Anti-Israel bias on BBC's Newsnight?

The BBC's flagship news and current affairs programme Newsnight demonstrated what appeared to be a blatant example of the anti-Israel bias of which the corporation is frequently accused last night (02.06.10) when presenter Jeremy Paxman repeatedly referred to the IDF's boarding of the "aid ship" Mavi Marmara as an "attack." The show in its entirety - including excellent features on life inside Gaza and North Korea - can be seen here. In doing so, the BBC may well have failed utterly in its duty to remain impartial at all times, so I've just fired off a quick complaint which can be read below:

"While I understand Jeremy Paxman is fully entitled to his own beliefs, I would like to make a complaint over his continual use of the term "attack" in reference to Israel's raid upon the Mavi Marmara on Monday the 31st of May during his interview with US Assistant Secretary of State Philip J Crowley. At one point, Crowley took issue with this, leading Paxman to crowingly ask which other term could be used. How about "interception?"

While I have sufficent respect for Paxman as a journalist to convince me that he is above anti-Israeli prejudice, the word "attack" suggests that Israel's actions were aggressive and reprehensible, whereas there is a great deal of evidence to support their claims that they made several invitations for the vessel to dock in Israel where the cargo could be inspected and delivered to Gaza - after all, Israel surely is within its rights to take steps aimed at protecting its people from violence and, as it distributes 15,000 tons of aid to the region each week has the infrastructure to do so - and that it was in fact the activists on board who instigated the violence. At present we do not know and will not until any inquiry is complete - however, I feel that the BBC completely failed its duty to remain impartial during this broadcast."

Was Jeremy Paxman's insistence on referring to Monday's events as an "attack" acceptable and/or justifiable?

Hopefully, I'm not the only one - if you saw the broadcast either on television or online and felt similarly angered, why not consider making a complaint of your own via the BBC's website?

I've requested a reply and will keep you posted.

Frankie Boyle: Israel "terrorist"

Your analogy would be worth something, Frankie, only if the cake regularly fired explosive candles into towns inhabited by unarmed civilians and taught its little cupcakes that all Jews are evil and should be destroyed.

Frankie Boyle - no stranger to controversy with his briefly-funny-but-becoming-tiresome brand of shock humour - is in the headlines after claiming that Israel is a terrorist state in a response to the BBC's decision to apologise for a joke the Scottish comedian made in which he claimed to be learning an Israeli martial art - "I know sixteen ways to kick a Palestinian woman in the back," he said.

In his response, he states that “The situation in Palestine seems to be, in essence, apartheid. I grew up with the anti-apartheid thing being a huge focus of debate. It really seemed to matter to everybody that other human beings were being treated in that way. We didn’t just talk about it, we did things, I remember boycotts and marches and demos all being held because we couldn’t bear that people were being treated like that.” He also mentioned the BBC 2009 decision not to broadcast a humanitarian appeal aimed at helping the people of Gaza, which in the Corporation's opinion was sufficiently biased towards the anti-Israel movement that broadcast contravened the strict impartiality clause that makes up an important part of its mandate, claiming that the BBC is "now cravenly afraid of giving offence and vulnerable to any kind of well drilled lobbying."

The full letter can be read here.

The joke ended with Boyle saying, “I've got an analogy which explains the whole thing quite well: if you imagine that Palestine is a cake – well, that cake is being punched to pieces by a very angry Jew.”

That would be worth something, Frankie, only if the cake regularly fired explosive candles into towns inhabited by unarmed civilians and taught its little cupcakes that all Jews are evil and should be destroyed by any means possible, including blowing yourself up. You said, as part of the joke in question, that "People think that the Middle East is very complex" - that's because it is. It's much more complex than your analogy suggests, and when it comes to Israel and Palestine neither side is as pure as the driven snow. While your brand of humour doesn't require any in-depth research, make sure you have at least some idea of what you're talking about. You look like an idiot otherwise.

Orca kills trainer

A trainer at the SeaWorld wildlife park in Orlando, Florida, has died after being bitten around the waist, violently shaken and held under water by one of the park's orcas. Read the BBC's report here.

The orca - also known as a killer whale and named Tilikum - has also been linked to the death of a man at the park in 1991, though it transpires that the man was found floating naked and dead in the orca's pool and is believed to have either crept into the park at night or hidden until closing time. Authorities put his death down to hypothermia rather than a fatal case of orcas and one can only suspect that, due to his nakedness, he might well be a candidate for a Darwin Award if we knew more. Other - as yet un-named - orcas are said to have attacked trainers in 2004 and 2006.

An orca, that happened to be passing Acid Rabbi's flat as we wrote this article.

Public domain image from Wikipedia.

