There’s plenty of other stuff on this blog about the BBC’s unbalanced bias against Israel after the President’s speech yesterday, but here’s one glaring example of their entrenched anti-Israel attitude.
This article about Netanyahu’s visit to the US and audience with the President includes an analysis inset from Wyre Davies, in which he sneers at the Israeli PM and at what he perceives to be trained seals in Congress, as well as at the nasty old Jewish Lobby. Surely there is a less snarky – less editorializing and impartial – way to describe the situation? In the middle of the article itself, though, the News Online sub-editor slips in this other bit of Davies’ wisdom:
Israel’s claim to being the only democratic state in the region has also been undermined by the dramatic developments of the “Arab Spring” anti-government uprisings, our correspondent adds.
Let’s consider the twisted logic here. Davies – approved by the BBC – is saying that protests against Arab dictators have (Davies uses the past tense, and so will I) already undermined Israel’s claim to being the only democracy in the village. In other words, according to the BBC protesting against dictators diminishes the democratic position of the only non-dictatorship.
And this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this Narrative from a Beeboid. Kevin Connolly, having departed his former post as US correspondent where he insulted thousands of people on air with a sexual innuendo to become a newly-minted Middle East correspondent, said the exact same thing two weeks ago.
Now if, in a few months’ time or so, an Arab/Muslim country actually achieved a state of democracy as a result of all these Arab Spring protests (which would be great and fine with me, regardless of the resulting government’s attitude towards Israel or the US), then there would be some validity to the BBC’s position. At this time, though, there is no such thing. In fact, the protests highlight the very fact the BBC says is undermined by them. But since BBC groupthink is that Israel is the worst of the bunch and the root cause of all strife in the Middle East (even as the President tells them to cut the crap), they see it exactly backwards.
The anti-Israel sentiment entrenched at the BBC twists their vision into seeing black as white. Protests against dictators undermine the idea that Israel is the only non-dictatorship in the region? Only in the minds of Beeboids. Sadly, it’s a set Narrative, clearly prepared in advance, with the latest opportunity seized with gusto. They want Israel to be undermined, to be diminished, to be delegitimized, and see it happening even where it’s the exact opposite.
Equally, if you’re a news organsiation claiming to survey the prospects of democracy taking root in the Arab world, you’d think you’d want to take note of the one country which really did go from brutual dictatatorship to democracy. Must be something about the Iraq story they don’t like.
The BBC smells Israel’s blood.
RCE,
That makes me even more pro-Israel, if that is possible !!!
Caroline Glick on Obama’s speech. Well worth reading.
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/05/obamas-abandonment-of-america.php#comments
I think Netanyahu has just told Obama who is boss, the BBC won’t be happy.
yes he did
I was laughing to myself as he told Obama more or less to go and boil his head
Kim Asshat is now on spouting off more crap
Eat my shorts! Apparently he gave Hilary a bollocking too. Hee hee.
In its propaganda for Obama on Israel, INBBC reproduces two maps of Israel, at the end of the following article:
“Middle East: Obama and Netanyahu hold Washington talks”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13466910
But, of course, Hamas and Fatah are using quite different maps – the reason why Israel must avoid the mistake of giving up land for nothing – as with Gaza:
“‘Palestine’ replaces Israel”
http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=413&fld_id=555&doc_id=4939&sort=d
Benjamin Netanyahu has to explain to Obama on live television the basic facts about Israel and the refugee problem. I realise Obama is weak on Foreign Affairs but to make a speech exhorting Israel to go back to the 67 borders is pure madness. But not understanding the history of Israel is inexcusable.
The President was raised in anti-Israel environments, carried around tapes during His young adulthood of speechs by an anti-Israel preacher, and attended an anti-Israel church for twenty years. Of course He has different ideas on the matter. I said so before He was elected. Nothing surprising here at all. His speechwriter for yesterday’s sermon tried to have it both ways, but the hypocrisy was just too much and it’s all coming out now.
