All those in favour of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, raise your hands now…

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“Hamas is the enemy not only of Jews, but of the Palestinians themselves. Israel hoped that when Gaza was evacuated it would become an economic powerhouse. Had that happened, many Israelis would have been prepared to withdraw from most of the West Bank. The purpose of Zionism, after all, was to provide a homeland for Jews, not to rule over another people. But Gaza chose a different path, electing Hamas in 2006; and when, in 2017, an Israeli minister said he would help Gaza economically if it renounced terror, Mahmoud al-zahar, a Hamas co-founder, said that if Gaza had wanted to be like Singapore, it would have done so already.” – Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government, King’s College, London. (Item in Daily Telegraph behind the paywall.) The professor delivers a succinct summation of the moral depravity of Hamas, and by those who, through evasion of the facts, seek to excuse its actions. As an aside, there is another reason that the writer doesn’t spell out for why Hamas will not renounce terror: it is in many ways like the Mafia, or what Sinn Fein/IRA was and became: a gangster group that enjoys the trappings of power, including the money (as shown by how some of its political leaders reside in comfort, hundreds of miles away, in Qatar, etc). Four days ago John Simpson of the BBC wrote this article, “Why BBC doesn’t call Hamas militants ‘terrorists’ – John Simpson”, in which he said, “It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn – who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.” It may not be in its job description – it may be contrary to its job description – but the BBC tells people who are the good guys and who are the bad guys all the time. Here is why I know that. For several years I was one of the contributors to the “Biased BBC” blog, which in those days was on Blogspot but now is at https://biasedbbc.tv/. Eventually, I gradually stopped posting there due to a combination of burnout and the political centre of gravity of the blog having moved away from my own views. But before that there was a period of years when I used to post some example of BBC bias almost every day. People would send them in, or I would see them myself. And there was never a day when I could find no example to cite; there were only days when I did not post because I was doing something other than the damn blog. As an exercise in nostalgia, yesterday morning I clicked on the BBC News website to see what I could see. And, just like the old days, I found something immediately. (I did not post it then because during the day I was doing something other than the damn blog.) Like John Simpson, Katya Adler, the BBC’s Europe editor, is a veteran BBC journalist who has done much good work. I’m sure she thinks of herself as impartial. I am sure that she genuinely did not see the words I am about to quote as endorsing or condemning any particular view. The article concerned is headlined “Polish election: Expected political earthquake delights Brussels”, and it includes the words:
The line about Polish politics is expressing an opinion. The line about abortion is expressing an opinion. Can a professional journalist like Ms Adler conceivably be unaware that the phrase “taking away women’s rights over their own bodies by virtually outlawing abortion”, assuming as it does that the foetus is merely part of the woman’s body, firmly takes one side in the abortion debate? The answer is yes, she can be unaware of it, because she is a well-connected, well-educated member of the more intellectual segment of the British upper middle class, who spends most of her time with colleagues of a similar background to herself. She joined the BBC in 1998. At that time the only major newspaper that carried BBC job adverts was the Guardian. It could be worse. The British chattering classes are often silly and vain, but those who rose to prominence in the 1970s, 80s and 90s still have much of the liberal ethos of their parents in them. They want to believe, and so they do believe, that the rest of the world shares their kindly liberal values. They particularly want to believe that all their colleagues in the BBC World Service are “BBC people” in the same sense they are. This belief is false. Since John Simpson posted his piece, it has come out that several of the BBC’s Arabic language correspondents felt it was their job to “tell people who to support and who to condemn”, and the answers were “Hamas” and “Israel” respectively: “BBC reporters in the Middle East appear to justify killing of civilians by Hamas”
Hossam is a freelancer, but Sheleib is a senior correspondent. Those two were not the only ones. Sally Nabil, Salma Khattab, Sanna Khoury and Amr Fekry were four more examples of BBC journalists happy to take the side of Hamas in public. Their BBC colleague Nada Abdelsamad was particularly enthusiastic:
I suspect this observation from writer Katya Sedgwick that Mr Obama and his circle are increasingly driving the US administration, is going to gain ground and become noisier in the months leading to November 2024:
The “reluctance” of journalists to investigate issues unflattering to the Obama/Biden administrations – with honorable exceptions – is almost a default assumption of mine these days. (The Hunter Biden laptop episode, etc.)
