" If You Don’t Do This, You Are Professionally Ostracized": A journalist on anti-Israel bias

Ring any bells, Jon Donnison?

'....Over time, I came to realize that to be considered a successful journalist by the Western media, a journalist must stick to an acceptable script. In the Middle East, this means portraying Israel and the Jews as the bad guys, and the Palestinians and the PA as the good guys. If you don’t do this, you are professionally ostracized.

.... I saw journalists depict the easiest stories to tell without digging any deeper into the facts behind the conflict. There were various reasons for this—lack of time, money, and resources; ignorance and pressure from editors....

Beyond this, however, I found that some stories carried with them an inherent dislike for the Jewish state and the Jewish people. I’m not speaking about most of the Western media. But a few conversations with journalists do come to mind in which it was obvious that the motivation for their stories was anti-Semitism. What’s scary is that these stories inevitably play a major role in shaping foreign policy toward Israel.

Of course, every news outlet, newspaper, or magazine has an agenda. There is no such thing as an unbiased journalist. We bring our experiences, interactions with people, and our emotions to bear on every story and situation. This is inevitable. Biases will always exist. But we still have a responsibility to uncover and portray the truth to the best of our ability. Admitting to our biases does not mean we should submit to them. [This goes double for publicly-funded public broadcasters like the BBC, whose charters obligate them to impartiality.]

I admit that, at times, I questioned my perception of the situation in Israel. Was I missing something? I felt like I must be doing something wrong, because my views didn’t fit into the framework presented by the Western media.... And the Western media’s view of Israel is a status quo that needs to be questioned.

There is another reason why Western journalists must begin to question their biases and their conduct toward Israel: Their failure do so is pushing peace further away. For example, the Western media feeds the corruption of the Palestinian Authority. If journalists really want to help change things for the better, they should have the courage to criticize the Palestinians and their government.

Got that, Jezza?

They should report on human rights violations committed by the PA (and Hamas). They should tell the world about incitement again Jews and Israelis in PA-controlled media, as well as mosques and schools. They should report on the television shows that teach Palestinian children to hate Jews. They should share the stories of Palestinians who want to speak out against their leaders, but are afraid to do so for fear of imprisonment or death. Give Palestinians a real voice. Putting all the blame on Israel will never change the fate of the Palestinian people.

In fact, just like the PA, the Western media exploits the Palestinians. They use them in order to get the award-winning story their editors want. What the Palestinians do not realize is that these journalists don’t care about the Palestinians. They interview a few people in Ramallah about their struggles, take some emotional photos, and then head back to the comfort of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. As a result, decades of pro-Palestinian bias has changed nothing.

.... As a journalist myself, it pains me to see how bias, unprofessionalism, laziness, ego, and sometimes outright racism influences coverage of Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians. These failures are not only a violation of journalistic ethics, they make peace less likely and embolden Israel’s enemies, and the enemies of democracy around the world.

People ask me a lot if I am pro-Israel. Am I pro-Israel? If supporting democracy and the search for truth it permits means that I am pro-Israel, then, yes, I am.'

Those are extracts from a suberb indictment of journalistic bias against Israel, entitled 'Yes, Journalists Choose Sides in a Conflict—and Often for the Worst Reasons' by Israel-based journalist Zenobia Davji, herself of Parsee heritage.  The entire piece must be read.

And since her article inevitably reminded me of the BBC, here's a recent Memri.org video of Al Beeb's very good friend "Bari" Atwan, speaking late last year in Beirut:

The BBC's Pal Bari: "Chemical Weapons ... Are The Poor Man's Nuclear Bomb" (video)

Here's the recently resigned editor of the London-based Al Quds Al-Arabi, the BBC's old mate (see my post here) Abdel Bari Atwan, one of the BBC's most frequent and honoured studio guests despite having declared that were Israel to be struck by Iranian missiles he'd dance for joy in Trafalgar Square, making some frank comments about Syrian chemical weapons: "a loss to the entire Arab nation"...

(Memri.org video)

I hear on the grapevine that  Bari, as his BBC hosts call him, might soon find a berth at The Guardian.

There's now, incidentally, a version Down Under of that odious rag.  How it must hate the fact that one of the first international phone calls placed by new Aussie Prime Minister Tony Abbott has been to Bibi Netanyahu declaring his (genuine and long-standing) support for Israel.

