Love of the Land: Demonizing Israel in Spain

Demonizing Israel in Spain

Monica Cooper slams lacking, biased news reporting by leading Spanish daily El Pais


Monica Cooper
Opinion/Ynet
14 March '10

Monica Cooper is the Director of ReVista de Medio Oriente, the Spanish outlet of CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America

A few weeks back, the well-known author Alfonso Ussia wrote in Spain’s La Razón about a young Catalan woman picked up by Israeli police in Ramallah. Ussia relates that she was presumably campaigning against the Jewish state while holding an expired entry visa on her Spanish passport. Had she been in an Arab state doing something similar, writes Ussia, she would be - most probably - stoned to death in the public square. Instead, Ariadna Jové Martí was sent in good health back to Spain, with an airplane ticket – probably paid for by the State of Israel.

How was all this viewed in Spain? The Foreign Relations Office expressed outrage to Israel’s diplomats over the affair, while the press got busy lambasting the Jewish state. All this, as Ussia rightly points out, while ignoring or justifying every ignominy of any other country around the globe.

Are Israelis aware of the Israel-bashing and demonizing carried out in the Iberian press?

Do they know, for example, the case of Madrid’s El País? With 430,000 daily copies and an Internet readership of over two million, El País is considered the “leader of the mainstream press in Spain.” And alongside every single article about Israel on the website of this pre-eminent newspaper is a profile of Israel that lists Tel Aviv as the country’s capital.

In its section “Corresponsales” (reporters), El País explains that reporter Juan Miguel Muñoz reports from “Jerusalem, Near East.” No other reporter is identified like this as based in a geographic area; they are all in a named country (except those who report on the EU from Brussels).

ReVista de Medio Oriente, a Spanish media watchdog organization, asked El País’ editors why this different treatment of Israel. About their placement of Israel’s capital in the “Near East,” they said that Muñoz “reports from Jerusalem on Lebanon and Syria too” - hardly a convincing answer on the face of it, and even less so because the reporter almost never writes about those countries but writes practically daily on Israel. About Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel, the editors told ReVista that the “directive to maintain this designation the way it is comes from the paper’s directors and can’t be changed.”

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Demonizing Israel in Spain

Love of the Land: Johann Hari: Back With a Vengeance

Johann Hari: Back With a Vengeance

Honest Reporting
Media Critiques
15 March '10

The Independent's columnist returns with another biased op-ed full of distortions and historical revisionism.

The Independent's Johann Hari will always be remembered as the columnist who compared Israel to excrement. Rather than answering the various libels and misinformation contained in his articles, Hari accused HonestReporting and others of attempting to curtail his freedom of speech when he was quite correctly and legitimately held to account.

So Hari shouldn't be surprised if his latest offering in The Independent (and reproduced on The Huffington Post) is enough to trigger yet more outrage.

Historical Revisionism

Perhaps Hari should start by consulting a credible history book as demonstrated by his faulty description of events in the region:

Their [the Palestinians'] story is so rarely explained without disinformation that it still seems startling when it is stated plainly. Until 1948, the Palestinians were living in their own homes, on their own land – until they were suddenly driven out in a war to make way for a new state for people fleeing a monstrous European genocide. They lived huddled and dazed in the 20 per cent of their land they were allowed to keep. They hardly fought back: they wept and dreamed of return. Then in the 1967 war, even these small strips were conquered with tanks and platoons.

In fact, the Palestinians were not living on their own land until 1948 - the land was part of the British Mandate and before that, the Ottoman Empire. There had never been a Palestinian state. The modern-day State of Israel was legitimately created by a vote in the United Nations and rejected by the Arab states who attacked it from all sides. The Palestinian refugees were created as a direct result of a war of aggression carried out by those Arab states and the Palestinian residents themselves. In addition, the 1967 war was also one of self-defense on the part of Israel, which indeed conquered more territories as a result of Arab aggression.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Johann Hari: Back With a Vengeance

Love of the Land: Andrew Sullivan's 'pulverization of Gazans'

Andrew Sullivan's 'pulverization of Gazans'

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/JPost
14 February '10

A bitter and protracted war of words has developed since Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, suggested in a recent article that some of the commentary of the popular Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan on Israel seemed to reflect "something much darker" than mere opposition to Israeli policies. Inevitably, the resulting debate in the blogosphere has once again fuelled the longstanding controversy about the question of if and when criticism of Israel can be described as anti-Semitic.

