Author Archives: Sue

A Question of Question Time

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I don’t often watch Question Time, but anticipating a clash of cultures between Douglas Murray (Hooray) and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (Hiss) I thought it would be worth watching last night. In the event the excitement was generated by action-man Ashdown.
Elder statesmen-turned-national-treasure are often afflicted by symptoms of geriatric pre-dementia such as continually harking back to the glory days, and his youthful military adventures in the Royal Marines have provided Lord Paddy with eternal bona fides for his unassailable expertise on everything to do with ‘war.’
Having taken on a Tony Benn-like egotism, he peers out from concealed eyes, talking over others, and sniggering with fake incredulity at anything they might dare to say.
Yasmin’s arguments collapsed under their own inconsistency, so she made up for it by performing histrionic gestures of mock exasperation. The director featured shots of her over-dramatised shrugs and facial acrobatics at moments calculated to best mock and undermine Douglas Murray.
The QT zeitgeist was thrown off balance by certain members of the audience. In particular a lady who had experienced the sharp end of Al Qaeda’s London Jihad, who made an emotional speech in support of Douglas Murray.
Douglas Murray has to bear the hampering ball and chain of the demonising ‘neocon’ label, and he heroically puts himself in situations in which he is outnumbered by hostile and dishonourable opponents.

A remarkable example of BBC bias, or incompetence, call it what you like, came following Douglas’s explanation that the West didn’t need to ‘be seen’ to use due process of law to deal with Osama Bin Laden in order to show that we are ‘better than them’, because the West patently shows that this is the case the whole time. (Merely by being libertarian, democratic, and free as opposed to Islamic, oppressive and barbaric)
(28:56) Paddy Ashdown, however, deliberately or through stupidity, totally misrepresented this by repeating indignantly, despite Douglas’s protestations, that Douglas had merely said we don’t have to show that we’re better than Al Qaeda. (Cut to shot of Alibhai Brown’s bizarre, exaggerated clapping.)
Meanwhile, David Dimbleby who was filing his nails or tweeting, or not paying attention for reasons of his own, sat back and allowed this slanderous disingenuous drivel to continue unchallenged. (I’m fairly sure a shot of this was edited out of iPlayer) But whether he couldn’t see, or wouldn’t see what what Paddy was getting away with, it was appalling chairpersonship.

“How old are you?” Paddy had been allowed to ask Douglas earlier. The same question should have been put to Paddy, begging the answer “Well past it.”
Finally, I mustn’t forget to query why Armando Iannucci was given so much time to waffle on meaninglessly, or indeed why he was on the programme at all.

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Targeted Serenading

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We’ve had many surprises this week. One was seeing Mark Regev in the studio, speaking without constant interruptions and contradictions. We had the usual anti Israel tripe from various talking heads too, endlessly bringing up the illusory obstacle to peace, Netanyahu’s refusal to extend the settlement freeze.
Eventually, Hamas’s mourning of Bin Laden’s assassination, or heroic martyrdom, was mentioned. Even the fact that the Arab Spring might not necessarily presage enlightenment and democracy as we know it was voiced, openly, on the BBC.

However, back to normal this morning with Thought for the Day (1:48:06) The Rev Angela Tilby’s words of wisdom addressed the intractable problem of Israel Palestine. Now that those two naughty boys Hamas and Fatah have made friends, she brayed, peace can happen at last. Doves and Hawks, she purred, are both vital to the process. Hawks, though annoying, must be brought in from the cold. We must not treat this as a playground dispute, she warned, unaware that that was exactly what she was doing.
Her two unconvincing reminders that Israel’s fears were rational stuck out oddly, as though they’d been squeezed into the script as an afterthought, having remembered the need for impartiality just in time. The final bit, about Daniel Barenboim’s Gaza gig and the wonderful peace giving properties of Mozart avoided mentioning the tricky subject of Hamas’s aversion to music.
But this isn’t about Today. Most people take its irrelevance as a given, something like being made to swallow a tonic that is thought to be good for you, but isn’t really.
It’s about the item that followed. Are targeted assassinations acceptable? Does Obama’s recent escapade set a precedent? Geoffrey Robertson QC had been listening to Thought for the Day, because he mentioned it to help his argument that targeted assassinations are never justified. What, he speculated, if Sarah Palin as POTUS decided to assassinate Fidel Castro, or Julian Assange? Or what if some Ayatollahs decided to assassinate Salman Rushdie? (What indeed.)

