Oops

Mahmoud Abbas, Israel’s so-called partner for peace has made a grossly offensive speech at the opening the 23rd session of the Palestinian National Council. It must have been pretty bad because even the BBC has reported it, and so has the Independent, though they don’t seem quite so sure whether to be offended or not. 

"Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas accused of antisemitism over Holocaust comments" 

They did report, however, that Emily Thornberry was in attendance, and that she condemned his comments, adding:

"I hope President Abbas will immediately apologise for them," 

They didn’t report, however, that the UK's shadow Foreign Secretary was somewhat late in the day with those remarks, as according to Guido, her first response was:

“While we of course want to see the resumption of meaningful peace talks, I said President Abbas had been quite right to argue that the Trump administration cannot act as a mediator for peace when they themselves are sowing the seeds of discord, and making a negotiated peace ever harder to achieve…”

and only later put out the following statement:

“It is deeply regrettable that, during a lengthy speech whose main and successful purpose was to urge the Palestinian National Council to remain committed to the Middle East peace process and the objective of a two-state solution, President Abbas made these anti-Semitic remarks about the history of the Jewish community in Europe which were not just grossly offensive, but utterly ignorant. His comments were out of keeping with the tone of the Council as a whole, and of my discussions with other delegates, and I hope President Abbas will immediately apologise for them, so that the message to come out of this important Council meeting can remain positive and progressive, and focused on re-establishing peaceful and constructive dialogue.”

The BBC did not mention Emily Thornberry at all in the report linked to above. 

Where's Barry?

Haaretz

“Abbas is caught in a catch-22. On the one hand, there is the U.S. peace initiative, which he has good reason to think will come to nothing of value. On the other, there is the failed reconciliation process between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. The elderly leader escapes his troubles  by hurling insults at Americans and imposing further sanctions on the Gaza Strip. His declarations and actions could bring closer a military conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Strip, and continue to destabilize already tense relations with Israel in the West Bank. 

Elder of Ziyon thinks that :

“Abbas is delusional. He always has been. The amount of criticism of him in the West is minuscule compared to how insane his words are. And the only explanation for this is because the West is committed to the meme of blaming Israel for everything, first and foremost, in any story.”

I haven’t seen Abdel Bari Atwan on Dateline for a week or so. Wonder if he’s well. Oh look. Here he is!

Not exactly ‘delusional and always has been’ - our Bari (aka 'Arry Batwan' or "Barry) wonders now whether Abbas is all there.

“Why did President Abbas depart from diplomatic norms and describe the American ambassador as "the son of a dog"? Is it reasonable to raise his anger against America and Hamas at the same time? What is the guilt of two million people in Gaza to pay the price of this anger? Has his health deteriorated?

No, our Barry hasn’t switched sides. Instead, our Barry supports another, more physical course of action. He “wishes Abbas had declared a new intifada’  and adds:

There is a secret that we do not know about the health and psychological state of President Abbas, and we do not rule out that the disease lies behind his emotions. He went through tests at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland, specializing in incurable diseases, during his recent visit to America.

So our Barry is in rude health and I’m sure he’ll be on Dateline London again soon, preaching ‘actions, not words’.

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.

Slaps in the face

It’s plain that the BBC is ideologically anti-Israel. I don’t think anyone would dispute that. It’s their way of expressing their impartiality. 

Image of amusing mic joke/ gent 2nd left

The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas made a two-hour speech in Ramallah yesterday. The BBC has reported it. 

Well, when I say “reported it” I mean the BBC told us that the speech took place, but if you happen to be interested in what President Abbas actually said, you’d be disappointed because the bulk of the BBC’s report is about Trump. You’d have to make do with what appears under the sub heading “What did Mr Abbas tell the meeting?”

“Speaking to Palestinian faction leaders in Ramallah on Sunday, he said: "The deal of the century is the slap of the century and we will not accept it."

"I am saying that Oslo, there is no Oslo," he added. "Israel ended Oslo.”

So, what else did Abbas say in his ‘slap of the century’ speech?

Well, to find out you’d have to look elsewhere, say, here ,    here or here or here

EoZ commenter Y K  summed it all up:

“Abbas clearly believes the nonsense he spews. The reason that he keeps spewing it, however, is not due to his stupidity (he's no Einstein, but underestimating him would be a mistake), but to a fact he's very well aware of: that with a few exceptions, nobody in the Western (and even mainstream Israeli) media would actually reproduce his verbal diarrhea in full. What will be presented to the audiences is a version carefully doctored in order to make the guy appear as a tragically misunderstood embodiment of “moderation".

