The BBC is overjoyed today because there is a disturbance in an Israeli-Arab village. What’s more, it’s a deliberately provocative incitement by a hardline right wing group, reminiscent of the Orange marches in NI.
Last year on a similar occasion a clip on the BBC website featured Katya Adler in a fetching baseball cap, ducking the occasional missile, saying that all the Palestinian residents want to do is live in peace alongside their neighbours.
This time, no Katya, but more of the same.
Meanwhile back on BBC News 24, we’re given the background.
An extremist Rabbi was murdered in Manhattan. His party (racist) was outlawed by the Israeli government. There’s a resurgence of such (racist) sentiments in Israel, and right wing (racist) Israelis are trying to carry out their annual supremacist march, provoking clashes in Umm al-Fahm, an Arab village in the West Bank.
There’s a handy reminder of the proposal (racist) by right wing hardliner Avigdor Leiberman, requiring all Israeli citizens to swear an oath of allegiance (racist) to the Jewish state.
Unfortunately though, the violence seems to have subsided, but the BBC is anxious to squeeze every drop out of the story.
But wait. Rupert Wingfield-Hayes is on the scene too. He’s saying there is an Islamist resident in peace-loving Umm al-Fahm. The BBC anchor is telling Rupert that the right-wing Leiberman and his ilk are after booting all the Arabs out of Israel. Rupert is attempting to elucidate. It’s not quite like that, he tries to explain. They think there should be a transfer of Israeli Arabs from Israel / West Bank to Palestinian /West Bank in a future Palestinian state.
But the BBC is very keen on tolerance. Obviously everyone everywhere should be free to vent their spleen, even if it means tolerating those who would happily stop you venting yours. Literally. So Israelis should be like us, tolerant and accepting of hostile groups in their midst. (Which they actually are) They should even be tolerant and accepting, as the BBC is, of the quaint and quirky (if a tad racist – it’s their culture innit) diktat that no Jew will ever be allowed to live in a Palestinian land.
It’s interesting to note the difference in the naming of the groups. I wonder does the BBC EVER mention “extremist Arabs” or “far-rightwing Arabs” in these articles.
I just assume that the Beeboids know that the Arabs’ reactions are “less nuanced”, and so don’t bother to label them. I learned that from their coverage of the Muslim World’s response to that dopey Pastor in Florida who was condemned for expressing an unapproved thought but never even touched a match.
What’s more, it’s a deliberately provocative incitement by a hardline right wing group, reminiscent of the Orange marches in NI.
oops DV is gonna love you Sue… 😛
The World Service was all over the story as well today. I was keeping half an ear on it and hour after hour they were pushing the story. They couldnt quite make up their little minds whether the “far-right” Israelis should be portrayed as “parading” through the streets of the village or as being “whisked away” by the police after having briefly left their vehicles, so they swung from one story to the other.
Anyone who only got their news on the event from the World Service will never know if the Israelis in fact paraded or were whisked away. But of course the news itself is never a big deal for the BBC – its the agenda that comes first.
Why do you link to the Ami Isseroff article on Zionism-Israel in support of the argument that Palestinians want a Judenrein Palestine when his article says that there is no evidence for this and I know for a fact that he has argued that no such evidence exists?
I think this is what you are claiming.
If so, this does not further the argument.
Just be fair, Sunshine. Most Palestinians and most Arabs/Muslims, want Israel rubbed off thew face of the earth. And they don’t give a damn if all the Jews are killed as part of it. They WANT Iran to launch a nuclear strike.
Or do you deny that ?
There are something like 1,600 million Muslims world-wide, and you apparently know how most of them think.
Perhaps you’re right, but if you are going to make such an assertion, it’s up to you to prove it.
Where do you get this information from?
Dez, if you kept your eyes half open surfing the net and elsewhere you would notice that from Iran to Iraq to Pakistan to Saudi Arabia to Lebanon to Syria to Somalia to Libya to Algeria to Palestine and so on and endlessly on, Muslim hatred of Jews rivals the Nazi hatred of Jews that culminated in the Holocaust.
All of these places are virtually Jew-free. Iraq soon will be once the pitiful remnants of the Jewish community, which stretched back to ancient times, have gone. The Jews of Morocco, the most “moderate” Arab country, have dwindled to one-tenth of their pre-1948 size, due to oppression and periodic slaughter at the hands of their Arab compatriots.
