I was reading the BBC’s coverage of the Quartet’s condemnation of Israel for daring to build in Jerusalem and came across this sentence...”That move undermined efforts to restart indirect Israeli-Palestinian talks” But did it? Wasn’t the firing of rockers from Gaza into Israel another reason to conclude that “peace talks” are being undermined from THAT side? The BBC is always in such a rush to damn Israel, 24/7, isn’t it? I wonder why the BBC hates the Jews so much?
ON THE QUARTET….
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One would think that the firing of over 300 rockets at Israeli population centres since the end of Cast Lead is a pretty good indication that it is the Palestinians who are continually undermining efforts for peace!
Mailman
No no no ! Firing rockets, indocrinating kids with anti-semitic school lessons and TV programmes is very peaceful. Building some flats in Jerusalem is casus bellum.
The quartet want a] a decision to suspend building in an area that Israel sees as its own territory; a] that will prejudge a major area of negotiation; c] will endanger the stability of Netanyahu’s government; d] is opposed by a majority of the Knesset and a majority of Israel’s Jewish citizens. In return Citizen Abbas will talk to George Mitchell. Doesn’t seem like an offer impossible to refuse to me.
“indirect talks” huuh? How can the two sides have any meaningful and genuine talks if one side refuses to even sit in the same room for face to face talks?
Why is it that the BBC is peddling the myth that Israel is unwilling to negotiate a solution? Israel is willing to enter a genuine peace dialogue. The real intention of the BBC/fatah-hamas-UNRWA has always been to bully Israel into making consessions from the start and to make it appear that Israel is the offender and bad guy.
Its clear from the way the one sided propaganda effort is constructed that Israel is being set up and its postion at any negotiations weakened, the hamas/fatah stooge puppets are working for the exclusive benefit of the Jew hating islamist gangsters.
If hamas/fatah wanted peace they could have it within a week by renouncing violence and starting face to face dialogue in good faith, the fact they are resorting to grubby place setting and dirty tricks with the worlds jew haters is very telling indeed.
Those of the diaspora who funded and supported Obama are kicking themselves right now!
Life in Gaza for women is not so bad, the BBC tells us, and if there are problems, well it’s Israel’s fault:
Women in Gaza: Life under Hamas
Hey Bio! Thanks for letting me know the other day about the comments being reinstated. I went back to 2006 and checked some out. Do you know who retrieved them and how they were retrieved? Could be that those thousands of comments were floating around in cyberspace all lonely and disjointed and suddenly found the website and came scrambling back down a cable to arrange themselves neatly in the appropriate boxes. Actually I think it’s more likely that there was some kind of human intervention.
“A rocket from Gaza kills a worker in Israel during a rare EU foreign policy chief visit.”
That’s the title of the Newshour piece from Thursday by Mary Ann Sieghart. Got to watch this woman:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002vsnk
I’m listening again to the programme now. When the obligatory cliched BBC hack came on to bemoan the conditions in Gaza I pricked up my ears when he mentioned that Gaza City is bustling and the markets are full of food. Then he spoilt it by claiming that the prices are comparable to London’s prices. Idiot doesn’t realise that’s most likely what they are charging HIM and other naive Westerners.
Anyway, back to Mary Ann. Could be that we are witnessing the first BBC journalist to be even-handed on the Israeli-Arab conflict in quite some time. She interviewed a Hamas spokesman and grilled him on the rocket that killed the Thai worker. She also grilled the Israeli side, but not with the usual petty BBC vindictiveness. Yep, Mary Ann Sieghart may be a woman to watch. Dunno how long she’ll last at the BBC, though, if she has a sense of journalistic ethics.
Hi Too True. Wow. Staggering ‘BBC Journalist in impartiality on Israel’ shock! horror! headline!
Could you let us know when M/s Seighart runs her piece. The audio clip is 55 mins and didn’t have time to wait for it.
Cheers.
Mary Ann Sieghart was at the Times for nearly 20 years.
That is – a proper journalist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ann_Sieghart
hippiepooter, yes, amazing isn’t it. The piece on Gaza starts right from the beginning. First she brings in the hack for a few minutes and then the Hamas spokesman.
It doesn’t appear to be on the site yet. Just for 19.03
It’s the THURSDAY recording, from the beginning. Sieghart is chairing the 60-minute prog – but also interviewing. Ain’t it crazy that we are surprised to find someone at the BBC asking the sort of question of Hamas that the BBC should ALWAYS be asking – rather than covering up.
About six minutes in, the Hamas spokesman moans and groans that, “Everybody talk about the rockets but nobody talk about the siege.”
Mary Ann’s reply: “Well, the one is violent and the other one isn’t.”
I’m beginning to like this woman.
Sorry TT, clumsy me. 6 mins in, gotcha!
Then the hack comes back on and concedes that the rocket fire has been radically reduced since Israel’s attack on Gaza.
Then an astounding thing happens: Mary Ann interviews a political journalist from the Jerusalem Post! This is practically unheard of at the BBC. They always go straight for Haaretz because they know it is staffed mostly by their felow lefties, some quite far left.
I hope nobody from the BBC is reading this. Could be bad for her career prospects there.
I heard that too TrueToo, perhaps the BBC’s perception of Gaza is changing, or perhaps they’re just trying out a new slant on the same message.
I commented on another flying pig moment here on another thread, here: So it Goes Again
I almost choked on my coffee this morning listening to the World Service, the BBC actually allowed somebody to put Israel’s case!
Eric Cantor, Republican “Jewish American” Congressman, and Republican whip.