BBC's Buddy: "Whoever Fights America & Its Enterprise In The Region, & Whoever Fights Israel & The American Occupation, Is Not Considered A Terrorist By Me” (video)

Here's one of the BBC's favourite pundits, their old mate Abdel Bari Atwan, who's welcome in the BBC  studio despite having said that were Iranian missiles to strike Israel he'd dance for joy in Trafalgar Square, explaining jovially to an Egyptian interviewer why Osama Bin Laden was "only half a terrorist".

 (Memri.org video; hat tip: BBCWatch)

Pumping Out Anti-Israel Poison – BBC-Style

Well-known British Middle East specialist Robin Shepherd has a pungent not-to-be-missed article here regarding the latest round of bias against Israel from the loathsome BBC. Entitled "More shameful BBC propaganda against Israel," it points out that "The BBC has now sunk to pinning its stories against Israel on people who refer to the Jewish state in terms of Nazism and Apartheid" and cites 9/11 truther Richard Falk as a case in point:

'In a nutshell, Falk is so hostile to Israel that he’s a de facto anti-Israel activist. But even that fails to do justice to the sheer viciousness of his diatribes against the Jewish state. Here’s just a smattering of examples of his approach. First there are the suggested comparisons with Nazi Germany. He has sometimes claimed that he doesn’t quite mean it literally. On others he has talked of Israeli policies as "genocidal".

He’s ambivalent about Hamas as a terrorist outfit. His language about Israel is peppered with references to "apartheid", "criminality", "collective punishment" and so on. The picture is clear enough.

I can't see how he can be described as anything other than an obsessive, anti-Israeli fanatic.'

Shepherd continues:

'Which brings us back to the BBC and its decision to hang an entire story on the testimony of a man with a record like that. I find it difficult to believe it was pure ignorance. Falk has been on the scene for years, and his attacks against Israel are legendary. The BBC’s story did not even include a single line informing the reader of his anti-Israeli reputation.

And this is how the propaganda against Israel is spread: a mainstream media outlet feeds an unsuspecting public with a story purporting to hang on an objective source, all the while knowing that 95 percent of the readers will swallow it because they don’t know Richard Falk from Adam.'

Abdel Bari Atwan, Gaza-born editor of the London-based Al Quds Al Arabi, is also such a man, one of Al Beeb's honoured studio guests in programmes about international affairs and news bulletins about the Middle East.  In fact, as so often, he was a panellist on "Dateline London" this weekend, along with France24 correspondent Benedicte Paviot, John Fisher Burns of the New York Times, and Sir Simon Jenkins of The Guardian.
 
(A nice politically balanced panel, no? Er, no. But at least yesterday they didn't focus on Israel, the nearest that they got to it in the time allotted being towards the end, when Burns announced that to defeat Islamic extremism the West must change both its foreign policy and its treatment of its "domestic" Muslim populations... Nobody demurred, by the way.)


That the BBC frequently trots out Abdel Bari Atwan as a commentator on the Middle East, despite his proven pattern of vilification of Israel, and as in the case of Richard Falk, with no mention or even hint of it, is disturbing, to say the least. (You may recall this post of mine regarding how fond Al Beeb is of him.)

Indeed, it is shameful in the extreme that the national broadcaster appears to lionise the man who boasted  on Lebanese television that if Iran nuked Israel he'd dance for joy in Trafalgar Square.

Can you imagine the BBC welcoming back time and again a commentator who had contemplated the annihilation of any other Middle East country with such gloating anticipation?  No, neither can I.

Although his manner on television is genial and gentlemanly, Mr Bari Atwan has very strong, indeed embittered, opinions, and seems to want the eventual eradication of Israel altogether; however, his goal is sometimes unclear

Here's a taste of his views on and vilification of Israel, via English-language editorials in his newspaper.

[Sorry about the black font in some of the extracts - I didn't choose it.  I blame Blogger!]
 
 On David Cameron's characterision of Gaza as an open-air prison camp:

'The Western world has started to run out of patience with Israel and its genocidal policies. Israel has become an economic, moral, and security burden on the west and the countdown to get rid of it gradually has started. Cameron is totally right when he talks about the Gaza Strip as a large prison. We wish he had compared it to the Nazi detention camps, that he had condemned Israel's war on the Strip and the war crimes the Israelis committed during it, particularly the use of white phosphorus. But at least the days when Israel can carry out war crimes and lay seige to an entire, innocent, people are now numbered, or so we would like to believe.'

On the Mavi Marmara incident:

'The world is losing patience with this pariah state run by racist war criminals, and the tired excuses of history, the Holocaust and persecution, no longer weave their magic. If the blood of the martyrs and heroes of the flotilla marks the countdown to the end of the Apartheid Israeli regime then it has not been spilt in vain.'

and:

'We thank God that the Freedom Flotilla ships sailed from Turkish ports and thank Him more that one of them (Marmara) was sailing under the Turkish flag. We thank Him a third time that Turkish martyrs were killed by the bullets of the Israeli soldiers who raided the ship and opened fire deliberately at the activists aboard it with the murderous intent....

