Harry's Place

Fairly typical of the BBC, which will always without exception tell us that Israeli settlements on the West Bank are against international law, but not that Hamas bombardments of Israel financed and armed by Iran are violations of the Geneva Conventions.

Who was the Press TV person, and who was the interviewer?

Incidentally, the BBC Radio 4 Today programme the other day interviewed Ezra Nawi as if he was a perfectly credible conscience driven Human RIghts activist, without telling us about his background in spreading settlers-poison-Palestinian-wells-stories and settlers-control-the-Israel-government-and -judiciary-stories. HP readers will be unsurprised to know that the presenter for that story was Jeremy Bowen

Quite a common BBC error, born, to be charitable I think out of laziness and the Polly Fillerish nature of long days, not enough content and too few journalists.

Roger Bolton on the Sunday Programme interviewed a guy last week from the Muslim Association of Britain in full ’so Mr —- what do muslims think of this’ mode. It’s lazy and dangerous.

The BBC are not telling their listeners that Press TV are a Iranian government funded operation, the station’s slavish support of the regime, and the problems they have had with impartiality.

Oh!

That’s new.

Disappointing

And completely unsurprising.

Well, what do you expect, Neil D?

Of course, the BBC are extorting £140 a year from you to enable them to do this sort of thing.

“Incidentally, the BBC Radio 4 Today programme the other day interviewed Ezra Nawi ”

Nobody even knows him in Israel. These people earn their living with your money.

as Nick and Morgoth put it, what the fuck do you expect from the BBC?

It’s the BBC for the sake of Thor, so naturally they are sympathetic to the Press TV Iranian regime spin on things. Hey Neil D winter is coming, that time of year, are you disappointed by you know natural laws?

Neil D, how about expressing disappointment at the latest speech by Ahmandinjehad. What difference?

PS Nick, I’m originally from South Africa. Are you back in SA for good?

“The BBC are not telling their listeners that Press TV are a Iranian government funded operation.”

I don’t know what’s more disgraceful, BBC bias or Harry’s Place grammar.

It should be “The BBC IS not telling ITS listeners that Press TV IS AN Iranian government funded operation…”

Bloody radio journalists. You should never let them write.

Personally, I don’t think laziness comes into it; I think it’s totally deliberate.
Did anyone see the 4th part of the Kate Humble ‘Frankincense Trail’ programme? For the benefit of non-UK readers, this was a recent series about the ancient frankincense trading route from Oman to Gaza, presented by a woman who usually does nature programmes.
She travelled from Oman, through Saudi, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan, meeting allsorts of interesting local people on the way. Then she crossed into Israel at Eilat.
She went on and on about the Israeli security, but all we saw was a pretty inocuous border crossing.She took a taxi into town with a driver with a wierd sense of humour who told her that the residents of Eilat were people sent there by the Israeli courts -and the BBC left it in!
Then she went to a hotel in Eilat. For some reason the BBC had booked her in to a Shabbat-keeping hotel, and she had arrived on Shabbat. So she got a tour of the hotel by the in-house rabbi, showing the Shabbat lift, the Shabbat coffee machine, the synagogue,complete with Mechitsa, of course. Now we all know that 100 meters from there is the rest of Eilat including bars, pubs, clubs and hotels which would look totally normal in any Western town, but we never got to see those; only the wierd religious stuff.
Then she drove to Shivta to the Nabatean ruins. She must have got permission to visit there from the army because most of Shivta is an artillery practice range, but no interview with any one of the numerous experts on Nabatian history from Israel’s universities, no interview with anyone from the nature reserves people…
Next to Jerusalem, and the only interview with an Israeli was with a representative of Na’amanay Har HaBeit: a tiny group of dreamers who want to build the third temple. No proper explanation as to the fact that El Aksar sits on the Temple Mount, just an expression of dismay that these Jews want to rebuild their temple where the mosque is currently sited.
And that was it as far as Israel was concerned. She then went to ‘Palestine’ (apparently located in ‘arabia’) where everyone was lovely and friendly and old and young, Christians and Muslims held Christmas parades in idyllic harmony, but all of course in the shadow of the terrible Israeli wall.
So anyone not knowing better would think from this supposedly non-political programme that all there are in Israel are military (border guards) and rather whacky religious people who have allsorts of strange customs and restrictions and want to destroy Muslim holy sites. Oh, and some desert.
If that’s not selective editing, I don’t know what is.

