BBC Arabic Service "Boosts Terrorists"

Via The JC: British solicitor Trevor Asserson, who set up a website to monitor the BBC's coverage of events in the Middle East, released a report on Wednesday claiming that the BBC's Arabic-language radio programing provided a platform for terrorist organizations who hate Israel. Asserson presented his report, "The BBC Goes Native," co-written by Deena Pinson, at a conference held by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Asserson studied the Arabic radio station's main news-analysis program, Hadeeth Al-Sa'a, over a four-week period during the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbullah. "We identified 17 spokespeople for Hizbullah and Iran among program guests, and only five for Israel. The airtime given by BBC Arabic radio to the pro-Hizbullah position outweighed that given to the pro-Israel position by a ratio of some 4.5 to one."

Reuters mistake triggers Israel “Holocaust” libel

Via National Review:

A Reuters mistranslation of remarks by Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai this morning has triggered an international news libel against Israel.

Among the news outlets jumping on the bandwagon are those that have previously been accused of deliberately attempting to stir up anti-Semitism through false and inflammatory coverage of Israel.

They include several British-owned or British-based media. For example, at the present time the following headlines can be found on these websites:

Reuters: Israel minister warns Palestinians of “shoah”
The BBC: Israel warns of Gaza ‘holocaust’
The Guardian: Israeli minister warns of Palestinian ‘holocaust’
The Times (of London): Israel threatens to unleash ‘holocaust’ in Gaza

In fact Vilnai said this morning in off-the-cuff remarks made on Israel Radio that: “The more the Qassam rocket fire [on Israeli civilians] intensifies and increases its range, the Palestinians are bringing upon themselves a bigger disaster because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”

Vilnai used the word “shoah” (meaning disaster), which Reuters mistranslated as “Holocaust,” which is “HaShoah” in Hebrew. It is like confusing a “white house” with “The White House.”

Given the virulently anti-Israel (and many would say anti-Semitic) track record of some of the news organizations who have jumped to prominently headline these mistranslated comments on their home pages, one wonders if they are making this mistake in innocence?

Fundamentalists Threaten Israel from All Sides

The Telgraph is too cowardly to use the term "Muslim", so they choose the term "Fundamentalist". Cowardly pukes. From Fundamentalists Threaten Israel from All Sides:

Hamas makes no secret of the fact that it now receives most of its financial and military support from Iran. The Iranian government signed a memorandum of understanding with the Hamas leadership in June last year in which it agreed to fund the militant group to the tune of £400 million. In addition, Iran provides military training to Hamas members by sending them to camps in Lebanon and Iran run by the elite Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards.

Earlier this year, the Iranians sought to establish new supply lines to Gaza. On February 24, Khaled Mashaal, Hamas' supreme leader, traveled to Khartoum where he met senior Quds Force officials and Sudanese politicians who are broadly sympathetic to Hamas' political objectives. The main topic of conversation was setting up a supply route that would enable Iran to smuggle rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles, guns and explosives through the porous border between Gaza and Egypt.

Ordinary Palestinians, it is true, in both Gaza and the West Bank, are suffering hardship. But this is not because of a lack of funds entering the Palestinian territories: it is because successive Palestinian administrations have made no effort to distribute the resources available equably among the population. By forcing the majority of Palestinians to exist in dire poverty, Hamas succeeds in attracting widespread sympathy from international do-gooders who do not understand the sadistic economic manipulation that is taking place.

Hamas is trying to replicate Hizbullah's success in Gaza, not a pleasing prospect for Israel, which now faces the threat of having two Iranian-backed, Islamic fundamentalist organizations dedicated to its destruction camped on its northern and southern borders.

BBC Apologizes to Muslims for Stating Jerusalem as Capital of Israel

It is outrageous to the extreme that the global community would dare to tell a sovereign nation what is - or is not - its capital. What a bunch of pandering cowards the BBC is. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) issued an apology this week to Muslims for having referred to Jerusalem as being the capital of Israel in one of its broadcasts.

The apology came in response to complaints by four Muslim-British organizations:
Arab Media Watch,
Muslim Public Affairs Committee,
Friends of Al-Aksa and,
the Institute of Islamic Political Thought.

The reference to Jerusalem that drew the complaints occurred on March 24th, when a presenter on BBC’s Football Focus program mentioned that Jerusalem was, in fact, the capital of Israel, as well as her “historic soul."

The BBC's Editorial Complaints Unit issued an official response to the complaint, stating, "The reference was a passing one in a context where the focus was on sport, not politics. While recognizing the sensitivity of the issue of the status of Jerusalem, the ECU took the view that the program-makers had taken sufficient action by acknowledging the error and rectifying the website."