It’s equally plain to see that the BBC isn’t alone in its ideological attitude to Israel. Our MPs are even worse. Alistair Burt is at it now.  He’s not only defending Ahed, but the whole Taimimi clan, with whom he appears to be ‘friends’. So Corby isn’t the only one with mates. 

Burt has stated: “The truth is the soldiers shouldn’t have been there and the young woman shouldn’t have needed to do what she did,” 

As others have pointed out - using the word “needed” in this comment is tantamount to justifying all sorts.

I understand there is to be a parliamentary debate on Hezbollah on 25th of this month, secured by Labour Friends of Israel. All I can say is  - be careful what you wish for.

Update:

"Israel Policy Forum expresses its disgust over President Abbas’s words to the Fatah Central Committee delegitimizing Zionism, denying the Jewish connection to the land of Israel, and peddling conspiracy theories about the plight of European Jewry. It is impossible to view Abbas as a viable negotiating partner when he continues to deny ​the ​right​ of the Jewish people​ to their own national movement and when he continues to insist that the basic recognition of a Jewish homeland is the original sin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The injustice of Palestinians remaining stateless cannot and will not be rectified by a fever dream that wishes for a world in which Jews w​ould also be stateless and ​in which ​Israel ​would not exist. 

Words matter, and if Abbas’s commitment to nonviolence is worthy of praise, his commitment to vitriolic rhetoric is equally worthy of condemnation. Abbas’s unhinged screed provides ammunition to those who insist that the sole obstacle to peace is Palestinian denial of Israel’s legitimacy, making his hateful words instrumentally harmful as well as being utterly without merit in their own right. With his distortion of history and denial of reality, Abbas makes himself part of the problem rather than part of the solution. 

Israel and the Palestinians must reach a two-state solution that recognizes both sides’ legitimate claims and narratives, ​and President Abbas must unequivocally recognize these mutual rights if he is to be a credible partner in the quest for peace."

Update: (another)

"Too many media reports whitewashed Abbas’ coverage. Perhaps editors didn’t attach enough importance to the speech to give their correspondents a longer word count, which might account for the short, sanitized reports by Reuters, BBC News, CNN and Sky News. "

The Mandy Rice-Davies approach.

I have friends - I once had friends - who are avid Guardian readers.. They see themselves as humanitarians, libertarians and socialists. They are undoubtedly middle class so I suppose it’s the Guardian that has made them into inverted snobs. They are staunchly a-religious and they take a dim view of Islamic fundamentalism and, obviously, terrorism. However, they have absorbed every melodramatic detail of the tragic Nakba / catastrophe. Why they chose to follow the Palestinian/Arab narrative exclusively, and so religiously, I have no clue. It’s as though they have abandoned reason. To me this is a complete, logic-defying mystery. However, their opinions are what they are and, by the atheist God almighty, they’re sticking to them. 

The reason behind this can only be latent antisemitism; but they don’t see it. They would be mortified at such an idea.

Under the general umbrella of “Stolen Land”, their view of the creation of Israel goes like so: Indigenous “Palestinians” were forced out of their homes at gunpoint by interloping European and American Jews who were mysteriously authorised to do so, illegally, by the British. 

They are the very types who claim they don’t hate Israel, only “What Israel is doing” . 

Recently, the Guardian featured a typically disingenuous article by Mahmoud Abbas, titled: “Britain must atone for the Balfour declaration – and 100 years of suffering” h

UK media Watch has given it a thorough Fisking. But of course, my ex-friends won’t see this, and even if they did they would be sure to take the Mandy Rice Davies approach.  

PMW has another deconstruction of Abbas’s account of ‘the greatest crime in the history of mankind”, which my ex-friends and their fellow Guardian readers are even more unlikely to see.

Oh well. That’s what this country is like these days. Here is Theresa May’s curate’s egg of a speech followed by a moving speech by Israel’s PM. at the Balfour Dinner, which I hope the shadow foreign secretary enjoyed.

Harriet Harman precedes anti-semitic joke with: "People like Andrew say these things are perfectly alright". What could go wrong? #bbctw pic.twitter.com/bMcWmi1p7G

— Rob Howland (@HowlandRobin) November 3, 2017

Now, there's the Andrew Neil thing that everyone is talking about, and finally this strangely gleeful BBC report by James Landale about a scandalous breach of the ministerial code of conduct.
“I put a long list of questions to her department about this”.

He would, wouldn’t he.

Fiction, paranoia and all

My late mother looked out at me from the bathroom mirror this morning. When I was young I thought the old girl was stupid, but fast forward a decade or three and now it seems I AM her. I can hear myself saying things she used to say (and sounding quite like her as I do so.)

