Craig's very important piece

Craig posted a significant piece on Saturday and it has quite rightly been picked up by The Conservative Woman. I hope it will be followed up by others as well.

The BBC has expressed an interest in delivering education directly to schools, allowing schoolteachers to concentrate on pastoral care.  Although left-leaning teacher training colleges are churning out graduates that share most of the BBC’s ideological and political views, could the BBC really make a useful contribution to the overall school curriculum? 

By the way, let’s just confirm what “pastoral care” is.

 “Pastoral care is defined as the commitment to, and active demonstration of concern for, the growth and wellbeing of each student, as well as the broader school community.

"Leave academic subjects to us", says the BBC, let’s make teachers provide the parental guidance that seems to have gone awol.

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The BBC thinks it’s qualified to teach children M.E. history, a sensitive subject, and one that is particularly dependent on factual accuracy and rigour. Yet the BBC has proved woefully deficient in this area to date. It habitually allows ‘feelings’ to override ‘facts’ and in any case, it has trimmed and styled most facts appertaining to Middle Eastern history to fit its own fixed hostility to Israel.

This, from Wiki explains when and why Jeremy Bowen was appointed BBC Middle East Editor: 

"He became the BBC's first Middle East Editor when the position was created in June 2005 after the 2004 Balen Report on the BBC's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict[11] to provide a broader perspective on wider Middle East issues[12] and to add context to the reporting of events on the ground.

Bowen’s wrist has since been slapped for anti-Israel bias and he has held a personal grudge against Israel since his Arab driver was killed, in part due to Bowen’s reckless decision to film an on-the-spot report from a vulnerable hot-spot. Partiality coupled with superficiality do not a perfect reporter make.  (But it’s good enough for the BBC.)  

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The responses to Craig’s post to date have veered off into two parallel but distinctly separate directions. One branch reflects a rapidly deteriorating trust in the BBC, which, if social media is in any way representative, is widespread.

However, the most directly relevant responses acknowledge that each time the BBC disseminates vague, half-understood and savagely cropped Israel-related material it aggravates pre-existing and equally half-understood anti-Israel and antisemitic animus. If the BBC is let loose on the state school curriculum, biased coverage of the Middle East conflict can only nurture and inflame existing antisemitism. 

Put in the form of the BBC’s favourite question: “How does that make you feel?” the answer has to be ‘Terrified’.

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While palpable distrust of the BBC abounds, many commenters decided to leapfrog over the Middle East, so to speak, and skip straight to Jimmy Savile and BBC bias in general. Although understandable, I find that disappointing - but not as disappointing as the fact that antisemitic voices from ‘the right’ are still apparent on right-wing websites. This effectively hands ammunition to left-wing antisemites who rely on ‘whataboutery’ to deny their own racism.

Clearly, the BBC’s saccharine narrative that ‘all the Palestinians dream of is a state’ is so demonstrably false that the BBC’s chutzpah in promoting it makes the mind boggle. 

The tacitly agreed pretence that Islamic fundamentalism doesn’t feature in the Palestinian psyche is so conspicuous by its omission that I can’t even think of the most apt words to describe it. So I won’t.  The sources of reference for the BBC’s ‘bitesize’ history lessons need to be exposed for what they are. 

The selective array of Palestinian spokespersons and revisionist historians they’ve chosen to narrate their ‘story’ is telling. Collectively they’ve built up a picture so false, yet so beguiling that an insurmountable barrier obstructs every attempt to counter it. A wall of solidarity, if you like, which might also account for the racist rhetoric willingly showcased by the Seumas Milne arm of the press, The Guardian and Independent newspapers.

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The BBC invariably misrepresents complicated situations by adding a little here and subtracting a little there, trimming and tweaking yet always leaving sufficient leeway for the BBC to demand 'benefit of the doubt', should any of it be queried. Their fairy tales are based on the myth that the ‘Palestinian people’ are uniquely indigenous to the region. Jesus of Nazareth and tales from the Christian bible have faded from the collective memory; the Jews are rebranded as interlopers in ‘another people’s land’. Stories concerning the creation of modern-day Israel have been turned on their heads, swallowed whole and regurgitated by fools. 