Any bets that the BBC will start admitting now that some people were suspicious of His attitude towards Israel from the beginning? Besides the nasty old rich Jews, I mean.
Just floating a balloon, a hypothetical if you will, but i’ve always been mildly aware that Prime Ministers have to be street fighting, gutter dwelling, professional debaters as they live on their wits in their parliaments, whereas Presidents just do press conferences and deliver the occassional speech. To that end, is there a greater propensity for Presidents to make dicks of themselves?
I could do a whole series of essays on the pros and cons of your system versus ours, but in this case I think it’s due to the media and Hollywood selling us a bill of goods rather than the real truth about what kind of President He’d be. We were told all knds of myths about Candidate Obamessiah and the Hope & Change and McCain=Bush and racial blackmail instead of getting an honest look at a candidate who had zero experience and little knowledge or interest in foreign policy or realpolitik other than spending a few years as a child as an Indonesian Muslim and having a middle name that Muslims would like (yet anyone else who mentioned the Hussein part was called a racist for doing it). We were also told that it was too dangerous to have Sarah Palin one heartbeat away from the Presidency because she had no experience either, even though she had far more executive and administration experience than the Community Organizer. Plus we were lied to repeatedly by the same media about how His Communist and domestic terrorist connections were either not true or unimportant. This dick is the result of unique circumstances, I think.
We were sold a “blank slate”, a new beginning, a restored standing in the world, etc., while all concerns were dismissed as either racist or right-wing extremism or falsehoods. That’s why we have this particular President, but I don’t think the formula is repeatable with someone else.
There’s also the notion that the excessive scrutiny and two-year long campaign slog plus the endless string of excrutiating fundraising gladhandling results in only real dicks wanting to go through it all anymore.
If the Arab counties and Palestinians would be happy with Israel within 1967 borders, why did they try and destroy it in 1948 and 1967 when it was within those borders?
Well, exactly. That’s been the myth for four decades now.
It seems that Sunday’s Andrew Marr show will have an interview with the President. He’s talking about Israel and a Palestinian State, and the excerpt here shows Him sounding nearly reasonable. He even mentions rockets from Gaza and Hezbollah, which Jeremy Bowen will hate. But “land swaps”? That idea worked when, exactly? No BBC analysis so far on the viability of that part of the speech, so we’ll see if Marr attacks or defends.
But He also repeats the concerns about Jerusalem and the “refugees”, so when He says “1967 borders”, he means that the Old City of Jerusalem will no longer be part of Israel, and Jews won’t even have access to the Wall anymore. The result will actually make the Arabs’ war on Israel successful at last. Again, no insight from the BBC on that score. The “Right of Return” will spell the end of the Jewish State, which is the whole point. Will Marr bring that up?
Aside from that, it’s naive to think that the Palestinian leadership will stop Hezbollah from doing anything. A UN recognition of a Palestinian State will not stop Hezbollah, and will not stop Iran or Syria from supporting attacks on Israel, and will not stop the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from supporting Hamas attacks. This is essentially the same argument I used to have with two-state advocates 25 years ago. Israel’s security concerns go far beyond its border with the West Bank and a Palestinian leadership, yet the President glosses right over it and pretends that the peace process is between Israel and Abbas/Hamas.
The BBC Narrative is that Syria and Egypt and Hezbollah and Iran and all the rest of them will stop hating Israel the moment a two-state solution is imposed. This couldn’t be further from the truth, yet the BBC wants us to believe it, this time with the naive President’s help.
If Israel is dismantled, there will be peace in the region, and the President will at least be able to claim success on that score. I suspect that’s all that really matters. Can’t wait to see the whole thing on Sunday.
Is any of this his own idea? Who does his Israeli policy advice? I don’t mean the Secretary of State – I can’t believe she’d be the source for this. Who are his closest confidants and advisers?
The President is trained political activist. They don’t tend to have original ideas of their own. His recent statements on Israel are mostly cliché anti-Israel talking points we’ve all heard for decades, although His speechwriter admirably tried to have it both ways by saying Israel had a right to exist in some form.