Nabatea was located in Arabia Felix, I think, but that was the only sense in which they were “Arab”, for they spoke and wrote in a dialect of Aramaic. The old route to Gaza passed near Mtzpe Ramon and the high school geography teacher took me on tour round the ancient ruins of the rain collect (not the right term, I’m sure) farms.

Ironically the route was ended by the Roman annexing of Nabatea and then the creation of the province of Palestine in place of “troublesome” Judea. The spice route shifted further north, passing through Palmyra.

Yeah, Nurse, it sounds of a piece with the English Arabist view that Israel is an alien, European intrusion into an otherwise essentially peaceful and Arab middle east.

Those bl–dy Jews, sorry, Zionists.

Reminds me of when, back during the Reagan Terror, Phil Donahue (American teevee personality) would have “citizen-to-citizen” discussions with Soviet apparatchik Vladimir Pozner.

Yes, apologies for the appalling grammar.

No doubt the BBC didn’t want to appear “Islamophobic” or “racist”.

“as Nick and Morgoth (and Larry) put it, what the fuck do you expect from the BBC?”

I had a visitor from the UK staying with me recently, a moderately, (well quite) Left leaning visitor actually, after pointing out to said guest that the BBC world service is obsessed with pushing anti-Israel propaganda she said that she “didn’t see it”.

After a small and simple experiment, a week of jotting down how often the BBC mentioned the Israeli’s, my guest, after reviewing the data said (with a very supercilious smile) and I quote: “You should really stop believing the Israeli propaganda”

Now work that one out, if you can, because it has been almost 3 months since that snippet of Leftist logic and I still haven’t got any fucking idea what that reply is supposed to mean.

I swear if it had not been a female member of my extended family, I would have been up on an assault charge.

That’s why I watch Fox. Iran is getting slaughtered. 300m Americans are ready to press the Go button. Fox showed maps of three possible Israeli attack flight paths.

Israelinurse, you have to admit that the Fiddler On The Roof soundtrack as background music to the program really made that piece swing with cultural reality. The lovely touch of barging-in on the Yentl School of Matchmaking was a gem. I felt that some old footage of Orthodox Jews dancing around with the Sefer Torah and getting a bit drunk was pure cameo theatre.

Meanwhile, back at the E & A Salt Beef bar on a typical Sunday we pan left to the Carmel where a barmitzvah is taking place……. we move down to West Bank where a Mikvah is in session…..

“Oy, vers de knishes already?”

(Just to make David T remember the good old days. I just LOVE the way Jews get stereotyped in the media)

I’ve only seem a few minutes of that Kate Humble show while flicking through- by chance the bit where she was talking rather sternly to the nutty temple rebuilder and the bit in an earlier episode where she was shamelessly sucking up to some arab royal pratting about in a glider, he might have been a saudi, I couldn’t stand to watch more than a few seconds. I’ll try not to think about it when I’m watching her next wildlife show.

see here: http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/08/14/the-ayatollahs-propaganda/

move down to West Bank

Confusing? East Bank and West Bank are two roads at right angles to Stamford Hill Station and running parallel with the railway line. Not Judea and Samaria. Oh, I don’t know!

There’s always a load of women hanging around the bus-stop there but they never seem to find the right bus! I’ve seen men offering them lifts.