Israel has lost its strategic ally Turkey and moved it from the corner of friend to that of the enemy.... Israel is increasingly hated as it faces the threat of Iran's growing regional power and stands on the verge of losing its Western allies whom it is embarrassing and threatening their security with its massacres.

The only friend left for Israel, and we say it with bitterness and sorrow, are the official Arab order or those still committed to the peace process and moving in the American orbit. We say it sincerely and with satisfaction: Congratulations to Israel for these friends. They might be helpful to it when they have not been helpful to their nation, creed, peoples, and fair causes.'

 On religious strife in post-Mubarak Egypt:

'Israeli fingers never stopped playing with fire in the internal affairs of Egypt, as it did in Iraq, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories, and churches always been one of its goals, in order to incite Christians against their Muslim brothers, and to give the impression that peaceful Islamic-Christian coexistence is impossible. The Israeli lobby plays the same game against Muslim minorities in the West, smearing them with allegations of terrorism and presenting them as a security risk and source of great danger. From the same source come all the unfounded opinions about the incompatibility of Islam and democracy.'

On direct peace talks:

'A former Arab foreign minister, who did not want to be named, confided to me that President Husni Mubarak told him one day that if he wanted something from the United States, he would turn to Sharon, and the US response would be quick to come, meeting his request. Is it reasonable for a state with the standing of Egypt, its history, and civilization to deal with the United States through Israel? Yes, everything is possible these days. After all, have the Arab regimes not fought all Israel's wars through the United States - in Iraq and Afghanistan - and against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and against Hamas in Palestine? And these regimes are now getting ready to fight a new war against Iran.'

On visits by Muslim dignitaries to the disputed territories:

'We in Al-Quds al-Arabi back Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi's fatwa which incriminates all calls for and all forms of normalization of ties with Israel as long as the territories remain under occupation and face continued grabbing by the successive Israeli governments, which reject peace and continue to commit war crimes in the Gaza Strip and in south Lebanon.

Visits to the occupied territories by Muslim religious clerics and senior officials will only serve to legitimize the Israeli occupation and give a misleading picture to the world about Israel's tolerance towards other religions at a time when it Judiazes Arab mosques and churches in the holy city, undermines the foundations of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and implements plans to partition it, if not, in fact, it is seeking to demolish it by the excavations under its foundations.'

 and:

'[I]t is necessary to warn of this dangerous kind of normalisation with an enemy that totally ruins the Arab and Islamic identity of Jerusalem....

High profile Muslim scholars should convene and face Sheikh Goma with clear religious evidence proving the wrongness of his ruling. They also have to call for his sacking if they are convinced he is "committing the crime of normalisation" with an enemy that occupies the holy lands, Judaises it and kills thousands of Muslims in wars which haven't stopped since the occupation of Palestine.“the occupation state”....'

On Bibi Netanyahu:

'Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu practices lies as a profession, like all Israeli officials ...'

and:

'Netanyahu considers himself more powerful than the US President because of the support he enjoys within Congress and from the Jewish lobby, AIPAC [American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee]....'

 and:

'When Netanyahu demands that the Palestinian [National] Authority abandons the Palestinian refugees' right to return, accepts a disarmed state, and recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, then what is left for the Palestinians in terms of rights or aspirations?' 

On Operation Cast Lead and its aftermath:

'[T]he Israeli army's rabbi issued a fatwa sanctioning the merciless killing of Arabs....

The legislation used in the application for Livni to be arrested was the same mechanism used by Jewish Nazi hunters in many countries, including Britain, in their quest to bring those responsible for the Holocaust to justice.

It did not cross their minds or those of the Israeli State's leaders that they would drink from the same cup and face the same justice, the same charges, for their own barbaric crimes, equal to the Nazi ones, against an innocent and unarmed people whose lands they robbed and whom they dispersed in the diasporas and refugee camps and then chased them with white phosphorous bombs after imposing on them a blockade of starvation with the approval and support of the 'civilized world'.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry, which represents the only democratic state in the region according to the classification of the British Government and its European counterparts, summoned the British ambassador in Tel Aviv to protest a purely judicial measure and issued a statement rejecting the 'tendentious' procedures in a British court against Tzipi Livni instigated by 'extremist' elements.

