I’ve been struggling to understand the new articles in Nature on the fly brain, and it’s not easy! I will write about the issue, but not until I have something clear and interesting to impart to readers.
When I look at my draft posts, I see that many of them are about Israel, which prompted me to call Malgorzata and whine, “Everything I’m writing is about Israel; people are going to think I’m obsessed.” Malgorzata responded that. as with her, I likely have two reasons. First, I’m a Jew and am naturally concerned with an existential crisis threatening the Jewish state. Second, she said, both she and I have been worried about the new rise in anti-Semitism that goes by the name of “anti-Zionism”.
Before 1880, anti-Semitism was called “Jew hatred,” but that was deemed too crass, so “anti-Semitism”, coined by Wilhelm Marr, arose as a softer, more scientific euphemism. Now with the rise of Jew and Israel hatred, and the reluctance of liberals to say they are “antisemitic”, we have yet another euphemism: “anti-Zionism”. But at bottom they’re all the same thing, softened variants of “Jew hatred.” And that hatred, expressed as approbation for eliminating the existence of Israel, threatens not only the Jewish state, but the West as a whole, for the sentiments are more than “Jew hatred”: they’re “West hatred.”
Or so Malgorzata said, and sent me a video, saying that I would get a better explanation by watching the section of this video between 9:15 to 22:30. I’ve pasted it in so it starts at 9:15. The speaker is Dr. Einat Wilf, “former Knesset member and expert on Israel’s foreign policy,” and she’s quite eloquent. Wikipedia notes that “Wilf describes herself as a Zionist, a feminist and an atheist.”
At any rate, that’s her take, and I guess I have no choice about the topics I cover, since they just issue from the determined molecular movements going on inside my head. So here’s my post.
The BBC, accused repeatedly of biased reporting, has formed a division called “BBC Verify”, dedicated to fact checking and preventing misinformation. The announcement of its inception says this:
We’ve brought together forensic journalists and expert talent from across the BBC, including our analysis editor Ros Atkins and disinformation correspondent Marianna Spring and their teams. In all, BBC Verify comprises about 60 journalists who will form a highly specialised operation with a range of forensic investigative skills and open source intelligence (Osint) capabilities at their fingertips.
They’ll be fact-checking, verifying video, countering disinformation, analysing data and – crucially – explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth.
This is a different way of doing our journalism. We’ve built a physical space in the London newsroom, with a studio that BBC Verify correspondents and experts will report from, transparently sharing their evidence-gathering with our audiences. They will contribute to News Online, radio and TV, including the News Channel and our live and breaking streaming operation, both in the UK and internationally.
But investigative journalist David Collier, who has investigated “Verify,” cannot verify that it’s fulfilled its mission. In fact, on this post on his website (click to read), he calls for this BBC unit to be shut down.
One example: Verify purported to verify that the Iranian missiles raining down on Israel last week were aimed solely at military targets. (Regardless of what they were aimed at, of course, it was an attack unprovoked by any Israeli attack on Iran.) But some elementary fact-checking showed that Verify dissimulated:
On Tuesday evening, 1 October 2024, Iran fired approximately 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Many were intercepted, but several sites were hit. On Wednesday evening BBC Verify published a 1 minute 20 second video – titled ‘where Iran’s missiles struck in Israel’.
The BBC Verify team tells us they have been looking at ‘where Iran’s missiles have landed’ and the video is to counter ‘a lot of false imagery’ being circulated online. They say they managed to verify strikes in the vicinity of three key locations – all of them military sites:
Here’s the figure from “Verify”, showing the verified Iranian missile strikes:
More from Collier:
This creates an immediate problem. Why only these three? For example, a verified strike by Ramat Gan shopping mall has not been included. The BBC had reported on this – and so were well aware of it – but for some reason, BBC Verify left the shopping mall strike out of their analysis.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that BBC Verify were deliberately pushing a pro-Iranian propaganda line that the missiles were fired only at military targets.
But it gets a lot, lot worse.
Having told us that the three targets verified were ‘in the vicinity’ of military targets, we are then shown the evidence. The first we see are several apparent strikes on Nevatim airbase, but it is when the journalist turns her attention to the attack on the Tel Nof base that things become surreal.
