Rupert Murdoch, Friend of Israel

In a characteristically searing piece, Melanie Phillips likens the present "witch hunt" in Britain against a certain media mogul to

"an insurrectionary frisson that we last saw in the wake of Diana's death in a car crash, when for a moment the monarchy itself seemed to be in danger at the hands of those who believed the Royal Family had effectively (and in the minds of not a few conspiracy nuts, actually) killed her.

This time round, the frenzied mob consists not of the public but members of Parliament, the BBC and the left-wing media baying for the blood of Rupert Murdoch. http://www.melaniephillips.com/murdoch-derangmeent-syndrome

You have only to see the wall-to-wall coverage of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal on Al Beeb, and the way in which the glint-eyed correspondents, politicians, and their accomplices have transformed the scandal into all-out warfare on Murdoch and his media empire, to realise how the Left have turned the scandal to their advantage.

It's no accident that as soon as the scandal broke members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and other elements within the anti-Israel fraternity (perhaps I should say "sorority," given the numbers of militant feminists who improbably fill its ranks) were tweeting each other to contact David Cameron and Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt opposing Murdoch's bid to acquire BSkyB

For Rupert Murdoch is a good friend of Israel.

As I observed last year http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2010/10/unheavenly-twins-ground-troops-in-in.html:

'It’s long been a fiction among antisemitic groups in his native Australia and elsewhere that media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s mother Dame Elisabeth (née Greene) is Jewish. We can no doubt expect the conspiracy theorists to be buzzing afresh with that line, in view of the robustly pro-Israel speech that Murdoch delivered before the ADL in New York on 13 October. How very true is Murdoch’s observation that: “We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews. For the first decades after Israel’s founding, this war was conventional in nature. The goal was straightforward: to use military force to overrun Israel. Well before the Berlin Wall came down, that approach had clearly failed."  As he continued:

“Then came phase two: terrorism. Terrorists targeted Israelis both home and abroad – from the massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich to the second intifada. The terrorists continue to target Jews across the world. But they have not succeeded in bringing down the Israeli government – and they have not weakened Israeli resolve.

Now the war has entered a new phase. This is the soft war that seeks to isolate Israel by delegitimizing it. The battleground is everywhere: the media … multinational organizations … NGOs. In this war, the aim is to make Israel a pariah.

 The result is the curious situation we have today: Israel becomes increasingly ostracized, while Iran – a nation that has made no secret of wishing Israel’s destruction – pursues nuclear weapons loudly, proudly, and without apparent fear of rebuke.”'  Read the entire speech here: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/rupert-murdoch-anti-semitism-and-israel_508697.html

In complete contrast to the BBC, with its overt left-wing bias, Murdoch has consistently presented a pro-American, pro-Israel viewpoint in his newspapers, as on Fox TV, but in the context of being fair and balanced.

Again, unlike the BBC, which conscripts its revenue from hapless licence-payers, Murdoch's media outlets pay for themselves by selling newspapers and getting subscribers to Sky.  Despite the fact that 39% of it is owned by Murdoch, Sky TV has covered the current "hacking" debate completely fairly and objectively.

Most of Murdoch's newspapers, such as The Times, The Australian, and The Wall Street Journal, have obviously never engaged in unethical "hacking" but represent the best of the world press.  Murdoch, who of course switched The Sun's allegiance from Tory to Labour during the Blair years, has basically allowed The Times - Britain's venerable newspaper of record dating to the eighteenth century - to survive despite the fact that it is losing money.

The now defunct News of the World (its final issue was last Sunday's) was a notorious scandal sheet that revelled in salacious stories, and which engaged in unethical behaviour for many years.  But it was not representative of the Murdoch empire as a whole.

Clearly, much of the present row, although obviously justified by the News of the World's unconscionable behaviour, has aspects of lynching against Murdoch.

Friends of Israel should pause for reflection before joining in the clamour for his blood.