Whatever the BBC’s roving reporter Jon Donnison is it’s not the renowned Alistair Cooke….Donnison doesn’t seem to know which continent he’s on, I’m not sure what planet he’s on.

Despite the BBC spending a large wodge of licence fee dosh on sending Donnison to Australia it seems he is still having flashbacks to Gaza, and can’t help telling the world…no doubt two weeks in Gaza without latte and a cinnamon bun and a dose of the Guardian imbibed daily has brought on PTSD.

What’s happening in Oz?  It’s raining, and it has a slower internet speed than Romania.

That hasn’t stopped Donnison from updating us on his personal crusade in an excited newsflash:

Donnison claimed Hamas had nothing to do with the kidnapping of 3 Israeli teens….and here he tries to suggest the Times of Israel article backs him up…trouble is, it doesn’t…as Donnison knows.

The TOI does say that ‘The officer revealed that the terror attack is believed to have been a local initiative rather than a directive from above’…..

That does not mean it was not an Hamas operation….it was approved of and paid for by Hamas….for Donnison to claim it wasn’t an Hamas operation just because Hamas HQ didn’t think up the idea is verging on dishonest when you read on:

The two men at the heart of the attack were the brothers Hussam and Mahmoud Kawasme. The latter, who lives in Gaza, was released from a 20-year sentence in an Israeli prison for his role in a 2004 suicide attack in Beersheba and exiled, as part of the Gilad Shalit deal, to the Hamas-controlled coastal enclave.

Hussam, whom the Shin Bet said played a “staff officer role” in the attack, asked his brother for, and received, NIS 220,000 ($61,000) in cash in order to fund an attack, the Shin Bet said.

So Kawasme, a Hamas operative in Gaza, ran the operation past his bosses, who must have approved it and decided to fund it.

Kawasme is described in the indictment and by the Shin Bet as a command-level Hamas operative, who obtained funding for the kidnapping from his brother, a Hamas member whom Israel expelled to the Gaza Strip as part of the Gilad Schalit deal.

Palestinian sources: Teens’ killing planned, funded by Hamas

The brother of a Palestinian man arrested as the ringleader of a terror cell that kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teens in June, suspected of funding the attack, has fostered deep Hamas ties since being deported to Gaza, Palestinian security sources said.

His ties to the attack and to Hamas will likely further implicate the terror group in the killings. Israel has alleged Hamas involvement, though Hamas’s leadership has denied any connection to the scheme.

According to Palestinian sources, Mahmoud Kawasme initiated and planned the kidnapping along with his brother Hussam. Senior members of Hamas’s military wing were aware of the plan, and gave him money to fund the attack. The kidnappers needed vehicles, Israeli license plates, weapons, and safe houses.

Donnison is being economical with the truth here….and twists it once more with his other Tweet claiming the Israeli police officer ‘told him’…falsely and slyly trying to bolster his story with the credibity of an Israeli police spokesman…@MickyRosenfeld was right in what he told me 6 weeks ago. Lone cell, not hamas leaders.

Trouble is Micky Rosenfeld denies having told Donnison that and Donnison hasn’t come up with any proof he did.

Rosenfeld said that he had told Donnison what the Israeli government had been saying all along. “The kidnapping and murder of the teens was carried out by Hamas terrorists from the Hebron area.”

 

It looks like Donnison concocted a story from the facts and due to his desperation to spin for Hamas only heard what he wanted to hear…..and now keeps digging himself deeper by refusing to acknowledge he was and is wrong.

It is quite clear Hamas were deeply involved in this, the main planner being an Hamas member, Hamas approving of and funding the operation.

Here’s something from the Times of Israel that Donnison decided not to share with us:

Be Responsible When Sharing Images on Facebook and Twitter

Terrorist organizations are bad enough – you don’t need to use falsified images to portray the horror they inspire. The real McCoy is as evil as it gets.

Good advice.  Donnison pay attention.

