Author Archives: Sue

Jews for Justice for Palestinians. What a handle! It implies that non-signatories are for Injustice for Palestinians. What about Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Israelis?

The JFJFP mission statement is pretty platitudinous at first, then it tails off into stuff that makes you think they’ve relied solely on the BBC for information.
Their blogroll features the websites of authors of those self-hating diatribes in the Guardian.

Luvvies like Stephen Fry typify ‘I’m-alright-Jack As-a-Jews’ all wrapped in the cosy embrace of the establishment security blanket. Why should they bother tearing out their hair over the complexities of the M/E, or waste precious time anguishing over why people defend evil Israel? They may as well relax and let the BBC take the strain. It’s the most well respected organisation there is, surely? Or does the BBC simplify everything for the simpletons they have created through years of dumbing everything down and missing half of it out ?

Personally, if I could be certain that the JFJFPs knew the full story, the ominously vast number of signatories would bother me in quite a different way. But I fear they might have been listening to the BBC, and relying on Wyre Davies and Jeremy Bowen to put them in the picture. For example, would they just pooh-pooh these little known facts about settlements and ignore the ‘history of the geography’ of the region if they had read these articles? Would they completely dismiss this credible hypothesis, which questions the whole desirability of “Peace” if they’d taken the trouble to read it and apply their brains to some of the similar material that’s out there before signing up?

Like Pounce, (Open Thread yesterday 23:41) I was at the keyboard when the strains of Barack Obama addressing the UN wafted in from the TV in other room.
“Those who want to see an independent Palestine rise,” I heard, “must stop trying to tear Israel down”
I rushed in just in in time to see Obama saying:

“After thousands of years, Jews and Arabs are not strangers in a strange land. And after sixty years in the community of nations, Israel’s existence must not be a subject for debate. Israel is a sovereign state, and the historic homeland of the Jewish people. It should be clear to all that efforts to chip away at Israel’s legitimacy will only be met by the unshakeable opposition of the United States. And efforts to threaten or kill Israelis will do nothing to help the Palestinian people – the slaughter of innocent Israelis is not resistance, it is injustice. Make no mistake: the courage of a man like President Abbas – who stands up for his people in front of the world – is far greater than those who fire rockets at innocent women and children.”

“Oh!” I thought, “I wonder how the BBC will like that?” Imagine my surprise (not really) when I heard the BBC’s summary of President Obama’s speech on the BBC news this morning. Apparently he focused on Israeli settlements, borders, and the Palestinians’ right of return! That would have summed up last year’s speech, surely, when he did focus on all that, to rapturous applause from the Palestinian supporting UN. (About 20:40 in )

This is what the BBC website makes of the above excerpt from yesterday’s speech.:

“There was advice too for those Arab states who back a comprehensive peace in the region. Mr Obama urged them to take tangible steps towards normalisation with Israel”

It’s as though they could hardly bear to repeat any of it. Back in their comfort zone, the website continues:
“With Israel’s deadline to end its partial moratorium on settlement building in the West Bank looming in a few days time, President Obama inevitably focused on the Middle East […….] That reference to the “hard realities of demography” represents a clear warning to Israel to acknowledge that trends in the region are not in their favour and to act on the consequences.

He called for the moratorium on settlement construction to be extended.”

I say potayto, you say potahto. But I’m allowed to cherry pick and the BBC is not.

Depicting Gaza and the West Bank as if they were English suburbs blighted by ‘neighbours from hell’ typifies a huge flaw in the BBC’s biased coverage of the I/P conflict.
Jon Donnison is one of the worst offenders. After reading yesterday’s report on Gaza (blogged yesterday by David) one could take away the impression that the blockade was merely a hardship that Israel imposed at random upon innocent people just because it could. For some inexplicable reason a terrible misfortune seems to have befallen the Palestinians. Neither they themselves nor the BBC appear to be aware of why they are suffering this unfair siege. Bad karma? Behaving badly in previous incarnations? Or just the pure evil of the Zionists.

When he mentions that Israel has eased the blockade, he can’t resist qualifying it, and reminding us, “exports are still banned and most people are not allowed to leave the territory.” just in case we started to stop hating Israel.

Stranded in the middle of a list of hardships is a reference to “near-daily rocket and mortar attacks last week,” which omits to explain where or by whom; then there is this throwaway remark: “Israel and neighbouring Egypt shut down Gaza’s border crossings when an Israeli soldier was captured in June 2006. “
An Israeli soldier “was captured?” Oh, what a silly accident that seems to have been! How careless, to get yourself captured! But who captured him? Jon Donnison doesn’t say. What has happened to him since? Jon Donnison doesn’t think we’d be interested. Instead he wants us to know some UN-sponsored statistics about the damage and destruction caused by the blockade, and for good measure throws in some extra bits about Operation Cast Lead.
An explanation of sorts comes at the end. By way of providing what the BBC is so famous for – ‘balance,’ here is Israel’s side:

”Israel says the restrictions are necessary to pressure militants to stop firing rockets from the territory.”

Puhlease don’t exaggerate Jon.

It’s not good enough to present Palestinian society as though it were downtown Slough in an economic downturn. Palestinian standards need to be understood before anyone can begin to comprehend what Israel is dealing with. If we’re to get the full picture we must be told more. Apart from describing the antics of the Islamist extremists that run Gaza, what about the PA reaffirming the death penalty for Palestinians who sell land to Israelis. Will there ever be the death penalty for people in the UK who sell property to neighbours from hell?