Even Jordan, of one Israel’s “peace partners,” has a law against Jews becoming citizens of that apartheid state and Egypt’s state-controlled media pumps out anti-Semitic propaganda indistinguishable from that of the Nazis. Egypt, of course, is the other Arab “peace partner” of the Jewish state.
Contrast that with the handful of courageous Muslims, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Walid Shoebat, who have raised their voices against the insane prejudice of their Muslim brothers, and you might begin to get a reasonably accurate picture of what the majority of Muslims think and feel about Israel and the Jews.
TrueToo,
Excellent post, spot on !
Thank you, kind sir.
Very true and very depressing in its implications.
What 1,600 million Muslims world-wide think is the ultimate straw man. It is about as relevant (even if it could be proved they had benign feelings) as saying the majority of pre WWII Germans did not vote for the Nazis (true only 36%) or the overwhelming majority of Japanese were never asked about the decision to bomb Pearl Harbour.
In Palestinian and wider Arab politics there are two groups that matter because they hold the weapons. There is considerable overlap in the wider population.
The Islamic group are the completely unambiguous, consistent and transparent. …the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to realize the promise of Allah, no matter how long it takes. The Prophet, Allah’s prayer and peace be upon him, says: “The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,’ except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Hamas Charter, Article 7).
The Nationalist group are much more difficult to pin down. Abbas was widely quoted as saying “If a Palestinian Authority state is created in Judea and Samaria, no Israeli citizen will be allowed to set foot inside” and “If a Palestinian Authority state is created in Judea and Samaria, no Israeli citizen will be allowed to set foot inside” .
It’s true that he has been also quoted saying quite conciliatory things or things that could be interpreted that way. In this he learnt from his mentor Yasser Arafat. It clearly depends on his audience, if he expects to be reported and what language he is speaking in.
The mosques, the ‘representative’ bodies, the Arab controlled media and the school curriculums ALL take either the nationalist or the Islamic point of view. The exceptions are not millions of Muslims but brave individuals, generally under police protection.
BTW I saw Arafat do this personally in Jordan in 1982. He made a ‘conciliatory’ speech in English. This was followed by one of his deputies, who Arafat introduced as the man to tell the real truth. His bloodthirsty uncompromising speech in Arabic was widely cheered by the audience (Jordan TV obligingly provided English subtitles) while the cameras would frequently turn to a beaming Arafat standing and nodding in agreement.
Have you ever seen the BBC report Yasser Arafat’s comments on Jordanian TV on the very day that he signed the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn in 1993?
“Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel.”
Ray,
I wasn’t actually trying to ‘prove’ what either the Palestinians or Abbas really want. All I wanted to show was that it there is such an allegation. Maybe I should have linked to to Elder’s poster, but I then would be be accused of cherry picking, which I don’t think furthers the case either.
In my article I was trying to highlight the way the BBC wallows in unfounded and misguided insinuations of racism by Israel, but pretends such a thing is fine or non existent when it comes to their saintly Palestinians.
Everybody should read your website. I’m a fan.
Ray Cook, one could fill volumes with the evidence that the Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular want a Jew-free Arabia, if not a Jew-free world. anyone who argues differently knows nothing about the subject.
Many Arab countries are today totally Jew-free.
………..and the few remaining Christians are being driven out as well.
Mr Cook – can you name any group on earth more intolerant than the Arabs / Muslims ?
Yes. Most of the regular contributors to this blog ;p
‘Most of the regular contributors to this blog’
‘you apparently know how most of them think.’
‘ if you are going to make such an assertion, it’s up to you to prove it.’
Where do I get this from?
Simply cut & pasted from about three posts up.
lefties
what a bunch of dicks!
there’s nothing as intolerant as a liberal
Guest Who,
That skewered him !
I have found that the most potent words to show the paucity of thought shored up by sheer hypocrisy in word and deed of the BBC and its supporters… are usually their own.
When Capita hauls me into court, they are going to have fun explaining why I was expected to fund a system whereby my merely citing a BBC URL and a selected quote can be modded… from a BBC Blog.
Dez is a halfwit and proves it with his own words every time he posts here
John Anderson,
Yes, Buddhists !
John and TT,
Ray knows all that. His criticism of me was that the example I used weakened my case.
I was trying to do something that was probably too subtle. But as you very well know, if you do try and make an unprovable allegation, someone like Dez Simon or Nick will come and throw it back in yer face.
Everyone is aware that Abbas and Co. say one thing to us and another to the Arab-speaking world.
There’s all this stuff about “he didn’t really mean this, he meant that.”