An Appeal:

If you want to help Donnie get into the mood and the swing of things in OZ, which he seems to have trouble doing, go buy him a T- shirt like the one at the top of this post..not only is it suitable for a warm climate it also comes with an uplifting message encouraging professionalism and a critical outlook on the world….and it’s sold by the Guardian…so kosher for a BBC ‘Friend of Hamas’.

Whilst the BBC doesn’t allow on measured, sane and reasonable commentators like Lord Lawson any more, extremist, frothing at the mouth, swivel eyed loons like George Galloway get the red carpet treatment, given a platform by the Islamist’s very own Trojan Horse within the ‘Establishment’, Peter Oborne.

Oborne is never happier than when ‘Dispelling myths about British Muslims’,   asking ‘Is post-war Britain anti-Muslim?’.   He tells us that ‘Many people have come to regard Muslims as a backward group of religious extremists estranged from wider society and incapable of coming to terms with what it means to be British.’….but of course that’s just so much prejudice and ignorance of the immoral, ignorant Kufar cattle.  He says that ‘The history of post-war Britain is a proud story of enlightenment and the steady eradication of irrational fears and resentments.’  So nothing to worry about….once again ‘The Power of Nightmares’ narrative is being peddled….nothing to see here…just ‘irrational fears’…there’s no such thing as Al Qaeda, no Islamists under the bed!

There is that old saying ‘you’re known by who your friends are’, so the fact Mehdi Hasan has a bit of thing for Oborne shouldn’t go unnoticed:

In praise of Peter Oborne

Yes, nothing like having a friend of the Islamic narrative behind the lines.

Oborne has recently come to the aid of Gorgeous George, allowing him a platform to present himself as the victim of an outrageously brutal attack not just on the body of Galloway but on the body of British democracy:

‘The attack on Mr Galloway is beyond doubt an attack on British democracy itself.’

Oborne reprised his thoughts on the BBC’s ‘Week in Westminster’ where he actually brought in Galloway for a chat.

We were told that this assault of GG was an attack on free speech and democracy, that all those who value free speech and value democracy should be concerned.

Except…whilst it was a brutal and violent attack it wasn’t an attack on free speech or democracy.  Galloway was attacked because of his virulently racist views,  something carefully not mentioned at all in the interview….racist views which I’m sure have no part in British democracy, nor, I’m certain, would Oborne suggest they should be propagated even under the guise of free speech….never mind the illegal glorification of terror in Iraq and of the Jihadists fighting British troops.

Some might argue that democracy and the law has failed when George Galloway is still an MP and walking free…not a concept that crosses Peter Oborne’s mind though.

However Oborne himself has spent a good deal of his time trying to suppress all criticism of Islam so it is somewhat surprising to hear him talk about threats to free speech and democracy.

Oborne asks if the attack on Gorgeous George is the start of a trend towards physical intimidation of politicians…whilst he mentions Jim Murphy’s travails in Scotland he makes no mention of Nigel Farage under attack by the Nats….nor of the threat by Lord Ahmed to march on Parliament with 10,000 Muslims to stop Geert Wilders speaking, or the allegations he placed a £10 m bounty on Obama’s head.  Nor indeed of the intimidation of Parliament by the ‘Muslim community’ who try override democracy and threaten us with ‘radicalised youths’ if we operate a foreign policy they don’t agree with. Yesterday the BBC in a trailer for Any Questions posed the question ‘Should we put boots on the ground in Syria or would that just radicalise people in the Middle East and here in the UK?’

Whence democracy and free speech there?….bearing in mind that supposedly, as we are constantly told,  all those ‘radicals’ don’t represent the true Islam nor the community…and yet somehow they do when it suits.

Oborne seems to pick and choose his examples with care so that they support his own pro-Islamist, anti-right wing narrative.

Good that he’s got the BBC to allow him time and space to devote to his pet prejudices.

Newsnight is run by children on a fool’s errand. Paxman

Newsnight, it’s redundant.  Who said so?  Ian Katz, the editor of Newsnight.

Well, sort of.  He tells us that the political interview is dead, has been for nearly 30 years.

Thatcher killed it, of course, oh and Kinnock.  But Kinnock doesn’t count politically, he’s a never was, so Guardianista Katz can rag him without upsetting the fellow travellers.