The constant whinge we’re hearing, which is that the old who voted to leave the EU have ruined the lives of the young who voted to stay, is unpleasant and inaccurate; but even if it weren’t, let’s not forget how cringeworthy most of our own youthful attitudes look, in retrospect. The old may not all be wise, but neither may the young. Especially the ones who are complaining now but didn’t even vote.

Since 24th June, when the country delivered that surprise slap in the BBC’s face, the BBC’s political fraternity have been consistently talking the country down. The financial and business gurus have hugely exaggerated the effect on the pound and the ftse. Britain’s glass is half empty, across the board. Sally Bundock and Ben Thompson were at it earlier today, and Thompson even described what would happen “If we leave the EU” - in fact if I remember correctly he even said “If we vote to Leave the EU”. Eh, what?

funny business

The BBC has a choice. An editorial choice. It can report what it chooses to report and ignore what it chooses to ignore. The most glaring evidence of that is, of course, the MSM’s exclusively negative reporting on Israel. The BBC chooses to ignore multitudes of positive stories about Israel yet ignores mountains of easily accessible examples of the Palestinians’ malevolence. 

You know how small children inadvertently reveal what they’re thinking in fantasy and play?

It’s a peculiar characteristic of the Arab world, which followers of the BBC won’t know much about because the BBC doesn’t report it. 

The conspiracy theories and infantile accusations the Israel haters of the Arab world invent could be used as typical psychological case studies of projection.  Like children, they egg each other on, their tales getting wilder and wilder and ever more revealing of their own thought processes and “unconscious impulses”.  This would be almost comical if only the rest of the world saw it for what it is instead of resolutely taking it at face value. The rest of the world lacks a sense of humor. 

Just one recent example of the EU’s gullibility on this score is the speech Mahmoud Abbas gave to a packed auditorium on 24th of this month.

After he had delivered it, fiction, paranoia and all, he received a standing ovation. Thank goodness we voted “Leave’. Any fleeting twinge of buyer’s remorse - dissipated in one fell swoop.

Thanks to Daphne Anson (comment below) I enjoyed reading this piece by Charles Moore,  (Telegraph) particularly:

“.....it is the Labour moderates, with their gloopy admiration for the EU and their uncritical endorsement throughout the Blair/Brown era of the excesses of global capitalism, who are the most out of touch with their natural supporters. “

and the final few paragraphs:

It's as if the BBC wishes the world was falling apart
Funny how Project Fear has been even more strongly pushed by the BBC (and Channel 4 News) after Remain has lost. The poor public are encouraged to believe fantasies, such as that all Poles must now go home or that we shall need visas to visit France. Such tales cannot be authoritatively refuted because poor Messrs Cameron and Osborne dare not admit that most of what they told us the week before is rubbish, and the Leave campaign is not the government of the country. 

Into this vacuum rush the doom-sayers. Yesterday the BBC put at the top of some bulletins the exclusive ("the BBC has learnt") that HSBC will move 1,000 workers to Paris if Britain leaves the single market. The following things were not properly explained – that HSBC was contemplating this, not actually doing it; that we might not leave the single market anyway and certainly won’t for more than two years; that 1,000 workers is only just over two per cent of HSBC’s British workforce; and that most of those sent to Paris would probably be French people currently in London. 

Is there any country in the world – apart from Britain – where the British Broadcasting Corporation would greet the return of parliamentary democracy with terror and dismay? 

  Despite the above, there is one person who should be deported at once. During the campaign, Ken Livingstone said that if Britain were to vote to leave the EU, he would leave Britain. When I last looked, he was still around. He should be put on a plane with a one-way ticket to Venezuela or Iran. 

Libby Purves has some interesting observations in today’s Times:

Hysterical lefties really need to grow upAs the culturati weep into their lattes while demonising the poor, old and insecure, the carry-on has been beyond parody. 

It has been a particularly grim couple of days for a soft-left newsaholic like me with a tenderness for the arts world. To quote one performing artist’s tweet — “Ashamed. Terrified. Shocked. Horrified”. Indeed: but it was not the actual vote that shocked, life having taught me that democracy has rough patches. It was the online squawk of reaction by my timeline, my tribe: cultural icons, colleagues, friends. If they feel “let down, betrayed, distressed” by the result, so did I by the mass response of the liberal media and arts sector to this vote against a 43-year-old administrative arrangement. 

 (That’s the accessible bit) Behind the paywall:

These are directors, actors, critics, cultural titans, intelligent lefties. Yet the carry-on was beyond parody: anguished bunker-mentality tinged with patronising. generalising hauteur about those who voted Leave. There had been nonsense from that general direction in the days before, alarm calls like panicked parakeets about how Brexit meant turning your back on Beethoven, Picasso and foreign cooking.”

