Having each other's backs

Talking of spiked, Mick Hume has a piece in the Daily Mail today headlined Whatever you think of Boris, the BBC’s obsessive campaign to destroy him is a disgrace. Along the way he criticizes Nick Robinson for leading the "Boris-bashing" on Today, and "sneering" and "going beyond what could be considered objective journalism".

Far from being impartial, Robinson was editorialising at every opportunity, the tone always scathing or sarcastic — to the point where one could almost hear him rubbing his hands with glee during each dramatic pause in his diatribe.

Mick Hume puts it down to BBC bias:

It has built itself in the image of the woke metropolitan elites who run it. And they long since decided that, to appropriate Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, Boris is not ‘one of us’.

Interestingly, the comments at the Mail are going the BBC's way for once. "Boris-bashing" has spread in recent weeks among the public, unimpressed at everything they've been hearing about Partiesgate.

Still, I've rather enjoyed the irony today of the very personification, indeed the living embodiment, of those "woke metropolitan elites", ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, riding to Nick Robinson's aid on Twitter:

Alan Rusbridger: Portraying Nick Robinson as a member of the woke metropolitan elite - the latest Mail obsession - is wide of the mark. I doubt it will stop him doing his job rather well. It’s called journalism.

Nick Robinson: Thanks Alan. I rather enjoyed the irony of being accused of anti-Tory bias by a former editor of Living Marxism 🤣.

And Gary Lineker has popped in too with a smug "quick reminder":

Gary Lineker: Quick reminder: the BBC has tens of thousands of people that work for It, with a huge cross section of views. The corporation doesn’t think as one. There’s no political criteria from above other than impartiality in news & current affairs. Any perceived bias is probably your own.

It may be a typo on Gary' part, but I shall think of the BBC as "It" from now it. Never mind 'Auntie Beeb', it's 'Cousin It' from now on.

A meeting of mind (in the BBC's defence)

Good news! The former editor of The Guardian and the present editor of the Times Literary Supplement agree to agree (isn't that lovely?):

Alan Rusbridger: BBC is due to celebrate its centenary in 2022. Quite easily - still - one of the most trusted institutions in Britain, if not the world. But apparently Dominic Cummings doesn’t like it, so, whatever.
Stig Abell: The problem is that it is hard to argue that the funding model is not anachronistic. If the BBC were to be invented today, it would not be funded by a licence on televisions. It is a small step to ignore the fact that state-supported broadcasting fills an essential function.
Alan Rusbridger: Agree. So we need to shore up the “essential function” argument and make people realise that is impossible if the BBC is essentially privatised.
Stig Abell: And the BBC needs to shore it up too.
Alan Rusbridger: True.

Wake up call (3/3)

The final early-morning listen was a programme that sometimes contains some real gems. Something Understood. 

This episode was called: The Court of Public Opinion. 

Whom do you think Mark Tully’s guest was? Why, none other than Alan Rusbridger. 

Charlotte Church sang the opening number, Gabriel Fauré’s Tantum Ergo, recorded before her credibility was blown to bits. No, not by her political activism; she ‘lost her credibility’ ‘at the court of public opinion’. 

Mark Tulley said social media has a lot to answer for. 

After thought-provoking readings from  Gustave Le Bon “The power of crowds”  and 

Bruce Schneier “The Court of Public Opinion Is About Mob Justice and Reputation as Revenge”.   

Tully said:

Accuracy is one of the most important attributes readers and listeners look for in quality journalism. 

Alan Rusbridger. who was editor of the Guardian for 20 years and only retired this year, says journalism will continue to provide accurate information and play its essential role in society, even though the social media have made a wholesale change in the court of public opinion.

AR

I think journalism does what journalism has always done, and I think is completely necessary, but it lives in a completely different context in which everybody can be a publisher, so when I first became editor 20 years ago the only way anybody had of responding to anything the Guardian did was to write a letter, and I could decide whether to publish it or not, and mostly, we didn’t! 

But now anybody can respond, discuss with each other, publish, and that ability of everybody to answer and to distribute their own thoughts and material is a vast, vast change, probably the biggest change in 500 years.

MT

And so what impact has it had on newspapers and journalism?

AR

I think it’s very difficult to ignore the response, and the big question for newspapers is whether you do more than acknowledge it, whether you welcome it and embrace it, and my strong feeling as an editor was that it was better to embrace it because the response is usually quite informative and interesting.