The complaint that critics of Israeli politics always risk being unfairly accused of anti-Semitism is rather common, not least because many people refuse to acknowledge that debates about the Jewish state and its policies are sometimes "heavily indebted to anti-Semitic tropes." Likewise, the glaring double standards that are routinely applied to Israel - summed up recently by Anthony Julius in a superb article in The Jewish Chronicle - are all too often ignored or denied.

Instead, it's rather popular to pretend that anti-Semitism has been frozen in time. Writing in defense of Sullivan, an Economist blogger urged:

We American Jews have simply got to stop accusing people who object to Israeli policies of being anti-Semitic, unless they're literally waving around drawings of hook-nosed bankers and arguing that Auschwitz never happened."

No doubt: if we built on this and came up with similar definitions for other cases of bigotry and racism, we would soon be able to declare that mankind is close to eradicating all such forms of prejudice. But somehow, I can't quite imagine that anyone would want to argue, for example, that accusations of racism against blacks are only justified if the perpetrator "literally" wears a Ku Klux Klan outfit and threatens a lynching...

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Andrew Sullivan's 'pulverization of Gazans'

Love of the Land: What a difference a caption makes

What a difference a caption makes

Elder of Ziyon
09 February '10

The same event, as seen by by Reuters and AP.

1st Reuters



Reuters caption: An undercover Israeli police officer (R) scuffles with a Palestinian youth suspected of throwing stones while trying to detain him during clashes in the Shuafat refugee camp in the West Bank near Jerusalem February 9, 2010. Clashes erupted between Palestinian stone-throwers and Israeli police that entered the refugee camp, a Reuters witness said on Tuesday.

Click here for full post and AP

Love of the Land: What a difference a caption makes

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: Anti-Israel Bias Infects Medical Journals

Anti-Israel Bias Infects Medical Journals

It's not just the Lancet that sees the world through Palestinianized glasses.


Barbara Kay
Pajamasmedia.com
04 February '10

As all doctors know, untreated gangrene in a single limb can spread quickly through the body and lead to death. The most effective way to halt the progress of gangrene is to cut off the corrupting limb, a necessary sacrifice for the greater good.

As with bodies, so with scientific credibility.

As Phyllis Chesler informed us in these pages on January 24, Lancet, once an impeccable source for authoritative medical research, has in recent years become more and more “Palestinianized.” In the just-published article she cites, “Association between exposure to political violence and intimate-partner violence in the occupied Palestinian territory: a cross-sectional study,” Palestinian husbands were found to be more violent towards their wives as a function of the Israeli “occupation” — “and … the violence increases significantly when the husbands are ‘directly’ as opposed to ‘indirectly’ exposed to political violence.”

Very clever. Being a Palestinian means you get to beat your wife without having to say you’re sorry, because, hey, it’s too bad about all those bruises, but the Israelis made me do it! That the statistics were gathered and the study was funded by the Palestinian Authority should have been a clue to its lack of objectivity. This is propaganda, not research.

It isn’t only Lancet, though. Editorial views in the prestigious British Medical Journal and the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians (recently renamed Clinical Medicine) have revealed a similar pattern of anti-Israel bias.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Anti-Israel Bias Infects Medical Journals

Love of the Land: Media’s “Hard-Line” on Israel’s Prime Minister

Media’s “Hard-Line” on Israel’s Prime Minister

MK
CAMERA/Snapshots
26 January '10

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has called for immediate negotiations without preconditions and expressed acceptance of a Palestinian state that would not threaten Israel's security, is nevertheless often pejoratively called “hard-line” (as is the government coalition he leads) by the mainstream American media, especially the Associated Press. Conversely, the term “hard-line” or “intransigent,” is rarely, if ever, applied to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who repeatedly refuses to enter peace talks with Israel despite compromises offered by Mr. Netanyahu.

For example, a January 21 Associated Press report, by Mohammed Daraghmeh, said: “The hard-line prime minister who leads a coalition largely opposed to territorial compromise had long hesitated to accept the concept of Palestinian statehood, capitulating only in June under heavy US pressure.”

