July 2009 Archives
After following the BBC for a few days on my new RRS feed reader and paying special attention to how they cover Israel, I've become increasingly shocked at the crassness of their anti-Israel position.
Here are ALL the stories on the BBC about Israel from the past week (let me know if I've missed any):
Story headline: Israel sees Brazil help with Iran
Excerpt: "In what could be seen as a message for Israel he also spoke of the desire to see a Middle East free of nuclear weapons."
Translation: Israel having nukes is awful, because Israel would just attack other countries without provocation or reason.
Story headline: Paralysed girl's story reflects Gaza's plight
Excerpt: "The family alleged that Israeli soldiers had opened fire at close range - as they lined up outside the house and while Samar's grandmother waved a white flag."
Translation: Israel likes to shoot at children.
Story headline: Israel settlers burn olive trees
Excerpt: "At least 280,000 Jews live in settlements (with a further 180,000 living in East Jerusalem), established in the occupied West Bank with Israeli government backing, in contravention of international law."
(Which is kind of odd, given that they said this previously in the same article: "The caravan was part of an "outpost", a settlement illegal under Israeli law, which Israel has agreed to remove." So, is the Israeli government in favour of these or not?)
Translation: Israelis are violent and their government breaks international law.
Story headline: Palestinian killed on Gaza border
Excerpt: "The Israeli military said he had aroused suspicion by approaching the fence in a heavy coat, despite high summer temperatures.
But it said he was later found to be unarmed."
Also: "Israel's military said troops returned fire after a border patrol was targeted with a rocket-propelled grenade.
But a pro-Hamas website said militants had been retaliating against Israeli fire."
What 'but'? Hamas is credible now? And why do you think Israel is firing at them in the first place?
Translation: Israel likes to shoot at innocent, unarmed civilians.
Story headline: Israel condemns Iran-PA meeting
Excerpt: "The PA has been negotiating with Israel for years on a two-state solution, but is currently refusing talks unless Israel freezes all settlement activity - a condition of a 2003 agreement."
Translation: Israel is refusing the Palestinian Authority's offer of a two-state solution. (Back in real life, it's Israel who has always been pushing for a two-state solution. That's why they left Gaza after offering it to them and being rejected.)
Story headline: Israeli PM defiant on Jerusalem
Excerpt: "Israel has occupied East Jerusalem since 1967. It has annexed the city and declared its east and west Israel's eternal capital. This is not recognised by the international community, with the east of the city considered occupied territory."
I kind of want to quote half of this article. But I'll just do one more: "Palestinians hope to establish their capital in East Jerusalem, as part of a two-state peace deal with the Israelis.
They say Israel uses settlement and demolition orders to try to force them from the area."
Translation: Israel steals land by demolition and force. Palestinians just want to live in peace via the two-state solution.
Story headline: Israel soldiers speak out on Gaza
Excerpt: "Israel denies breaking the laws of war and dismissed the report as hearsay."
Translation: Israel breaks the laws of war.
Oh, but it gets better:
Excerpt: "[An Israeli soldier says:] 'People were not instructed to shoot at everyone they see, but they were told that from a certain distance when they approach a house, no matter who it is - even an old woman - take them down.' "
Translation: The IDF's policy is to kill old women and civilians.
(The article continues on to say that the IDF uses human shields, demolishes homes and fires at Gazan water tanks. It's attempt at the end to be balanced started with "An internal investigations by the Israeli military said troops fought lawfully," citing the Israeli military -- whom the article already built up as unreliable and evil -- that the Israeli military is OK, and still continuing with "although errors did take place, such as the deaths of 21 people in a house that had been wrongly targeted.")
Story headline: Breaking silence on Gaza abuses
Excerpt: "The soldiers tell in their testimonies how this unwritten message [...] translated into zero patience for the life of enemy civilians."
Translation: Israel is bloodthirsty.
Story headline: Israeli textbooks to drop 'Nakba'
Excerpt: This one isn't actually so bad. But even still, near the end: "The term Nakba is usually applied to the loss suffered by millions of Palestinian refugees displaced by the 1948 war and subsequent conflicts; their fate remains a key factor in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute."
Translation: Israel stole land and made millions of Palestinians suffer.
Story headline: Israeli charged over bus deaths
Excerpt: "An Israeli bus driver has been charged with manslaughter following the deaths of 24 Russian tourists last December."