Israelinurse: It’s a bloody good thing that I didn’t watch that programme. I think that I would have throttled the bloody telly! And to think that we are blackmailed into paying for this sodding tv license or prison… I wrote a letter to a mainstream newspaper’s travel section this week. Why is it, I asked, that you NEVER feature anything to do with Israel. You know, that country at the eastern end of the Med. with great beaches, restaurants, weather, destinations – you know, the usual stuff – and why do you NEVER quote what their currency is valued at vis a vis the rate of the exchange. Of course I didn’t get a reply. Israel is persona non grata so far as anything in the UK is concerned. The fact that there are millions of visitors each year visiting, especially, Jerusalem, is irrelevant. I steam…

Remember the airline who’s interactive flight map didn’t label Israel or any Israeli towns. They said they inherited it from an Arab airline. That explains it then.

Then we had MPAC UK force BBC to retract “Jerusalem is Israel’s capital” said in a pre-match piece for Israel v England. BBC wrote a grovelling apology.

not forgetting Bowen being cited by OFCOM for not exercising due impartiality in some reports about Israel,.

But, in defence of Humble, I think the spice flow was the closest thing in antiquity to the supply of oil today, which is one of the reasons the Romans sought to secure it. Spices were that curious paradox: essential luxuries.

you have to admit that the Fiddler On The Roof soundtrack

Topol?

Reading this is a catastrophe for me.
I’d just got used to Spring/Autumnwatch without that boorish unfunny twat Oddie, enjoying the real knowledge of natural history content that Kate Humble and Chris Packham provided, and now you tell me that the former is a snivelling dhimmi?
Too awful

I’m going to disagree with people here and NOT attribute this to incompetence.

I don’t believe there’s that much incompetence in the world. I think people at the BBC must be getting pay offs.

It’s not like KH is a talentless bimbo at all, she’s really good on those [insert season here] Watch shows which are complicated bits of live telly she’s got to weave together, appearing knowledgable with directors barking down her earpiece.
Someone aught to juxtapose her performance bumlicking the arab royal and tonglashing the Israeli nutter though and stick it on youtube.

Anyhow I think it’s 100% understandable why the BBC doesn’t want to get involved in calling out other stations for being state propaganda organs.

Do any HP readers have any observations from memory or research about the history of the BBC and institutional anti-semitism?

I doubt very much whether Kate Humble herself had much input into the script – there’s most likely a director dictating the overall tone, including in the editing suite.
The subject matter itself is fascinating but the overall impression I got of the series was that the director could not decide whether he wanted to make a film about an interesting piece of history or a political/social commentary on a certain region of the world. The official subject matter at times seemed to be an excuse for the latter. This was particularly unfortunate because the chosen presenter is obviously much better at fact-based material than opinion pieces.
It was very noticable that whilst in Saudi Arabia when KH was forced to cover herself from head to toe -something she openly declared as finding very vexing- the opposite view was painstakingly presented when she interviewed local women. Great effort was made to present SA as both traditional in a manner not understandable to Westerners and at the same time modern, innovative and with a sucessful social structure. By contrast, the portrait of Israel was very one dimensional and totally predictable, which is a great waste because there is so much variety within the country.
As an Israeli I just get so sick of seeing my country stereotyped into soldiers and religious extremists when there is actually so much more going on. It always seems to me like very lazy journalism or film-making: lazy from the point of view that this is what the film-maker knows will find favour upstairs, so he does not trouble himself or take a risk by presenting something fresh and different.

my guest, after reviewing the data said (with a very supercilious smile) and I quote: “You should really stop believing the Israeli propaganda”

Now work that one out, if you can,

What she means is: “I go along with what’s in fashion. Hamas is in and Israel is out, and I know that ‘cos it says so on the telly. So there you are, case proved.”

Nick (back in Sith Ifrika) – I’m probably a bit late to the party here, but are you the NickSA of The Daily Ablution fame? You’ve been missed, if so…

It used to be that the Communists used to have to make an effort to trick Western journalists. Not much of one, but some effort. And they made an effort to find out the truth. My favourite being a bunch of naive Maoists being allowed into China and being shown a “typical” worker’s home. One of them, being slightly smarter than the rest, asked the worker how much the fridge cost, and the oven, and the kettle and so on. The proud “owner” did not, of course, know. But these days they just write the lies themselves.

mesquito – “Reminds me of when, back during the Reagan Terror, Phil Donahue (American teevee personality) would have “citizen-to-citizen” discussions with Soviet apparatchik Vladimir Pozner.”