Conversely, a January 22 AP report, by Dalia Nammari, while describing what amounts to an intransigent Mahmoud Abbas, failed to pejoratively characterize him as “hard-line” or “intransigent” or anything like that. The report said: “President Barack Obama's Mideast envoy failed Friday to lure Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas back to peace talks with Israel, as Abbas stuck to his insistence that an Israeli settlement freeze come first.”

The phenomenon of the use of “judgement terms” in Middle East reporting, such as the habitual characterization of Mr. Abbas and his Fatah party as "moderate," is the subject of a CAMERA Op-Ed in the Christian Science Monitor.

Love of the Land: Media’s “Hard-Line” on Israel’s Prime Minister

Love of the Land: New report shows anti-Semitism in Europe at highest level since WWII

New report shows anti-Semitism in Europe at highest level since WWII

Robin Shepherd
Robin Shepherd Online
25 January '10

The figures confirm what our instincts have been telling us: anti-Semitism in western Europe has now reached its highest level since the end of World War II. A report released on Sunday by the Jewish Agency for Israel compiles figures from across Europe which make for disturbing reading (though not if you read the BBC’s website since the story has been ignored!).

According to the Jerusalem Post’s coverage of a press conference at which the report was unveiled:

“In France, 631 incidents occurred in the first half of 2009, compared with 431 in 2008. In Britain, some 600 anti-Semitic incidents took place during 2009 [the largest number since records began]. In the Netherlands, some one hundred incidents were noted [in the three months] following the Gaza incursion, the same number as the country had witnessed the entire previous year.”

The report also warned of the re-emergence of the medieval blood libel in mainstream media outlets such as the notorious article in Sweden’s top selling Aftonbladet newspaper alleging a Jewish conspiracy in which Israeli soldiers were harvesting the bodily organs of Palestinian children for sale on the international black market.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: New report shows anti-Semitism in Europe at highest level since WWII

Love of the Land: The Greeks had a word for it: hypocrisy

The Greeks had a word for it: hypocrisy

Fresnozionism
22 January '10

News item: (The news item link now states "Article content no longer available" which has led to some speculation as to the accuracy of the source. However the original source is Theodoros Pangalos's website and is still available in the Dec. '08 archives of his site. This link is the Google translation of the specific letter in question. Pretty straightforward. Y.)

The deputy prime minister of Greece has sent back to the Israeli Embassy in Athens three bottles of wine given to him as a gift, because they were produced in the Golan, which “belongs to Syria” and is “illegally occupied.” [apparently this occurred in December 2008 - ed.]

The embassy had given the wine to Theodoros Pangalos — MP for the socialist party PASOK and responsible also for co-ordination of the foreign policy and defense committee in the Greek government — as a gift for the Christmas holidays with the wishes of Israel’s ambassador to Greece, Ali Yihiye…

“I have been taught since I was very young not to steal and not to accept products of theft,” [Pangalos] wrote. “So I cannot possibly accept this gift and I must return it back to you.

“As you know, your country occupies illegally the Golan Heights who belong to Syria, according to the international law and numerous decisions of the international community,” Pangalos added.

Referring to atrocities that occurred during the Second World War and the Balkan War, the socialist MP said: “Actions such as those of these days of the Israel military in Gaza remind the Greek people of holocausts such as in Kalavrita or Doxato or Distomo and certainly in the ghetto of Warsaw.”

Was he also taught not to murder or allow others to do so? Perhaps not:

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: The Greeks had a word for it: hypocrisy

Love of the Land: For bigots, Israel can do no right

For bigots, Israel can do no right

Alan M. Dershowitz
Double Standard Watch/JPost
24 January '10

As most objective observers throughout the world marvel at Israel's efficiency and generosity in leading the medical aid efforts in Haiti, some bigots insist on using these efforts as an occasion to continue their attack on the Jewish state. Both the neo-Nazi hard right and the neo-Stalinist hard left cannot help but to demonize Israel, regardless of what Israel does.

The neo-Nazi Web site ReportersNotebook.com features a blog entitled The Zionization of Disaster Relief. It accuses Israel of "exploiting the suffering of poor, defenseless Haitians on behalf of Israeli Triumphalism." It complains that Israel is rendering medical aid to Haiti only to deflect attention from its crimes against the Palestinians.