According to the BBC wars have ‘broken out’ spontaneously and the warring entities have been granted equal billing, like cowboys and Indians, cranes and crows or blacks and whites on a chequered board. 

The religion of Islam has been sanitised but when it hasn’t been completely erased from the narrative, Palestinians are portrayed as ‘devout’; their piety is ‘good’ piety and their zealotry is ‘good’ zealotry while Israeli Jews are portrayed as demonic religious zealots and baby killers. This is a trial in which evidence from only one side is ever given a fair hearing and the BBC is acting for the prosecution.

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Ample evidence of bias has been cited by pro-Israel advocates over the decades but always ignored by the BBC. 

Has the BBC reported anything about Abbas’s ‘pay for slay’ policy? Has the BBC acknowledged any damning news about, say, the lies of the Palestinians’ chief negotiator Saeb Erekat? Gentle probing by Stephen Sackur, maybe?

If you want a typical example of one-sided biased journalism, look at the BBC’s recent ‘explanatory backgrounder’ “Israel annexation: What is the West Bank?” 

It was the subject of a Camera UK article, which deconstructed the piece with its customary forensic rigour. Both Camera UK’s critique and the BBC’s piece were posted on 30th June this year. 

Narrated by the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams, whose presentable veneer is plausible enough to mask the snake-oil-slick he must have ingested, inconvenient material has been slyly edited - added to or subtracted from - to evoke the usual predetermined anti-Israel message. 

Highly emotive language has been deployed; truth has been so steeply tilted that it’s effectively standing on its head. Looking at it again, the selective editing and production still strike me as particularly appalling. The scene is set with a ruthlessly trimmed, ‘bespoke’ version of Middle Eastern ‘history.:

• Since the Middle East war in 1967 it’s been occupied by Israel.
• Before that it was controlled by Jordan.
• Before that by the British,
• and before that it was part of the Ottoman Empire

Is that an example of the BBC’s prospective potted ‘bitesize’ history?

By the way, the 1967 war didn’t just ‘break out’. The BBC leaves out crucial facts that led to that war. The concerted plan by surrounding Arab countries to have another shot at wiping Israel off the map were preceded by a series of provocative acts of aggression and local skirmishes throughout the spring of 1967, eventually culminating in the short, sharp all-out war that was over in six remarkable days; the BBC cannot admit that the six-day war was intended as a rerun of the Arabs’ failed 1948 attempt at the very same thing that the Palestinian leadership is still trying to do -  annihilate Israel - and which is the very real, ongoing and fundamental obstacle to peace.

Using the emotive ‘occupied by Israel’ in contrast to the innocent-sounding “controlled by Jordan” wipes away a whole tranche of historical information, not to mention the complex role of the British nor of the nature of the ‘Ottoman Empire’.

When Paul Adams enunciated: 

“But for centuries it’s been home to Palestinian Arabs, as many as 3m of them today. And it’s long been seen by most people as the heart of a future Palestinian state.

you can see that the BBC has taken massive liberties with the actualité. “For centuries” and “the heart of” -  what emotionally loaded words to pick!

Then there is the imagery. The picture that looks like a sea of ‘invading’ Jews echoes the infamous anti-immigration campaign poster that Nigel Farage was vilified for exploiting, with excoriating accusations of racism. Does the BBC not recognise the irony in that?

And we haven’t even scraped the surface of it yet. If the BBC succeeds in taking over state education Britain’s future looks bleak.

All fool's day

And I haven’t finished yet!
Camera has just posted a new article about the latest of the BBC’s grossly biased annexation related offerings.

Paul Adams presents us with an embarrassingly crass and one-sided view. In sanctioning this grossly selective version of events, the BBC must have abandoned all pretence of impartiality. It has given up. Is this its death throes?

