Litigious news and other stories

This on antisemitism by @afneil was a depressing, yet informative, explanation on how it spreads on the Left and in so-called academia. pic.twitter.com/RGFdiJeDTa

— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) July 25, 2020

So the BBC is cancelling Andrew Neil to make way for more diversity and youth-orientated content. Well, there does seem to be support for left-wing, antisemitic-flavour broadcasting.  Jeremy Corbyn’s go-fund-me pot has reached a quarter of a million pounds and rising, so the demand is obviously there.

‘Adolf Hitler’ and ‘B’stard Son Of Netanyahu’ help fund Corbyn’s legal costs  by Adam decker

A Go Fund Me page set up to finance the former Labour leader's court battles has raised £231,000 due in part to the generosity of self-proclaimed racists.

[…]

“Among the most generous donors are former deputy leader of Liverpool City Council Derek Hatton who’s given £1,000, prominent anti-Israel campaigner and Labour member Susanne Levin who’s offered £500 and music producer Brian Eno, who’s provided £500.”

Update! As you were! The fund has so far reached  (a staggering!) £300,000 

Strangely, the BBC seems to be embroiled in a complicated tangle of litigation, would-be litigation and counter-litigation. Who’s suing whom? It’s as farcical as one of those ‘you couldn’t make it up’ farces that cry out for the erudite clarification of a Captain Blackadder.

Panorama has been going since 1953! In all that time the BBC has exposed many scandals and injustices, but I have found just three litigious cases involving something that could be interpreted as vaguely ‘philo-Semitic’. 

In 2005 a case involving the BBC’s John Ware drew a complaint from the Muslim Council of Britain. 

From the BBC report:

"MCB secretary general Sir Iqbal Sacranie complained the show was "purposefully trying to sabotage" the progress Muslims were making in the political mainstream.

Panorama reporter John Ware also found groups affiliated to the MCB promoting anti-Semitic views, the belief that Islam was a superior ideology to secular British values and the view that Christians and Jews were conspiring to undermine Islam.

MCB secretary general Sir Iqbal Sacranie complained the show was "purposefully trying to sabotage" the progress Muslims were making in the political mainstream.

"John Ware's team have made a deeply unfair programme using deliberately garbled quotes in an attempt to malign the Muslim Council of Britain," he said.

The BBC rejected that complaint.

Another case followed a couple of years later when the BBC was made to pay damages. 

BBC's Panorama in libel payout to Islamic charity boss (May 2007)

"The former general manager of Islamic Relief UK, Waseem Yaqub, today accepted undisclosed libel damages and a public apology from the BBC at London’s High Court over a Panorama programme called Faith, Hate and Charity.

Mr Justice David Eady was told that the programme was broadcast on BBC One and investigated the London-based charity Interpal which gives funds to charities on the West Bank to help needy Palestinians.

It was said to reveal that some of the charities were linked to Hamas and helped build support for the movement by spreading Islamist ideology.

22nd July 2020  and we’re back in the room. John Ware is at the centre of a sue-storm; a blizzard of articles appeared in the press. Who’s suing whom? I can’t reliably put the articles in chronological order, but things are happening. 

'That Panorama’ was aired on BBC Two one whole year ago.  “Is Labour Anti-Semitic?” A bit like this blog - the question is rhetorical. David Collier had already exposed the tsunami of Corbynite/ Momentum antisemitic material that had engulfed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, both in real life and on social media. A certain amount of momentum had been created, a demonstration had occurred in London and more and more ‘incidents’ were being unearthed. Yes, we all knew the answer to the question. Labour definitely is antisemitic,  but the Panorama exposé was still unexpected.  The BBC allowing such an overt critique of their beloved Labour Party?  Whatever next?” 

