Author Archives: Sue

HARDto take

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Israel’s image is being buried by an avalanche of negative reporting, which spans the whole gamut from the severe to the subliminal.

The wholesale acceptance of the so-called Palestinian narrative, and near total rejection of the Israeli one, questioning Israel’s right to exist, the interminable, repetitive reiteration of the number of Palestinian casualties compared with what they apparently regard as pitifully few Israeli ones that’s tacked on to almost every article. All told this makes the rehabilitation of Israel in the eyes of the world seem hopeless.

Palestinian grievances cast a sort of white noise, which surrounds the subject and blots out everything else. Any smidgeon of favourable news that does manage to penetrate this auditory barrier is met with cynicism and suspicion and dismissed as propaganda.

The BBC, under an obligation to be impartial, has taken many years to skew the balance-point. Perceived impartiality, which is in the eye of the beholder, has come to rest way off centre. To stay within the BBC charter, the goal posts have been moved a mile.

Sarah Montague, who often lets her personal left-wing anti-Israel leanings hang out, was an odd choice to interview Ken O’Keefe on HARDtalk. She probably landed the job after a rare interview she did while suddenly overcome by common sense. Overwhelming evidence had finally emerged about the truth behind the flotilla, and she grilled the female peace activist Sarah Colborne till she was toast.

Did the HARDtalk producer choose to pit her against O’Keefe hoping for a bit of controversy and sensation, the one BBC interviewer who would get sparks flying?
So she grilled him, but lightly; and the sparks flew, but not on the programme.

Hundreds of websites were ignited by HARDtalk, furious over what they saw as their hero’s interrogation by that BBC Zionist whore.
The ratio of supporters to critics of our deranged peace activist – is about …..hundreds to three. Hundreds love him, and about three people think he’s nuts.
Tattooed peace activist O’Keefe is a self-styled one-man provocateur, inciter, manipulator, self promoter, instigator of human shield activism, and US traitor. Bizarrely, he seems to have had something to do with CBeeBIES at one time. Not sure what, exactly. Just the man to entertain the kiddies.

People who are incensed if Israel even gets a mention on the air in any capacity other than as the spawn of Satan, people who regard balance as a matter of allocating wall-to-wall air-time to Palestinian victimhood and hardship, while depriving Israel of the oxygen of publicity altogether – these are the people who complain that the BBC is pro-Israel. They are the ones who tip the balance right off the scale, allowing the BBC to tell itself they’ve got it about right.
‘we get complaints from both sides, so we must be doing something right. ‘ they declare, in their complacent ignorance.

O’Keefe is clearly mentally unbalanced, and if anyone should be deprived of the oxygen of publicity, it’s him. Or as the late Linda Smith once said of someone equally repulsive, “ He shouldn’t even be given the oxygen of oxygen.”

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Whassup?

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James Naughtie is baffled. Some bad men have attacked a children’s’ UN summer camp in Gaza. He asks Jon Donnison if he knows anything. “Could it be something to do with Hamas?” he speculates. “Only, it’s the second time this has happened.”
“Why do you suppose Hamas don’t like the UN summer camps?” He wonders.
“They’re jealous, because their own summer camps are rubbish. Also, they don’t like girls cavorting on the beach.”

“oh; well that’s understandable then.” “We’ll be talking to someone from the UN in a minute.”
Can’t wait to see how they explain this one away. Maybe it was Israel’s fault. The illegal blockade, probably

No, you prat. It’s because Hamas is an Islamist outfit who think nothing of tying people up and throwing them off tall buildings, and they aren’t too keen on anything much, especially women’s lib, and fun. You know, a bit like those bad Taliwhassisnames that our brave boys are fighting in Affie.

Update: Surprise surprise. They got our friend, Israel hating John Ging to speak for the UN. “It’s the fault of the conditions Gazans have to live in.” (Israel’s fault.)
I’ll add links ASAP.

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Try, Try and Try Again

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The interminable legal wrangle over the non-release of the Balen report seems to hinge on whether it’s covered by an exemption from the FOI act on the grounds of being “for the purposes of journalism.”

The argument over whether ‘for the purposes of’ is the same as ‘actual’ journalism seems like dancing on the head of a pin.

Why does the BBC want to keep it secret? Surely it can only be because it harbours doubts about its own good practice at that time.

In any case much water has passed under many bridges since the BBC commissioned the report from Malcolm Balen in 2004.

It could be that they disagreed with the findings in the report and regretted commissioning it.

It could be that the BBC did stealth change their policy in some way in accordance with Balen’s findings, and hoped that would do. After the report they did create a new post. Middle East Editor. We all know what good that did.

It could be that the report wasn’t particularly conclusive, in which case the BBC’s efforts to conceal it would be more propitious as a grievance we can complain about, Palestinian style, than a revelation of whatever bias was detected by Mr. Balen.

There have been other detailed analyses of the BBC’s middle east coverage that have been ignored because they come from people who are regarded as having a vested interest. (Jews.)

One of the things people are particularly incensed about is the amount of the licence fee that the BBC has squandered in concealing it, thus drawing inordinate attention to the whole fiasco as well as wasting our money.

Pressure should be applied to the BBC to instigate a fresh report on the subject, framed in such a way that the outcome couldn’t be sheltered, either by the data protection act, an exclusion clause from the FOI act, or by or any silencing order devised by the likes of Carter Ruck.