If one looks closely, everything He says on any issue can be traced back to someone else’s ideology which He has since adopted: Jeremiah Wright, Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers, ACORN, and so on. He has influences, not ideas.
Unfortunately, I can believe that Hilary Clinton IS advising him.
Add to that the small but important word – contiguous. I Gaza and the West Bank are somehow joined then Israel is cut in half. How did Obama plan to solve that one.
“Obama turns his back on Israel – 1967 Macht Frei ”
http://www.archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/
His Grace is wrong about the potential mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the settlements, as we well know Israel will be expected to extract them all beforehand as they did in Gaza. Or fantasists may suggest that keeping that territory is part of the “land swap” idea. But he is 100% correct in busting the biased BBC for their claim that the Arab protests supposedly diminish Israel’s stance as the only democracy in the region.
In his chat with Justin Webb at 6.07am, Mark Mardell always called Barack Obama “President Obama” but twice called Benjamin Netanyahu just “Netanyahu”. Respect for one, disrespect for the other.
A return to the so called 67 borders would mean the eventual demise of Israel, it would put her at the mercy of the Arabs surrounding her, that is why it is being pimped so hard. It is merely a way of tightening the noose.
The so called right of return for so called refugees is even more dangerous, millions of militant Arabs moving into a shrunken Israeli state, an immediate intifada would follow with constant unrest. It would imediately alter the political balance and Israel would cease to exist the second the Arabs gained the majority in area the Arabs flowed into.
The Obama plan is an Arab infiltrate and destroy plan, it is not a peace plan, it is a blueprint for the destruction of Israel. If Israel were to agree to the Obama/Arab plan it wold mean certain death and certain war. The BBC knows all this. Obama is in effect saying to Israel ‘heres a knife, cut your own throat’.
The Arabs have been quite honest about their intentions, to reduce and then destroy Israel.
On the same day Yasser Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn in 1993, he explained his actions on Jordan TV thus “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.”
The intent is there, it has been acknowledged but the BBC and Barack Obama and the rest of the left either refuse to see it or pretend it does not exist; all fueled by a hatred of Israel.
A return to 67 borders is merely a way of making Israel weaker, anyone with two brain cells can see it but the BBC is not going to allow air time to ‘peace deniers’ is it?
The return of so called refugees is merely an artifice to weaken the the state of Israel, anyone with two brain cells can see that millions of utterly hate filled and resentful Arabs, many of whom have never set foot in Israel will never ever be content to be Israelis, the minute they walk into Israel they will be undermining and attacking Israel with another intifada from within shrunken borders. The BBC is not about to show that side of the story is it?
For peace to work, there must be two sides who wish to live side by side in peace but is one side only wishes to weaken the other in preparation for yet anotherwar of extermination there is and can be no peace. Peace of the graveyard is not peace is it? And yet the BBC will never allow this side to shown, there is only one BBC narrative and only one set of victims and only one peace plan.
Israel has almost no land to give away and still be a valid state whereas the Arabs have all the land they need and more much much more land than they need but why is none of this land being offered to the ‘Palestinians’? Of the millions of acres of land surounding Israels borders not one square foot of Arab land is being offered to the ‘Palestinians’ not one inch of Lebanon/Syria/Egypt/Jordan is being offered to the ‘Palestinians’ in order to help form a ‘Palestinian’ state is it? And the BBC will never allow that side to be shown and debated will it?
The Arabs do not want peace, they want a weakened Israel ready for the eventual Jew extermination war, a war the Arabs desire more than anything in the world, more than life itself. The BBC knows this and Obama knows this but the truth will stay hidden.
Exactly! Obama and his advisors must surely realise this.
Cassie,
You are right it is as simple as that.
All the manouverings of the Arabs are designed to ensure the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jews.
Blair, Obama, the BBC and all their fellow travellers know that, but no amount of bullshitting from these wretched people can change the facts.
They are perpetrating one of the biggest lies in history which could lead to Genocide.