Here’s what was next. The Labour Party’s vengeful treatment of the “Panorama whistleblowers” became the subject of a court case resulting in Labour being forced to apologise and to pay damages to the seven former employees appearing in the programme. The BBC published this report, no byline:

Anti-Semitism: Labour pays damages for 'hurt' to whistleblowers 

The party has issued an unreserved apology in the High Court for making "false and defamatory" comments about seven whistleblowers who spoke out in a BBC Panorama programme last year.

The individuals had criticised the then leadership's handling of complaints.”

Laura Kuenssberg also produced a report. 

Labour’s agony over anti-Semitism far from over

Astonishing still that the Labour Party, a political movement based on fighting for equality and against racism, found itself in a situation where its members and officials have been playing out a battle over anti-Semitism for so long - on the airwaves, in constituency meetings, in executive meetings and also in the courts. The argument is not settled.”

You can say that again! Next, still on 22nd July, an indication that a challenge is in the offing; The Guardian,

Corbyn-era Labour figures may challenge antisemitism settlement by Jessica Elgot and Lisa O'Carroll

Senior party members understood to be mulling legal action over verdict on treatment of whistleblowers

“Key figures in Labour when Jeremy Corbyn was leader are mulling a challenge to the party’s settlement with a BBC journalist and seven of its former staff over a libel case relating to a Panorama programme last year about its handling of antisemitism.

It is understood the former Labour leader himself as well as his former director of communications Seumas Milne have taken legal advice about the settlement and apology set to be read at the high court on Wednesday.”

and also from The Guardian:

Antisemitism settlement plunges Labour party into civil war 

“Jeremy Corbyn’s statement caused astonishment among litigants in libel action.

Labour’s decision to pay a six-figure libel settlement to ex-staffers who claimed the party was failing to deal with antisemitism has plunged the party back into civil war, with Jeremy Corbyn publicly condemning his successor’s decision to settle the case.

Corbyn’s statement caused astonishment among the litigants in the libel action, with the Panorama journalist John Ware confirming to the Guardian that he was “consulting his lawyers” and raising the prospect of another costly court battle over Labour and antisemitism.

[…]

Mark Lewis, the solicitor who acted for Ware and the whistleblowers, revealed to the Guardian that he had been approached by 32 individuals who want to take action against the party for a range of allegations, mainly centring on the fallout from the leaked report.

On the same day (22nd July) The Jewish Chronicle came out with:

The Corbynites have lied with impunity - now they face the legal consequences

"John Ware explains why he sued the Labour Party - and why his case is merely the first of several against alt-Left sites and individuals who lie

A year ago, the Labour Party declared all-out war on the BBC. Why? 

I was the reporter on a Panorama programme in which seven former Labour staffers blew the whistle about antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labour Party. They explained how they felt a growing factionalism had created a safe space for antisemitic views inside the party.

Labour responded by accusing me of having flouted journalistic ethics. I had, Labour alleged, knowingly promoted falsehoods and invented quotes. I had misrepresented and fabricated facts.

You don’t need much experience of television to know that the BBC’s editorial processes simply don’t allow for such mammoth corruption of the editorial process, especially a programme that examines such an incendiary subject as the relationship between the leader of the Opposition and antisemitism. Every line of my commentary was trawled over by the editor, lawyers and the BBC’s editorial compliance panjandrums. The whistle-blowers were also extensively cross examined."

Also on 22nd July 2020, Jewish News printed this:

Panorama journalist John Ware planning to sue Jeremy Corbyn By Jack Mendel

The journalist behind BBC Panorama’s on Labour’s antisemitism row is planning to sue Jeremy Corbyn for libel.

Labour falsely accused Ware of “deliberate and malicious misrepresentations designed to mislead the public” regarding the show.

Media lawyer Mark Lewis said: 'I can confirm that I have been instructed to pursue claims' against the former Labour leader

It’s irritating when journalists like Philip Collins allude to 'journalistic ethics' as if the BBC were a paragon of excellence in the journalistic ethics department. In one paragraph in an otherwise laudable essay, titled “Time to root out Corbybites once and for all” Collins wrote:

“The response of the Corbyn team to the allegation that Labour was not really serious about investigating antisemitism was to pour scorn on the journalistic ethics of the BBC.”

