So you think J Street is pro-Israel, huh?

This video might change your mind:

(hat tip: Jon Cohen http://www.thejc.com/blogpost/j-street-truth-about-anti-israel-group)

Lord Patten as Chairman of the BBC Trust? Part of a Pattern of Anti-Israel Prejudice at Al Beeb

In exchange for its unique and privileged status as a licence-payer funded broadcaster – an anachronism from the 1930s that is decades past its use-by date – the BBC is obligated by the terms of its Charter (and its Producers’ Guidelines) to be impartial in its presentation of news. It is a requirement which this arrogant, bloated, incorrigibly left-leaning institution breaches with impunity again and again.

As the lawyers Trevor Asserson and Elisheva Mironi stated in an analysis of the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2001:

“Some breaches are minor and would not be worthy of note in isolation. Taken together, however ... even these subtler or more minor breaches reveal a clear and significant trend of bias. Some of the breaches are ... quite glaring. At times, by mere selection or omission of facts, the BBC report is misleading. At times, it appears to invent material to suit its own bias. “

Several further Asserson reports later, and the BBC remains as biased as ever. In 2009, following public complaints, the BBC Trust rapped Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen (pictured below, right, and again left) over the knuckles for several instances of bias, an action that merely left Bowen petulant and defiant.

And he had his champions. “You don’t have to search far on the web to find Zionist publications, lobby groups and bloggers all over the world using distorted versions of the report to justify their ill-founded prejudice that the BBC has a deep-seated and long-standing bias against the state of Israel,” inveiged  the pro-Palestinian broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, scion of one of those familial dynasties the BBC (despite its disdain for the hereditary principle in monarchy and House of Lords) is not averse to creating, and author of a book on the PLO.  “Conversely, millions of Palestinians, other Arabs and Muslims will by now have been confirmed in their – equally false – belief that the BBC is yet again running scared of Israeli propaganda.” (As satirical magazine Private Eye might add: “Shome mishtake shurely?”)
See http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2009/05/dimbleby-fearful-bbc-risks-losing-its-way/http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/13/jonathan-dimbleby-jeremy-bowen-bbc-middle-east

Dollars to doughnuts Bowen’s getting ready to uncork the bubbly now that former Hong Kong Governor and EU Commissioner Chris Patten (Lord Patten of Barnes) has been recommended by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt to David Cameron as the person to fill the £110,000 p.a. post of Chairman of the BBC Trust. For barring an unforeseen hiccup, Patten will be a shoe-in.

He’s a terrible choice, given his own highly demonstrable track record of pro-Palestinian partisanship.  Not only is he President of Medical Aid for Palestinians, no doubt a worthy cause in and of itself, but he has publicly excoriated Israel on several occasions, demanding, for example, that Israel opens talks with Hamas and declaring that Israel’s easing of the siege on Gaza is insufficient.

Here’s a video that gives a brief glimpse into his stance on the issue (the announcer mistakenly calls the Guardian by its old and no longer appropriate locational title, the Manchester Guardian, by the way):

And see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article5804266.ece
See also http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/11/eu-show-courage-on-middle-east

An “analysis” on the BBC News website by Professor Fawaz Gerges, director of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics, entitled “Arab unrest: Winners and losers,” is so outrageously propagandistic that it should be formally protested by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Zionist Federation. In a passage sub-headed “Fortress Israel” it says:

“Regionally, Israel is the biggest loser. It has put all its eggs into the basket of Arab dictators and autocrats, like Egypt's deposed Hosni Mubarak. Israel fought tooth and nail to support Mr Mubarak, who played a key role in tightening the siege of Gaza and the noose around Hamas's neck.

Time and again, the Israeli political class has proven to be its own worst enemy. Israel lost Iran 40 years ago because it put all its eggs in the Shah's basket. It has just lost Turkey over the killing of nine activists on board a Gaza-bound Turkish aid ship.

And now Israel is likely to lose Egypt, a critical and pivotal neighbour whose Camp David peace agreement in the late 1970s consolidated Israel's superiority in the region and undermined the official Arab state system.

Regardless of what governments emerge out of the rubble of political authoritarianism in the Arab world, they will have assertive foreign policies that challenge Israel's hegemony and further colonisation of Palestinian lands.

