Paradise lost
In today’s Daily Telegraph Israel’s ambassador to the UK Ron Prosor writes about his shock, upon returning to a Britain he remembered for its fairness and decency from an earlier posting to London, to discover that it has become a bubbling cauldron of anti-Israel prejudice, demonisation and lies. One of his central points is that media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
is routinely tainted with bias and a surprising lack of context. Double standards are rife. Israel's military reaction to the attacks it faces is given in-depth, microscopic coverage. Yet the attacks to which Israel is responding are often ignored. Terror attacks, ambushes, suicide bombings, the constant barrage of rockets being fired on Israeli citizens are frequently disregarded.
And then -- just as they did on that previous occasion – within a few hours of their censorship being revealed they tried to cover their tracks. A short while ago, they restored the offending message but pretended that the poster had broken the rules by claiming:
Your thread has been closed as you have linked to an opinion piece rather than an actual news story. Links to ‘comment’ or the editorial pages of online newspaper sites are not considered to be today's news. If you think they are about today's news then just find and link to the leading front page news story instead, you can add links to editorial pages later on in the discussion if relevant to the news story.
But the Prosor article was a news story; the Telegraph thought it was so newsworthy it ran a story about it on its front page. Furthermore, the moderators’ excuse does not explain why they obliterated all trace of the post; nor why they then restored it but prevented any further comment; nor why they did not apply the same rule to another comment on the messageboard referring to Prosor’s remarks about the academic boycott, which was allowed to remain even though no further comments on it were allowed.
Curiouser and curiouser!
And now some further evidence of the BBC’s famed commitment to its public service principles of fairness, balance and objectivity for which British taxpayers stump up the licence fee. The London Evening Standard reports that the BBC paid expenses to Nicholas Kollerstrom for contributing to Conspiracy Files, a documentary about theories surrounding the 7/7 London tube and bus bombings. Kollerstrom, a Holocaust denier, has pestered families bereaved by the 7/7 bombs, claiming the attacks were an intelligence agency plot.He has admitted he phoned the father of one victim to tell him how he believed the man's daughter's body had been planted at the site of the Tavistock Square bus bombing. The victim's family has described the phone call and subsequent claims posted on a website as ‘very upsetting’... Dr Kollerstrom was last month stripped of an honorary research fellowship at University College London after it emerged he had written a paper entitled The Auschwitz ‘Gas Chamber’ Illusion on a far-right website -- claiming it was like a holiday camp where inmates sunned themselves by an ‘elegant’ swimming pool and listened to orchestras.
The BBC treats conspiracy crackpots like this as legitimate sources of information because it produces programmes which, merely by investigating them, give credence to crackpot conspiracy theories involving Americans, Israel and the Jews. And that is because it leads the field in Britain’s current abandonment of reason and embrace of irrationality and prejudice towards America, Israel and the Jews.
In the Jerusalem Post, Gavin Gross of the Zionist Federation provides three recent vignettes of al Beeb’s institutional prejudice against Israel – and, even more distressingly than its use of a genocidal Islamist in the interests of ‘balance’ in such discussions is its use of the ‘good’ anti-Israel Jew to bait the ‘bad’ pro-Israel Jew. This has the delicious advantage of making it fireproof, as it achieves journalistic ‘balance’ through the delightful spectator sport of putting two Jews in a ring and seeing who gouges the other’s eyes out. And there’s no shortage of Jews, alas, to oblige.
What’s happened to the BBC is what has happened to the Britain that Ron Prosor once knew -- which, although still alive in the hearts of so many decent and rational Britons, is fast becoming erased as surely as a pro-Israel post on a BBC messageboard.