Orcas, while weighing a respectable 5,450kg and equipped with the sort of teeth that scare dragons, are not generally known to attack humans despite the fact that for an orca to eat a human would be no more hassle that it is for an obese teenager to eat a Big Mac (and we probably taste better too). There a number of cases, in fact, in which wild orcas have shown what can only be interpreted as a friendly interest in the humans with which they come into contact.

If wild orcas, which need to spend time thinking about where their next meal is coming from rather than sitting back and waiting for the next bucket of herrings, rarely attack humans why would a captive orca want to kill its trainer? After all, it'd be used to human contact and you don't drown the hand that chucks the herrings into your pool.

Doesn't it suggest that SeaWorld is doing something wrong? Zoos have their purpose - there a several species of animal that today only survive because of specimens in zoos, some of which have been used to establish new wild populations - but an animal as undoubtedly intelligent as an orca is never going to take to captivity too kindly unless provided with a suitably vast pool (when the entire ocean has been your playground you're not going to like swimming around inside what in comparison isn't even a molecule of water) and will require a vast amount of stimulation.

We hope SeaWorld will look at why their orcas are attacking humans, rather than blaming the orcas themselves.

Anti-Israel bias at the BBC

I am, and have always been, a very great fan of the BBC. I watch many of their excellent dramas and documentaries, I love to watch films without finding myself becoming increasingly irritated by advert breaks every ten minutes and most of all I adore their excellent nature programmes. If they could wrestle The Simpsons back from Channel 4 (where every show is interrupted by adverts before the story even gets started) I'd be entirely happy with the service...well, if they replaced EastEnders with something not quite so mind-numbingly tedious, anyway - though since EastEnders is watched by millions I'll accept it has its place in the world and that I'm likely to be heavily out-voted on that one.


Since Operation Cast Lead there has been a notable rise in those voices accusing the Beeb of displaying anti-Israel bias, voices further fuelled by the decision to allow BNP leader Nick Griffin to appear on Question Time. However, I've never felt this to be the case: I've always thought that the BBC does an admirable job of keeping any form of bias out of its news programming, one from which other channels and certain newspapers could learn a lot. But I'm pained to say that, last night, I was presented with what to me seems undeniable evidence that what the BBC's accusers claim might just be true.

The Noughties...was that it? (9pm, BBC3) was a fun sort of programme otherwise - a vaguely cynical yet affectionate look at the years between 2000 and the present, the fads and crazes, the celebs and popular stories. The sections on chavs and hoodies even did a rather good job at directing humour not at the chavs and hoodies themselves but at those whose sole aim in life seems to be the demonisation of Britain's young people (take note, any newspapers that felt they might be the ones I meant when I said "certain newspapers" in the previous paragraph). But the section on flash mobs - that brief craze whereby a message is sent via SMS, e-mail and Bluetooth in an attempt to gather strangers in a public place who then do something en masse such as perform the YMCA dance or, as in The Noughties..., the Do Re Mi song from The Sound of Music (you may never have heard of it - businesses rapidly cottoned onto the fact that the phenomenon offered a fantastic and virtually cost-free way to generate free advertising and as a result it became deeply uncool immediately) - contained a worrying segment.

If you missed it (which seems unlikely, as there was absolutely nothing else worth any attention anywhere on British television last night), you can still see it on iPlayer at the time of writing. Fast forward to 0:09:08 for the exact bit in question.

Hundreds of young Israelis gather in the street and have a giant pillow fight. It looks like great fun, too. But listen to the narrator: "...and then, there was the time that Israelis decided to fight with each other instead of their neighbours..."

This, I really don't need to point out, suggests to the uniformed viewer that Israel is an aggressive and warlike nation that regularly decides to attack other countries for no apparent reason. In case you're not familiar with Israeli foreign policy and the conflicts with which she has been involved, let's have a brief look at some of those conflicts. We'll start with the Six Day War which began with Israel's pre-emptive strike against forces formed of Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian troops - but why did Israel launch this strike? Because those neighbouring nations had gathered their military close to Israel's borders and were blocking her access to the Red Sea. Conclusion - Israel was reacting to offensive action carried out by hostile forces.

On October the 6th, 1973, the Yom Kippur War began after Egypt and Syria lauched surprise attacks on Israel, which suffered heavy losses while repelling the attack. Conclusion: Israel was once again attacked by hostile forces, and in response took measures to defend itself.

In 1982, Israel became involved in the Lebanese Civil War when it destroyed military bases which had been used by the PLO to lauch missiles aimed at northern Israel. Conclusion: Israel had been under attack from hostile forces and defended herself.

