BBC Uses 'UN' To Advance Anti-Israel Credibility

[Teddy Bear]

The ludicrous composition of the UN Human Rights Council would be a story in itself for any self-respecting journalist presenting the world from the viewpoint of our society.

But as we know, the BBC is far from that. In fact, far from exposing the pervading ideology within the UN, since it coincides with the same BBC direction, they prefer to pretend that it is indeed credible.

In this story, Robin Shepherd analyses how the BBC uses just such a report, and what is missing. Another relevant omission though is this.

Settlements weren't a problem for Israel in giving back a substantial amount of land to Egypt and Jordan in exchange for peace. Hitherto desolate, today Egypt has a very lucrative tourist industry based on the vision Israel initiated along the Red Sea before turning it back to Egypt. The fact that Israel is the only nation in history ever to give back land won in a defensive war in exchange for peace should guide how viewpoints on political solutions should be viewed.

Even for the possibility of peace, Israel has evacuated settlements in Gaza, some by residents who had been there for hundreds of years, despite being immediately attacked after it had done so as a response to its goodwill gesture.

The very fact that the BBC makes no mention of it in this report, or any related to settlement building, shows its deceit and agenda in furthering Israel hatred.

Nexus of hate: UN’s Richard (Nazi-Israel) Falk given major platform by BBC to slam Israel

Now, I know that it is no surprise that Richard Falk –United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights since 2008 — has come out with yet more hysterical bile against the State of Israel. This is a man, after all, who in a 2007 article entitled, Slouching toward a
Palestinian Holocaust, said the following: “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with [the] criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not”.

In fact he’s said many things like that. He also continues to flirt with 9/11 conspiracy theories along the lines that it was all a plot cooked up by “neo-cons” in the White House. In other words, he’s got all the qualifications you might expect for a senior role with the United Nations Human Rights Council, and to be treated as a credible source for the BBC about problems in the peace process.

So much for Richard Falk. Now bring on the BBC’s UN Correspondent, Barbara Plett — whose laudatory story about Falk’s report yesterday to the UN General Assembly on Israeli settlements and the need for boycotts is today splashed all over the BBC website. (By the way, does the name Barbara Plett ring any bells? It was Plett, some may recall, who in 2004 admitted on air that she had burst into tears at the sight of the terminally ill Yaser Arafat being helicoptered out of his compound on the West Bank).

Obviously, then, the story makes no mention whatsoever of Falk’s Nazi-Israel comparisons or of his stance on 9/11. To do that would be totally to destroy his credibility and, with it, his message to an uninitiated, non-Israeli and non-Jewish audience that for the most part will never have heard of him before and can reasonably be expected to see him as a UN official who is simply doing his job.

The story pegs off his charge that Israel has made peace impossible by mounting settlement projects in the West Bank and East Jerusalem “so extensive it amounted to de-facto annexation of Palestinian land”. Twice in the report, the BBC gives the illusion of objectivity by noting that the Israelis have called the report biased. But since every government describes sharp criticism as bias the effect of mentioning it is insignificant, as the BBC knows all too well.

What was necessary, and what any objective (non-specialist, non-niche) news outlet not totally mired in a rigidly ideological worldview would do in practice, was simply to quote from Falk’s own articles and speeches in order to help the reader understand precisely why Israel and the rest of us should treat his words with something less than the reverence they are accorded by the BBC. That’s basic journalistic good practice when you are dealing with an audience that you know is unlikely to know very much about the source for your story.

Instead, the main reference to Israel’s objections to Falk’s credibility is manicured into a statement of near-denial about Palestinian terrorism. Get a load of this:

“Israel said the report was utterly biased and served a political agenda, criticising its author for making no mention of what it called Palestinian terrorist attacks”. (My italics). Ah yes, that’s right. To the BBC, there aren’t any Palestinian “terrorists”. Just “militants” engaged in “resistance”.

As a final flourish in the story, Falk is given a global platform by the BBC to advocate for boycott and divestment:

“He urged the UN to support civil society initiatives, such as campaigns to sanction or boycott Israel for alleged violations of international law”.

