Dear Jon: The Jews fled Iraq decades before the 2003 US invasion

...By 2003, when the Allied invasion began, there were only 34 Jews left in Iraq. Today, there are believed to be 5 Jews remaining. The expulsion of Iraq’s Jews occurred due to the rise of Arab nationalism and Nazi-style annihilationist antisemitism in the 40s. To suggest, as Snow did, that Jewish life in the country ended as the result of the US-led invasion is completely ahistorical.

Adam Levick..
UK Media Watch..
10 June '15..

Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow has been roundly criticized for the following tweet about former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, who died last week in an Iraqi prison.

Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz has died in jail: Nice guy in a nasty situation – made no better by Bush/BLair’s Shock and Awe

— Jon Snow (@jonsnowC4) June 5, 2015

Aziz was sentenced to death for his role as a senior member – and the token Assyrian Christian – of a regime which murdered hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. He was a loyal defender of Saddam Hussein until he was overthrown during the Second Gulf War. Nonetheless, Snow defended his comments about Aziz, telling The Independent:

“I think he was made the fall guy by the West. It’s a long time ago. He’s been in prison for a long time. There were plenty of people who needed to go to prison in that regime. He was one of the only ones who were picked off.”
…

“I just described him as a nice guy. It’s an absolute tragic morass in which everybody has behaved badly. What was the idea of going in and smashing that place? It meant Christians couldn’t stay. It meant Jews couldn’t stay.

Note to Snow: The flight of Iraq’s Jews occurred more than fifty years prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

(Read Full Post)

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A silly and gratuitous anti-Israel propaganda piece

Yorker..
The Commentator..
04 March '13..

Moves in the UK's mainstream, centre-Right media to "out Guardian" the Guardian when it comes to the campaign against Israel seem well underway. It's going to be a tough battle of course. Yesterday afternoon the Guardian put up a piece in its Comment is Free section from a Palestinian hunger striker in which he proudly related his own criminal convictions and those of members of his family. Gruesome.

But at least the Guardian knows how to do anti-Israeli propaganda properly, which (for all the right reasons) is more than can be said for the Daily Telegraph. One can never know the extent to which editors have interfered with a reporter's copy so let's leave aside the question of whether the piece in question is primarily the work of its bylined author -- Jerusalem-based Middle East Correspondent Robert Tait -- or someone else. What matters is that the Telegraph chose to run the piece at all.

The substance is drearily familiar, though it is particularly gratuitous. It is (yawn) an "Israel-Apartheid" story, and it pegs off moves by the Israeli authorities to take the completely reasonable step of introducing extra Palestinian buses to ferry Palestinian workers into Israel from the West Bank.

There are two reasons for the move. First, there's the obvious security issue: there is a dreadful history of Palestinian suicide bombing on Israeli buses. Israelis are understandably afraid, especially in the context of mass incitement by the Palestinian Authority, and would rather Palestinians took their trips to Israel on their own buses. (Are you absolutely sure you wouldn't feel the same way?)

The second reason, which explains why Israel has made its move now, is that due to more generous arrangements for the Palestinians, Israel is now granting more work permits. More workers, more buses. More Palestinian workers, more buses for Palestinians. Not one of life's great mysteries... unless you smell a conspiracy.

Tut-tut! Israel defends itself against hundreds of rocket attacks.

Melanie Phillips..
melaniephillips..
14 November '12..

So here we go again. In the four days from Saturday until yesterday, Islamic terrorists under the Hamas umbrella fired more than 120 rockets from Gaza at Israeli civilians, along with a number of mortar shells. Some hit civilian homes and factories; some civilians were lightly wounded and others treated for shock. Some million or so inhabitants of southern Israel have been under siege from such attacks for years, with air raid sirens giving people just a few seconds to find shelter. If there weren’t so many shelters, there would be more casualties.

None of this has caused the slightest concern in Britain or the west. The rocket attacks have barely been reported. But today, Israel finally took action. In a targeted drone strike on Gaza it killed Ahmed Jabari, the leader of Hamas’s military wing and second-in-command of the Iranian proxy al-Qassam Brigades, a man who was linked to hundreds of terror operations and human bomb attacks over several decades, and his second-in-command, Raed Al Attar.

If you look at the video footage of the strike, you can see the care the Israelis took to avoid other casualties, waiting until the terror commanders’ car had passed other traffic before striking it.

Rocket attacks on Israelis are not news; Israeli military action to defend Israel against such attacks is. Suddenly, media indifference has been transformed into media hyperactivity. And in the eyes of the British media and foreign office Israel is at fault; astoundingly, it is apparently Israel which is responsible for inflaming the situation, not the Palestinians. Never mind the 120 rockets in four days or the 50 further rockets this evening, including 17 Grads fired at the city of Beersheva; or that since the beginning of 2011, 1,100 rocket have been fired on Israeli targets, 797 since the beginning of this year; or that a staggering 5274 rockets have been fired from Gaza at southern Israel since 2006 (what’s that – you had absolutely no idea about the scale of these attacks? Of course not – the British media haven’t bothered to report them. Didn’t you know? Israeli victims don’t count – especially when not enough of them actually die to meet the British definition of ‘proportionality’).

UK Press Complaints Commission to Media: Stop Lying About Israel’s Capital

Seth Mandel..
Commentary/Contentions..
04 October '12..

Israel won a rare media victory this week when the UK’s nongovernmental press regulator ruled that the Guardian was wrong to call Tel Aviv Israel’s capital. The ruling by the UK Press Complaints Commission, according to Honest Reporting, “set a precedent on British coverage of Israel, effectively barring all British publications from referring to Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital.”

The commission also did the Guardian, and the British press in general, a favor. Since Jerusalem is, in point of fact, Israel’s capital, and since a large part of Jerusalem is uncontested, the refusal to put embassies there or to refer to Jerusalem as the capital has always been an assault not only on the Jewish state’s sovereignty but also on basic logic. However, calling Tel Aviv the capital is inexplicable. Whatever Israel’s opponents think of Jerusalem, how could anyone possibly justify inventing a new capital for the Jewish state? No newspaper that refers to Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital could possibly retain any credibility. The Times of Israel reports:

In Monday’s decision, the PCC concluded that “the unequivocal statement that Tel Aviv is the capital of Israel had the potential to mislead readers and raised a breach of… the Editors’ Code of Practice.”

The editor’s code states that the press “must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information.”

Guardian and Independent play down Turkey threat to deport resident Armenians

Just Journalism
22 March "10

(By now, we should all know the punchline.Y.)

Last week’s announcement by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he might deport 100,000 Armenians from his country provides an interesting test for media responsiveness. It had – potentially – all the necessary ingredients for an explosive story: strong regional power responds to accusations of genocide against minority by threatening to deport said minority.

However, the comments made in an interview with the BBC following resolutions passed in the U.S. and Sweden acknowledging the mass killings of Armenians by Turkey between 1915 and 1923 as an act of genocide, failed to attract much attention. Only the right-of centre broadsheets covering the story in their print editions. ‘Turkey threatens mass expulsions to punish Armenians for genocide rulings’ led The Times’ international section on Thursday 18th March, detailing Erdogan’s threat:

‘In my country there are 170,000 Armenians; 70,000 of them are citizens. We tolerate 100,000 more. So what am I going to do tomorrow? If necessary I will tell the 100,000: OK, time to go back to your country.’

(Read full article)
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