Israel vs. Middle Eastern Arab states

[Gibber]

The first programme on the BBC that I've seen that hasn't been totally anti-Israel.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00thr24/Panorama_Death_in_the_Med/

 

Thanks Balen report

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balen_Report

 

Its also probably the reason I don't have to sit through Orla Guerin and Barbara Plett's lies about Israel. The dirty feckers.

[DamnSaxon]

The first programme on the BBC that I've seen that hasn't been totally anti-Israel.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00thr24/Panorama_Death_in_the_Med/

 

You know, it never fails to amaze me how two people can look at the same thing and see it totally, irreconcilably differently. Gib, somehow, you perceive the BBC as being "totally anti-Israel". I, on the basis of exactly the same evidence, perceive it as an invidious stream of insidious pro-Israeli propaganda, with a regular supply of Israeli spokesmen pumping out - well, whatever it is that Israel wants us all to believe this week.

 

"Death in the Med" was certainly an outstanding programme, though. It was one of the purest pieces of Israeli propagandising I think they've ever produced - someone should get an award for it. Yep, "anti-Israel" it absolutely wasn't. There, at least, we can agree.

 

Frankly, I agree with the excellent Ken O'Keefe: it was a beautiful gift from the BBC, a perfect, object lesson in producing propaganda.

[Gibber]

Gib, somehow, you perceive the BBC as being "totally anti-Israel".

 

Somehow? A few years ago my partner was amazed at how they had mistranslated the Hebrew from someone they were interviewing to mean almost the complete opposite of what he was saying. This is literally lying to the audience. BBC correspondents telling the audience about how they cried when they saw Arafat's body being helicoptered away. I don't think there is a somehow.

 

I, on the basis of exactly the same evidence, perceive it as an invidious stream of insidious pro-Israeli propaganda, with a regular supply of Israeli spokesmen pumping out - well, whatever it is that Israel wants us all to believe this week.

 

Is that because "the Jews" control the media...

 

Count the Conservative - and Labour - "Friends of Israel" in our own government. Couple of percent? Count the most powerful positions in the White House, even under Obama, and its environs. Couple of percent? Watch in astonishment as the twice-discredited Mandelson schmoozes with David Geffen at one of the Rothschild mansions and returns to declare war on the filesharers allegedly damaging the interests of the media business. Try not to notice that Monica Lewinsky was a rabbi's daughter, or that the editor who commissioned those "Danish cartoons" which spread such hatred between Islam and Christianity just happened to be a Jewish mate of the White House lot. Once you become aware of it, it's remarkably hard to miss the fact that there are outstandingly disproportionate numbers of Jews the higher you get in the power, money and influence hierarchy.

 

 

...along with the rest of the world throughout history?

 

Does it not strike anyone else as a tad unusual that an ethnic group comprising maybe a couple of percent of the populations involved somehow contrived to provide practically all the major players for something on the scale of a world war - not to mention most of the funding for both "sides"? It does me, I'm afraid.

 

I have not felt the same about accounts of WWII since discovering the Jewish roots of Churchill, Eisenhower, Roosevelt and Stalin ... casts rather a different light on things, that.

[DamnSaxon]

Well, I'm certainly not the only one with serious doubts about the BBC's vaunted "impartiality", nor about Israel's over-enthusiastic militarism. Mairead Maguire fully agrees with me about this programme, as does Lauren Booth about Israel's modus operandi.

 

As for "mistranslation", I'd recommend people to read about how practically all the "al-Quaida" BS you hear and see in the Western media seems to originate with the "SITE" "News" agency run by Rita Katz in ... oh, Israel. No propaganda channel there, then. As I said, we see the same stuff, but notice quite different bits of it.

 

Perhaps we should try both listening to or watching, say, a week or two of BBC news and comparing notes. I'm pretty sure the exercise would prove my point rather than yours. Mind you, after listening to all the BBC's "news" output for a week, we might both end up with terminal brain damage.

[Gibber]

Well, I'm certainly not the only one with serious doubts about.....Israel's over-enthusiastic militarism.

 

That's right, I would say your opinions on Israel are in the majority.

 

Mairead Maguire fully agrees with me about this programme.

 

Dear BBC Panorama Team

 

I write to you regarding your programme of 16th August, 2010, about

 

The Freedom Flotilla and particularly the killings of unarmed civilians by Israeli Navy Seals on the ship MV “Mavi Marmara’, on 3lst May, 2010.

 

So you both think these crew members of the Mavi were unarmed and "uniting in nonviolent resistance" yet the BBC is displaying bias by showing this unarmed non-violent resistance?

