-Muslim comments.

One of the latest charmers to swing by went on a long rant about the Holocaust before suggesting that I visit my “thieving relatives in Israel” whereupon he hopes that Iran would “blow your hooked nose off”.

Someone needs to have a word and tell him what a goy is.

I have to admit that when I first heard of the plans to launch CiFWatch – a website which monitors antisemitism on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free (CiF) website – I was not immediately convinced there was a pressing need for such a project. I wondered whether the energies of the brilliant people behind CiFWatch – some of whom are friends of mine – might not be better directed against other targets.

I was very aware of the track record of some British broadsheets when it comes to reporting of Israel. As I wrote in 2007, newspapers like The Guardian frequently “print editorials that are so biased and distorted that Osama Bin Laden would probably blush at them and say: Steady on! We can’t print that!’” Given the combination of that atmosphere and the internet – the haven of anonymous bullies – I suppose the writing was on the wall for CiF.

The following year I was given further insight into the problem. I had an interesting exchange with one the CiF editors after they published an article written by a member of the terrorist organisation Hamas. I wrote in to express my surprise and I received a thunderous response from the CiF editor asking ‘And you are who to tell me this?’ and expressing how ‘staggered’ he was that I might disagree with such an article being commissioned. Probably not half as staggered as the victims of Hamas suicide bombs and rocket attacks, I’d venture. CiF recommissioned the Hamas man in January 2009.

All the same, I initially had my doubts about the need for CiFWatch, which launched last year. However, the cesspit of anti-Israel and, yes, anti-Jewish hatred that is exposed there on a daily basis shows just how urgent that need is. Urgent is exactly the word, because as the Guardian’s own Michael White has agreed, explosive commentary about Israel does lead to antisemitic crime on the streets of England. Yet CiF bubbles over with just such commentary nearly every day. You can read a – rather upsetting – compilation of it here including instances of commentary seemingly influenced directly by neo-nazi forums, plentiful lies about Israeli policy and even Holocaust denial.

And yes, moderation of reader comments must be a tough job to get right. But any benefit of the doubt has surely gone after the case of William Bapthorpe, who openly called on CiF for the ‘slaughter’ of Israeli settlers – ‘every last man woman and child’ and yet is allowed to continue posting on the site. What happened to The Guardian’s tradition of opposing the bullies and bigots of this world?

So I hold my hands up, I was wrong about CiFWatch – it is very much needed. I’d suggest to the increasingly-defensive CiF team that admitting you’ve got something wrong doesn’t hurt all that much. It can feel rather liberating actually, and it can lead to a better world.

There is a big story running this week on the brilliant CifWatch website, which exists to monitor and expose the plentiful antisemitism on The Guardian newspaper’s Comment Is Free (Cif) website. Recently a commenter there called for the murder of Israeli settlers, including children:

“Sadly, there’s only one way to deal with these religiously motivated maniacs who think their superstitious beliefs trump international law. 1. We ask them to leave their squats, kindly. 2. If they don’t, we force them to [leave] at gunpoint. 3. If they still refuse, they must be slaughtered, every last man woman and child.”

Surprisingly, the commenter has not been banned from posting on CiF. Or is this a surprise? Check out this collection of key articles on CifWatch.

From the latest Tom Gross Dispatch:

“Young female athletes from Israel’s fencing team won top medals at a 28-nation European fencing tournament held in Mödling, Austria last week. But they then faced an additional challenge when they stood on the winners’ podium to receive their medals: the organizers refused to play the recording of the Israeli national anthem.

“The Israeli national fencing team’s coach, Yaakov Friedman, said it is not the first time that such an incident has happened this year. At a tournament in Göteborg, Sweden, in January, Israel won the silver medal and when the medalists mounted the podium the organizers refused to play the Israeli anthem.”

Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, is heartbreaking, joyous and inspiring all at once. Likewise, while the above story undoubtedly has the capacity to both upset and anger, most of all it should inspire. The quiet courage and dignity of those two Israelis reflects the shining moral example that their nation all too often sets to us all. Kol hakovod.