Under Ariel Sharon, Israel withdrew troops from Gaza
- where their presence had attracted widespread condemnation from many quarters. Hezbollah later mounted an artillery attack on Israel and kidnapped two IDF soldiers, sparking the Second Lebanon War. Conclusion: Israel accedes to Palestinian demands, but is attacked so once again is forced to defend herself.

On December the 18th, 2008, Hamas declared its six-month ceasefire with Israel at an end and by the 24th had begun a sustained wave of rocket attacks on Israeli settlements, bringing terror to Israeli civilians, destroying their homes and only by the grace of G-d not causing widespread death. Israel launched airstrikes, attacking military bases, government buildings and police stations - civilian buildings were damaged during the attacks, but to date there is no evidence that they were intentionally targeted. Hamas then stepped up its attacks, with many Israeli civilian facilities hit. Israel responded with a ground invasion on January the 3rd and withdrew troops on the 21st. Conclusion: Israel and her citizens were under daily attack and Israel took steps to bring the threat to an end.

The UN Human Rights Council has decided that Israel is entirely to blame for the Palestinians killed during the recent Gaza War and makes no mention of reprimanding Hamas despite the recommendations made by the Goldstone Report. When it comes to popular opinion, the jury is still out - many people, both Jewish and otherwise, are still making up their minds over whether or not Israel acted fairly at all times during the war and if not, to which extent. Despite early anti-Israel sentiments, the general consensus seems to be heading in the direction of a feeling that whereas some of the methods employed were excessive, Israel sought only to defend its citizens from a very real and deadly threat. Those early anti-Israel sentiments took the form of widespread condemnation of not just Israel herself but also the Jews in other nations who in the popular mind are so closely associated with Israel; and as a result led to a massive increase in attacks on synagogues, Jewish graves, Jewish property and Jews themselves.

Thankfully, those attacks have tailed off and are now at the more normal levels which, sadly, surprise none of us. That is why neither Israel nor Jews in any other countries will benefit from instances where seemingly-inconsequential little bits of anti-Israel bias are allowed to slip through into the public sphere. Israel is not an agressive nation and Jews are not an agressive people, but there are still many people who would like to see both destroyed. The BBC is is a position to help in preventing this from happening and surely has a duty to do so.

Right, I'm off to make a complaint to the BBC. I hope that I won't be the only one - you can do the same by following this link. I hope you will do so - a throw-away comment such as this one might seem of little importance, but they serve to confirm the prejudices of those who believe that Israel and, by association, Jews, are dangerous and a threat to peace.

Let's keep Griffin and the BNP where we can watch them

Well, well, well. Didn't Nick Griffin do well on Question Time last night? Of course, when I say "do well," I mean he did well for us rather than for him and his disgraceful little band of bigots - he revealed himself as the poisonous idiot that he is.

BNP leader Nick Griffin, probably not listening to the latest Wu Tang Clan album.

For those who didn't see it (like, where were you?! See it right after reading this by clicking the Question Time link in the paragraph above), a large part of the show went something like this: David Dimbleby: "Mr. Griffin, how do you explain your comments concerning X, in which you stated that X is evil/unBritish/etc.?" Griffin: "Oh no, no, no. I never said that. The newspapers and the BBC said I did, bit I didn't." Dimbleby: "But Mr. Griffin - it's on video. There is a record proving you said it." Griffin: "Er...oh yeah. I did say it. [ridiculous smirk, possibly intended to look charmingly boyish but actually looking more like the exagerrated facial expressions of a man who realises he's being made to look like a fool]."

Time and time again, Griffin vomited up the revolting rhetoric we expect of him and his ilk, and time and time again the main party guests used the most effective weapon that those of us who oppose the BNP's policies have - they simply replied with cold, hard, logical common sense and facts. It works like a charm - nothing the BNP say can survive this sort of attack. Every single one of their arguments withers and dies if there's even the merest whiff of intelligent, empirical reasoning in the air.

Acid Rabbi was pleased that the BBC allowed Griffin a platform last night, despite the widespread attempts to stop them so doing. Not because of the right to free speech; which, it seems to me, should apply only to those who support such a right (Griffin, like all fascists, does not - he would prefer to silence those with viewpoints different to his own, and in doing so forfeits his right to that freedom), but because we need to keep these people out in the open where we can keep an eye on them. Did the National Front conveniently vanish in the 1980s after the Anti-Nazi League and other groups responded in physical terms? Unfortunately not - they just retreated underground where they festered for a few years and - once they'd had time to recover up they popped like the weeds that take over your lawn every summer. Many of them had decided to change their name, adopting that of 1960s far-right movement the British National Party and remain with that title to this day but they were the same old racist, homophobic, anti-semitic and, despite their own claims, anti-British Nazis that they always had been. Keep them where we can see them - and, what's more, it's much easier to attack someone when they're where Mr. Griffin was last night - a person on a podium is a very easy target.

