Wednesday 11 June 2008

Britain is a hotbed of anti-Israeli sentiment

It would be naive to believe that fierce anti-Israel sentiment is only to be found in Britain and that it is not the norm in other European countries.

Article by Melanie Phillips:

"In today’s Daily Telegraph Israel’s ambassador to the UK Ron Prosor writes about his shock, upon returning to a Britain he remembered for its fairness and decency from an earlier posting to London, to discover that it has become a bubbling cauldron of anti-Israel prejudice, demonisation and lies. One of his central points is that media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

"is routinely tainted with bias and a surprising lack of context. Double standards are rife. Israel's military reaction to the attacks it faces is given in-depth, microscopic coverage. Yet the attacks to which Israel is responding are often ignored. Terror attacks, ambushes, suicide bombings, the constant barrage of rockets being fired on Israeli citizens are frequently disregarded."

Although he doesn’t name it, a principal offender in this regard is the BBC. But as the Useful Idiot blog records, BBC moderators today deleted an inoffensive observation about Prosor’s article from the FiveLive messageboard and then hid the thread altogether (as they have done before to hide their own complicity in purveying gross anti-Jewish prejudice: see my earlier article here).

And then -- just as they did on that previous occasion – within a few hours of their censorship being revealed they tried to cover their tracks. A short while ago, they restored the offending message but pretended that the poster had broken the rules by claiming:

"Your thread has been closed as you have linked to an opinion piece rather than an actual news story. Links to ‘comment’ or the editorial pages of online newspaper sites are not considered to be today's news. If you think they are about today's news then just find and link to the leading front page news story instead, you can add links to editorial pages later on in the discussion if relevant to the news story."

But the Prosor article was a news story; the Telegraph thought it was so newsworthy it ran a story about it on its front page. Furthermore, the moderators’ excuse does not explain why they obliterated all trace of the post; nor why they then restored it but prevented any further comment; nor why they did not apply the same rule to another comment on the messageboard referring to Prosor’s remarks about the academic boycott, which was allowed to remain even though no further comments on it were allowed.

Curiouser and curiouser!"

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