BBC: Jewish refugees not a central issue to peace

From Point of no return blog (Information and links about the Middle East's forgotten Jewish refugees)

"Last month, when Israel was celebrating its 60th anniversary, I complained to the BBC that its news reports insisted on putting a dampener on the festivities by juxtaposing them wth the lamentations associated with the 'Palestinian 'nakba'. The flipside of the Palestinian nakba, I argued, was surely the nakba of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries. At first the BBC confused my complaint with someone else's gripe about the expression 'Palestinian land' and sent me the wrong pro-forma reply. Now I have just received a second reply, which though more relevant, leaves me more bewildered than ever.

"The specific issue of Palestinian refugees was mentioned in the context of the peace process. It is generally seen as one of the key stumbling blocks to finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We have covered the issue of Jewish refugees in the past, however, it is not something that is generally viewed as a central issue in the peace process in the same way the Palestinian refugee issue is. Should the issue of Jewish refugees become an integral part of the negotiations in the Israeli-Arab peace negotiations or a stumbling block thereto, we would of course look at them in a more in-depth fashion.

Overall, whilst focusing on the celebrations in Israel it seems fair to have mentioned the contrasting marches being held by Palestinians at the time."
Yours sincerely
Stewart McCullough
Complaints Coordinator"

So there you have it. The BBC claims to have covered Jewish refugees in the past, but forgive me if I can't recall when. It does not consider the Jewish refugeees important enough to be mentioned, and certainly not as important as the Palestinian refugees. If Jewish refugees were to make a real nuisance of themselves - become a 'stumbling block' - then the BBC might sit up and take notice."

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!"

Is it time to give up on the BBC?, by Gavin Gross

From The Jerusalem Post:

It seems to reflexively turn to most extreme Israel critics available.

"In May I was invited to appear on BBC Radio 4's Sunday program, a religious news and current affairs show, to discuss the ZF's [Zionist Federation] upcoming "Israel 60" concert at London's Wembley Arena that attracted over 7,500 people. The producers also invited Ivor Dembina, a Jewish comedian performing at a Jewish Socialists' Group (JSG) dissenting event at a small hall in north London. Dembina had just signed a letter in The Guardian newspaper titled "We're not celebrating Israel's anniversary" which claimed that Israel was a "state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land" and which "even now engages in ethnic cleansing."

Despite the fact that the ZF's event would be at least 25 times the size of theirs and was supported by 50 mainstream Anglo-Jewish organizations, the BBC producers felt that as a matter of journalistic "balance" these two opposing views of Israel's 60th anniversary should be presented to their listeners. (...)

In the end I chose not to appear as I felt my time would be spent having to rebut these accusations against Israel rather than discussing our celebrations. Without a ZF spokesperson, the item was never broadcast.

In April I did appear in the BBC TV program Aliyah - The Journey Home? produced by its religion department and broadcast during Pessah as part of the BBC Charter's requirement for non-Christian programming. While I was told the program set out to examine the spiritual and religious motivations for British Jewish aliya, I was asked mainly political questions about the Palestinian right of return and Israel's treatment of its Arab citizens. The producers used Antony Lerman, an anti-Zionist Jewish academic, as one of their on-air experts even though Lerman has called publicly for the repeal of Israel's Law of Return and for the evolution of a single Israel-Palestine state. When I queried the use of Lerman on such a program, given that his views on aliya and Israel represent a tiny fringe of Anglo-Jewish opinion, the executive producer told me that Lerman had the support of significant Jewish figures such as Haim Bresheeth, who the producer referred to as a reputable academic and noted author.

Bresheeth, an Israeli-born academic and activist within the UK's University and College Union (UCU), regularly calls for a full boycott of Israeli academic institutions and was quoted by The Jerusalem Post as telling a "Resisting Israeli Apartheid" conference at London University that: "The occupation started in 1948" and "There is no valid comparison between South Africa and Israel; Israel is much worse. South Africa exploited its native population while Israel expelled and committed genocide against its native population." Is it ignorance or malice that would lead a BBC producer to credit this man with being an important representative of the Jewish community?

Finally, The Jerusalem Post's UK correspondent Jonny Paul was invited to appear on the BBC World Service's "World Have your Say" radio show in the run-up to Israel's 60th anniversary, alongside a Haaretz journalist and two Palestinian students from the Olive Tree scholarship program at London's City University. (...) when Paul arrived at the BBC's studios he was shocked to find Dr. Azzam Tamimi replacing one of the Palestinian students. Nicknamed "Kaboom" by bloggers, Tamimi is a Hamas supporter who doesn't believe Israel has a right to exist, supports suicide bombings within Israel, and famously told the BBC's Hardtalk TV program that he wanted to be a suicide bomber himself. Paul threatened to walk out of the studio but was eventually persuaded to stay. Various BBC programs use Tamimi as a Palestinian spokesperson. (...)

