The other morning, when the BBC was on strike and there was no Today, I watched instead a film about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, on the channel known as ‘Yesterday.’
The film began with the birth of Israel, and didn’t shy away from including Britain’s shameful cruelty and heartlessness in rigidly enforcing a cap on immigration by Jewish refugees to Palestine, even though they were known to have been fleeing Nazi persecution. It showed the ship Exodus with a cargo of 4,000 concentration camp survivors hoping to restart their lives in Palestine, being turned turned away by the British, heedless of the fate of those on board. It described the formation of the Irgun, and explained quite fairly the cause of their resentment against the British.
Fast-forward to the film’s focal point. The filmmakers had decided that Rabin and Arafat were partners for peace, both equally dovish and conciliatory, and on the brink of ending the ‘intractable conflict’ in the Middle East. Aside from a snapshot of the Grand Mufti’s notorious meeting with Hitler, Arafat’s ‘three nos’ and the intifada he engendered as he famously walked away, were conspicuously absent from the narrative, as was Islam’s inherent antisemitism.
Subtlety and nuance were sacrificed for the simplicity of the fallacious message that Rabin and Yasser Arafat were heroic peaceniks, while the peoples they represented were unanimously opposed to peace.
Yigal Amir, Rabin’s assassin, was portrayed as a rogue representative of the right-wing warmongering Israeli public, though a little more deranged; an extremist, motivated by a commonly held malevolent determination to scupper the peace process just so that Israel could continue sadistically oppressing the Palestinians. In other words, Israel’s own Anders Breivik, acting on behalf of the universal right-wing nutter fraternity.
The myth that Arafat sincerely sought peace thrives to this day, and his modern-day counterpart Mahmoud Abbas has inherited the undeserved mantle of moderate seeker of peace. In the Telegraph Benedict Brogan explains why David Cameron is a dupe, playing dangerous games with his Security Council vote. Netanyahu’s latest concession doesn’t interest the BBC, and neither do the qassam rockets that were fired from Gaza recently . As a Harry’s Place commenter predicted, only Israel’s retaliatory strikes were worthy of a mention by the BBC.
When one of the Fogel family’s murderers was convicted yesterday the author of the BBC web article felt compelled to mention Abbas’s condemnation of those behind the killings, as if to emphasise that he was a man of peace, and included, even in this incongruous context, the obligatory reminder that the world and his dog regards settlements as illegal ‘though Israel disputes this’, which smacks of the accusation that, for having the impertinence to be there, the family was ‘asking for it’.
Much of the British public clings to the sentimental parody systematically projected by the left, in which Palestinians play the part of the universal victim. Images of wailing women brandishing giant keys, mutterings about bulldozed homes, shortages of food and medicine, all because of the Zionist oppressors and nothing to do with their very own ‘democratically elected’ corrupt and venal leadership. The widely-held belief that Israelis are Western interlopers transplanted onto ‘Muslim land’ by interfering outsiders who who should have minded their own business, is alive and well. Pallywood seduced the BBC, and the BBC seduced the liberal left world.
The aid that Israel trucks into Gaza on a daily basis, the luxury hotels, the abundant provisions, the shopping malls and restaurants that are springing up, the virulent antisemitic passion that fuels the Islamic world, and the findings that a majority of Palestinians are opposed to the peace process and are of the opinion that Israel should not exist, are all absent from the BBC’s impartial reporting.
Anyone who wishes can easily track down Arabic television programmes, translated by Memri. They can see interviews with Nonie Darwish or Wafa Sultan on Arabic T.V. stations, Imams and preachers waving their arms histrionically, screeching infantile rhetoric that would be laughable if it weren’t as incendiary and hate-filled as anything that ever emanated from Nazi Germany.
If you care to look, you can watch clips from Palestinian children’s TV, and observe men in animal costumes implanting aspirations in the next generation of Palestinian children. Not, Mr. Michael Morpurgo, of peaceful coexistence with Jewish children, but of murdering Jews for Allah, and promoting the glory of martyrdom with all the gusto and advertising acumen of T.V.’s Mad Men in every sense of the phrase.
Yet the BBC has never shown any interest in that. Viewers, mildly interested in world affairs, but not enough to look beyond the BBC, are treated to half a story. Most people are baffled by the left’s ‘cognitive dissonance.’ Nick Cohen says, ‘of ‘the “liberal” press where I make my living:’
“you see them deploy two tactics. The first is a determined refusal to admit the nature of radical Islam. They never discuss the misogyny, homophobia and antisemitism, let alone stir themselves to confront it. Second, they pretend that anyone who does describe and condemn it is a part of the supernaturally powerful “Israel Lobby” – or the “International Jewish Conspiracy,” as previous generations called it.”