Danny Yatom, former Head of Mossad was on the line. “ Danny Yatom”, says Sarah Montague, authoritatively, “You think it’s better to kill them that remove them alive. “ “No” he replies from some echoing Zionist den, “It’s better to capture alive and obtain intelligence, but we are at war, and in that case, if you don’t shoot, you are shot.”
So our human rights lawyer can’t see the difference between random hypothetical murders of people that a head of state might disapprove of and Israel’s intelligence-led targeted assassinations of terrorists in pre-emptive self-defence in. a. state. of. war.
The USA should have got Daniel Barenboim to play Al Qaeda some lovely Mozart instead.

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Deliberately So

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I wish somebody else had written this because it’s about the usual, and believe me, I don’t want to be repetitive. But needs must.

Anyone who heard R4’s Saturday Live this morning will know what I mean. The studio guest was ‘comedian’ Mark Thomas who has walked the length of the separation barrier in Israel /Palestine. Saturday Live’s genial host, exceedingly left wing Reverend Richard Coles, was all ears.

Not wishing to appear one-sided, Mr. Thomas took a moment to explain that the Second Intifada was very bloody, before lapsing into a melodramatic chronicle of the Palestinian suffering caused by checkpoints and the wall. Meanwhile, Stockholm Syndrome sufferer John McCarthy chimed in with a trail for Excess Baggage, the following programme, which he hosts. McCarthy regularly devotes much of ‘Excess Baggage’ to recommending idyllic holiday destinations such as Damascus, and eulogising over Arab hospitality. Which they duly demonstrated by holding him hostage for several years.
While Mr. Thomas was underlining the unnecessary suffering caused by checkpoints and the barrier, McCarthy interjected with his twopence-worth – “Deliberately so.”

Much as Mark Thomas’s ‘comedian’s cockerney’ portended a preconceived political agenda, I still hoped this might have been tempered by his eye-opening adventure. But his eyes had remained blinkered. Barriers are bad, and must come down, he surmised. Bombs still go off, proving the wall doesn’t protect Israelis as they claim. Here I’m assuming that I’m preaching to the converted, much as the BBC consistently does from the opposite perspective. Please, if you’re not sure what I mean, you need go no further with this.

Mark Thomas is anxious to tell us that his escapade was solely motivated by a devilish, naughty-boy, ‘ooh I am awful’ spirit, and a genuine, healthy curiosity.
But, same as anyone else – you knew it all along – he was merely exploiting ‘our’ hatred of Israel to make a few bucks out of his book, Extreme Rambling. Upcoming gigs seem to be doing rather well.

Funnily enough, he’s written an article for the paper that laps up, with gusto, any morsel of anti Israel rhetoric that comes along. It features an account of a rather moralistic encounter with the late Juliano Mer-Kamis, whose Jenin based inspirational theatre project purportedly channelled would-be suicide bombers’ hatred into the performing arts. Mr. Thomas didn’t disclose that their success rate was dubious. Nor that poor Mr. Mer-Karmis was thenceforth summarily dispatched by some raving Salafist murderers.

On his journey Mark Thomas spoke to Israelis as well as Palestinians, but predictably the list he provides on his website comprises only Israeli pro Palestinian organisations such as ‘Jews for Justice for Palestinians’. There is a deep well of such bodies in Israel. Sadly, not so on the other side.

