Political choices. Part 2.

While I’m aware that this topic represents something of a minority interest and many visitors to sites like this will scroll past as soon as they see what it’s about - I still feel that, well, someone’s gotta do it and it might as well be me.

And I haven't forgotten the reason I started writing about bias against Israel (and/or antisemitism) in the first place, and why I chose to do so on a general ‘BBC bias’ platform, rather than below the line on a dedicated “Zionist” blog, like, say, Elder of Ziyon or Harry’s Place. 

I know that this specific issue isn’t necessarily at the top of every bias-watcher’s agenda, but such people aren’t likely to visit ‘Jewy’ blogs at all, so in the hope that I might catch the eye of someone who might otherwise avoid listening to me, I keep soldiering on.  

I’m not apologising in any way. I’ve said this many times before. I’m not religious. I’m secular through and through. I don’t belong to any association, group or community. But I do feel compelled to make a fuss about a massive injustice that has been going on forever and seems to be getting worse the more ludicrous it gets.

Yesterday I just scraped the surface of it, but the piece grew a bit too long and unwieldy for a blog post. Brevity is a virtue - I wish I knew how to achieve that.

So let me recap. 

I began by asking myself whether singling out the BBC’s undue respect for someone with such unpleasant “political views” as John Ashton was justified when it was really nothing out of the ordinary.  The BBC routinely promotes virulently antisemitic individuals without so much as a whisper that their views might be in any way controversial.

The people who immediately came to mind (Chris Gunness, Richard Horton, Abdel Bari Atwan, etc) were but the tip of a giant iceberg. And that’s before we got to the long and terrifying list of (mainly Labour) MPs. Lo and behold, David Collier came up with just such a list, and all the more sinister for the fact that these individuals were ‘democratically elected’ and their ferocious anti-Israel activities are regarded as ‘political choices’. 

One of these people - Sarah Champion (MP for Rotherham) is routinely lauded as a “champion” for the victims of the Pakistani grooming gangs and the MP who selflessly sacrificed a front-bench position for the cause.

However, calling her courageous for naming the perpetrators as “Pakistani men” in a Sun newspaper article is ‘benefit of the doubt too far’. Because, well, this crime was being perpetrated for quite a while before she ‘spoke out’ and she was by no means the first MP to do so. 

As we have pointed out before, Sarah Champion has long been pandering to the virulently antisemitic ‘political choices’ of her constituents, and as Collier points out:

"How many times did she critically mention Israel? – and how many times did she critically reference the world’s serial human rights abusers?
Israel: 60
Syria: 7
Iran: 5
N Korea: 2
Pakistan: 1
DRC: 0

That’s dealt with section one. 

Next, there’s the mountain of a communication problem to overcome regarding those wretched “annexations” which the BBC and its international ilk are determined to misrepresent in their default “It’s all settled” manner  -  i.e., as yet another of greedy Israel’s characteristic land-grabs. 

As I said yesterday, legally, the land is already Israel’s, and here is another easy-to-read and a particularly accessible piece which I enjoyed, despite my own recently acquired short attention span syndrome.

“The Palestinians have adopted a paradigm of the conflict in which Israel is entirely at fault. Justice, they say, requires that we vacate “their” land – in fact, if you asked them, they would say that this includes everything from the river to the sea; they believe they are being generous by just asking for Judea and Samaria (at least, for now). But this paradigm is wrong. In fact, we are the ones who have been excessively generous in repeatedly offering them large parts of the land, offers that were rejected because they did not provide a clear enough path to an Arab state in all of the land.

Within the article, there's a link to  Why Israeli Rule in the West Bank Is Legal under International Law in which Professor Eugene Kontorovich explains the legal (not the political choice) aspect of it.

Professor Eugene Kontorovich

Lastly, I’d like to expand on the final section of yesterday’s post. Matthew Sweet’s piece in UnHerd. Anti-Semitism runs deep in Britain.

Antisemitism is not exclusively ‘on the left’. I read some interesting comments generated by this article on Harry’s Place. Commenter Fritz Wunderlich linked to several detailed and extremely lengthy historical accounts of Britain’s role in the establishment of Israel in 1948 and I’m afraid it doesn’t look good for Blighty.

Two conclusions can be drawn from research into these documents, which are relevant to the role of British intelligence in the war in Palestine. 

The first is that, in the 1940s, Britain conducted a two-track policy in the Middle East: one, a well-documented, official policy defined by Whitehall under both the Conservative and Labour parties; the second was informal and secretive, which can be termed “regional,” implemented by “agents in the field,” which left few traces in British archives. 

It was perpetrated by a small, influential group of Arabist secret agents who manipulated the cabinet in London and implemented their own policies, which deviated from the official position. These agents enjoyed a unique status as intermediaries between Whitehall and local Arab leaders. Either intentionally, or because of deep-seated personal beliefs, they provided biased assessments. 

They did not merely gather and interpret information and recommend policy, but controlled the flow of information and implemented their own policies while keeping the London decision makers in the dark. They joined forces with Arab rulers, whom they portrayed as voicing the Arab view, in order to mislead their government. Their tactics, which were backed by senior military officers in Cairo, gathered momentum under the post-WWII Labour government and during the crisis in Palestine in 1947-48. 

The second conclusion is that the British secret agents succeeded in implementing their policies due largely to their use of indirect control over local “agents of influence.” They employed undercover political operations, clandestine diplomacy and covert propaganda to manipulate Arab leaders and public opinion – methods widely used in the Middle East during World War II.

British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin

Britain’s antisemitism runs deep indeed. It looks like our covertly (right-wing) Arabist agenda and our arrogant meddling planted the seeds of an increasingly intractable conflict. So the ongoing situation in the Middle East is our fault? Not entirely, though. The religiously-based hatred of Jews emanating from the religion of peace probably had something to do with it as well.