ITBB is a futile endeavour

Melanie Phillips has written a penetrating essay in the Jerusalem Post. Do read it through.

The gist of it is that bloggers like me are on the wrong track. Being on the defensive is an utter waste of time. Typically, we wait for some slanderous attack on Israel to appear before pleading “unfair!”.

She’s completely right about this. To struggle against institutional anti-Israelism and antisemitism is a hopeless endeavour. The BBC is impervious to reason.

On and on they go.  Here are just a couple of prime illustrations. 

1) Stephen Sackur’s sclerotic approach here, in an episode of Hardtalk with Danny Danon, 

His questioning is straight from the “……. dozens of Palestinians including children were gunned down – unarmed innocent civilians – by the Israeli military,” “Mark Serwotka” school of thought. 

Way beyond Devil’s advocate, Mr Sackur.

2) Jeremy Bowen’s obnoxious and partisan Tweet featured by Craig here. 

Why does Jeremy Bowen think it’s alright to Tweet out a random slice of a complex situation? 

Why does he assume no-one will notice that the story has been abridged to portray it as “another” example of Israeli brutality? 

The obvious omission of context is one thing, but the wider and more significant consideration, as I see it, is that it’s being done in the context of the current atmosphere of antisemitism and anti-Israel hysteria. 

Antisemitic shit-stirring is the only plausible motive I can think of.

SOFTtalk

What’s the point of Hardtalk? The blurb says:

In-depth interviews with hard-hitting questions and sensitive topics being covered as famous personalities from all walks of life talk about the highs and lows in their lives.

Well, you’d never guess that Sackur’s guest Ahmad Tibi was the same fellow that appears in this clip. 

If you have the stamina you can read BBC Watch’s two-part deconstruction of the interview, here and here. 

The first problem one has is that this outrageous figure is being treated respectfully when he is obviously a fundamentalist religious extremist; racist, duplicitous, grievance mongering, and very privileged to occupy a seat in the Israeli Knesset. Peace ? forget it.

The other problem - or problems - lie within the interview itself, and all the omissions and sundry economicals with the actualité that Sacker allows to slip through the net. 

So what of it?

Well, as a certain BDS activist might say, it’s just another brick in the wall. 

SOFTtalk

Does anyone watch HARDtalk? It’s usually on TV at unsocial hours. I watched Stephen Sackur's disappointingly lacklustre interrogation of the co-founder of Hamas, Mahmoud Zahar, even if you didn’t.

BBC Watch rigorously unpacks the falsehoods that Zahar got away with in a two-part blog post.

I sense that many of the BBC’s regular viewers are uncertain about whether Hamas is a designated terrorist organisation, and if so, by whom. Sometimes the BBC mentions that Israel deems Hamas a terrorist organisation, and they would, wouldn’t they,  but it’s unclear whether the BBC knows which other countries agree, if any. 

One minute the EU thinks it isn’t …. the next the ECJ decides it is. There’s profile of Hamas on the BBC website that I don’t think even includes the word 'terrorist'. Of course this could be because the BBC is loath to make controversial value judgments. It’s understood that the BBC’s policy is to avoid using the term at all, except within reported speech, or in connection with specific cases of deadly terrorism here or in continental Europe. The BBC won’t use the term when terrorism occurs in Israel (as to do so would imply ‘taking sides’.)  

One might put this apparently selective ruling down to the fanciful, idealised picture of the Palestinians that quietly seeps into the BBC’s language. Yolande Knell, for example, will pay lip service to impartiality by giving us an empathetic version of, say, Bassem Tamimi, and an impersonal, ‘othered’ picture of the Israeli voice she is obliged to include. I believe the general public is not at all sure what to think. Quite a few people seem to be thoroughly bored with the lot of it. They end up wishing a plague on both (Israeli and Palestinian) houses.

Pro-Palestinian activists undoubtedly do see Hamas as freedom fighters, and the numbers who agree are bound to increase as Jeremy Corbyn’s influence widens. Many western politicians regard the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas as a credible partner for peace, perhaps because they are unaware of his true intentions, though he makes little secret of them. Make no mistake, Mahmoud Abbas says it loud and clear, he wants Israel eliminated and vows he will settle for nothing less. No matter how loudly or how often he says this, the media ignores it or makes sure the true meaning of his words is lost in translation, perhaps assuming everyone would prefer not to know. Like, too much information.

We didn’t see much of Stephen Sackur's HARD talking that the programme promises. It’s all very well claiming that the entire premise of Hamas’s existence is founded on so many falsifications of the actualité that it’s not worth picking up on every single one of them otherwise we’d be here all day. (not that anyone has claimed such a thing) I’m merely preempting possible excuses for a half-hearted performance.

Distilling BBC Watch’s detailed analysis, I offer this: 

The introduction includes a list of cruelties inflicted upon Zahar’s family by the Zionists, seemingly for no reason: 

“My guest today[…]was imprisoned, deported, his home was targeted, family members – including his son killed.”
“But he and his Hamas colleagues remained committed to an armed struggle whose ultimate objective they characterise as the liberation of all the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. “

The word “But” obfuscates here. It should be “and”.  

“To Israel, Hamas is a terrorist organisation and Mr Zahar is a terrorist with blood on his hands.”

To Israel? As Hadar says, Sackur is simply reminding us that 'one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.'  

Not everyone knows that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 so Sackur shouldn’t have let Zahar imply otherwise. Conflicting and confusing BBC reports in the past about the on / off relationship between Hamas and Fatah haven’t been helpful, but at least we now know that there is no reconciliation between the two Palestinian factions. The one thing they do agree on is that they are both committed to a Jew-free ‘Palestine’. I wish a wart on both their noses.