Of course, the problem here is that the BBC and like-minded media outlets have an obvious get out clause. The United Nations is a very important global institution. The Israel-Palestine conflict is a major international news story. Therefore, what the UN’s top officials say about the issue is in fact newsworthy, as evidenced by the fact that many other media outlets, including in Israel, will cover the same story.

There is as much truth as there is falsehood in such a retort. It is indeed true that the story is newsworthy. The UN matters in international affairs and journalists are right to report on it. The falsehood is in the assumption (dishonestly made or not) of objectivity from an institution packed with extremists, among whom the likes of Richard Falk are not unusual.

And it is here that we get to the nub of the matter. If the BBC were to report on Falk’s statements about the Holocaust, his dalliance with 9/11 conspiracy theories and his other expressions of ideologically motivated extremism, they would have to do it for a whole host of other people and institutions inside and outside the United Nations that sustain the very world view that is shared by a critical mass of BBC journalists and editors. If you’re going to tell the truth about Falks, you have to do it about the Human Rights Council itself, you have to do it about Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, the Methodist Church in the UK, Breaking the Silence in Israel, mass anti-Semitism in the Palestinian and Arab media and so on endlessly until the worldview you subscribe to becomes totally unsustainable.

This does not require a conscious decision, let alone a matter of BBC policy. It simply requires a sufficiently large number of people to internalise the same set of assumptions and opinions, at which point the groupthink becomes reflexive. You can bet your house that Barbara Plett and the editorial team that helped produce this story have no inkling at all that they have violated what should be considered basic journalistic standards and practices. In their world, their behaviour is reasonable and normal. And so, they would argue, is Richard Falk.

[Teddy Bear]

Consider the news headlines and summary as reported by the BBC coming out of the Middle East at the moment:

Now run a search of 'UN resolutions' on the BBC website and out of the first 20 articles appearing in recent date order since December 2010, 8 of them relate to Iraq, and our 'illegal' involvement in a war there, 5 of them are on 'Illegal' settlements in Israel, and none of the others relate to the violence and upheaval going on throughout the Arab world.

If the BBC was a genuine news agency intent on fulfilling its mandate , then it might be newsworthy to run articles on just what kind of organisation the UN has evolved into , and how it has become merely a vehicle for truly corrupt nations to serve their agenda.

But since it matches the BBC agenda, we can understand why not to expect any such bona-fide reporting.

An excellent article expands on this UN and media corruption.

Amidst Mideast Turmoil, Only Israel Galvanizes the UN into Action
David Harris, AJC Executive Director
February 21, 2011

With Iran violently suppressing demonstrators in the streets and Libya using brute force in the face of mass protests, it was reassuring to know that the UN sprang into quick action.

Just as it did after the rigged elections in 2009, Tehran was using arrests, live fire, torture and intimidation to confront those challenging the regime. Meanwhile, the UN Security Council members gathered on February 18th in New York.

The members solemnly deliberated as reports from Libya suggested that hundreds of peaceful protesters were slain by government forces with the help of foreign mercenaries.

There's only one small problem. The UN Security Council met to discuss neither the situation in Iran nor Libya, but, surprise of surprises, Israel.

Meanwhile, the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council, charged with monitoring and protecting human rights, was also nowhere to be found when it came to Iran and Libya.

But then again, why should that be shocking?

After all, Libya is currently a member of the 47-nation body. Its foremost aim there is to cast judgment on others, principally Israel, while ensuring that it avoids any serious scrutiny.

And even though Iran tried and failed in its bid for reelection to the council last year, it has its share of defenders there - fellow members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference and Non-Aligned Movement, for example. They do their best to shield Tehran from close attention and deflect it instead to the Council's favorite whipping boy, Israel.

By the way, while Iran didn't make it back onto the UN Human Rights Council, it did get itself elected to serve this year on the UN's 45-member Commission on the Status of Women, a body dedicated to "gender equality and advancement of women." Notwithstanding President Ahmadinejad's memorable 2007 claim at Columbia University that Iran's women are "the freest in the world," the notion of Iran sitting on this UN body would be funny if it weren't so tragic and telling.