MT

But social media are often cited as being democratic, and as you rightly say everyone has the right to publish, but they can be extremely tyrannical and vindictive, can’t they?

AR

Well yes, it has all the faults of democracy. Sometimes you get an ugly crowd mentality, although often that;’s counteracted by people getting together and saying ‘this is ugly’, so it’s often quite self-correcting. We’re learning how to use this amazing new democracy, but of course if you don’t like the sound of it you can just point to the ugly bits and say ‘well, we don’t like that’.

“I mean the way I tried to explain it when I was editing the Guardian was to talk about a play, say, the first night at the National Theatre, a new play. 

I always wanted Michael Billington our theatre critic in the audience. He’s an expert and he’s been writing about the theatre for 50 years now, but if you ask anybody and they say there were nine hundred other people in that audience and say is it conceivable that none of those nine hundred have got anything interesting to say about this play, it’s obvious. there will be highly intelligent and perceptive theatre-goers in that audience, do you want to hear from them? Well why not? That would surely add to the sum of that criticism. Now, out of that nine hundred, maybe only 30 want to do that, and out of that 30 maybe only 10 are any good. But if you’ve got 10 views of the play and could persuade Michael to discuss this with them I think that’s better journalism.

MT

When it comes to this question of bullying, of media judgment, media courts and that sort of thing, actually what you might call traditional media can be just as vindictive, and just as wrong in fact, as the social media sometimes, can’t it?

AR

Completely; if the people who have traditionally held the megaphone have often been quite vindictive and nasty, so I don’t think there’s a monopoly of virtue in newspapers, and I think actually one of the things that journalists have found in this new world, when they say” oh my god, these people are horrible, so vitriolic” you sometimes think, well, have you read what they’re responding to. Have you examined your own tone? Because you’re pretty vitriolic too, and this has led to an interesting thing happening, which is some journalists becoming more tentative in what they write. Some journalists are saying well this is more like a conversation. This is what I think, now what do you think? When you and I were at our peak, Mark, if I can put it like that, the moment the story ended was the moment you broadcasted it or published it, then you went off to the pub..

MT

Yes..

AR

The most interesting journalists now said well actually the moment i press that button is the most interesting because that;s the moment people are going to respond, and if I go and make myself a cup of tea and come back and start talking to them I;m going to learn all kinds of things about this story that I wasn’t able to do in the first versions. So in a sense stories don’t have an ending now; they have a beginning.

MT

Yes. One has to raise the dreaded question of control over the media, partly because of social media and partly because of the behaviour of the media itself. Do you think there is a way of controlling the media, which is not actually run by the media itself?

AR

We haven’t perfected the regulatory system for regulating the newspapers. Arguably it works better in broadcasting, but I think social media does act as a check and balance. To give you a really trivial example. earlier this year an opera critic was very rude about an opera singer and referred disparagingly to her size and weight, and there was an uprising of opera singers on Twitter and Facebook who just said ‘we’re not going to take this any longer’ and ‘by the way, have you seen this bloke, he looks pretty odd too, and he’s no-one to judge’. It’s a trivia example, but there’s a strength in solidarity and I think 20 years ago no opera singer would have dared respond to a critic

MT

I’ve always felt that in some ways the social media in some ways increases the responsibility of newspapers because when there are so many rumours, so much misinformation on social media it is very important to have reliable and trusted media organisations that you can turn to.

AR

Yes  that’s true. Nothing I say should undervalue the skills of journalism, but, if you look around you now, quite often the place where things are first reported, or where the important evidence lies, is on social media. So, this year alone, some of the most compelling bits of journalistic eyewitness material appears on social media. I don’t think any journalist.. can’t cut it off and say well they’re all stupid, they’re not journalists. You have to look and sort out the wheat from the chaff and say, well, there are gems here and if we combine what we do with what they know we’re going to be better journalists.

[...]

MT

I also discussed with Alan Rusbridger the crucial role that reliable journalism plays in sifting facts from the sea of rumours that floods social media.

Apologies for the lengthy transcription, but I think you’ll see what I was getting at. Motes and beams.

The infamous example of Alan Rusbridger’s trip to Israel with Tom Gross and the Guardian’s ongoing vitriolic campaign to delegitimise the only democracy in the Middle East.

