Ray Cook - As I See It

Israel, Zionism and the Media

Category: The Delegitimisation of Israel (Page 14 of 15)

BBC’s third attempt at a ‘truthful’ headline

12/04/2009 / / 0 Comments

Continuing the saga of the BBC’s ever-shifting headline on the story of an Israeli Arab who drove at three policeman protecting those demolishing the home of Hussam Dwayat (the July 2008 bulldozer attacker who killed three and injured 40 and was shot dead) – see my previous posts here and here .

The driver was shot dead by the police.

Headline No 1. Palestinian killed in demolition (no he was not!)

Headline No 2. Police kill Palestinian motorist (whilst attempting a 3-point turn, no doubt)

And now, No 3. Palestinian ‘attacker’ shot dead 

Note the quote marks. This warns us that someone who drives directly at and injures three policeman may not be an attacker but is so characterised by Israelis. This is because he only “injur(ed) them lightly”.

As I previously wrote, given the history of suicide attacks within Israel, how can the police take any chances with someone driving straight at them with a lethal weapon, namely a half-ton car. This is not Kensington High Street. But the BBC, in its attempt to be ‘fair’ describes terrorists as ‘militants’ and people driving directly at security forces as ‘attackers’.

They have no such scruples when they use terms such as ‘occupation’ (without quotation marks), of course.

And let us not forget that by the time this latest and considerably more accurate headline reaches the BBC’s pages, it has already ceased to be current news and is confined to the archive. It’s the earlier headlines that have already made their nasty little innuendos and have now conveniently disappeared to cover the BBC’s previous ‘bias’.

BBC correct headline – and still avoid the truth

07/04/2009 / / 1 Comment

Following my previous post and complaint to the BBC ( I am sure they had several) they changed the headline to – wait for it – “Police kill Palestinian motorist”.

I almost wet myself. If it wasn’t so tragic it would be funny. Of course they have to really rub our noses into Israeli disproportion:

A police spokesman said officers shot the man after his car hit three guards, injuring them lightly.

Police responded by firing more than 20 bullets into the windshield

They completely ignore the fact that the car or the man or both may have been booby-trapped and full of explosives. This is the problem with such reporting: people outside Israel just do not realise what police and the IDF have to contend with every day. Are they trigger happy? No. But why should they take any chances when history has shown them that a moment’s hesitation could cost them their life. As in Gaza, so in Israel. It’s a tragedy, but one imposed by a series of ruthless, suicidal assaults. This could have been the next one. Do not US soldiers in Iraq do likewise? Did not UK soldiers in Basra and still in Helmand?

But for the BBC this is little short of murder. Either they don’t understand or they don’t wish to.

Two other attacks by Palestinians using bulldozers have been carried out since Hussam Dwayat’s death, though no Israelis were killed in these later incidents.

And so as with Hamas rockets, so with bulldozer attacks. If they kill no-one then it’s all right because they didn’t intend to kill anyone. Duh! BBC logic.

The bulldozers failed because of the vigilance of Israelis not because they were intended to cause a little mischief.

Peace or surrender?

07/04/2009 / / 0 Comments

King Abdullah of Jordan, on a visit to Bucharest, has said that Israel

“must decide whether they want to observe this opportunity and become integrated in the region or whether they want to remain a fortress … and keep the Middle East hostage in conflict”

as reported by Arutz Sheva. The opportunity he refers to is the Saudi Peace Plan/Ultimatum reiterated in Qatar last week in terms of “take it or leave it”.

The Saudi plan offers recognition of Israel from all Arab countries but in return Israel must withdraw from what are known as The Occupied Territories, there must be an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and (and here’s the killer punch), there must be a just solution to the “problem” of Palestinian refugees.

So in return for the dubious benefits of “recognition”, whatever that really means, Israel must return to the 1949 ceasefire lines and potentially allow into Israel hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Palestinians against whom it has been fighting an existential war since 1967. This influx will turn the Jewish State into something quite different. In no time, Jews would be a minority in their own country and there would be two Arab states, no doubt with the intention of confederating as Palestine and thus bringing about the end of Israel.

Security issues (massive), housing, health, the economy would all suffer to the detriment of Israelis. And where would these returnees go? Would they have the right, having kicked the Jews out of the West Bank, to start to kick them out of Ashkelon and Haifa?

In Qatar an ultimatum was issued. See my post “Israel must agree to its own destruction” – Arab League This is more of the same from a previously tacit source – namely king Abdullah.

It’s as if the enmity generated throughout the world by Operation Cast Lead, the move to a right wing government in Israel and the pleasant noises (for Arab ears) emanating from the new administration in Washington have emboldened the Arabs in the belief that the time is ripe to land a killer blow on the Israeli chin or maybe a kick somewhere lower down.

All this might be considered a first round negotiating position, but three significant players are completely ignored in this equation: Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.