....This foreign ministry of an outlaw state no more than 60 years old is casting doubts on the British legal system dating back at least 600 years and refusing to comply with it although Israel benefited from it and its measures even before its establishment.... We do not know of any terrorism that is fiercer and bloodier than Israel's own....

The Israelis, whether war criminals or ordinary people, believe they are the descendants of gods....

Israeli generals - whose chests are crammed with the medals and badges they received for killing the innocent and unarmed and using children and old people as human shields in front of their tanks - are in a state of panic. They can no longer freely wander the Capital cities of Europe and the credit for this goes to a group of Arab and Muslim activists who decided to deal with the West in its own language and laws and without the help of corrupt and dictatorial Arab regimes....

The Israeli lobby will use all its weapons against the British Government to make it amend the judicial system and stop the pursuit and arrest of Israeli war criminals. This amendment requires the House of Commons' approval first and then that of the House of Lords, which means we are facing a long and complicated political and judicial battle that requires counter moves by the Arabs, Muslims, and all supporters of human rights in the world.

 We are pinning much hope on the sons of the Arab and Muslim communities and humanitarians in general to continue to confront the Israeli lobby. In the British universities they succeeded in imposing an academic boycott on Israeli universities and another campaign ensured that produce from illegal Israeli settlements would be clearly labelled as such so that the British consumer can exercise his or her conscience while shopping....'

and:

'The whole world supported the victims of Nazism and took the necessary measures for taking revenge against the war criminals by bringing them to justice and punishing them to ensure that their crimes and mass holocausts are not repeated. Why then is the world conniving with the Israeli war criminals just because their victims are Arabs and Muslims? It is an ugly revenge which exposes the UK's present moral collapse.

Britain, which is planning to amend its laws ...  [since done - D.A.] to protect the Israeli criminals, bears moral and legal responsibility towards the Palestinian people whose blood is allowed to be shed by the Israeli war criminals and gives them a green light to continue their massacres. With this step, Britain is repeating, and even confirming, its hostility to the Palestinian people and its insistence on chasing them even in their exiles by its shameful bias towards their butchers whose state Britain had established at their expense.

Instead of atoning for its big crime against the Palestinian people, as it is responsible for their tragedy and all the catastrophes caused by it, Britain is continuing this crime even after more than 60 years of committing it by providing the legal and political protection for those who stole their land and dispersed them all over the world with its connivance.'

and

'[T]he crimes in Gaza were committed by the grandsons of the victims of the holocaust against innocent, unarmed peoples whose only guilt was that they were Palestinians, not Jews. This discriminatory view of British laws, based as it is on ethnicity, religion, and nationality, is a great insult to the victims of the holocaust themselves. Were the holocaust victims to express their view on this issue, they would have resisted any alteration to these laws, stood on the side of the victims in the Gaza Strip, and demanded the trial of the war criminals for tearing apart those victims' bodies, destroying their homes, and forcing more than 60,000 of them to live in the open air without shelter!'

On Israel and nuclear weapons:

'If the material for making dirty nuclear bombs must not reach terrorist organizations, which pay no attention to international law and do not hesitate to use any weapon of mass destruction which falls into their hands against their enemies, let us not forget that there are still official parties that pose as much danger to the world's security and stability and the lives of their people.

We are referring here of course to Israel which is considered above the international law, its articles, and its treaties. It is a "rogue state" which succeeded in developing nuclear weapons away from the eyes of international supervision or despite it with the encouragement of the Western world and in particular the United States of America.

The presence of nuclear weapons in Israel's hands is as dangerous as if they were in the hands of extremist organizations like al-Qa'ida. victims of al-Qa'ida are modest in number compared with those killed in Israeli massacres of Arabs and Palestinians...'

and:

'The German novelist and Nobel laureate Günter Grass bravely published a poem entitled “What Must Be Said,” in the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily newspaper in which he condemned Israel, the guardian of a nuclear facility, for threatening Iran which does not yet have one. He said it (Israel) is a source of danger to the fragile international peace and criticised his country for providing it with another nuclear submarine in the coming days. He also appealed for an international authority to inspect both Israeli and Iranian nuclear facilities.'

On Sheikh Salah, and 'Zionist lobbies':

'The arrest of Shaykh Ra'id Salah [leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel] by British security forces after he had entered the country legally in response to an invitation by British parliamentarians to take part in a political forum is the ugliest form of McCarthyism and a revival of the tyrannical European inquisition courts that belong to the Dark Ages and intellectual backwardness....