Antisemitism and the media

We hear that there’s a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents, perhaps because Jews are now more likely to report them. (Or because of the negative way Israel and Jews are portrayed in the British media.) The Today programme announced this news clearly enough, but didn’t seem curious about the how, the why or the wherefore.  

Get an earful of Ajmal Masroor’s ugly Speech about Zionism and the Zionist Lobby. Do listen, at least for a few minutes.

Masroor is one of the BBC’s go-to faces of normative, moderate Islam. He’s a frequent guest on The Big Questions. 

In his comfort zone, away from the BBC and in front of a fawning congregation of brothers and sisters this grinning puppet believes he is a big man. He puts on an act. For this audience he’s the ranting, raving fanatic, spewing out a stream of anti-British, anti-Israel, illogical, lying rubbish, delivered with a histrionic yet faltering Shakespearian swagger interspersed with Arabic.

Think Sir Laurence Olivier reciting Mehdi Hasan’s cattle diatribe with a touch of the late Ian Paisley; mix in the Zionist lobby, Palestine, racism, Jewish supremacism, the biggest concentration camp in the world while channeling 'Hamlet'. Then add a tearful six-year old girl/boy sobbing on the phone, double it and stick a cherry on top.

There you have Imam Masroor, the person the BBC has the cheek and the idiocy to beam into our homes on a Sunday morning without a health warning.  Then try and work out why Muslims believe what they do. 

Friends

People often use the term “friends” loosely, other than in a strictly literal way. They say it sarcastically, or sort of ironically, as in ‘our feathered friends’, or slightly disparagingly if they were referring to a bunch of delinquents. 

For example I don’t know if Bill Grundy ever said “our friends the Sex Pistols”, but he probably would not have meant it literally if he did.

We also use ‘friends’ as a collective term for people to whom we are kindly disposed, but don’t necessarily know personally. In other words, in the way we assume Jeremy Corbyn means it when he refers to Hamas and Hezbollah. Of course he could have been using the term cynically, but he didn’t claim that.

Obsessing about one potentially ambiguous word in isolation produces a lazy, unconvincing argument. That interview on Channel 4, the one with ‘friends’.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s tactic  - attempted ‘demolition by repetition’ - was originally created by Jeremy Paxman on a bad day, and unfortunately, much copied thereafter. 

Who could forget Michael Howard - “did you or did you not”-  and while we’re at it, remember Mishal Husain’s infamous “How many Israelis were killed?” with Gill Hoffman. (not enough for her) I call that cheap, lazy, wrong-headed and low.

It was refreshing in one way though. At least Guru-Murthy tackled an awkward subject - antisemitism - albeit tangentially. It doesn’t matter what word Jeremy Corbyn uses when he refers to radical Islamic Jew-hating militia. It’s the fact that he supports them, speaks alongside them at rallies and participates in questionable Palestinian solidarity events that is the problem. Or should be.

In this BBC-led nationwide drive to embrace diversity, a frightening number of people are willing to turn a blind eye to antisemitism. When Jeremy Corbyn is interviewed the questioner, Andrew Marr for instance, will usually ignore the issue altogether. I do wonder what would have happened if Corbyn had actually held his hands up and said yes, I sympathise with my friends Hamas and Hezbollah, and although I am not an antisemite I can understand  those that are. He wouldn’t be the first one to say that. Then Guru-Murthy might have said, “Oh! So do I!” and they could have lived happily ever after.

Polls show that Muslims are generally ill-disposed towards Jews, if not individual Jews - some of whom may be their best friends - they’re almost universally opposed to the existence of Israel (as the Jewish state) and most are immersed in the narrative of the Palestinian media machine.  

Everybody knows this, but it doesn’t seem to bother them. In their need to embrace diversity, antisemitism is a kind of under-the-counter glitch that cannot be directly confronted. It bothers me though, quite a lot. It bothers me that it doesn’t bother you.

   

Corbyn thinks we should include the views of all comers in any debate, however unpalatable they might be.  People who embrace unacceptable ideas often plead that ‘silencing’ their unpopular views and opinions has a chilling effect on freedom of speech.