As for Hamas’s new, improved Charter. It isn’t. As far as I know it’s a softened, image-burnishing policy document, not a revised charter. 

Zahar attributes the poor quality of life in Gaza to Israel and Trump, and says it has nothing to do with Hamas “management”. This is untrue. He complains that Israel is somehow interfering with “Our human rights in the most important third shrine in Islam, al Aqsa Mosque.” The opposite is the case. Bizarrely it’s actually Jews who aren’t allowed to pray there, and this lie should have been challenged.

More, still. Zahar gets away with accusing Israel of “destroying our medical, our social, our economic life” and says that “nobody is interested about human rights where 2 million Palestinian people are living in this area.”

The BBC has never attempted to rectify this widely believed falsehood. Zahar freely admits that Hamas considers the whole of Israel to be an occupation of Palestinian lands.

  “Listen, listen: this [Israel] is Palestine. This is Palestine occupied ’48. Occupied by ’48 by the support and by a built by the British occupation.” 

“The people in the West Bank have their right to defend themselves by all means. […] 

"We have to defend ourselves by all means in the West Bank in order to avoid the expansion of the settlement not only on Jerusalem but also on the rest of the West Bank.”

Surely the BBC is obliged to challenge the justification of terrorism? Zahar sees Israel’s evacuation (in 2005) of Gaza as a triumph for terrorism. Does that not merit a robust challenge from the BBC? Zahar declares that Israeli Jews are “foreigners”:

 “These people left their homeland from America, from Russia and come. For this reason we are against foreign people took our land, violated our rights.”

Even if historically illiterate BBC journalists doubt the Jews’ connection to the land, isn’t this precisely the kind of racism the BBC despises. So why let it go?

As BBC Watch rightly says,

“the fact that Zahar’s lies, omissions, distortions of history and blatantly bigoted messaging falls on ears which for the most part have a poor understanding of the history of the region and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should have been reason enough for Stephen Sackur to challenge his remarks and at least set the historical record straight for viewers and listeners.”

I’ve already touched on the way the BBC ignored the content of Abbas’s speech. 

The media doesn’t want to know.

Melanie Phillips:. 

“For years some of us have argued that Abbas should be considered instead a political and diplomatic pariah. We have said he is a deep-dyed antisemite, having written his “doctoral” thesis on denying the Holocaust. We have drawn attention to his regime teaching its children about seizing the whole of Israel, and that their greatest goal should be to murder Jews. 

We have circulated the hideous antisemitic caricatures published in his regime’s media outlets. We have pointed out that he and his henchmen have repeatedly said not one Jew would remain in such a state of Palestine. We have referred to his repeated attempts to write the Jews out of their own history by denying their historic connection to the land of Israel, a central feature of the Jewish religion.

“Now Abbas has come out in his true colours in an utterly vile and deranged speech yesterday to the PLO central council. 

“Abbas’s speech should be sent to every member of the British parliament, and the Prime Minister, Theresa May, should be asked how Britain can continue to give any money at all to such open antisemites and Holocaust deniers. She should be asked how the British government can continue to support giving such people a state of their own. She should be asked why the British government has ignored this horrifying reality, and the constant mortal danger it poses for the Israelis, for so long. 

But then, many British people will be unaware of the appalling nature of Abbas’s speech since the BBC chose to bowdlerise it…”

A person called Christine Shawcroft has been elected on to the Labour Party committee responsible for dealing with antisemitism, deposing the person who was committed to ferreting it out. It remains to be seen what line the BBC will  take over this.

HARDtalk and the man on the Clapham omnibus

The BBC’s HARDtalk covers a vast breadth of issues. Stephen Sacker sweeps in on all sorts of scenarios and situations, tasked with confronting his prey with a set of penetrating questions designed to expose weakness or hypocrisy. He’s armed with several sheets of paper; perhaps he prepares his own notes or perhaps they are prepared for him by a research team.

Analogy:

Imagine a complex fraud investigation. Just like on TV.

An official body spends hours, days, weeks constructing a watertight case against a devious fraudster whose ‘business’ activities extricated thousands of pounds from customers who cannot immediately tell they’ve been swindled.

Evidence has been seized, statements and counter statements taken, character references concocted and a solicitor painstakingly prepares umpteen charges. Even as the case is ready to go to court the criminal activity is ongoing,

A learned barrister sweeps in from on high and after a cursory glance at the evidence and a last-minute tête-à-tête with the defence, a plea bargain is agreed. Guilty to half the charges and the rest - dropped. Just like that. The upshot: a suspended sentence, not a hefty custodial one as was hoped for.

End of analogy.

Due to being parachuted in with little more than a sketchy overview and a necessarily limited grasp of crucial minutiae, Stephen Sacker is the BBC’s jack-of-all-trades who can only be master of none. (Like that barrister.)

Instead of a bundle of painstakingly prepared evidence, Sacker is only armed with his own research, or that of the BBC. He wades in, woefully ill-prepared, and achieve an inevitably unsatisfactory outcome. I felt this too about Sarah Montague’s interview with Kenneth O’Keefe.

They mean well, but they are only as good as the research they are armed with. They can succeed only as much as that famous passenger on the Clapham omnibus, should he decide to take on an argument he is not absolutely familiar with. 

BBC Watch deconstructs the shortcomings in Sackur's interview with former head of UN ESCWA Rima Khalaf in far more detail than I can. They gave Sackur due credit for the challenges he did make, but like the fraudster in my analogy, Rima Khalif got away with most of her offences.

