Look out!

 

The NUS is belatedly looking at antisemitism.  (Is this an attempt to rehabilitate the Labour Party?)

Come on guys. Let’s not wang on about the Oxford Street bus incident and other low-hanging fruits that skirt over or miss the underlying problem. 

It’s a much more fundamental issue, which the NUS is unlikely to fully confront anytime soon. 

The BBC is dutifully fulfilling its holocaust-day-related obligations but the media’s annual mawkish celebration of that tragic historical event is not enough. Constant ahistorical pro-Palestinianism is hobbling rational debate. Antisemitism (and its proxy anti-Israelism) is back with a vengeance in Britain,  America, and Europe. Look out!

The Great Escape

The Palestinian jailbreak that rocked Israel 

The BBC and much of the UK media routinely approach Middle East news and views from the Palestinian perspective. Historically ill-informed and ideologically hostile-to-Israel staff are dispatched to the battlefield, where they cover selected stories and ignore others. This has been the case ever since I can remember and despite Tim Davies’s promises, the BBC is actually getting worse.

In this film Tom Bateman shows where his sympathies lie. Openly respectful towards the ‘resistance’, he shapes the narrative in a way that dehumanises the Israelis and distances them from the viewer. He pays the obligatory lip-service to “the other side of the story”, but Bateman’s script reeks of awe and admiration for the audacious Palestinian prison break.

“This is the story of an extraordinary jailbreak” Gushes the first caption, and the strap-line in the description exclaims: “But this is about more than just a dramatic jailbreak.” 

So what he's saying is (to coin a phrase) 'this is not just an ordinary jailbreak - this is a BBC portrait of a dramatic jailbreak'. Our own version of The Great Escape. Epic!

Much give-away signalling is in there; in my former OTT tl;dr mode I would have gone into minute detail, citing each of the BBC’s go-to, stereotypically emotive subliminals such as  featuring their pet Palestinian old crones and those photogenic, cheeky and bravely defiant young Palestinian lads Jon Donnison used to be so fond of. But life’s too short to skin a biased BBC film, and who cares, anyway? (I do, though) 

I drafted this a few days ago, and funnily enough, Camera has deconstructed the film for me. 

"Clearly Tom Bateman’s revisiting of this three-month-old story does not provide audiences with any information not already available. Rather, Bateman’s project was primarily aimed at advancing narratives and omissions that have dominated but compromised BBC coverage for years, while attempting to ‘contextualise’ Palestinian terrorism."

Green cake and other stories

The BBC’s relentless pandering to the Palestinian ‘cause’ (eliminating Israel)  is encapsulated on this page. 

They’ve highlighted a vignette, first featured in Simon Reeve’s Mediterranean travels  - no, not Israel’s fantastic desalination plant - but some gushing propaganda about  “Green Cake” -  also noted here.

It’s a display of the BBC’s unadulterated anti-Israel emoting, side by side with various similarly themed items. 

The one about Palestinian forces torturing critics is unusually critical of something ‘Palestinian’, but unless you click on the link and follow through you might be misled by the scare quotes around ‘torturing critics’, not to mention the scare quotes surrounding ‘killed planting a bomb’ in another title.

These short video items clearly illustrate the BBC’s accelerated journey towards dumbed-down land.