One might wonder what’s the point of trying to talk to intransigent bodies like Hamas and Hezbollah. No amount of talking will alter their genocidal aspirations. Unlike their equally inflexible ideological compatriots ISIL, Hamas and Hezbollah may be willing to bamboozle their gullible western opponents by making superficially plausible concessions, but at heart they will not be diverted from their core values.  Just like ISIL, they want to destroy Israel, kill Jews, restore the Middle East to undiluted Jew-free Islamic Statehood and be left to prosecute their Shia-Sunni differences in peace. Not in peace, but undisturbed.

Which brings me to Peter Oborne. Peter Oborne is a highly rated political pundit and another of those high profile personalities with  disturbing friendships. Hardly anyone seems to notice this, but if they do it doesn’t appear to bother them. They still employ Oborne on the BBC fairly regularly and treat his opinions with considerable respect. However, his latest project did ruffle a few feathers.

  

People have been wondering why the Guardian is giving a platform to Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Peter Oborne’s friendly chat with Abdul Wahid has been widely disseminated by way of the full-page spread in Guardian. 

In what appears to be an attempt to disparage David Cameron’s policy on “those he calls extremists”, (Oborne impliedly wouldn’t call them that himself) Oborne, like Corbyn, believes that we need to talk to them, whomever they are, especially if they’re opposed to Israel, or have been associated with extremism, or have been kicked out of HSBC. 

“As the latest round of this debate has unfolded, one voice has been noticeably absent: that of the alleged extremist.” 

he declares, in his puff piece about his good friend Abdul Wahid.

Oborne proceeds to chat convivially to his occasional dinner companion, and he shares the conversation with us adding his own observations courtesy of the Guardian. 

He tackles Islam’s policies on terrorism, democracy and women, but what I’m more concerned about at the minute is the following: 

“I turn to the charge that his organisation is antisemitic. Fifteen years ago HT published a notorious article entitled The Muslim Ummah will never submit to the Jews.
It contained unpleasant language, some of which I read out to Wahid, and invite him to denounce the article. He refuses. “HT is not antisemitic at all, but we are absolutely anti-Zionist”

Oborne presents a verbatim account of Wahid’s justification of that dubious claim, the gist being: “It’s not about the Jews, but all about Israel, therefore understandable” and  “It’s out of context, lost in translation, merely the rhetoric of conflict” 

We must hear him out, Oborne says. The Guardian must let his views have an airing, otherwise there’s that ‘chilling effect,’ that obstructive shutting down of debate. Only it’s not really a debate, it’s more a matter of weasel words and spin unconvincingly masking outright antisemitism. 

The rest of the piece includes an affectionate snippet of biographical detail, a kind of apologia for HT and an admiring description of Wahid’s library. ‘He’s well-read, is my non-extremist friend. A cultured chap and an all-round good egg. “

“You can say many things about Wahid, and be appalled by much of what he says. But in a democracy he surely has the right to say it. Whatever the government thinks.”

There are 976 comments below the line, and not all of them very sympathetic I’m pleased to see, although there are still plenty of Israel-bashing contributors who nevertheless seem slightly uncomfortable with Abdul Wahid and Hizb ut-Tahrir.  

Oborne’s pretence of even-handedness is particularly worrying. In his “Israel lobby” days, (2009) he takes great pains to say that he had been to Israel on a trip funded by Conservative Friends of Israel, and had ‘tried to understand’. 

“No pressure was put on me, at the time or later, to write anything in favour of Israel. The trip, which was paid for by the CFI, certainly enabled me to understand much better the Israeli point of view.”

In the event he evidently didn’t understand it at all. He clearly demonstrated that by citing the Gaza death toll and making an ignorant reference to Israel’s war crimes.

Of David Cameron’s speech at a Conservative Friends of Israel  lunch at the Dorchester  Oborne observes:

“I was shocked to see that Cameron made no reference at all to the invasion of Gaza, the massive destruction it caused, or the 1,370 deaths that had resulted. Indeed, Cameron went out of his way to praise Israel because it “strives to protect innocent life”. I found it impossible to reconcile the remarks made by the young Conservative leader with the numerous reports of human rights abuses in Gaza.” [...]“It is impossible to imagine any British political leader showing such equanimity and tolerance if British troops had committed even a fraction of the human rights abuses and war crimes of which Israel has been accused.”

Wrong! On several counts, just wrong! 

This comes from the preamble to a written outline or a transcript of his Jewish Lobby “Dispatches” programme for Channel 4, which, for all its bluster amounted to nothing but an elaborate sensationalised hullaballoo about very little. However it does come remarkably close to the conspiracy theory nonsense that David Cameron gave as a specific example of the kind of thing we don’t need in these dangerous times.  