The woeful inadequacy of another Stephen Sackur episode of HARDtalk has also been mentioned elsewhere on the www. The interviewee was a staunch critic of Islam, the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner. Sackur’s principal argument seemed to be  accusing Bruckner of Islamophobia.

I watched Sackur’s latest episode, which was broadcast yesterday. The interview took place in northern Germany and was with the writer Nicklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank the brutal Nazi governor of Poland 1939-1945 who was “hung” (sic) when Nicklas was seven years old. 

Rather than a confrontation, after all there was nothing much to confront Nicklas Frank about, this interview morphed into one of those heart to heart counselling sessions that Victoria Derbyshire specialises in.  The only hook upon which to hang a HARDtalk approach was to question the need for transferred collective guilt and the folly of taking responsibility of the crimes of others.

One point passed by without a challenge from Sackur, one I could really have done with. Nicklas Frank equated criticism of Angela Merkel’s generous refugee policy with the world’s inhospitable response to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. A variant of the Kindertransport / refugee analogy. Interestingly, he also said that he fundamentally distrusted the German character because of a collective refusal to properly acknowledge the crime committed by Hitler (and his own father.) He said ‘the swamp has not been drained’. 

Here endeth the lesson.

The wild side

I read a piece about Facebook in last week’s Sunday Times(£) titled:  “Behind our happy snaps is a sea of Facebook filth” by Sarah Baxter.
The article was about Facebook's cavalier attitude to dodgy content, namely "hosting pornographic images of children", something that was exposed by an undercover reporter from The Times.

 “Facebook actively encourages dissemination of vile material by herding users into friendship groups, where they can find more and more of the stuff they “like”

Facebook’s attitude seems to be “Don’t worry about the filth - if you’re not in a group that likes ‘filth’ you don’t have to see it”. It’s the algorithms, stupid. The Times reporter’s complaint elicited the boilerplate response:

'it doesn't go against any of our specific community standards"

What caught my eye was another complaint about “An objectionable TV clip of a 2013 interview with Kenneth O’Keefe, a former US marine turned self-styled peace campaigner” but this time the complaint was from one of Ms. Baxter’s family members. It too had drawn Facebook’s pro forma response. Sarah Baxter says:

“O’Keefe is a 9/11 “truther” who blames Israeli intelligence for the attacks on the twin towers and publicly burnt his US passport in 2004, but you wouldn’t know that from the Facebook clips, nor that the interview had first appeared on the Iranian propaganda channel PressTV. No, he is presented as a truth-telling, honest-to-goodness ex-marine.

In the interview, carried out at the time of the previous chemical attacks in Syria - when Bashar al-Assad crossed Barack Obama's "red line" - the ranting O'Keefe laid into the US for its "war of deception" over Syria. That, you might say, is just his opinion.

But as soon as he slipped into sly anti-semitism by claiming the Syrian civil war was part of the "greater Israel project" to destabilise the region with "rich and powerful backers" as the puppet-masters. 

Alarmed to see this nonsense proliferating again, my family member reported the clip for "racism" to Facebook last week. It didn't just reject his complaint, however; it politely offered to "help you see less of things like it in the future". That's missing the point. You don't like anti-semitism? You don't have to see it. "

Of course, this irresponsible approach is bad enough coming from Facebook, but I well remember O’Keefe being plastered all over our television screens after the Mavi Marmara affair. 

The BBC devoted two episodes of HardTalk to this person.  We can’t be sure if Sarah Montague is aware of what the ‘blockade’ actually is or why it exists, but her opening line of questioning was framed in accord with the BBC’s ideological bias against Israel.

“Do you think your achievement was worth those nine lives?” is a question that seems to come from the premise that nine martyrs’ lives were squandered -  as it merely resulted in the ‘easing of the blockade’ rather than having the blockade lifted altogether.

Later, although Sarah Montague made good use of the “Israel says’ formula, she did put Israel’s case forcibly enough to rile O’Keefe, and leave his repeated claims that ‘Israel lies” as his best argument.

The hate-filled comments to this video accuse Sarah Montague of being a Zionist. If the BBC uses comments that are so obviously written by hard-line antisemites as evidence of that well-worn “complaints from both sides” meme it exposes the weakness of the BBC’s flawed conclusion that “we must be getting it about right.”

The BBC didn’t give us the full picture of O’Keefe. I don’t know who wrote this, but it’s on the HARDtalk website:

“This is the second interview of Ken O'Keefe by BBC's flagship HardTALK program. His first interview was in February 2003 regarding his TJP Human Shield Action to Iraq. In this 2010 interview O'Keefe discusses the plight of the Palestinian people and the mass-murder of humanitarian aid workers who sailed to Gaza on the Turkish lead ship the Mavi Marmara. 9 people were murdered, all Turkish nationals, one with American citizenship as well. Some of these were provably executed, in international waters no less. This is a classic interview, a true rarity of straight talk on the planets most influential propaganda institution in the BBC.”

I don't know what the final sentence is supposed to mean. Someone enlighten me, please. But the BBC’s rose-tinted description of "Ken" contains nothing remotely like Sarah Baxter’s realistic summary of O’Keefe’s background. Substitute “BBC” for “Facebook” for a clearer understanding of this man’s history. Let me remind you:

“O’Keefe is a 9/11 “truther” who blames Israeli intelligence for the attacks on the twin towers and publicly burnt his US passport in 2004, but you wouldn’t know that from the Facebook clips, nor that the interview had first appeared on the Iranian propaganda channel PressTV. No, he is presented as a truth-telling, honest-to-goodness ex-marine.