I have never forgotten the deference with which the production team of Any Questions treated Baroness Tonge. They had invited me on to the programme with her, perhaps because they thought it a bit of laugh to sit someone called ‘Cohen’ next to someone who had updated the medieval blood libel and suggested that an inquiry was needed to ascertain whether Jews were stealing the vital organs of Christian earthquake victims.”
In Britain today we have people expressing openly antisemitic opinions while enjoying respectability and a fully functioning public life, regularly given a platform on the BBC. We have anti Israel meetings, which purport to be pro Palestinian, where people are shouted down disgracefully; we have rabbles behaving appallingly in supermarkets and outside Israeli businesses and overt antisemitic bullying in our universities, yet the BBC, paragon of virtue and righteousness looks the other way.
oh not this Mr Arafat then….the lying antisemitic scumbag one
http://youtu.be/nGwCGNVGy1M
nudge nudge wink wink…say no mowwaa
i seem to remember a certain beebo, sheding tears
on his “good riddance”…i mean passing.
beebo…. somethings NEVER change
Well said, sue.
Cheers, DP
I find this merry go round of deceit, so gaulling…occupied land- the Palestinians & their so called oppression., the sycophantic apologist trio of Cameron, Hague, Obama….add beneath contempt El Beeb…is it any wonder the narrative is so “out”
feel like im stuck on replay, you cannot occupy any territory,
whose people never had jurisdiction over it in the first place,
Israel had it from 67 from when Jordan tried to invade
before that Jordan had it for 19 yrs since 1948 (Egypt – west bank)
before that Great Britain had it
before that Ottoman Turkey had it
before that the Crusades
before that Rome
before that well probably jewish people
The “Palestinians” already have a state: Jordan. OH WAIT they tried to kill the king and take over the country in September 1970, so the Jordanians kicked them out.
No other country would have them…. and thus, that’s WHY they’re in Israel.
& Israel IS a state. Not a group of settlers….bloody travellers camping for a while without permission….
I see also that other useful idiot so beloved of Al Beeb, Robert Fisk, has just been exposed as lying in the course of his eternal quest of spreading his anti-Israeli bile.
The good folks over at at Honest Reporting have him nailed:
http://honestreporting.com/independent-admits-robert-fisk-story-was-false/
‘Cranmer’:
“As Israel buries her dead, Gaza continues to fire her rockets and mortars ”
[Excerpt]:
“So, the next time you hear BBC reports of an attack by the IDF upon Gaza, with streaming footage of Palestinian blood and detailed commentary of bombed hospitals and schools, try to imagine the 20, 30 or 40 deadly mortars and rockets which preceded the raid. They’ll have been fired towards Ashkelon, Pit’hat Shalom and Shaar HaNegev, with the intention of wiping out, inshallah, Israeli civilians of whatever gender, age or creed. It won’t have been reported, of course. But it’s causal.”
http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2011/08/as-israel-buries-her-dead-gaza.html
Saw that last night – I see Atlas is alive and well, and somewhat calmer these days.
Splendid post Sue!
Thanks Bio, much appreciated, coming from you.
Watch “The Struma” and realize how important it is that Israel remains secure and a place of refuge for Jews. ..and the roll of the British in the disaster.
http://tinyurl.com/3q7o44h
Thanks, very moving.
With apologies the link to the Struma story is…
Here’s an interesting snippet of information about the siege of Gaza the bBC censor missed:
Smuggling drives Gaza’s building boom
“I didn’t have a job for four years because of Israel’s blockade. Now I’ve got more work than I can handle,” smiles Musla Embayed a chunky-looking builder, with a vice-like handshake. Musla is working on a new block of flats in the centre of Gaza City. He is caked in a thick crust of sweat and dust. It is tough work with the temperature approaching 40C. “There is too much work now,” he laughs.Musla is benefitting from a mini-construction boom in the Gaza Strip. On almost every street of the coastal territory’s biggest city, you can see some type of building going up or being renovated
Back north in Gaza City, I meet Rafik Hassouna who runs one of the biggest construction companies in the Strip. Mr Hassouna does not have a tunnel himself but he buys the materials from merchants once they are in Gaza.”Now I am using around 1,300 tonnes of gravel and cement from the tunnels every week,” he says.