British Home Secretary Theresa May, whose government took the decision to arrest and then deport him, does not have any legal basis for her action - but has clearly demonstrated that she is giving in to the blackmail of Zionist Jewish pressure groups that want to turn Britain into a banana republic and deface the image of democratic institutions and its age old parliament where Shaykh Ra'id Salah was to lecture in one of its halls in the presence of several of its members.

How can the Conservatives Party's coalition government justify banning a peaceful man who has not been convicted in the most racist country in the world whose nationality he carries and was allowed to travel when this government is intervening militarily in Libya and its missiles and aircraft are killing dozens of civilians under the slogan of freedom, human rights, and consolidation of the values of justice and democracy?....

Shaykh Ra'id Salah speaks on behalf of the legal owners of the land which the Jews fleeing from European repression and holocausts usurped, expelling and displacing the majority of them while those who remained - representing a fifth of the new racist state's population -are facing the harshest kinds of discrimination and treated as 10th class citizens in a state boasting falsely it is the only democracy in the region.

We wish the British Government had arrested Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak who committed war crimes in the Gaza Strip and issued orders to use white phosphorous bombs against its unarmed and blockaded sons or Binyamin Netanyahu and members of his government who committed the Marmara ship massacre in the Mediterranean Sea's international waters. But it did not do this and will not do it because these represent a country that the civilized democratic West is treating as if it is above all laws and its terrorists enjoy immunity regardless of the crimes or massacres they commit.

How can Shaykh Ra'id Salah be anti-Semite when he and all the Palestinian people's sons are the biggest victims of anti-Semitism?....

 This venerable man coming from the bowels of suffering who believes in his faith, defends his creed, and is the model of patience and fortitude does not deserve this racist and exclusionary way and from a government that represents the state which caused the Palestinian people's catastrophe, deprived them of their land and homeland, and dispersed them all over the world even though they had not committed any crime and did this to atone for its sins of keeping silent over the Jews' holocaust in Nazi Germany....

We blame ourselves as Arabs and Muslims before blaming Britain, France, and all the governments of the civilized West for treating us scornfully and for yielding totally to the Israeli blackmail. We are the ones who have the oil and assets. We are the ones investing more than 3 trillion dollars and buying arms costing hundreds of billions of dollars to save Western economies from bankruptcy and yet do not have an iota of influence to stop this humiliation and ignominy to which we are subjected at the hands of Western governments and the Zionist lobbies controlling them....'

Mr Bari Atwan is, of course, entitled to his views.  However, the BBC, which is bound to objectivity by the terms of its (much-flouted) Charter is surely not entitled, morally at any rate, to its unconscionable duplicity in presenting him as a credible commentator with no axe to grind.

It is high time that the BBC demonstrates some integrity by lettiing its audience know that Mr Bari Atwan is a partisan commentator on the subject of Israel.  Either that, or ceasing altogether to invite him to comment on matters pertaining to Israel and its neighbours.

In London, Amnesty Hosts Racist Garbage

This is a crosspost by well-known British pro-Israel activist Jonathan Hoffman, a leading figure in the UK's Zionist Federation.  It first appeared at http://www.thejc.com/blogs/jonathan-hoffman/amnesty-hosts-racist-garbage:

Despite representations from the Board of Deputies, Amnesty went ahead with this Israel hate event: http://www.thejc.com/blogs/jonathan-hoffman/no-hate-amnesty-next-monday-...

This was no surprise, since Amnesty has been taken over by a person or persons with a malevolent agenda towards Israel – see all my previous blogs [on the Jewish Chronicle website] on meetings there. Notably I have offered Ruvi Ziegler as a speaker but this offer has been ignored by Amnesty’s Campaigns Director Kristyan Benedict (he who told Richard Millett that he would “smack me [Millett] in my little bald head”).
https://richardmillett.wordpress.com/tag/kristyan-benedict/

About 15 of us demonstrated before the meeting. Well done to Campaign4Truth for organising this.
http://campaign4truth.org/

I guess that in one respect the meeting (which was largely about the BBC) was music to our ears. The pro-Israel lobby was incessantly said to have cowed the BBC into parroting its own output.... (If only!)

[Professor] Greg Philo, for example, said (in so many words) that the advocacy manual published by The Israel Project has become the BBC’s Style Guide on Israel. Would that it were so …. The question I wanted to ask was just why was the BBC so much in thrall to the few of us who actively support Israel.

But I never got the chance because Victoria Brittain (of the Guardian) who was chairing didn't call me despite having my hand up throughout the Q&A.