Nothing whatsoever from the BBC detailing O’Keefe’s overt antisemitism for viewers not well enough informed to  see it for themselves.
Here's what Sarah Baxter has to say, again, about Facebook, but it applies equally to the BBC, if not more so. 

You don't have to see it [...] but that doesn't mean it isn't out there, corrupting what can often be very young minds. O'Keefe's clip is popular with anti-war teenagers.

Facebook wants you to think the world is full of people who are as sensible and well informed as you. My social media helpfully direct me to all sorts of terrific articles from traditional media. But if you prefer to walk on the wild side, you will encounter bucketloads of hate speech. Such types naturally think they are every bit as sensible and well informed as me and - here's the really scary thing - their posts are the most likely to be shared. Facebook feeds off viral videos by the likes of O'Keefe and other haters and conspiracists. You're just not seeing them.

"You're just not seeing them?" The BBC doesn’t even have that excuse.

A tale of two Tzipis

The BBC put out two interviews, one  with Israeli opposition politician Tzipi Livni, the other with deputy foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely In both cases the interviewer was Sarah Montague

The Today Programme broadcast the first one January 23rd, and on February 21st HardTalk  featured  the other. 

HardTalk's raison d’être is adversarial and confrontational, but both interviews were distinctly hostile. Numerous interruptions halted the flow, and Sarah Montague’s disinclination to listen sidelined the answers, throwing all the emphasis on her loaded questions. A bit like current press conferences.

It’s obvious that Sarah Montague takes the BBC’s ‘Arabist’ approach to the Israel / Palestinian conflict. The religious/Islamic element is ignored. All Palestinian claims and accusations are taken at face value, while Israel’s are treated with cynical disbelief. The issue of settlements is of particular interest to Israel’s critics who will cite the UN and International law to support their argument, while all counter argument automatically falls on deaf ears.

That sets the scene. 

BBCWatch has a transcription of the Today Programme interview with Tzipi Hotovely here.

Now there’s a new episode in that particular saga. Before I go into detail, here is the relevant excerpt.

“Montague: “Of course, as I say, the majority of the rest of the world take a very different view but one thing that – clearly you think differently – but do you recognise that the building of these homes makes peace less likely?” 

Hotovely: “Absolutely not. What we saw throughout last year is that every time Israel went through a process of concessions and when Israel committed disengagement from the Gaza [in] 2005, what we saw was more extremists on the other side. We saw Hamas regime taking over; terror regime that the Palestinians chose on a democratic vote. So what we saw is actually the opposite. When settlements were not there, instead of having democratic flourish in the Palestinian side, we just saw extremist radicalism and radical Islam taking over. Unfortunately…” 

Montague [interrupts]: “You’re talking about a flourish…yes…you’re talking about flourishing of a particular one [laughs]…the…the…Israeli Jews in settlements; they are flourishing. Of course the Palestinians are not. I wonder, do you think that the idea of a two-state solution – because this is of course land that would have been Palestinian under the two-state solution – is the idea of that now dead?”

BBCWatch made a complaint about the lack of impartiality - specifically in the latter part of that exchange. They argued that Sarah Montague’s odd remark about ‘flourishing’ was both irrelevant and subjective. 

Initially they received a bungled, slapdash reply which misidentified interviewer, prematurely recognised Palestinian statehood, misunderstood the complaint and delivered a haughty and patronising lecture on the BBC’s infallibility.

BBCWatch made the complaint a second time, and received an apology and a new reply. Again the complaints department misunderstood the complaint. 

Once again, here’s where the word “flourish” first appears in the conversation.

Tzipi Hotovely said: 

When settlements were not there, instead of having democratic flourish in the Palestinian side, we just saw extremist radicalism and radical Islam taking over”

She was explaining, in less than perfect English, that when Israel withdrew from Gaza (and settlements were no longer there) the opportunity to establish a flourishing democracy was not taken up by the Palestinian side; instead, “extremist radicalism and radical Islam” took over. 

Again, this obsession with settlements dominated the debate. Sarah Montague let her emotions steer her response and seized on the word ‘flourish’. 

“The Israeli Jews in settlements are flourishing, of course the Palestinians are not.”

Sarah Montague is emoting that the settlements are ‘crushing’ the Palestinians. She believes this because she treats all Israel’s arguments with disbelief. 

“You would continue building in settlement blocks” she says, provocatively to Livni on HardTalk. Demographic reality and any mention of final status negotiations fall on deaf ears and always will while the BBC takes a hostile and partial approach to Israel. 

“Ms Hotoveley, (sic) however, did not take issue with the suggestion that Palestinians were not flourishing as a result of the settlements.”

concluded the BBC in its second reply to BBCWatch. That is eerily similar to the police caution on arrest:

 “……it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in Court”  

The BBC’s kangaroo court.

Hardtalk about Brexit

Katty Kay's anti-Brexit aside there might remind viewers of Hardtalk of this recent exchange between a BBC presenter and the leader of the French National Front:

Marine le Pen: Now, if at the end of the negotiations, the European Union tell me 'no', I will tell the French people that there is no other option but to get out of the European Union, because the policies you want to see implemented... 

Stephen Sackur (interrupting): Forgive me for interrupting but why would the French people look across the Channel at Britain and want to follow Britain when we see that the British pound is now at historic lows against international currencies, we see huge uncertainty which is provoked by businesses in Japan and across the world saying they are now very concerned about staying in Britain and might well leave. Why, why, why would the French want to follow that model? 