So why did the Security Council choose to meet on Friday? To discuss Israeli settlement-building policy.

Now let's be clear. Settlement policy is, indeed, highly relevant to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on a final peace accord. In fact, it's one of the central issues.

But that doesn't mean the UN was right to take it up on Friday.

First, the breaking events occurring in Iran, Libya, and elsewhere in the region have global security implications and, surely, merit immediate attention by the UN. They have not gotten it to date.

Second, the settlements are not the alpha and omega of issues central to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While there is a global industry of those asserting that settlements are the one and only matter worth discussing, thereby placing the entire onus for resolution on Israel, the truth lies elsewhere.

Israel has repeatedly indicated a willingness to discuss the future of settlements in the context of direct talks.

Moreover, it suspended settlement building for ten months last year as a sign of good faith, only to be met by nine months of dithering by the Palestinian Authority.

And, as further proof of its sincerity, Israel dismantled the homes of thousands of settlers in fulfillment of the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty and the 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.

Additionally, there are some other, shall we say, not unimportant issues central to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Needless to say, they were conveniently overlooked in the Friday deliberations.

How about condemning the missiles being fired this year at Israeli towns and villages from Hamas-controlled Gaza? Their aim, pure and simple, is to kill, maim, and destroy.

How about dealing with the massive arms build-up by Hezbollah, under the very noses of UNIFIL troops deployed in Lebanon, and the blood-curdling threats of Hezbollah's leaders to destroy Israel with its arsenal of missiles, courtesy of Iran and Syria?

Apropos, Iran's export of those missiles is in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1747, adopted in 2007, banning Iran's export of any weapons, but that's been inexplicably ignored.

Or how about addressing the continued incitement coming from the Palestinian Authority, such as the lionization of Dalil Mughrabi, the Palestinian terrorist who led an attack in 1978 that slaughtered 37 Israelis, including 12 children? Only last year, the PA named a summer camp after her. Earlier this year, the PA released a television spot highlighting her as a "role model" for Palestinian women. Does this contribute to a culture of peace?

Or how about insisting that the PA, in pursuit of an end to the conflict, recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people? After all, Israel has already agreed to recognize the future country of Palestine as the nation-state of the Palestinian people, thus attempting to create a strong foundation for future coexistence between the two states?

And third, the UN Security Council did not advance the cause of peace in its meeting on Friday. To the contrary, it set it back. Among the 15 member countries, only the United States had the good sense to see this seemingly obvious point, prompting the first exercise of the veto by the Obama administration.

The place to discuss, debate, and decide issues affecting Israelis and Palestinians is in direct, face-to-face talks. There is no other way, at least if the goal is genuine progress.

But the PA decided to do an end-run, using the UN, not for the first time, to circumvent talks.

By doing so, it alienated and embarrassed Washington, which, under President Obama, has shown a determination to make progress on the ground. And it antagonized Israel, which is the essential partner for any durable agreement, raising new questions about the PA's commitment to actually achieving an accord.

And so, while this transparent diversion goes on at the world body, the main show right now is elsewhere. From Tehran to Tripoli, alas, the UN is nowhere to be found.

[Teddy Bear]

The opening sentence of this topic goes
The ludicrous composition of the UN Human Rights Council would be a story in itself for any self-respecting journalist presenting the world from the viewpoint of our society.

In light of world events it might be worth just expanding on this, and in particular the fact that Libya's Gaddafi was voted on to UN Human Rights Council in 2010. This is the same man who admitted murdering 1200 political opponents in the Abu Salim prison massacre in 1996. This is the same man who has ordered his troops to fire on citizens demonstrating in the streets opposing his regime, and have already killed at least a 1000 there.

Don't you wonder why Western societies approved this ludicrous position for this man? Is there any doubt that the rights and wrongs that politicians and media pretend to be concerned about is nothing more that idle posturing, enabling them to crawl further up the arse of Islamic oil rich regimes.