She never called the other pro-Israel person in the audience (of about 250) either. That's how powerful we are …

Reality check: The BBC will never refer to Hamas as “terrorists” – always “militants”. BBC journalists are instructed to say “regarded as illegal under international law" whenever the settlements are mentioned. And Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East Editor, was ruled by the BBC Trust’s Editorial standards Board to be in breach of the organisation’s guidelines on impartiality and accuracy. The notion that the BBC is biased in Israel’s favour is about as absurd as saying that Harold Shipman [the mass murdering physician] was kind to old people

The first speaker was Greg Philo [pictured left], author of Bad News from Israel, a book which in short claimed the media was biased in favour of Israel because it did not reflect his extreme pro-Palestinian view of history. (Philo has a new update out called More Bad News from Israel, inevitably published by Pluto Press who specialise in this drivel (they published Ben White's book - Israeli Apartheid - too)).

Here is what Mike Brennan (Warwick University) had to say in his review of Philo’s book:

"Ultimately this is a rather tendentious and agenda-driven book in which the researchers set out to prove their own politically-inflected views. Its claims are based upon data generated by the selective use of historical material and flawed research methods. The net effect of the book will be to reinforce perceptions of Israel as monolithic, and will give succour to those who claim that the western media are controlled by ‘Zionists.’" http://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya/article_pdfs/d3Brennan-2.pdf

According to Philo, Israel has “a very sophisticated propaganda system” (I wish).

“All their speakers are organised to give the same message …. BBC journalists “wait in fear for the phone call from the Israelis”

The next speaker was Tim Llewellyn (ex-BBC; pictured right). Panorama’s Death on the Med was distorted but “it has become impossible to raise these issues with the BBC” (those pesky omnipotent Israel supporters hard at work again …)

The level of Llewellyn’s bias became clear when he said that the BBC should be supervised by an independent body, not by the Trust. The truth is that the BBC has a “dual key” regulatory structure involving both the Trust and OFCOM. Then Llewellyn – unbelievably – told the audience members they should complain that Labour, the Conservatives and the LibDems have no “Friends of Palestine” organisations (they all do of course).

Finally Abdel Bari Atwan spoke. The first thing he did – to prove that “the Israel Lobby“ was out to silence him – was to hold up the Jewish Chronicle’s front page: “How Was This Hatefest Allowed on Campus?” Atwan is convinced that the “Israel Lobby” is to blame for the fact that he is not invited as a guest on TV shows (he thinks he is treated "worse than Adolf Hitler").

Has he considered that it might just have something to do with the fact that he is an extremist who says that he will “dance in Trafalgar Square” if Iranian missiles hit Israel?
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1506.htm

This meeting was uncomfortably redolent of the thesis in the forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claimed that Jews controlled the press. Shame on Amnesty for hosting it. It is about time that Amnesty members made their voice known against this racist garbage.

“Always Good to See You,” gushed the BBC Presenter to the Anti-Israel Arab Extremist

London-based Dr Abdel Bari Atwan, who’s dedicated (for some audiences subtly) to Israel’s overthrow, is, thanks to a fawning media, a familiar face on British television. Born in Gaza in 1950, he attended school in Jordan and studied journalism at Cairo University. He moved to London in 1978, working for a Saudi publication, and is now a British citizen.

In certain Arabic media, pre-eminently the widely-distributed Pan-Arab newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi (circulation about 50,000 according to one estimate), which he’s edited since its foundation in London in 1989 (and which has been banned or censored for its extremism in some pro-Western Arab countries), he’s foams with fury and venom against Israel and the West, and exults at their tragedies and setbacks. In 1996 he got a scoop by donning Afghan robes, trekking into remote terrain, and securing an interview with Osama Bin Laden, who took the opportunity of issuing a fatwa.

Dr Atwan can be considered one of those Arab radicals who’s made Londonistan what it is, to the avowed satisfaction of Frances Guy, a principal dhimmi-driver of Foreign Office appeasement (see her quoted remarks in my post of 15 January, “Drivers of Dhimmitude ...”)

The splendid Canadian columnist Mark Steyn – whose departure as a regular columnist from Britain’s Daily Telegraph is much regretted by his numerous admirers – has described Atwan aptly as a “celebrity eliminationist”, for there seems to be no shortage of Western venues and Western broadcasters prepared to host the extremist editor.

In this photo, for instance, Atwan’s seen at the Edinburgh International Festival of Books in 2009, while Dr Ghada Karmi, whose father worked for the BBC’s Arabic Service, says her piece.