Listen here on the iPlayer, should also be available outwith the UK, at about 30.39, after the piece on Juarez:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p006lykd
The BBC is still spinning the story of the building in Jerusalem being the cause of the recent “unrest”, but the real reason is the Arabs’ indignation that the Jews have the temerity to rededicate the ancient Hurva synagogue. What exactly is the problem with Jews rebuilding a synagogue in Jerusalem?
The history of the Hurva synagogue is important too. Twice destroyed, by Muslims:
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Article.aspx?id=170971
Interesting that there’s a “Middle Class” for the BBC to interview in Gaza to promote the democratically elected Hamas government.
But wait, isn’t Gaza the world’s largest prison camp, more overcrowded that Monte Carlo or Hong Kong? I thought they were all starving and living on UN aid.
I commented on one of the other threads about the Gaza hairdresser story:
http://biasedbbc.tv/2010/03/open-thread_11.html
Al-Beeb makes light of Hamas banning male hairdressers from cutting women’s hair:
Cut and run?
Bombed out and banned: Gaza’s male hairdressers
[…]
Biodegradable, I’ll have a listen to Cantor. Meanwhile I’m crossing swords with the anti-Semites on HYS again:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/haveyoursay/2010/03/what_next_for_usisrael_relatio.html?page=2#comments
Yes, they gave Cantor a fair crack at the whip and they didn’t sneer at him. Amazing. Perhaps someone high up in the corporation is kicking leftie butt. Or perhaps they are leaning towards the centre out of fear of being shafted by the Conservatives, though I don’t suppose that is likely.
Well boys and girls, it’s not that the bbc is anti-semitic so much as they are a bunch of socialist loons who view Israel’s existence as a successful, 21st century nation-state an affront to their internationalist notions.
This morning al-beeb was busily quoting “Mr Ban”, as they refer to the UN supremo, condemning Israeli policy. No mention of violence from Arab-Palestinians, or any hint about their refusal to simply talk reasonably for the last 62 years!
Yeah, well that’s true as well. But I believe there are a number of BBC hacks who have an intense dislike of Jews.
Anti-semitism or de facto anti-semitism is still anti-semitism. The fact is that the incessant drum beat underlying BBC reports that the Jews are the new Nazis can only help to bring to the fore in more and more people’s minds the question ‘Was Hitler right?’. On CiF a leftie commenter actually posed this question at the end of the usual ‘anti-zionist’ trope.
Let us remember that as German Jews were marched off to their deaths by the Gestapo and Brownshirts, they were mocked and spat on by their neighbours who previously had been life-long friends. This is the sort of insidious evil that has seeped through the BBC and is polluting the minds of the British public.
Mary Ann Sieghart is a proper journalist. Balanced. Good previous career at the FT, Economist and Times etc.
By contrast, Owen Bennett-Jones, the usual presenter of the World Service Newshour prog – the heaviest news review each day – always appears to me to be tendentious, following all the usual BBC prejudices.
And his BBC biog notes that his career has been with the BBC – but that he also writes for the Guardian and the Indy. Now ain’t that a surprise ?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/biographies/biogs/worldservice/owenbennettjones.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/newshour/presenters/story/2004/09/040920_obj.shtml
In this snippet he is being interviewed abroad about the Saudi programme to rehabilitate jihadis. We know that programme ius as full of holes as Gruyere cheese – with a record of too many “graduates” reverting to their killing ambitions. But Bennett-Jones sounds fairly sanguine about it in his conclusion – some failures but mostly OK. Like – being a little bit pregnant.
Bennett-Jones is one of hordes of BBC “journalists” who do not accept that there is a real war going on – a jihadi war against the West.
sorry – here is the link to the Bennett-Jones interview about jihadi rehab in Saudi :
http://www.thetakeaway.org/people/owen-bennett-jones/
I see that Bennett-Jones was the guy who did that awful dhimmi piece “The Crescent and the Cross”. Glorifying some of the Islamic battles, suggesting that the Crusades were all the fault of Christian Europe – not a push-back against Islam’s attacks on Europe.
also – Bennett-Jones wrote an article in the New Statesman defewnding that atrocious Lancet article on numbers of deaths in Iraq. He will have known full well that there was a storm of controversy over that article – and as a BBC employee he should have stayed aside from the controversy, not taken the anti-US side.
http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/04/iraq-death-toll-lancet-survey
No bias at the BBC ? Bennett-Jones has always sounded to me like a mellifluous version of Plett/Guerin. With stacks of bias in the way he presents Newshour and other World Service stuff – and stacks of bias in what he decides to run on the programme.
(I recall him giving lots of time to the notorious US academics Mersheimer and Walt a couple of years ago, on their argument that US foreign policy is effectively run by Jews. Don’t remember their critics getting such a good airing.)
The World Service is meant to be Britain talking to the world. It is not. It is the British left talking to the world, and inviting endless contributions critical of the West. All at our expense, of course.
Yes, I agree with your take on Bennett Jones. I heard him do an interview ages ago with one of Iran’s vice presidents – a woman who had been among the student leaders who took the hostages at the American Embassy. I posted my impressions here. There were no tough questions from Bennett Jones. He seemed to be quite smitten with her as the airwaves were crackling with the personal chemistry between the two of them. I was disgusted and remember wondering at the time if he in fact realised he was talking to a woman who was part of a hideous regime that exports terror and tortures prisoners to death and hangs schoolchildren from cranes for having sex.
I also listened to the Walt and Mearsheimer interview and it was mostly quite tame. But strangely enough I recall him putting the point to them that all groups lobby so what was so special about a Jewish lobby. They were evidently taken aback by the question and almost offended at being asked such a thing by the BBC, but he wouldn’t be brushed off by their response.
I was intrigued by this because he is such a typical BBC hack in so many other respects.