If it weren’t for the fact that this particular Panorama was a remarkably unrepresentative example of the BBC’s normal output, ‘journalistic ethics-wise’  Collins would have had a valid point. 

I can think of but one or two other exceptions to the BBC’s default Labour-leaning perspective, one, in particular, comes to mind.  Jane Corbin’s Panorama titled “Death in the Med’ where she quite rightly sided with the Israelis over the Mavi Marmara affair. If I’m mistaken and the other cases I’ve cited were in fact ‘the norm’ for Panorama, the BBC in general and not exceptions at all, please forgive me. I had the impression that Panorama’s output since 1953 has generally been in accord with the BBC’s left-wing ethics rather than plain and simple ‘journalistic ethics’.

“To declare war on all of the mainstream media is a disastrously stupid strategy for any political leader. In due course, Sir Keir will be well advised to be much more forensic than this in his choice of media enemies. He will need some — a media bogeyman is always handy in politics — but it most certainly ought not to be the BBC.”

..adds Collins. Why ever would a self-proclaimed Labour supporter like Philip Collins suppose Starmer is likely to alienate the BBC? The BBC loves Labour under Starmer and I daresay it’s mutual.

I have no idea what Seumas Milne and Len McCluskey are up to, but if antisemitism is really going to be deemed beyond the pale they’ll have to carefully consider the best use of the monies generously donated by ‘Adolf Hitler’ and ‘B’stard Son Of Netanyahu’

The BBC is dumping Jane Corbin I hear, as well as Andrew Neil. I rest my case. (M’lud.)

Britain's Promise to the Holy Land

Given the climate of low expectations in which Israel-related programmes poise precariously in BBC world, Stephen Pollard’s positive review of Jane Corbin’s Balfour programme was par for the course. 

If that’s too convoluted, to put it another way, anything less than the default Israel-bashing to which we’ve become accustomed is a small mercy for which we should be truly grateful.

Still a bit obscure? 

(Last attempt) It makes a change to see a smidgeon of balance on an Israel-related programme on the BBC and, arguably, that absolves Stephen Pollard from some of the harsh criticism he’s getting for his Tweet. 

Superbly balanced and fair documentary by Jane Corbin on #Balfour100. Really recommended https://t.co/7u1FVsx61R

— Stephen Pollard (@stephenpollard) October 31, 2017

However, as some of his critics have pointed out, the programme was littered with omissions. But of course you can’t fit everything into a one-hour documentary that attempts to cover one hundred years of conflict about such a complex issue. 

What might illustrate the situation equally sharply is that the leftie press has seized upon one segment that implies that the intractable religious zealotry comes solely from the Israeli side:

“In the garden of his home in the Orthodox Jewish Israeli West Bank settlement of Tappuah, Lenny Goldberg rubbished the idea that it was us Brits who made modern Israel possible. “The only reason we have a country here,” he told Jane Corbin, “is not because of the Balfour Declaration. It’s because Jews sacrificed themselves with blood and fire and bullets.” 

Goldberg, a tough New York Jew turned tough West Bank settler, is among half a million Israelis living in 140 towns and villages that have sprung up on the ostensibly Arab West Bank in the past 30 years. When Corbin told him that these settlements were illegal according to international law, Goldberg replied that he didn’t care about mere secular laws. He was interested in the word of God as expressed in the Bible and that, according to that higher authority, there is no Palestine and so there can be no question of Arabs having a claim to live there. “This is where Abraham walked. Why should we give it up for a bunch of murderers?” he asked rhetorically.”

However, neither the Guardian nor the Indy reviews mention the part when Corbin speaks to Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar, in which  the real and insoluble sticking point to a peaceful outcome is revealed in all its malevolence. 