In my post I was talking about the BBC and the ridiculous fuss they made all day yesterday. I swear I heard George Alagiah saying gleefully that Israel wants to kick all Arabs out of the country.
The Widespread Arab and general Muslim intolerance and hatred of Jews and Israel is virtuall ignored by the mass media, particularly by agenda-pushing lefty media like our beloved BBC.
I doubt there is a better example of propaganda by omission of facts. Unfortunately for the BBC and others who would love to see Israel sleepwalking towards its destruction as a Jewish state, the Israelis understand that hatred only too well. After all, they have been on the receiving end of it for 62 years.
And of course if Jews become minority dhimmies in their own country, the next Holocaust looms. Never again.
Yes, it’s completely mad. It’s not as if the BBC tolerates racial hatred. The opposite. It’s blindingly obvious that only one kind of racial hatred eludes their consciousness.
One important element in this uninformed discussion the ignorant beeboids and most of you are missing is that this village, and many others in the north are heavily populated by Druze. They are fiercely loyal to Israel, serve in key army units, and are a generally successful group in the country.
That is interesting. This post was originally about yesterday’s display of insinuation, partial reporting, exaggeration, bias by omission, and the BBC’s obsessional fascination with Israel’s perceived irrational hatred of Arabs.
Of course if the BBC had known of the loyalty of Druze Arabs to Israel, they surely would have mentioned it in their reporting of yesterday’s disturbance.
(The last sentence was a joke just in case anyone thought I seriously believe the BBC would use their journalistic expertise to weasel out this information, and would then use it and risk diluting their message.)
Sami Kuntar, terrorist murderer of an Israeli father and his little daughter, is a Lebanese Druze.
Truetoo: All of these places are virtually Jew-free. Iraq soon will be once the pitiful remnants of the Jewish community, which stretched back to ancient times, have gone. The Jews of Morocco, the most “moderate” Arab country, have dwindled to one-tenth of their pre-1948 size, due to oppression and periodic slaughter at the hands of their Arab compatriots.
Almost a million Jews were made to leave Arab countries since 1948, leaving land four times the size of Israel itself. Still waiting for the BBC to do a single report on this key issue. The painfully few references we’ve seen attempt to minimise or whitewash the Jewish exodus.
The Jews of Morocco are now one percent of their original number – 3,000 of 300,000.
As I recall a few years back they did an extremely tame and misleading report on the “News” website about Iraqi Jews who had moved to Israel. People complained and they changed it, making it slightly more realistic.
Then, when the story broke about a group of Jews seeking justice for Jewish refugees expelled from Arab lands, the BBC was dragged, kicking and screaming, to do a World Have Your Say programme on it. Though still biased, they did a fairly decent job of it. Not into Googling right now but I reckon the article and comments are still available on the WHYS site. That’s where I got the figure of 10% remaining Jews in Morocco.
But your point is well taken. The BBC avoids this particular issue like the plague. Can’t have anything competing with Palestinian victimhood.
The story is still top of the Middle East news RSS feed even though it’s now a day old.
I’ve commented before how it’s common practice for anti-Israel articles to be shuffled to the top, above newer stories, just to keep the anti-Israel pot on the boil.
Note also the disproportionate number of stories about Israel.
There are significant differences between Avigdor Lieberman and the late Meir Kahane. The most relevant re Umm al-Fahm is that Kahane wanted to kick troublemakers out of Israel. Leiberman proposed moving the border so the largest groups of Arabs would become part of a Palestinian state without them moving a centimetre. The large Jewish settlement blocs would be incorporated into Israel simularly by redrawing the border.
It was the Arabs who objected most strongly to the thought of not being part of the state they claim oppresses them. The opposition to Kahane who never held more than one seat in the 120 seat Knesset (cf. Israel Beitenu, Leiberman’s party’s 15 seats) came from the Israeli government.
Sue: The Druse are loyal to wherever they live. In Syria, they are loyal to Syria. In Lebanon, as much as this is possible, to Lebanon. The Golan is a problem as the Druse consider themselves Syrian. Were Israel to stop offering to return the Golan to Syria, it is possible the Golan Druse would rethink their position. However a well founded fear of what the Syrians would do to their relatives in Syria is a strong factor against it.
The Druse are in any case completely outnumbered by Arabs as are the Circassians (Muslims who were expelled from the Caucuses by the Russians in the 19th Century). Incidentally the Bedouin in the North frequently serve as professional soldiers. As far as I know, all IDF trackers are Bedouin.