We find the base was not hit at all. This is the script:
Location two is the Tel Nof airbase. In this video you can see a crater where a missile has landed. It is not the airbase itself, but a school a few miles away”:
And Collier makes a clever analogy:
What? So the Iranian’s didn’t hit Tel Nof airbase with this missile – they hit a school. So why isn’t the school listed in the original map. How on earth can BBC Verify know that the intended target of this missile was an airbase? They can’t.
The school that was hit is the Shalhavot Chabad school in Gadera. About 5 miles from the place BBC verify tells us was the target.
. . . . To put this into context. Below on the map are two marks, Gaza City Centre and Jabalia camp. The distance between them is approximately the same distance as between the school and the airbase. Can you imagine Israel hitting a school in Jabalia camp and BBC Verify virtually forgiving them by suggesting it was a close call on a Hamas military target 5 miles away.
There is no excuse for this – and it appears to be a deliberate attempt to whitewash an Iranian ballistic missile strike on a school. Why on earth didn’t the BBC put the school as one of the verified strikes on the map at the start? We all know why. For the same reason they didn’t mention the strike on the shopping mall. It doesn’t fit the propaganda story they are seeking to tell.
Yes, this is of course biased reporting, made worse that it was made by the “Verify” team. This is just one more incident in the Beeb’s history of biased anti-Israel reporting. I’ve written before about the Asserson Report that accused the Beeb of violating its own journalistic guidelines 1500 times during the Gaza War, and you can see my collection of pieces on the BBC’s bias here. The Beeb is the British equivalent of the NYT, and it’s doing exactly what the NYT does—passing off biased reporting as if it were unbiased.
Collier discusses the author of this “verified” piece, Verify correspondent Nawal Al-Maghafi, showing that she has a history of reporting for anti-Israeli publications like Middle East Eye, Al-Jazeera, and even for PRESS TV, the state media outlet of Iran! This is hardly the person for Verify to choose as author of a piece that tries to exonerate Iran of trying to kill civilians! He concludes that BBC Verify should be shut down (indeed, the Beeb needs a top-to-bottom housecleaning). Check out the numbered links.
The BBC has spent decades demonising Israel – but since Oct 7, the situation has become blatant and inexcusable (a few examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). Two damning reports have recently been published on BBC Bias (Asserson, Cohen)
The BBC has gone completely off the rails. It isn’t just that it is incapable of putting together proper impartial coverage of Israel’s conflict with its neighbours – it is that it doesn’t think it is doing anything wrong. The inability to even begin to identify the problem it has – means it cannot be salvaged in its current form. No public funds should ever be used to finance something so deeply and irredeemably flawed.
Well, so much for that. Nobody claimed that the liberal MSM media, whether in the US or UK, was objective when it came to the Gaza war.
After reading that, I immediately came upon Tom Gross’s newsletter, which said this:
No surprise here. Just a publicly-funded BBC journalist leaving today after 4.5 years to go and officially work as an anti-Zionist influencer.
Check out the Palestine Media Centre yourself; I’m not sure it’s a mouthpiece for anti-Zionism, but there are suggestions of that in its mission, for how many Palestinians dare speak against their rulers?
The Britain Palestine Media Centre connects media professionals with Palestinians – from academics and artists, to human rights activists and ordinary people with extraordinary stories.
An independent non-profit, the Centre is an invaluable resource for journalists, editors, and producers seeking expert opinion, information, and contacts in a timely and reliable manner.
How we can help:
-
Looking for Palestinian experts to talk to for an article or report? We can connect you with the right person for your topic.
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We can provide quick turnaround Palestinian guests for TV, radio or online broadcasting, to respond to breaking news.
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Need information or data for a Palestine-related story? Let us know what you’re researching, and we’ll be happy to help.
********
Finally, something that I read today in the Times of Israel: a report on a woman who used to be “a vocal supporter of the Islamic Republic” but now heads a pro-Israel group that accuses the BBC of war coverage biased towards Hamas (this, of course, is not a new accusation).