To be specific:

Not a word about the way Jordan originally acquired the “Palestinian” land.

Not a word about the Arabs’ ongoing violence against Jewish Israelis from1948 to the present day.

 The only reference to Palestinian violence is as a predicted  the promised ‘threat’ in response to annexation - “fallout”

Not a word about the extra land allocated to the Palestinians in exchange for areas that are to gain Israeli sovereignty.

Not a word about Jewish presence Judea and Samaria, but “for centuries it’s been home to Palestinian Arabs, as many as three million of them today. And it’s long been seen by most people as the heart of a future Palestinian state.”

Most people! Most interpretations of international law! Land the Palestinians want for their state!

Not exactly facts, though, are they? Aspirations, at best, but is it really up to Paul Adams to present his personal prejudices on behalf of the BBC? It must be some kind of joke. Pinch, punch, first of the month or something. No, that’s tomorrow, isn’t it?

The Annexation Trigger

After being treated to decades of spiteful, passive-aggressive anti-Israel spin from Middle East editor Bowen and his subordinates, anyone with a smattering of political and historical knowledge of ‘Middle East affairs’ could rattle off a pretty good case against the BBC.

Last night Yolande Knell treated us to a mawkish, innuendo-laden report on the BBC World Service impliedly blaming Israel for interruptions to Palestinian children’s cancer treatments during the coronavirus crisis - although most obstacles seemed to stem from the P.A.’s latest strategy of refusing to ‘cooperate’ with Israel in answer to the proposed annexation of parts of the West Bank. I wasn’t certain what message she was trying to send to be honest, but I predict a whole lot more mileage will be extracted from that situation ‘going forward’.  

Although criticism of Israel-related reporting is but one factor in a bias-related bigger picture, many bias-watchers regard the BBC’s left-wing/anti-Conservative bias as their chief bugbear and therefore their main target, but in a way, the BBC’s anti-Zionist bias is the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of bias. 

Regrettably, the BBC’s Palestinian-advocacy reporting style has a wide reach. Compare the BBC’s uncritical regurgitation of the Palestinian narrative with the overtly hostile, ‘arms-length’ or even non-existent representation of the Israeli perspective that is routinely dished up by the BBC’s Middle East correspondents. Bog-standard, superficial and shallow reporting, served with ‘half-a-story’ contemporary and historical analysis.

Given that both Britain and Israel are democracies, this attitudinal imbalance is hard to explain. If ‘Palestinianism’ is rooted in (Islamic) religion-based antisemitism, surely a largely secular - or at least a not very religiously observant country like post 60s Britain would see Israel as a natural ally, while instinctively filing overtly racist,’Yahud-hating Palestinians’ as ’other’.  

As non-racist Brits, shouldn’t we at least find the Palestinians’ intractable refusal to accept Israel’s existence a little problematic? Since the opposite seems to be the case, the obvious conclusion must be that this demonisation of the Jewish state stems from the ‘oldest hatred’.

However, the word ‘Annexation’ has triggered a new wave of anti-Israel angst. 

Mark Regev has been Israel’s UK Ambassador for over four years. Here’s a link to his ‘goodbye interview’ It seems like only yesterday that he was merely Israel’s ‘spokesperson’ and his very appearances on the BBC would send the haters into paroxysms of fury.

Palestinians: Is It Really about 'Annexation'? Khaled Abu Toameh offers another perspective on Trump’s plan for peace. He says that the Palestinians’ opposition to annexation encompasses twin objections; the religious one and the political one. According to Islamic clerics and scholars, Israel has no right to exist anywhere in the region, so with that in mind, any legality (or otherwise) appertaining to ‘annexation’ is but a trivial detail, therefore irrelevant to the ultimate objective - eliminating Israel altogether. 

