Author Archives: Sue

Complicity in Israel-Bashing Jamboree

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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.

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How The Establishment Closes Ranks Around the BBC

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This is a cross post from Autonomous Mind

“Regular readers may recall a couple of posts back in January where we told the story of an Autonomous Mind reader who complained to the BBC about an edition of Hardtalk.

This is the one in December 2010 where President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives was allowed to state, without challenge, that due to human induced climate change sea levels around the Maldives are rising. The lack of journalistic rigour and blind acceptance of such a controversial viewpoint as fact led to the complaint being made and the BBC’s two fingered resp0nse in January which included the immortal words:

We’re committed to honest, unbiased reporting and are determined to remain free from influence by outside parties.

Following the response, our reader then filed a Freedom of Information request to the BBC asking for details of:

  • how many complaints/ accusations of bias the BBC received from the public about the BBC’s coverage of climate change
  • how many of the complaints received about climate change were upheld by the BBC, i.e. were accepted
  • brief details / a list of all the complaints upheld, i.e. the details of the upheld complaint and the BBC’s response (excluding details of the person complaining)

In publishing the story in a follow up post we shared the unsurprising news that the response from the BBC to our reader’s request was a refusal to provide the information sought. Once again the BBC was hiding behind its establishment-given provision to withhold any information the BBC considers to be held for the ‘purposes of journalism, art or literature’.

Read the rest:

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All The same Mistakes

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The only thing that was new in Andrew Marr’s interview appeared to be Obama’s acknowledgment that ‘conditions on the ground have changed’ in the Middle East. People are attributing this to Netanyahu’s response to the ‘1967 lines’ section of Obama’s speech. On BBC news 24 with Zeinab Badawi they infuriatingly cut Netanyahu’s reply. It was essential to listen to Netanyahu’s speech in full to critique his reaction, but as the BBC would rather misunderstand it, why bother?

The West’s desire for a new dawning of an Arab age of enlightenment has triumphed over reality. Effigies draped in the Israeli flag, strange fruit hanging in Tahrir Square, are ignored while the West’s wishful thinking is projected onto the so-called Arab Spring. Echoes of the deluded optimism that led America to project all its desires onto Obama’s vacuous promises of Hope and Change and swept Him to power, startled, on a tidal wave of expectation with only a platitudinous manifesto to sustain him. Obama was bound to disappoint.

As we pull out of Iraq it is generally admitted that we failed to plan for the ‘peace.’ The overthrow of Saddam was the beginning, not the end. Yet we repeat this error having learned nothing.

Obama’s obtuse self-serving interpretation of the Arab revolutions, his deliberately naive pretence that they herald ‘democracy,’ his willful ability to ignore the rise of Islamism and refusal to acknowledge that the single unifying feature of the Arab street is hatred of Israel and Jews, were the discordant notes in Obama’s ambiguous backward-looking speech.
In the Marr interview Obama refers to ‘ rockets fired by Hizbollah’ but completely fails to mention the ideology behind them. Similarly his two ridiculously biased ill-informed guests sagely warned that unless Israel makes more concessions to its deadly enemies there will be dire consequences for the whole world.
On Barry Rubin’s Pyjamas Media summary, commenter ‘Terry’ describes Obama as:
“an adolescent, a sophomore radical imbued with all the Leftist BS slogans, he is immature & his intellectual development stopped long ago, he is intellectually shallow & not particularly well-educated or well-read. He has no understanding of history or economics beyond all the incoherent leftist slogans & the crap he heard from his leftist & Islamist friends & acquaintances, the Rev. Wright comes to mind.”
The BBC is hostile to Israel, openly disrespectful to PM Netanyahu, superficial, lazy, pandering to Islam; in fact the BBC itself fits the above description of Obama perfectly. How else could they get away with promoting 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? They make no secret of the fact that this is still their aim. They don’t have to. Even if they shouted it from the rooftops, the world would project their own cuckoo-land interpretation onto the religion of peace, and the BBC is up there aiding and abetting.