Marine le Pen: Sorry, but don't you think it's time to stop all this propaganda? That's it. They voted. There's no need to tell us it's going to be catastrophic, that there's going to be a locust invasion, that Great Britain is going to be hit by a tsunami. Great Britain has never had it so good in economic terms. Householders' confidence has never been so high, exports have never been so strong. So, all the debate's over if and whether companies will leave. No, they don't leave because it's in their interests to stay in Britain because the British economy is doing better today than it was doing yesterday and it's doing much better than the economy of all the other EU countries together.

(Not very) Hardtalk

Over the years a number of BBC related blogs have featured HARDtalk. Some have written about it many times.  

It presents itself as the BBC’s hard-hitting, one-to-one platform, where awkward but penetrating questions are put to important public figures, who are expected in return to give honest, revealing answers, and defend their case against intelligent criticism.

Stephen Sackur has a slightly bullying demeanour, which can look deliberately intimidating, like an overly stern schoolteacher “I'm establishing my discipline” (because I’m rather afraid of losing control.) (Thank you Dr. Freud)

I don’t know how effective that tactic is.  If one’s aim is to ‘draw something out’, surely it puts the subject on the defensive, which I daresay could eventually expose some important truth, perhaps more by accident than design. 

I imagine Sackur sees himself as the BBC’s chief Q.C. tasked with the huge responsibility of cross-examining the witness, uncovering lies and inconsistencies, weakening the defence, hoping that the verdict is favourable to Stephen Sackur and unfavourable to the accused.

The question is, has he been properly briefed? Is he well prepared? Has he studied the case, understood the nuances and complexities? Can he get to the heart of the matter?

Here’s an odd list . “Radio Times - The Greatest Interviews of all time.” I don’t think they mean the greatest. They mean interviews that went wrong, (car crash interviews) notorious ones, ones when the interviewee stormed out, swore, was pissed, or when the whole interview fell apart.

But in the olden, black and white days there were some memorable interviews, notably the one where John Freeman managed to penetrate the protective shell of famously irascible personality Gilbert Harding and reduced him to tears.   Very shocking in those days. That series, “Face to Face” was considered iconic, but I doubt whether it would fare well today.   

Anyway, I digress.

BBC Watch addressed the topic of HARDtalk recently in a piece called:

BBC Hardtalk for Israel, Softchat for Palestinians.

Guest poster Aron White compared the underlying gist of Sackur’s introductions, pitting episodes involving Israelis against those involving Palestinians. Needless to say, one thing he found was that Israeli guests get a tougher grilling.

One example was a recent episode featuring Israeli MK Yair Lapid. The harsh introduction, which pitted Israel’s ‘shoot to kill’ policy against the Palestinians‘ ‘stab to kill‘  policy, (without the latter of course, the former would not be necessary) was framed from a ‘hostile-to-Israel’ premise, which (I’ve argued in previous posts) is the BBC’s default position. 

HARDtalk routinely poses questions from the starting point (at best) of attributing moral equivalence to the Israeli and the Palestinian points of view, which sends across an acrid whiff of sympathy for the Palestinian cause and antipathy towards Israel. It pervades most relevant output from the BBC.

In that BBC Watch article, an example of a 2014 episode featuring Saeb Erekat was cited. Erekat has appeared on the programme again,more recently.

The Palestinians have a habit of clinging to the same old themes, repeating them over and over, sometimes ostentatiously using their fingers to ‘count the ways’. 

Here, commenter TrueToo gives an example on the open thread of Biased-BBC. Two recent HARDtalk episodes. Yair Lapid and “veteran Palestinian negotiator” Saeb Erekat.

Erekat, continually addressing his interlocutor by his first name, once again utters the same old banal, repetitive manufactured list of Israel’s misdeeds.  He lies from start to finish, and he is able to get away with doing so simply because Sackur wasn’t up to scratch, didn’t know the topic well enough, and with Erekat in the hot seat his probing and analytical skills are AWOL.

Erekat’s index finger is the occupation. The middle finger is the settlements; the third finger is the hopelessness etc. Ethnic cleansing. House demolitions. ‘Dictations’, killing fields. A handful or two of self-inflicted and manufactured grievances.

“I’m not saying we are perfect” is a new one. It’s all he could offer to defend the suggestion that there may have been incitement.  Twisted, distorted reinventions of things Netanyahu once said, lies, projections onto Netanyahu of all manner of Palestinian malevolence - Sackur let it all pass.   

So much went unchallenged; untrue allegations about expanding settlements, blaming Israel for all the shortcomings of the Palestinian leadership, all accepted by Sackur, and interpreted as ‘passionate’. “I hear what you say”.

Apparently Saeb Erekat has 60 grandchildren! Did I hear that correctly? Ethnic cleansing in reverse? Or perhaps he meant 6? Who knows. 

It’s as much as the Palestinians can do to drum up some dubious examples of what they see as (or can convince the outside world are) Israeli transgressions and milk them for all they are worth. They repeat them as often as they can get away with, emphasising them with their fingers and slicing gestures to disguise the paucity of the material. 

On the other hand, there are so many moral transgressions and illogicalities in Palestinian conduct that one wouldn’t know where to start. There aren’t enough fingers on the hands of the whole of the IDF.

The pretence that all the Palestinians want is a two state solution living side by side,  “A Palestinian State and the State of Israel” as Erekat claims (note: not the Jewish state) is a tailor-made equivocation designed to beguile people like Sackur and hoodwink the West.