The hard left, even in a Israel, complains that Israel should not be sending medical assistance to such a faraway place. Instead it should be sending it to nearby Gaza.

Even The New York Times, in an otherwise thoughtful analysis of the controversiality of the aid among some Israelis, failed to note the difference between Israel sending its limited resources to faraway Haiti and to nearby Gaza. Haiti is not at war with Israel. Haiti has not pledged itself to Israel's destruction. Haiti has not fired 8,000 rockets at Israeli civilians. Gaza, on the other hand, has a popularly elected government that has done and continues to do all of the above. Moreover, there is no comparison between the tens of thousands of Haitians who have died from a natural disaster, and the people of Gaza who suffer far less from what is, essentially, a self-inflicted wound.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: For bigots, Israel can do no right

Love of the Land: Norway’s Middle East Hypocrisy

Norway’s Middle East Hypocrisy

Ben Cohen
Z-Word Blog
20 January '10

This is a guest post by Christian Tau of NIJ.

Norway FM Jonas Gahr Støre toured the Middle East between January 16th-20th, visiting Jordan, the Palestinian Territories, Israel, Egypt and UAE. The topics of Støre’s meetings in the different countries as well as the manner in which he was received shows us a Norwegian foreign policy bathed in the gold sheen of hypocrisy. The manner in which the Norwegian media reports on Støre’s tour reveals how this hypocrisy is rooted in a bedrock of popular denial.


Criticizing Israel on human rights

Of the countries Støre visited we find Israel at the far end of the spectrum. Freedom House ranks the little nation as a “Free”. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index for 2008 ranks Israel at no.38. The nation is a vibrant affair, producing writers, film-makers, and scientists amidst a strong entrepreneurial culture. It is by far the state in which most Norwegians would settle, if they were to live in the Middle East.

In spite of this, Israel has reluctantly come to realize that what goodwill she enjoyed with Norwegian Labor has, after the failure of the Oslo accords, mutated into a seething resentment of failed expectations and dashed hopes. Merged with the traditional anti-Zionism of the Norwegian left-of-centre, this resentment has made criticism of Israel the very core of the Norwegian debate on the Middle East. In this debate Hamas and Hezbollah appear as symptoms of a problem which in itself consists solely of Israeli politics.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Norway’s Middle East Hypocrisy

Love of the Land: BBC Panorama: Misleading account of east Jerusalem shooting

BBC Panorama: Misleading account of east Jerusalem shooting

Just Journalism
justjournalism.com
21 January '10

Tuesday’s edition of BBC documentary programme Panorama focused on the tensions between Jews and Palestinians in east Jerusalem, a subject gaining increasing attention in UK Middle East reporting.

‘A walk in the park’, presented by BBC journalist Jane Corbin, addressed Jewish building, archaeology and development in the eastern side of the city, and the impact these activities are having on Palestinian residents. Demolitions, evictions and concerns about Muslim prayer sites were all covered at length, conveying clearly to viewers a message of Palestinian suffering, despair and uncertainty.

One incident, given substantial coverage in the documentary, was portrayed by the BBC in a highly misleading way, by the heavy emphasis of one version of events to the near exclusion of the other. All the relevant facts were in the public domain, making this difficult to justify.

The episode involved the shooting of two Palestinians, one of whom was Silwan resident Ahmad Qaareen, by an Israeli in September 2009 in east Jerusalem. It was covered in the Israeli press at the time, with both Ha’aretz and Ynet reporting that the Israeli shooter claimed he had acted in self-defence after being attacked by Palestinians and that he was subsequently released from custody on that basis.

Two problems emerged in the reporting:

(Read full article)

Related: BBC: Denying Jewish Jerusalem
Prime time BBC documentary on Jerusalem: An anatomy of bias and distortion

Love of the Land: BBC Panorama: Misleading account of east Jerusalem shooting

Love of the Land: Amanpour's Impulse: Smear Israel

Amanpour's Impulse: Smear Israel

Andrea Levin
CAMERA Media Analysis
21 January '10

CNN's Christiane Amanpour can't seem to help herself. Whatever the subject of the program, she's inclined to inject mention of Israel and its alleged myriad faults. An interview with Tibet's revered Dalai Lama prompted her to insert jarring comparisons of Tibet and the Palestinian "nakba." (Though with no musings on the absence of Tibetan suicide bombers.)