"Quran tells us to drive Jews out of Palestine's entirety"

Since the programme was created to commemorate the Balfour declaration its focus was, quite rightly, on Britain’s part in the creation of the Jewish State, and Corbin didn’t shirk from recounting the cruelty of the British in imposing strict limits on Jewish immigration in what is recognised as the Jews’ darkest hour of need. This was a welcome contrast to the BBC's customary portrayal of the British military in Palestine as victims of Jewish terrorism, wherein the bombing of the King David Hotel is presented as an unprovoked atrocity against innocent civilianrs rather than a targeted attack on a British military headquarters. 

You can read about Orde Wingate here.  The Palestine Arab revolt occurred in the late 1930s, well before Israel's declaration of Independence, and  the Arabs’ hostility to the Jews is longstanding, religiously based, and demonstrably not a result of “What Israel is Doing” a commonly held belief encouraged by ill-informed broadcasting.  

Kill the Christians

Jane Corbin was in super-superficial mode in last night’s programme Kill the Christians.

Corbin’s thrust appeared to be that the Christians are being persecuted and murdered by Islamic State, alongside the wrong kind of Muslims whom I.S. lunatics are presently slaughtering in droves. It made copious use of ‘old’ footage of Islamic State parading its victims, pre-beheading, in their orange jumpsuits.

The programme espoused the increasingly prevalent theory that Islamic countries were, after all, better off under the stabilising influence of tyrannical despotic leaders like Saddam and Assad. This is a distinctly credible theory, but as far as the current crisis concerning Christians in the Middle East is concerned it’s a distraction.

Jane Corbin was filmed striding hither and thither on mountain paths. She and her replenished hair were standing a mere stone’s throw from an Islamic State stronghold, she announced, pointing to smoke plumes billowing in the distance. 

Corbin visited beleaguered Christians sheltering in monasteries and spoke to Christian priests. All the while one of Corbin’s gravity-defying scarves was draped over her shoulders; never out of place, in sharp symbolic contrast to the displaced Christian families stripped of their churches, homes and livelihoods whose tales she was recounting. 

I don’t claim to be an expert on the topic of the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, but it was my understanding that this process began long before the comparatively recent rise of the IS.

Canon Andrew White, aka The Vicar of Baghdad,  was conspicuous by his absence in this programme. He is the real expert on the exodus of Christians from Iraq, and he has long been trying to tell the world of their plight. Corbin didn’t even mention his name.

Another glaring flaw in this hour-long un-investigative piece of journalism was the Bethlehem section. I didn’t hear Corbin explain that Bethlehem is run by the PA, or that the persecution of Christians is not really the fault of the IP conflict - it’s my understanding that it’s more a case of the Muslim Palestinians‘  long standing antipathy to Christians or any religious group that differs from their own. Corbin’s narrative gave the opposite impression. So what’s the truth?

I’d better leave that matter to the specialists, and I hope BBC Watch will elucidate in due course, but if Corbin intended to imply that Israel was guilty of something here, she was treading on dangerous ground. Remember Sarah Montague and Baroness Warsi?

Jane Corbin was off form this time.  Her hair seems to have purloined all her mojo; but is she worth it?  

Update: BBC Watch

Electionearache

A painful case of electionearache. 

The media’s desperate attempts to engineer a Tory ‘split’ is particularly exasperating. 

That ‘stab in the back’ thing was clearly counterproductive, but the media’s continual attempts to pester any off-guard Conservative spokesperson they can lay their hands on to denounce it (or categorically endorse it) is even worse.   Let it go, please. 

You can tell Theresa May and co. don’t particularly like Michael Fallon’s ill-conceived remark, but, like that game where you mustn’t say “Yes” or “No” , the sport of trying to catch-a-Tory-out is unhelpful and definitely not entertaining. We all know what the headlines would be if they could squeeze a schism out of the Tories.  

No wonder people are pissed off with it all. 

***************

I heard Jeremy Bowen ”reporting” (and I use the word with a pinch of salt) on the phenomenon of Christians being persecuted in the Middle East. 

