The Man Who Begat a Multitude - of anti-Israel BBC presenters

The anti-Israel bias of the BBC - Al Beeb as it's consequently often dubbed - needs no introduction from me. It has been systematically documented - in a series of reports by the lawyer Trevor Asserson, who  runs the website BBC Watch, by Honest Reporting, by Tom Gross, and by the Biased BBC blog, for example.  It has also, presumably, been proven in a report the BBC commissioned from employee Malcolm Balen -  why else would the licence-funded "national broadcaster" suppress Balen's findings and furiously fight attempts via legal channels to force it to release his report?  No doubt Al Beeb hoped Balen would exonerate it from charges of bias against Israel, and didn't like what he had to say.

Al Beeb's Barbara Plett, who shed on-air tears for Arafat upon his impending death; Alan Johnston, the Gaza correspondent kidnapped by "militants" in 2007 and awarded an Amnesty International prize, immediately following his release, for his pro-Palestinian radio reports; the repugnant Orla Guerin; the seemingly incorrigible Jeremy Bowen (pictured, near Johnston's photo on a placard, during a show of solidarity by BBC staff with their kidnapped colleague) - these have been or are among the worst offenders. Their partisan reportage (together with such prejudiced online items as Bowen's "diary", which he posted on the BBC News website during Operation Cast Lead)  is truly despicable in an organisation which is obliged, by its Charter and its Producers' Guidelines, to be strictly neutral.  Yet BBC employees have been judges on journalistic awards given out by Amnesty International (a controversial organisation these days, and certainly one not particularly enamoured of Israel).  Even if the BBC employees concerned have the best of motives, in my view this involvement is not in keeping with impartiality.

Usually, Al Beeb disdainfully dismisses complaints by members of the public regarding its bias. It doesn't always bother to respond, even if a response has been specifically requested. So long as there is no independent body to arbitrate complaints, it will continue to behave in this unacceptable manner, for - shockingly - it handles all complaints itself.  Last April, however, the BBC Trust rebuked Bowen for aspects of his coverage.  But when accepting a journalism award in London in June he declared: "The BBC Trust accused me, wrongly in my view, of some inaccuracies in my reporting.  They did that because of a rather nasty campaign group in the United States and some highly politically-motivated individuals in this country who were in fact the enemies of impartiality, but they got their thoughts through."  In other words, folks, "The Lobby". And he's proved since that it's business as usual - did you catch his insinuating reference to "rich Jews" the other day in a broadcast, by the way?  (hat tip: Biased BBC).

We're all pretty familiar with BBC bias.  But when did the BBC let slip the scrupulous objectivity demanded of it, and which once made it a respected organisation trusted round the world?  Being an historically minded gal I decided to try to find out. And I believe I may have discovered the individual who began the BBC's downward spiral into biased reporting, at least as far as news about Israel and the Middle East is concerned. 

Step forward the shade of Keith Kyle (1925-2007), a Liberal-turned-Labourite who later joined the SDP, and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament several times.  Kyle seems to have been the first BBC broadcaster to flout the neutrality incumbent upon the BBC when, during the tension leading up to the Six Day War, he opined that "fundamentally in this dispute the Arabs are completely in the right.  There can be no question about this at all."  These words were also printed in the 1 June 1967 issue of The Listener, a BBC publication.

Shortly after Israel's stunning victory, the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) was set up in London in order to coordinate Arab and pro-Arab opinion in the UK.  Its leading parliamentary supporters were Tory MP and Suez rebel Anthony Nutting (in 1956, when Nutting was Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden had mentioned "the anti-Jewish spleen of you people in the Foreign Office") and Labour MP Christopher Mayhew, both inveterate foes of Israel.  Funded by Arab governments, CAABU could afford a secretariat, and its director was Michael Adams, who had worked for the BBC early in his career but had later joined the Guardian.  It was owing to his articles in that paper that a columnist in the Jewish Chronicle (30 June 1967) observed: "It is with a sinking feeling and eventually turning stomach that one examines the Guardian each morning." (That writer would certainly vomit daily if he read the Guardian nowadays!)

     One of CAABU's first actions had been to send Adams, while he was still employed by the Guardian, on a funded trip to the Middle East, from whence he sent a series of articles biased against Israel.  The Guardian had printed them without explaining that they had been subsidised by Arab money.  There was also a despatch from Cairo which talked of the "forcible expulsion across the burning desert of Palestinian Arabs to Gaza".  In fact, those deportees were members of the Palestine Liberation Army and a threat to Israel's security, as the Guardian grudgingly acknowledged the next day.  Adams also used the offensive term "final solution" to describe Israeli policy.

