Democracy for the Middle East
September 21, 2004Blogs Shouldn't Be Allowed To Criticize UK
Offended by the idea that judeophobia is as endemic to Europe as racism was once to America, an erstwhile broadcast ministry (BBC) apparatchik writes in to express his scatagorical disapproval.
Yes, it's all very inaccurate. Take Parliament's desire to expand trade with the Iranian dictators, for instance, and the recommendation presently under consideration by its Select Committee On Foreign Affairs to use the BBC to curry favor with the mullahs. Now where would Dr. Edmund Herzig of the University of Manchester have gotten that idea? Separation of government and press? Bollux. Not when there's a farthing to be made off the Muslims. The reporters of the BBC Arabic Service are already recruited from Al-Jazeera. It shouldn't be too difficult to replicate that model with the Iranian Broadcast Service and the BBC Persian Service as partners.
Yes inaccurate, like the resulting news the way you like it product the UK broadcasts across the Muslim world, news that protects the interests of the dictators (meet them walking their poodles in Regent's Park some summer), news that's saturated with the artful dehumanization of Islam's former dhimmis (second class citizens) - the Jews. Can anyone spell Ku Klux Auntie? It's nothing against the Zionists, of course. It's just that the Muslims are insisting on genocide, and well.. trade is trade. Tom Gross writes:
Again, when suicide bombers killed 26 Israeli civilians in attacks on Jerusalem and Haifa, the word "terror" was used by the BBC only when describing Israel's retaliatory (and largely non-lethal) attacks on Palestinian military targets. (By contrast, the BBC didn't hesitate to use the word "terrorism" last week, when one of its own correspondents, Frank Gardner, was shot and badly wounded by an al Qaeda gunman in Saudi Arabia.)
Some of the foreign BBC staff are quite open about their sympathies for Hamas. The senior BBC Arabic Service correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Fayad Abu Shamala, told a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, (attended by the then Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin) that journalists and media organizations in Gaza, including the BBC, are "waging the campaign [of resistance/terror against Israel] shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people."
The best the BBC could do in response to requests from Israel that they distance themselves from these remarks at the time, was to issue a statement saying, "Fayad's remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC."
Indeed, today, three years later, the BBC is continuing to use Abu Shamala as much as ever. He was, for example, one of the BBC reporters in Gaza last month, who contributed to the BBC's highly slanted reporting (on both the BBC English and Arabic services) of Israel's operation to root out Hamas bomb-makers in Rafah in the southern Gaza.
Back in London, BBC staff are careful to promote sympathy for Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups in more subtle ways. Jenny Tonge, a Liberal Democrat member of the British parliament, declared in January that she would consider becoming a suicide bomber if she were Palestinian (and subsequently led a minute's silence in March — in the House of Commons no less — for the deceased Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, who issued orders for dozens of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians). Since then, Tonge's invitations to appear on BBC have noticeably increased.
She was sacked by the Liberal Democrat party leader as parliamentary spokesman for children's issues for these remarks, but this hasn't bothered the BBC, who now invite her on both radio and TV to discuss the Middle East.
In one case, in February, BBC Radio 4's Flagship morning news program Today actually sent her off to "Palestine" (at the BBC's expense), after which they broadcast her "diary," in which she further defamed Israel and reiterated her sympathy for suicide bombing. She has also repeated her support for suicide bombers on air on the BBC on other occasions.
Similarly, there is the case of Oxford University literature lecturer Tom Paulin — who among other things has compared Jewish settlers to Nazis, has said they should be "shot dead," compared the Israeli army to Hitler's SS, and said he could "understand how suicide bombers feel." He continues to be invited as a regular guest commentator by the BBC; indeed, he is one of the two or three most frequent contributors to their most widely screened program on the arts.
Those who dare criticize Arab extremism are dealt with somewhat differently by the BBC.