Showing your age there mate. I remember Phil. What is more I also remember him being mocked by “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death”. Arguably Shannon Tweed’s finest film. But then I remember his wife starring in “That Girl”.

It is interesting that Donohue invented the Talk Show, but since then the format has gone from the Soft Left he represented to the Right. He petitioned for the right to broadcast an execution. No doubt any number of Talk Shows would like to do so today but with a very different agenda in mind.

I’m going to disagree with people here and NOT attribute this to incompetence.

I don’t believe there’s that much incompetence in the world. I think people at the BBC must be getting pay offs.

Conspiracist theory thinking. Things like this are unlikely to be a deliberate policy, but more due to lack of awareness and a failure to invest time in looking into people’s background in the frantic rush to fill in space. Hence all the desperate needy calls for the public to ring in and text in their thoughts….

OT: “Bite me Jew Boy!” Allegation that an NBC producer sent this to Alex Rosenwald of “Americans for Limited Government”. One link of many: http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2009/09/nbc-denies-bite-me-jew-boy-accusation-against-jane-stone.html

Now, did someone use her Blackberry unknowingly?

Gene may be able to offer some updates.

What she means is: “I go along with what’s in fashion. Hamas is in and Israel is out, and I know that ‘cos it says so on the telly. So there you are, case proved.”
groupthink is a part of all this imo, People love to be part of a cheery peer consensus far more than they like thinking for themselves. It was probably useful to our apelike ancestors.
Other examples:
Emperor’s new clothes.

Experiments where you can get one subject to agree with 9 apparent peers (who are the experimentors stooges) that a plain yoghurt tastes like strawberries.

An SWP meeting.

All you need is a consensus or even an illusion of one.

Nice riff on Kate Humble, Israelinurse – I caught a glimpse of this show inbetween zapping channels, and from the jolly hockeysticks demeanour of the presenter, as well as it being on BBC TV, I just guessed that it would be antisemitic even without knowing the full details which you have now filled in.

RE: Cookie Cutter: “That’s why I watch Fox.”

That explains it, then.

The problem with that show could be that it’s trying to mix the light entertainment genre of travel show started by michael palin where the presenter makes some journey based on some arbitrary principle or retracing the footsteps of a famous traveller of the past with the current affairs genre without anyone ever having given it any thought.
KH wouldn’t be my first choice for either sort of show really, but certainly not the second type. I’d give her the benefit of the doubt, probably some muddled thinking researcher thought it’d be a laugh to hook her up with the temple mount nutter and the royal playboy showing off his millionaire toys.

It’s not just the BBC which has a problem with Israel, it’s a large section of the ‘liberal’ classes. For example anti-semitism is quite popular with some journalists and university staff.

These people are bigoted and take as much trouble to acquaint themselves of the facts on the middle east as they did about the Soviet Empire which they seemed to admire despite plenty of easily available evidence that it was a dreadful, totalitarian and murderous regime.

Sith Ifrika? I don’t recall that particular Darth lord. Must be be from before the ‘law of 2′ was instigated.

Mr Gump- I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to call it anti-Semitic; just predictably monochrome, one-sided and safe -as far as playing to the gallery is concerned.

Israelinurse,

Great analysis of the BBC there on 25 September 2009, 6:52 pm. I think they have only two or three journalists left there who report in a balanced fashion on Israel-Palestine. I wont name them because if word gets out it will ruin their careers. Meanwhile their colleagues jostle one another to express the standard anti-Israel line loudly enough to be noticed by chief anti-Israel hack, Jeremy Bowen, and thereby hopefully advance their careers.

Recently Robin Lustig, whom I regarded as one of the more moderate BBC hacks, had a blog post titled:

Will Obama get tough with Israel?

If I ever see a BBC headline questioning whether anyone will get tough with the Palestinians I’ll eat my keyboard.