Pounce, familyjaffa and Deegee (Open Thread and B-BBC COMMENTING thread) have highlighted the BBC’s clumsy and ill-informed picture show about Yom Kippur. It seems like a last minute attempt to address the imbalance between their blanket coverage of Muslim festivals and customs and their comparatively underwhelming coverage of Jewish ones.
The major difference is not in the quantity of the coverage, but in the treatment. With Islam, the BBC does all it can to normalise customs and practices most people consider abnormal. With Judaism, it does all it can to insinuate that all Jews are ‘other’
I know very little about religious practices – I tend to see them all as a form of slapstick – but as a staunch supporter of Israel I have great respect for Jewish festivals and celebrations. For information about what’s gone wrong with the BBC’s Yom Kippur article, please read Deegee’s post.

Okay. here’s another egregious example of the BBC’s hatred of Israel.
Please cast your mind back to July, and the “Rape by Deception case.”
Various news organisations heard that an Israeli court had convicted a poor Arab Israeli of rape just because he tricked a silly loose woman into believing he was a Jew.
“Oh!” they cried. “In the eyes of an Israeli – sexual intimacy with an Arab is tantamount to rape!” “See how very racist they are!” they all screeched, jumping up and down with glee.
I blogged it here after hearing Ed Stourton in full flow on the above theme.

However. Not only is there more to this story than meets the eye. Not the bit about him being married with children, which he was. Nor the bit about the strong support for him from many Israelis that made him feel really really integrated; which there was, though we can’t be sure how it made him feel.

Now it has emerged that the verdict was a result of a plea bargain – ill-advised though it surely turned out to be – to protect the victim, a damaged and vulnerable woman. The full story can be read here, and I heard about it when it came to light at the beginning of this month through Israeli journalist Lisa Goldman’s article, which was also the source of the BBC’s report.

Somehow or other it has taken a couple of weeks to be given the BBC treatment, emerging as this story, deceptively entitled “Unravelling the Israeli Arab ‘rape by deception’ case”.

The deception, Dina Newman whoever you are, is all yours.
Because you have left, in true BBC fashion, the sorry tale well and truly ravelled.

You reiterate the racist innuendo, cast doubt on the veracity of the woman’s testimony, focus on various protestations of innocence by the accused, re-tell the tale which was contrived for the plea bargain – that she went to the police two weeks later when she found out he was an Arab – and omit the part that says “he then assaulted her and raped her, leaving her naked and bleeding – which is how the police discovered her.” You omit to mention […] “By the time the verdict was published, Kashur had been under house arrest for nearly two years, wearing an electronic monitoring device, presumably living in the same house as his children and his wife while he was on trial for raping another woman.”

So Dina Newman, unravel that.
Update. So as I don’t stealth edit my error without an explanation, I apologise for misinterpreting the last quote – he wasn’t accused of raping ‘another woman’ The ‘other’ alludes to a woman apart from his wife. Thanks to Dez for pointing that out.

‘As early as the first paragraph of the Introduction he claims that “never a thought is given to Gaza” in the city of Tel Aviv.’

I lifted that from ‘Philosemite’ Chas Newkey Burden’s blog post about Gideon Levy’s book “The Punishment of Gaza”, which elicited a lively response from people who think of Levy as an obnoxious self serving liar.

Seeing as how Gideon Levy has been hobnobbing with Jeremy Bowen at the Edinburgh Festival, I immediately wondered if this was the source of this morning’s report by Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in which he decided to contrast heartless greedy Jews of Tel Aviv with a couple of Palestinian ‘victims’ in Nablus.
However, as one of the Palestinians seemed to be threatening another intefada, and the other had just been acquiring an MBA from Exeter University, which some see as a Saudi-funded academic enclave and possible hotbed of Islamist subversion nestling incongruously in a South West rural idyll, this seemed at odds with the Beeb’s normal practice of showcasing the righteousness of the Palestinians and the wrongteousness of the Israelis.
The Israelis he interviewed sounded somewhat easier to identify with than the Palestinians this time. So you slipped up there Rupert old bean if you don’t mind my saying so.

Does the theme that runs through the BBC’s presentation of the middle east conflict, namely that the Israelis are land-grabbing expansionist warmongers, actually stem from Jeremy Bowen’s superficial grasp of the situation? He recently exposed this when he stated that a religious element has been “grafted on” to what was fundamentally an issue about land.

Melanie Phillips touches on the topic of ill-informed journalism in this article about the misrepresentation of Jewish history underpinning a Christian theme park in Mallorca:

“It is a narrative which gives the lie to the naive belief that the Middle East impasse is a fight over land boundaries. It is instead an attempt to excise from the region not just the Jewish state of Israel, not just every single Jew from a future state of Palestine, but the historical evidence that this land – including Judea and Samaria – was the Jewish national home centuries before Arabs invaded and conquered it, and many more centuries before Arabs started to style themselves as Palestinian.[…..]

Isn’t it wonderful to have quality newspapers written by educated writers?”

The BBC should educate its journalists, if only because they wield such a disproportionate influence.
Ignorance in journalism is deplorable, but nothing satisfactorily explains the BBC’s “wholesale adoption of the fictional Arab narrative”