Oh hang on, news of the political interview’s death is slightly premature….

There are notable exceptions of course, most recently James O’Brien’s patient, forensic unravelling of Ukip leader Nigel Farage…..

and of course….

…. Russell Brand’s Newsnight diatribe against politics and politicians was watched more than 10 million times on YouTube alone and it’s hard to imagine that the spavined state of the political interview has not been a major contributor to the mood of suspicion and disgust that Brand so powerfully articulated.

So that’ll be an interview by James O’Brien who lied about and smeared Nigel Farage in an odious hatchet job and one with a drug addled half-wit who wants a revolution but doesn’t know what should come after it.

And just how self-reverential is Katz?…O’Brien being tried out as a guest interviewer on Newsnight recently and Brand interviewed by Newsnight’s Paxman, sort of, as Paxman giggled his way through it and refused to tax Brand with anything more difficult than what flavour of bubblegum he liked.

Katz lays out the problem..nothing original or new here……point scoring journalists out to show up a politician who consequently goes into lock-down resulting in a combative but uninformative interview that most people will be familiar with…

The unacknowledged truth is that half a century after the bristling exchange between Robin Day and prime minister Harold Macmillan that reshaped the relationship between politics and the media, the broadcast political interview is stuck.

[There is]  a safety-first ethos that conspires to make even the most interesting political figures seem dull, and rewards those who prove themselves to be “a safe pair of hands” with the highest offices in the land. 

Increasingly, the most senior political figures don’t simply stonewall their way through tough interviews, they avoid them altogether.

Ironically Katz quotes Evan Davis, the master of the point scoring interview that tries to humiliate and belittle the politician…any wonder they are reluctant to be interviewed.

Davis tells us that the political interview has  reached a Mexican stand-off where neither interviewer nor politician gives way : “The political interview is in a low trust equilibrium and it’s sort of stuck there.”

I imagine when you snigger your way through an interview, making fun of the politician, ridiculing him, is there any wonder you don’t get the trust?

Katz complains that politicians shut down and refuse to be candid and less defensive. He complains that interviews are impossible in such circumstances.

But isn’t that the job of the interviewer, to create an atmosphere conducive to trust and a level of familiarity in order to coax the truth out of an unwilling guest..failing that to lay out the facts for the audience and let them decide even if the politician won’t fess up.

Asking a question 12 times when the interviewee is obviously not going to give an answer is just stupid not great or courageous journalism.

Katz, after the longest moan in history comes up with the answer:

1.  Both broadcasters and politicians need to acknowledge that the interview is a transaction that must yield something useful for both sides – and especially the audience.

2.  We need to make a genuine attempt to explore and illuminate the dilemmas politicians face, to recognise that government is not a choice between good and bad policies but most often a search for the least worst option.

3.  We need to try harder to understand what makes politicians tick.

4.  Finally, one that follows from the first three: we broadcasters need to give interviews – at least some of them – the time to breathe, even if that means putting up with more boring, snoring bits.

Snooze. Does Katz write Ed Miliband’s policy statements?

You might have thought 30 years after the ‘death of the political interview’ he might have come up with something more original and less banal…otherwise the whole piece is an enormous waste of time….perhaps he should give up on interviews on Newsnight and allow guest speakers on to vent their spleen unfettered by the liberal constructs that stifle true political discourse in this country.

Geert Wilders recent speech in the Dutch Parliament comes to mind. [H/T Is the BBC biased?]

Geert Wilders: “War Has Been Declared against Us”
A Speech in the Netherlands Parliament

Ruffle a few feathers.

I have been away and been very busy so hence lack of activity here! Anyhow, here’s a thread for the weekend. Wonder if the BBC have discovered that it was a Muslim that cut the pensioners head off in London?  They seem more concerned about the CAT.

BBC had ‘deep liberal bias’ over immigration, says former news chief

Nothing’s changed since 2004.

Here’s the BBC explaining, or rather explaining away, the immigration problem:

Q&A: Calais migrant crisis explained

Immigrants are just wonderful the BBC tells us…they all want to work, they speak English better than the natives…and they don’t want any welfare handouts at all…..