These wretced creatures are no better than the Nazis they pretend to despise.
“wretched” !
This is the sort of sloppy, easy propaganda for Islam which INBBC indulges in: get one anonymous Muslim in each of several Middle East countries (excluding Israel) to say something which INBBC agrees with on Obama.
“Obama speech: Mid-East reaction”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13461500
Meanwhile the “moderators” on Mark Mardell’s blog appear to think the following comment is fine to publish:
158.matt-stone
27 Minutes Ago
Israelis’ instransigence towards peace can only mean more deaths for UK and US service men and women. I don’t know why we bother with Jews, even their so-called God couldn’t be bothered to rescue them while Hitler was exterminating them. The Israelis aren’t intersted in peace at all, only their expansion programmes matter to them. Since when have they helped anyone apart from themselves??
I almost never complain about comments since I believe in freedom of speech. But I complained about that one. We’ll see if they leave it up or not.
The new comment system is trash for twitterati. Deliberate dumbing down by the BBC. 400-character posts don’t do much to counteract the pumping out of BBC propaganda and I’m sure that’s the idea
On Davies, he hasn’t bothered to find out that there was and perhaps still is a fair amount of empathy in Israel for those involved in the Arab revolt. His anti-Israel attack mode precludes actual journalism.
There’s little or no point in only complaining to that awful “Complaints” website. Probably better to also complain directly to the propagandist swine who campaign against Israel. Though biased to the hilt, they must surely regard themselves as fair-minded and reasonable. No journalist likes to think he/she is prejudiced.
I’ve had a couple of minor successes with direct contact with individuals. Mostly they don’t even bother to reply but I think it’s worth a shot.
Link to Mardell’s blog post:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13465012
Poor Mardell. He knows his beloved Obamessiah has made a mess of things again, but can’t figure out a way to spin it. The White House talking points fed to him boil down to the following:
t does put Mr Obama on the side of the Arab Street more eloquently than his declaration that backing democracy is America’s top priority (funny that Saudi Arabia didn’t get a mention).
But perhaps above all it fits with his post-Bin Laden projection as a hard-headed risk taker.
But it still bugs the hell out of the BBC North America editor. I must say I enjoy Mardell at last criticizing The Obamessiah (from the Left, natch), but he really can’t figure out how to celebrate the President’s latest achievement, and it shows in his writing. It’s obviously not a useful roadmap for peace, but if the Jews hate it there must be some merit to it. That’s about as far as Mardell can take it, so he must be very frustrated.
Success – They removed that foul comment.
nice one TT
the nazis are indeed alive and well though,aren’t they?
Yep, sure are.
See my post at 6.04 above !
Nice work, but it should never have been allowed through.
Mahmoud Abbas, leader of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority and Israel’s “partner in peace”, says that he himself is one of those refugees the President spoke about.
Abbas says that he was born in Safed, near Galilee, and he and his family were forced to flee and lost their ancestral home when the Jews declared independence. He didn’t mention any real details about why they had to flee, but that’s probably no longer provable.
In any case, this puts a big quesiton mark on the entire concept of the Right of Return, which the President Himself says is an issue which the Jews must address before there can be permanent peace. An honest broker of peace would ask Abbas himself what he intends to do if he is given the Right of Return? Will he leave his government seat in Ramallah and return to Safed?
This begs the real question of the logical conclusion of the notion that Palestinian refugees must be allowed to return to their homes. If the leader of the Palestinians views Israel itself (pre-67 borders, even) as his home, then what happens next? What does he really want? We aren’t told by the BBC, that’s for sure.
Maybe Abbas believes what his predecessor Arafat said on the same day he signed the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn in 1993, when he explained his actions on Jordan TV thus “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.”
“Obama turns his back on Israel – 1967 Macht Frei ”
http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2011/05/obama-turns-his-back-on-israel-1967.html
The irony of all that is that despite all his efforts and despite this speech it doesn’t look as if either Obama’s or the United States’ popularity in the Arab World will rise.