When Catherine Perez-Shakdam took the helm of Britain’s biggest grassroots pro-Israel campaign group this summer, she inherited a bulging inbox .
Aside from the continuing domestic fallout from the conflict between Israel and Hamas, the UK’s new Labour government has made a string of decisions that have dismayed and infuriated large elements of the country’s Jewish community and supporters of Israel.
Since taking the helm in July, Labour has restored funding for the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA; pulled out of a legal case opposing the International Criminal Court application for arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant; and partially suspended arms exports to Israel.
The last paragraph surprised me, though I knew about the suspension of arms exports. But I thought Labour had purged itself of its anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism. In this case, we have the reverse of the case of Karishma Patel (above), for Perez-Shakdam was once a talking head for Iran and is now excoriating the Beeb for its anti-Israel bias. The article continues:
Born to Jewish parents in Paris whose own parents had fled Nazi persecution, Perez-Shakdam lived as a Muslim while studying in the UK after marrying a Muslim man from Yemen. She later spent years as a journalist and commentator in the Middle East and began appearing on Iranian state media. Increasingly trusted and valued by the regime, Perez-Shakdam was granted an audience with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei; interviewed the late Ebrahim Raisi during his initial, unsuccessful 2017 bid for the presidency (he would succeed in 2021 and serve as president until his death this year); and was invited to a pro-Palestinian conference in Tehran attended by Hamas terror chief Khaled Mashaal.
That was then; this is now. Influenced by her “Zionist” daughter, Perez-Shakdam did a 180°:
Perez-Shakdam’s journey was capped by her appointment last month as director of We Believe In Israel. She replaces Luke Akehurst, who was elected as a Labour MP in the July general election. The campaign group seeks to counter the well-organized pro-Palestinian lobby by mobilizing grassroots support for the Jewish state.
For years, I was motivated by a kind of self-hate. But you realize that you can’t deny who you are
The group’s latest campaign has the BBC firmly in its crosshairs.
The new report into the BBC led by British-Israeli lawyer Trevor Asserson says the public service broadcaster’s coverage associated Israel with war crimes, genocide, and international law violations far more often than it did Hamas. It claims that the BBC downplayed Hamas terrorism, and finds that the BBC’s Arabic service was among the most biased global media outlets in covering the Israel-Hamas conflict.
. . . . Perez-Shakdam says her organization’s campaigning is not driven by hostility to the BBC, which is prevalent in the opposition Conservative party and its media allies, as well as on the far left. “It’s not a witch hunt. This is not an effort to bring down the BBC,” she says. “It’s just to elevate the level of journalism and to make sure that ethic [of impartiality] is at the forefront of it all.”
“The BBC has a lot of answering to do and I don’t think that it’s willing to do that; it [has] already doubled down,” she says. She believes the government may have to take action. “Taxpayers’ money is being used, through the vehicle of the TV license. The government needs to do something about it. This is not a case of free speech. It’s a case of holding the BBC accountable for a service that it is not providing in violation of its own [guidelines].”
You can read the Asserson Report here. But if you’ve followed the Beeb’s coverage of the war you hardly need to Just think of all those British Jews who have to pay for a television license to listen to the distortions of the BBC.
The problem is that, as a result of mass immigration, many inner-city Parliamentary constituences that are natural Labour terrority now have large Muslim populations. And there’s a strong tendency for Muslims to be single-issue voters, that issue being opposition to Israel.
After the recent election there are now 19 Labour MPs who are Muslim, but more importantly and worryingly, in 4 such constituencies a moderate Muslim Labour candidate lost to an independent Islamist candidate, voted in by an electorate that deemed that Labour did not hate Israel sufficiently.
It’s also worth noting that a major donor to both Labour and Kier Starmer himself is a Muslim. The upshot is that Labour needs to court and placate Muslim opinion.
(Whereas Jewish opinion matters much less to them, since there are now 14 Muslims for every Jew in the UK; and while Muslims tend to vote >80% Labour, Jewish voters are more evenly split across the major parties.)
That’s why countries must be careful with their immigration policy, esp. given that mistakes in this policy are largely irreversible.