Why is the UK seen as a target?

It’s long been suggested that many migrants think they would have a better life in the UK as well as access to better benefits.

In fact migrants have quicker access to housing and benefits if they stay in France.

The British Red Cross agreed that it was a myth that migrants wanted to come to the UK for the benefits.

The charity also said that many of them have been taught or know English, and want to use the language.

Trouble is that’s all hogwash….and the BBC knows it…here it misses out a crucial part of the Mayor of Calais’ reasoning as she threatens to close the port:

Calais mayor Natacha Bouchart has previously threatened to shut down the port unless the British government did more to stop the problem of illegal immigration.

And not just in that article but this as well:

On Tuesday, the Mayor of Calais said she would blockade the port unless Britain helped to control the migrants.

Wonder why the BBC avoids this:

Calais Mayor Natacha Bouchart has long argued that Britain’s “generous welfare system” is the real cause of the migrant crisis in her town.

As for welfare……even as they wait in France they demand it….

“We do not want to live like animals but as normal human beings,” the letter says, stating they want “access to decent living conditions regardless of whether we are documented or not”. Last night one migrant, Younes Sajadi, said: “This would be a sensible solution to our situation.

Besides being given “houses in Calais with respectable hygiene, freedom from police checks, and three meals a day”, the migrants also want “negotiations between France and the United Kingdom” to ensure their arrival in Britain as soon as possible.

The BBC dodges around the question of benefits here:

‘In fact migrants have quicker access to housing and benefits if they stay in France.’

The BBC suggests only that they might get benefits faster in France (Migration Watch says:  In short, it is far easier to gain access to unemployment benefits in the UK than anywhere else in the EU15. ….so not true then…good old BBC) but avoids talk of how much…..and it looks like the UK government is the most generous with the handouts, the Mayor of Calais is correct….which is why immigrants flood here.

Update: H/T  The Beebinator in the comments who saw this plea from immigrants in Calais:

If we ask for asylum in France, they will make us wait many months before we can have access to a a shelter, whereas in England, in Germany, in Holland, they give us a house, we have access to school, to proper food and dignified conditions of life. France leaves us in the streets for more suffering.

“Our benefits are some of the most generous in Europe.”?

The UK was found to have larger than average “social assistance schemes, including housing and family benefits, as well as unemployment assistance” …but several other nations offered better benefits in other areas.

So housing, family and unemployment benefits are more generous in the UK then….all the major welfare benefits.

More Than 370,000 Immigrants On Benefits

Immigration to Britain ‘cuts Romanian unemployment’

It seems we are the most generous to those in low paid work as well:

From Migration Watch:

Comparison of UK Benefits with those of the EU14

The UK is far more generous than most other EU15 countries in topping-up low wages by just over 80% through in-work and housing benefits. This makes employment in the UK a very attractive for migrants from less wealthy EU member states, especially after adjusting for differences in the cost of living.

Access to unemployment benefit is also much easier than in other EU countries.

So, benefits are more generous and paid faster than most if not all other EU countries but the BBC tells us it is less generous and paid slower.

Everyone knows the huge problems associated with immigration and that’s not including social breakdown and intercommunal conflict.

The headlines have just been full of the massive cost to schools as the population grows enormously and we have just had the latest immigration figures….and they don’t tell the whole truth as they don’t give the net figure for foreign nationals coming here….the net overall figure is reduced by large numbers of British nationals emigrating…so the actual number of foreigners arriving on these shores is in fact a lot higher than the overall net figure…for instance the last immigration figures told us that 212,000 immigrants arrived here as a net figure…but the real net figure was something like 270,000 foreigners came here  if you took away foreign departures from foreign arrivals.

We’re being lied to and the BBC is still amongst those lying to us.

You might like to read this from NewsWatch:

BBC ‘ignores key immigration reports’

The BBC tells us they are being fair on immigration and indeed, they allow one of the chief correspondents to shout it from the rooftops. But meanwhile, when hard evidence is produced to show that this is not the case, they either ignore it altogether – or say it’s wrong. How very, very Animal Farm. 