Greg, I always thought it was “Souf Efrika.” That’s closer to the typical SA accent.

Do any HP readers have any observations from memory or research about the history of the BBC and institutional anti-semitism?

I used to work at the BBC and there was absolutely zero anti-semitism. What we did was clear rights for DVDs and Israel never ever crossed our minds, because we weren’t mad oafs bringing Israel into every bloody thing we did. In fact nobody I ever spoke to ever mentioned Israel or Jews, because it and they were irrelevent to their jobs.

This pattern, I’ve found, is repeated across the BBC’s output. If you watch Masterchef: The Professionals, John Torode doesn’t go on and on about Zionism, or whatever, because he’s not mad either.

wardytron,

You’re looking in the wrong places for BBC anti-Semitism. Try the political journalists, e.g. the motley crew “reporting” on the Middle East – for whom Israel can do no right and the Palestinians no wrong – led by anti-Israel “editor” Jeremy Bowen.

The anti-Semitism is apparent in the obsessive, disproportionate and emotional criticism from the BBC every time Israel defends herself against Palestinian terror. According to the BBC and its fellow-travellers, Israel is apparently the only nation with no right to defend herself.

This singling out of the Jewish state is indeed anti-Semitism.

Kate Humble’s “Frankincense Trail” Jerusalem segment is on Youtube. The Temple talk discussed in this thread starts at 6:21.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NLD0DinlwQ

After years of monitoring BBC bias, I can say with certainty that certain types of their bias is purposeful with the intention of fulfilling an agenda. Other less important topics fit in to a ‘leftwing’ mindset and can be regarded as accidental. The former would entail appeasement of Islamic regimes. One reason that the BBC invests so much energy in doing so is that they need these regimes to ‘accept’ them in order to ensure their status as ‘the world’s media organisation. The fact that the BBC mandate requires them to be balanced and unbiased makes any purposeful distortion of facts less likely to be argued, thus increasing its value to the mostly despotic regimes that the BBC serves.

This is not to say that the majority of BBC journalists are necessarily ‘in’ on this deception, but their very mindset makes it easy for the BBC hierarchy to steer them in the ‘right’ direction, and will tolerate wilful abuse of facts to maintain their mindset rather than attempt to be balanced.

Thanks Israelinurse, I accept your point to some extent, but I think my reaction was more or less instantaneous and is indicative of a certain problem that the BBC has in its coverage of the Middle East.

I’d like to qualify the sweeping statement I made at 9:45 pm yesterday:

This singling out of the Jewish state is indeed anti-Semitism.

It’s fairer to say it could be or is likely to be anti-Semitism. It is equally likely to be a journalist simply falling into line with the fashionable and unthinking anti-Israel mode of reporting rife in left wing media circles.

Sometimes, however, it does appear that BBC journalists are straining at the leash to write the most stinging criticism of Israel they can get away with. Is that anti-Semitism? Probably. It also could be an overpowering need to come out of the closet and show one’s proud lefty credentials as an unwavering supporter of the poor, downtrodden Palestinians.

Whatever the case, BBC reporting on the Israeli-Arab conflict is abysmal.

“Iran’s state-run al-Alam and Press TV channels said on Sunday that the short-range missiles test-fired during military exercises were of Tondar-69 and Fateh-110 type.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8277040.stm

Maybe someone at the BBC reads Harry’s Place?

Teddy Bear, Mr Gump and True Too all make valid points.
I think we need to be really careful not to throw the term ‘anti-Semitism’ around too casually when it’s not justified. It is not in anyone’s interests to cheapen that term.