Due to this sort of journalistic decision-making, and the fact that as the national broadcaster the BBC claims 34 million domestic radio listeners weekly, the British public ends up with a distorted view of the situation in Israel and Anglo-Jewish opinion of it. This is not only a Jewish or Israeli issue. When a British Muslim radical attacked then Home Secretary John Reid at a public meeting saying he should not set foot in any Muslim neighborhood, he was promptly invited to present his views on BBC Radio 4's Today program."

Rare mention of Jewish refugees at Westminster

From Point of no return (Information and links about the Middle East's forgotten Jewish refugees)

"For the first time since the 1950s, Jewish refugees from Arab countries were mentioned in a House of Commons adjournment debate to mark Israel's 60th anniversary.

In the debate, which took place on 20th May and is minuted in the HANSARD record, Andrew Dismore, Labour MP for Hendon and a tireless supporter of Jewish causes, said that 800,000 Jews fled Arab countries. Together with the Palestinian refugees, they constituted an exchange of populations.

"When talking about the problems of the Palestinian refugees, we overlook the Jewish refugees from Arab lands. In 1945, some 800,000 Jewish people were living in Arab countries; today, there are fewer than 7,000. I am thinking of the Jews from Iraq and Yemen, who had to flee the pogroms there. The net result was what can only be described as an exchange of populations, because of the number of Palestinians who left and the number of Jewish people who went to Israel, having been expelled from Arab lands, " Mr Dismore said.

Read debate in full"

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's first visit to Europe - sickening

It's my fault, by Stephen Pollard

"Almost all the coverage of the UN's woeful food summit in Rome has been about Robert Mugabe. But it also marks the first visit to Europe of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And guess what he chose to speak about (guess 'who', I should say)?

Me.

Not just me of course. Quite a lot of other people like me, too. People who are Zionists, that is. By which he means Jews:

The people of Europe have suffered the most harm from Zionists and today the costs of that falsified regime, whether political or economic, are on Europe's shoulders...I do not believe my statements [at the conference] will cause any problems. People love what I say because they are trying to save themselves from the oppression of Zionists.

In some parts of Europe his second point might just be met with knowing nods.

And on Sunday his foreign minister made clear what should be done about it (as Tom Gross points out):

Iran's foreign minister is the latest senior Iranian politician to join President Ahmadinejad in threatening Israel. In a speech on Sunday, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki called on the world's Muslims to work to "erase" Israel, reports the Gulf Daily News in Bahrain.

In April, a senior Iranian army commander also threatened Israel with "elimination."

I'm not sure what is more sickeningly ironic to hear at a food summit - the thoughts of a brutal tyrant such Robert Mugabe or a would-be genocidal murderer such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Tough call."

Germans and Israel: 60 Years of a Neurotic Obsession, by Jost Kaiser

Full article in Pajamas Media :

"In 2003 the European Commission sponsored an opinion poll whose results imply that Israel must be some sort of superpower — at any rate, in the eyes of German television viewers. (...)

There has long existed in Germany a sort of parallel world of uplifting speeches about Israel, on the one hand — and then, on the other hand, there is this: the poll in question showed that some 65% of Germans feel themselves threatened by Israel. (Another 45% feel threatened by the USA.)

How can that be? Threatened by such a small country with only six million inhabitants: about the size of the German state of Hesse?

The German satirist Wiglaf Droste once rightly said that by “freedom of speech” many Germans understand finally being allowed to say something negative about Jews and Israel again. And thus in the German context the real subject of many stories relating to Israel is just how one can go about doing this.

Germans are obsessed with the issue. Even a master thinker like the political commentator Heribert Prantl of Germany’s bestselling broadsheet, Die Süddeutsche Zeitung, cannot let go of the subject. In 2006, during the Israel-Hezbollah war, Prantl showed how it can be done: namely, by asserting that one cannot say anything against Israel — in order then to do so at great length.

“Bombs falling on Beirut, war in the Gaza Strip, a hundred thousand refugees. What criticism of Israel and how much criticism is permitted in Germany these days?”

Of course, all criticism is permitted. It is only that people like Prantl are always holding themselves back (happily), in order then at some point to out themselves as heroic rebels fighting against their authentic selves and to declare their own inner struggle as universal. (...)