Do read it all if you’re a subscriber to the Times online, or buy a copy. I disagree with some of the things she says, but after all, she was a Remain voter, and the obligatory comments about Nigel Farage and ‘that poster’ are par for the course.

My dear departed mother and her generation, (both parents staunch Labour supporters and readers of the pre-historic Manchester Guardian) would be turning in their graves if they could see us now. 

Tom Corbyn. "Palestine campaigner"

Mahmoud’s £8 million Palace and other deserving causes

Did you know you were contributing to Mahmoud Abbas’s £8million palace? No, neither did I. Nor did I know that I was contributing to the wages of murderers, including Amjad and Hakim Awad, the Palestinian cousins who killed Ehud and Ruth Fogel and three of their children in an unimaginably bloodthirsty manner. 

I know OMG the Daily Mail is not the most reliable source, and I understand that it puts a sensationalist spin on any gossip, rumour or scandal it lays its hands on, but this isn’t the first time I’ve heard murmurings about this, and I’m glad at least someone has managed to set it out in no uncertain terms, so that it reaches a wider audience. Even if only to make people think, and ask a few questions.

On Broadcasting House yesterday morning, the papers were reviewed by Digby, Lord Jones, amongst others. He mentioned the MailonSunday’s article about foreign aid and he did say it features a petition one can sign, but he failed to tell us, specifically, that Palestinian criminals were amongst the beneficiaries of our cash. He said things like:

“We’re a generous country; I think every Brit would be proud of that.” [...]”The underlying message is that we’ve ring-fenced 0.7% of our GDP” [...]  “I’m sure lots of it is going to good things, but when we gave £5.9million to the Americans? We paid £13,00 for a rich Texan businessman to fly to London for a summit?” ...[...] “It doesn’t mean don’t give money to the developing world. What it does mean is just look  more carefully at where it’s going”  

Oh well, maybe he thinks the Palestinians are a more deserving cause than the recipients he cited, which do disturb him. Maybe he didn’t want to offend any pro-Palestinian listeners. Maybe he didn’t notice. Who knows.

Update: There are currently 136,887 signatures on this petition (11am; 29th March 2016)

Lie on Sky

Yesterday, Sky News was sending periodic reports from Jerusalem. They interviewed a female journalist from JPost to discuss the recent escalating violence and the outbreak of stabbings and shootings in the Old City.

My understanding of the bizarre status quo with regard to Temple Mount / al-Aqsa is that Jews are allowed to visit the compound but are prohibited from praying there. (They do not wish to go into the mosque)  

Rabbi Yehuda Glick is part of a movement that campaigns for the ‘no-pray’ restriction to be lifted; last year he was shot and seriously injured.  The Israeli government stated categorically that there are no plans to alter the status quo. Nevertheless the Palestinians claim there’s a plot afoot - to let Jews pray there, and to DESTROY AL AQSA. 

Meanwhile, female Muslims are employed by the PA to harass Jews and tourists by screaming, ululating and and shouting the usual Islamic chant. Palestinian youths gather rocks and other ammunition and pelt Israeli soldiers from inside the mosque, their ‘third holiest site’. Violence has spread to the surrounding area.  Israelis have been stabbed by Palestinians; the stabbers subsequently shot by the IDF.

All the while Mahmoud Abbas has been ramping up the rhetoric, perhaps encouraged by the raising of the Palestinian flag at the UN and the apparent reduction of support for Israel by the US. He has been openly calling for violence against Israelis in that flowery, blood-flecked language they use.

Palestinian youths took Molotov cocktails and rocks into al-Aqsa to pelt religious Jews who they knew would be visiting for a religious holiday. The IDF rarely venture into the Mosque, but are occasionally forced to do so to dampen down extreme violence.

This was roughly what the Jpost journalist explained to the Sky anchor Samantha Simmonds.

When she had gone, along came Ghada Karmi, who is beginning to look madder than a hatter. She was incandescent with rage, and got away with an execrable, preposterous and fanciful diatribe, which she repeatedly insisted was ‘fact’. I think she must have been chatting to Ali Abu-nimah of E.I. who also gets reality and fantasy mixed up.

Kharmi, quivering with fury, said that the violence was caused by armed fanatical religious Jews forcing their way into the al-Aqsa mosque and demanding the right to pray inside. She kept stating that this was fact. She insisted that a mob of religious Jews had stormed, not the compound, the actual Islamic mosque, armed with fireworks and rocks. 

(Why would Jews even want to pray in a mosque?) Oh yes, they’re going to destroy it and supplant it with filthy Jewish stuff. Fact.