It was shortly after this that Adams became CAABU's director. The Guardian continued to offend.  In August it carried an advertisement from an Arab source that made "untrue and repulsive allegations about Israel's treatment of Arab civilians in the occupied territories" and in a report alleged the "collective shooting of civilians" by Israeli troops in the occupied territories as well as the discovery of "mass graves".  Yet overall it seems that with Adams's departure, and that of  leader writer Frank Edmead, the Guardian's coverage of Israel became more evenhanded - until it descended again into the travesty of truth and fair play that is its hallmark today.

The BBC's Keith Kyle was not slow to identify openly with CAABU.  He was a keynote speaker at one of its first major rallies.  The Jewish Chronicle (29 November 1968) noted "the intense anti-Jewish feeling generated in the CAABU audience - and among some of the speakers - by the very existence of the Jewish State, referred to as the Zionist State" as well as the way pro-Israel Jewish questioners were mocked and shouted down.

One of the worst features of Kyle's pro-Arab stance (apart from its infringement of the BBC Charter, of course) concerned the hijacking of an El Al aircraft at Zurich in February 1969.  Through his Arab contacts he had learned of the plan, but had not disclosed the information "to avoid Israeli retaliation against it".

In the same year he presented a series of programmes on the Middle East highly slanted against Israel and replete with gratuitous comments of his own.  Aghast, a  Jewish Chronicle columnist (9 May 1969) observed: "The casual viewer will doubtless have been fooled into believing that the Israeli occupation of Arab territories is barbaric and ruthless."

And that summer, on the BBC's Panorama, Michael Adams spewed out vitriol about "nation-wide and even world-wide Jewish pressure" - in other words, a certain lobby. 

In one of his platform appearances Adams - foreshadowing the avoidance by Al Beeb and the Guardian of the T-word - rhetorically enquired why the British press referred to "Arab terrorists": 'I can't remember calling members of the resistance in Nazi-occupied France "terrorists"', he continued.  (In 1999 his son, the BBC's Middle East correspondent Paul Adams, used the prescribed Al Beeb term "Islamic militants" of suicide bombers.  It was Paul Adams, when diplomatic correspondent, who in 2007 appeared to admit to BBC bias when he described Alan Johnston's job as "to bring us day after day reports of the Palestinian predicament in the Gaza Strip".)

As for Kyle, he became prominently associated with the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA; Chatham House) and wrote tendentious books on Suez and on Israel.  In 1983, when membership secretary of the RIIA, he invited as speaker Dr Israel Shahak, chairman of the so-called (and miniscule) Israel League for Human and Civil Rights, who had authored a book containing this odious assertion: "In the Jewish State, only the Jews are considered human.  Non-Jews have the status of beasts."

Perhaps we should not be too surprised that Kyle's obituary in the Guardian (27 February 2007) declared that Kyle "would have made a wise foreign secretary".

Northern Plights - Swedish Antisemitism and the Swedish Left

Some years ago, an Australian Jewish academic of my acquaintance, employed at a university somewhere in what is frequently dubbed "Eurabia", returned to his homeland for a visit.  During an interview with a reporter from the local Jewish newspaper he mentioned his conviction, based on the European experience, that unrestricted Muslim immigration into Australia would not bode well for Australia's Jews.  Imagine his surprise when he returned to his university and found that a small group of Aussie Jews, taking umbrage at his "Islamophobia", had contacted both the head of his department and the university's vice-chancellor in an apparent effort to get him sacked.  I guess that's the totalitarian hard left for you!

I'll be blogging in the very near future about the current situation in Australia, but today I want to focus on the plight of Swedish Jewry, about which perhaps not enough is known outside Scandinavia.  I base most of my information on a briefing paper authored by Mikael Tossaveinen, issued by the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University, and on the excellent blog Sweden Israel and the Jews, from which I took the accompanying photograph.  The blog http://www.swedenisrael.blogspot.com/ is essential reading for anyone wishing to gain an insight into just how viciously hostile towards Israel, and ambivalent towards Jews,  the Swedish left - government ministers, politicians, clergy, trades unionists, academics, journalists - has become.

