Sunday 1 July 2012

With the BBC's Connivance, Fledgling Journalists Are Fed The Anti-American Line

On 27 June John Pilger gave his sold-out talk at the Frontline Club, which as I mentioned here was promoted by the BBC's College of Journalism (CoJo).

Pilger began by explaining how and why he first departed Australia's shores, recalling that he left for Europe on the return voyage of one of the passenger ships that, during the immediate postwar decades when "Populate or Perish" was the country's watchword, had brought Italians and Greeks to Australia.

(It's quite true, as he implies in passing, that Australia had hitherto preferred northern Europeans, especially Britons, as immigrants; this antisemitic cartoon, which appeared in 1947 in the Sydney Bulletin, shows Holocaust survivors being welcomed by Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell, apparently depicted as their Pied Piper.)

At the Frontline Club, as seen here,  John Pilger, that legend in each lefty's lifetime, seems to have wowed his audience with his reminiscences, film clips, demonisation of the United States, and advice.

Towards the very end of the video, in response to a question by a young woman regarding Syria, he declares:
"No peace will happen in any of the countries of the Middle East ... until Palestine gets the justice that is due to it, that is the central, almost, the cockpit of Middle East difficulties, problems, injustices and so on ..."
And just afterwards the final questioner, novelist James Thackara, asks him:
"Can I ask you to say what you really think of America? ... How bad is it? How bad will it get? And can it be contained?"  
This unleashes an amplification of the evening's underlying anti-American theme: condemnation of "rapacious America" and its foreign policy, its influence on the foreign policies of other western powers, and the observation that he feels lucky not to have been "blown to bits" owing to nuclear America's stance during the Cold War... 

Thus, with CoJo's connivance, are fledgling journalists indoctrinated.

4 comments:

  1. Yes we used to experience the same thing in West Africa. We'd be greeted by jeers of "Yankee Go Home.....and take us with you!"

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  2. OT
    Today's must read article

    The American Girl in the Bunker
    To a volunteer from New York in an IDF paratrooper unit, the rockets fired from Gaza last week felt like war.
    http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/104939/american-girl-in-the-bunker

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