Ironically, in the post-war West, doubts about immigration from culturally divergent areas were taboo in polite circles because of the Holocaust.
i don’t disagree with a single word you have written. However, there is more to the story. Ever heard of ‘Rotherham’, ‘Rochdale’, and ‘Telford’?
I thought that The West said, “Never again.” after the Holocaust.
I daresay that Islam was not the threat that it is today?
I am appalled.
It seems that all the house organs of the global corporate state (for lack of a better term, more or less meaning the West’s liberal ruling classes)—the NYT, WaPo, CNN, BBC among others—have decided to oppose and villify Israel and embrace roles as PR agents/defenders/enablers of the Islamist terrorist theocrats of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
What perplexes me is their reasons and motivations: is it the ambient Jew hate emanating from the academy and being parroted by their angry blue-haired daughters? The need to appease all the Muslims they’ve imported? Their self-image as reflexive defenders of Oppressed underdogs, especially now that the Palestinians have been incorporated into the Left’s pantheon of sacred victims? Or just the modern coddled liberal’s response to what a war looks like and their desire to end it just so they can retreat back into their cocoons of Marxist-Lennonism?
You would think that liberal capitalists who consider both democracy and individual rights as sacred values would support the one country in the ME that respects both these things. Right?
What am I missing here? Appreciate any thoughts. Thanks.
In woke ideology, different group outcomes can only be explained by “oppression” by a dominant group of a less-sucessful “oppressed” group.
Since Jews are generally successful in the US, and indeed in Israel, they have to be placed in the “oppressor” category along with “whites” and thence demonized.
Not doing this would overturn the fundamentals of wokeism, including their explanations of why black outcomes are generally poor.
I understand and agree with this, I guess what I’m missing is:
It doesn’t surprise me when a teenager, activist or Left academic preaches Social Justice ideology/morality (every conflict has an Oppressor and an Oppressed, the job of the righteous is to demonize and attack the former and defend/lionize the latter, regardless of facts or intent), but I’ve been surprised and confused by large media corporations, their owners, publishers, and the older liberal class who surely must staff the upper levels of management taking the same exact line.
Has the entire international liberal class converted to the Social Justice faith? Or just when a sacred victim needs to take centerstage for the next performance of the Cultural Revolution (I’ve noticed how Palestinians have currently borrowed the tiara usually worn by black and/or Trans people)?
It’s one thing for the liberal class to step in and protect the feelings of a wounded child when they say discussing biology traumatizes them, but running PR for Islamic theocrats?
Are we living through an explosion of hatred or of cowardice? (Or both?)
Hope this makes sense! Thanks
The upper echelons of the elite have been learning what is now obvious with the kids, for a generation. Just in more watered down form. So the trend is getting WORSE.
Pal has always been deeply left coded, moreso since some Gulf countries have filled our unis up with money pushing the Pal/Jihad line like a car at a gas (petrol) station.
Plus… a factor more with the kids, TickTok, which in Oct last year switched big time to Pro Pal. as per the CCP.
D.A.
NYC
Maybe time to get rid of TikTok if it’s CCP propaganda?
I doubt the CCP is needed for this, pure demographics and the number of people from traditionally Pali-friendly nations now living in the West and posting in Western languages plus algorithms suffice. It’s the same on Youtube. I clicked one or two Israel-critical videos, I now get inundated with such stuff in the feed, plus lots of shorts from the truly hateful lie-mongers.
I think that your focus on Israel makes a great deal of sense. Not only is Israel the only country in the world where Jews are welcome without reservation, the world’s reaction to events in the Middle East brings to the fore so many other relevant topics: Jew-hatred (obviously), animus toward the democratic west (even in the United States), the decline of our universities, the rot in much of the mainstream media—the BBC is a case in point—and more. It’s a bigger topic than it seems.
Regarding Jew-hatred, antisemitism, anti-Zionism and the rest. I attended a webinar where The (U.S.) Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, had no problem using the phrase “Jew-hatred.” Listen to her crystal clear remarks here: https://interactive.state.gov/Jewish-Debrief-2024/. After the event I sent the Ambassador an e-mail telling her that by naming the webinar “Debrief for the Jewish Community” she implied that the event was for Jews alone. In fact, it was something that all of America should have watched.