It happened again on January 20, 2010 while she was engaged in a heated on-air exchange involving Marc Thiessen and Philippe Sands about American use of waterboarding in interrogating illegal combatants. Thiessen claimed waterboarding doesn't constitute torture and that valuable information had been gained by the CIA through the use of enhanced interrogation techniques that prevented terror attacks. Sands countered that waterboarding does constitute torture and is ineffectual in eliciting information from prisoners.

Then, quoting directly from her statements in a previous CNN segment, Thiessen charged Amanpour with spreading false information in comparing American interrogation methods with those of the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge at its infamous S-21 camp where prisoners were handcuffed and submerged in water-filled metal boxes during interrogation, and where thousands died. Thiessen argued that U.S. methods caused no harm or pain to the prisoner. Hearing her own words quoted back at her and bluntly characterized as false, Amanpour became visibly agitated and uncomfortable. In the tense back and forth focused on American handling of interrogation, Amanpour abruptly and incongruously injected Israel into the debate. Here's the clip, followed by an excerpt from the transcript:

(See video and transcript)

Love of the Land: Amanpour's Impulse: Smear Israel

Love of the Land: BBC slams “racist” Jewish settlers on West Bank while continuing to censor Arab and Palestinian anti-Semitism

BBC slams “racist” Jewish settlers on West Bank while continuing to censor Arab and Palestinian anti-Semitism

Robin Shepherd
Robin Shepherd Online
22 January '10

Posted before Shabbat

Coming hard on the heels of this week’s appalling Panorama documentary on Jerusalem (see last post but one), the BBC is now giving major prominence to a story about the alleged desecration of a Palestinian cemetery in the West Bank by a group of racist Jewish pilgrims.

The story stands in sharp and striking contrast with the policy of de facto censorship operated by the BBC on almost all instances of the deep-seated anti-Semitism that is a central feature of the political culture in the Palestinian territories, in Arab countries and in the wider Muslim world.

The incident in question is said to have taken place in the northern West Bank village of Awarta after a group of Jewish pilgrims were taken to nearby Jewish tombs by a settler group. Opening the piece on its website, the BBC, which is the world’s most powerful English language media outlet, said:

“Damaged graves and racist graffiti have been found in the Palestinian village of Awarta in the northern West Bank after a Jewish group visited the area.”

Now, from a journalistic point of view this is certainly a reasonable story to cover since it follows the arrest of 10 Israeli settlers earlier this week in connection with the arson attack on a mosque in the village of Yasuf in December, and the threats by some maverick settlers to respond to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s settlement freeze with attacks on Palestinians.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: BBC slams “racist” Jewish settlers on West Bank while continuing to censor Arab and Palestinian anti-Semitism

Love of the Land: Prime time BBC documentary on Jerusalem: An anatomy of bias and distortion

Prime time BBC documentary on Jerusalem: An anatomy of bias and distortion

Robin Shepherd
Robin Shepherd Online
19 January '10

On Monday night, the BBC’s flagship documentary programme Panorama was devoted to Jerusalem. Rarely will you get a clearer insight into the flagrant institutional bias inside the world’s most powerful media outlet than this. The slipperiness of the tactics employed, the unabashed censorship of vital historical context, and the blatant pursuit of a political agenda constituted a lesson in the techniques of modern day propaganda. It was something to behold.

Entitled “A Walk in the Park” — a reference to the parkways which link settlements across East Jerusalem — the programme was introduced by veteran BBC reporter Jeremy Vine: “Palestinians are being thrown out of their homes; Israelis are moving in, even underground,” he tells us. The drama then shifts to Jerusalem itself where Jane Corbin, narrator and reporter on the ground, is ready to begin a demolition job all of her own.

Right away, the documentary cuts to the destruction of a Palestinian home: “…roads were sealed. The Israelis don’t make it easy to see what’s going on,” we are ominously told as she skips daringly down a dirt track to avoid the watchful eye of the dastardly Israelis.

So why, one wonders, would the Israelis be so keen to hide their dirty little secret? “Under international law,” she tells us earnestly, “East Jerusalem is occupied territory; its status shouldn’t be changed.”