Also on Arutz Sheva this report Hamas: We Will Not Recognize Israel-Period. 

Hamas leader Ismael Haniya reasserted his faction’s principled refusal to recognize Israel, calling it “the Zionist entity” and claiming it to be an illegitimate state based on ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, according to the Palestine Times. He said that Hamas wouldn’t abandon its principles under pressure. “We will not cave in to pressure, we will not betray our people’s trust, we will not recognize the illegitimate Zionist entity. This has always been our stance, and it will never change.”

Haniya suggested that when it comes to recognizing Israel, the Palestinian Authority represented only itself and not the entire PA Arab population.

Let’s analyse this.  Israel is “an illegitimate state based on ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”. So what is it this “principled” people want to do with Israel? 

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” 

“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

(http://www.mideastweb.org/hamas.htm)

Hamas are a little hypocritical when it comes to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, don’t you think? Just go to PalestinianMediaWatch (www.pmw.il) to see the depraved depths of their hate-filled rhetoric, their “educational”materials, their blood-libels and then tell me who are the racists and Nazis in the Middle-East.

Hezbollah and Iran have a similar genocidal animus against Israel and the Jews. Fatah, Al-Aqsa Martyrs, Islamic Jihad are not exacty Israel or even Jew-friendly.

So let’s see what happens when the Saudi dream is realised. Israel’s borders will be open, the security wall dismantled and those whose professed aim is to kill all Jews and destroy Israel will have a free pass across its borders, along its coastline, in its airspace. Their agents and accomplices will move freely among Jewish Israelis.

So the small matter of the Right of Return for Palestinians is nothing less than a formula for the destruction of Israel and the removal of all rights to self-determination of Jews. So the other points in the formula a little moot. Of course, compensation for the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab countries in 1948 are not part of the equation.

Do the Arab nations really expect this government of all governments to agree to a new Jewish Holocaust? 

Of course they don’t. But what they do want is to be seen as moderate, offering a “peace solution” which Israel will reject out of hand and they can write another chapter in the Book of Historical Revisionism to say “the Jews didn’t want peace. We had no choice but to continue the struggle. They bring it upon themselves.”

“Israel must agree to its own destruction” – Arab League

01/04/2009 / / 0 Comments

The Arab League meeting in Qatar has come up with an ultimatum for Israel. No negotiations, just a restatement of how it believes Israel should agree to its own destruction. If Israel does not agree to its own destruction the generous offer will be withdrawn. This ultimatum is based on the 2002 Saudi “peace initiative”.

1. Israel withdraw to 1967 borders.

No mention of security – just a unilateral withdrawal from the Golan, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

2. Israel agrees to accept back “war refugees”.

So let’s see, the Arabs will decide who is a war refugee going back to 1948 and presumably all their descendants. Of course this would mean the influx of about 2 million Palestinians. Where would they go? Why would they want to be residents of Israel? The answer is simple: destroy Israel demographically. Apart from the crippling effect on the Israeli economy, apart from the obvious dangers to Jewish Israelis of allowing in 2 million people, many of whom are sworn to destroy them, apart from the fact they will be able to establish a political bloc that will quickly destroy the Jewish majority and therefore the very basis of a Jewish state and Zionism itself.

But this is what they want to do, of course, and this is what much of the world wants to see. State Number 1: Israel, a democracy where Jews and Muslims and Christians etc. can live together in peace and harmony until the Muslims become the majority.  State Number 2: a Judenrein Palestinian Muslim state with a Christian minority under siege and where Jews will not be welcome or choose to live at their peril.

This will lead to State Number 3: a confederation of States 1 and 2 called Palestine where Jews will be a minority, their property confiscated, the democratic government overthrown, Jews banned from public office, Jews driven into the sea, Jews murdered etc. etc. End of the Zionist dream.

Meanwhile Israel today is called ‘”apartheid” and “racist” but the PA and a future Palestinian state will not be? After all the Jews will have deserved everything they get for their 100+ year struggle to defend themselves and find a few thousand square kilometres of land where they can exercise self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

No one will cry for the Israeli Jews as their remnants make their way to America and Europe where they will face a growing Islamist threat and once again become a persecuted minority in the lands of their great grandparents or swell the former “Israel lobby” which will now be honestly called the “Jewish lobby”.

3. Israeli acceptance of a Palestinian Arab state on the West Bank and Gaza with Jerusalem as its capital.

This, at least, is approaching reasonable, but to make any part of Jerusalem Judenrein, as no doubt would happen, is not negotiable. When in history has a single, small city been the capital of two countries? See points 1 and 2 above. All part of the Palestinian master plan to deligitimize Israel and the centrality of Jerusalem as the capital of a Jewish state.