You may recall that about a year ago a leftwing Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet, shamefully published an article which alleged that the IDF was killing Palestinians and harvesting their organs; the article, whose title translated into English was "They plunder the organs of our sons", was essentially the medieval blood libel wrapped in a modern cloak.  Its author, an extreme radical and anti-Zionist propagandist, was duplicitously described by the paper as a "journalist".   In that same year, there was a dramatic increase - up 57% on 2008 - of antisemitic incidents in Sweden, although it's well-known that many incidents go unreported, so that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

It's also well-known - despite the attempts, some of them farcical, of the mainly oh-so-politically-correct Swedish press to disguise the fact - that most antisemitic incidents are overwhelmingly the work of members of the large Muslim community that has grown in Sweden over the past generation, especially in the southern city of Malmo (total population perhaps as high as 300,000), where a fifth of inhabitants are Muslim.  In 2007, for Sweden's National Day, 6 June, marked each year as an official holiday, it was decided by officialdom - in a nod to Muslim numbers - to hold  celebrations at the mosque.  Hence this photo of ethnic Swedes in their national costume performing traditional Swedish folk dances in a bemusedly incongruous setting. 
Hence, too, the frequent use of Arabic rather than Swedish music that has come to mark the day.

As in certain other European cities, the Jews of Malmo, whose community was founded in the late nineteenth-century, feel intimidated by this large - and aggressive - Muslim presence.  With good reason, for physical threats and sometimes actual violence lie in wait for those sufficiently courageous - or foolhardy, depending on your viewpoint -  to appear in public wearing kippot or other symbols of Jewishness.  The local Chabad rabbi, easily identifiable, has been victimised innumerable times - there was even an attempt to run him over. 

During Operation Cast Lead, the tiny Jewish community, less than 800-strong (its numbers have since fallen further owing to emigration), held a "peace rally" in Malmo's main public square.  Despite that description of the event they were surrounded by a surging hate-filled mob of Muslims and ethnic Swedish leftists.  This mob clashed with police and hurled bottles and firecrackers at the Jews, who were eventually, for their safety, shunted into an alley by police.  Not long afterwards, two Israeli tennis players in Malmo for the Davis Cup were forced into playing their match in private - with no spectators - as a mob of the same elements, similarly armed with missiles, attempted to storm police barricades and invade the court.  One of them, Andy Ram, described the experience to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as "distressing and disgusting ... the first time I have come across such a demonstration and felt the hatred towards Israelis".

The attitude of Malmo's Social Democratic mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, to the plight of his city's Jews has been exceedingly obnoxious - and instructive, reflecting as it does the attitude of so much of the political left (and not only in Sweden) towards Jews and Israel.  Reluctant to implicate the Muslim community, he has attempted to shift the blame to right-wingers, and has also dismissively stated with regard to the flight of Jews out of Malmo owing to the intolerable situation there that if the city's Jews choose to settle in Israel, that's not Malmo's concern.  A reporter, whose paper had run a series of articles on the threats, "Hitler" taunts, and harassment experienced by Malmo's Jews from members of the Muslim community, asked Reepalu for a statement.  Far from condemning the Muslim behaviour in unequivocal terms and expressing sympathy for the Jews, Reepalu declared "We accept neither Zionism nor antisemitism", describing them both as unacceptable supremacist ideologies, and observed that the Jews had brought their troubles on themselves by supporting Israel and that it was incumbent upon them to prevent antisemitism by distancing themselves from Israel.  Subsequently, he claimed to have been misrepresented by the reporter - but the reporter had wisely taped his words - so he claimed to have been set up by the "Israeli lobby" instead.

Predictably, therefore - yet of course no less outrageously for that - when, very recently, following a bomb threat, the Malmo synagogue (a beautiful Moorish structure dating to 1903) was attacked by an explosive device that blew out windows, Reepalu refused to comment.

Abolish the BBC Licence Fee!

Have you ever noticed how hypocritical the BBC is?  For an institution so left-liberal, which no doubt deplores the lingering traces of the hereditary principle in the House of Lords, it has more than its fair share of reporting dynasties based upon what might charitably be called that very principle - and uncharitably be called nepotism - the Dimblebys, the Adamses, the Sergeants, and goodness knows who else (perhaps even that nice but bumbling weekend newsreader with a paternal link to BBC Radio Stoke).  And then, despite the BBC's frequently absurd genuflections to political correctness in other areas, there's the ageism - primarily against women, whose on-screen life ends rather early, as Selina Scott and a host of other over-50s can testify - but also, according to Peter Sissons, against men as well.