Final thoughts: While this might look like a little unimportant story about an individual, its gives an impression much like the other stories: that Israel is evil and kills civilians for no reason. Taken by itself, it might be fine. Just a crazy guy who killed some people. But when coupled with the terribly anti-Israel articles on the BBC, the relatively warm fuzzy mentions about Palestine (the West Bank lifted the ban on al-Jazeera, don't you know), and no news about anything remotely positive in Israel, this story doesn't exactly help their image.
I think that's enough for now. The ones I didn't include were Palestinians mock 'bad taste' ad, In pictures: Gaza six months on, Ultra-orthodox Jews visit Hamas, and Israel warships pass through Suez -- only the last one of which was neutral, and all the rest contained similar passages to the other articles I quoted.
(As a side note, this is not just the BBC. It's in our culture.)
UPDATE: You know when I said one of the articles wasn't so bad? "The term Nakba is usually applied to the loss suffered by millions of Palestinian refugees displaced by the 1948 war and subsequent conflicts."? Well, turns out that contains a plain lie: the number displaced was significantly less than a million. Explained in a recent Mere Rhetoric post:
The only way it reaches "millions" is if you also count the refugees' third, fourth, and fifth generation descendants. That would make the 1948 Arabs the only population in the history of the planet who claimed their great, great, great grandchildren as "refugees." And no, "well the UN does it" is no excuse."
I think that there is only one way to science - or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part - unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children, for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days." -- Karl Popper
This contrasts with the conventional wisdom that says we do all these tests in science in order to get to the Solution, which we may then be happy with.
In real life, being in a state of no problems isn't fun -- it's boring. If you have no problems, you're not working towards anything; you're not growing; you're not creating anything. All creative acts involve some kind of problem-solving.
The real thing we should be excited about when we solve problems isn't the fact they're over and done with and now we can relax without them -- it's the discovery of new, better and more interesting problems.
My take on the 'America went into Iraq for oil' position:
The oil conspiracy says that for whatever reason, Bush (and any other fellow conspirators) lied about his real reasons for going into Iraq,in order to cover up the fact it was actually for oil. So he gave made-up, untrue or otherwise misleading reasons.
Now, consider a person who agrees with the reasons he gave, but would be opposed to the real (oil-based) reasons. Such a person is a dupe of the conspirators.
All the ordinary people who voted for Bush would be dupes, because none of them would think the oil reason is good or justified.
Also, for the conspiracy to work, it would presumably require the cooperation of many other dupes, such as journalists and political commentators, soldiers, and civil servants.
I'm guessing that these people would be dupes, rather than people in on the conspiracy, because it's in the conspirators' interests to have as many dupes as possible. Every lie the conspirators tell, every secret meeting they hold, every secret decision they make and every secret message they share, could run the risk of the conspiracy being found out and exposed to the public.
Therefore, the more people who believe in the conspiracy and want to help the conspirators (without knowing the true motives), the less the conspirators have to worry about secret planning, and having to hide their real reasons for supporting the plans. The more dupes help the conspirators, the fewer real conspirators are needed, so the secret-keeping is less risky.
So, there are a lot of dupes. But are there any politicians among them?
There aren't any immediate ways of telling. For the conspiracy to work, the conspirators must act exactly as if they were dupes, and any duped politicians would act the same as if they were conspirators (they'd argue for the policy, vote for it, criticise opponents, try to promote it, etc.).
How high are the dupes allowed to rise? For all we know, even some member of the Cabinet might not be in on the conspiracy, and are genuinely motivated by what Bush and the conspirators claim their reasons are. Could Bush himself be a dupe? We wouldn't be able to tell either way, because he would act exactly the same in public in both cases. Could it be that everyone are dupes, and in fact there's no conspiracy at all? It's impossible to tell.
Another thing is: how are conspirators enlisted? Are high-ranking dupes ever allowed to become part of the conspiracy? If so, how can the conspirators be sure that they won't rebel and reveal to the public that there's a conspiracy going on? The promise of riches won't sway everyone. Dupes genuinely believe in the policies and reasons that they've been fed -- most people would be outraged to find out that what they've been working for is a lie, and insulted at the offer of joining this lie. Not to mention they could probably make a fair bit of money selling the story to the paper, and appearing on TV programmes explaining the details of how the conspiracy was planned and so on. All of these reasons -- the money, the popularity, the morality -- might even persuade conspirators who were never dupes to come forth with the truth.
All of this, along with how difficult it would be to keep all the messages, plans, meetings, etc. completely secret, makes it seem unlikely to me that Bush lied and it was actually for oil.
(Incidentally, this is the reason no big conspiracies could work without being discovered quickly.)