So just one of the numerous builders in siege stricken Gaza requires around 1300 tonnes of gravel and cement a week.
Lets say there are only ten such companies then that equates to 13,000 tonnes that need to be imported. Then there’s the cars, food stuffs, rockets and other stuff which make their way into Gaza and the question needs to be asked is Gaza really under siege?
At the bbC they think so?
I heard this report by Jon Donnison on the Today programme on Tuesday.
It wasn’t related to any actual news. It’s merely a celebration of the smuggling trade in Gaza and the ingenuity of the tunnel smugglers. Jon Donnison is full of admiration.
The extra bit in the web article is there for context and additional Israel-bashing.
“Decades of conflict, not least Israel’s major offensive against the Islamist movement Hamas from December 2008 to January 2009, have left thousands of buildings and homes needing to be rebuilt.”
Israel’s major offensive. Out of the blue, apparently. That’s the BBC’s idea of context. Explaining why they need construction materials, but not why there was a ‘major offensive against the Islamist movement Hamas.’
“Israel’s ongoing blockade of Gaza means there are still tight restrictions on construction materials coming legally across the border.”
Israel’s ongoing blockade. More BBC style context. Explaining why they need to smuggle construction materials, but not why there’s a blockade.)
“Israel is worried, it says, about concrete and cement being using for military purposes by Hamas, which has governed Gaza since 2007. Israel regards Hamas as a terrorist organisation.”
Israel is worried, “it says” Mustn’t accidentally give the impression that anything “Israel says” can be believed.
Only Israel regards Hamas as a terrorist organisation? So do we, supposedly. (” We,” meaning Britain, not the BBC.)
Yes, the BBC’s standard half-truth on this subject – leave out all the others who rightly regard Hamas as a terrorist organisation and the impressiojn is created that it is only the unreasonable, paranoid Jews.
BBC agenda-pushing at its finest.
Well, we can push back. Another letter is due the BBC big shots apparently managing this charade of ‘reporting’ on the Middle East.
Well, the easy answer is that they shouldn’t need tunnels, and should be allowed to move the goods across a normal border. But that’s only if one believes the BBC about Hamas. Which I don’t.
Naturally the BBC won’t report this:
Building Materials Enter Gaza in Honor of Ramadan
Building Materials Enter Gaza in Honor of Ramadan Posted on August 3, 2011
The spokesman of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) announced yesterday, August 2, 2011 that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak approved the following measures in honor of the month of Ramadan, celebrated by Palestinian Muslims, and as part of the civilian policy towards the Gaza Strip:The import of construction materials for ten private sector factories in Gaza, under the supervision of the international community.
Textile and furniture exports and expansion of agricultural exports to Jordan.An additional 3 million cubic meters of water from Israel will be transferred to Gaza as part of an effort to improve the quantity and quality of drinking water for the Gaza Strip population.Change of address for more than 1,900 Gaza citizens, who have residence in Judea and Samaria.Increasing the number of merchants permitted to enter Israel and Judea and Samaria.
These measures were made possible following administrative work, which was directed by COGAT and included numerous meetings with various governmental ministries and security agencies, the Palestinian Authority, and the international community.
This week, Major General Eitan Dangot, the coordinator of government activities in the territories, met with representatives of the Palestinian Authority and updated them on the concessions and gestures that were approved for the holiday in the West Bank and Gaza.
Instead we get this:
New Israeli air strikes on Gaza
Second night of Israeli strikes on Gaza after rocket fire
Was previously headlined Fresh Israeli strikes.
You see, it’s always Israeli attacking and “striking” again, and again…
http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/versions?commit=+Search+&page=1&q=fresh+israeli+strikes
Good work, bio. That’s the BBC – a news-laundering organisation passing itself off as a news provider.
Our Neighbor and Why We Have to Kill Him
Our neighbor lives in the house in which our grandfather used to live. He claims he bought the first part of the house from a Turki, and later the second part from a British bank, but that doesn’t make the sale any less illegal: my family lived in that house for hundreds of years and we don’t accept the documents of sale. Now he’s living there. He is the son of monkeys and pigs.
The problem is that he’s not just brazen, he’s also strong, although he is a tiny guy.