Time for another one of these…..the floor’s yours….

Last week sometime, somewhere on the BBC I heard them tell us that 95% of scientific research data was still unanalysed, lying in drawers and filing cabinets, on computer hard drives, waiting to be checked out.

Who knows what they will find.  It makes you wonder about the stuff they claim they have found…..if their conclusions are only based on 5% of the data.

As an example of this WUWT brings us this:

1960’s satellite imagery of polar ice discovers “enormous holes” in the sea ice

In the Arctic, sea ice extent was larger in the 1960s than it is these days, on average. “It was colder, so we expected that,” Gallaher said. What the researchers didn’t expect were “enormous holes” in the sea ice, currently under investigation. “We can’t explain them yet,” Gallaher said.

“And the Antarctic blew us away,” he said. In 1964, sea ice extent in the Antarctic was the largest ever recorded, according to Nimbus image analysis. Two years later, there was a record low for sea ice in the Antarctic, and in 1969 Nimbus imagery, sea ice appears to have reached its maximum extent earliest on record.

They finish off  this video with the comment that if you don’t understand the past how can you understand the present, how can you understand the future?

Astonishing that scientists today clearly didn’t know the true state of the Arctic and Antarctic even as recently as the 1960’s….and yet they still managed to compare modern ice extent with the past…and predict the future.

Harry’s Place records that

Anti-semitic incidents reach record level in July 2014

One anti-Semitic incident was missing from those statistics.

At a time in history when the Middle East is in flames and running with blood and the Israel/Palestine conflict is oft cited as the catalyst for all other conflicts you might think it was an incendiary move by the BBC when it decided this was the perfect time to add fuel to the flames by broadcasting a series that sides with Islamic terrorists and promotes the destruction of Israel.

The BBC thought otherwise.

‘You know what “clue” is in Ancient Greek? It’s “thread”.

One thread to pull it all together.

And all I have to do is find it.’

So said MI5’s Hugh Hayden-Hoyle in the BBC’s ‘The Honourable Woman’.

Many, if not all, reviews of the series have declared that it is an immensely complex and deeply plotted piece but in reality it is quite simple…once you find the thread, the message it wishes to impart.

That thread that pulls everything together for the BBC’s ‘The Honourable Woman’ is  the terrible things Palestinians are prepared to do, forced to do by Israeli tyranny and oppression in the writer’s eyes, in order to establish a Palestinian state….the thread throughout the series is that ‘price for a nation ‘.

The politics of the programme were pretty much ignored by the reviewers, not bothering to ask if there was a message in the tale, possibly as any genuine assessment would not paint the BBC in a good light,  though one reviewer declared that Palestinians would be upset as ‘once again they find themselves cast as the villains’.

The series did indeed revolve around a Palestinian group kidnapping and murdering its way to its intended goal, a Palestinian state, with the connivance of the USA and a rogue UK MI5 officer.

However….such unpleasant actions, we were repeatedly told, were the inescapable and tragic result of decades of Israeli terrorism, murder and lies against the defenceless Palestinians who had no other weapons but terrorism…a narrative echoed by sympathetic BBC reporters in the recent Gaza conflict…though that is somewhat turning the truth upon its head….the Israelis being the ones who have suffered 70 years of terrorism, attempted invasions and ethnic cleansing.

Here you can see that narrative in black and white as a Palestinian excuses her duplicity and the murder of the Jewish Stein family…..

Atika:

I lost all my family.
All my family.

Have you seen the hills? What they’re building? Every day and every day? What you try don’t change anything for my people.  We need so much more.

Nessa:

What else can I do? Do you need me to die? Me?

Atika:

Oh, no. No….But if it’s the price for a nation I’m sorry to tell you, yes.