There were some worries that the show's audience would be taken over by BNP supporters, but this did not happen - rather surprisingly, because Griffin likes to have a few big men backing him up at all times. There were one or two, of course, but all in all it represented British society rather well. OK, a million people voted BNP in the last elections and that's a million too many. But there are 49,138,831 people in England alone. 11,132,847 of those are children. So assume there are around 38,005,984 adults able to vote - whether they do or not is a different matter - and we can see that far from being currently on the crest of a wave of popular support, only around 1 in every 40 people voted BNP (many of these people are probably not even racists - some will have voted BNP as a protest vote against the main parties and some may have fallen for the BNP's lies when it claims to be a democratic party that represents the nation's best interests). There is, after all, a big difference between voting BNP and being a member of the BNP - far more than is the case with the other parties (they have a total of members. If the BNP really spoke for the country's best interests, surely 11,560more than 0.02% of the population would scrape up the £30 a year it costs to join?). The audience at the very least approximately reflected this, and it shows that Griffin's attempts today to write off Question Time as no more than a "Let's all bash Nick Griffin" event is rubbish. It was not a carefully-planned exercise aimed at discrediting him - simply yet more evidence that if you take a random cross section of British society, the majority will have passionately anti-racist views.

The BNP have around 50 councillors at the moment, but it's interesting that those areas which elect BNP representatives very rarely do so twice. Perhaps it only takes a bit of apathy, one election with a low turn-out, for the BNP to get in - but once they are, the local electorate get rid of them again as soon as they have the chance. Maybe sometimes a sufficient number of people get fed up with the main parties' failings that they decide to vote BNP - but again, once they've had some experience of what life is like when the BNP get any power, they soon turf the fascists out again. This is reflected in the party's membership lists, which were once again laid bare for all to inspect this week following the appearance of a leaked one online (that's right - another one): of the twenty constituencies with BNP members, only four recorded an increase in member figure between the end of 2007 and April 2009 . With these facts in mind, it seems obvious that the BNP have very little real support, far less than Mr. Griffin tries to convince both himself and the world in general, and the only chance they ever have of getting into power is when people who are not BNP supporters vote for them. I'll bet a fiver that both Griffin himself and Andrew Brons lose their European Parliament seats in the 2014 EU election.

Let's keep Mr. Griffin right where we can see him so we all know what he really stands for. That way, his nasty gang of racist thugs will have to rely on the very limited numbers of true supporters they have. They won't get the message that they're not wanted and go away, unfortunately, but we will at least know that here in Britain, with its liberal, tolerant, multi-cultural, welcoming and above all decent society, they will never get the power they crave.

Amusing Headline of the Day

Haddock in court over 1997 murder

(real story here)

MP blusters about expense claims live on BBC

Labour peer Lord Foulkes (pictured right) appeared on the lunchtime BBC news today and attempted to defend his colleague's ludicrous expense claims. Carrie Gracie, a presenter on the broadcaster's 24 hour news channel, asked the peer if he agreed with those demading that ministers and MPs who abused the expenses system should have to pay back the money they claimed for. But the poor woman must have felt as though she'd been viciously attacked by a damp tissue when he turned on her in an attempt to divert attention from himself, asking her how much she was being paid for conducting the interview. Proving she's a lot more open about her finances than most politicians, Ms. Gracie informed him that she receives a salary of £92,000 per annum. He replied that she was being paid "nearly twice as much as an MP to come on and talk nonsense," obviously unaware that the current basic salary for an MP is £64,766 - which, in fact, is £22,766 more than half of Gracie's wage and a good wodge of cash more than the average UK family's income of approximately £32,799. But then, if you can get your swimming pool cleaned out like some MPs have been doing recently and then have the tax-payer foot the bill, I expect you soon lose all track of the value of money. Lord Foulkes then accused the BBC and other media of paying no attention to all the good work carried out by MPs and claimed that newsreaders including Jeremy Paxman and John Humphreys "come on TV and sneer at democracy and undermine democracy. The vast majority of MPs are being undermined by you." Perhaps he feels that MP's activities should not be open to public scrutiny? Gracie showed grace when she apologised to the peer for interrupting him, to which Foulkes showed he's a fucker by replying, "You're not at all sorry to interrupt me - every time an MP comes on you constantly harass them."

Could we also point out that Gracie's salary is paid by the BBC, which none of us are forced to finance - if we feel it's unfair, we can avoid the cost by not having a television licence (whether or not you feel this means you should also not own a television is up to you) - whereas Foulkes' salary - like that of all Government ministers - is paid through taxes, which those of us who can't afford to piss off to some tax haven or another have no choice but to pay?