Our Girl

It’s a new dawn!

It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me!  One way your body tells you you’re getting older is through the medium of coffee. When I was younger its laxative, diuretic and insomnia-inducing effects were barely noticeable, but as time goes by, it makes me need to pee all the time. While constant coffee stimulates you and keeps you focused, the trips to the bog, (oh, you call it the loo) are such a nuisance, interrupting the mental flow. (While facilitating the physical flow if you like) So, where was I?

Oh yes. Does anyone know how many times you can reheat a cup of coffee in the microwave before it becomes carcinogenic? asking for a friend.

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To readers of this blog who are uncomfortable with one particular theme that runs through this blog like a stick’o’rock, you know who you are, kindly let me expand an idea. 

Obviously, Craig’s prolific output exposes multiple and varied examples of the BBC’s bias. His contributions outnumber my own by a factor of about ninety to one. (I haven’t done the maths.) Although our themes often overlap, it’s fair to say that I do tend to focus on the constant anti-Israel and anti-Jewish messages the BBC sends out. 

This applies to both Craig and me; our frustration with the BBC has to be articulated on this blog. The blog has to act as a vehicle for venting one’s spleen to a degree that one could hardly get away with in real life. 

If I come across to you as merely an obsessive ‘Israel Firster’, I’ve totally failed. (How many real fanatics of that kind have you come across? I bet there are far more entrenched, reflexively anti- Israel bloggers and journalists out there doing their utmost to inflame racial prejudice than all the so-called Israel-Firsters and Mossad-employed hasbara-proselytising pawns they fondly imagine are plotting world domination, put together.)

Had Craig and I been more technically proficient we might have introduced gadgets and widgets so that our Israel related material could be protected behind a tag, so you’d have to ‘opt-in’ rather than have it dished up in your face whether you like it or not. That preamble was leading up to something. 

I’m told that there’s something ‘Talmudic’ about my obsessiveness. Genetically Talmudic! But I keep seeing massive bias in the reporting of the latest Israel related scandal. The rape!

The way the media keeps emphasising “Israeli”. Compare this with the way the media collectively obscured the ethnicity of the ‘men’ involved in our homegrown grooming gang scandal. Notice the language -  that they refer to the Israelis, whose ages, as reported, range from 15 to 20 - as ‘men’, yet the girl is described as a ‘teenager’ or a ’nineteen-year-old.’

The media, not just the Beeb, suddenly seems to be interested in the ‘mental health of the ’British girl’ in accord with the campaign currently being promoted by the ‘young royals’. The emphasis on her p.t.s.d. and her 18-hour sleepathons are undoubtedly valid concerns, but I wonder, was there quite so much attention given to the mental health and the p.t.s.d. suffered by the traumatised young female victims of those Pakistani / Muslim men?  And the girls who weren’t required to testify because they’d be considered too unreliable to make credible witnesses?

On the Today Programme, the Beeb decided to re-voice the mother’s statement. An “actress” spoke the words, using received English (rather than whatever accent a Derbyshire resident might actually have) they claimed, ‘to protect her identity” (why is her identity a secret?)  

My immediate thought was that they chose it to project a suitable image. In particular, that of a middle-class, respectable family.  But then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Last but not least, the photograph that is now being widely used to illustrate “Israeli triumphalism.” This shot captured the moment when the father’s arm is raised as he greets his son with a hug, and very likely with some relief. That shot is cropped, to emote (I contend) Israeli malevolence.

This isn’t my final verdict. The metaphorical jury’s still out, as is the actual one. It’s just that these questions are playing on my mind.

Let’s go back to the beginning. I’ve looked at the earlier reports in The Times. The atmosphere changes. Initially far more objective, the reporting is now overtly emotive; unequivocally protective of ‘our’ side.  

Anshel Pfeffer, in The Times now introduces a whole new Israel-bashing angle.  Cyprus rape case: Hints that acquitted Israeli boys have friends in high places. I don’t quite know what to make of that! Well, I do, but I might be falling into an elephant trap if I speculate too soon.

You can follow the progress of the story in the ’related articles’ section.  In August the reporting is factual. Israeli men cleared of raping British teenager in Cyprus should be prosecuted for sex video, say lawyers.

“The Israelis, aged 16 to 20, were released from custody last month in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, after their lawyers supplied video of the 19-year-old woman and three of the men having sex. 

The authorities said the evidence disproved her allegations that she had been pinned down, raped by all 12 and also slapped. She is in custody facing a charge of public mischief and could be jailed for up to a year if found guilty. 

The 34-second video was leaked to the website Pornhub and featured prominently on its homepage this month, which criminal lawyers spoken to by The Times say was an act of so-called revenge porn, which under European Union law was an invasion of her privacy that subjected her to humiliation.

However, the whole approach has hardened, and the leading article "Rough Justice" in today’s paper quite openly advocates for the girl. 

There are two separate issues here, which are intertwined, but they still have to be treated separately because of the way the court has dealt with the case. The first one is the rape itself. 

This has echoes of the infamous Brett Kavanaugh - Christine Blasey-Ford trial. The credibility or otherwise of the witnesses is in question. In that case and in this, the truth might lie somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. Who knows?

Are we looking at a studious, middle-class, horse-riding young woman, up for a mini gap-yeah adventure, but cruelly abused and humiliated by her new boyfriend - then held down and passed around amongst his mates, and revenge-porned, if that’s a term? Was she traumatised, gang-raped and then coerced by shoddy and possibly corrupt police practice into retracting her original statement? 

Do all Israeli men believe they are superior to British whores? Or just these youths. “Meat”, as Jack Straw once said. Or, was this British girl a fun-loving, promiscuous, sexually incontinent tourist who, after the event, was horrified and humiliated by the dissemination of video? I don’t think it’s possible for the likes of me and you to know.

However, this case is no longer about 'the' rape or rapes. It has been refined. Now it’s supposed to be only about the girl’s honesty. 

“She has now been found guilty of “public mischief”, a crime that is punishable by a prison sentence of up to a year and by a fine equivalent to £1,500.”

If only the alleged rapists hadn’t been Israelis!  Everything would have been different then. For a start, the British media wouldn’t have been nearly so interested. If she’s found guilty, her punishment might be relatively minor, in material terms. The BBC has even reported that a Cypriot lawyer has called for leniency. We must wait and see how the mother’s plea for boycotting Cyprus as a tourist destination plays out. 

I wouldn’t dream of downplaying the trauma the girl is suffering, or the damage that has already been done to her future.

My point is that the ongoing reporting in the Times alone, never mind the sensationalising Mail, gives contradictory versions of the event in its own paper. According to one report, forensic evidence supports her claim, while a few lines later another expert states the opposite. Since August, the reporting seems to have evolved. From a relatively objective account, we have a gradual metamorphosis to outright advocacy for the girl.

Taken as a whole it amounts to another not so subtle example of Israel-bashing that contributes, drip by drip, to the accelerated Jew-bashing we are witnessing today. That is just from the Times. The BBC, which is obliged to be impartial is far, far worse.