He gave a list of Islamic countries that were responsible for the exodus of Christians, and near the end he suddenly came out with:

“Palestinian Christians as well feel threatened, not just of course from extreme Islam, but they also feel threatened by what the Israeli government might be doing.”

Honest reporting has written about it here. Apart from the fact that Christians seem to feel somewhat unthreatened in Israel, why does he even bother to make such a dodgy, gratuitous and speculative observation? Rhetorical question.

*********

I see Jane Corbin has a programme about this topic tonight on BBC 2. "Kill the Christians".  She’s unpredictable is Jane. One minute she’s propagandising one way, next she’s at it from the other side. Allegedly.The Mavi Marmara episode was fair to the Israelis, her Walk in the Park was not, and her War of the Tunnels was a curate’s egg.

********

Has anyone been keeping an eye on George Galloway’s descent into total absurdity. From mild to severe absurdity and unbelievable preposterousness. 

The BBC has reported this in a rather uninformative, non committal  manner with the headline “Election 2015: George Galloway broke election law, Labour claims”

At least they’ve reported it. Not the Twitter stuff though, or the fact that Naz Shah has the requisite pro-Palestinian credentials to appeal to some Bradford constituents.

***********

I was going to say something about Andrew Neil’s interview with Paul Weston of Liberty GB., but it is what it is.

Tunnel vision

Blink and you’d’ve missed it. I nearly did, but ‘Mr. Sue’ happened to be watching BBC 1 last night, and spotted with eagle-eyed acuity that the upcoming programme was Jane Corbin’s elusive Panorama “War of the Tunnels.”   He woke me up! 

Because, dear reader, I was fast asleep. Early to rise etc. etc.

I tried to put myself in the shoes of Mrs Average Viewer. You know, the kind with a casual, non committal interest in the subject.  I kept thinking “But Corbin didn’t mention this” and “What about that?” which I suppose Mrs A V might not have done. Or would she?

I wanted to see whether the Guardian-reader-in-the-street I keep bumping into would come across anything revelatory in the programme, preferably something that would ease his passionate loathing of Israel.

However, and it’s a big however, on the whole the programme did indeed show several things that the BBC has previously tended to downplay or deny, such as the fact that Hamas was indeed responsible for kidnapping and killing the three Israeli teens, and that Hamas launched rockets from heavily populated areas and so on.

 But we knew that. Perhaps the un/non committed viewer might have caught a glimpse of something in Israel’s situation that they otherwise might have missed?

Although it was a revelation in itself that Panorama would make a programme about tunnels, let alone refer to them as ‘Attack Tunnels”, there was still that unequal weighting in the form of ‘emoting‘ television we’re accustomed to. We might callously call it the dead baby factor. 

There was comparatively little empathetic footage of the tribulations of the Israeli-in-the-street; what there was appeared almost laughable, for how could anyone look first at a pile of rubble that once was a house and a street, and then at a small hole in a roof of an empty house, in order to fully  understand the continual long-term state of apprehension and fear that at any moment a missile might fall out of the sky and kill you or your loved ones? 

Please don’t forget, Hamas’s stated aim is to get rid of you. 

Jane Corbin did have to take cover whilst in Sderot, “Lie down!” “Shouldn’t we get outta here now?” - and she appeared suitably frightened; but that didn’t quite convey the stress of living under the threat of permanent, random, sudden death.  

There was also a little too much empathetic film of one particular Palestinian-in-the-rubble.

Female Palestinian journalist Asma al-Ghul’s distress was affecting.The emotional value of her words as she accompanied Jane Corbin and kept referring to Israeli war crimes was hardly matched by the clinical testimony of a rather cold  Israeli politician  Yaacov Perry, whom Corbin introduced as an “Israeli government minister and former spy chief.” Hardly endearing. 

Asma’s anger at Israel was taken at face value, as though Panorama expects its viewers to accept that having many Hamas ‘relatives’ is a mere irrelevance in the context of the death of “that” innocent uncle.