Also on the programme was an interview with ex Guantanamo Bay guard Brandon Neely who is enduring severe pangs of guilt and regret about the inhumane treatment he unthinkingly meted out to former inmates. The Rev’s introduction alluded to the WikiLeaks revelations about innocent detainees, with nary a whisper about the accompanying revelations that explained why we were involved in the war on terror in the first place.

I have a great deal of sympathy with innocent people caught up in wars. Unfortunates who are in the wrong place at the wrong time do suffer unfairly and unjustly. If inhumane treatment is a tacitly approved practice, that should stop. Should our sympathy for those who are inconvenienced, ill treated, or who suffer loss and pain obscure our sympathy for the intentional victims of Jihad who are never coming back to tell the tale? No it should not.

Ultimately such people are victims of the same terrible thing; the collateral damage that stems from a wicked ideological fanaticism that sets out to overpower and subjugate, or dispose of, unbelievers and those who don’t belong. Deliberately so.

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Tangled Webb

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Reverend Nadim Nassar, a Syrian-born Anglican priest living in Britain, keeps in touch with contacts in Syria. He also listens to various media reports of the crisis. In an interesting interview on Today with Justin Webb he remarked on how extreme the differences are between what he’s hearing on Arabic stations, Al Jazeera etc. etc. – and the BBC. I would have liked to hear exactly what he meant, but no luck.

Justin didn’t pick that up, but he did go up in my estimation when he gave William Hague a chance to advertise the hypocrisy of the government’s floundering foreign policy. Our intervention in Libya was on humanitarian grounds. Our non-intervention in Syria is on none-of-our-business grounds. Glad he cleared that up.

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Suicide by Political Correctness

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What a fascinating turn of events. WikiLeaks has revealed that the government was so determined to uphold our reputation as a safe haven for the world’s oppressed that it repeatedly ignored warnings about radical Islamic extremists and refused to admit that harbouring them was not the simple humanitarian gesture they believed it to be.

Now that they’ve managed to turn British cities into Al Qaeda hubs, it’s a bit late in the day to say a shamefaced sorry. The labour party still diverts all recriminations over their open door immigration policy by making a reluctant apology for their small mistake concerning Poles.

At last we’re starting to hear on the BBC what we’ve known all along.

I made a flippant remark about Frank Gardner, but I really meant it.
If, as he says, he too knew all along, and (as he said on Today) Mubarak had actually gripped his hand and warned him, why didn’t he use his influence to persuade the BBC to inform educate and entertain us through one of the many programmes and documentaries that are specifically there to spread the word?

Presumably political correctness was too prevalent at the BBC, even for someone in his position, to penetrate the barrier that separates us from reality.
The real gem was the discussion at 7:31 with Frank Gardner and Kim Howells. Now ‘they’ know, the government knows, and we know they know, what is going to be done about it? If the government won’t act because they’re afraid of losing public support, the BBC must ensure the public knows, and then dealing with the problem firmly will be a massive vote-winner.

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Double Standards

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When something bad happens to Jews or Israelis the BBC reacts with indifference or worse. The reporting of two recent incidents (or non-reporting of one of them) contrast sharply with the BBC’s treatment of similar incidents, which, when they concern Palestinians or Muslims, cause cataclysmic BBC eruptions.

Incident 1, the burning of the Torah in Corfu, was mentioned on the Open Thread with a link to Ray Cook’s blog, but ignored by the BBC. Burning Korans make quite a splash, don’t they? (H/T Demon 1001)

The second incident is described sensitively by blogger Oy Va Goy. It concerns the shooting of some religious Jews, killing one and seriously injuring others, and was at least reported by the BBC, though they dwelled on certain things which almost seemed as though they intended to justify the actions of the Palestinian police perpetrators.
When I switched on the radio this morning I caught the end of a news bulletin. They seemed to be saying that the dead and injured Jews were in a Palestinian controlled area without permission. That’s all. Did anyone else hear that news bulletin?