Steven Sugar hasn’t given up. He’s contemplating an appeal to the Supreme Court.

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More Big Questions

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Sorry for bringing up this topic again. I don’t care for daytime TV, but a couple of weeks ago I heard that one of the topics on The Big Questions was to be about the morality of Israel, so I switched on. Unfortunately something went wrong with the transmission near the beginning, and the rest of the episode, including the Israel topic, was abandoned.

As today’s B.Q. concerned Islam’s PR campaign, and curiosity led me to the programme’s online messageboard. I was interested to see that several of the comments concerning the missing B.Q. blamed a conspiracy. Zionists, they said, had scuppered it. There was some discussion about whether the debate that did take place could be uploaded onto i-player, but computer said no.

It could be that Israel’s case was heard at last. I gather from Jonathan Hoffman’s comment that it was a good debate. We’ll never know.

Over the last few decades the BBC has managed to turn Israel’s wrongness into a certainty. It’s established as a a given.
Therefore, unless it includes a caveat in acknowledgement of that certainty, every fact containing a whiff or a hint of evidence to the contrary is inadmissible. In the absence of a nod in the direction of Israel’s innate wrongness, every teeny fact-ette will be discounted as Zionist propaganda.

Similarly, in political and journalistic circles, the ‘two state solution’ has turned into a bizarre cliché. ‘Two States’ is now established as a *solution* as though it’s the definitive answer to a mathematical problem. But how is two states the solution? What will it solve?
The idea that giving the Palestinians what they want will solve everything is very nice and tidy in theory. But is that what they really, really want? zigazig-ha?

Hamas and other Islamist organisations say they want the removal of Israel altogether, and the annihilation of Jews everywhere. Would that be a satisfactory solution? Would that constitute full and final settlement?
Many very aggressive and angry people clearly want much more than that. Obviously not the P.R. Muslims on B.Q.; or the nice Muslims, or the real Muslims, or the Muslims that don’t live in the massive ‘Muslim lands’ surrounding Israel.

So let’s call a spade a spade. I suggest that the two state solution is renamed the two state experiment or the two state trial, like a medical trial, where they test the side-effects of a new medicine, and try to find out whether it cures the patient, or kills him.

And further, I suggest that whenever this trial or experiment is mentioned on the BBC, it isn’t always in the context of the certainty of Israel’s innate wrongness.

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Not Inayat A Nice Way

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It seems that Guardian contributor and regular BBC talking head, Mr Inayat Bunglawala is an advocate of free speech.
Not so much when the speaker is Geert Wilders, but the kind of free speech that is specific to Muslims.
Bungle, if I may call him by his pet name, has a blog of his own in which he ascribes Theresa May’s ban on Dr. Zakir Naik to “a right-wing campaign to smear the popular Islamic speaker”.

From one extreme, i.e., various sources that support Dr. Naik and protest that when he says “all muslims should be terrorists”, he means it in the nicest possible way, to the other extreme, i.e., various ‘pro western’ sources that take the opposite view, namely that he’s a hatemonger and jolly well deserves to be banned, I’d say the BBC was fairly impartial, occupying the middle ground; and I don’t mean that in a nice way. For a British Broadcasting Corporation, surely impartiality over such a thing is tantamount to bias against “British” values.

In a similar way, the BBC seems to think Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, is a nice sort of ‘guy next door’ fellow, too. Married with kids, “personable, a nice guy, but unremarkable”. And he’s got a master’s in Business administration! He would wave and say hello to the next door neighbour. Cool.

Bungle also has something to say about Faisal. He thinks the guilty plea “should in a more sensible world urgently prompt a rethink in the US administration about its callous strategy in Afghanistan”. Obama might be already on the case.

Bungle doesn’t like Douglas Murray very much, he thinks Murray is trying to silence Islamic speakers. All these Islamophobes and dog lovers . What is the UK coming to? Never mind, Bungle, I feel the BBC is with you.

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What If

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Inspired by CifWatch, here are some What Ifs.

You know that Panorama episode where they set up a Muslim honey-trap scenario to highlight Islamophobia? Well, what if they made a Panorama with a decoy Jew to expose antisemitism like the Amsterdam police had to.

You know Alan ‘I’m telling your story’ Johnston, theBBC kidnapee that became a cause célèbre? Well, it’s 4 years on friday since Gilad Shalit was kidnapped by Hamas and the Army of Islam. What if the BBC marked this horrible anniversary by making a little fuss about his human rights?

You know the BBC’s fixation that peace will be brought closer by talking to Hamas? What if they suddenly realised that this was specious and delusive?

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Superfluous to Requirements?

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The Telegraph is almost as interested in the foibles of the BBC as we are here.
Today for example there’s Michael Deacon’s notebook.
He went to the launch event for a set of BBC history documentaries, one of which is about Pompeii, to be presented by Cambridge classics don Mary Beard, one of the Beeb’s faves. She’s known for causing outrage by saying, less than a month after 9/11, that “the US had it coming”. Mr. Deacon asked the publicist if he could interview prof Beard to ask if she thought Pompeii ‘had it coming’, whereupon the publicist moved swiftly on.

On page 11 is an item by Neil Midgley headed “Bonus time at BBC Worldwide.” People at BBC Worldwide will be getting bonuses if they’ve “performed according to the profit targets.”
Nice.
Online, Janet Daley has this: “Has the BBC noticed the change in government?”
Is the Telegraph trying to make B-BBC redundant?

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