I suggest that Sackur’s obvious empathy with Palestinians emanates from a feeling of superiority. It’s patronising, and maybe a tad racist. On the other hand, he knows he isn’t entitled to feel superior to Israelis, and he certainly doesn’t empathise with them or understand them. He’s just plain hostile. 

There. that’s my take on it. Just imagine. If Saeb Erekat and Hanan Ashrawi were stranded on a desert Island they’d be there counting the same old grievances on their fingers and blaming Israel as the sun went down and for ever and a day.

Suha and Zeinab revisited

I woke up in the middle of the night and switched on the radio, just in time to catch a familiar voice saying “Suha Arafat”. It was, of course Zeinab Badawi, and I was wondering if this was another case of deja vu all over again; was I hearing the same episode of HardTalk that I’d blogged a while ago? Was it a figment of my imagination, or was it one of those dreams that are so close to reality that you’re wondering, in the dream, if it’s really a dream?

It was “another chance to hear” Suha and Zeinab, for no apparent reason other than, perhaps, to reignite the vexing question of Yassir’s assassination. 

The audio version gives quite a different impression from the full-on technicolor version. No portrait of Yasser leering down from his easel to distract one - no time to ponder over Suha’s flawless make up (has she got a lady-in-waiting or does she do it herself?)

There’s just the conversation. No frills. Because I missed the start of the introduction I wasn’t quite sure if I was hearing an updated version, or whether this was an unadulterated repeat of the January interview.

Suha was still convinced that old Yasser had ingested a dose of polonium in his frugal lunch -  just a little fish or chicken don’t you know -  because he was in fine fettle up to that fatal day. “My husband  was a fitness fanatic”, she said - good diet, abstemious, and the picture of health. We’ll have to take her word for it. He didn’t have aids after all.

Suha was insistent that someone - it must have been a traitorous Palestinian - had slipped the poison into his healthy lunch on behalf of the Israelis.

Healthy diet

I was certain I’d heard that the poisoning theory had been definitively debunked by the French, Swiss and Russian investigators, but at the time of the interview, Suha hadn’t received those disappointing results, and she wouldn’t have liked them very much when she did receive them.  

She’ll be appealing the findings. I don’t know if this is ongoing.

Now that I was able to properly listen, I realised that Suha was saying that old Yasser, the father of the Palestinians -  specifically the father of every single Palestinian child - wanted to establish a secular state.  Confusingly, he had made Suha convert from Christianity to Islam when they were married, secular old rogue that he was. 

 The only aspect of religiosity that concerned her  greatly was the unthinkable prospect of Jews being allowed to pray at the Temple Mount. She thought the very idea was beyond the pale. She got so worked up at the whole idea of Jews praying at the Temple Mount that Zeinab had to calm her down,. ”The Israeli government assures us that it’s not going to happen.” said Zeinab in a calm voice. 

The bit about the money was as dramatic as ever. “Where is it?” asked Zeinab. “Where are Yasser’s millions?” I remembered the gestures with which Zeinab accompanied that question, looking round the room exaggeratedly, as if for a giant safe or a mound of ingots.   

I wonder why the BBC World Service thought it was a good idea to resurrect this peculiar interview, specially since with hindsight the poisoning claim looks so ‘conspiracy theory’.

Why on earth did they do it?

Put your feelings aside

We get caught up in semantics, such as 'what should we call Islamic State if we don’t want to look as if we’re legitimising the aspirations of a bunch of savages or allowing them to be perceived as representatives of Islam for fear of alienating The Muslims?'

One argument posits that there can be no confusion about what is meant by ‘Islamic State’, since that is what the movement calls itself. The suggested alternatives don’t resolve those issues because they retain the offending words ‘Islamic’ and ‘State’ save the one that is an acronym for 'Islamic State' in Arabic.

I couldn’t give a stuff. Call it whatevah. Call it ‘everyone hates us and we don’t care’ if you like.

Semantics which are of more interest concern the ‘Jew or Israeli’ contretemps, closely related to the ‘anti-Zionism’ or ‘antisemitism’  dispute. 

We all know that covert or ‘in denial’ antisemites try to launder the fundamentally antisemitic memes they spout by claiming their criticisms are dispassionately formulated, not at all racist and would equally apply to any other entity, government or culture.  

Concealing racism beneath a cloak of reason and logic can fool anyone, including the perpetrator who always sees him/herself as a good person.

With criticism of Israel in particular, intent is all, and people will lie about that, because they can. 

Criticism of anything, no matter what, should pass a basic test. Would it hold up if directed at an equivalent target? With Israel, we need to take into account where the critic is ‘coming from’ in order to distinguish whether a criticism is valid and perhaps well-intentioned or just antisemitic.

An episode of HardTalk might illustrate this. It’s with Stephen Sackur and William Schabas, the former head of UNRCC of Inquiry into events in Gaza in 2014. Schabas stepped down after pressure from many directions. Objections were on the grounds of his well-known bias against Israel. 

Near the beginning of the interview he claims that he is not biased, but even if he was, he is perfectly capable of putting his feelings aside and acting professionally, as journalists do all the time.  

“Journalists have opinions, Journalists have made public statements, some of them have been involved in politics, and they put them aside to do their job in an professional impartial and objective manner.”

His appearance, a kind of hang-dog chubbiness, did not lend credibility to what I believe is a somewhat far fetched assertion. 

For once I thought Stephen Sackur did a good job. He seemed well briefed.

With this business of the BBC’s decision to translate ‘Yahud’ to ‘Israeli’ rather than its literal meaning ‘Jew’, there is a clear attempt to airbrush away the racist element of Palestinian (Islamic) hatred and Arab rejectionist politics.

