Note to readers: This issue was first brought to light by HonestReporting. The link to their report is in the second comment below)
When the Guardian’s assistant editor slithers his way on to the BBC, there’s a good bet that something noxious is soon going to be coming across the airwaves. But, in its brazen and flagrant dishonesty, Monday’s contribution to BBC Radio London’s Breakfast Show by Michael White is something to behold.
In a discussion on security for political leaders pegging off the assault on Silvio Berlusconi the other day, White talked meanderingly about previous attacks on political leaders and, understandably for a British discussion show, brought in the case of Northern Ireland where Unionists and Nationalists in the main desisted from assassinating each others leaders. And then, like a flash of lightening out of a clear blue sky, this:
“In Israel they murder each other a great deal. The Israeli Defense Forces murder people because they don’t like their political style and what they’ve got to say and it only means that people more extreme come in and take their place.”
No interruption from the BBC moderator of course — apart from an approving “hmm”. No one to stop such appalling, defamatory lies in their tracks. There it is. On the record. A vicious calumny about Israel, pumping yet more sewage into the public mind as the Jewish state is portrayed as nothing better than a violent, totalitarian dictatorship which silences political dissent through the barrel of a gun.
To see just how mendacious White is being it is necessary to recall Israel’s policy of targeted assassination which was aimed at senior leaders of the terrorist infrastructure, mainly in Hamas. This, of course, would be White’s pseudo-defence.
But he and everyone else who follows the situation in the Middle East knows very well that democratic, pluralist Israel has never murdered anyone just because it doesn’t like “what they’ve got to say”. Or perhaps he is using the word “style” in a grotesque attempt at humourising the explosive belts packed with nails and ball bearings worn by suicide bombers by equating them to fashion accessories?
Friends and colleagues from outside the UK frequently ask me how intelligent people in Great Britain can really believe the kind of absurdities that Israel is charged with these days. What is hard to convey to them is the sheer casualness of the way such lies and distortions are now spread by Britain’s most powerful media outlets.
The extract quoted above is no more than 15 seconds in length. It is not the centre-piece of the show. There was no great fanfare announcing it. It is a quite casual reference, dropped on to the breakfast tables of London. People absorb this sort of thing day in day out. After a time, it simply becomes normal. This is how a nation’s reputation is being destroyed.
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To hear the extract — which will only be up for a limited time — click on the following link and move to 1 hr, 18 minutes and 50 seconds into the discussion:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p005gypm
December 16th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
They (both the BBC and the Guardian, as is the so-called Independent - independent from common sense and journalistic ethics only perhaps?) have long ago forfeited their basic journalistic credibility.
December 16th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
http://www.humyo.com/F/8292457-2279342827
White’s disgusting libel is at 3 mins 30 secs in at the above direct link.
The clip will be archived, I presume, here:
http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/new/Guardian_Ed_In_Israel_They_Murder_Each_Other_a_Great_Deal.asp
Which has this direct link embedded:
http://www.humyo.com/F/8292457-2279342827
December 16th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
1) Here’s White, in early 2008, on the Holocaust (my titles):
The Holocaust is such a bore
“MPs had a short debate yesterday to mark Holocaust Day, a familiar ritual in many countries which causes backbenchers like Hendon’s Andrew Dismore (not Jewish himself, but hot on anti-semitism) to be dismissed in newspapers as ‘Holocaust bores.’ ”
Don’t be mean to the Nazis
“My own favourite parliamentary speech on this subject remains that of the late Thatcherite economist, Lord Peter Bauer. In opposing Lady Thatcher’s 1990 war crimes bill - she used the parliament act to force it through - Bauer said approximately this: ”My Lords, I am a Jew who lost much of his family in the Holocaust. But I oppose this legislation because it is retrospective and therefore undermines the rule of law.” He then sat down. Not bad. I must check which way Mr Howard voted at the time.”
http://tinyurl.com/3aysu3
2) Here, in late 2008, White criticises the extradition of Holocaust deniers, purely on principle, naturally. Look out for these special titbits: “an abuse of process in a country which has not - yet - succumbed to Germany’s “witch-hunt mentality”; “We should not forget, but it smacked of retrospective legislation, pandering again.” Jolly decent of White, however, to suggest that we should not “forget” the Holocaust:
“Two strands of the affair trouble me. One is the restriction on free speech inherent in the laws that some countries – not Britain – have against Holocaust denial. We have broader laws against racial incitement in general, which seems acceptable to me, though not to those who believe that older public order laws would have proved sufficient.”
“The other problem I have with this is process. When the European Arrest Warrant came into force in 2004 to help police fight cross border crime - and post 9/11 terrorism - more effectively it abolished the “dual criminality” principle.”
Once again, in the same piece, White attacks the war crimes bill:
“Holocaust denial is a lesser offence than involvement in war crimes themselves. Britain has a different problem here in that, in the chaos after 1945 when it was often hard to sort victim from persecutor, a lot of bad people slipped into this country and led quiet, guilty lives.
In 1991 Margaret Thatcher used the parliament acts to override the House of Lords, which had thrown out her war crimes bill, passed by the Commons. The average age of current MPs in 1939 was six, one peer remarked during the debate: let it go. But some 300 suspects live on in the UK, countered the bill’s supporters.
At the time I sympathised with the critics. It was all a long time ago, witnesses and accused were old, far away or even dead, their memories faulty at best. We should not forget, but it smacked of retrospective legislation, pandering again.
Last time I looked there had not been a single successful prosecution. Other more recent war crimes dominate the headlines. Who’s right?”
http://tinyurl.com/3w38vc