WEIT must keep a daily focus on Israel with solid factual reporting and references. WEIT has been my introduction to resources such as Douglas Murray, sam Harris, Einat Wilf, Natasha Hausdorff, TOA, and a number of the well-read and knowledgeable commenters. Because of the continuous attention, I am comfortable with my knowledge, which would be abysmal based on msm, and more than that, I am comfortable engaging with the other side. Please keep it up! The other side surely does and will continue.
Well, I will stick my head above the parapet here. The Beeb is actually in a difficult position. It is not a Government mouthpiece, unlike many ‘national’ broadcasters, and has to pay attention to its many different audiences. Contrary to what some people may think, there is no international consensus on the status of Hamas or Hezbollah, and the BBC’s formula about their being ‘treated by the Government as terrorist organisations’ is a statement of fact that is designed not to instantly piss off its worldwide listeners who may think otherwise.
The BBC gives extensive coverage to the Israeli side of the conflicts pretty well every day. The flagship Today Programme on Radio 4 often has extended – and critical – interviews with Israeli Government spokespeople and allows them ample space to put forward their positions. They are not able to do the same with the other side because Hamas and Hezbollah don’t have any reliable or authoritative spokesmen. If they ever provided any, I am confident that the BBC would give them as hard a time as they would to anyone on the Israeli side.
The Asserson Report is only a few weeks old, but is already being accorded the status of holy writ. A lot of it is reported to be based on an AI program that is only as good as the questions put into it in the first place. The report should receive at least as much critical attention as it – and its readers – give to the BBC.
I write as a UK citizen who fully supports Israel in most of what it has been doing over the past year. The vilification that Israel has received in many quarters is alarming and unacceptable. But I don’t think the Beeb is to blame nearly as much as are the social media that can fan a spark to a flame in the flick of a finger.
Apologies if I have upset anyone.
Thanks for this. I think it’s a very fair summary. The BBC is caught between a rock and a hard place (the rock being unbiased reporting and the hard place being an agenda driven right wing juggernaut that sees anything neutral as left wing bias). There’s no doubt that the Beeb is giving plenty of voice to the Palestinian side, but overall it seems pretty clear that they very much provide the Israel case. The fact that Owen Jones constantly complains at their pro-Israel stance possibly says it all.
Thank you Geoff. And I agree about Owen Jones!
And I don’t want to take up too much space on this thread, but I have just been watching BBC 1’s News at 10’s report of the conflicts a year on, and I thought it was pretty fair. There was a summary of the 7/10 Hamas attacks, filmed in the remnants of one of the kibbutzim, followed by footage of destruction in Gaza, although the allegation of ‘42,000 deaths, 40% of them children’ went without comment. One report from Beirut said that, after an attack on one building, there were secondary explosions, indicating that munitions had been stored in the basement.
So, some infelicities, notably an incoherent attempt at a summary by Lyce Doucet, but on the whole not bad for a Sunday evening.
Agreed, Steve; I too watched that News at 10 report. Missed Lyse Doucet’s summary though.
Reading the above comments, I was reminded of Jeremy Bowen’s interview last week (on BBC1’s News at 6) with the Hamas deputy leader Khalil al-Hayya. At the time, as the interview proceeded, I thought why is he talking with a terrorist? He justified it later as a necessary thing in conflicts to talk to both sides.
Okay, fair enough, but I’m sure Hamas would not let him into Gaza, and I reckon the Israelis wouldn’t want him there, most likely because of the threat of kidnap and or death. With reference to that, on the report tonight in Beirut, when the BBC were filming the result of an Israeli strike that damaged a building very much but did show a heavy mortar round in the wreckage that Israel would not have used, Hizbullah men came along and ordered the filming to stop and the reporters to go. So much for speaking to both sides.
Anyway, the interview is worth watching for the smooth way the Hamas man evades Mr Bowen’s questions and outright lies about several things about October 7th. I thought the man was repellent but it gives one a very good idea what the Israelis are up against in trying to deal with this mindset. My first response, after leaving the room in disgust, was “Go IDF! Kill all these bastards!” How can one negotiate with someone who’s come to kill you?