Dr Kharmi, who’s a Research Fellow at the Institute of Arab & Islamic studies at Exeter University and is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and vice-chair of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), is herself no stranger to the television studio. Aged eight when the State of Israel was born, and brought up in Britain – she has a plummy English accent that’s very easy on the ear and a fascinating manner to accompany it – she’s got a tale of having to leave her little dog Rexy behind when her family fled – a tale guaranteed to tug at the heartstrings – and is known for such statements as these:

"There is actually nothing — repeat, nothing — positive about the existence of Israel, as far as the Arabs are concerned.... It has increased the danger in the Arab world and is a threat not only to the security of the region, but the security of the whole world."

"...Israel, from its inception in 1948, has been given the most wonderful opportunity to behave itself, and it clearly has not done so. It's flouted every single law, it's behaved outrageously, it's made a travesty of international and humanitarian law. On what basis should this state continue to be a member of the United Nations?"

‘The two-state solution ... panders to Israel's paranoia over "demography," an ambiguous term that refers to the morally repugnant wish to preserve Israel's Jewish ethnic purity.’

And, of course, the Israel-hating lefties at events like that festival, just like susceptible TV audiences, lap it all up.

Dr Atwan has a similar track record of anti-Israel statements – and anti-Western ones of the most obnoxious kind.

For instance, "The events of 11 September will be remembered as the end of the US empire. This is because all empires collapse when they pursue the arrogance of power." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5333812.stm
Yes, this was reported by the BBC, yet despite that – or perhaps because of it – Al Beeb can’t get enough of him, it would seem!

Disregarding Saddam Hussein’s bloody persecution of Marsh Arabs and Iraqi Kurds, Atwan stated that Saddam deserved to be honoured for preserving "the unity of Iraq, its Arab and Islamic identity and the coexistence of its different communities". (Africa News, 31 December 2006; hat tip: http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.com/2010/12/4-dec-10-should-this-man-be-accorded.html)

During an interview on Lebanon’s ANB TV ( 27 June 2008) Atwan declared of a nuclear-armed Iran: " If a war breaks out, where will the Iranians retaliate? If Iran is able to retaliate, it will burn the oil wells, block the Strait of Hormuz, attack the American bases in the Gulf and, God willing, it will attack Israel, as well. If the Iranian missiles strike Israel, by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square and dance with delight.”

That same year, he pronounced as “justified” the cold-blooded terrorist attack on the MercazHaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem, which left eight young men dead and another nine wounded, claiming that the yeshiva was "hatching Israeli extremists and fundamentalists”. He described the consequent celebrations in Gaza as symbolic of the "courage of the Palestinian nation" and added that events in Gaza might "mark the countdown to Israel's destruction."

Lior Ben-Dor, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in London, described those words as “ alarming, since Atwan is perceived as a legitimate and unbiased analyst by the British media, and is often invited to voice his views in different media platforms. The problem is that when addressing the British public, he tends to hide his true opinions and ideology – his support for terror and the murder of civilians. This article reveals Atwan's real colors, a supporter of fundamentalism and terror, and hence he should be treated accordingly".
http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=95074

Ben-Dor’s warning fell on deaf ears. And similarly ignored, evidently, was this comment made in October 2003 by Munir Al-Mawari, a Yemeni journalist based in the United States:

"The Abd Al-Bari Atwan [appearing] on CNN is completely different from the Abd Al-Bari Atwan on the Al-Jazeera network or in his Al-Quds Al-Arabi daily. On CNN, Atwan speaks solemnly and with total composure, presenting rational and balanced views. This is in complete contrast with his fuming appearances on Al-Jazeera and in Al-Quds Al-Arabi, in which he whips up the emotions of multitudes of viewers and readers."

In December last year Atwan addressed a meeting at one of Britain’s cesspools of Israel-delegitimising activity, that old leftist stomping ground, the London School of Economics (LSE).

Blogger Tom Friedmann described the evidently torrid occasion thus:

‘Really Atwan’s behaviour at the event was much to be expected, although few thought he would actually be foolish enough to openly use the terms ‘Jewish Lobby’ and ‘Zionist Lobby’ interchangeably, indeed Freudian slip or not it at least revealed what he really thinks on this subject. No doubt a great embarrassment to those in the anti-Israel movement who smugly go around professing how much they adore Jews but that rather it’s simply Zionists they have quarrel with. Clearly Atwan has no interest in indulging such pretences; at one point during the question and answer session even pointing to a Jewish student and saying ‘you bombed children in Gaza’, this being his response to a question about his Iran statements which this time he both failed to deny or dissociate himself from in anyway, instead preferring yet another incoherent tirade against Israel.