Yaacov Perry addressed the topic in the title of the programme. The Tunnels. Anyone who had hoped to learn more about the tunnels, their extent, their cost and their purpose might have felt disappointed. Jane Corbin said:

“An Israeli commander took me into one of Hamas’s attack tunnels, which emerges between two Israeli villages.”

“The tunnels are lined with cement, a precious commodity in Gaza, which Israel has tried to restrict with its blockade.”

The Israeli commander mentioned the quantity and the monetary value of the cement used in this endeavour, but neither he nor Corbin spoke of the cost to the people of Gaza - that the stolen material deprived them of the means to repair their houses, or the obvious fact that the ‘concrete’ existence of tunnels justified the restrictions imposed by the Israelis. Doh!

“What a huge investment of time and money Hamas had made in these tunnels, dug by hand” not to mention the 160 lives sacrificed by children in the process.

 Khaled Meshal was shown telling lies and accusing Israel of telling lies - would the viewers realise the one or believe the other? However, he did admit that Hamas was responsible for abducting and killing the three Israeli teenagers  (Jon Donnison, take note) “In the context of self-defence, against Israeli occupation and settlement policies” he said, and we did get to hear that the al-Wafa Hospital was a Hamas headquarters, and had been evacuated before being hit by Israel. 

Some pro-Palestinian activists say the IDF are lying about this, and dispute aspects of a video,which is almost paralleled by a clip we’re shown near the opening passage of this programme, footage of the aftermath of a bombing that has also been given a frame-by frame deconstruction and accused of being mere ‘Pallywood.’ 

“These tunnels were built in self-defense against a technologically and militarily superior power” said Meshal. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything I thought, still in the shoes of the average viewer. “We don’t target Israeli civilians,” he says, “and we don’t have smart sophisticated weapons like the Israelis have,” he continued ambiguously.  “Give us such weapons and we’ll only target Israeli military.” So - do you or don’t you? Mrs A V might wonder.

A paramedic accused Israel of a war crime - targeting an ambulance, but we heard nothing of terrorists using ambulances.

Lt Eitan was the most engaging interviewee of the Israelis. He was handsome, sincere and distraught at the loss of his friend Hadar Golding, the soldier who was dragged off through a tunnel and killed. “the tunnel was booby-trapped with explosives” said Jane.

The mother of the murdered Israeli teenager Naftali Frenkel was pitched against the father of the murdered Palestinian. I can imagine several possible reactions to those two individuals.

“By the beginning of July it was all-out war. Hamas has launched rockets from built-up areas of Gaza, as their own video shows.” said Jane. I should imagine the pro-Palestinian viewers will be up in arms at anything they perceive as being sympathetic to Israel. I can hear them protesting that Gaza is the most densely populated area in the world etc etc., and Hamas had no choice etc etc. 

“Just 27 miles long, the Gaza Strip is home to 1.8 million Palestinians. It was occupied by Israel until 2005.
I was in Gaza two years later when Hamas took charge, ousting the more moderate PA government. (footage of Hamas marching and singing military song)
“Hamas is considered a terrorist organisation by Britain, America and Europe. The militant Islamist group have sworn to destroy Israel. When Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza Hamas dug tunnels into Egypt to smuggle in everything from household goods to weapons. Last year when a new Egyptian government destroyed those tunnels Hamas lost its economic lifeline, seriously affecting its ability to govern.  By the start of this year Hamas couldn’t pay the salaries of its public workers, and its leader warned the people of Gaza there were hard choices to be made.
“Hamas was preparing for a showdown with Israel. To ease the blockade they claimed was strangling Gaza. The trigger was pulled. Not in Gaza, but in the occupied West Bank, near Hebron in June a Hamas cell targeted three Israeli teenagers hitching home from boarding school into Israel. One of them was 16 year old Naftali Frenkel.”

That was Corbin’s curate’s egg monologue.

Make of it what you will. I do wonder if anyone else happened to watch this stealthy Panorama, or has it sneaked past its critics unnoticed? 