The whole neighborhood hates him. He’s a thief and possessed by the devil. But he seems to be able to beat everyone. We tried to force him out of the house together, but it didn’t work. He has bulletproof windows, and the roof is made of inflammable material.
All we think about is him. Our own home is in ruins because all our efforts, all our money and ideas and energy are devoted solely to destroying our neighbor’s house. We’re utterly convinced that we will be perfectly happy just as soon as we’ve killed him and his house is a heap of smoking rubble. We live for one thing only: our neighbor’s demise. It’s a noble ambition for which we’re all willing to die.
Sometimes our neighbor seems to forget we exist, then we throw a couple of pebbles at his windows. If we’re lucky, there’s a window open and we toss a Molotov cocktail inside to start a nasty fire. That makes our neighbor angry, and that’s good. We don’t want him to forget us. Life means nothing to us as long as our neighbor’s living in that house. So we make sure he remembers us, even though we can’t force him out and he sometimes beats the hell out of us.
Every now and then our neighbor gets fed up with our stone-throwing — those are the best moments. Then he storms out of our grandfather’s house and smashes our kitchen or bathroom or refrigerator to pieces. By doing so he proves that it’s right that we hate him. We provoke him until he reveals his true demonic character. That’s what we live for. We can’t beat him, but there’s something satisfying about watching him kick our old, worn-out, empty refrigerator to shreds after we have tried to ransack one of his freezers — he has several, all full of food which he bought with the wealth he found in our grandfather’s house. What he does to us is much worse than our provocations, but we keep provoking him because that’s the main thing we want in life.
Our neighbor, the dog, wants us to leave him alone. We can’t. His death is our ultimate ambition in life. We live in our hovel, we grow nothing in our garden, and we leave our schoolbooks on the shelf because we dream of returning to our grandfather’s house and work solely towards our neighbor’s collapse. Nothing is allowed to distract us from that.
Our neighbor claims that when he bought the house, it was just a wooden hut on a piece of barren land that he turned into a palace. He claims he planted a fertile vegetable garden — that’s a lie. It was an estate with fertile soil and the bathrooms had gold taps; our grandfather told us so himself, we even keep the key to his house in a sacred place. If we had still been living in our grandfather’s house then we would have had all those freezers in which our neighbor keeps his food. The family of monkeys and pigs never lived there before; our neighbor’s existence is based on clever lies and forgeries.
We keep challenging him and when we’ve insulted him enough and managed to wreck some part of his house, he marches angrily into our place. We can’t stop him and we have no idea how long he’ll stay in our hovel, until one day he leaves. Then we lick our wounds in satisfaction and survey in intense pleasure all the destruction he left behind, and we show it to the world. Our scars prove to us and to the world that our cause is just. We know he doesn’t harm us when we leave him alone, but we want him to harm us. If he wouldn’t, the world would think he is just an ordinary guy. Which he isn’t. That’s why we provoke him. Without him harming us, we wouldn’t exist.
We want to kill him, but we don’t have the right weapons. He has the means to kill us all, but he doesn’t, the coward. If we had the weaponry he has, we would have killed him long ago. And the fact that he doesn’t kill us, although he could, is a sign of his unbearable arrogance.
Some, who don’t live in our neighborhood and who don’t know how things work around here, occasionally ask us, “Why do you keep provoking him when you know that he’ll hit back so ferociously?”
This question proves they are ignorant about our neighborhood. We do it because that’s what our life is about. Our neighbor, who’s a murderer of prophets, humiliates us just because he is there. That’s why we can’t think about anything else. Our grandfather’s honor is worth risking our own lives and those of our children and grandchildren. We have no future as long as our neighbor lives in peace and plenty. None of us in the neighborhood can build as long as his house remains standing.
Strangers sometimes try to persuade us that we ought to build a viable house on our own lot. But nothing is viable beside our neighbor’s stolen property. He is the burning focus of our existence. He is rich, so we are poor. He is powerful, so we are weak. He has to disappear.
A little further along in our neighborhood we have a friend who supplies us secretly with stones and Molotov cocktails. He’s working on a big bomb that will reduce our neighbor to a miserable pile of atoms in a fraction of a second. That bomb will kill us too — that hellish thought is almost erotic. Our neighbor will burn, and we will as well, but one thing is certain: we won’t feel inferior anymore; at last we’ll have beaten him, in death — which we don’t fear, but he does.
The neighborhood will be completely gone. And that’s how it should be. Death will free us of the son of monkeys and pigs, and of our infuriating obsession with him.