Does the Media Aid Israel? Does Amnesty Aid Humanity? Does the BBC Aid Amnesty?
To comply with its charter the BBC needs to convince the world that its coverage of the Middle East is impartial, but you need only glance at certain BBC employees to spot a commonality that belies any such claim. Former BBC Middle East correspondent Alan Hart is a conspiracy nut whose anti-Israel fanaticism crosses the line between rationality and hyper mania. He flimsily camouflages this by producing a faux BBC chat show called ‘Hart of the Matter,’ with a rogues gallery of career anti Zionists as guests. He parted company with the BBC a while ago, but there’s also Tim Llewellyn who worked for the BBC for ten years and knows all about propaganda. At the 2004 book launch of ‘Bad news From Israel’, Mr Llewellyn exposed the tricks used by the cunning Israelis to dupe the BBC into promoting the case for Israel.
“The Israelis appear in studios wearing suits. They’ve learned all sorts of tricks. They are wizards at communication; [….]He added that the tone of complaints against those giving the Palestinian viewpoint was “vituperative, pestering and controlling.”
‘Bad News From Israel’ is a rich source of material from which BBC spokespersons tediously produce morsels to attest to the BBC’s impartiality. (the antidote is Stephanie Gutmann’s The Other War)
Author Greg Philo and his colleague Llewellyn use the technique, much cherished by Arabs, of attributing your own most malevolent inner thoughts, suspicions and shortcomings to your enemy.
To employ one anti-Israel polemicist as Middle East correspondent seems careless; two appears more than mere coincidence. Yet more still …… looks positively purposeful.
When the Arab uprisings began to make the headlines, one of the experts on the BBC’s speed dial was kindly grandfather Kamal Helbawy, spokesman for the Islamist group Jeremy Bowen calls moderate, the Muslim Brotherhood. Moderate in comparison to something in his own head no doubt. Meanwhile, Bowen, himself a man with attitude, has temporarily forsaken his Palestinian pals to support Gaddafi, and Jon Donnison is following in Alan “I’m telling your story” Johnston’s well trodden footsteps, like a kidnap waiting to happen. So Is Wyre Davies. Yasmin Alabhai Brown is on the BBC so often that she acts as if she owns the place. She and Mehdi Hasan are incessantly called upon to review the newspapers. Why?
Abdel Bari Atwan’s eyes bulge constantly from our screens. Thought for the Day regular Oliver McTernan runs Forward Thinking.
“Have a look through Harry’s Place archives and you’ll understand very quickly that this is merely a euphemism for “we support Hamas”.
I could go on, but I won’t.
Tim Llewellyn is consumed by his hatred of Israel. He’s beside himself, a man possessed. He and Mr Philo are continually beavering away alongside other Israel-haters, spreading the word. Amnesty International has unequivocally aligned itself with the Islamists. In the UK the BBC, the rest of the MSM, and probably the global social media network have convinced the majority of the idiocracy that taking an anti Israel stance is cool.
Occasionally the BBC administers Douglas Murray and Melanie Phillips to take the bitter taste away, but that’s just a drop in the bucket of balance. Next time a human rights report from Amnesty headlines a BBC news bulletin, remember the BBC’s charter.
Because of the BBC, Zionism is a pejorative, and the very word Israel has come to embody evil. Heedless that they’re recreating 1930s Germany, the BBC carries on regardless.
The thing is idiots like the bBC don’t or won’t accept is that the vast majority of non Muslims in the UK no longer accept that ‘islam’ is a religion of peace. Nothing about Islam is peaceful hell even pricks like J Bowen understand that basic snippet. It’s just that he loves swallowing what his muallah unzips in front of him 5 times a day.
All correct as usual Sue!
Still I know that we stand or fall with Israel.
Israel is in no danger of falling-they have a will to exist and to thrive in the face of the evil presnted by the worst of Islam.
Just because the fainthearts and lily livers in Bush House would love to grease the slipway to send Israel into the sea-albeit with due handkerchief wringing and a damp eye to camera-doesn`t mean for a second that Israel will acquiesce or wish itself away…not even for its most craven diaspora in their posts here!
Israel alone shines a light in that dark and dangerous area of the world, and its friends know what the BBCs game is-and the Guardians too!
The more the Beeb squeal-the more I know Israel is right on course. We`ll not need any scoffing about the endtimes either…Israel knows its reality, and along with the USA(not the Obama types either) will win!
cj,
Hear ! Hear !
