Love of the Land: A rational article provokes bigoted frenzy at the FT

A rational article provokes bigoted frenzy at the FT

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
07 March '10

A few days ago, the historian Andrew Roberts wrote a piece in the Financial Times trenchantly defending the presumed assassination by Israel in Dubai of the Hamas terrorist Mahmoud Habhouh. In this article, which was itself a response to two examples of standard boilerplate bigotry that the paper had run about this, Roberts wrote:

All that the Dubai operation will do is remind the world that the security services of states at war – and Israel’s struggle with Hamas, Fatah and Hizbollah certainly constitutes that – occasionally employ targeted assassination as one of the weapons in their armoury, and that this in no way weakens their legitimacy. As for the ‘separation walls’ and checkpoints that one sees in Israel, the 99 per cent drop in the number of suicide bombings since their erection justifies the policy. There is simply no parallel between apartheid South Africa – where the white minority wielded power over the black majority – and the occupied territories, taken by Israel only after it was invaded by its neighbours. To make such a link is not only inaccurate, but offensive.

Not nearly as offensive, however, as what then followed. For as Robin Shepherd points out, the readers’ comments on Roberts’s article constituted an outpouring of vicious hatred, lies and libels about Israel. Not for the first time, one has to wonder at the unique and profoundly unbalanced frenzy of this particular hatred, based on a startling ignorance of the history of the Middle East which is thus comprehensively inverted. Here’s a taster, if you can stomach it:

Is it terrorism when a thief invades my house, kills my family and ends up complaining to the ‘police’ after I try defend my place against him and his criminal acts? Now transport yourselves to years and years and years of ethnic cleansing, bulldozing of homes, killing of unarmed civilians in filthy refugee camps and use of prohibited weapons. Add to that the stockpiling of illegally obtained and undeclared nuclear weapons, the official statement that a certain State is ‘Jewish’ (probably the most blatantly racist qualification ever to grace the constitutional texts of a single State) and HAS to preserve its ‘jewishness’, or the catastrophe brought about by a colonial power that was too incompetent and biased to ensure a home to the REAL inhabitants of Palestine.

(Read full story)

Love of the Land: A rational article provokes bigoted frenzy at the FT

Love of the Land: Financial Times website gives platform for anti-Semitic bigotry following rare piece supporting Israel

Financial Times website gives platform for anti-Semitic bigotry following rare piece supporting Israel

Robin Shepherd
Robinshepherdonline.com
05 March '10

One consequence of traditional media’s move to online platforms is that the threads which follow many articles are now open to readers to make comments of their own. This not only provides an insight into the kind of people who are attracted to a given article, it also places a responsibility on newspapers to police their websites in order to prevent libellous, bigoted or racist opinions from becoming associated with them.

Few issues reveal the nature of the problem more starkly than the Israel-Palestine conflict where extreme hostility to the Jewish state now masquerades as “normal” commentary in much of the British media. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that fanatics and open anti-Semites feel they have licence to let rip.

The Guardian, of course, has come in for much criticism in this respect but equally egregious in its attitude to Israel has been the Financial Times which is rapidly acquiring a reputation as one of the most rabidly anti-Israeli outlets in the English speaking world’s mainstream press. Following a rare pro-Israel piece by the historian Andrew Roberts in the comment section of the newspaper earlier in the week, the online threads have featured some of the vilest anti-Semitic bigotry to have been sanctioned by a British newspaper for quite some time.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Financial Times website gives platform for anti-Semitic bigotry following rare piece supporting Israel

Love of the Land: Another Hit Job By The Financial Times

Another Hit Job By The Financial Times

Marty Peretz
The New Republic
02 March '10

Hardly a day goes by that the Financial Times doesn’t do a hit job on Israel. The otherwise sober pink sheet has such an obsession with the Jewish state that I’ve come to wonder what its views were on the rescue of Jewish children into England during the Nazi onslaught on them and on their parents.

Tobias Buck is virtually on call full time to twist Israeli reality into his own jaundiced view of Zionism. Last week in the FT, he came to conclusions about Israel’s diplomatic isolation which he himself had trumpeted. Since Buck is the paper’s Israel correspondent, all you have to do is pick up the daily or log on to its web site, and you’re almost sure to find the same story he wrote yesterday or last week and will surely write tomorrow.

Sometimes the FT sinks so low that it will even ask Henry Siegman, a dreary old Jewish bureaucrat who found glory in being asked to speak at gentile soirees and left-wing “getting-to-yes” talkfests, to write. So, on the very same day, Siegman picked up Buck’s theme and argued that “for Israel, defiance comes at the cost of legitimacy.”

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Another Hit Job By The Financial Times

Love of the Land: Financial Times of London's Bias Against Israel Attracts Attention

Financial Times of London's Bias Against Israel Attracts Attention

Cartoon appearing on the Financial Times' Rachman blog

CAMERA/Snapshots
03 February '10

The Financial Times of London (FT) is a prominent business-oriented newspaper with an international reach. Over the years its slanted coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict has attracted notice. Two recent pieces expose the depths of this bias.

Just Journalism, an independent media research group based in the UK, published an investigative report that assesses 121 Financial Times editorials relating to the Middle East over the past year. According to Just Journalism board member Robin Shepherd, "This report demonstrates that the FT has repeatedly disregarded salient facts when it comes to the Middle East and disproportionately blames Israel for the region’s woes."

The report finds that

1. The FT views Israel as primarily responsible for the perpetuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while downplaying other factors. Other aggravating factors such as terrorism, disunity within Palestinian ranks and a failure to accept Israel as a Jewish state are downplayed.

2. The prospect of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities is referred to in five editorials; yet no Financial Times editorial in 2009 makes reference to the threatening rhetoric from Iran’s President Ahmadinejad against Israel.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Financial Times of London's Bias Against Israel Attracts Attention

Love of the Land: We’ll Meet at the Knesset, in Tel Aviv

We’ll Meet at the Knesset, in Tel Aviv

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
02 February '10

A British media watchdog named Just Journalism has released its review of 2009 Financial Times editorials, and it finds what anyone familiar with this newspaper would expect: the FT fits in perfectly with the media culture of obsessive and deranged coverage of Israel that is a national embarrassment for Great Britain. My favorite example of this (as is Marty Peretz’s) is the fact that the FT, as official policy, refers to Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel, a plain denial of reality. Can you imagine the FT referring, today, to Philadelphia or New York as the capital of the United States? That would be crazy. It would cause the FT to become a laughingstock. But it is really no more neurotic than the Tel Aviv rule. Just Journalism’s complete report (PDF) can be found here.

Love of the Land: We’ll Meet at the Knesset, in Tel Aviv