Media and the Middle East and Other Mysteries

We waited for  this programme with bated breath.   BBC Watch marked it as one to listen out for, as did we at “Is the BBC Biased?”

John Lloyd has written about the Middle East before and he has an authoritative manner,

but I’m afraid this programme disappointingly turned out to be just more of the same.

I’m waiting for Hadar’s critique, which I’m sure will soon be with us, packed with specific examples of the ‘omissions and subversions of fact’ that commenter ‘amie’ refers to here.  I hope she won’t mind if I steal a chunk out of her comment:

“Ceserani’s narrative, whether intended or not, came across as: Israel managed somehow to pull the wool over the world media’s eyes for the first 2 decades, until it could no longer conceal its true colours. The impression that it was the events themselves which brought opprobrium onto Israel, without mentioning the deliberate Soviet media strategy of branding Zionism as racism, which Durban took still further. The proud story of how they resisted Arafat’s legal threats, but none about the abject failure through fear of journalists in the most recent war to publish Hamas’ use of civilian launchposts. Etc.” 

The opener featured Jon Snow who has stated that his aim is ‘bearing witness’ rather than achieving objectivity or balance. Which is 'unusual' for someone in such a responsible and influential position. Before he went to Gaza he “never knew that the average age in Gaza is 17”, which is quite odd, is it not,  because it’s no secret. I mean did he go there without doing any research? Does he not even use Mr. Google?

Snow says: “if you know any children you’ll realise how difficult it is to ‘know where they are’ all the time, and in a densely packed urban area, if you decide to throw  missiles, shells and the rest, then undoubtedly you will kill children.” 

Guess what. He was referring to the Israelis. He thinks it was the Israelis who “decided’ to throw missiles, shells and the rest, into (not from) a densely packed urban area. That’s what ‘bearing witness’ does for you.

Liberal sprinklings of archive newsreel interspersed with John Lloyd’s authoritative sounding commentary gave the impression he was summarising the media’s past record impartially and factually, albeit with, to the eagle-eared, the usual omissions, but it all fell into the familiar pattern when David Cesarini and a Palestinian professor of journalism spoke, as per amie's comment above.

All prospect of impartiality evaporated as soon as Jeremy Bowen was wheeled in to elaborate on the difficulties a poor Middle East journalist must endure, what with the passions of all those wretched pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel lobbyists. 

Bowen recounted two examples of complaints from diametrically opposed agitators. I think the implication was that they cancel each other out, and his intention was to hammer home the BBC’s disingenuous theory that ‘we get complaints from both sides so we must be getting it about right’.

The pro Israel complainant was described disparagingly as a ‘retired doctor’, too old and stupid to realise that he had inadvertently left the ‘hasbara’ instructions on the end of his e-mail. His complaint came ‘pro-forma’, requiring the complainant to insert appropriate words into blanks.  This showed that the Jewish lobby was well organised and sinister, and pro-Israel complainants were a) useful idiots or b) salaried hasbara reps. 

 The Palestinian complainant, on the other hand was a straightforward  fanatic or lunatic. (A perversion of / not the real Islam?) With one fell swoop Bowen was killing two birds with one stone  and dismissing all complainants out of hand. Lobbyists and lunatics.

The minute Bowen was brought in to this programme to opine rather than to face his many critics, you knew the whole programme was a lost cause. 

Most of the examples used to illustrate or characterise M.E. reporting seemed years out of date. It’s as though this programme had been made several decades ago and kept in storage till all the material had gone stale and become irrelevant. Operation Protective edge was never dealt with. It might never have happened.

John Lloyd was like the crusty old judge who hadn’t heard of the Beatles. I mean no doubt he is very knowledgable on certain matters, but seriously lagging behind on contemporary events and the fast-changing politics of the here and now.

I haven’t time to go into more detail but I hope others will do so in good time, and now there‘s a mystery over the much postponed Panorama about the tunnels. At the time of writing it’s been dumped for the Scottish referendum, something which seems to have taken the Panorama team by surprise, investigative journalists that they are. 