But don't nod in agreement with the Muslims, folks, Learn your history, not Muslim revisionism. Daniel Pipes, in Exploring the Strength of Ties to Jerusalem, writes:

Historically, the religious standing of Jerusalem for Muslims waxed and waned six times through 14 centuries. British rule over the city in 1917-48 galvanized a passion for Jerusalem that had been absent during the 400 years of Ottoman control. Throughout the Jordanian control of the walled city in 1948-67, Arabs largely ignored it.

Jordanian radio broadcast Friday prayers not from Al-Aqsa mosque but from a minor mosque in Amman.

The PLO's founding Covenant, which dates from 1964, contains no mention of Jerusalem.

Muslim interest in the city revived only with the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem in 1967. By 1990, the Islamic focus on Jerusalem reached such a surreal intensity that Palestinian Arabs denied the city's sacred and historical importance to Jews.

The Camp David summit of July 2000 saw the Israeli government put forward its demands for sovereignty over parts of the Temple Mount. As Dennis Ross, an American diplomat present at the summit, put it, Arafat "never offered any substantive ideas, not once" at the talks. However, "He did offer one new idea, which was that the Temple didn't exist in Jerusalem, that it was in Nablus." With this, Jerusalem's pseudo-history became formal Palestinian Authority policy.

What is actually remarkable is that Muslims know that Jerusalem is holy to Judaism and to Israel. If they didn't, they wouldn't have been busy destroying archaeological remains of the Jewish temples, mimicking the destruction of the Buddhist statutes in Bamiyan by the Taliban Islamists in Afghanistan.

See, Muslims destroyed all Jewish synagogues in the old city of Jerusalem and they were desecrated to symbolize the supremacy of Islam over Judaism. But Islam is not better than Judaism. How can Islam be better when it commits crimes against humanity and destroys historical artifacts of other religions and cultures that can never be replaced.

Jerusalem has been the heart of Judaism for three thousand years, in the same way that the Vatican is the heart for Catholics.

See, what IslamoNazis are trying to do is gain territory and they do so through lies and deceptions so that they can control the borders of Israel and then claim they are victims. Muslims are not victims; they are predators.

But Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis reminds us, the Talmud relates that after the destruction of our Holy Temple, Rabbi Akiva and the Sages of Israel were walking on the streets of Jerusalem. As they came to the Temple Mount, they beheld a devastating sight. There, where the Sanctuary had once stood in majesty and splendor, where the Holy of Holies had been, were only ruins, and wild foxes were roaming about.

The Sages broke down and wept.

"Woe is us," they wailed, "that we have seen this with our own eyes."

But Rabbi Akiva did not weep. Instead, he smiled.

"How can you smile at such a time?" his colleagues asked, shocked.

"I smile," Rabbi Akiva answered, "because today I have seen the fulfillment of prophecy, for the same prophet who foretold the destruction also foretold that the Temple shall be rebuilt. The same prophet who prophesied our exile, also prophesied that we shall return to Jerusalem in joy. And so I smile, for now that the first part of our prophecy has come to pass, the second part will surely come to be."

"Akiva," the Sages declared, "you have comforted us."

Folks, be counselled. Be comforted, those of you who love HaShem with all your heart and all your soul. Be comforted.

And to the BBC and to all Muslims and Arabists, you disgust me. I am disgusted by those of you who delegitimize non-Muslims. Who do you think you are trying to dictate to us Jews who we are and where we belong and what our borders are? It is time you learned that we reject you. We reject your views on immigration, culture, religion, ideology, law enforcement, military strategy - and God.

There is no law on earth that requires the Jewish people to accept the revision of their history and the division of Israel borders, nor their own demise merely because Muslims say we should.

As for the shills over at the BBC; you've been diapering and bottlefeeding Muslims for so long, you've prevented them from growing up. Muslims aren't exactly chained to their homicide belts and kassam rockets. Stop being so afraid of them. They're not immortal. Muslims are on the move, they are a dysfunctional body, they are on the move to take over the world. Stand up for something principled, BBC. Take the moral high ground for once.

It is time to clean house. It is time to speak up for the innocent. And this time, the Jewish people are in the right. I know, I know it takes courage. Stop being weak. Stop pandering to Muslims. It will be your pandering that will enable your city and your railways to get hit again.

Who is Julie Burchill?

From RadioRote:

The maverick British journalist Julie Burchill, who is a veritable household name in the UK, has decided to quit 'The Guardian' because of what she perceives as its biased views on Israel.

