The Vicious Broadcasting Corporation

[Teddy Bear]

Melanie Phillips posts this incisive observation in her column:
The Vicious Broadcasting Corporation

Last Thursday, BBC TV Newsnight transmitted an item which, even by the standards of today’s poisonous climate, left an extraordinarily bad taste in the mouth -- to put it mildly. The item by reporter Michael Crick and producer Meirion Jones, which was tied to a report in the New Statesman, excitedly claimed a sensational exclusive – the discovery that British civil servants had secretly colluded with a Middle Eastern country to enable it to develop nuclear weapons, in flagrant contradiction of UK government policy. The only problem with this sensational exclusive was that the alleged policy breach occurred in the 1960s during Harold Wilson's government; and that the Middle Eastern country was Israel.

The purpose of running this item, itself a follow-up to a previous Newsnight ‘exclusive’ last summer about alleged British help in developing Israel’s nuclear weapons, was clearly highly political and acutely tendentious. It was to make the point that, at a time when the ‘Bush-poodle’ in 10 Downing Street is telling us that a nuclear-armed Iran is a danger to the world which cannot be allowed to develop, Britain itself is guilty of having started the nuclear arms race in the Middle East. The true guilty party in the world today, therefore, is not Iran but Britain – and the true danger to the world is Israel. For the item not only blamed Israel for starting the arms race, but equated its development of a nuclear weapon with the behaviour of Iran.

This is moral equivalence at its most sickening. We can all deplore nuclear proliferation and wish that Israel did not have nuclear weapons, just as we can wish that Britain, America or anyone else did not have nuclear weapons. But there is all the difference in the world between Israel’s bomb – developed solely to prevent itself from being annihilated – and Iran’s bomb – being developed in order to threaten the annihilation of Israel and points west. Moreover, such equivalence immediately turns into moral inversion, because it implicitly denies the victimisation of Israel – indeed, en passant Crick sneered that while Israel appeared to be heroically fighting for its life in the Six-Day War, it had the insurance policy of nuclear weapons all the time.

Well, it is far from clear that in 1967 it possessed a usable nuclear weapon; and in any event, since that war was over almost as soon as it began, the perception of ‘plucky little Israel’ derived not so much from the way that it fought than from the then overwhelmingly obvious fact that a tiny blameless country was surrounded by millions of people in hostile states who were trying to exterminate it. It is that fact, of course, that Newsnight was so keen to deny. For the real purpose of this item was to deny that Israel was the potential target for genocide that it is, and blame it instead for being the root cause of Iran’s desire to get the bomb -- and thus, by extension, the root cause of the danger in which we have all now been placed.

To rub home the alleged iniquity of Israel, the programme interviewed that dispassionate expert Mordechai Vanunu, who duly stuck Israel with the charge of nuclear proliferation as he was set up to do – although interestingly, even he balked at the BBC’s suggestion that, in going after Iran (if only), Britain was pursuing the wrong target; for he understood, unlike the BBC, that a nuclear Iran is absolutely not a good idea. It was left to a somewhat bemused Israeli author, however, to make the screamingly obvious point that back in the 1960s the need to stop nuclear proliferation was simply not on the global agenda, and that Israel was perceived to be fighting for its existence and needing all the help it could get. In other words, the context then was radically different from what it is now. To draw a parallel between then and now, as Newsnight was doing, was therefore grotesque. To seek to equate the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a terrorist state that openly threatens genocide and world domination with a nuclear deterrent developed by an ally of this country was moral imbecility of a high order.

However, worse was to come. Far worse. For the centrepiece of this ‘investigation’ was the unearthing of a superannuated former analyst from the Defence Intelligence Staff, Peter Kelly, who apparently had been the one man in Whitehall who, upon seeing photographs of Dimona back in the 1960s, realised that the Israeli cover story was false and that this was a nuclear weapons installation. And the centrepiece of his testimony to Newsnight was that the impact of his dramatic insight at the time had been blocked by another civil servant, who had not only knowingly provided a false report to HMG that Israel was not developing nuclear weapons but had helped Israel secure materials to make these weapons in direct contravention of the declared policy of the British government. The name of this civil servant was Michael Michaels, who for 14 years had been Britain’s representative on the IAEA.

And now we got to the real rotten nub of this ‘exclusive’. For what Newsnight alleged was that Michaels had behaved in this treacherous way because he was a Jew who was a keen supporter of Israel. ‘Indeed’, Crick reported breathlessly, ‘his middle name was actually Israel’. Oh dear. The implication was that Michael Israel Michaels was actually named after the state – whereas, of course, quite apart from the fact that when Michaels was born the state of Israel didn't exist, 'Israel' has always been a common first name for a Jew, for reasons that would be obvious to anyone who knew any of the history of the Children of Israel. No matter. The nub of this singularly obnoxious revelation was that Michaels was a Jew, and that therefore at the very core of the behaviour by Israel that had made the world the unsafe place it is today lay an act of Jewish treachery by someone who purported to be a patriotic Englishman at the heart of the British government.

Why did Kelly think that Michaels had gone along with Israel’s deception, asked Crick. ‘Well his middle name was Israel’, Kelly replied. ‘You think there was an element of dual loyalties here?’ pressed Crick. ‘Yes’, said Kelly. And what had this Jew, thus posthumously smeared by the accusation of treachery, actually done? According to Crick, he had not only borne false witness but had secured the provision of plutonium for Israel which had helped it make the bomb, in contravention of British government policy and in the teeth of opposition by the Foreign Office.

Let’s look at all this a little more closely. The first point is that the claim that Britain’s plutonium helped make Israel’s bomb is absurdly over the top. As Crick himself acknowledged en passant, the amount Israel asked for was 10 mg, whereas 4 kg of plutonium would have been needed to make a bomb. The second point is that the story does not add up. It is extremely implausible that a middle ranking official such as Michaels would have had the power to reverse government policy in this way. Indeed, as Crick mentioned even more en passant, the Foreign Office – which we were told was originally dead against the deal – eventually agreed. There would almost certainly have been other, more significant actors playing a role in this drama. Indeed, since the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a very strong supporter of Israel, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he himself pursued a policy which was not declared in public. Who knows? All we have to go on is the connection made in the mind of one retired former defence intelligence analyst between his perception of a colleague’s behaviour and the fact that ‘his middle name was Israel’.

In another context, the suggestion that a middle-ranking official could reverse policy by himself would be ludicrous. But in the context of this item, it was something else entirely. For Michael Israel Michaels was not only presented as a deus ex machina covertly manipulating events behind the scenes so that the world was put in danger; he was specifically accused of having done so because he was a Jew. To hear the BBC single out, as the clinching proof of a perfidious disloyalty to the state by a British citizen, the fact that ‘his middle name was Israel’ is to strike a chill to the very bone. For of course the unspoken implication here goes far beyond this particular civil servant. The real message of that Newsnight item was surely this: forget Iran; forget the worry over thousands of Islamist terror supporters in Britain; the real danger to the world is Israel, and the real British fifth columnists are those Jews who support it.

Vicious, vicious stuff.