I’d like to agree but fear that this time the forces lining up to destroy Israel whether physically like Hamas, Fatah, Hezb’allah, Syria, The Muslim Brotherhood, Iran etc. or reputationally the BBC, MSNBC etc. may be too strong.
Those crafy, suit-wearing Jews. If only they’d take their true form so we wouldn’t be fooled by their evil.
“The Israelis appear in studios wearing suits” – how very cunning of them!
When two sofa guest on the Andrew Marr Show from different positions on the political spectrum – Helena Kennedy and Max Hastings – can both describe Israel’s response to Obama’s speech in almost identical negative terms (in Sir Max’s words “a catastrophe” and in Baroness Helena’s words “a disaster”), then it again looks as if Tim Llewellyn & Co’s all-powerful Israel lobby (which Sir Max alluded to) is not as all-powerful as it’s cracked up to be.
(Neither wore a tie though, hopefully fatally undermining their points.)
What they should really have worn is the right-on keffiyeh
Are you selling them Sue!
Talking of lobbies, an anti-Semite has crawled out of a hole and into a blog I frequent with mutterings of the Jews controlling banking and the media. On a thread on Kahn’s rape charges, he was the one to mention that Kahn is Jewish but crawled back into his hole when others on the thread asked why that was relevant.
I pointed out that if Jews control the media they aren’t doing a very good job of covering for Kahn. Took him a while to come back out of his hole after that but unfortunately he did.
The corollary of INBBC being anti-Israel is, of course, it being pro-Islam, including pro-Hamas-Fatah.
Abdel Bari Atwan
more faces than the albert clock,as they say in Belfast
tries to play the nice guy on tv,but the mask really slips when he’s speaking elsewhere
a bBC speed dial cert
It slipped a bit on yesterday’s Dateline when he tried to shout down Saul Zadka. What a nasty piece of work – yet he remains the most-invited guest to appear on the programme. Sick.
Dead right Craig. He’s a cretin can’t stand the man.
Excellent post.
>>Heedless that they’re recreating 1930s Germany, the BBC carries on regardless.<<
I think the BBC Stormkorp is wetting itself with excitement at the evil they’re embracing within themselves. They are the dayglo avatars of new age fascism.
“recreating 1930s Germany” sadly even that bunch of uniform obsessed maniacs would have been in envious of the BBCs reach and power !
“Does the Media Aid Israel”
getting their defence in early…again. The BBC ALWAYS claim they get as many complaints from Right as from Left hence “they must be about right”. Has anyone EVER seen any stats? The media (not even considering the spasms of ecstacy the BBC engages in whenever any “anti Israel” story energes) BASHES Israel as anyone with even half a braincell can see without having to even scratch the surface.
This is what Israel has to defend against an ocean of Arab/Muslim hatred- all inspired by the koran
http://www.afsi.org/maps.shtml
A small island of civilisation in an immense ocean of vile Jew hatred. And Obama wants to reduce it to just the beach.
Has anyone ever heard Baz Atwan with Satan ever complain about BBC pro-Israel bias on air?? I’m sure he can’t be at all short of reasons judging by the title of the seminar.
‘¡Does the media aid Israel?’
Of course, the Orwellian sub-text of this doublespeak is: ‘How can we make the media even more biased against Israel so that Western public opinion will accept a second Holocaust?’
I can imagine the BBC reportage if it did come to Israel’s destruction and a second Shoah:
“It’s a terrible thing to happen to these people, most of whom wanted to just get on with their lives. But their government refused to choose the peaceful option so they have brought this tragedy upon themselves. If only they had been willing to talk to the legitimate voice of the Palestinians, Hamas, then this tragedy could have been averted. Israel should never have been created on stolen and sacred Islamic lands in the first place.”
It would be attempting to sound sympathetic to the murdered Israelis but still blaming them for their own demise. I am extremely worried for Israel’s survival – this is the most worrying time for it since 1948/49. However, it must survive or we’re all doomed.
I Tuned into an Israel Radio English newscast yesterday to hear Obama received with rapturous applause at AIPAC even, or especially, when saying that “land swaps” meant that the envisaged borders would not look like the ’67 borders:
Let me reaffirm what ’67 lines with mutually-agreed land swaps means: it means that the parties themselves, Israelis and Palestinians, will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4th 1967 [applause] That’s what mutually-agreed land swaps means [applause, escalating into cheering as he expands on the point.]
Then I switched to the World Service to see how the BBC was reporting it or if it was. Three minutes into the 18:00 GMT newscast, there was a brief mention of Obama’s AIPAC appearance. It went something like this:
In an address before an AIPAC audience, President Obama refused to back down on the issue of 1967 border with land swaps.