For example, Robert Kilroy-Silk — who does not appear on BBC news but hosted a daytime chat show — was immediately taken off air after he wrote in a non-BBC newspaper article in January that Arabs were "suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors." He swiftly apologized and the newspaper in question acknowledged that he had written "Arab governments" and this was inadvertently changed to "Arabs" as a result of an editing error. But Kilroy-Silk was rapidly sacked by the BBC nevertheless.
However, Kilroy-Silk's remarks — as many Arab moderates who welcomed them, such as the Egyptian human-rights campaigner Ibrahim Nawar, have pointed out — were not wholly inaccurate. Limb amputation and repression of women are enshrined in Saudi law, and suicide bombing of Israelis and Americans strongly encouraged by some in government circles. Paulin's comments, on the other hand, were both blatantly biased and incendiary.
Kilroy-Silk — whose article appeared just a few days before Tonge's suicide-bomb remarks — apologized. He said he "greatly regretted the offence caused" by his remarks. But this wasn't enough to satisfy the BBC. Paulin and Tonge have offered no such apology; but then the BBC gave no indication they would expect one.
When Harvard University later withdrew an invitation for Paulin to lecture, the BBC seemed to think it was all a bit of a joke. BBC news online commented: "[Paulin's] knockabout style has ruffled feathers in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive."
The BBC rarely misses an opportunity to denigrate Israel or its prime minister. One program even staged a mock "war crimes" trial for Ariel Sharon. (The BBC verdict — that Sharon has a case to answer — was never in doubt.)
Yasser Arafat, though, receives a very different treatment. One particularly cosmetic exercise was a 30-minute BBC profile of Arafat which described him as a "hero," and "an icon," and spoke of him as having "performer's flare," "charisma and style," "personal courage," and being "the stuff of legends." Adjectives applied to him included "clever," "respectable," and "triumphant." He was also inaccurately referred to as "President." [2]
This was broadcast on July 5, 2002 — just two weeks after President Bush had called for a change in Palestinian leadership following revelations about Arafat's links with suicide-terror attacks. But then the BBC knew that they would get this kind of approach when they asked the notoriously anti-Israeli journalist, Suzanne Goldenberg (formerly Jerusalem correspondent for the London Guardian, now the Guardian's Washington correspondent) to make the program.
A particularly blatant example of bias, perhaps, but not an isolated one. The BBC rarely mention Arafat's dictatorial rule, his endemic corruption, or the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade — the terror group he set up after launching the current Intifada, a group which, in recent months, has outstripped Hamas in the number of terror attacks perpetrated against Israeli civilians. As for Hamas, Sheikh Yassin was recently described by one of BBC radio's Gaza correspondents, Zubeida Malik, as "polite, charming and witty, a deeply religious man."
The BBC's double standards are clear to almost everyone except, it seems, the BBC itself and its sympathizers in the press. A BBC spokeswoman for example, told the Guardian (May 23, 2002) after the BBC was accused by British Jews of being a prime force in inciting renewed anti-Semitism in the U.K., that "The BBC's reporting about the Middle East is scrupulously fair, accurate and balanced."
The propaganda-for-hire corruption of the BBC shouldn't surprise us, nor should its evident disregard for Jewish life. This is the same morally untalented BBC that cheered on Hitler until it was too late to save six million innocent Judeans (let alone the British Empire); the same international drug-dealers that turned China into a gigantic opium den and then fought a war to defend their right to do so; the same duplicitous, recalcitrant imperialists that collude in the genocide of Israel and whinge when the Jews swat their noses.
Are the Brits dehumanizing Jews solely for profit? Just ask the average Jewish-Brit how far below the surface British judeophobia lurks. Notwithstanding pretentions to being a modern society, Britain is distinctly pre-American and its judeophobia, like many things old European, feeds from the sour tit of the old church. Here's the Anglican vicar of Christ's Church in Surrey on the subject of the Jewish homeland:
The remarkable thing is that these self-righteous annihilationists sleep at night.
Home . Posted by Editor at September 21, 2004 05:44 PM . DFME's new internet address is www.dfme.org