Then they came for me

Does it matter if the BBC perpetuates the ever increasing anti-Israel undercurrent, which is frightening many British Jews and making them think of leaving the country?

This is a BBC bias blog,  and some of our readers might be wondering what this has to do with them. 

We’re not exclusively Zionist  - we don’t want to frighten the horses, do we - but as a generalised BBC-watching blog we stand a chance of gathering a few I/P fence-sitters as we go.  As far as the Israeli Palestinian conflict is concerned many people are so fed up with the subject that they dismiss it with an exasperated ‘plague on both your houses’.

However, even your disinterested onlooker will be aware of a growing disconnect between the man in the street and the rarified world of media and politics, specifically on returning Jihadists, the normalisation of Islamic cultural practices and the sanitisation of imported antisemitism coming from refugees and immigrants from Islamic countries.

I wasn’t aware that Tom Gross of Middle East Dispatches  was a contributor to the Spectator till I spotted his piece about the BBC’s ‘half a story’ reporting about Gaza. 

The good news about Gaza you won’t hear on the BBC

“But the BBC (which remember is under a legal duty through its charter to be impartial) and most other mainstream media, don’t show you any of this other side of Palestinian life. And unlike those people typically seen in European and American media dispatches from Gaza, in the Al-Jazeera video, almost no Palestinian interviewed even mentions Israel. Instead, they point primarily to the internal Palestinian political rift between Hamas and Fatah as being their main concern in terms of their businesses thriving. Israel barely gets a look in. What’s more, contrary to widespread opinion, Al Jazeera also shows some women without headscarves in Gaza, including businesswomen.”

I’d already seen the video about Gaza’s flourishing tourist industry - I think it’s been around for a while - not on mainstream media of course. Also from the Spectator, Gavin Mortimer’s disturbing piece about our lamentably complacent approach to returning Jihadis.

“At the root of the problem is successive governments’ superficial knowledge of political Islam and their insistence on taking advice from the wrong sort of people. The majority of the mainstream media don’t help, either, lacking the insight and honesty to confront the growing problem. Instead they try and make light of the danger, endowing our Islamists with childish nicknames like Captain Hook, Jihadi John, the White Widow and The Beatles. But if Britain doesn’t start getting a grip on this problem, the joke may eventually be on us.

Several journalists and Middle East specialists are in despair about the (predominantly British) media’s lack of appetite for pro-Israel or anti-Palestinian stories, and its even more injurious appetite for juicy, Israel-demonising ones. 

  

Kaled Abu Toamah writes for Gatestone Institute, and in this video he expresses a similar kind of frustration to that of Matti Friedman, who encountered similar difficulties while working as a journalist for Associated Press. 

You may be worried about creeping Islamisation  as is Daphne Anson in her piece about the foreign Office and “World Hijab Day”

“For the sake of pandering to the Islamic world at home and abroad the Foreign Office believes it appropriate for non-Muslim females to cover their heads in a scarf that many Muslim women themselves regard as a symbol of female subservience and which began as an indication of which women (the covered ones) were not to be considered fair game for sexual violence by Muslim men”

If you’re still wondering what antisemitism, a Jewish exodus and the potential destruction of the Jewish State has to do with you, remember 1930s Germany and that famous poem.