Blood Libels aka Euro Middle East Journalism Maimon Schwarzschild

It's a commonplace that the world media, particularly the European media, are hostile to Israel.  As Jonah Goldberg put it this week, there is a "nigh-upon global campaign to depict Israelis as the heirs to Hitler. Of course, ad hitlerum argumentation is just the tip of the propaganda spear.  “Aggression,” “apartheid,” “racist”: No insult is barred from the anti-Israel script."

Still, it's hard to imagine just how poisonous the anti-Israel "journalism" is in Europe, and perhaps nowhere worse than in the UK.  The "Independent" - one of the few self-styled "serious" newspapers in Britain - runs a daily section of articles by Robert Fisk, who serves up high-pitched anti-Israel propaganda, with an umistakable anti-semitic edge, in every article.  Here is the lead article from yesterday's "Fisk Section" in the Independent: "Entire Lebanese Family Killed in Israeli Attack on Hospital".  There are links at the bottom to Fisk's other shrill "advocacy journalism" yesterday: and note that there is a portfolio of these propaganda pieces every day in the Independent.  Read some of this, if you have the stomach for the sort of thing that might have come straight from the 1930s.

Or here is John Pilger, a fixture on one of Britain's major television networks, as well as in the British print media.  His propaganda rants make even Fisk sound "restrained":

The catastrophe in the Middle East is a product of such an imperial tyranny. It is clear that the long-planned assault on Gaza and now the destruction of Lebanon are Washington-ordained and pretexts for a wider campaign with the goal of installing American puppets in Lebanon, Syria and eventually Iran.

An Israeli soldier belonging to an invasion force was captured and held, legitimately, as a prisoner of war. Reported as a "kidnapping", this set off yet more slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The seizure of two Palestinian civilians two days before the capture of the soldier was of no interest. Neither was the incarceration of thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons, and the torture of many of them, as documented by Amnesty. The kidnapped soldier story cancelled any serious inquiry into Israel's plans to reinvade Gaza, from which it had staged a phoney withdrawal. The fact and meaning of Hamas's self-imposed 16-month ceasefire were lost in inanities about "recognising Israel", along with Israel's state of terror in Gaza - the dropping of a 500lb bomb on a residential block, the firing of as many as 9,000 heavy artillery shells into one of the most densely populated places on earth and the nightly terrorising with sonic booms.

The historical equivalent is not far from that of the Nazi bombardment and starvation of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto.

So goes Europe's feverish media war against the Jewish state.  This is the informational context in which the French Foreign Minister publicly praised Iran earlier this week as a "stabilising force in the Middle East", before nominally backtracking a few days later.

Comments

[dearieme]

Hang on, do keep a sense of proportion. Pilger is a daft Aussie leftie whose writings over the years led Auberon Waugh to invent the verb "to pilger", to cover the case of, shall we say, hysterical, biased ranting. Fisk is said to be the origin of the verb "to fisk", meaning to demolish an argument by revealing its factual inaccuracies, internal inconsistencies and illogic. The Independent is a once-decent paper in its death throes, but will never do damage to Western Civilisation on the scale of, lets say, the NYT.

[William Sjostrom]

Not to depress you further, but there is much worse out there than Fisk. Fisk spoke at my Irish university to a crowd of about 700 mostly university types. Although he was generally well received, he got grief from the audience on a couple of occasions. One was when he defended Dennis Ross. I recall one member of the audience got audience approval when he dismissed Ross as a tool of the Zionist entity. Fisk also defended the Irish Times' use of David Horovitz, then editor of the Jerusalem Report, as one of its Middle East stringers. The audience was more favorable to the creep who called the normally anti-Zionist Irish Times a Zionist tool because of it.