If Israel agrees to all three points of the ultimatum the Arab states would begin a peace agreement with Israel and “consider the Arab-Israeli” conflict ended. Well they might do. Israel would effectively be destroyed. And what of the jihadis and wahabis, the terrorists and the Islamists who will pour across Israel’s borders to wreak havoc on its cities? Would Palestine guarantee Israel’s safety? Would thay stop Hamas? Hezbollah? Islamic Jihad? Al Qaeda? Iran? and every other genocidal nut from finishing the job of eviscerating Israel.

So thank you Arab League. What a wonderful plan for peace and security. Peace and security for everyone except Israelis, that is.

Remember Nahr el-Bared?

09/03/2009 / / 0 Comments

No, I don’t suppose you do unless you are one of the 30,000 Palestinians displaced or a relative of the 400 who died two years ago in fighting between the Lebanese army and Islamist militants.

The Lebanese army went in hard. It destroyed homes and killed many innocent civilians.

Yet there were no delegations from the Arab League, no British MPs making a tour of the devastation, no UN resolutions, no lurid TV pictures, no Iranian outrage, no Hamas demonstrations, no Palestinian Authority claims of war crimes,  no UNRWA officials accusing Lebanon of anything, no Viva Palestina convoys and definitely not a Jeremy Bowen in sight.

Why? Because it’s alright for an Arab country to kill Muslims with impunity. No Jews or Israelis were involved. So the world has little interest. Why did Lebanon take this action? Because an Islamist group was threatening to destabilise the country. They weren’t sending a missile barrage into neighbouring towns and cities, they didn’t threaten to annihilate the Lebanese people, but they were brutally slaughtered.

The Lebanese did not allow in any journalists. Pictures of the devastation have been carefully suppressed.

The camp was not bombed for three weeks but for 3 MONTHS!

This is what Michael Birmingham had to say on 25th October 2007 on the Information Clearing House website:

Between May and September of this year, a ferocious battle took place between the Lebanese Army and a small armed group known as Fatah Al Islam. From the first the day, the Lebanese Army surrounded the camp and fired in artillery, maintaining this course for months. Most of the residents of the camp were forced to leave with the clothes on their backs within the first three days. As the number of young Lebanese soldiers killed and horribly maimed rose through the battle, Lebanon became awash with patriotism and grief, any questioning of the army taboo.

Something terrible has been done to the residents of Nahr al Bared, and the Lebanese people are being spared the details. Over the past two weeks, since the camp was partly reopened to a few of its residents, many of us who have been there have been stunned by a powerful reality. Beyond the massive destruction of the homes from three months of bombing, room after room, house after house have been burned. Burned from the inside. Amongst the ashes on the ground, are the insides of what appear to have been car tyres. The walls have soot dripping down from what seems clearly to have been something flammable sprayed on them. Rooms, houses, shops, garages – all blackened ruins, yet having had no damage from bombing or battle. They were burned deliberately by people entering and torching them.

How many we do not know; it is too large for a few people to comprehensively assess. But finding an un-bombed house or a business that has not been torched is very hard indeed.

(http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18618.htm)

Basically THE ENTIRE CAMP was destroyed by the Lebanese army. Was this not a prima facie war crime? Was this not worthy of world-wide condemnation, ICC war crimes investigations and those other instruments being used to attack Israel?

Unfortunately the residents of Nahr el-Bared do not have the propaganda machines working for them, but what is incomprehensible is that they do not even appear to have the interest of their fellow Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

But perhaps it’s not so incomprehensible after all. In fact, it’s blindingly obvious. Hamas and the PA don’t care about Palestinians who are not fighting Israel because there is no political ground to be gained. Accusing the Lebanese does nothing to further their aims of destroying Israel by arms or by political stealth.

Meanwhile the BBC reports today (here):

Palestinians have been here for more than 60 years – since the creation of Israel – but they are still barred from at least 70 professions, have no access to state education or healthcare, and cannot move freely or buy land.

These conditions turn the Palestinian camps into a breeding ground for extremism, a time bomb which will inevitably explode

It sounds to me that these Palestinians have it considerably worse than those in Gaza but are ignored by the world and the Arab world especially. The BBC adds:

The UN’s relief agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has only managed to raise $43m (£31m) to rebuild the camp – a tiny fraction of the $430m needed. Lebanon’s rich neighbours in the Gulf have not delivered the funds they pledged. 

Can the world not see the utter moral bankruptcy of the Arab world with regard to these people. But still it’s Israel and Israel alone which is being demonised and delegitimised around the world by Arab and Muslim hypocrites who allow hundreds of thousands to die in Sudan whilst sending support to the evil regime of al-Bashir and turn a blind eye to their fellows in Lebanon many of whom, despite the BBC’s assertion, were actually expelled from Jordan, another state that has washed its hands of the Palestinians.

The PA’s sick logic

05/03/2009 / / 0 Comments

I recently wrote about how many Palestinians have sought medical treatment in Israel.