 Anyone familiar with Atwan and his Saudi funded propaganda paper would be hard pressed to claim genuine surprise at his conduct during his evening at LSE, what was much more shocking was the behaviour of the chairing Professor; Martha Mundy. Draped in a hideous black velvet Bedouin style gown (presumably as much a rebuke to Western fashion as a show of solidarity to the Palestinians) Mundy was the wizen grimacing face of the Leftwing alliance with the fanatics of the Middle East. Openly declaring that she was prioritising questions from Women, as well as possibly racially profiling her selected members of the audience, she continuously interrupted and patronised those questions that came from the floor in anything other than a tone praiseful of Bari Atwan. The most surreal moments of all came when she jovially laughed during Atwan’s mocking of the question concerning his support for Iran nuking Israel. Her display only got more unnerving when she flew into a rage upon a student eluding to her being unfair in how she was taking questions, ‘EXCUSE ME!’ she screamed as she leapt to her feet and slammed her fists down on the desk. Perhaps her conduct should be considered unsurprising also, she is after all a member of the hardline BRICUP, a group supposedly for Palestinian Universities (of which there were none prior to Israel taking over administration of the territories in 1967). She has also called for the academic boycott of Israel, a disgustingly discriminatory proposal made particularly farcical by her claim that Israeli academics have failed to criticise their government’s actions, something which could hardly be further from the truth.

 As it was Mundy was almost as responsible for whipping the crowed up into a fury as was Bari Atwan himself. Indeed the Jewish and Israel supporting students who dared to turn out to challenge the false narrative presented at the lecture found themselves in the midst of a fierce and hostile audience only further incited by the rhetoric of the speaker. I can say with certainty that I heard Muslim girls seated behind me laughing when another student said that he knew someone who had been killed by a Hamas Rocket from Gaza. Perhaps the most sickening moment of all came when LSE’s Students Union anti-Racism officer stood up and asked Atwan how he could justify having superimposed Nazi Symbols onto the Star of David in his newspaper. To this a girl in the front row retorted ‘Yeh you are Nazi’s’ and despite the outrage this provoked among the Jewish students present the girl who made the comment was neither ejected nor reprimanded, rather Professor Mundy demanded that those students incensed by this remark be quiet or leave. Finally several Jewish students did leave in tears, including the President of the Israel Society who exited to harrowing shouts of ‘go get her’ from others present. Eventually there came the long awaited exodus of the remaining decent students left in the audience, so bringing the whole horrendous affair to a close.

 http://tomfriedmann.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/to-bigotry-we-give-no-sanction-%E2%80%93-so-then-why-was-abdel-bari-atwan-speaking-at-lse/

For another account see
http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/42703/full-extent-lse-atwan-fury-finally-revealed-video

 And see extracts here – but not before you read the remainder of this post!

For more on American-born Professor Martha Mundy, an expert in the anthropology of Sharia, who on a further happier occasion at LSE when an anti-Israel motion was defeated (http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/43964/lse-vote-strikes-a-blow-boycotters) had a run-in at LSE with barrister Jonathan Arkush, a senior vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, explaining "I felt considerably harassed by what I perceived as organised male aggression” (by the way, what is it about some western feminists that they are only too quick to condemn the Western male for alleged “chauvinism” or – as here – aggression, yet happily align themselves with misogynistic Islamic causes? Is it a Rudolf Valentino seductive sheikh thing? I really would like to know!) see http://www.thejc.com/universities/43965/take-academic-slaps-out 

Despite all, the antisemitic anti-West extremist Atwan is the man who the long despicable, increasingly dhimmified BBC still loves to trot out to comment on Middle Eastern affairs, and whom they wheeled into the studio yesterday morning (Monday) in order to ask him how Israel must be feeling now that Mubarak ‘s regime seems to be in tatters. That’s right, they chose to interview an Arab extremist on that topic – not even an Israeli!

Following the interview, in which Atwan was treated as usual with studied deference, the male presenter who’d given him free rein said in a chummy, heartfelt tone after thanking their Palestinian poster boy for his comments, “Always Good to See You”.

Having Atwan on is integral to Al Beeb’s preferred take on the current Egyptian crisis, it appears.
http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/2011/01/uk-and-us-now-to-blame.html#comments

Is it any wonder that Israel’s friends – in common with so many people dismayed and disgusted at its incorrigible leftist bias on other issues, including its marginalisation of all religions except for Islam – believe that Al Beeb is no longer fit for purpose and that its funding by a compulsory licence fee (in effect a poll tax on every household in Britain with a television, whether the household watches Al Beeb or not) is nothing less than an outrage?