The child in Lyse Doucet’s film who said he wished all Israelis were dead does really mean Jews; he probably doesn’t wish the same for Israeli Arabs. The Islamic clerics and religious leaders are quite clear who they see as their enemy. Jews. Hamas may have learned to use the term Israeli when addressing their western friends in the media. They know which way their bread is buttered. 

But for the BBC to collude in that masquerade is truly objectionable, and the decision to adopt “Israeli” for “Yahud” as a suitable translation cannot be a morally justifiable interpretation of their editorial powers. 

Can we forgive Zeinab Badawi?

I happened to see HardTalk yesterday - the episode with Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack, a Hungarian born Jew who now lives in London, and Zeinab Badawi.

Zeinab, as we know, is inclined to wear her heart on her sleeve in terms of Hardtalk. She gave Mosab Hassan Yousef, the eldest son of a founder of the militant Palestinian movement Hamas a very hard time, and suggested he was a traitor to his father and the Hamas terrorist organisation.  

On the other hand, she gave Suha Arafat an easy ride. Her most penetrating questions concerned money matters, and she appeared easily satisfied with Suha’s evasive responses.

We are aware that the BBC has a severe case of cognitive dissonance when it comes to the Jewish peoples. On the one hand they disapprove of Israel, are opposed to Zionism and sympathetic to the Palestinian version of the Israel/Palestine conflict, but on the other they have an almost mawkish curiosity about the Holocaust and love filming the personal stories of survivors, especially if recounted in great detail.  

All that aside, I was pleasantly surprised that Zeinab drew out harrowing information from Mrs Pollack respectfully and gently in an interested, almost warm manner. I didn’t know she had it in her, as they say.  The only dissonance was at the end, where either the BBC or Zeinab chose to impose a jarring agenda about forgiveness.

I realise that many righteous people consider forgiveness a virtue. Something to aspire to, even under the most appalling and difficult circumstances. Remember Gordon Wilson who forgave his daughter’s killers after the Enniskillen bombing? Forgiveness is supposed to be cathartic, like throwing off a cloak of darkness.

   "To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you." - Louis B. Smedes

Perhaps it was with that in mind that the BBC decided to frame, in a rather negative light, Susan Pollack’s inability to forgive the Nazis on behalf of the millions they murdered. 

This is the blurb on the HardTalk website:

Zeinab Badawi talks to British Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack, who lost fifty members of her family, including her parents, in Nazi camps. She recently gave evidence at the trial in Germany of former SS guard Oskar Gröning, who has been charged with complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jews. She says she cannot forgive him and welcomes the trial. What purpose can it serve today?

Recently Susan Pollack spoke at the trial of former SS guard Oskar Gröning, but unlike Eva Kor, did not embrace the 93 year-old former death camp clerk.

Eva Kor said: 

‘I wanted to thank him for having some human decency in accepting responsibility for what he has done.‘The victims, 70 years after liberation, with 300 others, they were all talking about their experience, falling apart – “poor me… what have they done to me?”‘I don’t forget what they have done to me. But I am not a poor person – I am a victorious woman who has been able to rise above the pain and forgive the Nazis.’

Allegedly other victims have said they see Eva Kor as a traitor, a sentiment the press seems to view with disapproval. All I can say is, who are they to judge? If that seems ambiguous - to clarify - I’m addressing the press, and for that matter, everyone else as well. Including me. 

Neither Eva Kor nor Susan Pollack sought revenge in the form of imprisonment for Gröning, and both campaigned for enlightenment, awareness and vigilance against antisemitism and racism in any form. 

Eva Kor’s response, like Gordon Wilson’s, was remarkable, but Susan Pollack was not self-pitying and at no point did she come across as saying anything resembling “poor me..”. She was an articulate, intelligent and extraordinarily un-bitter, philosophical person, in my humble opinion.

If Zeinab Badawi has a softer side, and is willing to let us see more of it, bring it on!

Carefully made up

Should you take the sincerity of the spoken word for granted when you see or hear it on the media? Some might think, cynically, that what we get is more a matter of what the spokesperson has decided to say today.

That thought persisted when I watched the HardTalk with Zeinab Badawi and Suha Arafat. (H/T BBCWatch. Congratulations to Hadar Sela on a very well deserved accolade.)

HardTalk.

You know that expression ‘rats fighting in a sack’? Something like that popped into my head.  

Zeinab and Suha. Two harpies play-fighting on the BBC.

Everyone who’s aware of Zeinab’s interviewing history would be pretty naïve to expect any kind of penetrating grilling from Zeinab, a least in the case of an Arafat.  In the event, apart from the usual propagandistic cliches that Suha knew she could get away with, it was Zeinab who came across as equally, if not more, ‘partial’ than the (relatively) poor widow. 

Some of this interview was hilarious, some plain weird.  Hadar noted Suha’s evasive answers and picked out the most fanciful of the propagandistic allusions she slipped in, more of which later, but what about Zeinab’s performance?

Zeinab asks Suha “when you’re living in Malta in relative comfort and you see the struggling  of the Palestinian people....how does that make you feel?”

Well, Suha feels terrible, but she and her daughter wouldn’t be safe in ‘Palestine’.  “The name Arafat.. it’s not easy.” Fair enough. I can quite believe they’d be a sitting target,  even more so now that the Islamic State terror group has managed to set up bases of power in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The section one could call “Where’s the money?” was strange as strange could be. Zeinab mentioned eleven million dollars that were supposed to be in bank accounts “under your control - where is it? 