Jane Corbin was attacked from all sides when she made “A Walk in the Park” 

and then the one about the Mavi Marmara "Death in the Med."  (The BBC gives credibility to Ken O’Keefe?)

If Jane can switch from the ridiculous to the sublime at the drop of a hat, she must be getting something wrong. 

Apparently this “Tunnels” programme is being shown on BBC Arabic. Maybe the Arabs aren’t so bothered about the Scottish issue as we are in the UK or Europe, or maybe it’s something more complicated?

A Problem like Sharia.

The following is a belated review, which I mothballed for some reason, but in the light of today’s news “The police watchdog the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has published a second highly critical report on the failures by Essex police to protect Ms Stubbings and her son” I’m resurrecting it.

By the time Jane Corbin’s Panorama programme about Sharia was aired we’d already seen the most sensational snippet of footage in the programme because it had been trailed, several times, during the preceding week. In it, an aged bearded Muslim elder, a sort of Islamic marriage councillor, advised an undercover reporter posing as a battered wife that unless there were visible bruises, she must keep her fictitious husband’s domestic violence to herself, rather than report it to the police.

Jane Corbin found this extremely shocking in the puffed-up way the BBC has of being shocked - shocked - whenever they’ve decided it’s about  time they showed the public something shocking, in order to make us all marvel at Panorama’s cutting edge.

On reflection, it seemed pretty understandable that the bearded Muslim cleric wished to keep it in the family, because he knows, as do you and I, that once the police get hold of something like that theres‘s no turning back.

   

One day the BBC might discover that police and the social services treat family matters in an insensitive, ham-fisted manner, and perhaps they will be shocked - shocked,  and decide it’s time to make an equally groundbreaking programme about that. 

The editorial whimsy that governs choice of material to be subjected to the BBC’s eagle-eyed gaze is a mystery, but that time the spotlight was directed at Sharia. The beam alighted upon the profound disservice Britain’s Islamic councils do to Muslim women. This topic was long overdue, which perhaps took much of the edge off the shock.

   

Jane Corbin has an erratic CV when it comes to Panoramas. One minute she’s taking a walk in the park in Jerusalem, saying all kinds of disparaging things about Israel, next she’s investigating the Mavi Marmara and actually supporting the Israeli version of the event, and doing so against the extremely hostile prevailing wind that’s constantly blowing in from the BBC and surrounding media. She’s showing footage of the incident instead of outrageous fantasies that pro-Palestinian activists are inexplicably able to wangle onto BBC news programmes disguised as factual reportage.

Those who are always careful to distance themselves from the EDL, Geert Wilders or anything Islamophobic while simultaneously - if half-heartedly - espousing many of their sentiments, inevitably tie themselves into knots. If you’re not a fan of Shari’a and you recognise the danger of an effectively unregulated parallel legal system, and if you accept that this was a legitimate subject for the BBC to tackle, but nevertheless found the programme unsatisfactory, you might want to ask yourself whether it was perhaps Islamophobic. But if you were honest, you’d have to concede that the flaws in the programme lay elsewhere.

The problem was that the subject deserved a deep and fundamental scrutiny rather than the superficial shortcut on offer. Furthermore, it was unnecessarily sensationalised by using a modus operandi plagiarized from channel 4‘s Undercover Mosque, with a provocative honey-trap style deception grafted on. Jane Corbin took the easy route, cheating viewers by depriving us of the grown-up programme we deserve, one that takes a wider look at the  situation with the common sense perspective the BBC is supposed to take.  

The folly of the implication that ‘going to the the police’ or ‘not going to the police’ was the crux of the matter and a kind of cure-all for domestic violence was brought home, so to speak, with the news surrounding the police’s mishandling of the case of Maria Stubbings who was murdered by her violent partner despite unequivocal warning signs. 

Must we always reach the point of no return before we dare admit we might have been wrong?