As if AIPAC was twisting his arm, rather than loudly applauding him.
So it’s evident that whoever wrote that bit of propaganda either had no idea what happened at that AIPAC speech or did, but just went ahead with his/her pre-determined propaganda.
Yet again, the BBC demonstrates that it cannot be trusted with the news.
However, Googling got me to the following article on Obama and AIPAC, not too bad for the BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13493372
But there’s no link to it on the main US-Canada page, so nobody will find it unless they Google it.
Now ain’t that just typical of the BBC.
On Sky News yesterday they were regularly showing substantial clips from Obama’s speech to AIPAC, aka America’s Jewish lobby. On the BBC, zilch. If anyone saw it there, please say so, and I see it’s on the website now.
Here, Obama fleshes out the Israel friendly parts of his speech, adding little, apart from mentioning Gilad Schalit and America’s unshakeable support for Israel.
Of course some will exaggerate these apparent concessions, saying he was courting the all-powerful Jewish lobby as part of his electioneering strategy. They may say he had his arm twisted by Israel, thus proving that the Jews control the world. However, I still think he said little or nothing new in either speech, nor in the Andrew Marr interview.
In my post yesterday I mentioned “Obama’s outrageous plan to wind the clock back 44 years and recreate the conditions that gave Israel’s enemies the confidence to attempt an intended war of annihilation.”
Though I called it an outrageous plan, I knew all along that he had tempered his ‘1967 lines’ proposal with some noncommittal hints about land swaps, and after his close encounter with PM Netanyahu had even made references to demographic changes on the ground. But on the whole his much vaunted speech was another vacuous content-free shimmy around the issues without getting to grips with any of the insurmountable obstacles, most notably the rabid antisemitism inherent in Islam which is behind Israel’s enemies’ implacable determination to erase the Jewish race.
The Telegraph has an interesting article about what they call his “Foggy Bottom” and AIPAC speeches.
“Although Mr Obama insisted in his Aipac speech that he “wasn’t surprised” by the furore created by his decision to become the first American president publicly to state that the 1967 lines should be the starting point in talks, there is every indication that the White House was blindsided.”
He may have been taken aback by the reaction to the specific citing of the 1967 lines, merely because he assumed it was relatively uncontroversial, being the starting point that Clinton and Bush had hypothetically established in previous negotiations.
The BBC is very interested in Obama’s trip to Ireland, retracing his ancestral roots. Maybe his Irish heritage is responsible for his tendency to say what he thinks people want to hear rather than the truth. The Irish are renowned for doing that, after all.
“While the words of the Aipac speech were an improvement for Israelis on those of three days earlier, the question hanging in the air was why they could not have been uttered to a world audience rather than, belatedly, to Israeli’s staunchest backers.”
A big question. But for me the question hanging in the air is why has the BBC done so much to create such conditions? Why are we living in a world where these words cannot be uttered because they are not the words the world wants to hear?
Sue,
When you refer to the Irish, I assume you are not including David Vance 😀
This seems to be an increasingly used tactic by the BBC; report one side of the story (the approved BBC side) with links and headlines so any passing reader can see the article and then the other side of the story (the non-approved side) with no discernible links so it has to be searched for. It’s clever as the BBC can point to the existence of the counter article as proof of not being biased. Clever and evil?
On Amnesty, Irene Kahn received a modest $900 000 parting package when she retired as head of that foul organisation last year. This seems to have pissed the World Service off enough to get them voicing criticism of Amnesty last week, the first time I’ve ever heard them do that, in an interview with an Amnesty representative:
Roger Hearing: Can Amnesty give an undertaking that this will never happen again?
And
Amnesty is an organisation that relies on small donations from a large number of people. What will they think when they hear of these kinds of payouts for staff?
Could be that Roger Hearing himself donates to Amnesty. Or did, probably.
That’s funny. I would have thought $900000 would be petty cash to a Beeboid !
The question of contiguity of the allegedly upcoming Palestinian state is worrying. I was in blissful ignorance of the fact that it was apparently agreed on in some fashion by Ariel Sharon. How would the union of Gaza and the West Bank be achieved, and what would that do to Israel?
If they do join up, that would be a weapons and terrorist conduit from Iran through Egypt and Gaza to Ramallah. Nice.
Have you read this?
The strange thing is that the BBC often use Col Richard Kemp as a military expert. I wonder how they reconcile his views on the IDF with theirs?
Reconciliation is easy. They ignore it.
Surely if Gaza and West Bank are contiguous then Israel is not; how can that be right?
The Beeb’s Occupied by Gaza