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A Matter of Time

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I want to mention Jeremy Bowen again, and the interviews with John Humphrys and Palestinian official Husam Zomlot and Mark Regev. While I’m at it I may as well bring in Mark Mardell’s BBC Obama fanzine blog too, for another example of the BBC’s approach. The comments illustrate my point. Go instead to Caroline Glick if you’re interested in Obama’s policy on Israel.
The following is not verbatim, but a rough transcript of Webb and Bowen.
Webb. “Were these concerted demonstrations part of the Arab Spring? […]Is that how Palestinians see them?”

Bowen: ”I think it is the way to see them as a madder of fact, and [….]it was organised by Facebook and other social media. Israel says it was inspired by Iran…I think it’s a….*….who knows …but Palestinians have many grievances of their own. I think that they have seen what other people in the Arab world have been doing and they’ve thought well hang on, why can’t we do something as well as… like that.. to get on the streets or on the roads.”
Webb: “Pretty worrying for Israel..”
Bowen: “That’s why the Israelis opened fire on them and killed quide a lot of people. It was the biggest loss of life in one incident in South Lebanon since the 2006 war and the Israelis have warned that this is just the beginning, that Barak the defence minister has said that in the future they might have to deal with similar and maybe more complex incidents.”
On to Syria.
Webb. “They got into Golan and occupied the Golan Heights as well.”
Bowen then proceeded to analyse the situation in Syria. The ‘trouble’ in Syria. The Assad regime wanted quiet borders. The Israelis want Assad to stay.
Jeremy Bowen is perfectly well aware that the similarity between Facebook-orchestrated plans for a third intefada and the Arab spring is that the planning was social-media inspired, which enabled large numbers of people to co-ordinate their activism. The comparison ends there.

Mark Mardell should know this too, but his infatuation with Obama clouds his thinking.
In BBC world, the Arabs are revolting, end of. They see it as a simple matter of ‘the oppressed’ trying to break free. The fact that one lot is targeting their own oppressive leaders and the other is targeting another sovereign state is of little consequence, because the BBC has spent the last 60 years presenting Israel as the great oppressor of the Palestinian people, interlopers and thieves of ‘Muslim lands.’
This was illustrated in the interview with John Humphrys I mentioned earlier. I won’t transcribe, but I will say this. John Humphrys began with a fairly robust line. “how did you expect the Israelis to react?” However, the Palestinian gentleman was arguing on an entirely different level. Kindergarten. “Keys.” “Deeds.”

You started a war Mr. Palestinian spokesman. You lost. Your Arab brothers have had 63 years to absorb the refugees from their own failed war of annihilation, something the Israelis did straight away with the refugees from their own “Nakba”, you know, the one nobody mentions, where 800,000 Jews were chucked out of the countries they lived in, with nothing.
That’s just a fraction of the sort of thing Mark Regev means when he talks about the Palestinians rewriting history; but, sorry, time is running out.
What was fairly obvious is that behind all this is the ever more visible feeling from the BBC that Israel’s legitimacy is in doubt.
‘we are just at the start of this matter and it could be that we’ll face far more complex challenges.’
Time is running out.

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Nakba Day

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11:53 am.

Driver in Tel Aviv Truck Rampage shouted “Death to Jews”
Israeli forces ‘fire on Palestinians’ near Gaza border *

One of these stories is not reported by your BBC.

A large red banner proclaiming ‘Breaking News’ adorns the BBC Middle East page. This advertises the latter story, whereas at the time of writing there is nothing at all about the former.

So. The BBC was interested in Israel’s reaction to a well-publicised, premeditated, deliberately orchestrated, provocative demonstration by anti-Israel activists when it first erupted near the Gaza border, whereas a terrorist mowing people down in his truck in Tel Aviv whilst shouting Allahu Akbar was not deemed newsworthy, even at the time when the original violence was limited to the border with Gaza, and before it had spread to all Israel’s borders with surrounding enemy states.