(Read full article)
.

Love of the Land: Prime time BBC documentary on Jerusalem: An anatomy of bias and distortion

Love of the Land: Full Report: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israel Hatred on the Huffington Post

Full Report: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israel Hatred on the Huffington Post

Welcome to the ugly side of the most powerful blog in the world.

Huff-Watch
FrontPageMag.com
14 January '10

[Editors’ note: The following is an introduction to, and summary of a new investigative report by Huff-Watch: "The Stimulus And The (Approved) Response: Anti-Semitism and Israel-Hatred on Huffington Post." Click herefor the full report.]

---

In its four years of existence,The Huffington Post (aka “HuffPost”) has grown from obscurity into the world’s most-visited blogsite, and one of America’s most popular news sites. It now has more monthly visitors than the Washington Post, and is supported by some of the largest advertisers in the world. Its representatives have been allowed to ask questions at presidential press conferences, and one was even given preferential treatment. It now enjoys access to, and influence over, the top levels of the U.S. government. Top members of the U.S. Senate are among HuffPost’s official bloggers, including John Kerry, Carl Levin, Chris Dodd, Barbara Boxer and others.

A significant reason for HuffPost’s success and “legitimization” are its claims that it is a nonpartisan “newspaper,” dedicated to “ferret(ing) out the truth,”and “debunking the left-right way of thinking.”

HuffPost also claims to be non-partisan in its moderation of user comments. Arianna Huffington, the site’s founder and Editor-In-Chief, claims HuffPost has “a zero tolerance policy” for hate speech, and that it acts vigilantly to keep its comment threads free of offensive content, 24-7.

Unfortunately, HuffPost consistently “frames” news stories in such a way that incites anti-Israel perceptions and hatred. Further, in violation of its own policies, it approves and tolerates user comments submitted in response to these stories that contain incendiary, hate-filled libels against Israelis and Jews, as well as links to anti-Semitic hate websites.

(Read full report)

Love of the Land: Full Report: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israel Hatred on the Huffington Post

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.

(Read full article)

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: Vintage Pilar Rahola: Jews of Six Arms

Vintage Pilar Rahola: Jews of Six Arms

Mario M
Portal of Ideas
3 January '10

As I have done before, I am reprinting here a speech given by Pilar Rahola at the Conference in the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism. For those of you not familiar with Dr. Rahola, she is a Spanish Catalan journalist, writer, and former politician and Member of Parliament.

Pilar Rahola has published several books in Spanish and Catalan and is a columnist in La Vanguardia, Spain; La Nación, Argentina; and Diario de América, USA. Rahola appears frequently on television and has taken part in several university lectures. From 1987 to 1990, she was director of the Catalan publishing house Pòrtic, and as a journalist, she covered the Eritrean-Ethiopian War, the Balkan Wars, the Gulf War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a politician, Rahola was the only member of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya in the Spanish Congress of Deputies in 5th and 6th Spanish legislatures. She also served as vice-mayor of Barcelona. Rahola also participated in several committees of investigation, especially those related to political corruption such as the comisión Roldán. In 1996, she left Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya to join Àngel Colom and Joan Laporta in a new political group, the "Partit per la Independència", but after this failed, she concentrated on journalism and writing. Her areas of interest include women's rights, international human rights, and animal rights. In recent years she has attracted controversy in Spain for her critical support of Israel and Zionism.

Jews of Six Arms, speech by Pilar Rahola

A meeting in Barcelona with a hundred lawyers and judges a month ago.

They have come together to hear my opinions on the Middle-Eastern conflict. They know that I am a heterodoxal vessel, in the shipwreck of “single thinking” regarding Israel, which rules in my country. They want to listen to me, because they ask themselves why, if Pilar is a serious journalist, does she risk losing her credibility by defending the bad guys, the guilty? I answer provocatively – You all believe that you are experts in international politics when you talk about Israel, but you really know nothing. Would you dare talk about the conflict in Rwanda, in Kashmir? In Chechnya? – No.

They are jurists, their turf is not geopolitics. But against Israel they dare, as does everybody else. Why? Because Israel is permanently under the media magnifying glass and the distorted image pollutes the world’s brains. And because it is part of what is politically correct, it seems part of solidarity, because talking against Israel is free. And so, cultured people when they read about Israel, are ready to believe that Jews have six arms, in the same way that during the Middle Ages people believed all sorts of outrageous things.

