Saturday, October 17, 2020

How the snake stings and poisons the self

 Look at this headline: “The BBC isn't just too 'woke'––over Israel, it incites baseless hatred,” which says in brief that “the BBC incites hatred.” And this is a big accusation to throw at someone.

 

That headline identifies an article written by Melanie Phillips who must be thinking she caught the tiger by the tail, but like the snake that wandered in the wrong places and inhaled the wrong fumes, she stung herself and killed her cause before she could present it in any rational fashion.

 

The article was published in the Jewish News Syndicate on October 15, 2020, also under a subtitle that tells what Melanie Phillips intended to prove but failed to do so. Here is that subtitle: “For years, it [BBC] has uncritically recycled Palestinian propaganda as innately credible and true, while treating demonstrable factual Israeli statements as mendacious propaganda”.

 

Those of us who feel for the Palestinians and empathize with their pain enough to try helping them, felt bedeviled by the Jewish propaganda machine throwing accusations at the Palestinians without proving them or discuss them in detail so that we could parse them and rebuff them. But we can now do it thanks to Melanie Phillips who gave us a way to respond to such accusations.

 

One of the most vexing accusations had been that the Palestinians lived for no reason but to incite against the Israelis and the Jews in general. They had the accusation repeated in the echo chamber so often that prominent people in America and elsewhere mindlessly repeated it like a trained parrot. Most of the time, we could do nothing but ignore the accusation, and go on to discuss other things.

 

Well, we don't have to do this anymore because Melanie Phillips has used the word “incite” to set up an equivalence between the Palestinian view of their situation and the BBC view of the same Palestinian situation; one that Melanie Phillips has called incitement. The issue has been reduced to this equation: If it is legitimate for the BBC to see the plight of Palestinians the way that it does, it is legitimate for the Palestinians to describe their own plight the way that they do, and the way that does the BBC.

 

This being the sum total of Palestinian and BBC propaganda, what about the Judeo-Israeli propaganda? How do these people present their case? Well, we have right here a case study that is the quintessential bag of Zionist weaseling which they use instead of engaging in open debate with their opponents. What they normally do instead of debating, is point out to a higher authority that has ruled in their favor, having discussed the issue with them in hiding and behind closed doors. It is what Melanie Phillips tried to say has happened, but the attempt crushed her because, lacking enough material to work with, she was forced to make up the falsehoods that fell on her like a ton of bricks. Look what she did:

 

Her opening paragraph was a single sentence that went like this: “In recent weeks, there have been indications that the British government intends to try to bring the BBC to heel.” Wow, that will truly be a battle of the Titans. How will it go? How will it end? Tell us what were those indications? We're eager to know. Well then, if you're eager to know, here it is: “The prime Minister (of Britain) reportedly intends to install as the BBC's chairman someone who is prepared to challenge its embedded leftism.” But who was it that reported, and how did they know what they reported? Don't ask no questions, and I'll tell you no lies, says Phillips with her silence on this matter.

 

But not knowing how things will unfold from here on, and to make sure that her credibility as a journalist will not suffer much by what might happen, she thought it prudent to plant the following hedge at this point: “It is doubtful whether this as yet unknown individual will have any degree of success, it's vanishingly unlikely that it will change the BBC's appalling treatment of Israel”.

 

Underlying the dispute between the BBC and the Jewish propaganda machine, is the reality that after more than five decades of occupation, the Israeli stance in Palestine has increasingly come to look like a stubborn occupation whose aims are the same as those held by the occupiers of an earlier era.

 

The Brits having been occupiers, know exactly what the Jews of Israel are saying and doing, and know why the Palestinians respond the way they do. And so, like any experienced media organization, the BBC presents some programs form the Palestinian point of view, and some from the Israeli point of view. It is normal that when filmmakers work on a project that's supposed to reflect someone's point of view, they be sympathetic to that point of view. The BBC does that when treating both the Palestinian and Israeli stories.

 

The Jews object to that approach because, like the old colonial powers, they want the occupation to be discussed as if it were a good thing, and want those who resist it to be painted as bad people. The trouble is that the old description of the occupied being primitive savages who need to be tamed and educated, whereas the old description of the occupier as being the gentle trainer who will civilize and educate the savages, is no longer accepted by anyone in the world today.

 

So, the Jewish propaganda machine, of which Melanie Phillips is but a cog, came up with a different––yet the same kind of approach. It is painting the occupied Palestinians as the aggressors in their own country, and painting the invading Jews as the victims in someone else's country. Believe it or not, this is how Jewish logic works.

 

And so, that infamous machine wants the BBC to broadcast those kinds of images to the world. Anything less than that, is considered biased against the Jews who will whine from here to the end of time about being treated badly by the BBC simply because they are Jews.