What a travesty. The only armed fanatics inside the Islamic ‘holy’ mosque were Palestinian hooligans, whipped up by Mahmoud Abbas’s incitement, after being bolstered by the symbolic flag-raising malarkey at the UN. 

  

Saddest of all was that Samantha Simmonds let it all go unchallenged. 

Loving angels (instead)

The Catholics seem to be all over the place. Not so long ago they blamed the Jews for killing Jesus, which accounted for a great deal of Catholic antisemitism back in the day.

Then Pope Benedict XVl decided to forgive them. 

Unfortunately Pope Francis might have decided to unforgive them again, since he’s about  to recognise a Palestinian State and canonise two 19th c. Palestinian nuns in an attempt to 

“strengthen the Christian presence in the Middle East at a time when when hundreds of thousands of Arab Christians are fleeing Islamic violence.”

Does that compute? I don’t quite get it, but hey, as they say on the internet, ‘hope that helps’.

Now it looks like Pope Francis has gawn stark staring bonkers.  He’s given that devious old rogue Mahmoud Abbas a medal, and called him an “Angel of Peace.” 

 The BBC reports:

“The BBC's David Willey in Rome says that after 20 minutes of private talks, Pope Francis gave Mr Abbas the medallion depicting an angel of peace adding: "It is appropriate because you are an angel of peace."

Umpteen other news outlets including the Times of Israel also report that the Pope called Abbas an “Angel of Peace”. What can this mean? Your holiness cannot be serious!

Italian is such an obscure and untranslatable lingo, we can’t expect the BBC to go to the trouble of finding an independent Italian-speaking translator.   What’s that saying -  “A mistranslation can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting its boots on”.

There is a difference between stating something is a fact and wishing it were. 

Italian sources suggest that ‘you are’ was a mistranslation of ‘may you be’ . This is their version, which does sound like a more rational thing to say of Mahmoud Abbas.

“ As is tradition with heads of State or of government, Francis presented presented a gift to the Palestinian leader, commenting: “May the angel of peace destroy the evil spirit of war. I thought of you: may you be an angel of peace.” 

I hope that’s correct, because earlier, Pope Francis apparently did hand out inappropriately flattering compliments willy nilly.

Pope Francis had called Abu Mazen a “man of peace” when he visited Bethlehem in May 2014, just as he called the then Israeli Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, a “man of peace” during his subsequent visit to Jerusalem.”

The difference between “You are’ and “may you be” is quite profound, wouldn’t you agree? It’s very nice that the Pope wishes Mahmoud Abbas will turn into an Angel of Peace someday, if that is indeed what he did; but I’d prefer it if his holiness would just butt out. 

May the Pope butt out.

Intolerable Bias

The BBC’s conduct over the recent outbreak of violence in Israel has been worse than ever. Today a parade of commentators, one after another, have reacted to the synagogue murders 

with a begrudging half-hearted condemnation swiftly followed by the kind of justification that they know the public will swallow, namely that violence is understandable because of Netanyahu, ‘the occupation’ and the settlements. 

We even  had to watch Ben Brown interviewing an individual named Ismail Patel from Leeds ‘Friends of Al Aqsa’ who couldn’t even bring himself to condemn the murders, and Rachel Shabi of the Guardian who attributed all the violence to provocation  by belligerent, far-right Jewish activists who demand the right to pray at ‘Al Aqsa’  and of course the occupation.

Sabri Saidam from Fatah condemned Israel on Al Jazeera and on the BBC, Mustafa Barghouti  was able to make outrageous accusations including blaming Israel for the murder of a Palestinian who was thought to have committed suicide. 

Ever since Rabbi Glick was shot because he had been campaigning for Jews to be allowed to pray at their holiest site, the BBC’s reporting has been wracked with omissions and bias.

The BBC and the British press are not the only ones who use the term ‘right-wing’ pejoratively, and they’re not the only ones who applied it to Rabbi Glick. 

What’s the definition, though? Some use it as shorthand for ‘intolerant racist’.

  

Anyone with the slightest interest in the topic could easily find videos of Rabbi Glick praying, in Arabic, alongside a group of Muslims. 

They appeared to be positively pally with each other. Yes, that was a pun. So he wasn’t a Muslim-hating racist but a friendly, rather gentle, respectful individual who’s ‘right-wingery’ was merely in his religiosity and his desire to pray at the Jews’ holiest site.

Why, one might wonder, should Jews not be allowed to do that? I understand that it was part of a deal by a former Israeli government who handed control of Al Aqsa  back to the PA. It was an   an act of ‘reaching out’, a gesture, which in hindsight looks futile to say the least.