And then, at a time of general belt-tightening and redundancies in society at large, there's the grotesque continuing wastage of licence-payers' money - the obscenely inflated salaries commanded by top executives and top "talent", the junkets, the lavish parties, the frivolously-taken expensive taxi rides ...

Not to mention the absurd initiatives, many of them of an online nature, that have little to do with the BBC's core remit - one of the latest being the pompously-titled BBC Academy and College of Journalism, which (no surprises here in an institution branded by a former BBC director general as "hideously white") seems to display a distinct preference for persons from ethnic minorities.  Forgive me, indeed, for sounding so politically incorrect, but I sometimes feel that the best advice that could be given to a young white male "average Brit" applying for a job at the BBC would be to change his name to something exotic - and add Gustafsdottir for good measure!

But I digress.  There is also, of course, the outrageous long-standing bias against Israel from such people as Barbara Plett, Orla Guerin, and Jeremy Bowen - even a recent documentary series on "Syrian Schools" managed to have a good old bash at Israel, and touted twinning British schools with schools in the Arab world in a voice-over at the end of each episode.  (In a forthcoming blog I will suggest how the BBC became Al Beeb, so stay tuned, folks!)

Last month, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt indicated support for the yearly licence fee that subsidises the BBC - now a steep £145.50, although he did foreshadow its eventual reduction.  Yesterday the Adam Smith Institute published a report calling for the fee to be replaced by a voluntary subscription service for certain programming.

I believe that the licence fee is anachronistic and should be scrapped altogether.  One of the most cogent blogs on this subject was made way back in 2006 by Professor William Rubinstein on the website of the Social Affairs Unit, and remains relevant today. Here's the link:
http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001219.php

Why Avi's blue, Bibi's pink, and Tzipi's in the buff

According to a paper given by a psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a reference to synaesthesia ('synesthesia' if you're American) is in Exodus 20:18, where the Israelites' experience of receiving the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai is described thus: "And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking." 

I learned this from an article in the London Jewish Chronicle (22 June 2007) by a reporter who is herself a synaesthete.  Synaesthesia is a quirky but (to me at any rate) enjoyable condition in which a stimulus to one sense triggers another.  The most common form - which I have - is grapheme-colour  synaesthesia, where letters and numbers are perceived in colour.  Other forms include "tasting" words, "seeing" sounds, and "feeling" colours.  In the Jewish Chronicle report, for example, a man "tastes" ice cream whenever he says the Shema.  The reporter's mother perceives a particular singer's voice as "a clear, piercing blue" whereas the reporter herself perceives that same voice as "purplish red".

Estimates of numbers of synaesthetes range from one in 23 through one in 200 to one in 2000 to one in 25,000 depending on whose research you look at.  Studying the condition is still in its infancy, but it has been linked to creative people especially.  The artist David Hockney, the composer Oliver Messiaen, and the writer Vladimir Nabokov are examples. 

Many if not most synaesthetes are unaware that the "condition" exists.  Until I read an article in a Sunday newspaper about a decade ago, which described the novelist Shena Mackay as a synaesthete, explaining that (exactly like me) she "sees" letters in colour, and words in colour depending on what colour she perceives the letter they begin with to be, I thought everybody saw Daphne as green and Anson as blue, Saturday as yellow, Monday as pinky-red, Britain as pink and Israel as icy-grey.

Synaesthesia has been linked to high intelligence as well as to creativity.  It's not, of course, that every highly intelligent person has synaesthesia.  It's that synaesthetes tend to be highly intelligent.  Glad to hear it!  Still, there's a downside.  The kind I have, at least, has been linked to poor numerical and navigational skills.  Hmmm. That figures.  It explains why I struggled with maths at school and rebelled against piano lessons - much to the bewilderment of my dad, who was a mathematically-inclined musician. 

And here I wish to make a plea, on behalf of child synaesthetes everywhere.  It's only comparatively recently that educators have come to realise that some children written off at school as under-achievers because they were slow at reading were in fact afflicted by dyslexia - the British actress Susan Hampshire being a case in point.  Is it not possible, by the same token, that children who are slow at maths might in fact have synaesthesia?