 

The BBCs use of this footage, for you and Mairead Maguire can only be either accurate non biased footage of unarmed non-violent resistance or inaccurate biased footage of violent armed resistance.

 

 

I would say its accurate non biased footage of violent armed resistance. Perhaps you can explain how I'm wrong.

[shetlandpeat]

The result of guns v bats has got folk talking again. Was the ship not in international waters. Any how, another flotilla is being planned.

[Gibber]

If I took a metal bar to your head I wouldn't have the gall to come pleepsing to anybody that would listen if you used a firearm to defend yourself. I'd feel like a cretin.

 

You're right, more cretins will try to provoke Israel. Perhaps they will be shot too.

[EM]

... the Jewish roots of Churchill, Eisenhower, Roosevelt and Stalin ...

Don't forget Adolf. For a while the Frankenberger hypothesis was considered possible, then it was dismissed. Now there seems to be some hard DNA evidence of a Jewish or Berber haplogroup in the family. He'd have loved that I'm sure .

[Gibber]

Yes, what different light would you view WW2 in considering Hitler's Jewish roots Damn Saxon?

 

Another example of the Jews historical arrogance as you would call it?

 

I have wondered often whether the Romans' "solution" to the problem was the result of the Jews of the time acting with the same sort of chauvinistic arrogance as the present extremist element controlling Israel.

 

Like the Romans expelling the Jews we defeated Hitler (Jew), we can defeat the current Israeli Zionazi stormtroopers too seems to be a solution that, well, both of you would crusade for.

[DamnSaxon]

If I took a metal bar to your head I wouldn't have the gall to come pleepsing to anybody that would listen if you used a firearm to defend yourself.

Gibber, if I'd sprayed your civilian vessel with gunfire from a military helicopter and support boats, and swarmed down onto it with my team of heavies, I'd say you had every right to go for me with anything and everything you might have to hand. As Ken O'Keefe said at the time, their (temporary) home was under attack; they defended it as best they could.

 

As for your claim that a few metal rods off the handrails of the ship, chairs, or the impressive array of mostly kitchen knives shown on Panorama count as "armed" resistance in the face of a full-on aerial assault from a highly trained military force, there's really nothing I can say. It's just the Israeli government's argument all over again, and I think most people would see it as, at least, rather overstated. (Side issue: How can you declare any of the video clips from one side to be "accurate non biased footage" when you are not seeing any clips from the other side to compare them with?)

 

Re Adolf himself, well, what can you say? I'd heard the rumours, of course, but deliberately didn't include him in my original list precisely because I only knew them as rumours. Given that our faourite newspaper of record (/irony) sported this article from a Belgian mag this week, might as well add him to the mix. If anyone can find any pictures of Benito Mussolini hanging around the local synagogue as a boy, that'd be just about the full set for WWII. I have to admit that the more of this stuff turns up, the more completely bemused I feel about what, exactly, was going on.

 

I love the way the Mail says that Hitler was "biologically linked to the 'sub-human' races he sought to exterminate". I'm sure a modern PR firm would "emphasise the positive" and point out that at least he had the integrity to exterminate himself, too.

 

There was a reasonably thoughtful comment in the Telegraph, here, from Julian Kossoff. He concludes (incidentally, I believe he intended "substitute for addressing", not "substitute for avoiding")

Ultimately, continually demonising the BBC, one way or the other, is to wage a pointless war. Obsessing over the minutiae of its news reports has become a substitute for avoiding the fundamental and emotionally demanding questions that need to be addressed if the Israel-Palestine conflict is ever to be resolved.

 

Quite so. The BBC's partisan coverage of Middle East affairs, however reprehensible, is not the issue - although certainly worthy of comment given their oft-trumpeted "impartiality". The issue is how the Hades the appalling situation in that area can be resolved without too many more thousands of people having to die. And that is a job for very high-level diplomacy, not for propaganda machines, and certainly not for hairtrigger military over-reaction against civilian vessels in international waters.

[Gibber]

Gibber, if I'd sprayed your civilian vessel with gunfire from a military helicopter and support boats, and swarmed down onto it with my team of heavies, I'd say you had every right to go for me with anything and everything you might have to hand.

 

But they didn't spray the vessel (or any of the other vessels) with gunfire from the helicopters though. Why would they? If the deck had been sprayed with gunfire there would not be anyone left on the deck, they would be dead or in hiding, instead they were waiting in numbers for the troops directly underneath the helicopters. The Turkish autopsies of the dead did not conclude they had been shot from helicopters.