The BBC comes into the picture too. Did you know that the Jewish lobby puts a lot of effort into bullying the BBC?  Apparently Ben Bradshaw said:

“I’m afraid the BBC has been cowed by this relentless and persistent pressure from the Israeli government and they should stand up against it.”

Oborne even knows what’s in the Balen report.

“In October, the High Court finally ruled that the BBC does not have to publish the report, which has become an obsession for Israel’s supporters, who hold this up as the BBC trying to hide its anti-Israel bias.This is dubious. We have spoken to one of the very few people who have read the report. He says that far from concluding the BBC’s coverage was biased against Israel, it simply finds examples where more context should have been given. If anything, our source claims, the impression given is that the BBC is sympathetic to Israel.”

Oborne’s piece is little more than a detailed run-down of everyone and everything that has or might have Zionist lobbying connections, direct or indirect. It reads like those websites whose sole purpose was to  point out ‘Who’s a Jew.’ Do they still exist?

Covering his back from litigious Jewish tentacles, he says:

“ The pro-Israel lobby does nothing wrong, or illegal. It is not sinister and it is not unusual. It cannot be too much stressed that British public life is populated by all kinds of interest groups, many of them extremely active at Westminster. “

‘It’s just’, he claims, “that it’s not transparent.” 

Incidentally Oborne should be perfectly aware that  BICOM trips are more than matched by the CAABU trips. He should very well know that the Jewish lobby is outweighed by numerous pro-Palestinian and BDS organisations that are more vociferous, more overtly racist, more obnoxious, than the Jewish lobby. As Oborne admits, lobbying is part and parcel of the democratic process.

Since Oborne cites the Guardian I should mention someone else who paid a visit to Israel and came back with a bizarre tale that conveyed the opposite of the reality that was before his very (tight shut) eyes. It was of course Alan Rusbridger.  His short trip to Israel (2001) is described by Tom Gross. H/T UK Media Watch. (Also present on this trip was Ian Katz of BBC Newsnight.)

Despite being given, at first hand, the chance to observe the polite and courteous manner of Israeli soldiers, the relatively good standard of living enjoyed by Arab residents of Bethlehem and having had the opportunity to oversee their un-troublesome passage between Bethlehem and Israel, on his return Rusbridger wrote a poisonous travesty of what he had witnessed, which was published in the Spectator. 

In a conversation with Oborne, his friend Rusbridger also refers to the chilling effect:

“I think it would be a terribly dangerous thing if the British press were made to feel that they couldn’t criticise Israel because they are going to be held up as anti-Semitic. I think it is a very disreputable argument.”

Tom Gross says:

“He went on to give some examples – taken out of context – of shooting incidents, and of Palestinian poverty he had witnessed in what he called the “large prison” of Gaza. He wrote of the “endless humiliating queues waiting to pass through Israeli army checkpoints.” There was no mention of our very different experience crossing into the “occupied West Bank.” “

“About the same time that Rusbridger published his Spectator article, he wrote a massive editorial in The Guardian, running to well over 2,000 words, entitled “Between Heaven and Hell.” A pull quote was reproduced in large type in a box on The Guardian’s front page. It read:“We are forced to confront some uncomfortable truths about how the dream of a sanctuary for the Jewish people in the very land in which their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped has come to be poisoned. The establishment of this sanctuary has been bought at a very high cost in human rights and human lives. It must be apparent that the international community cannot support this cost indefinitely.”

Why? why would these people abuse their position in order to propagate their antisemitic agenda?

Since this blog is principally about the BBC, here is the whole of Tom Gross’s BBC related section. It was written in 2001, 14 years ago. Nothing much has changed.

 THE BALANCED BBC?A good deal of the selective reporting derives from the fact that both the print and broadcast media rely heavily on Associated Press and Reuters to provide the text, photos and film footage from the West Bank and Gaza. In turn, the news agencies are heavily dependent on a whole network of Palestinian stringers, freelancers and fixers all over the territories to provide instant reports or footage of events. 