Since I began writing about this at 11:53 am, the website has been updated several times, the violence has multiplied, the BBC has become even more excited, and the presentation has become even more one-sided. For more details please see five invaluable comments by the esteemed Pounce, on the Open Thread.

The BBC speculates that the recent uprisings in Arab countries have emboldened the Palestinians, thus equating the Palestinians with the BBC’s pet freedom fighting seekers of democracy in the Arab World, and Israel with the totalitarian oppressive regimes who clamp down ruthlessly upon them.

The exact opposite of the truth.

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Catty Comment

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Late last night I switched on BBC1 in the middle of a mesmerisingly tasteless kinetic version of Heat Magazine, called “See you in Court”

What do George Galloway and Danielle Lloyd have in common, apart from both being remorseless self-publicists?
You got it. They’ve both been contestants on Big Brother. Appearing on Big Brother may be an instant, if sad way of increasing your public profile, but contestants must be aware that in doing so they sacrifice all, and I mean all, privacy.
Now this ill-matched twosome have turned to the courts of Justice to seek damages from corporations they claim have intruded upon their privacy. Ms. Lloyd had some images stolen by Carphone Warehouse during a phone-to-phone data transfer. The subject of the images in question happen to be the very things (another twosome) she is famous for, and she considers these particular images private because they show some scarring, due to a recent operation after a cancer scare. She claims. She has hired a respectable, expensive-looking lawyer to handle the case, whilst at the same time acquiring, courtesy of the BBC, some nice useful publicity for what she calls her career.
This is what we have come to expect from the BBC, and to be fair, this country. Cause and effect, effect and cause.
Much more unwelcome was the sight of George Galloway, the dandified publicity-seeking former Respect MP who seems to have nothing better to do than lead a camera crew around London, onto a train, and to the Guardian Offices to meet his good friend the Marxist Islamo-phile associate editor of the Guardian, Seaumas Milne, I can’t remember why.
Mr. Galloway feels he has had his phone tapped or bugged, but he’s not quite sure, by the Newspaper that Andy Coulson was in charge of.
These cases are very lucrative for the lawyers and possibly the winner, but in the scheme of things not particularly relevant to the advancement of all mankind. George Galloway is enjoying publicity, free, gratis, and to no benefit to you, me, or the man on the Clapham Omnibus, for his sickeningly hypocritical vanity project. A man who purports to be a politician, i.e. beyond reproach, who willingly, without duress or coercion, appeared on what they call ‘National Television’ wearing a red leotard while impersonating a cat in a most unsettling fashion, is claiming huge amounts of money, on the bandwagon of discrediting David Cameron because he once employed Andy Coulson, in the celebrity phone hacking mountain out of a microscopic molehill.
And the BBC adds insult to injury by beaming this repulsive trashy saga into our homes, pitched, needless to say, firmly on the side of the protagonists, and against the defendants, at our expense.

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Springtime For Arabs/Happy Independence Day Israel

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What is the Arab Spring? People think the uprisings in the Arab world denote a kind of dawning of the age of Aquarius.

“Harmony and understanding,
Sympathy and trust abounding”

they chirrup delusionally.

But the Arab Spring is….. a spring. Coiled, tense, and poised to uncoil in an explosion of hatred for Israel, and perhaps the West as well.
The BBC have lost interest in Egypt, but the Muslim Brotherhood is in the ascendant, and Jupiter Aligns with Mars, Diplomatic relations have been re-established with Iran.

Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars.

Right.

The BBC’s Kevin Connolly acknowledges that if democracy emerges from the Arab Spring it will be the kind of democracy that grants the people, by popular vote, the one thing that unites them. The freedom to give full vent to their anti Israel sentiment.

Popular sentiment in Egypt appears to run strongly against Israel and sooner or later if the largest country in the Arab world is to become a democracy, then it seems reasonable to assume that will be reflected in the attitudes of future parliaments and governments.