As you might have heard, I'm leaving the Guardian next year for the Times, having finally been convinced that my evil populist philistinism has no place in a publication read by so many all-round, top-drawer plaster saints. (Well, that and the massive wad they've waved at me.)

Once there, I will compose as many love letters to the likes of Mr Murdoch and Pres Bush as my black little heart desires, leaving those who have always objected to my presence on such a fine liberal newspaper as this to read only writers they agree with, with no chance of spoiled digestion as the muesli goes down the wrong way if I so much as murmur about bringing back hanging. (Public.) Not only do I admire the Guardian, I also find it fun to read, which in a way is more of a compliment.

But if there is one issue that has made me feel less loyal to my newspaper over the past year, it has been what I, as a non-Jew, perceive to be a quite striking bias against the state of Israel. Which, for all its faults, is the only country in that barren region that you or I, or any feminist, atheist, homosexual or trade unionist, could bear to live under.

I find this hard to accept because, crucially, I don't swallow the modern liberal line that anti-Zionism is entirely different from anti-semitism; the first good, the other bad. Judeophobia - as the brilliant collection of essays A New Antisemitism? Debating Judeophobia In 21st-Century Britain (axt.org.uk), published this year, points out - is a shape-shifting virus, as opposed to the straightforward stereotypical prejudice applied to other groups (Irish stupid, Japanese
cruel, Germans humourless, etc).

Jews historically have been blamed for everything we might disapprove of: they can be rabid revolutionaries, responsible for the might of the late Soviet empire, and the greediest of fat cats, enslaving the planet to the demands of international high finance. They are insular, cliquey and clannish, yet they worm their way into the highest positions of power in their adopted countries, changing their names and marrying Gentile women. They collectively possess a huge, slippery ! wealth that knows no boundaries - yet Israel is said to be an impoverished, lame-duck state, bleeding the west dry.

If you take into account the theory that Jews are responsible for everything nasty in the history of the world, and also the recent EU survey that found 60% of Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat to peace in the world today (hmm, I must have missed all those rabbis telling their flocks to go out with bombs strapped to their bodies and blow up the nearest mosque), it's a short jump to reckoning that it was obviously a bloody good thing that the Nazis got rid of six million of the buggers. Perhaps this is why sales of Mein Kampf are so buoyant, from the Middle Eastern bazaars unto the Edgware Road, and why The Protocols of The Elders of Zion could be found for sale at the recent Anti-racism Congress in Durban.

The fact that many Gentiles and Arabs are rabidly Judeophobic, while many others are as horrified by Judeophobia as by any other type of racism, makes me believe that anti-semitism/Zionism is not a political position (otherwise the right and the left, the PLO and the KKK, would not be able to unite so uniquely in their hatred), but about how an individual feels about himself. I can't help noticing that, over the years, a disproportionate number of attractive, kind, clever people are drawn to Jews; those who express hostility to them, however, from Hitler to Hamza, are often as not repulsive freaks.

Think of famous anti-Zionist windbags - Redgrave, Highsmith, Galloway - and what dreary, dysfunctional, po-faced vanity confronts us. When we consider famous Jew-lovers, on the other hand - Marilyn, Ava, Liz, Felicity Kendal, me - what a sumptuous banquet of radiant humanity we look upon!

How fitting that it was Richard Ingrams - Victor Meldrew without the animal magnetism - who this summer proclaimed in the Observer that he refuses to read letters from Jews about the Middle East, and that Jewish journalists should declare their racial origins when writing on this subject.

Replying in another newspaper, Johann Hari suggested sarcastically that their bylines might be marked with a yellow star, and asked why Ingrams didn't want to know whether those writing on international conflicts were Muslim, Christian, Sikh or Hindu.

The answer is obvious to me: poor Ingrams is a miserable, bitter, hypocritical cuckold, whose much younger girlfriend has written at length in the public arena of the boredom, misery and alcoholism to which living with him has led her, and whose trademark has long been a loathing for anyone who appears to get a kick out of life: the young, the prole, independent women. The Jews are in good company.

Judeophobia: where the political is personal, and the personal pretends to be political, and those swarthy/pallid/swotty/philistine/aggressive/cowardly/comically bourgeois/filthy rich/delete-as-mood-takes-you bastards always get the girl.

I'll return to this dirty little secret masquerading as a moral stance next week and, rest assured, it'll get much nastier. As the darling Jews them-selves would say (annoyingly, but then, nobody's perfect), enjoy!

(Julie Burchill, soon to be former correspondant for the Guardian -- UK)