Love of the Land: Not the White Response

Not the White Response

The Guardian Associate Editor's weak excuses and justifications for outrageous comments against Israel.



Honest Reporting
Media Critiques
25 March '10

Frosty US-Israeli relations and a very public and direct rebuke by Britain for alleged cloning of UK passports by Israel's Mossad have created a storm of negative headlines in recent days.

Some (but not all) British media took particular glee in reporting the expulsion of a diplomat from Israel's embassy in London. The Guardian even liveblogged the event as it unfolded while an editorial referred to Israel as "an arrogant nation that has overreached itself", thus smearing more than just Israel's government but also its entire population.

Some took advantage of Israel being hauled over the coals to justify their own failings. In December 2009, The Guardian's Associate Editor Michael White made the following comment during a discussion on BBC Radio London's Breakfast Show concerning the physical vulnerability of political leaders:

In Israel they murder each other a great deal. The Israeli Defense Forces murder people because they don't like their political style and what they've got to say and it only means that people more extreme come in and take their place.

The BBC responded by arguing that White's comments were his own while The Guardian declined to comment at all, judging that White had made these remarks on the BBC and not in his newspaper. From White himself we heard nothing. Until now.

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Love of the Land: Not the White Response

Love of the Land: Guardian calls Israel “an arrogant nation”, and also gives op-ed to Foreign Office grandee who complained about Jews on the Iraq inquiry

Guardian calls Israel “an arrogant nation”, and also gives op-ed to Foreign Office grandee who complained about Jews on the Iraq inquiry

Robin Shepherd
Robinshepherdonline.com
24 March '10

Charles de Gaulle once famously referred to the Jews as an “arrogant and domineering people”. The Guardian newspaper in its editorial today refers to Israel as “an arrogant nation that has overreached itself”. Not the government of Israel — castigated by the Guardian for using British passports in a “Mossad murder squad” in Dubai, as well as over the spat with Washington — but the nation of Israel itself.

I suppose they would argue that that there is still enough daylight, however thin a sliver of it, between de Gaulle’s open disdain for Jews and their equally open disdain for the Jewish state.

But let’s leave whatever room for discussion may still be available on that particular question to one side for a moment, and move on to an op-ed piece published alongside the editorial by a senior Foreign Office mandarin who last year made one of the meanest anti-Semitic remarks to have been made in mainstream Britain for many years.

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Love of the Land: Guardian calls Israel “an arrogant nation”, and also gives op-ed to Foreign Office grandee who complained about Jews on the Iraq inquiry

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.

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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.

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

Love of the Land: Currents of denial run deep among the Left

Currents of denial run deep among the Left

Bataween
Point of No Return
15 February '10

Is denial of Arab and Muslim antisemitism fast becoming a pathology of the left? Read my guest post on CiFwatch.

Leopold1904 must be a bewildered man. His comment, on the Uri Dromi thread, stating the facts of the 1840 Damascus blood libel - which Dromi had invoked in his piece on the Jenny Tongue ‘Israel harvests organs in Haiti’ affair - was deleted by the Comment is Free moderator.

Does Leopold’s comment breach Comment is Free guidelines? Does it contain offensive or personal attacks? No. Is it defamatory? No. Is it irrelevant? No, it simply seeks to expand on Dromi’s cursory description of the Damascus blood libel. Its conclusion, that the affair ‘restoked the fires of European antisemitism’, is unassailable.

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Love of the Land: Currents of denial run deep among the Left

Love of the Land: Freedman tries Pavlov

Freedman tries Pavlov

Israelinurse
CiF Watch
17 January '10

“No Eastern land occupied by a sedentary population has as uncertain a water-supply as Palestine. Its Mediterranean climate leaves it without any rain for about half of each year, on the average. Since Palestine is at the southern end of the rainy westerly winds, its rainfall becomes progressively more scanty as one goes south towards the Negeb. Winters with inadequate rainfall are both frequent and unpredictable, and disastrous famines have thus been common throughout its history.”

The above words were written by the famous archaeologist W.F. Albright in his fascinating book ‘the Archaeology of Palestine’ in 1949, but Seth Freedman would have us believe that water shortages in this part of the world are not only relatively new, but somehow deliberately engineered. In his familiar florid style, Freedman recounts his visits to encampments of the Jahalin Bedouin tribe and with typical British romanticism – a sort of ‘Lawrence of Suburbia’ – dramatically depicts the suffering of these noble tribesmen at the hands of the dastardly Israeli regime.

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Love of the Land: Freedman tries Pavlov

Love of the Land: Guardian website contributor says that recalcitrant Israeli settlers should be “slaughtered” in latest example of a new phenomenon in Great Britain

Guardian website contributor says that recalcitrant Israeli settlers should be “slaughtered” in latest example of a new phenomenon in Great Britain

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
12 January '10

One of the new realities of the internet age for the mainstream media is that the distinction between an opinion piece and the readers’ comments which come below it is increasingly blurred. This is all the more so for interactive sites such as the Guardian’s immensely popular Comment is free (Cif) site where regular “below the line” contributors are now as much a part of the overall experience as the commentary to which they are responding. Such contributors help create the kind of interactive community which has become the new holy grail of online news and comment services.