The first question, then, is why so many intelligent people, when talking about Israel, suddenly become idiots. The problem that those of us, who do not demonize Israel have, is that there exists no debate on the conflict. All that exists is the banner; there’s no exchange of ideas. We throw slogans at each other; we don’t have serious information, we suffer from the “burger journalism” syndrome, full of prejudices, propaganda and simplification. Intellectual thinkers and international journalists have given up on Israel. It doesn't exist exist. That is why, when someone tries to go beyond the “single thought” of criticizing Israel, he becomes suspect and unfaithful, and is immediately segregated. Why?

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Vintage Pilar Rahola: Jews of Six Arms

Love of the Land: Pianist Kissin protests against BBC anti-Israel bias

Pianist Kissin protests against BBC anti-Israel bias

World famous musician writes to BBC Director-General

Stephen Pollard and Robyn Rosen
The Jewish Chronicle
30 December 09

The Russian-born pianist Evgeny Kissin, who became a British citizen in 2002, has accused the BBC of “slander and bias” against Israel, broadcasting material he describes as “painfully reminiscent of the old Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda”.

Mr Kissin, 38, who until now has not generally been known as politically engaged, has written to the director-general of the BBC, Mark Thompson. According to a close friend of the pianist, he has decided to become “actively involved in exposing and countering the evil propaganda of certain British media and especially the BBC.”

Mr Kissin’s decision to use his fame and artistic renown to protest to the BBC on Israel’s behalf contrasts with the criticisms against the Jewish state regularly voiced by musicians such as Daniel Barenboim, who holds Israeli citizenship.

In Mr Kissin’s letter, he accuses the BBC’s Persian Service of a “blood libel concerning Israel’s alleged harvesting of Palestinian organs and blood for future transplant”.

He continues: “It beggars belief that the British taxpayer should be funding an organisation which is aligning itself with Iran’s despotic leader in its antisemitic propaganda. Other print media like the Guardian, which erroneously printed this libel propagated by Israel’s enemies, have since apologised. I am not aware of any such retraction from the BBC.”

Mr Kissin, who was a child prodigy in his native Russia and is now widely recognised as one of the greatest living pianists, intends from now on to speak out against media bias against Israel, which he sees as both fuelling and being fuelled by antisemitism.

(Continue article)

When not giving of his time on behalf of Israel he is likely to be found in these more classical surroundings.


.

Love of the Land: Pianist Kissin protests against BBC anti-Israel bias

Israel Matzav: More anti-Israel bias at the Guardian

More anti-Israel bias at the Guardian

CiF Watch, which keeps an eye out for the doings at the Guardian's popular online soapbox Comment is Free, writes today about an op-ed that discusses the recent decision by Britain's Trade Unions Council (TUC) to boycott certain Israeli and non-Israeli companies that deal with Israelis in Judea and Samaria.

At the end of an excellent post, they relate this interesting story:

The truth is that trade union members of Unite, Unison, the Fire Brigade Union and the GMB – some of the unions whose executives were pushing for action against Israel – were never consulted about the matter. The one occasion when a union was forced to consult its members resulted in overwhelming opposition to a boycott (the Association of University Teachers in 2005, voting on an academic boycott).

In the matter of Israel, the UK trade unions have been hijacked by the hard Left. Since the collapse of communism, the hard Left has been bereft of a cause. In addition it is facing the prospect of a long period of Labour in opposition. Israel – more precisely the false analogy of Israel with apartheid South Africa – gives it a cause.

PS: My comment welcoming the article and pointing out that no union has balloted its members was deleted without trace. But this comment remains – with 62 recommends, so far:

lalibella

23 Sep 09, 2:12pm

I support whatever action British trade unions can take to oppose the racist, apartheid policies of this disgraceful Israeli government

Nothing like providing an open forum for discussion, is there?

Read the whole thing.

By the way, for those of you in the US who don't understand the voting thing, in Britain, like in Israel, unions can call strikes without the approval of the union members, and the union members are obligated to go along. Very democratic, isn't it?

Israel Matzav: More anti-Israel bias at the Guardian