Obama was in many ways a very bad president. On foreign policy, his stance towards Iran and subsequent views on it, for example, looks like being a disaster, as we are now finding out. Or consider the domestic side – if you cast your mind back all the way to his encounter with Joe the Plumber (RIP), and his “you didn’t build that” speech, it is a reminder of how hostile this man is to the sort of small business free enterprise that is the backbone of the US. It was not all bad – Obama appeared to pursue a policy of benign neglect around private spacefaring, giving an opening for Elon Musk and others to perform wonders. Maybe Obama just wasn’t interested enough. In any event, he did not try to screw with it, and neither did he – at least that much – try to shut down fracking. (Again, I suspect that he just isn’t that into things like engineering.) OK, I will try and be fair and make the point that I am sure Obama isn’t the first ex-POTUS to try and pull the strings of a successor – as is claimed – but the sheer frailty and mental decline of Mr Biden (I don’t think this is any longer a controversial statement) makes the point all the more serious if it is true. (In the UK there are suppositions that Tony Blair is exerting a lot of influence over the Labour Party again, which if true is also troubling.) As regulars might know, I am not a Trump fan at all, and I hope for a better choice of GOP candidate to run against Biden, but given the way the Republican Party has developed an almost cult-like devotion to him, almost because of his problems and very serious flaws (his stance on lockdowns and latitude to Fauci hasn’t impressed some conservatives), we are where we are. As a Brit, it bothers me that the choice at the next US elections is so poor. We need someone who could be a two-term POTUS to undo so much of the damage of recent years and be free of the lawfare that is bound to be a relentless feature of a second Trump term. Back on the back-seat driving allegation vs Mr Obama, an issue is that it is easy to make that accusation on sort of circumstantial grounds, hard to back it up without smoking gun sort of evidence. And to be honest, I imagine that all presidents do at times take advice from former holders of the office. They may even keep and retain cabinet members from previous administrations (such as Robert Gates at Defense, or how Volcker and Greenspan stayed on at the Fed under different regimes). The question here is more whether, because of Biden’s physical condition and the fact that his vice president is clearly unfit for the job, the back-seat control is more glaring, and more dangerous to notions of democratic accountability. This matters a lot, particularly given the Irsrael horror. It may be that Biden is taking the decisions on what the US ought to do, but given the involvement of Iran in bankrolling Hamas and other terrorist groups that want to destroy Israel, it would be nice to know that a former POTUS whose judgement on Iran was so poor is spending more time writing another set of self-glorifying memoirs rather than influencing policy. The BBC yesterday: Why BBC doesn’t call Hamas militants ‘terrorists’ – John Simpson I wrote the following for the “Biased BBC” blog in 2006. Depressing to think that seventeen years and God knows how many thousands of terrorist murders later, I can repost it unchanged and, bar one or two place names and the reference to the London bombings of 7/7/2005 being ‘a year ago’, it is as relevant now as it was then.
‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!’ chant the useful idiots at elite institutions and parades in the West. Who are these people? Atheists who support theocratic lunatics, democrats who endorse medieval tyrants, feminists who defend misogynists who parade with the desecrated corpses of women, gays who defend maniacs who would joyfully hang them or toss them off the roof of a tall building. They talk of a secular, democratic and socialist Palestine. As George Orwell observed: ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.’ But the world has now seen what ‘from the river to the sea’ actually means. It is nothing less than a remake of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen. – Walter E Block & Alan G Futerman, Wall Street Journal ($) They are identifying the bodies now. For their relatives, the agony of not knowing is almost over and the different agony of knowing begins. But for some the hellish uncertainty goes on. One of our oldest friends is one of this group. He has family in Israel. One of his female relatives has disappeared without trace. Another, a very old lady, was taken by Hamas. If you pray, please pray for them. UPDATE 14th October: The younger lady is alive and safe. I have no other information except that wonderful fact. Thank God. Please continue to pray for the older lady. UPDATE 1st December: I am happy to say that the older lady has also been released. People compare Hamas to Nazis. That’s not fair. Nazis knew killing Jews was wrong. That’s why they did it in secret, mostly in Poland at isolated death camps (Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec). At war’s end covered over their crimes, burned documents, destroyed gas chambers & denied it after. Hamas is bragging about murdering Jews, posting videos on social media & declaring “Allahu Akbar” If you do not support Israel & the Jews, you