Channel 4 is an increasingly strange network. Its main news anchor, Jon Snow, showed shocking disdain for Israeli lives when he claimed “nobody gets injured” by the Kassam rockets that murdered, maimed and terrorised the people of southern Israel.

I discussed this with Snow recently but he only dug his heels in. At first he explained that he was unable to check what he said on the broadcast. When I provided a link to a video of his statement and also gave him references to show the many Israeli civilians who were injured and killed by the rockets, his response was: “Stop wasting my time”.

Jewish people have often seen the crimes committed against them denied. It is a tradition that continues to this day. Amazingly, Channel 4 asked the first-Holocaust-denying, second-Holocaust-preparing tyrant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deliver its Christmas message last year. The official remit for Channel 4 states that it should “exhibit a distinctive character” and “appeal to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society”. Snow’s denial of Hamas’s crimes and Ahmadinejad’s Christmas message appeal to the tastes and interests of only the worst bigots of our society.

Peter Oborne’s Dispatches program this evening, Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby, could only have appealed to the same people. The deliberate conflation of bloody bodies and Jews eating dinner was an early low. Full of familiar innuendos and stereotypes, it was an agenda-driven and unprofessional piece of work from its inception, as the numerous Jewish organisations it has targetted have discovered in recent weeks. Oborne was unable to prop up his prejudices, so he resorted to desperate nudge-nudge wink-wink tactics to try and create an impression of sinister secretiveness where there is none. The overall implication he made was that his failure to find anything genuinely scandalous was because of a fear, rather than because there’s nothing there.

Because where is this all-powerful Israeli lobby? Why did it not manage to convince the UK to veto the Goldstone report at the UN? How did it fail to stop the UK from starting an arms embargo on Israel? How did it allow our Foreign Minister to attack Operation Cast Lead as ‘disproportionate’, or the UK to finance the Breaking The Silence organisation? As for media activism, if the Israeli lobby had the power it is ascribed, it would have stopped the widespread and routine distortions years ago. Oborne couldn’t find an all-powerful lobby, so he tried to create a false impression of one. It’s the same make-believe world Snow inhabits with his “pretty pathetic” Hamas rockets.

Back in the real world, Israel faces hostility and distortion throughout much of British politics and the media. As statistics show, antisemitism is on the rise in Britain and brutal. By any clear-eyed assessment, there are few more powerless causes in Britain than that of Israel, and probably no more embattled group than our Jewish community.

That’s the real scandal – how about a documentary about that?

The CifWatch website (which monitors and exposes the plentiful antisemitism on the Guardian newspaper’s Comment Is Free blog) is going from strength to strength. It’s always an entertaining read and more importantly it is doing a tremendous job of consistently shining a light in a very dark corner of the world.

I find it required daily reading, never more so than when the brilliant ‘Israelinurse’ is involved in the discussions. I’ve seen that woman kick the asses of more Israel-bashers than I can remember on various forums – and always with such charm! She sent me a couple of great photographs from her most recent trip home to Israel. I will post them here soon.

Today she has posted a superb article on CifWatch which I recommend.

Carry on Nurse!

Those who routinely and uniquely demonize Israel always deny they are antisemitic. Of course some of them are not – but with so many the evidence makes it hard to conclude otherwise.

Foreign Office civil servant Rowan Laxton was watching a news report about the Middle East while exercising in a gym. He shouted that Israelis should be “blown off the f***ing earth” and ranted about the “f**king Jews”.

Yet his counsel told the court that Laxton “is not an anti-Semite”. No, he doesn’t sound like one at all, does he?

In the introduction to his adoring, toe-curling “world exclusive” interview with the Hamas leader in New Statesman, Ken Livingstone writes: “Palestinians fire ineffectual rockets into Israel.”

Numerous Israelis have been killed by those rockets, including children in nursery school. To describe them as ineffectual is therefore a straightforward lie.

Also, when Livingstone asks: “Are you committed to the destruction of Israel?” and Khaled Meshal dodges the question, does our intrepid reporter press him on the matter?

Does he heck.