So, when it comes to the Guardian’s notoriously vicious stance against the state of Israel it is hardly suprising that the community that has been created draws from among the foulest and most bigoted of the Jewish state’s numerous opponents. As an example, consider the following comment by regular below-the-line contributor William Bapthorpe which was brought to my attention by the invaluable media watchdog service CiF Watch. Referring to the settlers, in a thread following an article by Nicholas Blincoe, he said:

“Sadly, there’s only one way to deal with these religiously motivated maniacs who think their superstitious beliefs trump international law. 1. We ask them to leave their squats, kindly. 2. If they don’t, we force them to [leave] at gunpoint. 3. If they still refuse, they must be slaughtered, every last man woman and child.” (My italics)

If this were simply an isolated incident it would not be worth remarking on. Every website attracts its share of oddballs. But CiF Watch, which was set up last year to monitor a Guardian online community that attracts more than 30 million visits a month, provides reams of this sort of thing suggesting that at the intersection between the technological innovations of the new media and an ideological edifice which makes a fetish of demonising the most important Jewish project of our time an entirely new phenomenon has now emerged in Great Britain.

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Love of the Land: Guardian website contributor says that recalcitrant Israeli settlers should be “slaughtered” in latest example of a new phenomenon in Great Britain

Love of the Land: Then: Guardian Newspaper Slammed ‘Richard-Richard’ Goldstone Inquiry as ‘Rubbish Bin’

Then: Guardian Newspaper Slammed ‘Richard-Richard’ Goldstone Inquiry as ‘Rubbish Bin’

Hillel Neuer
U.N. Watch
10 January '10

That the U.N.’s Goldstone Report on alleged war crimes in Gaza is a travesty of justice is best demonstrated by analyzing its skewed contents, method, and conclusions, as well as its tainted political framwework, one-sided mandate, and prejudiced mission members.

I do not believe, as some do, that there is much to gain by casting aspersions on Goldstone’s widely respected career, although it is certainly relevant to counter the false claim that he has a record of pro-Israel actions. (In fact, he has a record of significant actions harshly critical of Israel.)

I am perfectly willing to recognize that Goldstone has accomplished many good things in his life, as those close to him have attested to me, even if his actions surrounding the report have been disreputable in the extreme.

That said, it is remarkable to observe how Goldstone is being lionized by certain circles solely because that is seen as useful to skewer Israel.

For example, these days, The Guardian of London has shown itself to be one of the most enthusiastic admirers of Richard Goldstone, running countless news articles, op-eds and editorials supporting his UN report on alleged war crimes in Gaza, including this one from December, which invokes the Goldstone Report to support the thesis that the UK’s public interest lies in prosecuting visiting Israelis for war crimes.

Interestingly, however, when there was no incentive to skewer Israel, the same Guardian of London once accused Richard Goldstone of running a “much vaunted judicial commission of inquiry” that “failed dismally,” and that was a “rubbish bin” used by the South African government; of Goldstone’s “disturbing” practice by which he acted with “overt political ’sensitivity’,” including his being “at pains to involve the politically distinguished in the conduct of his inquiry”; and of harboring such ambition to succeed Boutros-Boutros Ghali’s post as UN Secretary-General, that Goldstone’s legal colleagues gave him the nickname of “Richard-Richard.”

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Love of the Land: Then: Guardian Newspaper Slammed ‘Richard-Richard’ Goldstone Inquiry as ‘Rubbish Bin’

Love of the Land: New media monitoring group goes to town on the Guardian over anti-Israeli bigotry

New media monitoring group goes to town on the Guardian over anti-Israeli bigotry

Robin Shepherd
Think Tank Blog
21 October 09

Readers outside the UK will be well aware of the Guardian newspaper and its well earned reputation as the prime repository of anti-Israeli bigotry in western Europe. Some, however, may not yet be aware of a new monitoring group which analyses and dissects anti-Zionist bigotry on the paper’s flagship, online comment service, Comment is Free (Cif).

The group is called Cif Watch (see link below) and it provides a methodical, indeed forensic, breakdown of articles and the comment threads which follow them. I draw attention to Cif Watch in this entry in part because such a worthwhile endeavour deserves our support, but also because its latest posting provides a particularly revealing insight into the kind of people who are attracted to the anti-Israeli agenda.

The Cif Watch analysis focused on the comment threads following a rare instance in which the Guardian allowed an Israel-supportive commentary on to its site. It does this from time to time in order to present the facade of balance. In reality at least 95 percent of all commentary on the subject on the Guardian’s website is anti-Israeli, and much of that is extremely vitriolic.

After the commentary (by former Times editor Harold Evans) was published all hell broke loose.

But rather than take my word for it, click through to the Cif Watch site and read about it in all its gory details:

http://cifwatch.com/2009/10/21/shit-the-guardian-is-burning/

Love of the Land: New media monitoring group goes to town on the Guardian over anti-Israeli bigotry