Playing Your Cards Right

When someone is passionately arguing the case against Israel they often produce someone Jewish who agrees with them as a sort of trump card.
Well, in my pack Jews aren’t necessarily trumps, but they can be jokers.

Robin Shepherd notes that in Britain these days no foreign country is treated with more disdain than Israel:

“.. not just by the usual suspects on the fringes but by pillars of our country’s political and cultural life: the BBC, The Guardian, The Independent, the Financial Times, the Church Of England, celebrated figures from the arts, charities… the list goes on”

My previous post described Robin Shepherd’s astonishment at Vivian Wineman’s ostrich-like attitude over rising antisemitism in the UK. Robin Shepherd is not the only shocked one. Several dissenting Deputies have protested ‘not in my name’ and Jonathan Hoffman has written an excellent article in today’s JPost.
But the truth is that many prominent British Jews will agree with Wineman, and the sad thing, as Robin Shepherd points out, is that these jokers have handed over all the ammunition Israel’s enemies need, on a plate.

When the BBC steadfastly refused to air the Gaza appeal against a wall of outrage,Mark Thompson proclaimed it was a noble act of impartiality.
The uncertainty surrounding the credibility of the fundraising bodies that make up the DEC was played down, and BBC spokespersons brushed aside murky rumours and speculations as to who would ultimately get their hands on the cash.

The BBC must have been aware that an inconvenient truth might emerge in the future exposing exactly who had been ‘aided’. The potential threat to their perceived impartiality and good judgment is the most likely reason for their reluctance to broadcast. That risk must have outweighed the temptation to bow to popular opinion and air the appeal, together with the added bonus that a decision which was, in reality, a matter of expediency could also be exploited as “proof” of the BBC’s irreproachable impartiality.

In other words, we all knew the money would end up with Hamas, and that was not going to look good. So the clever old BBC resists the onslaught of outrage, looks heroic, and launders their grubby reputation in one fell swoop.
Jackpot.! Everyone’s a winner. Flock of birds with one stone.

It seemed a bit suspicious that the BBC hasn’t trumpeted the 2009 Global Peace Index from the rooftops, because it ranks Israel almost at the top of the list of nasty places, or should I say bottom, it was 141st of the 144 countries in the Index.

Oddly, the BBC doesn’t seem very excited about it at all. Comprising a compilation of scores cunningly gleaned from certain data and analysis, and scientifically cobbled together by the usual bunch of Israel-hating bodies such as the UN and Amnesty International, the index also features imaginative surmisings in place of various missing bits. So it does sound a tad lacking in forensic rigour. Which might explain why we aren’t hearing a lot more about it.
Nevertheless it is endorsed by the usual bunch of high profile individuals who are always ready to endorse Israel-bashing findings, however flawed.
Their support lends weight to whatever they care to endorse, as they hold a full hand of trump cards in the form of Nobel prizes. Excellent credentials for effective endorsing of dodgy reports, and surveys that turn the truth on its head.