Soldiers that died in the 2nd World War must be turning in their graves seeing what has been done with the values they fought for. If there is life after death, I have a feeling that those working for the BBC and doing their best to sterilise the real threat that these regimes impose will be 'met' when they get to the other side.

For now the BBC prefer to use dictates from this dubious 'human rights organisation' to increase the demonization of Israel. As the following article illustrates, the HRC has in the past five years issued some 50 resolutions that condemn countries; of those, 35 have been focused on Israel, and not one has been issued against Libya. Even as of Monday evening, as protesters were being shot down in the streets of Libya, no emergency session of the HRC had been called by its members

The UN’s Libya failures

It was an old and festering wound in Libyans’ collective memory that was the immediate cause of the bloody clashes that broke out in the streets of Benghazi last Tuesday evening.

A group of families whose sons were brutally massacred by the Libyan authorities would not abandon their quest for justice. They refused to be rebuffed yet again by state officials.

In 1996, an estimated 1,200 prisoners, mostly opponents of Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorial regime, were rounded up and gunned down in the space of a few hours in Tripoli’s infamous Abu Salim prison. The victims’ bodies were reportedly removed from the prison in wheelbarrows and refrigerated trucks and buried in mass graves. To this day, the Libyan authorities refuse to disclose the whereabouts of these graves. It wasn't until 2004 that Gaddafi admitted that the massacre had taken place.

The families of the victims, represented by human rights activist Fathi Terbil, wanted more than an admission.

When Terbil was arrested early last Tuesday, Libyans took to the streets in protest, two days before a previously planned “Day of Rage” was slated for cities across the country. Human Rights Watch estimated on Sunday that 233 people had been killed in the ongoing protests, many the victims of indiscriminate machine-gun fire directed at peaceful protesters by a coalition of commandos and foreign mercenaries loyal to Gaddafi. The NGO is warning of a new human rights crisis in Libya.

NEITHER THE Abu Salim prison massacre nor the many other human rights abuses perpetrated by Gaddafi’s regime over the past four decades have been singled out for censure by the world’s purported protector of human rights – the UN’s Human Rights Council.

Established in 2006 with a mandate to reform its predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights, the HRC has in the past five years issued some 50 resolutions that condemn countries; of those, 35 have been focused on Israel, and not one has been issued against Libya. Even as of Monday evening, as protesters were being shot down in the streets of Libya, no emergency session of the HRC had been called by its members, which include the US and the EU, as Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, noted in a soon-to-appear interview with The Jerusalem Post’s Ilan Evyatar. Neuer called this omission by the HRC and its members “not only a let-down to the many Libyans risking their lives for freedom, but a shirking of [the HRC’s] obligations.”

Indeed, instead of being condemned, Libya has been lionized. In May 2010, Libya was, absurdly, elected as a member of the HRC, a move that was not blocked by the Obama administration (as Iran’s bid for membership was). This was the culmination of a steady ascendancy to every important diplomatic body at the UN – including the African Union chairmanship, the UN Security Council and the presidency of the UN General Assembly. In a 100-minute rant given before the assembly in September 2009, his first since he took control of Libya in a military coup in 1969, Gaddafi exploited the opportunity to liken the UN Security Council to a “terror council” because of the veto rights enjoyed by the US and the other four UNSC permanent members.

A month earlier, the man US president Richard Nixon had referred to as the “mad dog of the Middle East” met with former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain.

“Late evening with Col. Kaddafi at his ‘ranch’ in Libya – interesting meeting with an interesting man,” McCain tweeted the next day. Several weeks later, this “interesting man” ignored McCain’s request not to give a “hero’s welcome” to freed Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali al- Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence agent.

WHILE ‘ENGAGEMENT’ has proved a dismal failure, other methods have been more effective. It should be recalled that it was in the wake of the US’s invasion of Iraq that Gaddafi, anxious not to become America’s next target, magnanimously offered to scrap his nascent nuclear program.

Although the US no longer enjoys the kind of influence it had in the region after the Iraq invasion, the Obama administration can move from a defensive strategy in the UN of vetoing the many anti-Israel resolutions, to an offensive approach – along with other democracies – singling out countries like Libya in a concerted shame campaign.