Mahmoud Abbas, whom the BBC persists in regarding as a ‘potential partner for peace’ claims that annexation would destroy any chance of a ‘two-state’ solution, ending all hopes of peace with Israel. According to officials, the plan would irreversibly deprive the Palestinians of their right to establish an independent and sovereign state on the (unsustainable) pre-1967 armistice lines. 

The BBC, being determined to see such disingenuous role-play as ‘the voice of reason’ takes Abbas’s words at face value. But the P.A. is actually with the clerics. Neither strand really wants ‘a state’, or is capable of forming one. Their idea of peace is simply ‘no Israel’. 

True to form, the BBC’s Tom Bateman puts the customary BBC spin on the matter. I don’t know if that was Bateman’s own headline, but whoever penned it is clearly hostile to Israel and sympathises with the Palestinians. Israel annexation: New border plans leave Palestinians in despair

Getting to grips with the complexity of Netanyahu / Trump proposals or analysing the long-term potential is of little interest to Tom Bateman whose job is to promote the BBC’s agenda, which disregards the welfare of the Palestinians. Stuck with their appalling leadership, encouraged to kill Jews by Abbas’s outrageous ‘pay for slay’ policy, and ensuring that the existing stalemate is prolonged indefinitely.

At the present time, while old allegiances in the region are shifting, the BBC’s current anti-Israel animus has been triggered bigly by the word “annexation’. An emotive concept indeed, but what does it mean? That terrible word alone evokes expansionism; land-grab; occupation. But this isn’t the idea at all. 

I don’t claim to be an expert on the legality or otherwise of Trump’s plan for peace, but one thing I have gathered from my research so far is that the idea of ‘annexing’ parts of the West Bank appears considerably less ominous than Israel’s detractors would have us believe.

Here is another piece explaining Trump’s “Deal of the Century”   Israel has the right to annex parts of Judea and Samaria   by Eli Vered Hazan:

“So before explaining what annexation is and why it is imperative, it is important to emphasize a few things: France and the United Kingdom are vocal opponents of the agreement. The United Kingdom, which controls 17 territories, spread over thousands of miles across the globe, is criticising a territorial process in which there is a deep connection between a country and its citizens. France maintains control over 13 colonies thousands of miles away and even uses some of them for nuclear experiments, yet opposes our connection to our historical homeland. Not only that, Turkey illegally invaded and took over Northern Cyprus but threatens Israel over the mere potential of Israeli sovereignty. All of them claim that for Israel “it is not the same”. In fact, they are right – it is not the same.

and from Melanie Phillips

“Under international law, annexation has a precise meaning: the forcible incorporation by one state of the territory of another state. This does not apply to the disputed territories, which never belonged in law to any other state. 

Israel has the only legally grounded claim to this land, including the never-abrogated duty given to the British in the 1920s to settle the Jews throughout what is now Israel, the disputed territories and the Gaza Strip. 

Far from being an illegal annexation, extending Israeli law to these areas actually implements international law after some nine decades during which it was flouted and then ignored by Britain and the world community. It is those who oppose the sovereignty proposal who show contempt for the law.”

If it’s too easy to tar her with the “She would say that” brush, legal expert Eugene Kontorovich, lays out the situation fully in this article: Don’t Buy the ‘Annexation’ Hype (WSJ is behind a paywall, but I will post it in full over the fold.)

I didn’t want to display my ignorance by spouting nonsense about something I know very little about, so I did try to digest as much of the document as I could, and I dutifully watched the interesting (to me) video below. In the end, it seems that the specifics of the annexation plan is still a work in progress.  Also, at the end of the day, the legality is never the main and ultimate clincher when it comes to Middle East policy. Emotion is the real game-changer; hearts and minds and so on.

Even if the annexation ploy turns out to be just one strategic move in a long-term game, and the objective is a genuine, just and lasting peace, the BBC is never going to give us a fully-rounded picture because it is ideologically and ‘institutionally’ opposed to it and not entirely convinced of Israel's right to exist.

Legal situation fully explained overleaf.