 As Ehud Ya’ari, Israel television’s foremost expert on Palestinian affairs, put it recently: “The vast majority of information of every type coming out of the area is being filtered through Palestinian eyes. Cameras are angled to show a tainted view of the Israeli army’s actions and never focus on the Palestinian gunmen. Written reports focus on the Palestinian version of events. And even those Palestinians who don’t support the Intifada dare not show or describe anything embarrassing to the Palestinian Authority, for fear they may provoke the wrath of Yasser Arafat’s security forces.”

Sometimes the local Palestinians admit their bias. For example, Fayad Abu Shamala, the BBC’s Gaza correspondent for the past ten years, told a Hamas rally on May 6 that “journalists and media organizations [are] waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people.” Yet no British paper (apart from the local Anglo-Jewish press) agreed to publicize these remarks. The best the BBC could do in response to requests from Israel that they distance themselves from these remarks, was to issue a statement saying, “Fayad’s remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC.” 

The principal reason for the bias, however, is that many western correspondents sent to cover the Middle East are not in effect living in Israel, but in occupied Palestine, as they perceive it. Whereas many pride themselves on knowing some Arabic, few make any effort to learn Hebrew. As a result, they are detached from Israeli life. Their encounters with Israelis are mainly with government and army spokespeople, or other kinds of bureaucrats – being asked irritating questions at airports, being kept in line renewing visas, and so on.
The fault here ultimately lies with the bureaus themselves. Most would not send correspondents to Paris without French, or to Cairo without Arabic, or to Moscow without Russian. Even in Prague, where I worked for three years, the foreign reporters all spent many months learning Czech. 

Occasionally, the media has responded in print to Jewish concerns over Western media reporting. They have not been sympathetic. David Leigh, the Guardian’s comment editor (in an article headlined “Media Manipulators,”) dismissed Jews who had criticized the paper’s Israel coverage as “right-wing extremists.” Another Guardian columnist wrote that at least some of the protests were “sinister” and directed by “a shadowy ultra-orthodox Jewish group.” 

A senior figure in the British media (a Jew) told me: “When Indians and Pakistanis in Britain have raised complaints about reporting in our newspaper, their concerns were treated with some respect, and often they received an apology. But when Jews complained, they were shrugged off or treated with contempt for even suggesting bias. England seems to be a country where to accuse somebody of anti-Semitism is far more impolite than being one.”
Again, when the deputy director of Israel’s foreign ministry said that the BBC’s coverage of Israel is “tinged with anti-Semitism,” BBC special correspondent Fergal Keane said this was a “contemptible” and “ludicrous” charge.”

The Guardian is under new management, the BBC is under scrutiny, Jeremy Paxman has left Newsnight, but Jeremy Bowen is still in post, the new Guardian editor is even more anti-Israel than Rusbridger and Islamic State is chopping people up. Obama has made an unforced error by entering into a deal which weakens the west and has caused the Iranian Ayatollahs much mirth, which they’ve Tweeted about triumphantly. Everyone under a certain age is going to vote for Jeremy Corbyn for leader of the Labour Party, and they neither know nor care which Islamic extremists he’s friendly with.  

Tom Gross ends his article by asking   DOES IT MATTER?Does the bias, in the end, matter? In my view, it does, and not just because the truth is always important.
For one thing, it is clear that inaccurate reporting is influencing international diplomatic efforts. A distorted picture of events is helping to produce correspondingly distorted policies, particularly in Europe.
Then, as Shimon Peres pointed out recently, there are cases where media bias bears a direct responsibility for encouraging acts of violence. Peres cited the example of a local Fatah leader caught by an Israeli army camera saying, “Don’t start the stoning yet. I have just been told that CNN crew is stuck in traffic near Ramallah.”
In addition, as Jewish organizations in Europe and beyond can confirm, there is a clear link between inflammatory reporting about Israel and physical attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in the countries where the reports are published or broadcast. Correspondents may not realize it, but their unfair reporting plays into pre-existing anti-Semitic feelings.

Emphasis added.

The systematic building up a false picture of Israel as aggressor, and deliberate killer of babies and children, is helping to slowly chip away at Israel’s legitimacy. How can ordinary people elsewhere not end up hating such a country? And contrary to the perceptions of some, Israel is not a big tough major power that can withstand such international antagonism indefinitely. As the Jews have learnt only too well, acts of wholesale destruction and ultimately genocide did not just spring forth in a vacuum: they were the product of a climate. The international media is not an innocent bystander in this affair.