Astonishingly, though the BBC’s initial reporting would describe the Al Aqsa / Temple Mopunt compound as the third holiest in Islam and the holiest in Judaism, no-one batted an eyelid at the obvious imbalance of the situation.   

BBC News has: 

“Mr Abbas's office issued a statement saying: "The presidency condemns the attack on Jewish worshippers in their place of prayer and condemns the killing of civilians no matter who is doing it."

So why didn’t the BBC report the incitement that all the other non-anti-Israel media is full of? Mahmoud Abbas’s blatant incitement, calling for days of rage, asking Palestinians to defend Al Aqsa by whatever means; the handing out of sweets, praising and glorifying Palestinian terrorists who succeeded in murdering Jews and martyred themselves in the process.

At the moment The BBC is appallingly biased. It really is intolerable.

From our own smiling correspondent.

A spate of BBC reports by Jeremy Bowen about the latest breakdown of the ‘Israel Palestine’ peace negotiations have been examined by Hadar of BBC Watch and been found guilty of bias. Sentencing will be announced at a later date. Not really.

Nothing new about that, but since all Bowen’s accounts are unashamedly related from a Palestinian perspective, isn’t it about time the BBC sent reinforcements, preferably less partial, to fill in the gaps and straighten out the rough edges, for balance? 

You know, snagging, like all good builders must. To make good the imperfections. 

Jeremy Bowen’s gappy FOOC needs a vat of polyfilla.

Kate Adie introduces it.

“Elsewhere in the Middle East, the long running peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, it seems, have finally foundered.The US secretary of State John Kerry who spent months trying to close the divide between the two has conceded it’s time for a pause in negotiations.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech in Tel Aviv on Thursday said he intended to establish in law Israel’s status as the national homeland of the Jewish people. Arab rejection of the Jewish State, he said, was at the heart of the conflict.
Earlier, the two rival Palestinian factions, Fatah in the West Bank, Hamas in Gaza, reached a deal, they said would bring them back together.Jeremy Bowen has been considering how these developments will affect the long-simmering discontent in the region.”

Jeremy Bowen.

“Gaza City has very few open spaces. The beach is the most popular. Many Palestinians in Gaza can’t leave the narrow overcrowded strip because of Israeli and Egyptian restrictions.
At the beach they can walk, swim in the Mediterranean, relax a little and wonder about a much bigger world somewhere beyond the horizon.
Another oasis is the Gaza war cemetery. Three and a half thousand dead from the British and commonwealth wars are buried there, and the commonwealth war graves commission has performed its usual gardening miracle.“Among the lines of limestone graves are flat green lawns, trees, and they’ve created some peace and shade in a dusty, noisy city built on sand dunes.”

These opening phrases set the scene. Gaza is a Prison. And it’s not the first time the cemetery has featured in one of the BBC’s slanted articles. 

“More than fifteen years ago I walked around the cemetery with a Palestinian man in his twenties. He told me it was the only place he could think. We were talking because he’d been tortured in a Palestinian jail. His fingernails had been torn out with pliers and had regrown as horny little stumps. He’d been accused of being an activist in Hamas. His torturers were Palestinian security forces that were dominated by men from  Yasser Arafat’s faction Fatah.”

Well, was he an activist in Hamas? 

“The peace process with Israel was still supposed to be moving ahead and Arafat’s people had cracked down hard on Hamas after a series of suicide bombs that had killed dozens of Israelis.
Tension and worse between Hamas and Fatah has deep roots, so it was no surprise that it led to bloodshed after Hamas won after an election in 2006.
Palestinians were sick of Fatah’s excesses, corruption and ineptitude. Hamas is an acronym for the Arabic words for the Islamic Resistance Movement. It’s a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that’s been working since the late 1920s to put Islam at the heart of political and social life in Muslim countries.

The link between the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas is clear and straight, and confirmed by Article 2 of the Charter of Hamas, which reads: "The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a world organization, the largest Islamic Movement in the modern era. It is characterized by a profound understanding, by precise notions and by a complete comprehensiveness of all concepts of Islam in all domains of life: views and beliefs, politics and economics, education and society, jurisprudence and rule, indoctrination and teaching, the arts and publications, the hidden and the evident, and all the other domains of life."

“The barman in the American Colony, the hotel that journalists like to use in Jerusalem was a Muslim who didn’t drink. He said back then that he’d known that an electoral upset was coming when Christian Palestinians had told him over their whiskies, that they’d be voting for Hamas.

I don’t suppose they’d do that again though.