It's an Unfair Cop, Guv! Mr Plod shows some muscle

Mr Plod is a British policeman stationed at the House of Commons.  His job is presumably to direct visitors, arrest miscreants and deter terrorist attacks.  Richard Millett is a British blogger and freelance journalist stalwart in his defence of Jews and Israel.  Like the valiant Jonathan Hoffman of the Zionist Federation, he goes where angels fear to tread; his reports on anti-Israel meetings and demonstrations are invaluable.  Tom Eisner is a British violinist who doesn't like Israel very much at all and often (although I haven't noticed him lately) goes onto the Jewish Chronicle blogs to taunt - there's no better word, really - fellow Jews who love Israel and wish that beleaguered little country long life.

The other evening, in a corridor of  the Palace of Westminster, Mr Plod, Mr Millett, and Mr Eisner crossed paths.  The outcome was not a happy one for parliamentary democracy.

You see, hosted by Jeremy Corbyn, a Labour MP long known for his hostility to Israel, a meeting was due to take place in a side room (I believe the correct term is committee room) of the House of Commons, addressed by three Arab members of the Knesset.  Its topic was On the "Jewish Character" of the State of Israel, its meaning and significance, political discrimination, and the condition of the Arabs in Israel - just the sort of topic to appeal to Mr Millett in his capacity as reporter.  On seeing it advertised, he tried to register but received no response.  So he went along anyway, and was queuing patiently when somebody approached him.

It was Mr Eisner, who, obviously having the measure of Mr Millett as a champion of The Zionist Entity, asked our trusty blogger whether he'd come to disrupt the meeting.  Somewhat taken aback - for disrupting meetings is not in Mr Millett's nature or remit - Mr Millett answered in the negative.  Mr Eisner, who jokingly asked him for a £200 good behaviour bond, agreed that he could attend the meeting.

However, Mr Millett had been recognised by others as someone holding pro-Zionist views.  And presently  Mr Plod and two colleagues strode purposefully up to Mr Millett.  Mr Plod took the pro-Israel blogger firmly by the upper arm and led him away, past Mr Corbyn, who reportedly averted his gaze and kept shtum.  Mr Millett's details were taken and he was escorted off the premises. 

So, in Westminster, the cradle of democracy, things have come to a pretty pass.  Mr Plod the policeman now muscles in on people who have caused no offence whatever - no offence, that is, apart from holding views that are anathema to anti-Zionists.  Needless to say, the irony of it all is not lost on Richard Millett.

Oh, and by the way, Jonathan Hoffman wasn't allowed in either.  I've advised him to wear a burkha next time.

The Sick Man of Europe: David Cameron talks Turkey

I'm a paid-up, card-carrying member of the Conservative Party.  I didn't vote for David Cameron as leader.  I distrusted him then.  I despise him now.  One of the pithiest definitions of a Conservative that I've ever seen is "someone who jumps back when they see a precipice at their feet".   

David Cameron is not a Conservative.  He is a smooth unprincipled opportunist, and, moreover, one who appears to bear the impression of the last man to sit upon him.  In his case, there are the imprints of two men - his appalling coalition partner Nick Clegg (whose antipathy towards Israel, like that of all too many of Clegg's Lib Dem colleagues, is a matter of public record), and the equally appalling Barack Obama (who in appeasement's cause seems willing to sell Israel down the Jordan river).

Cameron's speech in Ankara could have come straight from Obama's teleprompter. With a lunatic disregard for the fact that Erdogan is no secularising Ataturk but an Islamist puppet, Cameron will "fight" for Turkey's membership of the European Union - thus pitting himself against wiser counsels such as Nicolas

Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. With a cavalier contempt for the facts of history, he ignorantly likens opposition to Turkey's membership of the EU to de Gaulle's veto of Britain's bid to join the Common Market in 1963 (back in the days when the EEC could be considered the economic arm of NATO, by the way, and not the villainous bureaucratic tyranny that has been forced on the peoples of Europe by stealth).  The reason for de Gaulle's veto was the general's fear that if Grand Bretagne was to be accepted into what was then a club of six, British influence in the EEC would rival and perhaps eclipse that of France.  The reason so many Europeans today view with alarm the prospect of Turkey's membership of the EU is the fact  that Islamic influence in Turkey is growing, and that membership would give Turks - not only secularist or moderate Muslim Turks - the right to settle anywhere in the EU.