“Where is the money?” 

At that, Zeinab looked around with a theatrical gesture, meaning .... what? I don’t quite know. Did she mean the spartan fixtures and fittings? As in “I see no outward signs of wealth here?” Can’t be that.

Perhaps she meant the opposite. The ‘relatively comfortable' surroundings. Maybe she was alluding to the considerable sum Suha has very likely thrown at cosmetic dentistry and personal grooming. (Nice eyebrows, by the way.)

Well, “this is character assassination - not against me - against my husband.” Suha did look, momentarily, a little shifty.

I must digress a minute. You know how the BBC crew will ‘stage’ these films? (well, they do) They’re inclined to fiddle with elaborate lighting contraptions and turn off any humming fridges. They spend time artfully placing the subject before a suitable background. 

I just thought it was hilarious that a huge portrait of Yasser must have been wheeled in on a whacking great artists easel so he could leer down on the proceedings throughout the interview.  I wonder if they brought the easel with, as a prop? Perhaps Suha is a painter.

(Something about the Arafat countenance belies Suha’s insistence that her husband was a fitness fanatic before being poisoned with polonium. Yasser Arafat the health freak. Hmm.)

However, when it comes to the nitty gritty, it wasn’t clear who Suha fears most or regards as the greatest enemy, Hamas or Israel. 

She said, or has decided to say, that she and Yasser hadn’t put all that effort, suffering and struggle “all our life” for Palestine to become an Islamic state. But “it should have Muslim law” “We want the Muslim laws, but not the Muslim state.”

So what’s the actual difference? I must say this seemed confusing, and if Zeinab had her wits about her she might have insisted on clarification.

Suha also said what happened in France was terrible, a crime, and France opened its arms to immigrants who should have been appreciative of the Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité they were lucky enough to experience in France

Zeinab turned to the subject of Yehuda Glick who had also been a guest on a recent HardTalk, and mentioned the ‘religious dimension’ to the problem. Suha then adamantly  defended the Muslims. “It’s not the time to provoke the Muslims.” 

Suha keeps saying: “This is not a religious...it’s a nationalist cause”  Well if Mr and Mrs Arafat sincerely ever thought it was simply a nationalist cause, it sure ain’t now. Of course in truth, the whole basis of the Arabs’ rejectionism is religiously based. It is and always was a religious cause. 

 Regarding Hamas’s aspiration -  the extermination of Israel:

 “You’ve also said recently that the armed struggle is no longer plausible. When you look at your husband’s legacy, with the olive branch in one hand and the gun in the other, do you believe that he was wrong, then, to believe that there could be an armed struggle that would bring results” 

Suha decided to say,  “In the beginning Yasser Arafat agreed that there would be an armed struggle” History, not me,  will judge him, she declared.

She seemed to be saying that Hamas is making the people pay too high a price. She said: “Why did they not build shelters instead of tunnels?”

“Should now the armed struggle recognise Israel?” Asked Zeinab, with an inscrutable expression. Is Zeinab for or against?

“Listen. Come on! They have to recognise Israel” replied Suha. “They have to recognise Israel because there’s no other way. Don’t tell me they are going to banish Israel from the river to the sea.”

It all seems a bit vague. A little bit woo and a little bit waay; a bit dodgy.

So what does Suha really think? 

A few days ago, Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement posted the above picture to their official Facebook page. It demonstrates that the movement still favors violence as the way to obtain statehood. 
A stone, a knife, a Molotov cocktail, a gun, a hand grenade, an assault rifle and an RPG illustrate Fatah's progress in terms of more and more sophisticated weapons. These are the means with which it works toward its goal - to "finish with a state," as the poster states: "We started with stones .... and we will finish with a stateThe Palestinian National Liberation Movement [Fatah]"[Facebook, "Fatah - The Main Page", Jan. 18, 2015]
For years, the Palestinian Authority and Fatah have promoted violence. Palestinian Media Watch has documented numerous statements emphasizing their adherence to "armed struggle" and veneration for the rifle. This week's stabbing attack in Tel Aviv was encouraged by such promotion of violence by the PA and Fatah who have both explicitly encouraged attacking Jews and Israelis with knives.

Does she not know about this? Perhaps she doesn’t do Facebook.

Hadar had treated us to a comprehensive list of Suha’s propagandist nuggets:

“When there’s a rocket on Israel we have 1,000 people who are killed in the same day.”“Gaza…the most crowded city in the world…”“…more than 1,000 people who are still in the coma…” [after the conflict last summer]“….nothing happen [with the peace process] because Israel continue to do settlements, Israel continue to build the wall….”

as well as some of Zeinab’s, including the reference to “some progress being made on the diplomatic scene”, meaning Mahmoud Abbas’s ICC manoeuvre. Progress on the diplomatic scene? What an odd way of putting it, for an impartial BBC employee I mean.

Finally this brings me to Zeinab’s pronunciation. Like Yolande Knell, she’s gone native on “Ramallah”. Rumul-lah!

I thought this carefully made-up Suha came across as much more reasonable than the Suha who made hysterical claims about Israel poisoning the old rogue. Perhaps everything she said was as carefully made up as her face. She wasn’t wearing her mad hat for HardTalk, and Zeinab seemed disappointed. No doubt she would have preferred to play the voice of reason against widow Arafat’s histrionic anti-Zionism. Instead Zeinab took the role of part sycophant, part interlocutor and part fellow anti-Zionist, slightly deflated at her failure to coax as much virulence from her subject as she’d hoped.    As Hadar said, a puff piece.