Connolly appears to find nothing wrong with that, and I gather he’s saying that the Arab uprisings will empower the ill informed, uneducated masses to scapegoat Israel for all their very own failings, corruptions and incompetences, and it’s up to Mr. Netanyahu, the instinctive prevaricator, to deal with it as best he can.

Tunisia. Egypt. Libya. Bahrain. Yemen. Syria. Iraq.

Dissonance not understanding
Death and violence abounding
Only falsehoods and delusions
Darkly dying dreams of visions
Cryptic twisted revolution
Stifling true liberation.
Aquarius! Aquarius.

I wonder if Kevin Connolly has the faintest idea of the value of Israel as a staunch, vital and enormously useful ally of its fellow Western countries – of the U.S. as well as the UK, not to the mention the entire NATO alliance.
The BBC marks Israel’s 63rd birthday with a report about the protest against the government by Gilad Schalit’s relations because it ‘mars Independence day event.’
The Palestinians attack Israel. Israel imposes sanctions. Hamas syphons off aid leaving poverty and deprivation in Gaza. The Palestinians blame Israel. The Palestinians attack Israel. Israel retaliates. The Palestinians still blame Israel. Gilad Schalit is kidnapped by Hamas. Hamas demands the release of hundreds of Palestinian criminals in exchange for his release and denies him access to the Red Cross. Everyone blames Israel.

I can’t wait to see how the BBC will report the forthcoming Nakba Day.

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Meaningful Engagement

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Melanie Phillips has written another open letter, this time to David Cameron. The one she wrote earlier, to Jeremy Hunt about the BBC, must have got lost in the post, so it’s doubtful that she had high hopes of a response to this one by return of post, or indeed ever. It’s a great letter, even if it only reaches readers of the Spectator and the Commentator, and not Prime Minister Cameron himself.
When the Israeli PM visited London the other day, it seems David Cameron told him in no uncertain terms that in order to qualify for our unshakeable support Israel must engage meaningfully with the new Hama-tah /Fat-as coalition. Their refusal to come to the table unless Israel reinstates the settlement freeze is equally unshakeable, so presumably David Cameron thinks this is what Israel must do. This, Melanie points out, amounts to a kind of extortion not unlike a Mafia style protection racket. What a pity we can’t confront David Cameron with a similar ultimatum – unless he engages meaningfully with Melanie Phillips, we’ll withdraw our unshakeable support. But he knows that’s pretty shaky already.

The trouble stems, she feels, from Messrs Cameron and Hague’s lack of interest in the subject, and their consequential reliance upon Foreign Office briefings (think Rowan Laxton) for advice on foreign policy. As they seem to be largely making it up as they go along, they can’t be following it to the letter, although inserting “Britain is a good friend of Israel” into the text must either be a baffler or a double-bluff.
Melanie’s letter puts the case for Israel with eloquence, clarity and passion. She summarises Britain’s appalling historical record of the heartless betrayal of Jews, just in case Mr Cameron is not familiar with it. She makes a powerful comparison between the world’s unanimous condemnation of Islamic terrorism and the Arab world’s determination to annihilate Israel, and asks why the world condemns the former yet encourages the latter, when the motivation behind both is identical.
She implores the PM to understand that caving in so one-sidedly to Arab demands is tantamount to rewarding the aggressor and penalising the victim, and warns him, if nothing else, to think of his own legacy.
I think we all know that to hope the PM would acknowledge the letter, read it even, is fanciful. He will get away with ignoring it because our National Broadcaster has taken it upon itself to muffle the truth about Islam and to demonise Israel. Many people are therefore prepared to overlook what quite a few others are nevertheless beginning to feel uncomfortable about. Meanwhile the BBC is merrily and expensively setting the scene for a re-enactment of the 1930s, when the cavalier downplaying of the significance of what that silly German fellow with the moustache was up to led to the unimaginable events that took place under their very noses. “Peace in our time”, the prime minister is saying, but this time round, there’s no Churchill.

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