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The Protection of Information Act

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Everybody who frequents this site will know that the BBC has spent lashings of our telly tax on legal fees to safeguard the secrecy of a report they themselves commissioned. The subject was their coverage of the Middle East, and the question was: is the BBC biased against Israel?
The legal battle took many twists and turns, and Steven Sugar, who steadfastly fought for the release of the Balen report, very sadly and inopportunely died at the age of 60, shortly before another stage of the unfolding court case was due to be heard.
No-one knows whether Malcolm Balen’s findings confirmed the BBC’s anti Israel bias, but one thing’s for sure, the battle to keep them secret certainly gives the impression that they did. So, in some ways, the BBC’s intransigent refusal to let us take a peek works against them almost as much as the revelation of its contents might have done.

One slightly ironic bonus of this ongoing legal tussle is that the public gets to discover a bit of extra information for free, namely that the BBC is virtually exempt from the obligations of the FOI act, because of a cunning exclusion clause concerning ‘journalism art or literature,’ for the purpose of, yer honour m’lud.
Anything in that category is ‘out with’ the FOI act. In other words the entire BBC output can, if it likes, shelter under the same get-out umbrella.
So are we up in arms at the arrogance of the BBC for wallowing in a unique all-embracing exemption from scrutiny, which flies in the face of the ultra desirable, most-wanted virtue du jour – *transparency* – the essential quality that all organisations long for, and the one thing that makes everything come good? (WikiLeaks, anyone?)
Bear with me.
As well as (and to a large extent because of) the media – the dinner-party set, socialists, trade unions, celebrities and the Muslim community – all currently bask in a toxic climate of pro Palestinian advocacy and anti Israel activism. It’s a kind of global man-made antisemitic climate-change, and it is alive and well, flourishing even, in our universities. You can virtually get a doctorate in hating Jews.

The Arab sourced funding that some of our universities currently rely on has led to the alarming ascendancy of Islamic studies departments set up by Saudi Princes at places like Exeter, where anti Israel polemicists Ilan Pappé and Ghada Karmi prevail, and the LSE, Oxbridge and various other renowned academic institutions. I vividly recall reading with dismay this 2008 article about Aberystwyth University. It implies that if a student won’t toe the line they will probably fail their degree.
So here’s my point.
I found a FOI request that I am glad the BBC refused to deliver. It’s in the public domain, and there’s no super injunction preventing me from knowing about it. I found it on Google, by accident, as I was looking for something else.

I have no idea what this Palestinian gentleman from Strathclyde University intended to do with the information he requested. Ideas that ran through my head ranged from: *write a learned dissertation on Hasbara, *organise a troll blitzkrieg on B-BBC, and sadly, but inevitably, *kill infidels.

Why would I be grateful that the BBC refused to give details of the complainants and complaints about anti-Israel reports to a post graduate student who might be doing some important academic research? Because the student is a Palestinian activist with links to some very hostile people. Because we live in a culture of intimidation. Because B-BBC is number 12 on the list. Because because because.

I hesitated before posting this. I sought advice. They said “publish!” which I hereby do, sincerely hoping that B-BBC and I won’t be damned. What a sorry state I’m in to have such worries. It’s regrettable that some of us, because of our particular circumstances, are conscious of the need to take limited steps to preserve our anonymity, just because we dare to defend Israel.

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Easter Offering

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This is a Guest Post By esteemed commenter Chuffer.
______________________________________

What you missed by not watching News24 at 11 o’clock, Easter Sunday….

Dramatic Intro Music.


Nicholas Owen: This is BBC News; the headlines at 11 o’clock.
Video: grainy film of a Syrian funeral.
Owen: The Liberal Democrats launch a stinging attack on the [confused pause] campaign to change our voting system.(Video ends – cut back to frowning and confused-looking Owen.) They accuse the ‘No’ side of lies and deceit.

Video: William Hague in a chair (Strapline: ‘Referendum Row’)
Hague: British nationals should leave Syria now unless they have a pressing reason to remain. Obviously I’m concerned that if this trouble got worse, some of them would find that it wasn’t easy to get out of Syria at all.