Already in the sixties, the “alternative scene” leftist, Dieter Kunzelmann, suggested that Germans had to get over their “tick about the Jews.” He and his comrades thought they could do this, for instance, by putting a bomb in the Jewish community center in West Berlin.

Of course, the majority of Germans are not so radical. But they are, nonetheless, preoccupied by this “tick about the Jews” — of which they themselves show symptoms and whose treatment they obviously consider to be urgent.

A German neurosis. A neurosis that consists, for instance, in the fact that in Germany no country is criticized so harshly as Israel — and then at the same time Germans complain that “one is not allowed to say anything negative about Israel.”

A neurosis that consists in the fact that Heribert Prantl of Die Süddeutsche Zeitung can set off some of the classic pyrotechnics from the anti-Semitic arsenal — so long as they are just slightly repackaged as anti-Israeli rather than anti-Semitic. For example, the standard charge that Jews are responsible for creating their own enemies. One does not need to draw on any negative anti-Semitic “associations,” Prantl claims, “in order to criticize Israel’s aggression against Lebanon, which will prove to be a help to Hezbollah’s recruitment efforts. One may, indeed one must deplore the fact that Israel is rearing its own enemies and helping to make a murderous conflict eternal.”

Israel’s aggression? In fact it was the other way around: Israel was attacked. But no: Israel has, of course, to be held responsible.

Prantl continues: “In combating Islamist fanaticism, Israel’s self-fanaticization is no help. The right to self-defense cannot lead to international norms, like that of the protection of the civilian population, being suspended.”

“Israel’s self-fanaticization”? One needs to savor this defamatory coinage by Die Süddeutsche Zeitung’s amateur psychologist.

Needless to say, Prantl’s remarks were met with applause at the time. In fact, not just applause — rapturous applause.

This is probably of no concern to Israelis. They are used to it. Unlike Germans, who spend the whole day thinking about Israel, Israelis do not spend the whole day thinking about Germany.

It is similar with Americans, who could not care less about Germany and are more likely to show interest in Asia than in messed-up Europe.

Israelis would rather spend their time developing software and conducting research on biotechnologies, an area in which the country is among the world leaders.

And here in Germany, we will spend another 60 years obsessing over the question: “What may — no — what must we be permitted to say against Israel?”

Well, have fun with your ruminations — but I want nothing to do with them.

Happy Birthday Israel!"

Another Case of British Leftist 'Lobby Envy', by Solomonia

Posted by Solomon @ Solomonia:

"...Even the pro-Israel Brits often wind up only a hop and a skip away from the Jew baiters and conspiracy-theorists -- providing them, sometimes naively, sometimes callously, with more useful ammo for their belts.

Adam LeBor, writing at Harry's Place, is proud to announce he'll be posting at one of the internet's premier locale's for rampant Jew-hatred: The Guardian's Comment is Free: Commenting is free.

No anti-Israelite, he. LeBor was asked to write for CiF after they heard him on TV "opining on one of my perpetual themes: why the United Nations needs to start suspending and expelling member states who are guilty of the worst human rights abuses." Great! They need that at CiF.

So what's the object of attack in his first piece? Why, AIPAC, of course -- "a rather creepy organisation..." He should fit in at CiF rather well after all. You see this is the left's idea of being "pro-Israel.":

"I remember ten years ago when I was making some radio programmes for the BBC on Israel at 50 trying to interview one of their officials. Trying to get any information out of her about how AIPAC worked reminded me of interviewing suspicious ex-(not really)-Communists in eastern Europe."

That just shows they're an effective organization -- in contrast to officials of the Israeli government itself who just can't seem to stop themselves from bragging about their latest PR efforts -- an awfully silly thing to do. LeBor relies on a quote from Israeli David Kimche, both in the Harry's Place post and in the comments, to support his assertion that AIPAC is no good for Israel. An appeal to authority on issues around which a great deal of divergent but well-informed opinion circulates is a sure sign that the author himself is not quite able to forward a position sufficiently well-informed to stand on its own. A David Kimche quote -- just another opinion among many -- buys you nothing.

LeBor's idea? Encourage the British left to lay off the boycotts and support J-Street instead. There's a poetry to that somehow. Somewhere between his attacks on the extremism of AIPAC, someone may want to remind him that J-Street is brought to us by some of the same people who brought us the Geneva Accord -- so in tune with political streams of thought it was DOA in both Israel and America.

May he have all the success in his efforts to influence the American lobbying scene as The Guardian itself had in trying to influence the voters in Ohio last time out. Remember? Dear Limey assholes"