Here’s the link:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cdd4rpv5jp0o
The BBC has a bad reputation for deep seated bias. This is not new. Back in 2016, the BBC failed to report that Caster Semenya has XY chromosome. Of course, that fact was somehow “overlooked” by the NYT, WaPo, NPR, AP, Reuters, etc.
“Taxpayers’ money is being used, through the vehicle of the TV license.”
The licence fee is not a tax -it is a levy on ownership of a TV or downloading/playing BBC tv from the web. Not quite the same thing. It is not a mouthpiece of the state. I do not have access to TV at present, but I listen on the radio, & they usually take pains to reflect both sides. We regularly hear Israeli government spokes-people.
Is Asserson impartial?
You can argue that the BBC is not party political… but rather is pro-Establishment. Like most Establishment oriented groups it is often shocked by others who do not share its views and cannot comprehend that it may be biased (if only in part). It is in the nature of the Establishment to resist criticism.
The BBC is also ‘protected’ by the nature of its funding. If you do not care to watch the BBC you must still have the license to watch other terrestrial broadcasts, so there is no easy way to vote with your feet (or eyes) – but people are increasingly not buying the TV License and choosing to only watch non-broadcast media.
The alternatives are mostly terrible… for example GB ‘news’! The beeb is always damned by both sides…
Dr Einat Wilf’s talk is important. Thanks so much for posting it.
Jerry said that every one will think he is obsessed with Israel because he posts about it so much. I feel the same way about Israel but even though my dad was Jewish I am not and unlike Jerry I don’t identify as a Jew (although like Jerry I like butter on matzos). And my dad’s family it turns out came from Ukraine but I don’t feel like a Ukrainian but I am obsessed with Ukraine for the same reason I worry about Israel. They are both fighting for survival against brutal Nazi like regimes. They are two countries who only want to flourish in peace. (The Russians and Palestinians could have that but they reject that in favor of conquest) And both their citizens are fighting those who would like to see an end to the USA. Every American should be obsessed with their struggle.
On a lighter note: some Israeli humorists have countered the BBC reporting with biting satire. Students countering campus protests might wish to explore a similar tactic. Satirical songs might change minds.
Thanks for this.
The ongoing coverage of Jew-haters is not why I originally began regularly reading this site, and is not what one would assume would be in a site called WEIT, but I thank you for the regular information. It helps to offset the headlines I see in my Apple News feed.
Jew-hatred seems to be part of the DEI core philosophy, under the oppressor / oppressed rubric. As long as corporate executives are incentivized to push DEI initiatives, they will hire DEI experts who will mold corporate policy, and then brag about it in their annual reports.
Steve, I have to disagree with one of your points. News orgs control what ad who they put on the air. They also control which “experts” they choose. When you see two people interviewed taking opposite sides of an issue, and one person seems like a total crackpot, keep in mind that the crackpot was chosen with intent to mold the narrative. If BBC wanted, they could find Hamas spokespeople and give them a hard time; the fact that they don’t suggests to me that they want to avoid that confrontation.
Thanks for writing about Israel, Gaza, Hamas and Hezbollah. The whole situation points shows that religion may lead to some disastrous actions by people and nations. Religion can drive ordinary people to commit extraordinary acts of violence. Thank god I recovered from the disease of religion when still young.
RE: the BBC – I just saw this X post from BBC.com:
“Events held marking one year of the latest Middle East conflict”, showing pro-Palestinian protesters. The story is also at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70w95kzljjo . Quite the euphemistic headline.
In the story, the Hamas-provided Gaza casualty figure is given, and while there is brief mention of the attack on Israel on 10/7 and mention of the hostages, the article focuses on the voices of the attendees of the protests and UK government support for a cease fire.
Don’t stop writing about Israel, please Dr. Coyne.
It’s a critical topic that reflects far more than the politics and sorrows of a country. Rather, it’s a very clear mirror how the West is changing. Not a pretty reflection.
Agree!