are literally worse than the Nazis. Congratulations. After studying the Holocaust & its deniers for 30 years I didn’t think it possible anyone could top that. I was wrong. “Yet the idea that all British Jews are uncritical backers of the Israeli administration is fiction. There are as many vocal opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu and his hardliners as there are supporters. So why should they be blamed en masse for policies decided in Jerusalem? And why must it spill over into violence and vandalism? Indelibly ingrained anti-Semitism can be the only credible explanation.” “After all, the Left — and it is almost exclusively the Left — don’t hold all British Muslims responsible for the excesses of the Saudi regime. Or attack Chinese restaurants over Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs. Where are the protests outside the Russian embassy about the illegal war on Ukraine? What also baffles me is why the Left make common cause with fascistic, paramilitary organisations such as Hamas, which represents and practises everything they claim to abhor, including rampant misogyny. How can they make excuses for a terrorist group which rapes and kills women and children?” Part of the Left (and a few on the crazier ends of the Right) excuses attacks on Israel, and engages in this sort of moronic behaviour, because they are anti-semites. Anti-semitism is a moral sickness, the badge of under-achievers, losers and loons the world over, and has been that way for centuries. Another factor is that for a lot of Leftists, to be on the Left is to support “victims”, particularly if they have cultivated, nurtured and celebrated victimhood, as in the case of say, the Palestinians or wherever. Sometimes there are aspects of genuine justice in these stances, but in the main this is about a search for a cause with a group that is nice and far away, rather than to have to contemplate the more complicated facts on the ground. And another driver of Israel/Jew hatred is that Israel is a modern country in many ways, a tech powerhouse, and the Jewish people have over the centuries excelled in many fields when given the chance. If you are a Leftist, all this achievement cuts against the grain. The United Nations Human Rights Council:
Perhaps I should regard it as a miracle and wonder that this august body got as far as implying that murdered Israelis might be included, albeit not by name, in the “miscellaneous” category of those entitled to human sympathy. You do not need autocomplete in order to predict what sort of results that search term produces. Good thing, as autocomplete seems not to be working for those words on many browsers. Because you all already knew what Palestinian celebrations involve, I did not have to post the video of what was done to Shani Louk. This link does not take you to the video. The Times of India report it does take you to is bad enough: it describes how two Hamas members were filmed as they sat, grinning, on her naked corpse in the back of a pickup truck, while the mob whooped and shouted “Allahu Akbar”. This video was not taken secretly. It was filmed and put on the internet by a Palestinian who was enjoying the show. For most nations, the equivalent search term would garner images of that nation’s traditional festivities, and the case is no different for Palestinians. Here is a BBC story from 26th September 2001: “Arafat closes ‘suicide bombing’ art show”. Astonishingly, if you hover over the URL for that BBC story, you will see that it is classified as “entertainment/arts”. To be fair to the BBC, the URL may have been generated automatically, but to the Palestinians of 2001 it was indeed entertainment and art.
I am afraid I cannot now find the link, but after I posted something about the Sbarro bombing on the Biased BBC blog in the mid-2000’s, the father of one of the victims, a 15 year old girl called Malki Roth, commented there. This is an account of Malki’s last day, and the way that one of her murderers, a woman called Ahlam Tamimi, has become a celebrity in the Arab world. All nations have atrocities in their past and many have them in their present. But I do not think there is another nation or culture on the planet that currently exhibits such public delight in murder as the Palestinians do. That said, we should never forget that horrible things would happen to any Palestinian who protested at what was done to Shani Louk in 2023 or Malki Roth in 2001. That’s one reason why the culture of exhibiting the murdered corpses of young women or images thereof has gone on for so long. Another reason is the currently fashionable pretence that all cultures are equal. What dismal dangerous times we live in. Hot on the heels of the latest atrocity in Ukraine, I am seeing video after video after video of Israeli civilians being either brutalised and then kidnapped or just murdered in broad daylight by Jeremy Corbyn’s good friends Hamas. I am overflowing with questions. Israel seems to have been taken by complete strategic surprise on every level, comparable to 1973, by a Tet Offensive style assault. How did that happen? And what is the Hamas endgame? Typically the effects of substantive military surprise last about three days, at which point it is hard to imagine an Israeli response that is not completely and utterly unrestrained. |
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