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Fitzgerald: The BBC, and the Muslims who have it in thrall

Jun 18, 2007 10:55 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

–¦sent a joint complaint to the BBC after a presenter on its Football Focus program on March 24 mentioned that Jerusalem was Israel’s capital and “historic soul.'” — from this news article

What was the mistake? Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. It is the place where the Knesset meets, and the President has his house, as well as the Vice-President. Jerusalem is also the “historic soul,” as the keen presenter put it, of Israel. Where is the Western Wall? Where is the Old City itself, with that Western Wall? And where, despite Arab depredations, remains so much of what is central to Jewish history and Jewish life?

The fact that in 1948 the Arab Legion managed to seize the Old City and hold onto it until the Six-Day War, does not make Jerusalem less a center, the “historic soul,” of Israel. And since the Six-Day War, because of Arab blackmail, based on a quite unnecessary fear of offending what are essentially gas station owners who need have no favors done them beyond paying the posted price for their gas, the Western world has forgotten the legal, moral, and historic claim of the Jews to Jerusalem. It has proceeded to believe that the Arab claim, which is based not on history but on the belief that a single phrase in the Qur’an (Jerusalem is nowhere mentioned in that Qur’an) about the “farthest mosque” (al-masjid al-aksa) must mean that that mosque is located in Jerusalem, right on Temple Mount (which is where, after some initial squabbling, Muslims of the time of the Umayyad Caliphate based in nearby Damascus, as a symbol of the power of Islam and the conquering Muslims, decided to place it, in the city holy to Jews and Christians, right smack on the site most important to Jews).
It is a matter of regret that Western countries did not immediately recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, thereby getting it over with forty years ago. It is too bad, but it reflects not history, nor a historical judgment, but merely cowardice and laziness. One can compare this inattention to real history, with the alacrity with which, after the Six-Day War, the Western world, or much of it, accepted the hastily-created “Palestinian people” out of what had always been — not least among the Arab diplomats and leaders — merely the “Arabs” of the area.

Those Arabs suddenly acquired not merely a name, but a hasty “construction of ‘Palestinian’ identity” out of people identical in language, culture, religion, in every way, to those other Arabs around them. They took on this purely verbal cloak to disguise, for obvious propagandistic reasons, the Arab war against the Infidel state of Israel, which is nothing but a classic Jihad, the Lesser Jihad.

The BBC can apologize all it wants to the Arabs and Muslims who have it in thrall. This is merely of a piece with its entire editorial policy, and its speakers and speakerines, of a piece with the head of its World Service, John Simpson (who, or possibly which, google along with “Jihad Watch” to find out about his enthusiastic delight in the antisemitic conspiracy history of one Lonni Brenner). And it is of a piece with the hideous crap the British and world public have been fed about the Middle East, and that has aroused the fury not only of those with a particular sympathy for Israel, but of all those who are still capable of seeing through the manipulation by and of the media — such people, for example, as the celebrated Soviet dissident, long resident in Cambridge, England, Vladimir Bukovsky, who finds the BBC Stalinoid.

A very few of the individual reporters who spewed their venom have been transferred away from the Middle East. There was Barbara Plett, who wept when Yassir Arafat died (for more on Arafat, see the account of Magdi Allam in the just-published “Viva Israele”). There was Orla Guerin, who was herself married to the mob — that is, she was married to a ‘Palestinian’ who told her all she needed to know, and which she was intent, every day, on helping the larger public know as well. She reported on the Arabs and Israel. Her accounts of the ‘Palestinians’ in their self-inflicted wretchedness and hate and cultivated primitivization reflected a diseased sympathy. She got to be even too much for the BBC, which has now switched her to southern Africa, while Barbara Plett reports from Afghanistan and Pakistan. But so many others remain in place, including those whose voices became immediately hostile when the word “Israel” was mentioned, and whose “interviews” with Israeli officials became exercises not in mere skepticism, but in hectoring abuse, while the assorted “Palestinians” and “Arabs” were treated with kid gloves, and all kinds of local open supporters of terrorism, including an open supporter of Hamas, were welcomed on the BBC, introduced with respect, and allowed to speak their piece.

That’s the BBC.

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