Video: Cameron and Clegg in a school.
Owen: And, er, the other side have been batting away those criticisms, obviously; we’ll have much more on this, this hour.

Video: urban Scottish street, cutting to red letterbox
Owen: Britons are advised to leave Syria as more than one hundred [garbles] protestersarereportedtohavebeenkilled and also, in Scotland, police hunting those sending, er, parcel bombs to Celtic – people involved in Celtic – are appealing for a young couple to come forward.

Closing headline dramatic music – video alternates between blank screen and static shots of a front door.

Makes you proud to write a cheque every year to keep this flagship news service on the air.

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Less is More

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The necessity for brevity in BBC online articles calls for ruthless pruning of irrelevant material. Ditching the detail and binning the background lays bare the priorities and prejudices of the BBC. What’s hot and what’s not; the salient v the superfluous. What’s left unsaid says it all.

Let’s peek beneath the cloak of impartiality to expose the agenda-driven underbelly and unveil the secrets of the subtle but revealing body language of Jon Donnison.
In other words, what you say and what you leave out speaks volumes. The answer my friend is lying on the cutting-room floor.
Democratically elected!
Hamas, for example, is a violent Islamist group, resolutely opposed to Israel’s existence. They were elected to govern Gaza ‘by the people’ “democratically” yet they are officially a terrorist group – the BBC doesn’t know whether to love them or loathe them.
The tangible and subliminal Arabist vibes radiating from the BBC have inspired many Europeans and Westerners to see Palestinians solely as victims, not of their own government’s policies, but of Israel. Some particularly passionate, empathetic individuals are so moved emotionally (and physically) that they cross the globe to participate in ‘the struggle, ’ achieving both celebritydom and martyrdom.
I can I can’t!
Hamas can’t make up its mind whether it can or can’t control breakaway factions that send rockets into Israel, (it can’t) or capture hostages so as to make demands, (it can).
When Italian pro Palestinian activist Vittorio Arrigoni was abducted by Salafist Islamists, but prematurely hanged before the set deadline, Hamas set off in pursuit of those responsible to show who’s boss.
Blame Israel!
Meanwhile, despite the video, Salafists denied that they were involved, and various experts suggested Mossad bumped Arrigoni off before he could participate in the forthcoming anti Israel publicity-stunt flotilla.
Hamas organised a shoot-out, whereupon, as the BBC puts it, two Salafist suspects “died”.
Not Enough Information !
There’s more, but the BBC sticks with:
*a brief summary of the outcome of the siege.
*The abduction, and Hamas’s condemnation of it.
*An endearing quote from Hamas about the humanity of the Palestinian people.
*A brief description of Salafism,
*another brief description of the siege, including
*injuries sustained.
*Another reference to Hamas’s condemnation of Arrigoni’s killing, this time ‘by Jon Donnison in Ramallah’ and
*a reminder that this is the first kidnapping since 2007, indicating that Hamas have shown restraint and been very good well-behaved boys.
Deemed Superfluous!
The BBC evidently decided the following points are irrelevant.
*Hamas are as violent as Salafists who are affiliated with Al-Qaeda.
*“Peace Activism” is the exact opposite of what it says on the tin.
*Arrigoni was a shit-stirring trouble-maker.
*Arrigoni’s girlfriend was, of all things, ”co-ordinator of Israel/Occupied Territories Section” of our old friend Amnesty International.
*Ludicrous conspiracy theories that blame Israel for everything under the sun are rampant in the Arab world.
*Israel desires peace despite being surrounded by hostile Jew-hating neighbouring countries which constantly and deliberately provoke retaliation as an excuse to resume the traditionally devillish tactics of warfare that the international community deems immoral and underhand when practised by other countries, but which said International community blatantly overlooks when employed against Israel by her enemies.

Since the BBC has a habit of reiterating anything that casts Palestinians in a good light and Israelis as liars, the last point deserves reiteration as often and as repetitively as the death toll from Operation Cast Lead.
H/T Pounce

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