Here is the BBC laying out the Palestinian’s case for mitigation and absolvement for their use of terrorism……an analogy where the writer uses the Palestinian’s murder and rape of Nessa Stein’s family as a metaphor for what the Jews have supposedly done to Palestine…and in turn turning the Palestinians into ‘animals’, uncultured and violent…just one more reason to hate the Jews…..and in the end Nessa, being told these ‘truths’, agrees and accepts ‘her’ guilt saying ‘I deserve it‘….Nessa is ‘Israel’ here….the writer making her the guilty symbol of the Israeli state, and making her agree that Israel is to blame…..

Zahid Al-Zahid (Fatah commander):

Do you know who I am? I am Kasim’s grandfather.
My son raped you.
On my orders.
Mine.
One of my soldiers, also, he killed your father.
On my orders.
What I have ordered goes beyond all imagining.
So I must ask you if there was a knife on the table between us here what would you do? Your brother is dead.
My orders.
The hatred you feel for me right now only matches what I have felt for your people all my life.

I know you won’t take it because you think you are better than me….More cultured, more sophisticated, more human.
And I hate you all the more because you have never stopped to think why that is.

 

Nessa Stein:

No, I have.
I have.
And I know the answer.
And I’ve known it since I first asked and after every dreadful thing that’s happened since and the answer’s always the same.
I deserve it.
All of it.

So that’s the message from the BBC…the Jews deserve everything they get from the Palestinians…all of it.

A message reinforced when Atika, as she lay dying, spat out the demand to ‘Get off my land!’

This long drawn out BBC series set in Israel/Palestine, ‘The Honourable Woman’, has been a blatantly pro-Palestinian State tract all along….with the message that Israel is an illegitimate state that should be erased from the map….a message silently bolstered by the camera lingering on a map in a Palestinian official’s office showing ‘Palestine’ as including the whole of Israel….

One of the few comments that touches slightly on the politics of the programme is this as the Guardian applauds Blick’s apparent  skill in negotiating the political minefield:

Does anyone perceive Blick taking sides? I thought he walked a difficult tightrope with real skill. Calling for equality of opportunity with the statement: “Terror thrives in poverty. It dies in wealth,” felt powerful without being contentious.

The Guardian tells us that the writer, Hugo Blick, also the producer and director,

Chose no sides and offered no political resolution.

That’s clearly not true…he sided with the Palestinians and his political resolution was a one state solution…in other words the end of Israel and the erasure of a Jewish homeland and safe haven.

As the conflict in Gaza commenced the BBC no doubt thought that The Honourable Woman could have its place in the BBC battle order as it agitated against the Israeli state…..it is a ‘weapon’ of war as much as any gun or bomb…it is a ‘smart bomb’ delivered into thousands, if not millions, of homes around the world bearing not high explosives but a poisonous message….a message delivered by the BBC on behalf of Hamas, Fatah and all those who wish to ‘wipe Israel off the map’.

That explosive message is that Israel, the ‘Jewish state’, should be dismantled and the Palestinians allowed to take the land of Israel….needless to say the BBC glosses over what would happen to the Jews, merely implying that all would be peace and harmony as the love and understanding flowed between the two peoples.

The smart bomb that is intended to target the secure walls of the Israeli ‘house’ whilst not killing the occupants, merely forcing them to flee into exile, once again.

Hugo Blick declares he has no axe to grind, the series is apolitical….

The Honourable Woman is a work of fiction and yes, it does look at real and current politics in the Middle East but, I am certainly not offering any actual, specific answers to such a complex and emotionally provocative issue except to explore what happens to fictional characters who do.

My political sympathies and/or ideologies are not relevant to the story which stands on its own particular platform.

However he admits that he has a strong interest in those politics…..

Here this fascination comes from a lifelong interest and careful consideration of the real world conflict that serves as a back drop to this story – but necessarily it only goes so far as to relate to the motivations of my fictional characters.

It is important that viewers and critics watch the entire series – as intended – before making judgements on the characters or story arc because great care has been taken to explore this complexity.

The series though had threaded through it continuous slurs against Israel and apologia for Palestinian atrocities.

As Nessa Stein was being raped by her Palestinian captor we saw that he needed to take drugs to enable him to carry out the crime.  Essentially we were being told he is a decent man driven by circumstances and unable to do it unless off his head on drugs.  As he went to rape Nessa he waved photographs of his wife and child, killed by the Israelis, in Nessa’s face as yet more proof that it is the anguish and mental pain caused by those evil Israelis that excuses his actions.