 

So what right do the militia (who had armed themselves long before the boarding, had spoken about bringing a conflict to the IDF and were a part of a group whose aim it was to do just that) have to attempt to murder them? And what right have they got to boo hoo to the world when the IDF defends itself?

 

As for your claim that a few metal rods off the handrails of the ship, chairs, or the impressive array of mostly kitchen knives shown on Panorama count as "armed" resistance

 

Armed resistance is what being clubbed with metal bars and being stabbed with knives is. There is also a claim of being shot at. That is also armed resistance. If an Israeli soldier clubbed stabbed and possibly shot a Palestinian would you claim these the actions of an unarmed man?

 

(Side issue: How can you declare any of the video clips from one side to be "accurate non biased footage" when you are not seeing any clips from the other side to compare them with?)

 

There is already footage from 'cultures of resistance' which shows the premeditated violence, and shows the preparations for violence and the vociferous rhetoric that went along with it (it’s all in the thread above). All the footage should be released by Israel though.

 

Re Adolf himself….

 

You haven’t actually said what the different light is you see history in now that Hitler and Mussolini are now also “The Jewsâ€.

 

I, on the basis of exactly the same evidence, perceive it as an invidious stream of insidious pro-Israeli propaganda, with a regular supply of Israeli spokesmen pumping out - well, whatever it is that Israel wants us all to believe this week.

 

You’re wrong to think there is actually anything wrong with Israeli spokesmen putting their point of view across on the BBC. As long as it’s balanced by Palestinian (or whoever) spokesmen doing the same which it almost always is. Reporting the non existent Jenin Massacre, or that Al Dura was killed by the IDF or crying over Arafat or mistranslating Hebrew or Jermey Bowen’s snide digs or using my licence money to keep the Balen report secret is wrong though because it is bias.

 

Quite so. The BBC's partisan coverage of Middle East affairs, however reprehensible, is not the issue - although certainly worthy of comment given their oft-trumpeted "impartiality".

 

It’s an important issue.

 

The issue is how the Hades the appalling situation in that area can be resolved without too many more thousands of people having to die.

 

True, this is the more important issue.

[ArabiaTerra]

So what right do the militia (who had armed themselves long before the boarding, had spoken about bringing a conflict to the IDF and were a part of a group whose aim it was to do just that) have to attempt to murder them? And what right have they got to boo hoo to the world when the IDF defends itself?

You missed a step here, Gibber.

 

Q. What right did the IDF have to drop commandos on a civilian ship in international waters?

 

A. None, it was piracy.

 

Everything which followed, including the deaths was caused by this act of lunacy which initiated the incident in the first place.

[Gibber]

Q. What right did the IDF have to drop commandos on a civilian ship in international waters?

 

A. None, it was piracy.

 

Everything which followed, including the deaths was caused by this act of lunacy which initiated the incident in the first place.

 

So it would be ok for you if it wasn't in international waters.

 

Legal, Section 67 (a) San Remo and moral, to stop Hamas killing Israeli civilians.

 

As with all legislation or point of authority it is open to interpretation. Stopping civilians getting killed by Hamas isn't really open to interpretaion though and in my opinion moral authority supercedes written law.

 

How can it be piracy in any other sense than EM's biased use? Namely, if Israel does something its a crime, if Israel does anything within a maritime setting its piracy.

[ArabiaTerra]

Q. What right did the IDF have to drop commandos on a civilian ship in international waters?

 

A. None, it was piracy.

 

Everything which followed, including the deaths was caused by this act of lunacy which initiated the incident in the first place.

 

So it would be ok for you if it wasn't in international waters.

It would have been better, though still not ok.

 

Legal, Section 67 (a) San Remo and moral, to stop Hamas killing Israeli civilians.

In what way was an aid convoy killing Israeli civilians? Seriously. There were no weapons found on the ships.

 

As with all legislation or point of authority it is open to interpretation. Stopping civilians getting killed by Hamas isn't really open to interpretaion though and in my opinion moral authority supercedes written law.

There were no weapons found on the ships.

 

How can it be piracy in any other sense than EM's biased use? Namely, if Israel does something its a crime, if Israel does anything within a maritime setting its piracy.

 

Why do you find it so impossible to admit that the Israeli's might have f*cked this one up?

 

Why is it so difficult for you to admit that there is no right side or wrong side in this conflict, that both sides have committed crimes and atrocities?

[Gorgonzola Butt-cheese]

Well said Arabia Terra.