But Cameron is seemingly nonplussed at the potential arrival of millions of Muslim fundamentalists in Europe's heartland.  He lashed out in his speech at people who "think the values of Islam can just never be compatible with the values of other religions, societies or cultures".  I'd love to believe him, but the treatment of women, gays, dissenters and apostates  in Islamic societies makes me wary; I think it should make Cameron wary too.

And then there's the question of the Gaza flotilla, in which nine Turkish activists belonging to an Islamist organisation with terror links called the IHH lost their lives when violently resisting Israeli commandos.  Cameron insists on a rigorous enquiry into Israel's actions.  Never mind that Israel has a right to defend itself, and ensure that arms for Hamas aren't smuggled into Gaza.  Never mind, too, that there is plenty of evidence - such as that newly opened Gaza Mall - that Gaza is not exactly the "prison camp" that Cameron says it is.  Certainly, the lives of the people of Gaza could be improved, but tell that to Hamas. 

I could go on.  But instead I'll refer you to the splendid commentary on this subject that Ray Cook has on his blog today.  Cameron should read it too.  Compulsorily.

The Gaza Kiddies' Roadshow - turning Britons against Israel, one whistlestop at a time

You won't see the picture shown here in an exhibition of children's art that opened at Manchester Cathedral over the weekend.  This picture, which we might entitle "Red Alert", is by a little Israeli girl; it depicts her frightening experiences in her home town of Sderot, the target of escalated Qassam rocket attacks by Hamas following Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.  And you won't find any attempts to explain Israel's rationale  for "Operation Cast Lead" either.  For the exhibition, which has the backing of UNESCO and of official Gazan agencies, is unashamedly one-sided.  Called "Loss of Innocence", it shows only the artwork of children from Gaza, portraying (or purporting to portray) scenes of distress and barbarity from - you've guessed it! - during Cast Lead, and is in many ways the Hamas Propaganda Ministry's dream.

It consists of about 50 pictures, brought back from Gaza last year by Rod Cox, a Cheshire property developer who went there with the Viva Palestina convoy in which George Galloway also participated.  Due to help Cox to launch the exhibition at the cathedral - I missed that event myself - was Mona Baker, the Egyptian-born Manchester professor who caused widespread outrage in 2002 when, in accordance with her belief that Israeli academic institutions must be boycotted, she removed two Israel-based scholars  from the editorial boards of two journals she edits.

Cox has been prominently involved with an initiative called Chester and Palestine Exchanges, and in 2007 the members of a teenage Palestinian soccer team he was due to bring to the UK for a series of matches in the north-west had their visas cancelled owing to fears they would defect (despite the earlier blessing of the Foreign Office's "Engaging with Islam" scheme).  In 2008, in consequence of a letter he had written to The Independent newspaper, he was accused of antisemitism by the Community Security Trust's Mark Gardner.

On his blog http://www.rodcoxandgaza.blogspot.com/ there are many of the pictures in the exhibition.  There are also some revealing statements.  On the Armenian massacres: "Up to now it [Israel] has supported Turkey's cover up of the Pogrom, because it wants the Holocaust of Jews to be unique.  That way Jews are uniquely privileged to do things others are not."  On the slain Mavi Marmara activists:  "I believe that they have not died in vain ... for I believe that this marks the beginning of the end - albeit a long slow end - for Israel.  Too often have they killed from a wanton lust to kill, to exterminate those inferior and in their way, but, really, the future belongs to those dead."  And this: "How is it that Israel can commit such vile acts of murder ... when they have stolen the land in the first place and have killed everyone who gets in their way to keep this stolen land.  None of Israel or the land it occupies has any legitimacy .... It is truly a pariah state, and the only state except the USA to threaten another with Nuclear attack."

The exhibition, as Cox explained when it was first amassed, is "designed for children - but for adults as well"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=575N0JRzaIs
That's why there are simple captions for children, at their approximate eye level, and, higher up, captions aimed at adults.  All these captions present a very biased view of the conflict, unabashedly demonising Israel, justifying "resistance", and depicting Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters; there's even a drawing of an apparent would-be suicide bomber.

This is not the first time the exhibition has been to Manchester.  Since its inception last year it's been to many localities up and down the UK, remaining in each for about a week.  It arrived in Manchester this time from Bangor Cathedral in Wales, and soon it's on its way to Scotland, and then it makes its way to eastern England.  It's been shown in many schools, including primary schools - for it seems to be deliberately  targetting the youngest and most impressionable of children.

Clearly, it's making enemies for Israel of Britons young and old - one whistlestop at a time.