Fatah and its allies in the West were aghast about the victory of Hamas. A senior American official told me in his office in the state department in Washington that the priority was reversing the result. The Americans helped Fatah prepare a coup against the newly elected Hamas government. Hamas moved first and, amid brutal scenes, Hamas fighters unceremoniously ejected Fatah from the positions of power it still held in Gaza.

 As Egyptian mediators desperately attempted to avert a full-blown civil war, bursts of machine gun fire, exploding rocket propelled grenades and cannon booms echoed around the city for the fourth day in a row.

In the past 48 hours 19 Palestinians have been killed, tossed from rooftops, executed at point-blank range, and shot in hospital wards. That number seems certain to rise. More than 80 Palestinians have now been killed since mid May.

Among yesterday's dead was a 14-year-old boy and three women, all killed in a Hamas attack on a Fatah security officer's home.

"They're firing at us, firing RPGs, firing mortars. We're not Jews," the brother of Jamal Abu Jediyan, a Fatah commander, pleaded during a live telephone conversation with a Palestinian radio station.

Minutes later both men were dragged into the streets and riddled with bullets.

The fighting has spread to the West Bank where Fatah militants from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades kidnapped a deputy minister from Hamas and seized control of a Hamas-run TV station.

Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN envoy to the Middle East, said: "The picture which emerges is very dark, and apparently getting darker. There are reasons for real concerns in the international community."

“Mohammed Dahlan was the Fatah strong man in Gaza, someone the Americans relied on. His men had rounded up and tortured Hamas sympathisers in the 1990s including the man I’d met in the British graveyard.
I talked with Dahlan in his office not many months before I saw TV pictures of exultant Hamas fighters smashing it up and firing their kalashnikovs into his desk. He had escaped. Since then the Palestinians have been divided, with Hamas in power in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank.I use the term ‘in power’ advisedly. 

(?) Here I think Bowen means inadvisedly. Advisedly means deliberately/with intent. He’s looking for another phrase. I suggest ‘metaphorically’ or ‘figuratively’. But who am I to quibble with Bowen?

Israel is really in control in the West Bank, and even though its troops and settlers were pulled out of Gaza nine years ago, it can still blockade the Gaza strip in a way that is, at times, devastating for civilians.
People in Gaza, in different ways, relied on tunnels dug into Egypt, for everything from coca cola to weapons. Some tunnels were big enough to drive in cars and live animals. 
When the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s allies, won the election in Egypt, Hamas was flying high. But now the Egyptian military says it’s destroyed more than 1300 tunnels since it seized power last year. 
Hamas was running out of options. One it had left was ending the split with President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah. His side had concluded that the latest round of talks with Israel was going nowhere, like all the others over 20 years or more.
So unity seems to be part of a new strategy for president Abbas and his people. It includes joining international organisations which could eventually lead to war crimes prosecutions of Israeli soldiers.

This unity malarky is an on-off business. Each time it has been trumpeted before it’s ended badly - it’s a game both sides are playing. There is abundant evidence that Hamas and Abbas disagree about most things; particularly their differing approaches to those pesky, déjà vu-like ‘no-no-noes’ - namely recognising Israel, renouncing violence etc. etc.. Therefore anyone pretending to be appalled at Netanyahu’s reaction must seriously be doing just that. (Pretending) 

Why would war crimes prosecutions be restricted to Israeli soldiers? Surely the Palestinians would be eligible for a prosecution or two, too. What is Bowen up to? Is he acknowledging that the threat of international organisations backing the newly unified Palestinians in their quest for asymmetric justice merely part of Abbas’s dastardly blackmailing strategy, ultimately aimed at levering concessions out of Israel? Is Bowen indirectly hinting that Abbas is exploiting poor, down-on-its-luck Hamas?

“And there’s BDS or Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. The idea is for Israel to be as isolated as South Africa was in the 1980s. That worries the Israelis more and more. The editor of one of Israel’s leading papers told me that BDS was moving from the fringes to the centre of politics.
“Israel’s so much stronger than us” one Palestinian activist told me before I left Jerusalem this week, but we’re more organised than we were. And we’re not going away.”

Jeremy enunciates the closing section with the voice of a person audibly smiling. You know, what the director tells the voice-over to do when recording an in-yer-face advert for something no-one needs. Buy this! You’ll love it.

If Hadar decides to tackle this one she’ll be able to demolish it more authoritatively than me. I’m talking on behalf of the man on the Clapham omnibus who may not be familiar with all  the intricacies, but knows a load of emoting when he hears it. 

Gossip costs lives

This article illustrates the BBC’s habit of promoting gossip and tittle-tattle and presenting it as news (or comment)

 BBC Watch’s Hadar Sela has detailed what’s wrong with it.