Now Israel’s ‘peace partners’ cannot bear that Israel might be seen in a good light. So what do they do? They further emiserate the lives of their own people:

The Palestinian Authority has announced that it will stop sending sick Arabs to Israeli hospitals and will cut off funds to local residents who use Israeli medical facilities. “Israel cannot be allowed to render medical aid at the same time it is killing us,” said PA Health Minister Fathi abu Marlee.

So reports Arutz Sheva today. So yet again the Palestinian leadership not only fails its own people but blatantly uses them in its propaganda battle against Israel. It would rather they die than be treated by Israelis.

Tragic.

The hypocrisy of the Science Museum boycotters

04/03/2009 / / 0 Comments

The Science Museum has come under an unprecedented attack by a group of 400 academics.

The Zionist Federation has organised two Israel Day of Science events at the Science Museum in London and its sister museum in Manchester.

The academics who are aligned with supporters of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (Bricup) argue that such events give “respectability” to universities in Israel which are linked to the Israeli military and which are, therefore, so they argue, complicit in the recent Gaza conflict.

The Science Museum is resisting this effort to add to the long list of Israel demonizers, de-legitimisers and boycotters.

Clearly, the fact that the organisers have the word “Zionist” in their name is like a red rag to a bull(y).

To these people any contact with Israel or Israeli institutions, however worthy or non-political is to be condemned.

Whilst such events clearly have a propaganda aspect to promote Israel and its outstanding achievements in all areas of science, this is no different from similar events which all countries organise.

Israeli science is second to none and has brought untold benefits to mankind totally out of proportion to its population.  It is important that the world see this side of Israel instead of the constant flow of negative images and reporting.

It is clear that these academics view Israel as a pariah to be singled out for boycotting and academic disengagement.

But if this is the case then these academics and Bricup at hypocrites.

Do they support the daily assault on southern Israel which caused an almost complete breakdown of school life in Sderot and its neighbourhood? Would they therefore be as forthright in boycotting a Palestinian science event were it to take place? I don’t think so.

Recently there was an exhibition at the British Museum of Iranian art and culture. Would Bricup contemplate demonstrations against this exhibition because Iran is building nuclear weapons and supplying arms (presumably developed by Iranian scientists)  to Hamas and Hezbollah so they can be used indiscriminately against Israeli civilians?  And if they would argue that such an exhibition is not scientific and therefore a different issue, then it could be equally argued that an Israeli Science Day where the presenters are particle physicists working at CERN, hydrologists, nano-technologists and geneticists has absolutely nothing to do with the military.

And what if it had? Do not British scientists and American scientists and Arab scientists and Chinese scientists work at universities where military technology is studied, produced and even tested?

Will we have no exhibitions of science at all then? Are not some of these very academics engaged, perhaps, in scientific enquiry that could have military use? Maybe not.

This has nothing to do with science and everything to do with the obsession of a certain cadre in British academe that has an animus against one country above all others. Why is this? Go figure.

Andy Roddick – a mensch

27/02/2009 / / 1 Comment

I seem to have overlooked the strong stance Andy Roddick took when he boycotted the Dubai Tennis Championship after Shahar Pe’er had been denied a visa.

What’s more, he was the defending champion.

His decision is brave and ethical. 

Andy Roddick is a mensch.

King Christian had the right idea

23/02/2009 / / 0 Comments

During the Nazi occupation of Denmark, King Christian X once discussed with a minister the prospect of the Germans introducing the wearing of the Yellow Star for his Jewish subjects.  He is recorded as having suggested that if that ever came to pass all Danes should wear it, including himself. Contrary to popular myth, it never happened; the wearing of the Yellow Star was never introduced in Denmark, probably because the Danish people, surely one of the most heroic in all Europe, managed to smuggle almost every Jew (about 5000 including some of my relatives I am told) into neutral Sweden overnight.

This story gave me an idea. Let all WTP tennis professionals agree to have their passports stamped by Israeli immigration, then let’s see what happens next time someone tries to delegitimise Israel and its citizens by denying them access to a tennis tournament.

Pe’er pressure pays

23/02/2009 / / 0 Comments

As previously noted Dubai seems to have recanted its policy of banning Israeli tennis players by allowing Andy Ram to play having caused an almighty row over its original decision to ban Shahar Peer.

Now the WTP has fined the Dubai Championship $300,000 and compensated Ms Pe’er for $44,250.

Whilst I applaud the WTP’s stance I still believe that tournaments should not be held in country which does not recognise the nationality of WTP members.

Israel has been a country by vote in the UN sinc 1948. The UAE is also a member of the UN and it’s about time this nonense of not recognising Israel’s existence were ended. I don’t expect the Arab and Muslim states to like Israel but there is no foundation to any failure to recognise.

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