What we see at the BBC seems to be more related to the culture which exists in the media industry in general in this country. What is sad is that no-one seems to want to challenge that culture’s pre-conceptions.
I know that it’s a pretty cut-throat industry and that particularly in times of economic instability people naturally go with what is safe, but all the same, this conservative approach is doing nothing for the industry’s credibility or its future health. If all you have within your industry are a load of ‘yes-men’ who carry on down the accepted route, you’re going to find yourself in big trouble at some point down the line.
There just do not seem to be many brave, innovative journalists or film-makers out there who are prepared to challenge the status quo as far as reporting on the ME is concerned. Ironically, the BBC is best placed to lead the way on this as it is financially independent, but it seems to be the most fossilised of all in its approach. I really believe that this stagnant thinking on the subject of Israel will be to the BBC’s creative detriment in the long run.

Teddy Bear, Mr Gump and True Too all make valid points.
I think we need to be really careful not to throw the term ‘anti-Semitism’ around too casually when it’s not justified. It is not in anyone’s interests to cheapen that term.

What we see at the BBC seems to be more related to the culture which exists in the media industry in general in this country. What is sad is that no-one seems to want to challenge that culture’s pre-conceptions.
I know that it’s a pretty cut-throat industry and that particularly in times of economic instability people naturally go with what is safe, but all the same, this conservative approach is doing nothing for the industry’s credibility or its future health. If all you have within your industry are a load of ‘yes-men’ who carry on down the accepted route, you’re going to find yourself in big trouble at some point down the line.
There just do not seem to be many brave, innovative journalists or film-makers out there who are prepared to challenge the status quo as far as reporting on the ME is concerned. Ironically, the BBC is best placed to lead the way on this as it is financially independent, but it seems to be the most fossilised of all in its approach. I really believe that this stagnant thinking on the subject of Israel will be to the BBC’s creative detriment in the long run.

Let’s not be too serious about Kate Humble wearing her zipped-up fleece in the Jerusalem sun. Our Kate was clearly given this travel jolly to present as a reward for not looking like Lindsey German. However, the BBC producer should have been attempting to chase ratings, like the commercial channels. He could have made a better job of this and pulled in far more viewers by shooting Kate posing with the bikini-clad Eilat beach babes.

BBC quite happy to push the boat out to explain to us how the Youtube video ‘Muslim Demographics’ is wrong about the threat of immigration, going so far as to place their own video on Youtube….but here is a report from the German elections that tells us that 9% of the electorate are immigrants with of course higher concentrations in the cities( the BBC report calls Muslims ‘Turks’ so as not to frighten you):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8271249.stm

It is the first time that the voter statistics have been made public.
“Nine per cent is a significant portion,” said Andreas Wuest, project director at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research and the only German academic who focuses on migrants as political actors
“In one way or another, this share of the population can have an effect, especially in constituencies with higher levels of migrant voters, for instance in the bigger cities in the West.”
So all the major political parties are fielding candidates from the fast-growing migrant communities.
There is a new leaflet out, in German and Turkish, explaining in simple language how the political system works here, and plans to publish one in Russian for the next election.
One of its promoters is Gabriele Guen Tank, the commissioner for immigrants in Berlin’s Schoeneberg district.
Almost half of the youngsters in Schoeneberg, she said, come from a migrant background. Soon they will be eligible to vote.
“It’s a big group coming,” Ms Tank said. “And if we don’t give them the chance of participation, we will have more problems in the future. So there has to be a change.”

Truetoo: Agreed, and the phrase ‘getting tough with Israel’ implies that the US is in Israel’s pocket normally.

Slightly related, the BBC also generally calls the Lebanese government the ‘US’ or ‘Western-backed’ Lebanese government. Either all the other governments in the world are on bad terms with ‘the US/the West’ or there is more than one Lebanese government. What I’m saying is, the BBC’s middle-east coverage is lazy across the board and doesn’t stop at the stereotyping of Israel. The stories have to fit predetermined structures.
I blame groupthink rather than conspiracy of incompetence.

Israelinurse 7 September 2009, 10:48 am

I think we need to be really careful not to throw the term ‘anti-Semitism’ around too casually when it’s not justified. It is not in anyone’s interests to cheapen that term.

True, but there are times when BBC journalists actually seem to jeer at Israel.

Bialik 27 September 2009, 7:33 pm

Yes, that’s exactly what got me about Lustig’s blog title.