headline of the day

All of you oversensitive Anglophiles should sit this one out, because I’m about to violate the Eleventh Commandment:

Palestinians Abduct British Journalist; British Journalists Union Boycotts Israel

I’m not sure what Israel’s crime is, but I hope it’s the craven, abject British National Union of Journalist (probably—and pathetically and wrongheadedly—hoping to ingratiate itself with whoever kidnapped Alan Johnston) that will get the punishment for publicly violating journalism’s code of ethics to take sides: to assert its solidarity with “the Palestinian people” [a faux-pious dodge,*** which fails to distinguish between those murderous Palestinians whose clearly stated and oft-repeated goal is to eliminate Israel and Israelis from existence and those not-murderous Palestinians who wish to get on with their lives and are willing to give peace in exchange for land or rich bribes]”

the Palestinian people — notably those suffering in the siege of Gaza, the community Alan Johnston has been so keen to help through his reporting

and at the same time to attack Israel for

a “savage pre-planned attack on Lebanon” last summer and the “slaughter of civilians in Gaza.”

Happily, not all British journalists agree with the NUJ, and some of those who disagree have been quite outspoken in their opinions:

The NUJ also cited Israel’s “continued attacks inside Lebanon following the defeat of its army by Hizballah.”

“What kind of language is this?” [Toby] Harnden [the Telegraph's D.C. correspondent] asked. “It is tendentious and politically loaded propaganda that would be rightly edited out of any news story written in a newspaper that had any pretensions of fairness.”

Simon McGregor-Wood of ABC News, who chairs the Foreign Press Association in Israel, said the NUJ’s statements “seem to go against some of the core ethics of journalism that we are here to protect, such as balance and objectivity.”

“I don’t think any representative body of journalists should be taking a side,” he said.

No kidding!

———-

*** I am grateful to the British journalist Nick Cohen for pointing this out in print.  He put it like this:

It’s not radical, it’s barely political, to turn a blind eye and say you are for the Palestinian cause. Political seriousness lies in stating which Palestine you are for and which Palestinians you support. The Palestinian fight is at once an anti-colonial struggle and a clash between modernity and reaction. The confusion of our times comes from the failure to grasp that it is possible to have an anti-colonialism of the far right.

While we’re at it, don’t excuse Hamas and Islamic Jihad and all the rest by saying the foundation of Israel and the defeat of all the Arab attempts to destroy it made them that way. Anti-Semitism isn’t a local side effect of a dirty war over a patch of land smaller than Wales. It’s everywhere from Malaysia to Morocco, and it has arrived here. …

To explain away a global phenomenon as a rational reaction to Israeli oppression, you have once again to turn the Jew into a supernatural figure whose existence is the cause of discontents throughout the earth. You have to revive anti-Semitism.