Blick’s tale is a shallow, naive allegory of the Middle East…Nessa Stein’s zionist, arms dealing father is the old Israel, or rather the Israel that it still is, ‘armed and dangerous’, whilst the daughter, Nessa Stein, that ‘Honourable Woman’, is the new Israel, or rather the ‘one state’ solution where the walls are taken down and there are no barriers any more between the Jews and the Palestinians and everyone lives happily everafter.

The father is killed off, Blick signalling his belief that Israel should be destroyed as a state….Blick admits that the conflict is embodied within the characters…what happens to the characters a metaphor for what happens in the conflict…. ‘In The Honourable Woman the conflict is used as a creative device – a reflection of the internal conflict of the central character.’

Nessa tells us that strong walls were needed for Israel to thrive at its birth, and that’s what her father offered, strong walls for a fledgling nation….but those walls aren’t needed now.
She goes on, telling us that Israel’s GDP in the previous year exceeded $220bn…a fledgling nation no more….the Palestinians on the other hand had a GDP of only $4bn.
She tells us ‘What a difference a wall makes.’

Which wall would that be Mr Blick?  Could he possibly be making a not so subtle allusion to the Israeli security barrier?  It must come down!

Nessa goes on to reveal that ‘I believe in Israel’  but there needs to be ‘fundamental change….the greatest threat to Israel is Palestinian poverty, terror thrives in poverty, it dies in wealth…..The strongest wall we can help Israel to maintain is one through which equality of opportunity can pass.’

Blick is saying that that wall must come down, it must be breached, he is saying Israel must be destroyed as a Jewish nation.

And Blick is not above using Jewish stereotypes…the moaning wife of Nessa’s brother being an archetypal ‘Jewess’ whilst the Jewish businessman, Shlomo, wanting the contract for laying communications cables, is the Pub ‘humorists’ idea of a Jewish businessman…brash, rude, loud and obnoxious….add onto that a racist talking of that ‘Palestinian bastard’ and subliminally suggesting that Arabs are ‘fucking camel jockeys’….oye vay!

It should also be noted that the BBC was happy to screen this programme despite it involving the kidnapping of a Palestinian child.  No cultural sensitivities, no postponing of the broadcast, at a time when a Palestinian teenager has indeed been kidnapped and killed.

The Guardian certainly liked what it saw and applauded its ‘relevance’…check the link they provide:
‘This new eight-parter is among the most exciting TV events of the year (pace the World Cup). The opener didn’t disappoint, weaving not one but two whodunnits – the suicide/murder of Samir Meshal and kidnap of Kasim – around the most intractable political issue of the day (it could hardly feel more timely) and the life of the woman in the middle.’

There were some nice anti-Semitic touches in this episodes that must have played well with some.

We had one character called ‘Yaniv Levi’ described as that ‘horrible, horrible Israeli terrorist’ (there are of course so many of those)….whilst the Palestinian ones were all conflicted and anguished, driven to do ‘horrible things’ by dire circumstances forced upon them by the cruel world.  The Israeli ‘terrorist’  seemed to be just a gratuitous creation designed purely to suggest it is not only Palestinians who are capable of such things.

Levi was made to look as unattractive as possible with copious amounts of body hair, slumping fatly in a track suit with a Star of David made up of rifles that the camera lingered over for some reason whenever he came into shot……some sort of message there?  He was later described as ‘an Israeli attack dog….he always has a price….what Jew doesn’t.’

Good old BBC, feeding the stereotype and making up a few new ones.

And what to make of the Stein group’s logo?  Looks remarkably like a rocket launch from Gaza with someone cheering it on.  Just a coincidence I’m sure…..it must mean something else entirely……

The Palestinian commander ordering the rape and killing is from Fatah not Hamas…why Fatah and not Hamas in Gaza?  Fatah being the BBC’s least favourite Palestinian terrorist group….the BBC once dismissing Hamas’s murderous rampage in 2006 when it threw Fatah members off roof tops and dragged them from hospital beds to shoot them in front of their families as merely ‘clearing out a corrupt and violent Fatah’.  That’s OK then.
The Fatah commander gloried in the ‘poisoning’ of the Stein bloodline with Palestinian blood….