Donnison omits relevant factors concerning the deceased prisoner:

“Abu Hamdiyeh was connected to both the PA security forces and the terrorist organization Hamas or to note that he was known to be involved in recruitment for paramilitary activities, weapons training, providing weapons and finance for terror and bomb-making in addition to his role in the attempted suicide bombing of Café Caffit in Jerusalem in 2002, in which the awareness of a security guard and a waiter saved the lives of some 60 customers and 12 staff in the café at the time.”

BBC Watch also criticises an erroneous reference to ‘the occupied West Bank.’ “T(t)he majority of Hebron is in Area A and controlled by the Palestinian Authority rather than “occupied:”

Unpleasant  ‘between the lines’ insinuations run through the whole piece, barely concealing Donnison’s sympathetic attitude to the Palestinians. As Sela says, the BBC should steer clear of the propagation of deliberately engineered rumours. Donnison really should take heed.

Khaled Abu Toameh writes about the PA leadership’s orchestrated campaign against Israel on the issue of prisoners. A ministry for prisoners’ affairs has been set up to accuse Israel of mistreating prisoners, conducting experiments on them, torturing them and stealing their organs. (has Jenny Tonge been recruited?) 

“But these attacks are also intensifying tensions between Israel and the Palestinians and paving the way for violence. By making serious allegations against Israel, the PA is further radicalizing Palestinians and even driving some of them into the open arms of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”

That’s roughly what Jon Donnison is doing. Making matters worse by clumsy shit-stirring.

In the noble tradition of of long-windedness I annotate:

Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails protest death

Weird unpunctuated heading.

Israeli prison guards have fired tear gas to stop disturbances among Palestinian prisoners after a Palestinian inmate died from cancer.

Attention-grabbing opening gambit involving tear gas.

Palestinian officials claim that Israel did not provide adequate medical care for Maysara Abu Hamdiyeh, who was 64.

Unsubstantiated claim.

The Israeli Prisons Service (IPS) says he was well looked after and died in a public hospital in Beersheba.

“an Israel says”

The parole board was asked to consider his release but had not processed the case by the time of his death.

Implies Israel is deliberately procrastinating.

Following the announcement of Abu Hamdiyeh's death, Palestinian prisoners in several Israeli jails began banging on their cell doors and throwing objects around.

Implies prisoners are helpless and frustrated.

In Ramon Prison, tear gas was used to stop the protests although the situation is now under control. The IPS says that six prison guards and three Palestinian inmates were treated in the jail's clinic.

Implies Israel is heavy-handed with Palestinian prisoners.

The Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is said to have tried to intervene personally to have Abu Hamdiyeh released after it became clear that his illness was terminal.

Implies a thwarted humanitarian gesture, flatters Abbas.

"The Israeli government is responsible for the martyrdom of prisoner, Maysara Abu Hamdiyeh," said a statement by Nabil Abu Rudeina, a spokesman for Mr Abbas.

Gratuitous emoting.

"The continued detention of the prisoners and medical neglect leads to dangerous implications."

Gratuitous emotive gossip 

Tensions running high

Other Palestinian officials accused Israel of denying proper, timely medical care to Abu Hamdiyeh, claiming that his cancer had been left to spread.

More claims (unsubstantiated and outrageous)

"The prisoner was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus in February of this year and was under the medical supervision of experts at the hospital," read a statement by the Israeli prison authority.

More “Israel says”

"About a week ago, following the determination that it was a terminal illness, the IPS turned to the release committee to apply for early release, a procedure which started and didn't finish."

Implies Israel procrastinating over Abdelbaset al-Megrahi-type compassionate leave.

Maysara Abu Hamdiyeh, from Hebron in the occupied West Bank, was serving a life sentence for attempted murder for his role in a foiled attempt to bomb a cafe in Jerusalem in 2002.

Implies a foiled attempt is only a ‘thought crime’.

The issue of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails is an emotive one for Palestinians. Inmates are generally highly regarded despite the reasons for their detention.

euphemism for prisoners being generously pensioned / families rewarded.

Tensions have recently been running high as several Palestinian prisoners have been on intermittent hunger strike.

Intermittent hunger strike: like being a bit dead?

As of December 2012, Israel held 4,517 Palestinians in its jails.

Statistical implication that this is unfair?

Of these 1,031 were being held until the conclusion of legal proceedings, 178 were in administrative detention without trial or charge.

Not to mention the remainder who were tried and found guilty (1,031 + 178 from 4,517 = 2,308)

**** 

By what stretch of the imagination can this be an impartial article?

It’s unadulterated trouble-making. Like gossips do. Malicious gossips.