Perhaps if more pressure had been brought to bear against Gaddafi when he just might have been ready to listen, Libya’s citizens would not now be getting shot down in the streets by a “mad dog” regime. At the very least, the UN would have retained a modicum of moral legitimacy.

[Teddy Bear]

Robin Shepherd continues the discussion of the ludicrous nature in the way the BBC uses the UN and similar dubious organisations to further their own agenda, regardless of real moral merit, in this excellent article.

UN debacle over Libya again shows up BBC fetishism of “international law” as a tyrant’s charter, while slating of “criminal” Israel persists

Regular readers of this website will be aware of a line I frequently refer to in exposing the blatantly propagandistic approach taken by the BBC in its reporting of Israel. It appeared again following the Itamar massacre of five Jews in a West Bank “settlement” last week. The settlements, the BBC said, “are held to be illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this”. In its construction, the logic of the sentence may be compared to something like this: “The square route of nine is three, according to basic mathematics, though Robin Shepherd disputes this.” In both cases a proposition is established as being beyond all reasonable dispute. It is then pointed out that there are some (weird or wicked or possibly deviant) types out there that have the temerity to take a different view. This is called giving both sides of the argument, though it is deliberately done in such a way as to make a categorical statement about who is right and who is wrong: Robin Shepherd is a mathematical dunce; the Israelis are shameless criminals.

At this point one could take the discussion in several directions. But, unfolding right before our eyes, there is a fine (if that’s the right word) illustration of the futility of using “international law” in this manner as Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi slaughters his own citizens in broad daylight while the world twiddles its thumbs because China and Russia refuse to give “legal authority” to any form of intervention via the UN Security Council. Ponder that thought:

Two dictatorships — China, which massacred 3,000 peaceful demonstrators in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and holds millions in labour camps; and Russia, which has killed at least a hundred thousand in Chechnya in the last 15 years and which now occupies part of the sovereign state of Georgia — have the power to determine what does or does not constitute “international law”. That puts things in some perspective doesn’t it? And to be honest, there’s nothing especially difficult in exposing the fatal flaw in the international-law-as-categorical-imperative line of thinking.

The greater mystery lies in why such an obviously flawed proposition is fetishised in the manner in which it is by European elites and opinion formers (not to mention the Obama administration). Let me offer the following as one possible explanation.

The paradox of relativism: a world view saturated with post-modernist relativism still needs some frame of reference so as to impose order and project power. Unable to accept, for example, that democracy is “objectively better” than dictatorship or that freedom is “better” than oppression, let alone that the Western liberal-democratic tradition is “superior” to other models of government, there is a gaping hole that needs to be filled when we come face to face with mass injustice. International law fills that gap and does so very effectively since it conveys the sense of certainty that relativism inevitably always lacks, while simultaneously making its peace with multi-lateralist and multiculturalist assumptions — we are all equal at the UN, or at least on the Security Council — which themselves derive from post-modernist relativism.

Of course, those whose primary interest is the state of Israel might say that this is to over-intellectualise the matter. For Israel bashers it’s always a case of any stick will do. If it suits them, one day they’ll quote “international law”. On another day it’ll be a quote from Amnesty International. On another it’ll be a critical remark from a Nobel Laureate. Fair enough.

But I still think there is something more all embracing going on in the use and abuse of the notion of “international law” which constitutes a broader attack on the promotion and sustenance of Western values generally. It does not take much searching through the archives of the Guardian or the BBC, after all, to note that it was the weapon of choice against the Bush administration on a variety of fronts, but especially on Iraq. It is the “illegality” of Tony Blair’s actions in supporting Bush that always forms the centrepiece of the polemic against him. And yes, against Israel, the Guardian, the BBC, the British Foreign Office, the European Union and NGOs galore consistently throw “international law” in the country’s face as a means to deligitimise its behaviour, whether it concerns self-defence operations against Hamas or over the “settlements” in east Jerusalem.

If there’s a beginning, middle and end point to any process of thought, I’d say I’m somewhere in the middle right now on this one. I’d welcome thoughts in the comment section below.