Meanwhile, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, has lost all credibility in the eyes of the people there. The leaked negotiation documents obtained by al-Jazeera - offering wide-ranging concessions to the Israeli side - were the final nail in the PA's coffin.

Resistance-based movements like Hamas and Hezbollah have gained more popularity at the expense of Abbas's Palestinian Authority; they will emerge as major winners of the social turmoil unless Israel takes concrete steps to sign a peace settlement and withdraw from occupied Arab territories.

So Israel has become a military fortress. The best way for Israel to address its security dilemma is to accept a two-state solution as suggested by the international community - including its long-time ally, the US.” [My emphasis]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12599515

This goes beyond political commentary into subjective prescription – by what it claims and what it omits it tells us as much about the writer’s prejudices as the Middle East situation that he is meant to be describing.

And notice, incidentally, how this BBC video report on Britain's relations, historically, with the Arab world implies the Arab nature of "Palestine" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12616565

It is that piece I've quoted above, by Gerges, that might fittingly provide the first test of Patten’s mettle and show whether he can rise above his own pattern of prejudice against the Jewish State.

That is, if Anglo-Jewry’s infamously supine leadership (there are exceptions to the malaise) is willing to stir itself and rise to the challenge of confronting Al Beeb over the issue.

"Forget the Jewish Thing": Assange's Alleged Conspiracy Theory!

Private Eye is a satirical British fortnightly magazine that has been around since the 1960s. It exposes secrets, follies, corruption and hypocrisy in public figures and public bodies, national and local. Despite what one might think, it is not biased to the Left, but writes about figures and institutions along the entire political spectrum. It frequently breaks stories that are not immediately picked up in the rest of the media, but are often proved true weeks, months, or even years later.

According to its new issue, of 1 March, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange phoned its editor complaining about a piece it had run on 16 February, and alleged that the piece was “an obvious attempt to deprive him and his organisation of Jewish support and donations” . Mr Assange then claimed that Private Eye was “part of a conspiracy led by the Guardian which includes journalist David Leigh, editor Alan Rusbridger, and John Kampfner from Index on Censorship.”  He allegedly described them all as Jewish.

When Private Eye’s editor pointed out that Rusbridger isn’t Jewish, Mr Assange allegedly said he’s “sort of Jewish” since he’s Leigh’s brother-in-law, before retracting: “Forget the Jewish thing”.

Ah! If only The Guardian, which is fixated on reporting and commenting about Israel from a negative perspective and allows antisemitism on its website, would “Forget the Israeli thing” and concentrate its fire and ire on real rogue regimes!

To read more about Mr Assange's alleged conversation: http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/03/01/assange-goes-off-deep-end-blaming-jews-and-guardian-in-private-eye/

"Arrest Ron Prosor! ... He represents an apartheid state" (video)

Oh no he doesn't, guys and gals!

Clearly, these Israel-defaming whooping, screaming, scoffing deniers of free speech protesting Israel Ambassador to the UK Ron Prosor's visit to Edinburgh University at the invitation of the university's Politics Society on 21 February need to read my previous post, "Beware the Lies of March".

At least Mr Prosor's talk passed off without too much in the way of incident, unlike Ishmael Khaldi's recently.  See:
http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/45714/ron-prosor-ignores-silent-palestinian-protest

Beware the Lies of March

It’s March, and a grotesque annual event known as Israel Apartheid Week will soon be upon us. Ever since the end of the white supremacist apartheid (Afrikaans for separateness) regime that existed in South Africa from 1948-93 the fascist left and its foolish cohorts have been gunning for Israel, singling out Israel, the State of the Jews, the culmination of Zionism, the liberation movement of the Jewish People, for obloquy and censure, unremittingly, obsessively, insanely, evilly – and racistly. The aim is to delegitimise the Jewish State – to make it a pariah among the nations – and to ensure its ultimate demise.

Bizarre, is it not? That a tiny country –  the size of Wales or Tasmania or New Jersey –  and occupying just one-sixth of one per cent of the land occupied by the Arab powers, a tiny country that is still the only true democracy in the Middle East, should be the focus of such relentless scrutiny and hostility?