‘The grandson of Eli Stein with my blood in its veins…first I ordered his death and now I take his heritage….how great is his defeat!’

A clear message…the Palestinian militants have fought the Israelis and killed many but the real battle will only be won by destroying the ‘heritage’, the bloodline, the purity of the Jewish state by flooding Israel with Palestinian people…the ‘right of return‘…in other words destroying the Jewish nature of the Israeli state…the whole reason for its existence….that second phase can only begin when Israel drops its guard, its military defence (represented by the death of the arms dealing father) and more importantly the will to defend itself….this loss of will is represented by Nessa taking over the company with a completely different mindset and attitude and who believes that if only the Jews and the Palestinians could work and live together all would be well…there would be no ‘Israel’ but a one state solution…..a Palestine from the river to the sea…in other words Israel is wiped out.

A nice bit of pro-Palestinian propaganda from the BBC.

The Palestinian nanny, Atika, tells us that she is ‘A stranger in her own land….but we learn how to wait’….clearly the thought is that  the tyrannical Israel cannot last forever.

Nessa proclaims that Atika is ‘The Wandering Arab’…not once but twice to reinforce the message…this is an allusion to the ’Wandering Jew’, Blick trying desperately to make clever associations and to turn the Palestinians into victims of Israeli oppression and tyranny….The Wandering Jew was forced to roam the world homeless and scavenging for a living…..Atika dramatically states ‘It is what the world has made me.’  Not really though…it is what the Palestinian leaders have made her.

When Nessa and her brother Ephra are at a family party the camera lingers on a group of Jewish men who cheer the news on the TV that ‘Israel will not negotiate with terrorists’…..Nessa says to Ephra, who initiated the change from arms dealing to ‘promoting peace and reconciliation’ for his father’s company, that ‘Pappa would be proud of you.’….Ephra looks disdainfully at the cheering Jews and says ‘Yes I think he would have been.’   Quite clear what message the writer intended to impart to us.

The Israeli Ambassador is played as if he were a Gestapo officer from the war….very reminiscent of so many WWII films….Just another coincidence I’m sure….good to have a Jew acting like a Nazi!

Blick also introduces a device into the programme seemingly just so that he can accuse Israel of being a racist state running an apartheid system.  He creates an unnecessary storyline where Israeli ex-military are given preferential treatment when applying for university courses…to the detriment of Israeli Arabs.

‘What I discovered, it seems that the, erKidma Academy, ‘funded by the Stein Foundation, ‘is running a discriminatory selection process ‘against Israeli Arabs and in favour of Israeli military veterans.   Education is a meritocracy by function.   As soon as you use it as a tool ‘for social engineering on race grounds you’re simply creating an apartheid system.’

This was, as said, just an excuse to malign Israel by proclaiming it an apartheid state (repeated for reinforcement of effect as with the ‘Wandering Arab’ line) despite being in reality one of the most democratic and open states in the Middle East…and one where Christians can consider themselves safe…not something they could do anywhere else in the Middle East.

The character played by Igal Naor, Shlomo Zahary, was a pantomime Jew, a stereotype set up to be portrayed as shifty, money grabbing and untrustworthy….Blick summarises him as someone ‘who could always smell a deal.’…what does he mean about our stereotypical Jewish pantomime villain?

Blick has a clear message to impart…Israel is a racist, apartheid state that oppresses the Palestinians who are forced to react in the only way possible for them with terrorism,  but Israel will eventually be overwhelmed by a flood of returning Palestinians to ‘their own land’ when Israel’s will to defend itself militarily is broken and the ‘purity’ of the Jewish state is leavened by the demographic reality of that mass of Palestinians making a Jewish state meaningless and impossible.

‘How great would be their defeat?’  

Some at the BBC are already planning the obituary.

Get stuck in.