Thus some of the most corrupt and inegalitarian countries in the world, including those which deny basic rights and freedoms to women, to foreign workers, and to members of minority faith, were responsible for the obscene United Nations resolution of 1975 that equated Zionism with racism.

And although that infamous resolution has since been rescinded (thanks in no small measure to the initiative of Australian Zionist leader Mark Leibler, brother of the great Isi Leibler who is so consistently a prophet for our time) the repellent characterization of Zionism as racism persists.

That zealous promoter of replacement theology and inveterate critic of Christian Zionism Stephen Sizer, an Anglican clergyman in Surrey, has been quoted as saying that Israel is “fundamentally an apartheid state because it is based on race” and “even worse than South Africa,” and that it too will hopefully be “brought to an end internally by the rising up of the people.”

What vile, shameful rot. In fact, it's so mendacious and so outrageous that I will go so far as to label it racist. South African apartheid was based upon the premise that white people by virtue of their genes are inherently superior to black people.  Yet in striking contrast to that twisted philosophy Israel consists of Jews of all skin colours. And whereas non-whites in South Africa were denied civil rights, in Israel non-Jews are equal before the law.

The Arab minority in Israel (20 percent of the country’s total population) enjoy all the rights of citizenship. One of the best-educated Arab populations in the Middle East, it, like the Druze, has representatives in the Knesset, and elsewhere in public life.

Israel, from the outset in 1948, became the first country in the Middle East in which Muslim women were entitled to vote. In vast swathes of the Middle East women are still treated almost as sub-human, yet for reasons best known to themselves Western women in their thousands ignore the plight of those women, and concentrate instead on vilifying Israel, where women are as free as any in the developed world.

The so-called “apartheid wall” is a favourite metaphorical target of their ire, in common with their anti-Israel menfolk. Yet, as I showed in a previous post, Israel’s wall (in reality mainly a fence) is a security barrier that has many counterparts in the world http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2010/11/which-wall-would-that-be.html.

Its purpose, which it has served admirably, is to prevent terror attacks on Israeli civilians. Yet it alone preoccupies the left and other critics of Israel, who evidently believe that Israelis are not entitled to defend themselves as other peoples are.

The scene above is apartheid.  So is the scene below.

You won't find discrimination against minority religions in Israel:

Nor against non-heterosexuals:

And as for Apartheid Week, how about this?

Or this?

Not even a squeak of protest out of the anti-apartheid crowd, eh?  Now isn't that strange!

Hen am levadad yishkon uvagoyim lo yitchashav ("Lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations") declares the Torah (Numbers, 23:9).

Whatever interpretation religious commentators put on that phrase, politically, in our day, during these dark and troubling times through which we are passing, it has a familiar resonance.  It invokes the spectre of antisemitism, which we in the West had once so naively, so optimistically, yet so naturally assumed had been laid to rest by the Nazis' demonstration of the depths of degradation and depravity to which that unfathomable disease called Jew-hatred can lead.

How wrong – how unpredictably wrong – we were.

Make no mistake: as Professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University has observed, “Labeling Israel as an ‘apartheid state’ is the embodiment of the new anti-Semitism that seeks to deny the Jewish people the right of equality and self-determination among the nations”.

See also: http://walloflies.org/
And, of course, h/t to Elder of Ziyon for most of the great posters I've reproduced here.

Rabbi Marvin Hier Calls for the Pro-Democracy Movement to Condemn Antisemitism in the Arab Uprisings (video)

And he also calls for the Obama regime to do likewise. 

A Former PLO Fighter on the Peril Israel Faces from the Arab World and Turkey

Bethlehem-born Walid Shoebats, whose grandfather was an associate of the notorious pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, is a former PLO fighter who renounced both terror and Islam and now supports Israel.  In this video Mr Shoebats describes the jihadist nature of the Muslim Brotherhood, and warns of the dangers facing Israel in the Middle East, not only from Arab nations but from a militantly islamified Turkey.  This, of course, is the same Turkey that British Prime Minister David Cameron is hell-bent on admitting to the European Union. Walid Shoebats reminds us that 80 per cent of Egyptians want sharia law, and that "whoever controls Egypt controls the Middle East".  He predicts a domino effect of uprisings in the Middle East that will extend to the Horn of Africa, and a resultant attack upon Israel.